Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [28]
Knowledge was rarer then. A secondhand magazine was an occasion. For a Far Rockaway teenager merely to find a mathematics textbook took will and enterprise. Each radio program, each telephone call, each lecture in a local synagogue, each movie at the new Gem theater on Mott Avenue carried the weight of something special. Each book Richard possessed burned itself into his memory. When a primer on mathematical methods baffled him, he worked through it formula by formula, filling a notebook with self-imposed exercises. He and his friends traded mathematical tidbits like baseball cards. If a boy named Morrie Jacobs told him that the cosine of 20 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 40 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 80 degrees equaled exactly one-eighth, he would remember that curiosity for the rest of his life, and he would remember that he was standing in Morrie’s father’s leather shop when he learned it.
Even with the radio era in full swing, one’s senses encountered nothing like the bombardment of images and sounds that television would bring—accelerated, flash-cut, disposable knowledge. For now, knowledge was scarce and therefore dear. It was the same for scientists. The currency of scientific information had not yet been devalued by excess. For a young student, that meant that the most timely questions were surprisingly close to hand. Feynman recognized early the special, distinctive feeling of being close to the edge of knowledge, where people do not know the answers. Even in grade school, when he would haunt the laboratory late in the afternoon, playing with magnets and helping a teacher clean up, he recognized the pleasure of asking questions that the teacher could not handle. Now, graduating from high school, he could not tell how near or how far he was from science’s active frontier, where scientists pulled fresh problems like potatoes from the earth, and in fact he was not far. The upheaval caused by quantum mechanics had laid the fundamental issues bare. Physics was still a young science, more obscure than any human knowledge to date, yet still something of a family business. Its written record remained small, even as whole new scientific frameworks—nuclear physics, quantum field theory—were being born. The literature sustained just a handful of journals, still mostly in Europe. Richard knew nothing of these.
Across town, another precocious teenager, named Julian Schwinger, had quietly inserted himself into the world of the new physics. He was already as much a creature of the city as Feynman was of the city’s outskirts: the younger son of a well-to-do garment maker, growing up in Jewish Harlem and then on Riverside Drive, where dark, stately apartment buildings and stone town houses followed the curve of the Hudson River. The drive was built for motor traffic, but truck horses still pulled loads of boxes to the merchants of Broadway, a few blocks east. Schwinger knew how to find books; he often prowled the used-book stores of lower Fourth and Fifth Avenues for advanced texts on mathematics and physics. He attended Townsend Harris High School, a nationally famous institution associated with the City College of New York, and even before he entered City College, in 1934, when he was sixteen, he found out what physics was—the modern physics. With his long, serious face and slightly stooped shoulders he would sit in the college’s library and read papers by Dirac in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London or the Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion. He also read the Physical Review, now forty years past its founding; it had advanced from monthly to biweekly publication in hopes of competing more nimbly with the European journals. Schwinger struck his teachers as intensely shy. He carried himself with a premature elegant dignity.
That year he carefully typed out on six legal-size sheets his first real physics paper, “On the Interaction of Several Electrons,” and the same elegance was evident. It assumed for a starting