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By Root 2194 0

fall of 1937 they, along with an older student, met with Morse once a week and began to fit their own blind discoveries into the context of physics as physicists understood it. They finally read Dirac’s 1935 bible, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics. Morse put them to work calculating the properties of different atoms, using a method of his own devising. It computed energies by varying the parameters in equations known as hydrogenic radial functions—Feynman insisted on calling them hygienic functions—and it required more plain, plodding arithmetic than either boy had ever encountered. Fortunately they had calculators, a new kind that replaced the old hand cranks with electric motors. Not only could the calculators add, multiply, and subtract; they could divide, though it took time. They would enter numbers by turning metal dials. They would turn on the motor and watch the dials spin toward zero. A bell would ring. The chug-chug-ding-ding rang in their ears for hours.

In their spare time Feynman and Welton used the same machines to earn money through a Depression agency, the National Youth Administration, calculating the atomic lattices of crystals for a professor who wanted to publish reference tables. They worked out faster methods of running the calculator. And when they thought that they had their system perfected, they made another calculation: how long it would take to complete the job. The answer: seven years. They persuaded the professor to set the project aside.

Shop Men

MIT was still an engineering school, and an engineering school in the heyday of mechanical ingenuity. There seemed no limit to the power of lathes and cams, motors and magnets, though just a half-generation later the onset of electronic miniaturization would show that there had been limits after all. The school’s laboratories, technical classes, and machine shops gave undergraduates a playground like none other in the world. When Feynman took a laboratory course, the instructor was Harold Edgerton, an inventor and tinkerer who soon became famous for his high-speed photographs, made with a stroboscope, a burst of light slicing time more finely than any mechanical shutter could. Edgerton extended human sight into the realm of the very fast just as microscopes and telescopes were bringing into view the small and the large. In his MIT workshop he made pictures of bullets splitting apples and cards; of flying hummingbirds and splashing milk drops; of golf balls at the moment of impact, deformed to an ovoid shape that the eye had never witnessed. The stroboscope showed how much had been unseen. “All I’ve done is take God Almighty’s lighting and put it in a container,” he said. Edgerton and his colleagues gave body to the ideal of the scientist as a permanent child, finding ever more ingenious ways of taking the world apart to see what was inside.

That was an American technical education. In Germany a young would-be theorist could spend his days hiking around alpine lakes in small groups, playing chamber music and arguing philosophy with an earnest Magic Mountain volubility. Heisenberg, whose name would come to stand for the twentieth century’s most famous kind of uncertainty, grew enraptured as a young student with his own “utter certainty” that nature expressed a deep Platonic order. The strains of Bach’s D Minor Chaconne, the moonlit landscapes visible through the mists, the atom’s hidden structure in space and time—all seemed as one. Heisenberg had joined the youth movement that formed in Munich after the trauma of World War I, and the conversation roamed freely: Did the fate of Germany matter “more than that of all mankind”? Can human perception ever penetrate the atom deeply enough to see why a carbon atom bonds with two but never three oxygen atoms? Does youth have “the right to fashion life according to its own values”? For such students philosophy came first in physics. The search for meaning, the search for purpose, led naturally down into the world of atoms.

Students entering the laboratories and machine shops at MIT left the search