Джеймс Глик - Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

meaningful… . The people who say “that is not how science is done” are wrong… . When you describe what went on in your head as the truth haltingly staggers upon you and passes on, final y ful y recognized, you are describing how science is done. I know, for I have had the same beautiful and frightening experience.

Late that night in Chicago he startled Goodstein by pressing the book into his hands and tel ing him he had to read it. Goodstein said he would look forward to it. No, Feynman said. You have to read it now . So Goodstein did, turning pages until dawn as Feynman paced nearby or sat and doodled on a sheet of paper. At one point Goodstein remarked, “You know, it’s amazing that Watson made this great discovery even though he was so out of touch with what everyone in his field was doing.”

Feynman held up the paper he had been writing on.

Amid scribbling and embel ishments he had inscribed one word: DISREGARD .

“That’s what I’ve forgotten,” he said.

Quarks and Partons

In 1983, looking back on the evolution of particle physics since the now-historic Shelter Island conference, Murray Gel -Mann said, uncontroversial y, that he and his col eagues had developed a theory that “works.” He

summed it up in one intricately crafted sentence (rather more refined than “Al things are made of atoms …”): It is of course a Yang-Mil s theory, based on color SU (3) and electroweak SU (2) U (1), with three families of spin ½ leptons and quarks, their antiparticles, and some spinless Higgs bosons in doublets and antidoublets of the weak isotopic spin to break the electroweak group down to U 1 of electromagnetism.

His listeners recognized vintage Gel -Mann, from the “of course” onward. For aficionados there was a poetry in the jargon, much of which Gel -Mann had invented personal y.

He loved language more than ever. As always, during the next hour he punctuated his physics with a stream of abstruse and punning nomenclatural asides: “By the way, some people have cal ed the higglet by another name

[holds up a box of Axion laundry presoak], in which case it’s extremely easy to discover in any supermarket”; “… many physicists—Dimopoulos, Nanopoulos, and Iliopoulos, and for the benefit of my French friends I add Rastopopoulos”;

“… O’Raifertaigh. (His name, by the way, is written in a simplified manner; the ‘f’ should real y be ‘thbh’)”; and so on.

Some people found his style irritating—among them, those whose names he tried to correct—but that was a minor detail. Gel -Mann, more than any other physicist of the sixties and seventies, defined the mainstream of the physics that Feynman had reminded himself to disregard .

In so many ways these two scientific icons had come to seem like polar opposites—the Adolphe Menjou and Walter Matthau of theoretical physics. Gel -Mann loved to know things’ names and to pronounce them correctly—so correctly that Feynman would misunderstand, or pretend to misunderstand, when Gel -Mann uttered so simple a name a s Montreal . Gel -Mann’s conversational partners often suspected that the obscure pronunciations and cultural al usions were designed to place them at a disadvantage.

Feynman

pronounced potpourri

“pot-por-eye”

and

interesting as if it had four syl ables, and he despised nomenclature of al kinds. Gel -Mann was an enthusiastic and accomplished bird-watcher; the moral of one of Feynman’s classic stories about his father was that the name of a bird did not matter, and the point was hardly lost on Gel -Mann.

Physicists kept finding new ways to describe the contrast between them. Murray makes sure you know what an extraordinary person he is, they would say, while Dick is not a person at al but a more advanced life form pretending to be human to spare your feelings. Murray was interested in almost everything—but not the branches of science outside high-energy physics; he was openly contemptuous of those.

Dick considered al science to be his territory—his responsibility—but remained brashly ignorant of everything else. Some wel -known physicists resented Feynman for his

cherished

irresponsibility—it

was,

after

al ,

irresponsibility to his academic col eagues. A larger number disliked Gel -Mann for his arrogance and his sharp

number disliked Gel -Mann for his arrogance and his sharp tongue.

There was always more. Dick wore shirtsleeves, Murray wore tweed. Murray ate at the Atheneum, the faculty club, while Dick ate at “the Greasy,” the cafeteria. (This was only half true. Either man could be found at either place on occasion, although Feynman, when the Atheneum stil required ties and jackets, would show up in shirtsleeves and demand the most garish and il -fitting of the spare items kept on hand for emergencies.) Feynman talked with his hands—with his whole body, in fact—whereas Gel -

Mann, as the physicist and science writer Michael Riordan observed, “sits calmly behind his desk in a plush blue swivel chair, hands folded, never once lifting them to make a gesture… . Information is exchanged by words and numbers, not by hands or pictures.” Riordan added: Their personal styles spil over into their theoretical work, too. Gel -Mann insists on mathematical rigor in al

his

work,

often

at

the

expense

of

comprehensibility… . Where Gel -Mann disdains vague, heuristic models that might only point the way toward a true solution, Feynman revels in them. He believes that a certain amount of imprecision and ambiguity is essential to communication.

Yet they were not so different in their approach to physics.

Those who knew them best as physicists felt that Gel -Mann was no more likely than Feynman to hide behind formalism or to use mathematics as a stand-in for physical

understanding. Those who considered him pretentious about language and cultural trivia felt nonetheless that when it came to physics he was as honest and direct as Feynman. Over a long career Gel -Mann made his vision not only comprehensible but irresistible. Both men were relentless on the trail of a new idea, able to concentrate absolutely, wil ing to try anything.

Both men, it seemed to a few perceptive col eagues, presented a mask to the world. “Murray’s mask was a man of great culture,” Sidney Coleman said. “Dick’s mask was Mr. Natural—just a little boy from the country that could see through things the city slickers can’t.” Both men fil ed their masks until reality and artifice became impossible to pry apart.

Gel -Mann, as naturalist, col ector, and categorizer, was wel primed to interpret the exploding particle universe of the 1960s. New technology in the accelerators—liquid hydrogen bubble chambers and computers for automating the analysis of col ision tracks—seemed to have spil ed open a bulky canvas bag from which nearly a hundred distinct particles had now tumbled forth. Gel -Mann and, independently, an Israeli theorist, Yuval Ne’eman, found a way in 1961 to organize the various symmetries of spins and strangeness into a single scheme. It was a group, in the mathematicians’ sense of the word, known as SU (3), though Gel -Mann quickly and puckishly dubbed it the Eightfold Way. It was like an intricate translucent object which, when held to the light, would reveal families of eight or ten or possibly twenty-seven particles—and they would

be different, though overlapping, families, depending on which way one chose to view it. The Eightfold Way was a new periodic table—the previous century’s triumph in classifying and thus exposing the hidden regularities in a similar number of disparate “elements.” But it was also a more dynamic object. The operations of group theory were like special shuffles of a deck of cards or the twists of a Rubik’s cube.