by James Gleick
“I, Sir Phillip Roberts, and my friend, Major Forbes,” he began, “have just unravelled an important secret of nature; that Eros, that minor planet that is so well-known on account of its occasional proximity with the Earth, Eros, will approach within 3,000,000 miles of the Earth in 10 years 287 days hence, instead of the usual 13,000,000 miles every 37 years; and, therefore it may, by some great chance fall upon the Earth. Therefore I advise you to calculate the details of this happening!” …
When the cheers were over, and everybody had gone home, it did not mean that the excitement was over; no, not at all; everybody was making the wildest calculations; some reasonable, some not; but Sir Phillip only wrote coolly in his study rather more than usual; nobody could tell what his thoughts were.
He read popular books about Einstein and relativity and, realizing that he needed to learn a more advanced mathematics than his school taught, sent away to scientific publishers for their catalogs. His mother finally felt that his interest in mathematics was turning into an obsession. He was fifteen and had just spent a Christmas vacation working methodically, from six each morning until ten each evening, through the seven hundred problems of H. T. H. Piaggio’s Differential Equations. That same year, frustrated at learning that a classic book on number theory by I. M. Vinogradov existed only in Russian, he taught himself the language and wrote out a full translation in his careful hand. As Christmas vacation ended, his mother went for a walk with him and began a cautionary lecture with the words of the Latin playwright Terence: “I am human and I let nothing human be alien to me.” She continued by telling him Goethe’s version of the Faust story, parts one and two, rendering Faust’s immersion in his books, his lust for knowledge and power, his sacrifice of the possibility of love, so powerfully that years later, when Dyson happened to see the film Citizen Kane, he realized that he was weeping with the recognition of his mother’s Faust incarnate once again on the screen.
As the war began, Dyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he heard intimate lectures by England’s greatest mathematicians, Hardy, Littlewood, and Besicovitch. In physics Dirac reigned. Dyson’s war could hardly have been more different from Feynman’s. The British war organization wasted his talents prodigiously, assigning him to the Royal Air Force bomber command in a Buckinghamshire forest, where he researched statistical studies that were doomed, when they countered the official wisdom, to be ignored. The futility of this work impressed him. He and others in the operational research section learned—contrary to the essential bomber command dogma—that the safety of bomber crews did not increase with experience; that escape hatches were too narrow for airmen to use in emergencies; that gun turrets slowed the aircraft and bloated the crew sizes without increasing the chances of surviving enemy fighters; and that the entire British strategic bombing campaign was a failure. Mathematics repeatedly belied anecdotal experience, particularly when the anecdotal experience was colored by a lore whose purpose was to keep young men flying.
Dyson saw the scattershot bomb patterns in postmission photographs, saw the Germans’ ability to keep factories operating amid the rubble of civilian neighborhoods, worked through the firestorms of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945, and felt himself descending into a moral hell. At Los Alamos a military bureaucracy worked more successfully than ever before or since with independent-minded scientists. The military bureaucracy of Dyson’s experience embodied a routine of petty and not-so-petty dishonesty, and the scientists of the bomber command were unable to challenge it.
These were black days for the combination of science and machinery called technology. England, which had invented so much, had always been prone to misgivings. Machines disrupted traditional ways of living. In the workplace they seemed dehumanizing. At the turn of the century, amid the black soot clouds of the English industrial city, it was harder to romanticize the brutal new working conditions of the factory than the brutal old working conditions of the peasant farm. America, too, had its Luddites, but in the age of radio, telephone, and automobile few saw a malign influence in the progress that technology brought. For Americans the loathing of technology that would become a theme of late-twentieth-century life began with fears born amid the triumph of 1945. Among the books that had most influenced Dyson was a children’s tale called The Magic City, written in 1910 by Edith Nesbit. Among its lessons was a bittersweet one about technology. Her hero—a boy named Philip—learns that in the magic city, when one asks for a machine, he must keep using it forever. Given a choice between a horse and a bicycle, Philip wisely chooses the horse, at a time when few in England or America were failing to trade their horses for bicycles, motorcars, or tractors. Dyson remembered The Magic City when he learned about the atomic bomb—remembered that new technology, once acquired, is always with us. But nothing is simple, and Dyson also took to heart a remark of D. H. Lawrence’s about the welcome minimal purity of books, chairs, bottles, and an iron bedstead, all made by machines: “My wish for something to serve my purpose is perfectly fulfilled… . Wherefore I do honour to the machine and to its inventor.” The news of Hiroshima came partly as a relief to Dyson. It released him from his own war. Yet he knew that the strategic bombing campaign had killed four times as many civilians as the atomic bombs. Years later, when Dyson had a young son, he woke the boy in the middle of the night because he—Freeman—had awakened from an unbearable nightmare. A plane had crashed to the ground in flames. People were nearby, and some ran into the fire to rescue the victims. Dyson, in his dream, could not move.
He sometimes struck people as shy or diffident, but his teachers in England had learned that he had enormous self-possession. As a high-school student he had worked on the problem of pure number theory known as partitions—a number’s partitions being the ways it can be subdivided into sums of whole numbers: the partitions of 4 are 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, 1 + 1 + 2, 1 + 3, 2 + 2, and 4. The number of partitions rises fairly rapidly—14 has 135 partitions—and the question of just how rapidly has all the hallmarks of classic number theory. It is easy to state. A child can work out the first few cases. And from its contemplation arises a glorious world with the intricacy and beauty of origami. Dyson followed a path trod earlier by the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan at the beginning of the century. By his sophomore year at Cambridge he arrived at a set of conjectures about partitions that he could not prove. Instead of setting them aside, he made a virtue of his failure. He published them as only his second paper. “Professor Littlewood,” he wrote of one of his famous professors, “when he makes use of an algebraic identity, always saves himself the trouble of proving it; he maintains that an identity, if true, can be verified in a few lines by anybody obtuse enough to feel the need of verification. My object … is to confute this assertion… .” Dyson promised to state a series of interesting identities that he could not prove. He would also, he boasted, “indulge in some even vaguer guesses concerning the existence of identities which I am not only unable to prove but unable to state… . Needless to say, I strongly recommend my readers to supply the missing proofs, or, even better, the missing identities.” Routine mathematical discourse was not for him.
One day an assistant of Dirac’s told Dyson, “I am leaving physics for mathematics; I find physics messy, unrigorous, elusive.” Dyson replied, “I am leaving mathematics for physics for exactly the same reasons.” He felt that mathematics was an interesting game but not so interesting as the real world. The United States seemed the only possible place to pursue physics now. He had never heard of Cornell, but he was advised that Bethe would be the best person in the world to work with, and Bethe was at Cornell.
He went with the attitude of an explorer to a strange land, eager to expose himself to the flora and fauna and the possibly dangerous inhabitants. He played his first game of poker. He experienced the American form of “picnic,” which surprisingly involved the frying of steak on an open-air grill. He ventured forth on automobile excursions. “We go through some wild country,” he wrote his parents shortly
after his arrival—the wild country in this case being the stretch of exurban New York lying between Ithaca and Rochester. He traveled with a theoretician called Richard Feynman: “the first example I have met of that rare species, the native American scientist.”
He has developed a private version of the quantum theory … ; in general he is always sizzling with new ideas, most of which are more spectacular than helpful, and hardly any of which get very far before some newer inspiration eclipses them… . when he bursts into the room with his latest brain-wave and proceeds to expound it with the most lavish sound effects and waving about of the arms, life at least is not dull.
Although Dyson was nominally a mere graduate student, for his first assignment Bethe had handed him a live problem: a version of the Lamb shift, fresh from Shelter Island. Bethe himself had already made the first fast break in the theoretical problem posed by Lamb’s experiment. On the train ride home, using a scrap of paper, he made a fast, intuitive calculation that soon made a dozen of his colleagues say, if only I had … He telephoned Feynman when the train reached Schenectady, and he made sure his preliminary draft was in the hands of Oppenheimer and the other Shelter Island alumni within a week. It was a blunt Los Alamos–style estimate, ignoring the effects of relativity and evading the infinities by arbitrarily cutting them off. Bethe’s breakthrough was sure to be superseded by a more rigorous treatment of the kind Schwinger was known to have in the works. But it gave the right number, almost exactly, and it lent weight to the conviction that a proper quantum electrodynamics would account for the new, precise experiments.
The existing theory “explained” the existence of different energy levels in the atom. It gave physicists their only workable means of calculating them. The different energies arose from different combinations of crucial quantum numbers, the angular momentum of the electron orbiting the nucleus, and the angular momentum of the electron spinning around itself. A certain symmetry built into the equation made it natural for a pair of the resulting energy levels to coincide exactly. But they did not coincide in Willis Lamb’s laboratory, so something must be missing and, as Bethe surmised, that something was the theorists’ old bugbear, the self-interaction of the electron.
This extra energy or mass was created by the snake-swallowing-its-tail interplay of the electron with its own field. This quantity had been a tolerable nuisance when it was theoretically infinite and experimentally negligible. Now it was theoretically infinite and experimentally real. Bethe had in mind a suggestion that the Dutch physicist Hendrik Kramers had made at Shelter Island: that the “observed” mass of the electron, the mass the theorists tended to think of as a fundamental quantity, should be thought of as a combination of two other quantities, the self-energy and an “intrinsic” mass. These masses, intrinsic and observed, also known as “bare” and “dressed,” made an odd couple. The intrinsic mass could never be measured directly, and the observed mass could not be computed from first principles. Kramers proposed a method by which the theorists would pluck a number from experimental measurements and correct it, or “renormalize” it. This Bethe did, crudely but effectively. Meanwhile, as the mass went, so went the charge—this formerly irreducible quantity, too, had to be renormalized. Renormalization was a process of adjusting terms of the equation to turn infinite quantities into finite ones. It was almost like looking at a huge object through an adjustable lens, and turning a knob to bring it down to size, all the while watching the effect of the knob turning on other objects, one of which was the knob itself. It required great care.
From one perspective, renormalization amounted to subtracting infinities from infinities, with a silent prayer. Ordinarily such an operation could be meaningless: infinity (the number of integers, 0, 1, 2, 3, …) minus infinity (the number of even integers, 0, 2, 4, …) equals infinity (the remaining, odd integers, 1,3, 5, …), and all three of those infinities are the same, unlike, for example, the distinctly greater infinity representing the number of real numbers. The theorists implicitly hoped that when they wrote infinity – infinity = zero nature would miraculously make it so, for once. That their hope was granted said something important about the world. For a while it was not clear just what.
Bethe assigned Dyson a stripped-down, toy version of the Lamb shift, asking him to calculate the Lamb shift for an electron with no spin. It was a way for Dyson to find a quick way into a problem of the most timely importance and for Bethe to continue his own prodding. Dyson could see that the calculation Bethe had published was both a swindle and a piece of genius, a bad approximation that somehow coughed up the right answer. More and more, too, Dyson talked with Feynman, who gradually began to come into clearer focus for him. He watched this wild American dash from the dinner table at the Bethes’ to play with their five-year-old son, Henry. Feynman did have an extraordinary affinity for his friends’ children. He would entertain them with gibberish, or with juggling tricks, or with what sounded to Dyson like a one-man percussion band. He could enthrall them merely by borrowing someone’s eyeglasses and slowly putting them on, taking them off, and putting them on. Or he would engage them in conversation. He once asked Henry Bethe, “Did you know there are twice as many numbers as numbers?”
“No, there are not!” Henry said.
Feynman said he could prove it. “Name a number.”
“One million.”
Feynman said, “Two million.”
“Twenty-seven!”
Feynman said, “Fifty-four,” and kept on countering with the number that was twice Henry’s, until suddenly Henry saw the point. It was his first real encounter with infinity.
For a while, because Feynman did not seem to take his work seriously, neither did Dyson. Dyson wrote his parents that Feynman was “half genius and half buffoon” (a description he later regretted). Just a few days later Dyson heard an account from Weisskopf, visiting Cornell, of Schwinger’s progress at Harvard. He sensed a connection with the very different notions he was hearing from Feynman. He had begun to see a method beneath Feynman’s flash and wildness. The next time he wrote his parents, he said:
Feynman is a man whose ideas are as difficult to make contact with as Bethe’s are easy; for this reason I have so far learnt much more from Bethe, but I think if I stayed here much longer I should begin to find that it was Feynman with whom I was working more.
A Half-Assedly Thought-Out Pictorial Semi-Vision Thing
By the physicists’ own lights their difficulties were mathematical: infinities, divergences, unruly formalisms. But another obstacle lay in the background, rarely surfacing in the standard published or unpublished rhetoric: the impossibility of visualization. How was one to perceive the atom, or the electron in the act of emitting light? What mental picture could guide the scientist? The first quantum paradoxes had so shattered physicists’ classical intuitions that by the 1940s they rarely discussed visualization. It seemed a psychological issue, not a scientific one.
The atom of Niels Bohr, a miniature solar system, had become an embarrassingly false image. In 1923, on the tenth anniversary of Bohr’s conception, the German quantum physicist Max Born hailed it: “the thought that the laws of the macrocosmos in the small reflect the terrestrial world obviously exercises a great magic on mankind’s mind”—but already he and his colleagues could see the picture fading into anachronism. It survived in the language of angular momentum and spin—as well as in the standard high-school physics and chemistry curriculums—but there was no longer anything plausible in the picture of electrons orbiting a nucleus. Instead there were waves with modes of resonance, particles that smeared out probabilistically, operators and matrices, malleable spaces with extra dimensions, and physicists who forswore the idea of visualization altogether. Bohr himself had set the tone. In accepting the Nobel Prize for his atomic model, he said it was time to give up the hope of explanations in terms of analogies with everyday experience. “We are therefore obliged to be modest in our demands and content ourselves with concepts which are formal in t
he sense that they do not provide a visual picture of the sort one is accustomed to require… .” This progress had not been altogether free of tension. “The more I reflect on the physical portion of Schrödinger’s theory, the more disgusting I find it,” was Heisenberg’s 1926 comment to Pauli. “Just imagine the rotating electron whose charge is distributed over the entire space with axes in 4 or 5 dimensions. What Schrödinger writes on the visualizability of his theory … I consider trash.” As much as physicists valued the conceptualizing skill they called intuition, as much as they spoke of a difference between physical understanding and formal understanding, they had nevertheless learned to mistrust any picture of subatomic reality that resembled everyday experience. No more baseballs, artillery shells, or planetoids for the quantum theorists; no more idle wheels or wavy waves. Feynman’s father had asked him, in the story he told so many times: “I understand that when an atom makes a transition from one state to another, it emits a particle of light called a photon… . Is the photon in the atom ahead of time? … Well, where does it come from, then? How does it come out?” No one had a mental image for this, the radiation of light, the interaction of matter with the electromagnetic field: the defining event of quantum electrodynamics.