![]() Who was this person who could speak so technically of his own death, call it a sacrifice that does not seem insupportable? “Not insupportable ” to whom? Certainly not to me, my sister, my mother. I only knew that at last I had found some remnant of my father, a proof that he was real. Sitting in the Bohr Library, I did not know about the visa. As I discovered recently, the State Department denied him a visa because they were worried that the Soviets would kidnap him. Even though I was just three then, I could remember the talk in the house about the trip and posing for a passport photo. The year before he went to Princeton, he had won a Guggenheim to work with Wolfgang Pauli in Switzerland. He died at the start of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, which helps to explain the sentence about sacrifices. When I read his words, I set down the frail letter and stared for several moments at his small, careful handwriting, at my hands on the paper, at a clock on the wall. ![]() When you consider the hazards to which we will all be exposed, my own sacrifice does not seem insupportable.” It seems to me that everyone will have to make sacrifices before this thing is through. “As to all that has happened to cause my illness,” he writes, “my thoughts are clear. Most of the letter is about physics, but near the end he apologizes for his sudden departure and discusses his “doleful secret,” the cobalt treatments he is receiving, and his prognosis. My father’s papers are housed there, and I found a copy of a letter he had written a few months before his death to his teacher and mentor Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Princeton Institute that year my father had a fellowship, and then suddenly he became ill and returned to Urbana, which was the reason for the letter. The closest I came on my first trip was at the Niels Bohr Library in New York City. I would arrive somewhere-the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, the Fermi Lab in Chicago, the National Laboratory at Los Alamos-and simply stand there, trying to call his soul from decades in the past. Rail Pass and traveled across the country, to all the places where my father lived and worked, trying to find him. ![]() Because my father was who he was, they all spoke to me, Feynman and the rest. A graduate of UCLA Film School, I was searching for a topic for my first screenplay-my feet on my desk in my small Santa Monica apartment and staring out the window at passing clouds-when the subject of the Manhattan Project came to me, rained down on me seemingly out of thin air-all the eccentric physicists my mother talked about when I was growing up, the world she lived in before my father died-and I realized it was my heritage, to do with as I liked. My first attempt at serious writing came in my twenties. Had there not been a bomb, I would not have lived through the bomb drills and terrors of the Cold War aware that my father helped create them.Īnd had there not been a bomb, I probably would not be a writer. ![]() Had there not been a bomb, my biological father-a Manhattan Project physicist-would not have died in 1951 from radiation-induced cancer a month before my fourth birthday, and I would not have grown up fatherless. I would not be who I am today were it not for the Bomb. ![]()
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