BRIGHT SPECTRUM

"Scientists," says a California physicist, "are this century's version of the explorers of earlier times" And yet, as a nuclear chemist says, "most scientists are rather revoltingly normal in their manners and their way of life." These nine leading lights of U.S. science prove both points by their composite beginnings, their curiosities and their achievements. They also prove why the nation's scientific resources are basically sound and promising.

Luis Walter Alvarez, 46, sports-jacketed professor of physics and associate director of the University of California's Radiation Laboratory, has been called the "prize wild-idea man." Some prized wild ideas: isolation of tritium (used in thermonuclear weapons) and, with a graduate student, the discovery of helium 3 (1939); the universally used radar-operated Ground-Controlled Approach System for blind-flying aircraft (1942); a method of producing nuclear reaction without the presence of uranium or million-degree heat (1956). Born in San Francisco, the son of onetime Teacher and Mayo Clinic Physician (and now medical columnist) Walter Alvarez, he studied at the University of Chicago, switched, on the advice of a favorite professor, from chemistry to physics, took his Ph.D. in 1936. In the early years of World War II he worked at M.I.T.'s Radiation Laboratory, moved on to the Manhattan Project in 1943, Los Alamos in 1944-45. He flew in a B-29 half a mile behind the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, later lined up against J. Robert Oppenheimer's refusal to speed development of the hydrogen bomb. Light-haired, blue-eyed, easygoing, he sports a yellow Lincoln convertible, shoots mid-80s golf (he sent President Eisenhower an electronic golf trainer that he had invented), once told his father: "I probably would be a better physicist if I turned longhair and stayed in the laboratory on Saturday nights and Sundays. But I prefer to be a man as well as a physicist."

Richard Phillips Feynman, 39, whose father was a sales manager for a uniform company, was born in Manhattan, is professor of theoretical physics at California's Institute of Technology, won the Albert Einstein Award (1954) for his "Feynman diagrams," a complex system of simplified calculations in quantum electrodynamics. After M.I.T. and Princeton (Ph.D., 1942), he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, at Cornell (nuclear studies), joined CalTech in 1950. Curly-haired and handsome, he shuns neckties and coats, is an enormously valuable and dedicated adventurer in his field, harvests most of his brilliant ideas at the blackboard. A teetotaler ("I got potted in a Buffalo bar one night and wound up with a lulu of a black eye"), , he became fascinated with samba rhythms while on a lecturing appointment in Brazil, became proficient on the "frying pan" (a Brazilian percussion instrument). Other entertainments: playing bongo drums, breaking codes, picking locks. (He drove Los Alamos security officers to nervous exhaustion by easily opening locked desks and combination locks on safes.) Currently engrossed in the study of "weak couplings" (one of the four forces--with gravitation, electromagnetism and strong couplings--of all matter), Feynman admits that he has found nothing of immediate significance yet. But, he adds, "it's just another step toward trying to understand the fundamental nature of all matter."

Murray Gell-Mann, 28, professor of theoretical physics at CalTech, comes from Manhattan, the son of a language-school proprietor who infected his son with his own hobbies: mathematics, astronomy and archaeology. "I did poorly in physics in high school," he says. "It was terribly boring. At Yale it got more interesting." At 21 he took his Ph.D. at M.I.T., studied at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, became, at 26, an assistant professor in physics at the University of Chicago. A specialist in quantum mechanics, in 1952 he formulated the "Strangeness Theory," i.e., assigned physical meanings to the behavior of newly discovered particles. At CalTech Gell-Mann works closely with Feynman on weak couplings. At the blackboard the two explode with ideas like sparks flying from a grindstone, alternately slap their foreheads at each other's simplifications, quibble over the niceties of wall-length equations, charge their creative batteries by flipping paper clips at distant targets. Says Gell-Mann, of the future: "You might say there is a sort of truce between Nature and our understanding of her. But Nature is not obligated; she has made us no promises."

Ernest Orlando Lawrence, 56, University of California's Radiation Laboratory director, invented the atom-smashing cyclotron--which has been called "as useful in research as the microscope." Born in Canton, S.D., where his father was a superintendent of schools, Lawrence worked his way through local Midwestern colleges selling aluminum ware from door to door, and successfully so, despite the fact that the cakes he baked, as part of his presentation, usually caved flat as a platter. A Ph.D. (Yale, 1925), he spent his early career studying the phenomenon of ionization, began working on the cyclotron as early as 1930. He first demonstrated it that year with a crude but scientifically overwhelming do-it-yourself kit: a kitchen chair, clothes tree, toy-sized four-inch magnet, pie-sized vacuum chamber made of window glass, brass and sealing wax. Nobel Prizewinner (1939) Lawrence is a humorous, vigorous man who steams around his labs with--as nucleonics folk term it--all rods in. He plays tennis, fiddles with television (he invented a color TV tube in his garage), explains: "You don't have to have genius to be a scientist-- just character. All you have to do is work hard and figure things out."

J. (for nothing) Robert Oppenheimer, 53, . director and professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is "the father of the atomic bomb," i.e., the superb organizer and catalyst who, during World War 11, kept the high-strung, fenced-in Los Alamos colony working with desperate single purpose on the first Abomb. The son of a prosperous German immigrant, he was born in New York City, got his first taste of science at five, when he was visiting his grandfather in Germany and received a gift box of minerals. At Manhattan's Ethical Culture School he completed a year's chemistry course in six weeks--"and then I fell in love with physics because of the sweep of its laws, I suppose. In physics you get glimpses of such harmony and order!" After his Ph.D. (from Gottingen University, Germany) at 23, he taught physics, ranged into relativity, quantum theory, cosmic rays and nucleonics. In 1954 his security clearance was revoked after an airing of past Communist associations and his anti-H-bomb campaign as chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the AEC. Oppenheimer moved full-time to the institute in 1947, where he has been "trying to understand the existence, properties and behavior of the fundamental particles of which all matter is composed."

Isidor Isaac Rabi, 59, shy, good-humored Columbia University professor of physics is chairman of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee. The Austrian-born son of a tailor, he was brought to the U.S. as an infant. In 1944 he won the Nobel Prize for discovering a new method of measuring and studying the magnetic properties of the atomic nucleus. "Some people," he says, "turn to science as a career to make a living, others because somebody they admire tremendously is a scientist. And then there are those who just can't help it--like me. I knocked around for a long time before finding my niche." Growing up in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Rabi was "always making things." After studying chemistry at Cornell (B. Chem., 1919), he got a job with a chemical firm "analyzing furniture polish and mother's milk," tried running an abortive weekly newspaper ("a nonprofit organization") and even a private banking concern. "And then came the vision." Rabi returned to graduate school "and found physics and myself."

Julian Seymour Schwinger, 39, son of a Manhattan dress manufacturer, became a full professor of physics at Harvard when he was 29, is now rated, with Richard Phillips Feynman (see above), as among the top theoreticians in the U.S. Science-fiction pulp magazines infected him with the science bug. "I soon discovered," he explains, "that it was scientific fact that I was interested in, and not fiction." He won a fellowship at Columbia, took his Ph.D. there at 21. In 1951 he won the Albert Einstein Award for achievement in the natural sciences for his work on the interaction of light and matter and the properties of electrons and light, is now involved with studies on general principles of quantum mechanics. Like many other scientists, he is a music lover, once tried teaching himself to play the piano ("I could teach myself physics, but it didn't work in music"). In his colleagues' estimate, he is the "heir apparent to the mantle of Einstein."

Glenn Theodore Seaborg, 45, director of chemical research at the University of California's Radiation Laboratory, explains with disarming simplicity: "I discover new elements." Born in the mining town of Ishpeming, Mich., he found his calling in a Los Angeles high-'school science class, pursued it at the University of California (Ph.D., chemistry, 1937), became a key developer of the atomic bomb. In 1951, with Colleague Edwin M. McMillan, he won the Nobel Prize for his discovery (in 1940) of element 94 (plutonium), has since played a heavy role in finding subsequent elements (through No. 101). Although he finds little time nowadays for following football very closely (he is faculty representative to the Pacific Coast Conference), Seaborg does play golf (low 90s), swims in his backyard pool. One current project: search for the next synthetic element (No. 103). "The inner rewards," says he, "are very great. Science is the new frontier, and we all like adventure."

Claude Elwood Shannon, 41, M.I.T. professor of electrical engineering and mathematics, the son of a Michigan lawyer, is, like his fellow M.I.T. math professor, "ex-Prodigy" Norbert Wiener, a world authority on electronic computers and cybernetics (the theory and application of control mechanisms, including those of the human brain). Fascinated with science ever since he was given an Erector set at eight, Shannon was educated at the University of Michigan, M.I.T. and Princeton, went to work for Bell Telephone Laboratories during World War II. Still a consultant to Bell, Shannon calls himself an "inter-discipline man" who sees mathematics as the science most closely related to electrical engineering. "Perhaps one of the most challenging problems we face," says he, "is in making a machine to simulate the human mind." Shannon is a jazz addict, fashions devices such as the electronic maze-solving mouse, reads science-fiction and, says a friend, "like many scientists, works best at night, with plenty of cigarettes and coffee."

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