The cosmic secret3/8/2023 So many colorful details, from Albert Einstein’s distinctive coiffure to Marie Curie’s mournful gaze to Richard Feynman’s bongo playing, suggest that eccentricity is part of staring at the fundamental nature of the universe.Īnd it isn’t all caricature: When psychologists compare scientists and nonscientists on broad personality traits, they find notable differences. The image of the scientist as a maverick, the wild thinker with his eyes on the horizon, seeing something that no one has seen before, has a romance that’s hard to deny. It must be because he is a physicist, I thought.įrancis’s oddness put him in good company. But ask him about the history of Paris, for instance, or solo sailboat races, and he could go on for an hour, making nutty little jokes along the way. It was often hard to get him to talk at dinner. When our school bus dropped us off in the afternoons, he would come right up to the bus door and stand almost against it, much too close, unnerving the driver. He seemed poorly acquainted with the physical world, despite having built a full-size sailboat by hand (he named it after Évariste Galois, a French mathematician who invented an important branch of modern math before dying in a duel). I always knew there was something weird about Francis. To understand my grandfather’s grand obsession, I had to go into the foundations of physics, and to the heart of the stories we tell about science. The theory seemed to deal with the fundamental question of where probabilities come from, as well as a specialized subfield of mathematics and even quantum mechanics. I had never understood what it was, and looking through these papers, I still could not make sense of it. Indeed, as a child, I’d heard murmurings among the adults that Francis had an idea of some sort. My dad used to say, half-wonderingly, half-jokingly: “He’s about to utter a theory of everything.” He wore a single, boldly checked blazer for nearly every occasion, and he often went around with two pairs of glasses balanced on his forehead-one for close reading, one for distance-and his mouth slightly ajar. He had eyebrows like wiry caterpillars, and a constant look of delayed revelation. One year in the mid-’90s, it was a card game whose simple rules hid deep mathematical truths another, it was a demonstration, using a chair-back and a length of cord, of the strangeness of quantum mechanics. Francis was a man of consuming obsessions. When I knew them, Francis and Claire were no longer at the lab during my childhood, my mother would invite them for a month-long visit at Christmastime. These seem to have been happy years: Their son was born, and their work was well received, cited many times by other scientists. In the 1960s and ’70s, they published paper after paper describing the probabilities of various outcomes of their collision experiments-how often a neutron would veer left or right or another direction, how often the atom would emit another particle, and other possibilities. There they rammed neutrons into the centers of atoms for a living. But by the time Francis and Claire Perey came to town, peace had turned the facility into the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Together these secret cities became key sites in the Manhattan Project, the push to develop the first atomic bomb. The town of Oak Ridge had been rebuilt from the ground up for military research, like Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington. My grandparents had arrived in the low green hills of East Tennessee with their young daughter, my mother, in 1960. My grandfather had a theory, one that he believed to be among the most important work of his career. In this stack, I found, was evidence of a mystery. Letters from some of the biggest names in physics fell out of the folders, in correspondence going back to 1979. Then my eyes fell on the words fundamental breakthrough, spectacular, and revolutionary. My youngest sister put a pile of yellowing papers in front of me, and I started to leaf through the typewritten letters and scholarly articles. In the wood-paneled study, we passed around great sheaves of papers for sorting, filling the air with dust. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist, my grandmother a mathematician, and among their novels and magazines were reams of scientific publications. When my grandfather died last fall, it fell to my sisters and me to sort through the books and papers in his home in East Tennessee.
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