Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [57]
The laboratories of nuclear physics were spreading rapidly. Considerable American inventive spirit had gone into the development of an arsenal of machinery designed to accelerate beams of particles, smash them into metal foils or gaseous atoms, and track the collision products through chambers of ionizing gas. Princeton had one of the nation’s first large “cyclotrons”—the name rang proudly of the future—completed in 1936 for the cost of a few automobiles. The university also kept smaller accelerators working daily, manufacturing rare elements and new isotopes and generating volumes of data. Almost any experimental result seemed worthwhile when hardly anything was known. With all the newly cobbled-together equipment came difficulties of measurement and interpretation, often messy and ad hoc. A student of Wheeler’s, Heinz Barschall, came to him in the early fall of 1939 with a typical problem. Like so many new experimenters Barschall was using an accelerator beam to scatter particles through an ionizing chamber, where their energies could be measured. He needed to gauge the different energies that would appear at different angles of recoil. Barschall had realized that his results were distorted by the circumstances of the chamber itself. Some particles would start outside the chamber; others would start inside and run into the chamber’s cylindrical wall, and in neither case would the particle have its full energy. The problem was to compensate, find a way to translate the measured energies into the true energies. It was a problem of awkward probabilities in a complicated geometry. Barschall had no idea where to start. Wheeler said that he was too busy to think about it himself but that he had a very bright new graduate student …
Barschall dutifully sought out Dick Feynman at the residential Graduate College. Feynman listened but said nothing. Barschall assumed that would be the end of it. Feynman was adjusting to this new world, much smaller, for a physicist, than the scientific center he had left. He shopped for supplies in the stores lining Nassau Street on the west edge of the campus, and an older graduate student, Leonard Eisenbud, saw him in the street. “You look like you’re going to be a good theoretical physicist,” Eisenbud said. He gestured toward Feynman’s new wastebasket and blackboard eraser. “You’ve bought the right tools.” The next time Feynman saw Barschall, he surprised him with a sheaf of handwritten pages; he had been riding on a train and had time to write out a full solution. Barschall was overwhelmed, and Feynman had added another young physicist to the growing group of his peers with a weighty private appreciation for his ability.
Wheeler himself was already beginning to appreciate Feynman, who had been assigned to him—neither of them quite knew why—as a teaching assistant. Feynman had expected to be working with Wigner. He was surprised at their first meeting to see that his professor was barely older than he was. Then he was surprised again by Wheeler’s pointed display of a pocket watch. He took in the message. At their second meeting he pulled out a dollar pocket watch of his own and set it down facing Wheeler’s. There was a pause; then both men laughed.
A Quaint Ceremonious Village
Princeton’s gentility was famous: the eating clubs, the arboreal lanes, the ersatz-Georgian carved stone and stained glass, the academic gowns at dinner and punctilious courtesies at tea. No other college so keenly delineated the social status of its undergraduates as Princeton did with its club system. Although the twentieth century had begun to intrude—the graduate departments were growing in stature, and Nassau Street had been paved—Princeton before the war remained, as