Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss Read Free Book Online

particle, one could never use these crazy backward-in-time interactions to produce a device that could turn on before the on button is pushed, or anything like that.
    A S H UMPHREY B OGART might have said, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Whereas Feynman had mathematical brilliance and startlingly good insight, Wheeler had experience and perspective. Wheeler was able to quickly shoot down some of Feynman’s misconceptions and suggest improvements, but he had an open mind and encouraged Feynman to explore and to gain calculational experience that was adequate to match his talents. Once Feynman combined the two, he would be almost unstoppable.

CHAPTER 3
    A New Way of Thinking
    An idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all its details and in experimental situations, may in fact not be paradoxical.
    —R ICHARD F EYNMAN
    D espite the assurances of Richard’s undergraduate professors, Melville Feynman did not lay his concerns about his son’s future to rest. After Richard had begun his working relationship with John Archibald Wheeler in graduate school, Melville made the trek to Princeton to check once more on his progress and prospects. Once again, he was told that Richard had a brilliant future ahead of him, independent of his “simple background” or possible “anti-Jewish prejudice,” as Melville phrased things. Wheeler may have been sugarcoating reality, or merely reflecting his own ecumenical bent. While still a student he had been the founder and president of the Federation of Church and Synagogue Youth.
    Nevertheless, even any lingering anti-Semitism in academia would not have been sufficient to halt Richard Feynman’s march forward. He was simply too good and having too much fun. Only a fool would not recognize his genius and his potential. As they would continue to throughout his life, Feynman’s fascination with physics, and his ability to solve problems others couldn’t, stretched across the spectrum of the physical world, from the esoteric to the seemingly mundane.
    Everywhere there were glimpses of his playful intensity. The Wheeler children used to love his visits, when he would often amuse them with tricks. Wheeler remembered one afternoon when Feynman asked for a tin can and told the children that he could tell whether solid or liquid was inside without even opening it or looking at the label. “How?” came a chorus of young voices. “By the way it turns when I toss it up in the air,” he answered, and sure enough, he was right.
    Feynman’s own childlike excitement about the world meant that his popularity with children remained unabated, as reflected in a letter written in 1947 by the physicist Freeman Dyson, who was a graduate student at Cornell when Feynman was an assistant professor there. Describing a party at the home of the physicist Hans Bethe in honor of a distinguished visitor, Dyson remembered that Bethe’s five-year-old son, Henry, kept complaining that Feynman was not there, saying, “I want Dick. You told me Dick was coming.” Ultimately Feynman arrived, dashed upstairs, and then proceeded to play noisily with Henry, stopping all conversation down below.
    Even as Feynman entertained Wheeler’s children, he and Wheeler continued to amuse each other as they worked throughout the year to explore their exotic ideas on ridding classical electromagnetism of the problem of infinite self-interaction of charged particles, via strange backward-in-time interactions with external absorbers located out in an infinite universe.
    Feynman’s motivation for continuing this work was straightforward. He wanted to solve a mathematical problem in classical electromagnetism with the hope of ultimately addressing the more serious problems that arose in the quantum theory. Wheeler, on the other hand, had an even crazier notion he wanted to develop to explain the new particles that were being observed in cosmic rays and ultimately in nuclear physics