Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [30]
Welton (who liked to be called by his initials, T. A.) already knew he was a physics major. Feynman had vacillated twice. He began in mathematics. He passed an examination that let him jump ahead to the second-year calculus course, covering differential equations and integration in three-dimensional space. This still came easily, and Feynman thought he should have taken the second-year examination as well. But he also began to wonder whether this was the career he wanted. American professional mathematics of the thirties was enforcing its rigor and abstraction as never before, disdaining what outsiders would call “applications.” To Feynman—having finally reached a place where he was surrounded by fellow tinkerers and radio buffs—mathematics began to seem too abstract and too far removed.
In the stories modern physicists have made of their own lives, a fateful moment is often the one in which they realize that their interest no longer lies in mathematics. Mathematics is always where they begin, for no other school course shows off their gifts so clearly. Yet a crisis comes: they experience an epiphany, or endure a slowly building disgruntlement, and plunge or drift into this other, hybrid field. Werner Heisenberg, seventeen years older than Feynman, experienced his moment of crisis at the University of Munich, in the office of the local statesman of mathematics, Ferdinand von Lindemann. For some reason Heisenberg could never forget Lindemann’s horrid yapping black dog. It reminded him of the poodle in Faust and made it impossible for him to think clearly when the professor, learning that Heisenberg was reading Weyl’s new book about relativity theory, told him, “In that case you are completely lost to mathematics.” Feynman himself, halfway through his freshman year, reading Eddington’s book about relativity theory, confronted his own department chairman with the classic question about mathematics: What is it good for? He got the classic answer: If you have to ask, you are in the wrong field. Mathematics seemed suited only for teaching mathematics. His department chairman suggested calculating actuarial probabilities for insurance companies. This was not a joke. The vocational landscape had just been surveyed by one Edward J. v. K. Menge, Ph.D., Sc.D., who published his findings in a monograph titled Jobs for the College Graduate in Science. “The American mind is taken up largely with applications rather than with fundamental principles,” Menge noticed. “It is what is known as ‘practical.’” This left little room for would-be mathematicians: “The mathematician has little opportunity of employment except in the universities in some professorial capacity. He may become a practitioner of his profession, it is true, if he acts as an actuary for some large insurance company… .” Feynman changed to electrical engineering. Then he changed again, to physics.
Not that physics promised much more as a vocation. The membership of the American Physical Society still fell shy of two thousand, though it had doubled in a decade. Teaching at a college or working for the government in, most likely, the Bureau of Standards or the Weather Bureau, a physicist might expect to earn a good wage of from three thousand to six thousand dollars a year. But the Depression had forced the government and the leading