Manhattan Men: Feynman's Processor
This is the 16th installment of 774: Weekly lessons from history about science, technology, and innovation.
Next Week:
Manhattan Men: Hamming’s Code
This Week:
The Manhattan Project might be one of the single craziest scientific accomplishments in history1. The operation encompassed research, spying on German nuclear efforts, producing newly discovered Plutonium, and ultimately bringing about the single largest change to armed conflict ever. Second only to what was actually accomplished, the most interesting thing about the Manhattan Project was the all-star team of scientists involved. Robert Oppenheimer, Vannevar Bush, and Richard Feynman are just a few of the legends who might not even put working on the atom bomb at the top of their resumés. Many of the Manhattan Project’s contributors were demonstrable geniuses. What were the kinds of things they personally thought about and worked on that set them up to take on the Manhattan Project when they arrived in Los Alamos, New Mexico? In this short series I’ll be exploring what made some of the scientists who assisted the Manhattan Project so successful.
*Los Alamos Gate
2
Feynman’s Processor
Richard Feynman was relatively young at the time of the Manhattan Project. Unlike 35 year-old Oppenheimer who was an established theoretical physicist when he led the project, 21 year-old Feynman was anything but established. He hadn’t yet led the way in thinking about quantum computing, nor had he yet been awarded the Nobel Prize for his discoveries in physics, and it would be 6 decades before he was ranked by his fellow scientists as the 7th greatest physicist of all time3. In his book, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman4, he titles the section on the Manhattan Project “Los Alamos from Below.”
When I say “Los Alamos from Below,” I mean that. Although in my field at the present time I’m a slightly famous man, at that time I was not anybody famous at all. I didn’t even have a degree when I started to work with the Manhattan Project. Many of the other people who tell you about Los Alamos - people in higher echelons - worried about some big decisions. I worried about no big decisions. I was always flittering about underneath.
Feynman’s relative insignificance to the project only increases the oddity with how many legends had a hand in making the atom bomb. It’s not surprising that a mind like Einstein would have written to FDR to inform him that the United States should look into atomic weapons, nor is it surprising that an accomplished researcher like Oppenheimer would be tapped to spearhead the project, but Feynman, an unproven physicist at the time, is less predictable.
*Richard Feynman
5
In his memoir, Feynman retells numerous anecdotes from his life with accompanying wisdom sprinkled in. The stories all vary, but they end up forming a few hard and fast rules that Feynman lived by, namely his obsession with accurately understanding the world. Feynman spent his life working in physics, but he dipped his toes into art, biology, and electronics throughout his life. In each of these areas he wouldn’t take a birds eye view of any subject. He had a polymathic desire to understand new fields to a more extreme degree than the experts in those fields.
While at Princeton, Feynman got caught up ignoring his concentration in physics and instead began enrolling in biology courses. He was eventually encouraged by one of the biology graduate students to take a higher level course which he would need special approval from the professor to enroll in. During this course, Feynman was presenting a report to the class about gastrocnemius muscles of a cat.
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: “We know all that!”
“Oh,” I say, “you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it can be looked up in 15 minutes.
Feynman had a commitment to real understanding of the subjects he studied and shared an extreme contempt for people who had the guise of expertise but whose knowledge cracked up to memorized facts. Real understanding of what one was doing was of personal importance to Feynman, but he also believed that helping his subordinates understand what they were doing was the best thing for them and their work.
At Los Alamos, the scientists utilized tabulators from IBM (basically large calculators) that required punch cards to be filled out in order to complete computations. To conduct the manual punching of cards and utilization of the IBM machines, the U.S. government hired a group of mathematically minded young men.
The real trouble was that no one ever told these fellows anything. The army had selected them from all over the country for a thing called Special Engineer Detachment - clever boys from high school who had engineering ability. They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in barracks. And they would tell them nothing.
Then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM machines - punching holes, numbers that they didn’t understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we’re doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permissions so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited: “We’re fighting a war! We see what it is!” They knew what the numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant that there was more energy released, and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing.
Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn’t need supervising in the night; they didn’t need anything. They understood everything; they invented several of the programs that we used.
Feynman recognized that understanding was essential to the success of a project and that confusion would stagnate even the brightest individuals that the U.S. Army could find.
To Feynman, there was one most frustrating roadblock to people’s ability to understand what was going on in the world and find deeper scientific understanding: experts. When reading Feynman, one could forget that he is himself a scientific expert because of the contempt he clearly holds for people who tout credentialism but effectively prevent discovery. This is evident in his story about his biology class, but so many other areas too.
One meeting Feynman attended that discussed what seemed to be a paradox in physics eroded any remaining deference he had for the experts in his own field.
The problem was to find the right laws of beta decay. There appeared to be two particles, which were called a tau and a theta. They seemed to have almost exactly the same amount of mass, but one disintegrated into two pions, and the other into three pions. Not only did they seem to have the same mass, but they also had the same lifetime, which is a funny coincidence. So everybody was concerned about this…
Now, one possibility of course, was that it was the same particle, which sometimes decayed into two pions, and sometimes into three pions. But nobody would allow that, because there is a law called the parity rule, which is based on the assumption that all the laws of physics are mirror-image-symmetrical, and say that a thing that can go into two pions can’t also go into three.
At that particular time I was not really up to things: I was always a little behind. Everybody seemed to be smart, and I didn’t feel I was keeping up. Anyway, I was sharing a room with a guy named Martin Block, an experimenter. And one evening he said to me, “why are you guys so insistent on the parity rule? Maybe the tau and the theta are the same particle. What would be the consequences if the parity rule were wrong?
After a discussion between Martin and Richard about who should put forward the question to Oppenheimer the next day, Feynman pitched the question poised by Block the evening before:
What would be the consequences if the parity rule were wrong?
The question garnered some head scratching, but none of the big wigs at the meeting seemed to take it as a very serious line of reasoning. The experimental physicist Chien-Shiung Wu took it to heart and soon after found a violation of the parity rule. Because such a fundamental rule was overturned,6 a litany of other experiments ensued to determine where else the parity rule fell short.
*Chien-Shiung Wu
7
It also led Feynman to experiment with and reevaluate beta decay and to write this sentence:
Since then I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself.
Sometimes I make value judgements.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman
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All the quotes are pulled from this book.