Genius (60 page)
Authors: James Gleick
The two-piece “bikini” bathing suit, named after the tiny Pacific atoll that was blasted by atomic and hydrogen bombs through the forties and fifties, had not yet taken over the beaches of the United States in 1958, but Feynman saw one, blue, on the sand of Genève-Plage, and laid his beach towel down nearby. He was visiting Geneva for a United Nations conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. He was preparing to give a summary talk in his own name and Gell-Mann’s, telling the assembly:
We are well aware of the fragility and incompleteness of our present knowledge and of the manifold of speculative possibilities… . What is the significance or the pattern behind all these interrelated symmetries, partial symmetries, and asymmetries?
The yearly Rochester conference had also changed venue for the occasion, and he discussed the weak-interaction theory, impressing listeners with the body language he used to demonstrate the appropriate spins and handednesses. He had just turned forty. It was spring, and the young woman in the blue bikini volunteered that Lake Geneva was cold. “You speak English!” he said. She was Gweneth Howarth, a native of a village in Yorkshire, England. She had left home to see Europe by working as an au pair. That evening he took her to a nightclub.
The violation of parity had reached newspapers and magazines briefly. For readers who looked to science for a general understanding of the nature of the universe, the fall of left-right symmetry may have been the last genuinely meaningful lesson to emerge from high-energy physics, circumscribed though it was in the domain of certain very short-lived particle interactions. By contrast, though the universal theory of weak interactions commandeered the attention of theorists and experimenters a year later, the replacement of
S
and
T
with
V
and
A
made no ripple in the cultural consciousness. By then the American public was busy anyway, assimilating the most shocking scientific development of the 1950s, the piece of news establishing once again in the public mind the truism that science is power.
The beachball-sized aluminum sphere called Sputnik began orbiting the earth on October 4, 1957. Its unexpected presence overhead and the insouciant beep-beep-beep played again and again on American radio and television broadcasts set off a wave of anxiety like nothing since the atomic bomb itself. (Feynman arrived at a picnic that evening in the biologist Max Delbrück’s backyard with a small gray radio receiver that looked as if he had built it himself. He called for an extension cord, tuned the receiver quickly, held up a finger to demand silence, and grinned as the beeps played out over the crowd.) “Red Moon over U.S.,” said
Time
magazine, immediately announcing “a new era in history” and “a grim new chapter in the cold war.”
Newsweek
called it “The Red Conquest”—with “all the mastery that it implies in the affairs of men on earth.” Why had the United States established no comparable space program? A worried-looking President Eisenhower said at a news conference, “Well, let’s get this straight. I am not a scientist.” The director of the American Institute of Physics seized the occasion to say that unless his country’s science education caught up with the Soviet Union’s, “our way of life is doomed.” That message was heard: Sputnik produced a rapid new commitment to the teaching of science. Magazines focused new attention on American physicists. Among the younger generation,
Time
singled out Feynman—
Curly-haired and handsome, he shuns neckties and coats, is an enormously dedicated adventurer … became fascinated with samba rhythms … playing bongo drums, breaking codes, picking locks …
and Gell-Mann—
he formulated the “Strangeness Theory,”
i.e.
assigned physical meanings to the behavior of newly discovered particles. At CalTech Gell-Mann works closely with Feynman on weak couplings. At the blackboard the two explode with ideas like sparks flying from a grindstone, alternately slap their foreheads at each other’s simplifications, quibble over the niceties.
But the physicist who received most of the public’s attention that fall was Edward Teller. He was in tune with the cold war. Sputnik led him to declare—though there was evidence to the contrary—“Scientific and technical leadership is slipping from our hands.” A direct Soviet attack on the United States was possible, but he saw an even greater threat. “I do not think this is the most probable way in which they will defeat us,” he said. He predicted that the Soviet Union would gain a broad technological dominance over the free world. “They will advance so fast in science and leave us so far behind that their way of doing things will be the way, and there will be nothing we can do about it.”
With the winter’s excitement barely waning—the
Reader’s Digest
had now faced into the wind with an article titled “No Time for Hysteria”—a State Department official let Caltech know that the department would appreciate a presentation at the Geneva conference in the name of both Feynman and Gell-Mann, to balance the expected Soviet scientific presence there. Feynman acquiesced, although the mixing of propaganda and science disturbed him.
He declined to let the State Department make his hotel reservation; he found a walk-up room in an establishment called, in English, Hotel City. It reminded him of the flophouses he had known in Albuquerque and on his cross-country trip with Freeman Dyson. He had hoped to bring a woman with whom he had been having a sporadic and tempestuous yearlong love affair—the wife of a research fellow. She had accompanied him on a trip the summer before, when he was working on weak interactions. Now she agreed to meet him afterward in England but refused to come to Geneva. Instead, he met Gweneth Howarth on the beach.
She told him she was making her way around the world. She was twenty-four years old, the daughter of a jeweler in a town called Ripponden. She had worked as a librarian for a salary of three pounds weekly and then as a yarn tester at a cotton mill before deciding life in the backwaters of Yorkshire was too dull. She let Feynman know that she had two current boyfriends, a semiprofessional miler from Zurich, always in training, and a German optician from Saarbrücken. He immediately invited her to come to California and work for him. He needed a maid, he said. He would sponsor her with the immigration authorities and pay her twenty dollars a week. It seemed to her that he was not behaving like a forty-year-old; nor like other Americans she had met. She said she would consider it, and an unusual courtship began.
“I’ve decided to stay here after all,” she wrote him that fall. One of the boyfriends, Johann, had decided to marry her—out of jealousy, she suspected—
so you see what a good turn you did for me… . we talked for hours and hours, planning our life together. We shall probably start married life living in one room… . Were you really expecting me to come? … You’ll just have to get married again, or find a nice solid middle-aged housekeeper so people won’t gossip.
His love affairs were going badly, meanwhile. That same week a letter arrived from the other woman, making it clear that their relationship was over. She demanded money—five hundred dollars—“I will be frank, the chances of your getting it all back within a year are nil.” She had asked for money before, saying that she needed it for an abortion, but now she said that that had been a ruse. His money had actually gone for furniture and house painting.
You were too much of the “playboy.” But I was both embarrassed & intrigued by the effects that your girl friends had on you when they called you in my presence. Sometimes you left the phone, shaking & foaming at the mouth… . I recognized a baseness in you and was frightened that you took my love and affection for you cheaply, and so I wanted to compensate against that horrible feeling.
She knew too much about the women he had been seeing since his divorce. She named four of them and described an anonymous note that had come addressed to “Occupant”:
Dirty Dick, Filthy Fucking Feynman dates you. He will never marry you. Tell him he has made you pregnant. You’ll make a quick $300–$500.
She had been devastated by nasty physicist-gossip she had overheard about Feynman and his women, Feynman and “the pox.” He should get married, she said.
The baseness you talk of is due to the fact you aren’t married. You try to sublimate your desires by attending Burlesque Shows, Night Clubs, etc. These are fun for the healthy, but only an escape for the dissatisfied. I know this, because last year you were content in Rio, & as a result produced Beta Decay… .
Find yourself a real companion, someone you can really love & respect. Then capture love whilst it is fresh & spontaneous… .
At some point she had walked off with the gold medal he had received with the Einstein Award. She still had it, she reminded him.
Feynman implored Gweneth Howarth to reconsider. By November, as it happened, she and Johann were no longer on speaking terms and she had begun the immigration paperwork through the United States Consulate in Zurich. He consulted a lawyer, who warned that there were dangers in transporting women for immoral purposes and advised him to find a third-party employer; a Caltech friend, Matthew Sands, agreed to lend his name on the required documents. Feynman calculated fares (more than a year’s salary for a Yorkshire librarian, she noticed): $394.10 to Los Angeles; or $290.10 to New York and then $79.04 including tax for a bus from New York to Los Angeles.
She was excited but unsure. “You’ll write & tell me if you decide to get married again, or if there is any other reason why I should not come?” She wanted him to realize she had other possibilities—Armando, whom she met skiing, or a fellow who had been watching her at language class (“he walked part of the way home with me … I’d like it to be a platonic friendship, but I don’t suppose he will want it like that …”) and yet there were always hints of the domestic future Feynman so craved now—she was caring for “a beautiful baby now, I wish I could have one exactly like him.” A new friend, Engelbert, was buying skis for her; meanwhile she could now cook pheasant, chicken, goose, and hare with the appropriate sauces (“I’m improving, am I not?”). Feynman kept hearing from the other woman, too. She was telling her husband everything; they had left California for the East Coast. She wanted more money. She felt used. He let her know how angry he was. She told him, “altho’ you are clever at your own special work, you are very dim at human relationships.” She assured him that his Einstein Award medal was “safe”; also his copy of the
Rubáiyát
of Omar Khayyám, with drawings that had been carefully colored, so long ago, by Arline.
He begged her to come see him again. “I only mentioned my inner feelings for revenge, etc. to explain why it would be hard to guarantee you something that you asked,” he wrote. He still wanted to marry her.
I know where the right is—but emotions, like anger and hate and vengeance etc. are like a bunch of snakes in a barrel—with reason and good heart as a lid… . it is frightening and uncertain. Worth a good try tho.
She refused, despite the warm memories that now came back to her: building a sandcastle at the beach, surrounded by a mob of small boys; camping under the stars at Joshua Tree National Monument, where Feynman had tinkered delightedly with his gleaming green Coleman stove. On a wet Sunday night he had shown her a battered suitcase with all of Arline’s letters and photographs. Once in a flash of anger he had called her a prostitute—a cruel rhetorical weapon he had used before. “And,” she wrote, “I did enjoy my boss & my work.”
Her husband’s memories were not so warm. At a party he listened to someone telling a story about Feynman and blurted out that he knew a better one—but stopped. A few days later he wrote Feynman a formal letter demanding compensation. “You have taken callous & unscrupulous advantage of your position & salary to seduce an impressionable girl away from her husband,” he wrote. Could Feynman not remember the harder times of his own first marriage? “You alienated my wife’s affections. You flattered her with your attentions and your gifts. You made clandestine plans for exciting vacations… . I think you should pay for indulging your selfish pleasure.” He demanded $1,250. Feynman refused.
Gweneth Howarth was reporting that Engelbert had brought cognac and chocolate to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday; she decided to improve her shorthand and typing (“You do need someone to look after you, don’t you?”). Feynman sent the consulate in Zurich an affidavit vouching for her (“she is an intelligent girl with a fine personality and is an excellent cook and domestic servant”) and guaranteeing to undertake her financial support if necessary. Gweneth thanked him, mentioning that she had now met an Arab boy, beautifully polite, but he had started to make love to her. She had to avoid Engelbert because she could not hide a love bite on her neck. She was making her way through the immigration paperwork: pages of questions designed to ensure that she was not a Communist and then—infuriating her—questions about whether she was a woman of good character where sex was concerned. From what moral high ground—and with what bureaucratic logic—did the American authorities require her to swear that she was neither a prostitute nor an adulterer?
Feynman, meanwhile, tried to placate his former lover’s husband: “… forgive her and make her happy… . your love will be deeper for the forgiveness and greater because you each know how you have suffered.”
“Good thought,” the husband retorted, “but why don’t you apply it to yourself since you have enjoyed her for so long… . Don’t give me the story of your parents’ teachings, society etc. for I don’t go for that.” He engaged attorneys, who sent threatening letters on his behalf. But Feynman’s attorneys advised him not to settle, guessing that the matter would fade away on its own. The last word belonged to his lover.
