Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [58]
Graduate students, on track to a professional world, were partly detached from the university’s more frivolous side. The physics department in particular was moving decisively with the times. It had seemed to Feynman from a distance that Princeton’s physicists were disproportionately represented in the current journals. Even so he had to adjust to a place which, even more than Harvard and Yale, styled itself after the great English universities, with courtyards and residential “colleges.” At the Graduate College a “porter” monitored the downstairs entranceway. The formality genuinely frightened Feynman, until slowly he realized that the obligatory black gowns hid bare arms or sweaty tennis clothes. The afternoon he arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1939, Sunday tea with Dean Eisenhart turned his edginess about social convention into anxiety. He dressed in his good suit. He walked through the door and saw—worse than he had imagined—young women. He could not tell whether he was supposed to sit. A voice behind him said, “Would you like cream or lemon in your tea, sir?” He turned and saw the dean’s wife, a famous lioness of Princeton society. It was said that when the mathematician Carl Ludwig Siegel returned to Germany in 1935 after a year in Princeton he told friends that Hitler had been bad but Mrs. Eisenhart was worse.
Feynman blurted, “Both, please.”
“Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh,” he heard her say. “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” More code—the phrase evidently signaled a gaffe. Whenever he thought about it afterward, the words rang in his ears: surely you’re joking. Fitting in was not easy. It bothered him that the raincoat his parents sent was too short. He tried sculling, the Ivy League sport that seemed least foreign to his Far Rockaway experience—he remembered the many happy hours spent rowing in the inlets of the south shore—and promptly fell from the impossibly slender boat into the water. He worried about money. When he entertained guests in his room they would share rice pudding and grapes, or peanut butter and jelly on crackers with pineapple juice. As a first-year teaching assistant he earned fifteen dollars a week. Cashing several savings certificates to pay a bill for $265, he spent twenty minutes calculating what combination would forfeit the least interest. The difference between the worst case and the best case, he found, came to eight cents. Outwardly, though, he cultivated his brashness. Not long after he arrived, he had his neighbors at the Graduate College convinced that he and Einstein (whom he had not met) were on regular speaking terms. They listened with awe to these supposed conversations with the great man on the pay phone in the hallway: “Yeah, I tried that … yeah, I did … oh, okay, I’ll try that.” Most of the time he was actually speaking with Wheeler.
As Wheeler’s teaching assistant—first for a course in mechanics, then in nuclear physics—Feynman quickly found himself taking over in the professor’s absence (and it began to sink in that facing a roomful of students was part of the profession he had chosen). He also met with Wheeler weekly on research problems of their own. At first Wheeler assigned the problems. Then a collaboration took shape.
The purview of physics had exploded in the first four decades of the century. Relativity, the quantum, cosmic rays, radioactivity, the nucleus—these new realms held the attention of leading physicists to the virtual exclusion of such classical topics as mechanics, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, statistical mechanics. To a smart graduate student fresh on the theoretical scene these traditional