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

other physicists. After a year at the Institute for Advanced Study he joined Fermi’s group at Chicago. He was in time to join the tumultuous effort to find the right concepts, the right ordering principles, the right quantum numbers for understanding the many new particles. There was confusion and there were regularities—coincidences in the experimental plots of particle masses and lifetimes. There were mesons that seemed to exist, and mesons that seemed plausible but absent. There were even more mysterious particles cal ed V-particles. The problem with these enormously massive items was that particle accelerators produced them copiously, with relative ease, yet they did not decay with corresponding ease. They lingered for as long as a bil ionth of a second. Pais’s approach to associated production had reached toward the heart of some of the regularities in need of explanation. It contained the crucial idea of another hidden symmetry. It was also reaching a peak of popularity: in the summer of 1953 Pais created such a stir at an international conference in Japan that Time magazine cal ed him at his hotel. His roommate answered the phone—it happened to be Feynman, attending the same conference to present his liquid helium results. Feynman felt a flicker of envy when he realized that Time had no interest in him. Gel -Mann, in Chicago, felt even more, particularly since he now saw a far more powerful answer.

Physicists had learned to speak comfortably about four fundamental forces: gravity; electromagnetism, which dominated al chemical and electrical processes; the strong force binding the atom’s nucleus; and the weak force, at work in the slow processes of radioactive decay. The quick appearance and slow disappearance of V-particles suggested that their creation relied on strong forces and that weak forces came into play as they decayed. Gel -

Mann proposed a new fundamental quantity, which for a while he cal ed y . This y was like a new form of charge.

Charge is conserved in particle events—the total going in equals the total coming out. Gel -Mann supposed that y is conserved, too—but not always. The algebraic logic of Gel -

Mann’s scheme decreed that strong interactions would conserve y , and so would electromagnetic interactions, but weak interactions would not. They would break the symmetry. Thus strong interactions would create a pair of particles whose y had to cancel each other (1 and – 1, for example). Such a particle, having flown away from its sibling, could not decay through a strong interaction because there was no longer a canceling y . That gave the slower weak interaction time to take over.

Artificial though it was, Gel -Mann’s y qualified as not just a description but an explanation. As he conceived his framework, it was an organizing principle. It gave him a way of seeing families of particles, and its logic was so compel ing that the families had obvious missing members.

He was able to predict—and did predict, in papers he began publishing in August 1953—specific new particles not yet discovered, as wel as specific particles that he insisted could not be discovered. His timing was perfect.

Experimenters bore out each of his positive predictions (and failed to contradict the negative ones). But this was only part of Gel -Mann’s triumph. He also injected a piece of his fascination with language into the temporarily befuddled business of physics nomenclature. He decided to cal his quantity y “strangeness” and the families of V-like particles

“strange.” A Japanese physicist, Kazuhiko Nishijima, who had independently hit upon the same scheme just months after Gel -Mann, chose the considerably less friendly name

“?-charge.” Amid al the - ons and Greek-lettered particles, strange sounded whimsical and unorthodox. The editors of the Physical Review would not al ow “Strange Particles” in Gel -Mann’s title, insisting instead on “New Unstable Particles.” Pais did not like it either. He pleaded with the

audience at a Rochester conference to avoid loaded terms like “strange.” Why should a broad-minded theorist consider one particle stranger than another? The quirkiness of the word had a distancing effect: perhaps this new construct was not quite as real as charge. But Gel -

Mann’s command of language had an unstoppable force.

Strangeness was only the beginning.

The winter Fermi died, just before Christmas 1954, Gel -

Mann wrote to the one physicist who seemed to him utterly genuine, free of phoniness, the one who did not worship formalism and superficialities, whose own work was always sure to be interesting and real. Some of Feynman’s col eagues were already beginning to think that he had drifted away from the mainstream of particle physics, but it did not seem that way to Gel -Mann. On the contrary, he knew from their few conversations that Feynman was thinking about al the outstanding problems, al the time.

Feynman responded in a friendly way. Gel -Mann visited Caltech to give a talk on his current work. The two men met privately and spoke for hours. Gel -Mann described work he had done extending Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics at short distances. Feynman said he knew of the work and admired it enormously—that in fact it was the only such work he had seen that he had not already done himself. He had pursued Gel -Mann’s line of thinking and generalized it further—he showed what he meant—and Gel -Mann said he thought that was wonderful.

Playing the bongos: “On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.”

Talking with a student as Murray Cell-Mann looks on: “Murray’s mask was a man ofgreat culture… Dick’s mask was Mr. Natural—

just a little boy from the country that could see through things the city slickers can’t.”

With his hero, Paul A. M. Dirac, in Warsaw, 1962.

With Carl Feynman, three years old, facing photographers on the morning of the Nobel Prize: “Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn’t be worth the NobelPrize.”

Celebrating the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, 1965, with Gweneth Feynman (above) and a princess (below).

With Schwinger: “I thought you would be happy that I beat Schwinger out at last,” Feynman wrote his mother after winning one award, “but it turns out he got the thing 3 yrs ago.Of course, he only got 112 a medal, so 1guess you'll be happy. You always compareme with Schwinger.”

Shin’ichirō Tomonaga, whose work in an isolated Japan paralleled the new th eories of Feynman and Schwinger: “Why isn’t nature clearer and more directly comprehensible?”

With Carl and Michelle (right), and on a desert camping trip.

Standing at a Cal tech blackboard and playing a chieftain in a student production of South Pacific.

At the February 10, 1986, hearing of the presidential commission on the space shuttle accident: “I took this stuff that I got out of your sealand I put it in ice water,and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it fora while and then undo it it doesn't stretch

back. It stays the same dimension. In other words, for a few seconds at least and moreseconds than that, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees. I believe that has somesignificance for our problem.”

By the beginning of the new year Caltech had made Gel -

Mann an offer and Gel -Mann had accepted. He moved into an office just upstairs from Feynman’s. Caltech had now placed together in one building the two leading minds of their generation. To the close-knit, international community of physicists—a smal world, no matter how rapidly it was growing—the col aborations and the rivalries between these men gained an epic quality. They were together, working or feuding, leaving their imprint on every area they cared to touch, for the rest of Feynman’s life. They gave their col eagues a long time to muse on how strikingly different were the ways in which a giant intel ect might choose to reveal itself, even in the person of a modern theoretical physicist.