Genius

by James Gleick

Other concepts, too, had to become second nature. Symmetries suggested that various particles must come in families: pairs, or triplets, or (as physicists now said) multiplets. Physicists experimented with what they called “selection rules”—rules about what must or must not happen in particle collisions on account of the conservation of quantities like charge. A physicist Feynman’s age, Abraham Pais, guessed at a rule called “associated production”—certain collisions must produce new particles in groups, preserving some putative new quantum number, the nature of which was unknown. Feynman had had a similar idea in Brazil but had not liked it enough to pursue it diligently. For a few years associated production became an important catchphrase. Experimenters looked for examples or counterexamples. In the longer term its main contribution to physics was that its popularity rankled a younger theorist, Murray Gell-Mann. He thought Pais was wrong, and he was jealous.

  Murray

  At fourteen he had been declared “Most Studious” and “wonder boy” by his classmates at Columbia Grammar, a private school on the Upper West Side of New York, and that was the last they saw of him, for he was already a senior, and he started at Yale that fall. Gell-Mann’s surname was subtly difficult to pronounce. It was wrong to unstress the second syllable, as if the name were Gelman, although Murray’s older brother, Benedict, had chosen that simpler spelling. Many people leaned the other way, toward a pedantic, European style of pronunciation, the accent on the second syllable and the a broad: gel-MAHN. This, too, was wrong. Later, when he had secretaries, they sometimes upbraided malefactors: “He’s not German, you know.” Of course the g was hard, despite the unconscious tug of the soft g in the word gel. Natives of New York and other regions that distinguish between the a’s of man and mat suspected rightly that the second, flatter a must be better for Gell-Mann. It was safest to stress the two syllables almost equally. By then anyone who knew anything about Gell-Mann knew that his own pronunciation of names in any language was impeccable. Supposedly he would lecture visitors from Strasbourg or Pago Pago about the niceties of their own Alsatian or Samoan dialects. He was so insistent about differentiating the pronunciations of Colombia and Columbia that colleagues suspected him of straining to bring references to the country into conversations about the university. From the beginning most physicists simply referred to him as Murray. There was never any doubt which Murray they meant. Feynman, preparing for a cameo performance as a tribal chieftain in a Caltech production of South Pacific, taught himself a few words of Samoan and then resignedly told a friend, “The only person who will know I’m pronouncing this wrong is Murray.”

  Gell-Mann attended Columbia Grammar on full scholarship. His father, born in Austria, had learned to speak a perfectly unaccented English and so, in the early 1920s, decided to start a language school for immigrants. It was the closest to success that he came, as his son saw it. The school moved several times—once, as Murray recalled, because his mother was afraid that his brother would catch whooping cough from someone in the building—and went out of business a few years later. It was his brother, nine years older and so adored by his parents, who taught him to read and to take pleasure in language, science, and art. Benedict was a bird-watcher and nature lover before nature became a practical field of interest; dropping out of college at the height of the Depression, he stunned his parents and left a complicated impression on his younger brother.

  Murray did not find his way immediately to physics, talented as he was in so many subjects. When he applied to the Ivy League graduate schools, he was widely disappointed: Yale would take him only in mathematics, Harvard would take him only if he paid full fare, and Princeton would not take him at all. So he made a half-hearted application to MIT and heard directly back from Victor Weisskopf, whom he had not heard of. Gell-Mann decided to accept Weisskopf’s offer, though grudgingly. MIT seemed so lumpen. The joke he told ever after was that the alternatives did not commute: he could try MIT first and suicide second, whereas the other ordering would not work. He reached MIT in 1948, close to his nineteenth birthday, just in time to watch the exploding competition in quantum electrodynamics from the vantage point of an office near Weisskopf’s. When Weisskopf advised him that the future belonged to Feynman, he studied the available preprints. Feynman’s struck him as a cuckoo private language, though correct; Schwinger’s version struck him as hollow and pompous; Dyson’s as crude and sloppy. He was already inclined toward scabrous assessments of his famous fellow physicists, though for now he kept them mostly private.

  His own work was not quite living up to his severe expectations, though he was finally beginning to impress 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 called 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 billionth 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 called 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. Gell-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 all 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. Gell-Mann proposed a new fundamental quantity, which for a while he called 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. Gell-Mann supposed that y is conserved, too—but not always. The algebraic logic of Gell-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, Gell-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 compelling 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 well 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 Gell-Mann’s triumph. He also injected a piece of his fascination with language into the temporarily befuddled business of physics nomenclature. He decided to call 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 Gell-Mann, chose the considerably less friendly name “?-charge.” Amid all the -ons and Greek-l
ettered particles, strange sounded whimsical and unorthodox. The editors of the Physical Review would not allow “Strange Particles” in Gell-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 Gell-Mann’s command of language had an unstoppable force. Strangeness was only the beginning.

  The winter Fermi died, just before Christmas 1954, Gell-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 colleagues were already beginning to think that he had drifted away from the mainstream of particle physics, but it did not seem that way to Gell-Mann. On the contrary, he knew from their few conversations that Feynman was thinking about all the outstanding problems, all the time. Feynman responded in a friendly way. Gell-Mann visited Caltech to give a talk on his current work. The two men met privately and spoke for hours. Gell-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 Gell-Mann’s line of thinking and generalized it further—he showed what he meant—and Gell-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 Gell-Mann an offer and Gell-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 small world, no matter how rapidly it was growing—the collaborations 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 colleagues a long time to muse on how strikingly different were the ways in which a giant intellect might choose to reveal itself, even in the person of a modern theoretical physicist.

  In Search of Genius

  In the spring of 1955 the man most plainly and universally identified with the word genius died at Princeton Hospital. Most of his body was cremated, the ashes scattered, but not the brain. The hospital’s pathologist, Dr. Thomas S. Harvey, removed this last remnant to a jar of formaldehyde.

  Harvey weighed it. A mediocre two and two-thirds pounds. One more negative datum to sabotage the notion that the brain’s size might account for the difference between ordinary and extraordinary mental ability—a notion that various nineteenth-century researchers had labored futilely to establish (claiming along the way to have demonstrated the superiority of men over women, white men over black men, and Germans over Frenchmen). The brain of the great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss had been turned over to such scientists. It disappointed them. Now, with Einstein’s cerebrum on their hands, researchers proposed more subtle ways of searching for the secret of genius: measuring the density of surrounding blood vessels, the percentage of glial cells, the degree of neuronal branching. Decades passed. Microscope sections and photographic slides of Einstein’s brain circulated among a tight circle of anatomically minded psychologists, called neuropsychologists, unable to let go the idea that a detectable sign of the qualities that made Einstein famous might remain somewhere in these fragmentary trophies. By the 1980s this most famous of brains had been whittled down to small gray shreds preserved in the office of a pathologist retired to Wichita, Kansas—a sodden testament to the elusiveness of the quality called genius.

  Eventually the findings were inconclusive, though that did not make them unpublishable. (One researcher counted a large excess of branching cells in the parietal sector called Brodmann area 39.) Those searching for genius’s corporeal basis had little enough material from which to work. “Is there a neurological substrate for talent?” asked the editors of one neuropsychology volume. “Of course, as neuropsychologists we hypothesize that there must be such a substrate and would hardly think to relegate talent somehow to ‘mind.’ What evidence currently exists would be the results of the work on Einstein’s brain …”—the brain that created the post-Newtonian universe, that released the pins binding us to absolute space and time, that visualized (in its parietal lobe?) a plastic fourth dimension, that banished the ether, that refused to believe God played dice, that piloted such a kindly, forgetful form about the shaded streets of Princeton. There was only one Einstein. For schoolchildren and neuropsychologists alike, he stood as an icon of intellectual power. He seemed—but was this true?—to have possessed a rare and distinct quality, genius as an essence, not a mere statistical extremum on a supposed bell-curve of intelligence. This was the conundrum of genius. Was genius truly special? Or was it a matter of degree—a miler breaking 3:50 rather than 4:10? (A shifting bell-curve, too: yesterday’s record-setter, today’s also-ran.) Meanwhile, no one had thought to dissect the brains of Niels Bohr, Paul A. M. Dirac, Enrico Fermi; Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso, Virginia Woolf; Jascha Heifetz, Isadora Duncan, Babe Ruth; or any of the other exceptional, creative, intuitive souls to whom the word was so often and so lubricously applied.

  What a strange and bewildering literature grew up around the term genius—defining it, analyzing it, categorizing it, rationalizing and reifying it. Commentators have contrasted it with such qualities as (mere) talent, intellect, imagination, originality, industriousness, sweep of mind and elegance of style; or have shown how genius is composed of these in various combinations. Psychologists and philosophers, musicologists and art critics, historians of science and scientists themselves have all stepped into this quagmire, a capacious one. Their several centuries of labor have produced no consensus on any of the necessary questions. Is there such a quality? If so, where does it come from? (A glial surplus in Brodmann area 39? A doting, faintly unsuccessful father who
channels his intellectual ambition into his son? A frightful early encounter with the unknown, such as death of a sibling?) When otherwise sober scientists speak of the genius as magician, wizard, or superhuman, are they merely indulging in a flight of literary fancy? When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean? And a question that has barely been asked (the where-are-the-.400-hitters question): Why, as the pool of available humans has risen from one hundred million to one billion to five billion, has the production of geniuses—Shakespeares, Newtons, Mozarts, Einsteins—seemingly choked off to nothing, genius itself coming to seem like the property of the past?

  “Enlightened, penetrating, and capacious minds,” as William Duff chose to put it two hundred years ago, speaking of such exemplars as Homer, Quintilian, and Michelangelo in one of a string of influential essays by mid-eighteenth-century Englishmen that gave birth to the modern meaning of the word genius. Earlier, it had meant spirit, the magical spirit of a jinni or more often the spirit of a nation. Duff and his contemporaries wished to identify genius with the godlike power of invention, of creation, of making what never was before, and to do so they had to create a psychology of imagination: imagination with a “RAMBLING and VOLATILE power”; imagination “perpetually attempting to soar” and “apt to deviate into the mazes of error.”

  Imagination is that faculty whereby the mind not only reflects on its own operations, but which assembles the various ideas conveyed to the understanding by the canal of sensation, and treasured up in the repository of the memory, compounding or disjoining them at pleasure; and which, by its plastic power of inventing new associations of ideas, and of combining them with infinite variety, is enabled to present a creation of its own, and to exhibit scenes and objects which never existed in nature.