day after day on their office strongboxes). Meanwhile, dreamily wondering how to harness atomic power for rockets, he worked out a nuclear reactor thrust motor, not quite practical but still plausible enough to be seized by the government, patented, and immediately buried under an official secrecy order. With no less diligence, much later, having settled into a domestic existence complete with garden and porch, he taught himself how to train dogs to do counterintuitive tricks—for example, to pick up a nearby sock not by the direct route but by the long way round, circling through the garden, in the porch door and back out again. (He did the training in stages, breaking the problem down until after a while it was perfectly obvious to the dog that one did not go directly to the sock.) Then he taught himself how to find people bloodhound-style, sensing the track of their body warmth and scent. He taught himself how to mimic foreign languages, mostly a matter of confidence, he found, combined with a relaxed willingness to let lips and tongue make silly sounds. (Why then, his friends wondered, could he never learn to soften his Far Rockaway accent?) He made islands of practical knowledge in the oceans of personal ignorance that remained: knowing nothing about drawing, he taught himself to make perfect freehand circles on the blackboard; knowing nothing about music, he bet his girlfriend that he could teach himself to play one piece, “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” and for once failed dismally; much later he learned to draw after all, after a fashion, specializing in sweetly romanticized female nudes and letting his friends know that a concomitant learned skill thrilled him even more—how to persuade a young woman to disrobe. In his entire life he could never quite teach himself to feel a difference between right and left, but his mother finally pointed out a mole on the back of his left hand, and even as an adult he checked the mole when he wanted to be sure. He taught himself how to hold a crowd with his not-jazz, not-ethnic improvisational drumming; and how to sustain a two-handed polyrhythm of not just the usual three against two and four against three but—astonishing to classically trained musicians—seven against six and thirteen against twelve. He taught himself how to write Chinese, a skill acquired specifically to annoy his sister and limited therefore to the characters for “elder brother also speaks.” In the era when high-energy particle accelerators came to dominate theoretical physics, he taught himself how to read the most modern of hieroglyphics, the lacy starburst photographs of particle collisions in cloud chambers and bubble chambers—how to read them not for new particles but for the subtler traces of experimental bias and self-deception. He taught himself how to discourage autograph seekers and refuse lecture invitations; how to hide from colleagues with administrative requests; how to force everything from his field of vision except for his research problem of the moment; how to hold off the special terrors of aging that shadow scientists; then how to live with cancer, and how to surrender to it.
After he died several colleagues tried to write his epitaph. One was Schwinger, in a certain time not just his colleague but his preeminent rival, who chose these words: “An honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum.” The science he helped create was like nothing that had come before. It rose as his culture’s most powerful achievement, even as it sometimes sent physicists down the narrowing branches of an increasingly obscure tunnel. When Feynman was gone, he had left behind—perhaps his chief legacy—a lesson in what it meant to know something in this most uncertain of centuries.
FAR ROCKAWAY
Eventually the art went out of radio tinkering. Children forgot the pleasures of opening the cabinets and eviscerating their parents’ old Kadettes and Clubs. Solid electronic blocks replaced the radio set’s