he replied, not understanding quite what she meant. Little did he know that from that moment on, his hopes of remaining anonymous would be dashed forever. Suddenly he found himself transformed into an object of curiosity and ridicule for students and teachers alike, sacrificed to a ritual that would repeat itself over and over again at the beginning of each school year.
At first, it wasn’t such a terrible thing to discover that his name was not so original. He was consoled, in fact, by all the Johns and Marys and Roberts he saw. His mother’s second husband was called Tobias Smith, and he didn’t seem at all troubled by the fact that he had to share his name with thousands of his compatriots. But the taunts were what bothered Frank the most: “Bet you think you’re some kind of genius, don’t you, Mr. Bacon?” they asked. He did; that was the worst thing of all. Who would ever believe that there could be another brilliant scientist named Francis Bacon? The first coincidence seemed to make the second one virtually impossible. He tried defending himself by proving to everyone how talented he was, but the arrogance with which he presented his results only elicited bouts of laughter from his teachers. It was as if they thought his intellectual abilities were nothing more than an anomaly or an eccentricity rather than true genius. In any event, they never failed to compare him with the “real” Bacon, as if he were nothing more than the unfortunate, apocryphal copy of a long-dead original.
Bacon’s childhood and adolescence were lonely. Hypersensitive about the qualities that set him apart from the other children, he recoiled from all human contact apart from the unavoidable. He was hardly the easiest person to live with, either, due to the persistent migraines that plagued him, sending him into nearly catatonic states in which the slightest bit of light or noise was all but unbearable. He would spend hours on end locked away in his room, dreaming up formulas and theorems until his stepfather would knock on his door, practically dragging him downstairs to supper. By this point, his mother almost regretted ever having taught him how to count: Not only had he become intransigent and rude, but he also was increasingly intolerant of anyone less intelligent than he.
The hateful games people played at his expense gradually receded from his thoughts and he found himself more and more captivated by the English scientist who had caused all the trouble to begin with. He needed to know who that fateful ancestor was, the person whose mere name had made his life a living hell. With the same dedication of a teenager who inspects himself in the mirror day after day for the most infinitesimal signs of his metamorphosis into adulthood, Francis doggedly pursued his namesake. To avoid the displeasure of reading his name in print over and over again (since it always referred to someone else), Frank chose to immerse himself in the obsessions of his “ancestor.” And in the process of learning about the original Bacon’s great discoveries, Francis made one of his own, the kind of vague realization that emboldens a person to take a leap of faith across the great unknown. This discovery, rather than fulfilling the predictions of his detractors, was the thing that led Frank to discover his vocation. In spite of the apparent happenstance of their shared name, Frank was inspired by the discoveries of the first Francis Bacon, and began to believe that his destiny was somehow linked to that of the old, dead scientist. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a reincarnation—he couldn’t think about things like that—but he felt sure it was some sort of calling, a circumstance that was too obvious to have been an act of pure coincidence.
The life history of Baron Verulam, the first Francis Bacon, transformed the life of our Francis. The more Frank learned about the baron, the more he felt that he had to continue, in some way, the work of the original Francis Bacon. As unpleasant as he had been toward those around him, Francis Bacon had managed to achieve immortality. Young Francis felt a bond with him, for he, too, felt misunderstood by his contemporaries, and he comforted himself by thinking that one day his mother, stepfather, and schoolmates would be sorry for the shoddy treatment they subjected him to. He felt especially proud of sharing his last name with a man to whom Shakespearean plays had been attributed. Just like Sir Francis, Frank had become a learned person for a variety of reasons, including curiosity, the search for truth, plus a certain amount of natural talent for his studies. But in the end Frank easily admitted that the greatest source of inspiration had been the same one Sir Francis cited: rage. For him, a happy coexistence with the precise, concrete elements of mathematics was the only solution to confronting the chaos of the universe, whose destiny was utterly independent of his. Adapting a little saying made famous by his Elizabethan hero, Frank would have said for himself: “I have studied numbers, not men.”
In school, his standoffishness toward his peers gradually dissipated as the result of a growing appreciation for the natural laws, which included, at least in theory, a certain admiration for humanity in general. Although perhaps not everything that occurred in the world could be explained by reason, science at least offered a direct track to solid knowledge. And, most important, the person in possession of that knowledge—that is, a clear understanding of the laws governing the world—also possessed a power which he could then exert over other people. Francis never fully abandoned his original mistrust of others, but rather placed it in a far corner of his memory, a place he visited less and less frequently.
One morning he woke up in a most broad-minded and accepting mood. Without understanding precisely why, Francis had decided to give up theoretical mathematics, that labyrinth of abstractions and impenetrable formulae, and decided to test the slightly more solid, concrete ground of physics. This decision hardly pleased his mother, who wanted him to become an engineer, but at least it was a step closer to a world she understood. Rather than mixing and matching numbers like a schizophrenic frantically jumbling his words, his job now was to immerse himself in the basic elements of the universe: matter, light, energy. Perhaps this would be the path to satisfying his mother’s hope that he make himself useful to the world around him. Unfortunately, however, he would not be able to fulfill this maternal desire: He simply couldn’t manage to concentrate on such concrete problems. Instead of becoming a disciple of the realm of electronics, for example, Frank found himself drawn to perhaps the most experimental, fragile, and impractical branch of physics: the study of atoms and the recently unveiled quantum theory. Once again, there was nothing very tangible there. The names of the objects he analyzed—electrons, matrices, observable phenomena—were labels for a motley group of creatures as bizarre in nature as numbers.
In 1940, after several years of struggling with this discipline against the wishes of his mother and stepfather, Frank received his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in physics from Princeton University, having written his senior thesis on positrons. He was twenty years old and his future was filled with promise: As one of the very few specialists in his field, various state universities had extended invitations to him to conduct graduate-level research in their facilities. Three offers in particular stood out: one from the California Institute of Technology, where Oppenheimer worked; one from Princeton University, his alma mater; and one from the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton as well. All considered, this last offer was the most tantalizing. The institute was founded in 1930 by the Bamberger brothers (owners of the eponymous Newark-based department store), but didn’t really open its doors until 1933. Unlike the graduate departments of the great American universities, the institute was unique in that it neither granted degrees nor expected its professors to carry burdensome teaching schedules. Their only job was to think, and to give occasional lectures on their chosen fields of study. It rapidly became one of the most important centers of scientific research in the entire world. Albert Einstein, who decided to remain in the United States after the Nazis won the general election in Germany, was a professor there, as were the mathematicians Kurt Gödel and John von Neumann, to mention only a handful of the more famous names.
As he walked along the ample footpaths of Princeton University on his way to visit the chairman of his department, Bacon had no idea that what he was about to do would have a decisive effect on his future. The ash trees that lined the walkways were as immobile as the columns of a temple whose roof was slowly chipping away with age. A sharp wind blurred the edges of the buildings that housed the different academic departments. The faux-medieval style of the architecture—copied directly from Cambridge and Oxford—looked even less authentic than usual in the bright sunlight. Prisoners in their uncomfortable gray suits, professors and students sought refuge inside the anachronistic buildings, escaping from the frigid air that sent their hats flying off their