From: sarfatti@well.sf.ca.us (Jack Sarfatti)
Subject: FEYNMAN 2
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 07:10:03 GMT


F2 comments by Sarfatti enclosed in [...]

"In the spring of 1948 [I was 8] .... The bomb had shown the aptness of
physics. The scientists had found enough sinew behind their penciled
abstractions to change history,,,, they realized how fragile their theory
was. They thought that quantum mechanics gave a crude, perhaps temporary,
but at least workable way to make calculations about light and matter. When
pressed, however, the theory gave wrong results. And not merely wrong -
they were senseless. Who could love a theory that worked so neatly at first
approximation and then, when a scientist tried to make the results more
exact, broke down so grotesquely?" p.4

"Oppenheimer himself had privately noted that Feynman was the most
brilliant young physicist at the atomic bomb project.... A few knew of his
ocntribution to the key equation for the efficiency of a nuclear explosion
(still classified forty years later, although the spy Klaus Fuchs had
transmitted it promptly to his incredulous masters in the Soviet Union) ..

[As an undergraduate in physics at Cornell in the late fifties I sang in
the Cornell Savoyards with Ronnie Peierls' one of Hans Bethe's grad
students. Ron's father was the physicist Sir Rudolph Peierls. Klaus Fuchs
has lived with Ronnie and his parents at Los Alamos during the development
of the bomb. I met my first wife through Ron. I remember being enthusiastic
about general relativity and Ron thought the theory, while beautiful, was a
dead end- that was before the breakthroughs in the 60's.]

..or his theory of predetonation, measuring the probability that a lump of
uranium might explode too soon. ... They remembered him organizing the
world's first large-scale computing system.... p.6

[Feynman helped develop the connection machine right before he died.
Feynman's son works for Thinking Machines. It was another physicist, John
Von Neumann who invented the idea of the programmable universal computer -
and,of course we have Turing whose assistant I.J. Good has discovered the
superluminal telepathic intelligence he calls "GOD(D). There was also the
phone call in 1952 from a 'computer'.]

In the spring of 1948 ......twenty seven physicists assembled at a resort
hotel in the Pocono Mountains ,,, the elite of physics... Facing his elders
in the Pocono Manor sitting room, Feynman ...was trying to put across a new
program for making the more exact calculations that physics now required -
more than a programm a vision, a dancing, shaking picture of particles,
symbols, arrows, and fields...

Edward Teller .... on his way to heading the postwar project to build the
Super, the hydrogen bomb, interrupted with a question about basic quantum
physics:"What about the exclusion principle?"

Feynman had hoped to avoid this. The exclusion principle meant that only
one lectron could inhabit a particular quantum state.... in Feynman's
scheme particles did seem to violate this cheished principle by coming into
existence for a ghostly instant. "It doesn't make any difference-" he
started to reply.
"How do you know?"
"I know..
,,, He showed a particle of antimatter going backward in time. This
mistified Dirac, the man who had first predicted the existence of
antimatter. Dirac now asked a question about causality: "Is it unitary?"
[This is the same question Carlton Caves, Aephraim Steinberg, Mike Gallis,
John Baez and others asked me in my first design for the quantum connection
communicator - well the latest design is unitary. The transmitter beam
recombiner is manifestly locally unitary and the far away receiver twin
photon is polarized at a distance controlled from the transmitter!]
Unitary! What on earth did he mean?

"I'll explain it to you," Feynman said, "and then you can see how it works,
then you can tell me if it's unitary." He went on, and from time to time he
thought he could still hear Dirac muttering, "Is it unitary?" p.7




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