Genius by James Gleick Read Free Book Online

illuminated streets. “Look up,” Richard said. There, far above them, the streaky wine-green curtains of the aurora borealis rippled against the sky. One of nature’s surprises. Somewhere in the upper atmosphere solar particles, focused by the earth’s magnetosphere, ripped open trails of luminous high-voltage ionization. It was a sight that the street lights of a growing city would soon cast out forever.

    It’s Worth It

    The mathematics and the tinkering developed separately. At home the scientific inventory expanded to include chemicals from chemistry sets, lenses from a telescope, and photographic developing equipment. Ritty wired his laboratory into the electrical circuits of the entire house, so that he could plug his earphones in anywhere and make impromptu broadcasts through a portable loudspeaker. His father declared—something he had heard—that electrochemistry was an important new field, and Ritty tried in vain to figure out what electrochemistry was: he made piles of dry chemicals and set live wires in them. A jury-rigged motor rocked his baby sister’s crib. When his parents came home late one night, they opened the door to a sudden clang-clang-clang and Ritty’s shout: “It works!” They now had a burglar alarm. If his mother’s bridge partners asked how she could tolerate the noise, or the chemical smoke, or the not-so-invisible ink on the good linen hand towels, she said calmly that it was worth it. There were no second thoughts in the middle-class Jewish families of New York about the value of ambition on the children’s behalf.
    The Feynmans raised their children according to a silent creed shared with many of their neighbors. Only rarely did they express its tenets, but they lived by them. They were sending their children into a world of hardships and dangers. A parent does all he or she can to bring a child up “so that he can better face the world and meet the intense competition of others for existence,” as Melville once put it. The child will have to find a niche in which he can live a useful and fruitful life. The parents’ motives are selfish—for nothing can magnify parents in the eyes of their neighbors as much as the child’s success. “When a child does something good and unusual,” Melville wrote, “it is the parents chest that swells up and who looks around and says to his neighbors (without actually speaking, of course) ‘See what I have wrought? Isn’t he wonderful? What have you got that can equal what I can show?’ And the neighbors help the ego of the parent along by acclaiming the wonders of the child and by admiring the parent for his success …” A life in the business world, “the commercial world,” is arid and exhausting; turn rather to the professions, the world of learning and culture. Ultimately, for the sacrifices of his parents a child owes no debt—or rather the debt is paid to his own children in turn.

    The adult Richard Feynman became an adept teller of stories about himself, and through these stories came a picture of his father as a man transmitting a set of lessons about science. The lessons were both naïve and wise. Melville Feynman placed a high value on curiosity and a low value on outward appearances. He wanted Richard to mistrust jargon and uniforms; as a salesman, he said, he saw the uniforms empty. The pope himself was just a man in a uniform. When Melville took his son on walks, he would turn over stones and tell him about the ants and the worms or the stars and the waves. He favored process over facts. His desire to explain such things often outstripped his knowledge of them; much later Feynman recognized that his father must have invented sometimes. The gift of these lessons, as Feynman expressed it in his two favorite stories about his father, was a way of thinking about scientific knowledge.
    One was the story about birds. Fathers and sons often walked together on summer weekends in the Catskill Mountains of New York, and one