Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [94]
First came a briefing on the art of information gathering. He told Feynman to approach each department in turn and offer to lend expertise. “Have them describe to you in every detail the problem to such a point that you really could sit down and work on it without asking any more questions.”
“That’s not fair!” Feynman recalled saying.
“That’s all right, that’s what we’re going to do, and that way you’ll know everything.”
Feynman took the train to Chicago early in 1943. It was his first trip west since the Century of Progress fair a decade before. He did gather information as efficiently as a spy. He got to know Teller and they talked often. He went from office to office learning about neutron cross sections and yields. He also left behind an impressed group of theorists. At one meeting he handed them a solution to an awkward class of integrals that had long stymied them. “We all came to meet this brash champion of analysis,” recalled Philip Morrison. “He did not disappoint us; he explained on the spot how to gain a quick result that had evaded one of our clever calculators for a month.” Feynman saw that the problem could be broken into two parts, such that part B could be looked up in a table of Bessel functions and part A could be derived using a clever trick, differentiation with respect to parameter on the integral side—something he had practiced as a teenager. Now the audience was new and the stakes were higher.
He was not the last prodigy to plant the kernel of a legend at the Metallurgical Laboratory. Five months after he passed through, Julian Schwinger arrived from Columbia, by way of Berkeley, where he had already collaborated with Oppenheimer, and the MIT Radiation Laboratory. Schwinger was Feynman’s exact contemporary, and the contrast between these two New Yorkers was striking. Their paths had not yet crossed. Schwinger impressed the Chicago scientists with his pristine black Cadillac sedan and his meticulous attire. His tie never seemed to loosen through that hot summer. A colleague trying to take notes while he worked at the blackboard through the night found the process hectic. Schwinger, who was ambidextrous, seemed to have fashioned a two-handed blackboard technique that let him solve two equations at once.
Strange days for physicists reaching what should have been the intense prime of their creative careers. The war disrupted young scientists’ lives with infinite gentleness compared with the disruption suffered by most draft-age men; still, Feynman could only wait uneasily for the course change war would entail. Almost as a lark he had accepted a long-distance job offer from the University of Wisconsin, as a visiting assistant professor on leave without pay. It gave him some feeling of security, though he hardly expected to become more than a professor on leave. Now, in Chicago, he decided at the last moment to take a side trip to Madison and spent a day walking about the campus almost incognito. In the end he introduced himself to a department secretary and met a few of his nominal colleagues before heading back.
He returned to Princeton with a little briefcase full of data. He briefed Wilson and the others: telling them how the bomb looked as of the winter of early 1943, how much uranium would be needed, how much energy would be produced. He was a twenty-four-year-old standing in shirtsleeves in a college classroom. Wisecracks and laughter echoed from the corridor. Feynman was not thinking about history, but Paul Olum was. “Someday when they make a moving picture of the dramatic