Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [85]
To his dismay Feynman turned him down flat. He was too deep in his thesis; also, though he did not say so, the Frankford Arsenal had left him slightly disillusioned with war work. He said that he would keep the secret but that he wanted no part of it. Wilson asked him at least to come to the meeting.
Long afterward, after all the bomb makers had taken second looks back at their moments of decision, Feynman remembered the turmoil of that afternoon. He had not been able to go back to work. As he recalled it, he thought about the importance of the project; about Hitler; about saving the world. Elsewhere a few physicists already guessed, making delicate inferences from university rosters and published papers, that Germany was mounting no more than a cursory nuclear-weapons research project. Still, among the physicists who had disappeared from view was Werner Heisenberg. The threat seemed real enough. Later Feynman remembered the decisive physical act of opening his desk drawer and placing in it the loose sheets of his thesis.
The Manhattan Project
Chicago, Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Hanford: the first outposts of the Manhattan Project eventually became permanent capitals of a national nuclear establishment. To produce purified uranium and plutonium on a scale of mere pounds would require the rapid establishment of the largest single-purpose industrial enterprise ever. General Electric, Westinghouse, Du Pont, Allis-Chalmers, Chrysler, Union Carbide, and dozens of smaller companies combined in an effort that would see giant new factory towns rising from the earth. Yet in the first uncertain months after the attack on Pearl Harbor nothing in the modest scale of nuclear research even remotely foreshadowed the impending transformation of the nation’s war-making capacity. Workshops were converted according to happenstance and convenience. At Princeton no more than a few thousand dollars was available for Wilson’s project. To get help with the electronics he resorted to throwing a near tantrum in I. I. Rabi’s office at the MIT Rad Lab. Including shop workers and technicians, his team grew to number about thirty. The experimental division amounted to one ungainly tube the length of an automobile, sprouting smaller tubes and electrical wiring. The theoretical division comprised, in its entirety, two cocky graduate students sitting side by side at roll-top desks in a small office.
They found they were able to bear the pressure of working on the nation’s most fateful secret research project. The senior theoretician crumpled a piece of paper one day, passed it to his assistant, and ordered him to throw it in the wastebasket.
“Why don’t you?” the assistant replied.
“My time is more valuable than yours,” said Feynman. “I’m getting paid more than you.” They measured the distances from scientist to wastebasket; multiplied by the wages; bantered about their relative value to nuclear science. The number-two man, Paul Olum, threw away the paper. Olum had considered himself the best undergraduate mathematician at Harvard. He arrived at Princeton in 1940 to be Wheeler’s second research assistant. Wheeler introduced him to Feynman, and within a few weeks he was devastated. What’s happening here? he thought. Is this the way physicists are, and I missed it? No physicist at Harvard was like this. Feynman, a cheerful, boyish presence spinning across the campus on his bicycle, scornful of the formalisms of modern advanced mathematics, was running mental circles around him. It wasn’t that he was a brilliant calculator; Olum knew the tricks of that game. It was as if he were a man from Mars. Olum could not track his thinking. He had never known anyone so intuitively