Feynman Diagrams

Back when I was a physicist, I used to love the look of the chalkboard after a seminar. 

I came to think of this mess of dense symbols outlined in chalk as a kind of abstract art.

My favourite bit of physics / abstract art were Feynman diagrams – strange little figures of intersecting lines and wiggles and bubbles used to represent particle interactions. This bit of beautiful abstraction is named for Richard Feynman, a legend in the field. To this day, Feynman’s name is rarely invoked without tones of awe and reverence. My colleagues and I spoke, sometimes, about the man, his unparalleled mind, his theorems, his diagrams. We spoke about his larger-than-life personality, his sense of humour, the frat-boy pranks he pulled on his coworkers during his time in Los Alamos National Laboratory.

But we didn’t speak much about what he was working on there.

At Los Alamos, Richard Feynman was building atomic bombs.

In 1945, on August 6 and 9, the beautiful abstraction of Feynman and his theorist colleagues would be rendered into something unforgivably tangible. At Hiroshima, an area approximately 12 square kilometres was laid to ruin in a fraction of a second. An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people were killed – some 30% of the population – including both Japanese combatants and Korean slave labourers. At Nagasaki another 35,000 to 40,000 were killed. Tens of thousands more were injured, maimed, stripped of their livelihood, their loved ones, their health.

I used to love the way those diagrams looked, up there, on the chalkboard.

We talked about the abstraction, my colleagues and I. We talked about mathematics. A few of the more senior scientists shared stories of their own personal encounters with Feynman, usually incidents so minor they would have disappeared from memory were it not for the presence of the great man himself. We didn’t talk about the bombs, the ruined cities, the wailing orphans. We didn’t talk about leukaemia, about the cancers of the thyroid, lung, and breast. We didn’t talk about death.

Just a month before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were laid to waste, Feynman witnessed the world’s first nuclear explosion at a bombing range in the desert of New Mexico. It was there that his mentor, Robert Oppenheimer, was famously moved to quote the Bhagavad Gita, the primary holy text of Hinduism.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”