I just watched a sweet, low-key film called “Infinity” that stars Matthew Broderick as the renown physicist Richard Feynman and Patricia Arquette as his first wife Arline Greenbaum. Despite the fact that it covers the period of time when Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project, it is mostly really a love story.

It still trips me out that, despite the fact we (as in, Western civilization) had pretty much figured out modern physics (quantum mechanics and general relativity have not really been improved upon since), and had at last learned how to blow up the world, we still didn’t have penicillin in 1945, much less isoniazid.

The big reason why Feynman takes the position is so that he can keep his fiancé and later his wife Arline nearby. Arline happens to be dying of tuberculosis, which is supposed to better than dying of Hodgkin’s disease according to the movie, which I can’t really say, since I’ve never seen anyone dying of TB, but I’ve seen people dying of Hodgkin’s.

It also struck me that, while we can pretty much treat, or at least control, most cases of tuberculosis (the XDR cases the most obvious, most horrible of exceptions), our treatments for Hodgkin’s Disease aren’t quite as good. Although it’s way better than just waiting to die.

I think about a patient with relapsed Hodgkin disease who is three years younger than I am, who has a daughter, and who is pretty much dying.

But the quote that sort of caught my attention, in reference to the Bomb, (but which I don’t think Feynman ever really said) was this:

It brought to mind how terrible this thing was, that treated humans as matter.