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his occasional bantering abuse in exchange for the surprising pleasure that came with his praise. Some found their self-image enough changed that they abandoned physics altogether. Olum himself eventually returned to mathematics, where he was more comfortable. He worked with Feynman throughout the war and then Feynman drifted away. They met only a few times in the next forty years. Olum thought of his old friend often, though. He was president of the University of Oregon when he heard of Feynman’s death. He realized that the young genius he had met at Princeton had become a part of him, impossible to extricate. “My wife died three years ago, also of cancer,” he said.

… I think about her a lot. I have to admit I have Dick’s books and other things of Dick’s. I have all of the Feynman lectures and other stuff. And there are things that have pictures of Dick on them. The article in Science about the Challenger episode. And also some of the recent books.

I get a terrible feeling every time I look at them. How could someone like Dick Feynman be dead? This great and wonderful mind. This extraordinary feeling for things and ability is in the ground and there’s nothing there anymore.

It’s an awful feeling. And I feel it—— A lot of people have died and I know about it. My parents are both dead and I had a younger brother who is dead. But I have this feeling about just two people. About my wife and about Dick.

I suppose, although this wasn’t quite like childhood, it was graduate students together, and I do have more—— I don’t know, romantic, or something, feelings about Dick, and I have trouble realizing that he’s dead. He was such an extraordinarily special person in the universe.

Finishing Up

Absent from Princeton’s nuclear effort was John Wheeler. He had already departed for Chicago, where Enrico Fermi and his team at the Metallurgical Laboratory—that enigmatic laboratory employing no metallurgists—were driving toward the first nuclear reactor. They intended to use less-than-bomb-grade uranium to produce slow fission. In the spring of 1942 Chicago was the place where it was easiest to gain a sense of what the future held. Wheeler knew how deeply his former student was mired in the isotope-separation work. In March he sent Feynman a message. It was time to finish his thesis, no matter how many questions remained open. Wigner—who was also more and more a part of the Chicago work—agreed that Feynman had accomplished enough for his degree.

Feynman heard the warning. He requested a short leave from the isotron project. Even now he did not feel quite ready to write, especially under such pressure. Later he remembered spending the first day of his leave lying on the grass, guiltily looking at the sky. Finally, writing with fountain pen in his fast adolescent scrawl, he filled sheaves of scratch paper—but paper was expensive, so he used the stationery of the Lawrencian, the Lawrence High School newspaper (Arline Greenbaum, editor in chief) or surplus order forms of G. B. Raymond & Company, sewer pipe, flue linings, etcetera, of Glendale, Long Island. He had now thoroughly assimilated Wheeler’s revolutionary attitude, the stance that declared a break with the past. When the quantum mechanics of Max Planck was applied to the problem of light and the electromagnetic field, he wrote, “great difficulties have arisen which have not been surmounted satisfactorily.” Other interactions, with more recently discovered particles, were creating similar difficulties, he pointed out: “Meson field theories have been set up in analogy to the electromagnetic field theory. But the analogy is unfortunately all too perfect; the infinite answers are all too prevalent and confusing.” So he disposed of the field—at least the old idea of the field as a free medium for carrying waves. The field is a “derived concept,” he wrote. “The field in actuality is entirely determined by the particles.” The field is a mere “mathematical construction.” Just as radically, he deprecated the wave function of Schrödinger, the now-orthodox means of describing the