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great physicists. Yet in truth he had now found what had eluded all of his elders, a way to carry physics forward into a new era. He had created a private new science that brought past and future together in a starkly majestic tapestry. His new friend Dyson at Cornell had glimpsed it—“this wonderful vision of the world as a woven texture of world lines in space and time, with everything moving freely,” as Dyson described it. “It was a unifying principle that would either explain everything or explain nothing.” Twentieth-century physics had reached an edge. Older men were looking for a way beyond an obstacle to their calculations. Feynman’s listeners were eager for the new ideas of young physicists, but they were wedded to a certain view of the atomic world—or rather, a series of different views, each freighted with private confusion. Some were thinking mostly about waves—mathematical waves carrying the past into the present. Often, of course, the waves behaved as particles, like the particles whose trajectories Feynman sketched and erased on the blackboard. Some merely took refuge in the mathematics, chains of difficult calculations using symbols as stepping stones on a march through fog. Their systems of equations represented a submicroscopic world defying the logic of everyday objects like baseballs and water waves, ordinary objects with, “thank God,” as W. H. Auden put it (in a poem Feynman detested):

sufficient mass

To be altogether there,

Not an indeterminate gruel

Which is partly somewhere else.

The objects of quantum mechanics were always partly somewhere else. The chicken-wire diagrams that Feynman had etched on the blackboard seemed, by contrast, quite definite. Those trajectories looked classical in their precision. Niels Bohr stood up. He knew this young physicist from Los Alamos—Feynman had argued freely and vehemently with Bohr. Bohr had sought Feynman’s private counsel there, valuing his frankness, but now he was disturbed by the evident implications of those crisp lines. Feynman’s particles seemed to be following paths neatly fixed in space and time. This they could not do. The uncertainty principle said so.

“Already we know that the classical idea of the trajectory in a path is not a legitimate idea in quantum mechanics,” he said, or so Feynman thought—Bohr’s soft voice and notoriously vague Danish tones kept his listeners straining to understand. He stepped forward and for many minutes, with Feynman standing unhappily to the side, delivered a humiliating lecture on the uncertainty principle. Afterward Feynman kept his despair to himself. At Pocono a generation of physics was melting into the next, and the passing of generations was neither as clean nor as inevitable as it later seemed.

Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times. He took the half-made conceptions of waves and particles in the 1940s and shaped them into tools that ordinary physicists could use and understand. He had a lightning ability to see into the heart of the problems nature posed. Within the community of physicists, an organized, tradition-bound culture that needs heroes as much as it sometimes mistrusts them, his name took on a special luster. It was permitted in connection with Feynman to use the word genius. He took center stage and remained there for forty years, dominating the science of the postwar era—forty years that turned the study of matter and energy down an unexpectedly dark and spectral road. The work that made its faltering appearance at Pocono tied together in an experimentally perfect package all the varied phenomena at work in light, radio, magnetism, and electricity. It won Feynman a Nobel Prize. At least three of his later achievements might also have done so: a theory of superfluidity, the strange, frictionless behavior of liquid helium; a theory of weak interactions, the force