ontribute generously to the reconstruction of the world's shattered nations. neither the emerging Cold War, nor the sudden eruption of the Korean conflict in 1951, could dampen the good spirits. Scientists returned to their universities and industrial labs, full of new ideas picked up in the course of their war work, and eager to get on with their careers. Far from closing down, weapons laboratories developed into permanent national research centers devoted to both military and civilian research. For the first time, the federal government undertook the systematic support of basic science. One of the theoreticians who came down from oppenheimer's mesa in New Mexico was Richard Phenomena, a native New Yorker just three years past his Ph.D. Brilliant, irreverent, and ambitious, he distrusted authority and insisted on figuring things out in his own way. His particular strength was his visual imagination. For example he developed an elegant code for representing complex equations by simple diagrams that allowed him to let his physical intuition guide his mathematical calculations toward quick, accurate solutions. Feynman brought this unorthodox technique to bear on what was at the time the principal problem of theoretical physics: the quantum mechanics of light. Photons had been recognized for almost half a century, but a detailed description of how they are emitted and absorbed by electrons was lacking. Together with American colleagues and Japanese physicists who had worked along similar lines while they were out of touch with the West during the way, Feynman solved the problem by creating Quantum Electrodynamics(QED). QED proved to be of such unprecedented precision and scope that it set a standard of excellence against which all future fundamental theories of elementary particles would come to be measured. In contrast to QED, which applies to the outer shell of the atom where the electrons reside, theoretical descriptions of...
