Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [92]
Distant searchlights cut the sky, flashing back and forth between the clouds and the place Feynman knew the tower must be. He tried to see his flashlight through his welder’s glass and decided, to hell with it, the glass was too dim. He looked at the people scattered about Campania Hill, like a movie audience wearing 3-D glasses. A bunch of crazy optimists, he thought. What made them so sure there would be any light to filter? He went to the weapons carrier and sat in the front seat; he decided that the windshield would cut out enough of the dangerous ultraviolet. In the command center twenty-five miles away, Robert Oppenheimer, thin as a specter, wearing his tired hat, leaned against a wooden post and said aloud, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart,” as though there had ever been such an affair.
At 5:29:45 A.M., July 16, 1945, just before dawn would have lighted the place called (already) the Jornada del Muerto, Journey of Death, instead came the flash of the atomic bomb. In the next instant Feynman realized that he was looking at a purple blotch on the floor of the weapons carrier. His scientific brain told his civilian brain to look up again. The earth was paper white, and everything on it seemed featureless and two-dimensional. The sky began to fade from silver to yellow to orange, the light bouncing off new-formed clouds in the lee of the shock wave. Something creates clouds! he thought. An experiment was in progress. He saw an unexpected glow from ionized air, the molecules stripped of electrons in the great heat. Around him witnesses were forming memories to last a lifetime. “And then, without a sound, the sun was shining; or so it looked,” Otto Frisch recalled afterward. It was not the kind of light that could be assessed by human sense organs or scientific instruments. I. I. Rabi was not thinking in foot-candles when he wrote, “It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way into you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye.” The light rose and fell across the bowl of desert in silence, no sound heard until the expanding shell of shocked air finally arrived one hundred seconds after the detonation.
Then came a crack like a rifle shot, startling a New York Times correspondent at Feynman’s left. “What was that?” the correspondent cried, to the amusement of the physicists who heard him.
“That’s the thing,” Feynman yelled back. He looked like a boy, lanky and grinning, though he was now twenty-seven. A solid thunder echoed in the hills. It was felt as much as heard. The sound made it suddenly more real for Feynman; he registered the physics acoustically. Enrico Fermi, closer to the blast, barely heard it as he tore up a sheet of paper and calculated the explosive pressure by dropping the pieces, one by one, through the sudden wind.
The jubilation, the shouting, the dancing, the triumph of that day have been duly recorded. On the road back, another physicist thought Feynman was going to float through the roof of the bus. The bomb makers rejoiced and got drunk. They celebrated the thing, the device, the gadget. They were smart, can-do fellows. After two years in this brown desert they had converted some matter into energy. The theorists, especially, had now tested an abstract blackboard science against the ultimate. First an idea—now fire. It was alchemy at last, an alchemy that changed metals rarer than gold into elements more baneful than lead.
Accustomed to spending their days in a mostly mental world, the theorists had sweated over messy problems that they could touch and smell. Almost everyone was working in a new field, the theory of explosions, for example, or the theory of matter at extremely high temperatures. The practicality both sobered and thrilled them. The purest mathematicians had to soil their hands. Stanislaw Ulam lamented that until now he had always worked exclusively with