Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science Read Online Free PDF Page A

Competition in 1939. This is the most prestigious and demanding national mathematics contest open to undergraduates, and was then in its second year. I remember when I was an undergraduate the very best mathematics students would join their university’s team and solve practice problems for months ahead of the examination. No one solves all the problems on the exam, and in many years a significant fraction of the entrants fail to solve a single problem. The mathematics department at MIT had asked Feynman to join MIT’s team for the competition in his senior year, and the gap between Feynman’s score and the scores for all of the other entrants from across the country apparently astounded those grading the exam, so he was offered the Harvard prize scholarship. Feynman would later sometimes feign ignorance of formal mathematics when speaking about physics, but his Putnam score demonstrated that as a mathematician, he could compete with the very best in the world.
    But Feynman turned down Harvard. He had decided he wanted to go to Princeton, I expect for the same reason that so many young physicists wanted to go there: that was where Einstein was. Princeton had accepted him and offered him a job as future Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner’s research assistant. Fortunately for Feynman, he was assigned instead to a young assistant professor, John Archibald Wheeler, a man whose imagination matched Feynman’s mathematical virtuosity.
    In a remembrance of Feynman after his death, Wheeler recalled a discussion among the graduate admissions committee in the spring of 1939, during which one person raved about the fact that no one else applying to the university had math and physics aptitude scores anywhere near as high as Feynman’s (he scored 100 percent in physics), while another member of the committee complained at the same time that they had never let anyone in with scores so low in history and English. Happily for the future of science, physics and math prevailed.
    Interestingly, Wheeler did not describe another key issue, of which he may not have been aware: the so-called Jewish question. The head of the physics department at Princeton had written to Philip Morse about Feynman, asking about his religious affiliation, adding, “We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them.” Ultimately it was decided that Feynman was not sufficiently Jewish “in manner” to get in the way. The fact that Feynman, like many scientists, was essentially uninterested in religion never arose as part of the discussion.
    M ORE IMPORTANT THAN all of these external developments, however, was the fact that Feynman had now proceeded to the stage in his education where he could begin to think about the really exciting stuff—namely, the physics that didn’t make sense. Science at the forefront is always on the verge of paradox and inconsistency, and like a bloodhound, great physicists focus precisely on these elements because that is where the true quarry lies.
    The problem that Feynman later said he “fell in love with” as an undergraduate had been a familiar part of the centerpiece of theoretical physics for almost a century: the classical theory of electromagnetism. Like many deep problems, it can be simply stated. The force between two like charges is repulsive, and therefore it takes work to bring them closer together. The closer they get, the more work it takes. Now imagine a single electron. Think of it as a “ball” of charge with a certain radius. To bring all the charge together at this radius to make up the electron would thus take work. The energy built up by the work bringing the charge together is commonly called the self-energy of the electron.
    The problem is that if we were to shrink the size of the electron down to a single point, the self-energy associated with the electron would go to infinity, because it takes an infinite