Richard Feynman Physicist; Diffusion Problems Group leader

Once people thought that angels beat their wings to push the earth in its ordained track around the sun as easily as we might move a blackboard covered with Serber’s latest figures. That view has now been somewhat modified.

The blank, unassuming face of a blackboard makes it easier to calculate the sun’s mass, and gravity’s figures speak louder than the handful of earth in a man. Numbers don’t change their minds, like people or angels.

As a boy, I thought I’d been left on Earth by aliens. I could figure the rotational velocity of a changeup, but my aim was a radian off. While the sun arced through the blue vault like an angel, I scrawled resonance equations on a blackboard.

On my first drive up to Los Alamos, the sun on cottonwoods and sandstone transformed me. I’d been thinking of Arline in the TB ward in Albuquerque. The doctors figured she had a year. My heart was a blackboard covered in odds. The naked earth

rose before me then like the figure of an angel. I could spend my life slaving at a blackboard and never quantify the way light shifted in her eyes. I lay down on a bare patch of earth to think. My chest was heavy with sun.

I chose the smaller job: alter the course of a war. Armed with a blackboard, I would earn my place on Earth. Behind me, an angel beat her wings. I circled the sun with a lasso of figures.