Genius (36 page)
Authors: James Gleick
Under the heading “SKILL & KNOWLEDGE” he concluded:
Most was known… . Other peoples are not being hindered in the development of the bomb by any secrets we are keeping. They might be helped a little by our mentioning which of two processes is found to be more efficient, & by our telling them what size parts to plan for—but soon they will be able to do to Columbus, Ohio, and
hundreds
of cities like it what we did to Hiroshima.
And we scientists are clever—too clever—are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!
Many of the scientists found their magic mountain hard to leave. Lingering for months, they continued minor research that had acquired its own momentum, or skied near the Valle Grande, where they were intermittently aware that their tow rope had previously served to hoist the bomb up the tower at ground zero. Some joined the hydrogen bomb project that Teller would lead, and some remained at Los Alamos permanently, as the compound behind the fence grew into a major national laboratory and a central fixture of the American weapons-research establishment. The scientists who slowly dispersed began to realize how unlikely they were to work ever again in such a purposeful, collegial, and passionate scientific enterprise.
Nothing held Feynman to Los Alamos. He was joining Bethe’s faculty at Cornell. Raymond Birge at Berkeley had angered Oppenheimer by delaying the job offer he had recommended. Oppenheimer wrote again: “It would seem to me that under these circumstances too much of courage was not required in making a commitment to a young scientist… . I perhaps presumed too much on the excellence of his reputation among those to whom he is known… . He is not only an extremely brilliant theorist, but a man of the greatest robustness, responsibility and warmth, a brilliant and lucid teacher … one of the most responsible men I have ever met… . We regard him as invaluable here; he has been given a responsibility and his work carries a weight far beyond his years… .” Birge finally came through with an offer to Feynman that summer, but too late. When Arline was alive they had talked about moving to California for her health. Now Bethe easily swayed him.
Feynman became the first of the group leaders to leave, in October 1945. There were only a few reports to write up and some final safety tours of Oak Ridge and Hanford. It was on his last trip to Oak Ridge, as he walked past a shop window, that he happened to see a pretty dress. Before he could prevent it, a thought came.
Arline would like that.
For the first time since her death, he wept.
For physics as an enterprise within American culture there were two eras. One ended and the other began in the summer of the atomic bombs. Politicians, educators, newspaper editors, priests, and the scientists themselves began to understand the divide that had been crossed.
“Among the divinities of ancient Greece, there was a Titan named Prometheus,” ran a typical essay in
The Christian Century
the next winter. “He stole fire from heaven and gave it to man… . For this act, Prometheus has been held in highest honor as a benefactor of humanity and the divine patron of science and learning.” No more. Now, rather to the cleric essayist’s delight, the atomic bomb had humbled Prometheus’s heirs, the scientists. Their centuries of progress had decisively ended with their invention of a device of human self-destruction. Now it was time for Christian ministers to step in. Even the scientists, he said, “have for the first time in history turned aside from their vocation and become statesmen and evangelists, preaching the grim gospel of damnation unless men repent.” Here he was alluding to J. Robert Oppenheimer, for Oppenheimer had already seen the aptness of the Promethean legend—who could have missed it?—and had begun to speak out both to the public and to scientists. What Oppenheimer preached, however, was more subtle than a gospel of damnation. He reminded listeners that the religious had long felt threatened by science, and now the only mildly God-fearing public had something real to fear. He suspected that atomic weapons would scare people more than any scientific development since Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Already, in November 1945, with relieved soldiers and sailors streaming home from the Pacific Theater, before fallout shelters, nuclear proliferation, and ban the bomb had a chance to enter the language, Oppenheimer anticipated the time when celebration would give way to dread. “Atomic weapons are a peril which affect everyone in the world,” he told his friends and colleagues of the past thirty months. His audience filled the largest assembly hall in Los Alamos, its movie theater. He knew that the newspapers and magazines glorifying the scientists’ achievement would soon recognize how little real mystery there had been, how unremarkable, actually, were the problems of nuclear fission (if not implosion), how easy atomic bombs would be to make, and how affordable for many nations.
Prometheus was not the only mythic figure standing in for the scientist; the other was Faust. Lately the Faustian bargain for knowledge and power had not seemed so horrible as it had in medieval times. Knowledge meant washing machines and medicines, and the devil had softened into an amusing character for Saturday cartoons and Broadway musicals. But now the fires in two Japanese cities renewed a primal understanding that the devil was not so tame. It might mean something, after all, to sell him one’s soul. Oppenheimer knew, partly from introspection, that the scientists had immediately begun to question their own motives. “It’s a terrible thing that we made,” Robert Wilson had said to Feynman, surprising him and pricking his ebullient bubble. Others were beginning to agree. Oppenheimer reminded them of what they were reminding themselves: that two years earlier a Nazi bomb had seemed possible and that the American victory had seemed far from inevitable. He acknowledged that these justifications had faded. Some people, he said, might have been driven by a less high-minded motivation, no more than curiosity and a sense of adventure, and he surprised some of them by saying, “and rightly so.” He said it again: “And rightly so.” Feynman had left Los Alamos several days before, so he did not hear, nor did he need to hear, Oppy’s reminder of their shared credo, a credo now being welded to the most painful act of self-justification they had ever had to perform:
When you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world… . It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences.
Thus spoke a bringer of fire.
The relations between Americans and their scientists had changed. It became an instant truism that science meant power. Science as an institution—“organized science”—ranked second only to the military as a guarantor of what was being called national security. President Harry S Truman told the Congress that fall that America’s role in the world would depend directly on research coordinated by universities, industrial companies, and the government: “The events of the past few years are both proof and prophecy of what science can do.” In short order the government established an Atomic Energy Commission, an Office of Naval Research, and a National Science Foundation. Permanent national laboratories with no precedent in the prewar world arose at Los Alamos; at Oak Ridge; at Argonne, south of Chicago; at Berkeley; and at Brookhaven, Long Island, on a six-thousand-acre former army site. Money flowed copiously. Before the war the government had paid for only a sixth of all scientific research. By the war’s end the proportions had flipped: only a sixth was financed by all nongovernment sources combined. The government and the public gained a new sense of proprietorship over the whole scientific enterprise. As physicists began to speak out about world government and the international control of nuclear arms, so an army of clerics, foundation heads, and congressmen now made the mission and the morality of science a part of their lecture-circuit repertoire.
On the whole, the popular press lionized Oppenheimer and his colleagues. To have worked on the bomb gave a scientist a stature matched only by the Nobel Prize. By comparison it was nothing to have created radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, though by a plausible calculus radar had done more to win the war. The word
physicist
itself finally came into vogue. Einstein was now understood to be a physicist, not a mathematician. Even nonnuclear physicists acquired prestige by association. Soon Wilson, Feynman’s recruiter, would look back wistfully to “the quiet times when physics was a pleasant, intellectual subject, not unlike the study of Medieval French in its popular interest.” The atomic scientists felt the guilt that flowed from the sudden deaths of at least one hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; meanwhile the scientists found themselves hailed as hero wizards, and this was a more complex role than many of them realized at first, containing as it did the seeds of darker relationships. In less than a decade Oppenheimer himself would lose his security clearance in the classic McCarthy-era auto-da-fé. The public would find that knowledge created by scientists was a commodity requiring special handling. It could be stamped
CLASSIFIED
or betrayed to foreign enemies. Knowledge was the grist of secrets and the currency of spies.
Theoretical physicists, too, had learned something about their kind of knowledge. Oppenheimer reminded them of it, in his November 1945 talk at Los Alamos. The nature of the work in theoretical physics before the war had forced a certain recognition on them, he said—the recognition that human language has limits, that people choose concepts that correspond only faintly to things in the real world, like the shadows of ghosts. Before the bomb work began, quantum mechanics had already altered the relations between science and common sense. We make models of experience, and we know that our models fail to meet the reality.
Their remarkable change in status buffeted every American institution that made a home for physicists. At Cornell, President Edmund Ezra Day was one of the first to feel the force of the transition, in the stark contrast between two budget meetings with his physicists, one during and one after the war.
In the first, he sat down with his chief experimentalist, Robert F. Bacher, who was setting off on his leave of absence; ultimately Bacher led the bomb project’s experimental physics division. Bacher pleaded for a cyclotron like those at Berkeley and Princeton. He pressed Day to find a way of providing operating costs that he said might amount to as much as a professor’s salary, from four thousand to five thousand dollars a year.
In the second, two months after Hiroshima, Day’s physicists told him that a far more powerful accelerator would be required, along with a new laboratory to house it. This time they asked for a capital expenditure of $3,000,000 and an operating budget that would begin at $250,000. They suggested, furthermore, that without this commitment they would have to look elsewhere for a more propitious environment for nuclear science. The trustees had no obvious source of funds, but after a heated meeting with Day they voted unanimously to proceed. Day declared: “The problem is not to control nuclear forces but to control nuclear physicists. They are in tremendous demand, and at a frightful premium.” Bacher himself, after returning to Cornell briefly, left for Washington to serve as the first scientist on the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission. Three years later Cornell had a new accelerator, a synchrotron. The trustees’ leap of faith had been vindicated by generous funding from the Office of Naval Research. Three years after that, the synchrotron had passed into obsolescence and a new version was already under construction.
Feynman’s first glimpse of the postwar university came in the dead of night before the start of classes in the fall of 1945. Ithaca was a village at the dimmest reaches of a New York City boy’s sense of his state’s geography, practically in Ohio. He made the journey by train, using the long hours to begin sketching out a basic graduate course he was supposed to teach in mathematical methods for physicists. He debarked with a single suitcase and a self-conscious sense of being, finally, a professor. He suppressed the urge to sling his bag over his shoulder as usual. Instead he let a porter guide him to the rear seat of a taxicab. He told the driver to take him to the biggest hotel in town.
In Ithaca, as in towns and cities across America that fall, the hotels and short-term apartments were booked. Housing was scarce. With demobilization college enrollments were exploding. Boom was in the air. Even sleepy Ithaca seemed like a Western town amid the gold rush. Cornell was building houses and barracks at emergency speed. The week before Feynman arrived, five new barracks burned down. He tried a second hotel. Then he realized he could not afford to wander by taxicab, so he checked his suitcase and began to walk, past darkened houses and dormitories. He realized he must have found Cornell. Huge raked piles of leaves dotted the campus, and they started to look like beds—if only he could find one out of the glare of the streetlights. Finally he spotted an open building with couches in the lobby and asked the janitor if he could spend the night on one. He explained awkwardly that he was a new professor.
The next morning he washed as well as he could in the public bathroom, checked in at the physics department, and made his way to a campus housing office in Willard Straight Hall, near the center of the sloping campus. There a clerk told him haughtily that the housing situation was so bad that last night a professor had had to sleep in the lobby. “Look, buddy,” Feynman snapped back, “I’m that professor. Now do something for me.” He was unpleasantly startled to realize that in a town Ithaca’s size he could set off a rumor and circle back into its wake within a matter of hours. He also began to realize that he was going to have to readjust his internal clock. The war had left him with a sense of urgency about appointments and deadlines. Even as ten thousand undergraduates arrived, Cornell seemed slack. He was surprised to discover that the administration had scheduled a full week with nothing for him to do but explore the campus and prepare for classes. Speech patterns struck him as slow, with none of the
beep-beep-beep
nervousness he had got used to. People took time to talk about the weather.
