Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

  The experiment code-named Trinity was the threshold event of an age. It permanently altered the psychology of our species. Its prelude was a proud mastery of science over nature—irreversible. Its sequel was violence and death on a horrible scale. In the minute that the new light spread across that sky, humans became fantastically powerful and fantastically vulnerable. A story told many times becomes a myth, and Trinity became the myth that illuminated the postwar world’s anxiety about the human future and its reckless, short-term approach to life. The images of Trinity—the spindly hundred-foot tower waiting to be vaporized, the jackrabbits found shredded a half-mile from the blast, the desert sand fused to a bright jade-green glaze—came to presage the central horror of an age. We have hindsight. We know what followed: the blooding of the scientists, the loss of innocence—Hiroshima, Dr. Strangelove, throw weights, radwaste, Mutual Assured Destruction. The irony is built in. At first, though, ground zero stood for nothing but what it was, a mirrored surface, mildly radioactive, where earlier had stood a tower of steel. Richard Feynman, still not much more than a boy, wrote, “It is a wonderful sight from the air to see the green area with the crater at the center in the brown desert.”

  The Man Comes In with His Briefcase

  Thirty months had passed since the closing of the isotron project at Princeton. Feynman and the rest of Wilson’s team had been left in a tense limbo—not knowing. Wilson thought they were like professional soldiers awaiting their next orders. “We became then what I suppose is the worst of all possible things,” he said later, “a research team without a problem, a group with lots of spirit and technique, but nothing to do.” To pass the time he decided to invent some neutron-measuring equipment, sure to be needed before long. He meanwhile felt a dearth of hard information from Chicago, the project’s temporary center, domain of Enrico Fermi and his atomic “pile” (the leather-jacketed physicist from Rome was using his freshly acquired Anglo-Saxon vocabulary to coin a blunt nuclear jargon). The pile—graphite bricks and uranium balls assembled into a lattice on a university squash court—was chain-reacting. Wilson sent Feynman as his emissary.

  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 moment at which the men of Princeton learn about the bomb, and the representative comes back from Chicago and presents the information, it will be a very serious situation, with everybody sitting in their suit coats and the man comes in with his briefcase,” he told Feynman. “Real life is different than one imagines.”

  The army had made its unlikely choice of a civilian chief: a Jew, an aesthete, a mannered, acerbic, left-flirting, ultimately self-destructive scientist whose administrative experience had not extended beyond a California physics group. J. Robert Oppenheimer—Oppy, Oppie, Opje—held the respect of colleagues more for his quicksilver brilliance than for the depth of his work. He had no feeling for experimentation, and his style was unphysical; so, when he made mistakes, they were notoriously silly ones: “Oppenheimer’s formula … is remarkably correct for him, apparently only the numerical factor is wrong,” a theoretician once wrote acidly. In later physicist lingo a calculation’s Oppenheimer factors were the missing π’s, i’s, and minus signs. His physics was, as the historian Richard Rhodes commented, “a physics of bank shots”—“It works the sides and the corners … but prefers not to drive relentlessly for the goal.” No one understood the core problems of quantum electrodynamics and elementary particle physics better than he, but his personal work tended toward esoterica. As a result, though he became the single most influential behind-the-scenes voice in the awarding of Nobel Prizes in physics, he never received one himself. In science as in all things he had the kind of taste called exquisite. His suits were tailored with exaggerated shoulders and broad lapels. He cared about his martinis and black coffee and pipe tobacco. Presiding over a committee dinner at a steak house, he expected his companions to follow his lead in specifying rare meat; when one man tried to order well-done, Oppenheimer turned and said considerately, “Why don’t you have fish?” His New York background was what Feynman’s mother’s family had striven toward and fallen back from; like Lucille Feynman he had grown up in comfortable circumstances in Manhattan and attended the Ethical Culture School. Then, where Feynman assimilated the new, pragmatic, American spirit in physics, Oppenheimer had gone abroad to Cambridge and Göttingen. He embraced the intellectual European style. He was not content to master only the modern languages. To physicists Oppenheimer’s command of Sanskrit seemed a curiosity; to General Groves it was another sign of genius. And genius was what the general sought. Solid administrator that he was, he saw no value in a merely solid chief scientist. Much to the surprise of some, Groves’s instincts proved correct. Oppenheimer’s genius was in leadership after all. He
bound Feynman to him in the winter of early 1943, as he bound so many junior colleagues, taking an intimate interest in their problems. He called long-distance from Chicago—Feynman had never had a long-distance telephone call from so far—to say that he had found a sanatorium for Arline in Albuquerque.

  In the choice of a site for the atomic bomb project, the army’s taste and Oppenheimer’s coincided. Implausible though it may have seemed afterward, military planning favored desert isolation for security against enemy attack as well as more reasonably for the quarantine of a talkative and unpredictable scientific community. Oppenheimer had long before fallen in love with New Mexico’s unreal edges, the air clear as truth, the stunted pines cleaving to canyon walls. He had made Western work shirts and belt buckles part of his casual wear, and now he led Groves up the winding trail to the high mesa where the Los Alamos Ranch School for boys looked back across the wide desert to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Not everyone shared their immediate sympathy with the landscape. Leo Szilard, the Budapest native who first understood the energy-liberating chain reaction—at other times so prescient about the bomb project—declared: “Nobody could think straight in a place like that. Everybody who goes there will go crazy.”

  The impatient Princeton group signed up en masse. Wilson rushed out to see the site and rushed back to report on the mud and confusion, a theater being built instead of a laboratory, water lines being mislaid. The state of secrecy was such that Feynman already knew that Groves and Oppenheimer were arguing over the state of secrecy. Cyclotron parts and neutron-counting gear started heading out by rail in wooden crates from the Princeton station. Princeton’s carloads provided the new laboratory’s core equipment, followed eventually by a painstakingly dismantled cyclotron from Harvard and other generators and accelerators. Soon Los Alamos was the best-equipped physics center in the world. The Princeton team began leaving soon after the crates of gear. Richard and Arline went with the first wave, on Sunday, March 28. Instructions were to buy tickets for any destination but New Mexico. Feynman’s contrariety warred for a moment with his common sense, and contrariety won out. He decided that, if no one else was buying a New Mexico ticket, he would. The ticket seller said, Aha—all these crates are for you?

  The railroad provided a wheelchair and a private room for Arline. She had begged Richard tearfully to pay the extra price for the room and hinted that at last she might have a chance to be all that a wife should be to the husband she loves. For both of them the move out West portended an open-skied, open-ended future. It cut them off finally from their protective institutions and their childhoods. Arline cried night after night from worry and filled Richard with her dreams: curtains in their home, teas with his students, chess before the fireplace, the Sunday comics in bed, camping out in a tent, raising a son named Donald.

  Chain Reactions

  Fermi’s pile of uranium and graphite, sawed and assembled by professional cabinetmakers in a University of Chicago racquets court, became the world’s first critical mass of radioactive material on December 2, 1942. Amid the black graphite bricks, the world’s first artificial chain reaction sustained itself for half an hour. It was a slow reaction, where a bomb would have to be a fast reaction—less than a millionth of a second. From the two-story-high ellipsoid of Chicago pile number one to the baseball-size sphere of plutonium that exploded at Trinity, there could be no smooth evolutionary path. To go from the big, slow pile to a small, fast bomb would require a leap. There were few plausible intermediate stages.

  Yet one possibility was playing itself out in Feynman’s mind the next April, as he sat in a car just outside the makeshift security gate on the Los Alamos mesa. Hydrogen atoms slowed neutrons, as Fermi had discovered ages ago. Water was cheaply bound hydrogen. Uranium dissolved in water could make a powerful compact reactor. Feynman waited while the military guards tried to straighten out a mistake about his pass. Left and right from the security gate stretched the beginnings of a barbed-wire fence. Behind it lay no laboratory, but a few ranch buildings and a handful of partially complete structures rose from the late-winter mud in what the army called modified mobilization style, namely fast-setting concrete foundations, wood frame, plain siding, asphalt roofs. The thirty-five-mile ride from Santa Fe had ended in a harrowing dirt road cut bluntly into the mesa walls. Feynman was not the only physicist who had never been farther west than Chicago. The recruiters had warned scientists that the army wanted isolation, but no one quite realized what isolation would mean. At first the only telephone link was a single line laid down by the Forest Service. To make a call one had to turn a crank on the side of the box.

  As he sat waiting for the military police to approve his pass, Feynman was running through some calculations for the hypothetical in-between reactor that would be called a water boiler. Instead of blocks of uranium interspersed with graphite, this unit would use a uranium solution in water, uranium enriched with a high concentration of the 235 isotope. The hydrogen in the water would increase the effectiveness many times over. He was trying to figure out how much uranium would be needed. He worked on the water-boiler problem, picking it up and putting it down again over the next weeks, thinking about the detailed geometry of neutrons colliding in hydrogen. Then he tried something quirky. Perhaps the ideal arrangement of uranium, the one that would require the least material, would be different from the obvious uniform arrangement. He converted the equations into a form that would allow a shortcut solution in terms of a minimum principle, now his favorite technique. He worked out a theorem for the spatial distribution of fissionable material—and discovered that the difference would not matter in a reactor as small as this. When enriched uranium finally began to arrive, the water boiler took form as a one-foot sphere inside a three-foot cube of black beryllium oxide, sitting on a table behind a heavy concrete wall at the pine-shaded bottom of Omega Canyon, miles away from the main site. It served as the project’s first large-scale experimental source of neutrons and the first real explosion hazard. For all the theorists, the elements of this first problem became leitmotivs of their time working on the bomb: the paths of neutrons, the mixing of esoteric metals, the radiation, the heat, the probabilities.

  In the muddy weeks of April the population of scientists reached about thirty. They came and went through a temporary office in Santa Fe and disappeared from there into a void in the landscape. If they had seen their destination from the air, they would have understood that they were to be situated in a compound atop a flat finger of ancient lava, one of many radiating from the giant crater of a long-quiet volcano. Instead, their imagining of the place began with mysterious addresses: P. O. Box 1663 for mail, Special List B for driver’s licenses. Not all the procedures devised in the name of security helped allay the suspicions of the local population. Any local policeman who pulled over Richard Feynman on the road north of Santa Fe would see the driver’s license of a nameless Engineer identified only as Number 185, residing at Special List B, whose signature was, for some reason, Not required. The name Los Alamos meant hardly anything. A canyon? A boys’ school? When scientists reached the site they would see, as likely as not, a former professor standing outdoors and peppering a military construction crew with unwanted instructions. If Oppenheimer happened to be there to greet them, he would say from beneath the already famous hat, “Welcome to Los Alamos and who the devil are you?” The first familiar face that Feynman saw belonged to his Princeton friend Olum—Olum was standing in the road with a clipboard, checking off each truckload of lumber as it arrived. At first Feynman slept in one of a row of beds lined up on the balcony of a school building. Food was still coming up from Santa Fe in the form of box lunches.

  Amid the turmoil of construction, the concrete hardening in the open air, the noise of hand-held buzz saws everywhere, only the theorists had the equipment they needed to start work immediately—one blackboard on rollers. Their true ground-breaking ceremony came on April 15. Oppenheimer gathered them together, along with the first few experimentalists
and chemists, to learn officially what they had been told in hushed tones. They were to build a bomb, a weapon, a working device that would concentrate the neutron-spraying phenomenon of radioactivity into a speck of space and time concentrated enough to force an explosion. As the lecture began, Feynman opened a notebook and wrote the cautionary words, “Talks are not necessarily on things we should discuss but things we have worked out.” Much was known to the teams from Berkeley and Chicago, or so it seemed. The splitting of an ordinary uranium atom required a blow from a fast, high-energy neutron. Every atom was its own tiny bomb: it split with a jolt of energy and released more neutrons to trigger its neighbors. The neutrons tended to slow, however, dropping below the necessary threshold for further fission. The chain reaction would not sustain itself. However, the rarer isotope, uranium 235, would fission when struck by a slow neutron. If a mass of uranium were enriched with these more volatile atoms, neutrons would find more targets and chain reactions would live longer. Pure uranium 235—though it would not be available in any but microscopic quantities for months—would make an explosive reaction possible. Another way to encourage a chain reaction was to surround the radioactive mass with a shell of metal, a tamper, that would reflect neutrons back toward the center, intensifying their effects as the glass of a greenhouse intensifies its infrared warming. A lanky Oppenheimer aide, Robert Serber, described the different tamper possibilities to his audience of thirty-odd men radiating an almost palpable energy of nerves. Feynman wrote quickly. “… reflect neutrons … keep bomb in … critical mass … Non absorbing equiscattering factor 3 in mass … a good explosion …” He sketched some hasty diagrams. From nuclear physics the discussion was forced to turn to the older but messier subject of hydrodynamics. While the neutrons were doing their work, the bomb would heat and expand. In a crucial millisecond would come shock waves, pressure gradients, edge effects. These would be hard to calculate, and for a long time the theorists would be calculating blind.