Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

  194 HER WEIGHT HAD FALLEN: Arline Feynman, notebook of medical records and expenses, PERS.

  194 YOU ARE A NICE GIRL: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 2 May 1945.

  194 TIME PASSES FAST: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 19 April 1945, PERS.

  194 HE HAD HEARD ABOUT A NEW DRUG: Feynman to Richard Gubner, draft, n.d:, and Gubner to Feynman, 29 August 1944 and 14 November 1944, PERS.

  194 JOAN WAS DAZZLED: Joan Feynman to Arline Feynman, 29 April 1945, PERS.

  195 HE THOUGHT HE SAW SYMPTOMS: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 18 May 1945.

  195 HAVE IT DONE BY A SPECIALIST: Henry Barenblatt to Arline Feynman, 19 April 1945 and 23 April 1945, PERS.

  195 A DOCTOR AT LOS ALAMOS TOLD RICHARD: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 3 May 1945.

  195 THE SAME DOCTOR: Ibid.

  195 PS. 59-TO-BE: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 15 May 1945.

  195 HE DRIFTED THROUGH THE PAGES: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 17 May 1945.

  195 KEEP HANGING ON: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 9 May 1945.

  195 ENTIRE NATION CELEBRATES: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 10 May 1945.

  195 AT THE MAYO CLINIC: Waksman 1964, 127–28.

  196 THE DOCTOR WHO FIRST ISOLATED: Ibid., 115–18.

  196 WORKERS HANDLING PLUTONIUM: Hawkins et al. 1983, 163–64.

  196 ONE MAN, HARRY DAGHLIAN: L. Fermi 1980, 99; de Hoffman 1974, 166–67; Frisch 1979, 159–60.

  197 FEYNMAN HIMSELF PROPOSED A SAFER EXPERIMENT: Hawkins et al. 1983, 89.

  197 AT TELLER’S REQUEST: E. Teller to R. F. Bacher, 27 March 1944, LANL.

  198 HE BECAME RESPONSIBLE FOR CALCULATING: E.g., K. T. Bainbridge to Members of Committee on Fabrication and Assembly of Active Materials, 20 July 1944 and 5 September 1944, LANL.

  198 IT IS EXPECTED THAT A CONSIDERABLE FRACTION: Bethe to Oppenheimer, 8 November 1944, and Bethe to Bacher, 3 January 1945, LANL; Robert F. Bacher, interview, Santa Barbara, Calif.

  198 COMPLETE AUTHORITY: Bethe to Oppenheimer, 26 January 1945, LANL.

  198 DEAR SIR, AT THE PRESENT TIME: J. L. Patterson to Major W. E. Kelley, 19 September 1944, and W. E. Kelley to Feynman, 21 September 1944, LANL.

  198 AS SECRE HAD DISCOVERED: Feynman 1975, 119–21.

  198 FEYNMAN BEGAN BY RETRACING: F-H, 33.

  199 HE REALIZED THAT THE PLANT WAS HEADED: F-W, 353–54.

  199 IN ANSWER TO THE EASTMAN SUPERINTENDENT’S QUESTION: Feynman to Major W. E. Kelley, 27 September 1944, LANL.

  199 DURING CENTRIFUGING SOME PECULIAR MOTION: Feynman to Colonel Arthur E. Peterson, 18 September 1945.

  199 IS CT-1 EMPTY WHEN WE DROP: Notes, LANL.

  199 HE ALSO INVENTED A PRACTICAL METHOD: Feynman 1945.

  199 A FEW PEOPLE, LONG AFTERWARD: E.g.: “Unknowingly, he saved my life and the lives of everyone at Oak Ridge in those challenging years …” Irwin H. Goodwin to Ralph Leighton, 8 December 1988.

  199 FEYNMAN’S FIRST VISIT TO OAK RIDGE: F-L for SYJ, 104.

  199 YOU SHOULD SAY: Los Alamos cannot accept: Feynman 1975, 122.

  200 HE HAD TO GROW UP FAST: Ibid.

  200 SOMETIME THAT SPRING IT STRUCK HIM: F-H, 14.

  200 HITCHHIKING BACK ONE SUNDAY NIGHT: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 24 May 1945, PERS.

  200 BUT THEY WERE KIND OF UGLY: Ibid.

  200 MY WIFE: I AM ALWAYS: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 6 June 1945, PERS.

  201 ONE NIGHT HE AWOKE: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 14 June 1945, PERS.

  201 THE CROUP’S PRODUCTIVITY HAD RISEN: Bethe, interview.

  201 HE HAD INVENTED A SYSTEM: F-W, 371–74.

  201 WHEN HE REACHED HER ROOM: Ibid., 343–46; F-L for WDY, 50–53.

  202 THE NURSE RECORDED: Certificate of Death, PERS.

  202 HE CAME IN AND SAT DOWN: Robert and Dorothy Walker, interview, Tesuque, N.M.

  202 WHEN HE COMES IN: Joan Feynman, interview.

  202 AN ARMY CAR MET HIM: Feynman to Lucille Feynman, 9 August 1945, PERS.

  203 IF A MAN HAD MERELY CALCULATED: De Hoffman 1974, 171–72. 203 CREATED NOT BY THE DEVILISH INSPIRATION: Smyth 1945, 223.

  204 NO MONOPOLY: Notes, n.d., PERS.

  204 MOST WAS KNOWN: Ibid.

  204 IT WOULD SEEM TO ME THAT UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES: Oppenheimer to Birge, 26 May 1944, in Smith and Weiner 1980, 276.

  204 BIRGE FINALLY CAME THROUGH: Oppenheimer informed Birge of Feynman’s choice in a blisteringly formal tone: “I am glad that you are going to take steps to increase the strength of the department…. Several months ago Dr. Feynman accepted a permanent appointment with the Physics Department at Cornell University. I do not know details of salary and rank, but they are presumably satisfactory to him. I shall of course do my best to call to your attention any men who are available …”(5 October 1944, in Smith and Weiner 1980, 284). The California offer did prompt Cornell, at Bethe’s urging, to raise Feynman’s salary before he arrived. His “potential” salary was $3,000; when Berkeley offered $3,900, Cornell agreed to $4,000. Bethe had written: “I know that it is unusual to raise a man’s salary before he has even seen the University at which he is employed. The justification, I believe, is given by the unusual times and by the intimate knowledge that we here have acquired of Feynman’s qualities.” Bethe to R. C. Gibbs, 24 July 1945, and Gibbs to Feynman, 3 August 1945, CIT.

  205 FEYNMAN BECAME THE FIRST OF THE GROUP LEADERS: Hawkins et al. 1983, 304.

  205 IT WAS ON HIS LAST TRIP: WYD, 53.

  CORNELL

  Bethe provided access to his papers. Dyson shared copies of his remarkable letters home during these years (my portrait of him relies on these, on his various memoirs, on Brower 1978, and on Schweber, forthcoming). Schwinger collected the key scientific texts (1958) and gave his own rich perspective (1983). They and the other central figures in the postwar development of quantum electrodynamics all provided their oral recollections, as did Theodore Shultz, Michel Baranger, Evelyn Frank, Arthur Wightman, Abraham Pais, and others. Paul Hartman (1984) shared his entertaining history of the Cornell physics department and correspondence with Feynman about space flight. My discussion of scientific visualization is indebted to Arthur Miller 1984 and 1985, Bruce Gregory 1988, Schweber 1986a, Park 1988, essays by (and a conversation with) Gerald Holton, and Feynman’s own introspection. My accounts of Feynman’s relationships with women, in this chapter and the next, are based on correspondence in his personal papers and on my interviews with each of the women whose relationships are described in any detail; however, in the notes that follow, I usually omit individual citations of these letters and interviews for reasons of privacy.

  207 AMONG THE DIVINITIES: Charles Clayton Morrison, “The Atomic Bomb and the Christian Faith,” The Christian Century, 13 March 1946, 330.

  207 WHAT OPPENHEIMER PREACHED: Oppenheimer 1945, 316.

  208 IT’S A TERRIBLE THING: SYJ, 118.

  208 AND RIGHTLY SO: Oppenheimer 1945, 317.

  208 WHEN YOU COME RIGHT DOWN TO IT: Ibid.

  209 THE EVENTS OF THE PAST FEW YEARS: Truman, “Problems of Post-War America,” 6 September 1945, in Vital Speeches 11(1945):23.

  209 BEFORE THE WAR THE GOVERNMENT HAD PAID: Kevles 1987, 341.

  209 THE QUIET TIMES WHEN PHYSICS: R. Wilson 1958, 145.

  210 THE NATURE OF THE WORK: Oppenheimer 1945, 315–16.

  210 IN THE FIRST, HE SAT DOWN: Hartman 1984, 202.

  210 IN THE SECOND, TWO MONTHS AFTER HIROSHIMA: Bishop 1962, 560; Hartman 1984, 238.

  211 HE DEBARKED WITH A SINGLE SUITCASE: F-W, 415.

  211 THE WEEK BEFORE FEYNMAN ARRIVED: Bishop 1962, 556.

  211 HUGE RAKED PILES OF LEAVES: F-W, 417.

  212 LOOK, BUDDY: Ibid., 419; cf. SYJ, 149–51.

  212 SPEECH PATTERNS STRUCK HIM: “It was completely—like the nervousness of working during the war. And this university in the backwoods … was going at the typical university rate … he’s talking so slowly and batting the breeze about the weather.” F-W, 418.

  212 OUTSIDE, THREE TENNIS COURTS: Hartman 1984, 204–5.

&nb
sp; 212 MORRISON HAD BEEN LURED: Philip Morrison, interview, Cambridge, Mass.

  212 FEYNMAN DEPRESSED IS JUST A LITTLE MORE CHEERFUL: Quoted in Schweber 1986a, 468; Feynman said, “I got deeper and deeper into a kind of— I wouldn’t say depression, because I wasn’t depressed. I’m a lively and happy fellow….” F-W, 425.

  212 HE SPENT TIME IN THE LIBRARY: SYJ, 155.

  212 HIS DANCE PARTNERS LOOKED ASKANCE: F-W, 423; SYJ, 154.

  212 EVEN BEFORE LEAVING LOS ALAMOS: E.g. Olum, interview; Walker, interview. One physicist’s wife said, “He exploded like a sexual firecracker.”

  213 NOW I WANT YOU TO KNOW: Lucille Feynman to Feynman, 17 June 1945, PERS.

  213 BEGGING HIM TO COME HOME: Lucille Feynman to Feynman, 21 June 1945, PERS.

  213 THIS IS THE PRINCETON TRIANGLE: Lucille Feynman to Feynman, 8 August 1945, PERS.

  213 I FELT THRILLED & FRIGHTENED: Ibid.

  213 BY THE WAY: Ibid.

  214 RICHARD, WHAT HAS HAPPENED: Lucille Feynman to Feynman, n.d., PERS.

  215 HE PRIDED HIMSELF ON SPEAKING: Schwinger, interview. 215 A MAN POSSESSED: Polkinghome 1989, 14.

  215 I ABANDONED MY BACHELOR QUARTERS: Schwinger 1983, 332. 215 THEIR FIRST ENCOUNTER: E.g., Crease and Mann 1986, 129.

  215 ARE YOU A MOUSE OR A MAN?: Norman Ramsey and Rabi, quoted in Schweber, forthcoming; Bernard T Feld, talk at Julian Schwinger’s 60th birthday celebration, February 1978, AIR

  216 EVEN BEFORE SCHWINGER GOT HIS COLLEGE DIPLOMA: Schweber, forthcoming.

  216 SCHWINGER MADE ONE TOUR: Schwinger, interview.

  216 WHEN HE HAD LONG SINCE: Feynman 1978.

  216 THE HARVARD COMMITTEE: Schweber, forthcoming.

  217 PHENOMENA COMPLEX—LAWS SIMPLE: “Methods of Math Phys 405,” Notebook, PERS.

  218 WHETHER HE WOULD SUCCEED: Robert Walker, interview.

  218 IN AN ATOM BOMB: “Methods of Math Phys 405.”

  218 ANNOUNCER: LAST WEEK DR. FEYNMAN: “The Scientist Speaks,” transcript, radio broadcast, WHCU, 26 April 1946, OPR

  218 THE RAYS EMITTED: Ibid.

  218 AT LOS ALAMOS HE HAD INVENTED: Hawkins et al. 1983, 308.

  218 I BELIEVE THAT INTERPLANETARY TRAVEL: Feynman to Paul Hartman, 5 December 1945, PERS.

  219 FLYING UPSIDE DOWN: Ibid.

  220 HE RETURNED HOME AND OCCASIONALLY SNEAKED OUT: Joan Feynman, interview.

  220 ONE DAY FEYNMAN SAW HIM: F-L.

  220 IT IS NOT SO EASY FOR A DOPE: Melville Feynman to Feynman, 10 September 1944, PERS.

  220 THE DREAMS I HAVE OFTEN HAD: Ibid.

  221 ON FEYNMAN’S FACE WAS A LOOK: Joan Feynman, interview.

  221 CORNELL’S 1946 FALL-TERM ENROLLMENT: Bishop 1962, 555.

  221 D‘ARLINE, I ADORE YOU: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 17 October 1947, PERS.

  223 FEYNMAN’S VERSION OF THE STORY: F-W, 620; SYJ, 137. The latter was dictated more than twenty years later but sometimes tracks the first version with uncanny, verbatim precision. The Selective Service files were destroyed, as the FBI discovered in assembling its dossier on Feynman. FOI.

  226 FEYNMAN WAS INVITED: Princeton University 1946; F-W, 433–34; Wigner 1947; Feynman to Dirac, 23 July 1947, PERS.

  226 DIRAC’S PAPER: Dirac 1946.

  226 WE NEED AN INTUITIVE LEAP: Princeton University 1946, 15.

  226 FEYNMAN LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW: F-W, 437.

  226 HE HAD A QUESTION: Ibid., 272–73 and 437; Feynman 1948a, 378. Feynman cared about this detail of historical priority. He later emphasized it in his Nobel lecture: “I thought I was finding out what Dirac meant, but, as a matter of fact, had made the discovery that what Dirac thought was analogous, was, in fact, equal” (NL, 10). Schwinger, however, in a tribute delivered at a memorial service to Feynman, made a subtle point of dismissing the possibility that Dirac might not have understood the implications of his paper: “Now, we know, and Dirac surely knew, that to a constant factor the ‘correspondence’ … is an equality…. Why, then, did Dirac not make a more precise, if less general, statement? Because he was interested only in a general question.” Schwinger 1989, 45.

  226 OPPENHEIMER HAD INVITED HIM: Feynman to Oppenheimer, 5 November 1946, CIT

  226 THE CHAIRMAN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA’S PHYSICS DEPARTMENT: G. P. Harnwell to Bethe, 25 February 1947, and Bethe to Harnwell, 4 March 1947, BET.

  227 OPPENHEIMER HAD NOW BEEN NAMED: SYJ, 155; Smyth to Feynman, 23 October 1946 and 22 April 1947, CIT.

  227 HE EXPERIMENTED WITH VARIOUS TACTICS: F-W, 426.

  227 FOR A MOMENT HE FELT LIGHTER: Ibid., 427–28.

  227 DON’T WORRY SO MUCH: SYJ, 156; F-W, 428.

  227 A CORNELL CAFETERIA PLATE: F-W, 430; SYJ, 157. Also, Benjamin Fong Chao, “Feynman’s Dining Hall Dynamics,” letter, Physics Today, February 1989, 15.

  228 WELTON WAS NOW WORKING: Welton, interview.

  228 I AM ENGAGED NOW: Feynman to Welton, 10 February 1947, CIT.

  228 I AM FEYNMAN: Pais 1986, 23.

  229 SPIN WAS A PROBLEM: Schweber 1986a, 469.

  229 NO WONDER HIS EYE: “Within a week, altogether, this question of the rotation [of the plate] started me worrying about rotations, and then old questions about the spinning electron, and how to represent it in the path integrals and in the quantum mechanics, and I was in my work again. It just opened the gate.” F-W, 430.

  230 FEYNMAN DID NOT ATTEMPT TO PUBLISH: F-W, 444.

  230 THE CHALLENGE WAS TO EXTEND: Ibid., 443; Schweber 1986a, 472.

  232 THINKING I UNDERSTAND GEOMETRY: Feynman to Barbara Kyle, 20 October 1965, CIT.

  232 THE LAST EIGHTEEN YEARS: K. K. Darrow diary, 14 April 1947, AIP.

  232 THEORETICIANS WERE IN DISGRACE: Gell-Mann 1983a, 3.

  232 THE THEORY OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES: Weisskopf 1947.

  233 SO TWO DOZEN SUIT-JACKETED PHYSICISTS: Schweber 1983, 313.

  233 WHEN THEY GATHERED FOR BREAKFAST: Robert Marshak, telephone interview.

  233 IT IS DOUBTFUL IF THERE HAS EVER BEEN: Stephen White, “Top Physicists Map Course at Shelter Island,” New York Herald Tribune, 3 June 1947, 23.

  233 FEYNMAN TRIED HIS METHODS OUT: Pais 1986, 452.

  234 A CLEAR VOICE, GREAT RUSH OF WORDS: K. K. Darrow diary, 14 April 1947, AIP.

  234 LAMB HAD GONE TO BED: Lamb 1980, 323.

  234 TO SCHWINGER, LISTENING: Schwinger 1983, 337.

  234 THE FACTS WERE INCREDIBLE: Quoted in Schweber, forthcoming.

  234 AS THE MEETING ADJOURNED: Schwinger 1983, 332. Shortly afterward he was married; or, as he put it, “I abandoned my bachelor quarters and embarked on an accompanied, nostalgic trip around the country that would occupy the whole summer.”

  234 DEBACLE: Polkinghome 1989, 12.

  235 IT WAS HARDLY A COMMON NAME: Morrison, interview.

  235 WHAT THEY DID THERE: Michel Baranger, interview. New York.

  235 I EXPECT HER TO BE: Alice Dyson, quoted in Schweber, forthcoming.

  235 I, SIR PHILLIP ROBERTS: Sir Philip Roberts’s Erolunar Collision, in Dyson 1992, 3–4.

  236 HE READ POPULAR BOOKS: Dyson 1979, 12.

  236 THAT SAME YEAR, FRUSTRATED: Schweber, forthcoming.

  236 SHE CONTINUED BY TELLING HIM: Dyson 1979, 15.

  236 AT CAMBRIDGE HE HEARD: Brower 1978, 16.

  236 DYSON’S WAR: Dyson 1979, 19–21.

  237 AMONG THE BOOKS: Ibid., 4.

  237 MY WISH FOR SOMETHING TO SERVE: D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy, quoted in Dyson 1988, 125.

  237 THE NEWS OF HIROSHIMA: Brower 1978, 20.

  237 YEARS LATER, WHEN DYSON: Ibid., 24.

  238 BY HIS SOPHOMORE YEAR: Dyson 1987.

  238 PROFESSOR LITTLEWOOD: Dyson 1944; Dyson, interview.

  238 I AM LEAVING PHYSICS FOR MATHEMATICS: Kac 1985, xxiii; Dyson, interview.

  238 HE PLAYED HIS FIRST GAME OF POKER: “… and found I was rather good at it,” he wrote his parents, 11 June 1948.

  238 HE EXPERIENCED THE AMERICAN FORM: Dyson to parents, 11 June 1948.

  238 WE
GO THROUGH SOME WILD COUNTRY: Dyson to parents, 19 November 1947.

  239 HE HAS DEVELOPED A PRIVATE VERSION: Ibid.

  239 HE TELEPHONED FEYNMAN: NL, 449.

  239 IT WAS A BLUNT LOS ALAMOS-STYLE ESTIMATE: It diverged, but it only diverged logarithmically, heading ever higher, but ever more slowly, like the series 1 + ½ + 1/3 + ¼ + …—after a million terms this has not even reached 15, but it never does stop rising. When the news reached Russia, the great Lev Landau said with obscure Slavic wisdom, “A chicken is not a bird, and a logarithm is not infinity.” Weinberg 1977a, 30; Sakharov 1990, 84.

  239 BUT THEY DID NOT COINCIDE: Bethe, interview.

  240 KRAMERS PROPOSED A METHOD: Bethe had also talked with Schwinger and Weis-skopf, both of whom had suggested forms of renormalization.

  240 DYSON COULD SEE: Dyson, interview.

  241 ONE-MAN PERCUSSION BAND: Dyson to parents, 19 November 1947.

  241 DID YOU KNOW THERE ARE TWICE AS MANY NUMBERS: Henry Bethe to Gweneth, 17 February 1988, in WDY, 101.

  241 FOR A WHILE, BECAUSE FEYNMAN: Dyson, interview. 241 HALF GENIUS AND HALF BUFFOON: Dyson to parents, 8 March 1948.

  241 FEYNMAN IS A MAN WHOSE IDEAS: Dyson to parents, 15 March 1948.

  242 THE THOUGHT THAT THE LAWS OF THE MACROCOSMOS: Quoted in Miller 1984, 129.

  242 WE ARE THEREFORE OBLIGED TO BE MODEST: Bohr 1922, 338.

  242 JUST IMAGINE THE ROTATING ELECTRON: Quoted in Miller 1984, 143.

  242 I UNDERSTAND THAT WHEN AN ATOM: WDY, 18–19.

  244 IT IS WRONG TO THINK THAT THE TASK: Quoted in Gregory 1988, 185.

  244 FEYNMAN SAID TO DYSON: Dyson 1979, 62.

  244 A CORNELL DORMITORY NEIGHBOR: Theodore Schultz, interview, Yorktown Heights, NY.

  244 SPACE IS A SWARMING IN THE EYES: Pencil note, CIT. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, 1990), 40.

  244 WHAT I AM REALLY TRYING TO DO: F-Sch.

  245 WHEN I START DESCRIBING: Lectures, II-20–3.

  245 AT ANY RATE DIAGRAMS HAD BEEN RARE: See Miller 1984.

  246 WHEN HE FINALLY DID: Feynman 1948a.

  247 HE STATED THE CENTRAL PRINCIPLE: Ibid., 367.

  249 THE EDITORS NOW REJECTED THIS PAPER: Feynman and several other people recalled this, although the journal has no record of it. E.g., F-W, 485; Baranger, interview.

  249 THERE IS A PLEASURE: Feynman 1948a, 367.