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at Princeton that the mathematical machinery emerging in the Wheeler-Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler’s own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others. He was a sculptor who sleeps and dreams with the feeling of clay alive in his fingers. Graduate students and instructors found themselves wandering over to the afternoon tea at Fine Hall with Feynman on their minds. They anticipated his bantering with Tukey and the other mathematicians, his spinning of half-serious physical theories. Handed an idea, he always had a question that seemed to pierce toward the essence. Robert R. Wilson, an experimentalist who arrived at Princeton from the famous cauldron of Ernest Lawrence’s Berkeley laboratory, talked casually with Feynman only a few times before making a mental note: Here is a great man.

The Feynman aura—as it had already become—was strictly local. Feynman had not yet finished his second year of graduate school. He remained ignorant of the basic literature and unwilling even to read through the papers of Dirac or Bohr. This was now deliberate. In preparing for his oral qualifying examination, a rite of passage for every graduate student, he chose not to study the outlines of known physics. Instead he went up to MIT, where he could be alone, and opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: Notebook Of Things I Don’t Know About. For the first but not the last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject. When he was done he had a notebook of which he was especially proud. It was not much use in preparing for the examination, as it turned out. Feynman was asked which color was at the top of a rainbow; he almost got that wrong, reversing in his mind the curve of refraction index against wavelength. The mathematical physicist H. P. Robertson asked a clever question about relativity, involving the apparent path of the earth as viewed through a telescope from a distant star. Feynman did get that wrong, he realized later, but in the meantime he persuaded the professor that his answer was correct. Wheeler read a statement from a standard text on optics, that the light from a hundred atoms, randomly phased, would have fifty times the intensity of one atom, and asked for the derivation. Feynman saw that this was a trick. He replied that the textbook must be wrong, because by the same logic a pair of atoms would glow with the same intensity as one. All this was a formality. Princeton’s senior physicists understood what they had in Feynman. In writing up course notes on nuclear physics, Feynman had been frustrated by a complicated formula of Wigner’s for particles in the nucleus. He did not understand it. So he worked the problem out for himself, inventing a diagram—a harbinger of things to come—that enabled him to keep a tally of particle interactions, counting the neutrons and protons and arranging them in a group-theoretical way according to pairs that were or were not symmetrical. The diagram bore an odd resemblance to the diagrams he invented for understanding the pathways of folded-paper flexagons. He did not really understand why his scheme worked, but he was certain that it did, and it proved to be a considerable simplification of Wigner’s own approach.

In high school he had not solved Euclidean geometry problems by tracking proofs through a logical sequence, step by step. He had manipulated the diagrams in his mind: he anchored some points and let others float, imagined some lines as stiff rods and others as stretchable bands, and let the shapes slide until he could see what the result must be. These mental constructs flowed more freely than any real apparatus could. Now, having assimilated a corpus of physical knowledge and mathematical technique, Feynman worked