Genius

by James Gleick

  Feynman felt increasingly competitive about Schwinger, and increasingly frustrated. He had his quantum electrodynamics, he believed, and what he now thought of as “the Schwinger-Weisskopf-Bethe camp” had another. In January the American Physical Society met in New York, and Schwinger was the star. His program was not complete, but he had integrated the new idea of renormalization into the standard quantum mechanics in a way that let him demonstrate a series of impressive derivations. He showed how the anomalous magnetic moment, like the Lamb shift, came from the electron’s interaction with its own field. His lecture drew a crowd that packed the hall. Too many physicists were forced to stand out in the corridors to hear the bursts of applause (and the embarrassed laughter that came when Schwinger finally said, “It is quite clear that …”). Hasty arrangements were made for Schwinger to repeat the lecture later the same day in Columbia’s McMillin Theater. Dyson attended. Oppenheimer smoked his pipe conspicuously in the front row. Feynman rose during the question period to say that he, too, had reached these results and that, in fact, he could offer a small correction. Immediately he regretted it. He thought he must have sounded like a little boy piping up with “I did it too, Daddy.” Few people that winter realized the depths of the rivalry he felt, but he made a bitter remark to a girlfriend, who understood the drift of his disappointment if not the exact circumstances.

  “I’m so sorry that your long worked-on experiment was more or less stolen by someone else,” she wrote back. “I know it just makes you feel sick. But Dick dear, how could life or things be interesting if there was not competition?” She wondered, why couldn’t he and his competitor combine their ideas and work together?

  Schwinger and Feynman were not alone in trying to produce the calculations—the explanation—required by the immediate experiments on the Lamb shift and the electron’s magnetic moment. Other theorists followed the lead provided by Bethe’s back-of-the-envelope approach. They saw no need to create a monumental new quantum electrodynamics, when they might generate the right numbers merely by patching the technique of renormalization onto the existing physics. Independently, two pairs of scientists succeeded in this, producing solutions that went beyond Bethe’s in that they took into account the way masses fattened at relativistic speeds. Before publishing, one team, Weisskopf and a graduate student, Bruce French, committed a fatal act of indecision by consulting both Schwinger and Feynman. Engrossed in their more ambitious programs, Schwinger and Feynman each warned Weisskopf off, saying that he was in error by a small factor. Weisskopf decided it was inconceivable that these brilliant upstarts could both be wrong, independently, and delayed his manuscript. Months passed before Feynman called apologetically to say that Weisskopf’s answer had been correct.

  For Feynman’s own developing theory, a breakthrough came when he confronted the ticklish area of antimatter. The first antiparticle, the negative electron, or positron, had been born less than two decades earlier as a minus sign in Dirac’s equations—a consequence of a symmetry between positive and negative energy. Dirac had been forced to conceive of holes in a sea of energy, noting in 1931 that “a hole, if there were one, would be a new kind of particle, unknown to experimental physics.” Unknown for the next few months—then Carl Anderson, at Caltech, found the trail of one in a cloud chamber built to detect cosmic rays. It looked like an electron, but it swerved up through a magnetic field when it should have swerved down.

  The vivid photographs, along with the lively name coined by a journal editor against Anderson’s will, gave the positron a legitimacy that theorists found hard to ignore. The collision of an electron with its antimatter cousin released energy in the form of gamma rays. Alternatively, in Dirac’s picture of the vacuum as a lively sea populated by occasional holes, or bubbles, one could say that the electron fell into a hole and filled it, so that both the hole and the electron would disappear. As experimentalists continued to study their cosmic-ray photographs, they also found the reverse process: a gamma ray, nothing more than a high-frequency particle of light, could spontaneously produce a pair of particles, one electron and one positron.

  Dirac’s picture had difficulties. As elsewhere in his physics, unwanted infinities arose. The simplest description of the vacuum, empty space at absolute zero, seemed to require infinite energy and infinite charge. And from the practical perspective of anyone trying to write proper equations, the infinitude of presumed particles caused infernal complications. Feynman, seeking a way out, turned again to the forward- and backward-flowing version of time in his work with Wheeler at Princeton. Once again he proposed a space-time picture in which the positron was a time-reversed electron. The geometry of this vision could hardly have been simpler, but it was so unfamiliar that Feynman strained for metaphors:

  “Suppose a black thread be immersed in a cube of collodion, which is then hardened,” he wrote. “Imagine the thread, although not necessarily quite straight, runs from top to bottom. The cube is now sliced horizontally into thin square layers, which are put together to form successive frames of a motion picture.” Each slice, each cross-section, would show a dot, and the dot would move about to reveal the path of the thread, instant by instant. Now suppose, he said, the thread doubled back on itself, “somewhat like the letter N.” To the observer, seeing the successive slices but not the thread’s entirety, the effect would resemble the production of a particle-antiparticle pair:

  In successive frames first there would be just one dot but suddenly two new ones would appear when the frames come from layers cutting the thread through the reversed section. They would all three move about for a while then two would come together and annihilate, leaving only a single dot in the final frames.

  The usual equations of electron motion covered this model, he said, though it did require “a more tortuous path in space and time than one is used to considering.” He remained dissatisfied with the analogy of the thread and kept looking for more intuitive ways to express his view, capturing as it did the essence of the distinction between seeing paths in time-bound slices and seeing them whole. A Cornell student who had served as a wartime bombardier had a suggestion, and the bombardier metaphor, the one Feynman finally published, became famous.

  A bombardier watching a single road through the bomb-sight of a low flying plane suddenly sees three roads, the confusion only resolving itself when two of them move together and disappear and he realizes he has only passed over a long reverse switchback of a single road. The reversed section represents the positron in analogy, which is first created along with an electron and then moves about and annihilates another electron.

  That was the broad picture. His path-integral method suited the model well: he knew from his old work with Wheeler that the summing of the phases of nearby paths would apply to “negative time” as well. He also found a shortcut past complications that had arisen because of the Pauli exclusion principle, the essential law of quantum mechanics that forbade two electrons from inhabiting the same quantum state. He granted himself a bizarre dispensation from the exclusion principle on the basis that, where earlier calculations had seen two particles, there was actually just one, taking a zigzag back and forth through a slice of time. “Usual theory says no, because then at time between ty, tx can’t have 2 electrons in same state,” he jotted in a note to himself. “We say it is same electron so Pauli exclusion doesn’t operate.” It sounded like something from the science fiction of time travel—hardly a notion designed for ready acceptance. He knew well that he was proposing a radical departure from the commonsense experience of time. He was violating the everyday intuition that the future does not yet exist and that the past has passed. All he could say was that time in physics had already departed from time in psychology—that nothing in the microscopic laws of physics seemed to mandate a distinction between past and future, and that Einstein had already ruined the notion of absolute time, independent of the observer. Yet Einstein had not imagined a particle’s history reversing course and swerving back against the curre
nt. Feynman could only resort to an argument from utility: “It may prove useful in physics,” he wrote, “to consider events in all of time at once and to imagine that we at each instant are only aware of those that lie behind us.”

  My Machines Came from Too Far Away

  Schwinger and Feynman were both looking ahead to the inevitable sequel to the elite Shelter Island meeting. A new gathering was planned for late March at a resort in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania: again the setting was to be pastoral, the roster intimate, the agenda profound. Success had enhanced the already high-status guest list. Fermi, Bethe, Rabi, Teller, Wheeler, and von Neumann were returning, along with Oppenheimer as chairman, and now they would be joined by two giants of prewar physics, Dirac and Bohr.

  They gathered on March 30, 1948, in a lounge under a tarnished green clock tower with a view over a golf course and fifty miles of rolling woodlands. The presentations opened with the latest news of particle tracks in cosmic-ray showers and in the accelerator at Berkeley. With its sixteen-foot magnet the Berkeley synchrotron promised to push protons up to energies of 350 million electron volts by fall, enough to re-create copious bursts of the new elementary (so it seemed) particle called the meson, the cosmic-ray particle of most current topical interest. Instead of waiting for the cosmos to send samples down into their cloud chambers, experimenters would finally be able to make their own.

  There had been a problem with the cosmic-ray data, an enormous discrepancy between the expected and the observed strengths of the mesons’ interactions with other particles. At Shelter Island a young physicist, Robert Marshak, had proposed a solution requiring more courage and ingenuity in 1947 than such solutions would need in decades to come: namely, that there must be a second species of particle mixed in with the first. Not one meson but two—it seemed so obvious once someone dared break the ice. Feynman gleefully said they would have to call the new particle a marshak. Abetted by technology, the roster of elementary particles was climbing toward double digits. As the Pocono meeting opened, experimentalists warmed up the audience by showing pictures of an increasingly characteristic sort. Particles made impressive chicken-claw tracks in the photographs. No one could see fields, or matrices, or operators, but the geometry of particle scattering could not have been more vivid.

  The next morning Schwinger took the floor. He began to present for the first time a complete theory of quantum electrodynamics that, as he stressed at the outset, met the dual criteria of “relativistic invariance” and “gauge invariance.” It was a theory, that is, whose calculations looked the same no matter what velocity or phase its particles chose. These invariances assured that the theory would be unchanged by the arbitrary perspective of the observer, just as the time from sunrise to sunset does not depend on whether one has set one’s clock forward to daylight saving time. The theory would have to make sure that calculations never tied themselves to a particular reference system, or “gauge.” Schwinger told his listeners that he would consider a quantized electromagnetic field in which “each small volume of space is now to be handled as a particle”—a particle with more mathematical power and less visual presence than those of the previous day. He introduced a difficult new notation and set about to derive a sampling of specific results for such “applications” as the interaction of an electron with its own field. If his distinguished listeners found themselves in darkness, they were nevertheless not so easily cowed as Schwinger’s customary audiences, and the usual express train found itself halted by interruptions. Bohr himself broke in with a question—Schwinger hated this and cut him off abruptly. Finally he managed to move forward, promising that all would be made clear in due course. As always, he made a point of lecturing without notes, and nearly all of his presentation was formal, deriving one equation after another. His talk became a marathon, lasting late into the afternoon. Bethe noticed that the formal mathematics silenced the critics, who raised questions only when Schwinger tried to express plainly physical ideas. He mentioned this to Feynman, suggesting that he, too, take a mathematical approach to his presentation. Fermi, glancing about at his famous colleagues, noticed with some satisfaction that one by one they had let their attention drift away. Only he and Bethe managed to stay with Schwinger to the end, he thought.

  Then it was Feynman’s turn. He was uneasy. It seemed to him that Schwinger’s talk, though a bravura performance, had not gone well (but he was wrong—everyone, and crucially Oppenheimer, had been impressed). Bethe’s warning made him reverse his planned presentation. He had meant to stay as closely as possible to physical ideas. He did have a mathematical formalism, as private though not as intricate as Schwinger’s, and he could show how to derive his rules and methods from the formalism, but he could not justify the mathematics itself. He had reached it by trial and error. He knew it was correct, because he had tried it now on so many problems, including all of Schwinger’s, and it worked, but he could not prove that it worked and he could not connect it to the old quantum mechanics. Nevertheless he took Bethe’s advice and began with equations, saying, “This is a mathematical formula which I will now show you produces all the results of quantum mechanics.”

  He had always told his friends that once he started talking about physics he did not care who his audience was. One of his favorite stories was about Bohr, who had singled him out at Los Alamos as a young man unafraid to dispute his elders. Bohr had consulted Feynman privately there from time to time, often through his physicist son, Aage. Still, he had never fully warmed to Feynman, with his overeager, American, working-class style. Now Bohr waited, at the end of a long day, in this formidable audience of twenty-six men. Not even at Princeton, when he lectured to Einstein and Pauli, had Feynman stood before such a concentration of the great minds of his science. He had created a new quantum mechanics almost without reading the old, but he had made two exceptions: he had learned from the work of Dirac and Fermi, both now seated before him. His teachers Wheeler and Bethe were there. So were Oppenheimer, who had built one bomb, and Teller, who was building the next. They had known him as a promising, fearless young light. His thirtieth birthday was seven weeks away.

  Schwinger himself was hearing Feynman’s theory for the first time. He thought it intellectually repulsive, though he did not say so (and afterward they cordially compared techniques and found themselves in nearly perfect agreement). He could see that Feynman was offering a patchwork of guesses and intuition. It struck him as engineering, all I-beams and T-beams. Bethe interrupted once, sensing that the audience was numbed with detail, and tried to return Feynman to fundamentals. Feynman explained his path integrals, an alien idea, and his positrons moving backward in time, even more disturbing. Teller caught the apparent infringement of the exclusion principle and refused to accept Feynman’s unrigorous justification. It struck Feynman that everyone had a favorite principle or theorem and he was violating them all. When Dirac asked, “Is it unitary?” Feynman did not even know what he meant. Dirac explained: the matrix that carries one from the past to the future had to maintain an exact bookkeeping of total probability. But Feynman had no such matrix. The essence of his approach was a view of past and future together, with the freedom to go forward or backward in time at will. He was getting almost nothing across. Finally, as he sketched diagrams on the blackboard—schematic trajectories of particles—and tried to show his method of summing the amplitudes for different paths, Bohr rose to object. Had Feynman ignored the central lesson of two decades of quantum mechanics? It was obvious, Bohr said, that such trajectories violated the uncertainty principle. He stepped to the blackboard, gestured Feynman aside, and began to explain. Wheeler, taking notes, quickly jotted, “Bohr Has Raised The Question As To Whether This Point Of View Has Not The Same Physical Content As The Theory Of Dirac, But Differs In A Manner Of Speaking Of Things Which Are Not Well-Defined Physically.” Bohr continued for long minutes. That was when Feynman knew he had failed. At the time, he was in anguish. Later he said simply: “I had too much stuff. My machines cam
e from too far away.”

  There Was Also Presented (by Feynman) …

  Wheeler had arranged as rapid a news service as the available technology permitted. On his first day back in Princeton he pressed his graduate students into service as scribes. They reproduced his notes page by page onto mimeograph blanks and printed dozens of copies, turning their forearms magenta. For months this samizdat document served as the only available introduction to the new Schwingerian covariant quantum electrodynamics. Only a few pages were devoted to Feynman, with his “alternative formulation” and curious diagrams. Dyson read the Wheeler notes avidly. Bethe had tried to get him an invitation to Pocono (“you can imagine that I was highly pleased and flattered,” Dyson wrote his parents), but Oppenheimer refused to consider someone whose current caste was student.

  Feynman himself was assigned the task of writing a nontechnical account of the Pocono meeting for a new trade journal for physicists, Physics Today—anonymously, he hoped. He explained renormalization à la Schwinger, concluding:

  A major portion of the conference was spent in hearing and discussing these results of Schwinger. (((One conferee put it: “We did not have time to discuss a great deal, for we had to take time out to learn some physics.” He was referring to this work of Schwinger.)))

  There was also presented (by Feynman) a theory in which the equations of electrodynamics are artificially altered so that all quantities including the inertia of the electron turn out finite. The results of this theory are in essential agreement with those of Schwinger, but they are not as complete.