Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [32]
Unlike their European counterparts, American theorists did not have their own academic departments. They shared quarters with the experimenters, heard their problems, and tried to answer their questions pragmatically. Still, the days of Edisonian science were over and Slater knew it. With a mandate from MIT’s president, Karl Compton, he was assembling a physics department meant to bring the school into the forefront of American science and meanwhile to help American science toward a less humble world standing. He and his colleagues knew how unprepared the United States had been to train physicists in his own generation. Leaders of the nation’s rapidly growing technical industries knew it, too. When Slater arrived, the MIT department sustained barely a dozen graduate students. Six years later, the number had increased to sixty. Despite the Depression the institute had completed a new physics and chemistry laboratory with money from the industrialist George Eastman. Major research programs had begun in the laboratory fields devoted to using electromagnetic radiation as a probe into the structure of matter: especially spectroscopy, analyzing the signature frequencies of light shining from different substances, but also X-ray crystallography. (Each time physicists found a new kind of “ray” or particle, they put it to work illuminating the interstices of molecules.) New vacuum equipment and finely etched mirrors gave a high precision to the spectroscopic work. And a monstrous new electromagnet created fields more powerful than any on the planet.
Julius Stratton and Philip Morse taught the essential advanced theory course for seniors and graduate students, Introduction to Theoretical Physics, using Slater’s own text of the same name. Slater and his colleagues had created the course just a few years before. It was the capstone of their new thinking about the teaching of physics at MIT. They meant to bring back together, as a unified subject, the discipline that had been subdivided for undergraduates into mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and optics. Undergraduates had been acquiring their theory piecemeal, in ad hoc codas to laboratory courses mainly devoted to experiment. Slater now brought the pieces back together and led students toward a new topic, the “modern atomic theory.” No course yet existed in quantum mechanics, but Slater’s students headed inward toward the atom with a grounding not just in classical mechanics, treating the motion of solid objects, but also in wave mechanics—vibrating strings, sound waves bouncing around in hollow boxes. The instructors told the students at the outset that the essence of theoretical physics lay not in learning to work out the mathematics, but in learning how to apply the mathematics to the real phenomena that could take so many chameleon forms: moving bodies, fluids, magnetic fields and forces, currents of electricity and water, and waves of water and light. Feynman, as a freshman, roomed with two seniors who took the course. As the year went on he attuned himself to their chatter and surprised them sometimes by joining in on the problem solving. “Why don’t you try Bernoulli’s equation?” he would say—mispronouncing Bernoulli because, like so much of his knowledge, this came from reading the encyclopedia or the odd textbooks he had found in Far Rockaway. By sophomore year he decided he was ready to take the course himself.
The first day everyone had to fill out enrollment cards: green for seniors and brown for graduate students. Feynman was