Genius

by James Gleick

  The odds that your theory will be in fact right, and that the general thing that everybody’s working on will be wrong, is low. But the odds that you, Little Boy Schmidt, will be the guy who figures a thing out, is not smaller… . It’s very important that we do not all follow the same fashion. Because although it is ninety percent sure that the answer lies over there, where Gell-Mann is working, what happens if it doesn’t?

  “If you give more money to theoretical physics,” he added, “it doesn’t do any good if it just increases the number of guys following the comet head. So it’s necessary to increase the amount of variety … and the only way to do it is to implore you few guys to take a risk with your lives that you will never be heard of again, and go off in the wild blue yonder and see if you can figure it out.”

  Most scientists knew the not-so-amusing metalaw that the receipt of the Nobel Prize marks the end of one’s productive career. For many recipients, of course, the end came long before. For others the fame and distinction tend to accelerate the waning of a scientist’s ability to give his creative work the time-intensive, fanatical concentration it often requires. Some prizewinners fight back. Francis Crick designed a blunt form letter:

  Dr. Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to:

  send an autograph help you in your project

  provide a photograph read your manuscript

  cure your disease deliver a lecture

  be interviewed attend a conference

  talk on the radio act as chairman

  appear on TV become an editor

  speak after dinner write a book

  give a testimonial accept an honorary degree

  Requests in most of these categories now filled Feynman’s mail (except that his correspondents tended more toward hear my theory of the universe than cure my disease). Mature scientists did become laboratory heads, department chairmen, foundation officials, institute directors. Victor Weisskopf, one of those whom the prize had just barely eluded, was now director of CERN, and he thought Feynman, too, would be driven willy-nilly into administration. He goaded Feynman into accepting a wager, signed before witnesses: “Mr. FEYNMAN will pay the sum of TEN DOLLARS to Mr. WEISSKOPF if at any time during the next TEN YEARS (i.e. before the THIRTY FIRST DAY of DECEMBER of the YEAR ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE), the said Mr. FEYNMAN has held a ‘responsible position.’” They had no disagreement about what that would mean:

  For the purpose of the aforementioned WAGER, the term “responsible position” shall be taken to signify a position which, by reason of its nature, compels the holder to issue instructions to other persons to carry out certain acts, notwithstanding the fact that the holder has no understanding whatsoever of that which he is instructing the aforesaid persons to accomplish.

  Feynman collected the ten dollars in 1976.

  He already tried to avoid encumbrances as though every invitation, honor, professional membership, or knock at his door were another vine wrapping itself around his creative center. By the time he won the Nobel Prize he had been trying for five years to resign from the National Academy of Sciences. This simple task was taking on a life of its own. He began by scribbling a note with his dues bill: he paid the forty dollars, but he resigned. Almost a year later he received a personal letter from the academy’s president, the biologist Detlev W. Bronk (whose original paper on the single nerve impulse he had read as a Princeton student). He felt obliged to write a polite explanation:

  My desire to resign is merely a personal one; it is not meant as a protest of any kind… . My peculiarity is this: I find it psychologically very distasteful to judge people’s “merit.” So I cannot participate in the main activity of selecting people for membership. To be a member of a group, of which an important activity is to choose others deemed worthy of membership in that self-esteemed group, bothers me… .

  Maybe I don’t explain it very well, but suffice to say that I am not happy as a member of a self-perpetuating honorary society.

  It was 1961. Bronk let Feynman’s letter sit for months. Then he answered with calculated obtuseness:

  Thank you for your willingness to continue as a member of the academy… . I have done my best to reduce the emphasis on the “honor” of election… . I am grateful that you will continue a member at least during my last year as president.

  Eight years later, Feynman was still trying. He re-resigned. A reply came from the president-elect, Philip Handler, who mused talmudically, “I suppose that we truly have no alternative, in the sense that surely the Academy must adhere to your wishes,” and deftly slid Feynman’s resignation into the subjunctive mood:

  I would consider your resignation a most sorrowful event indeed… . I write to hope that you will reconsider… . I am reluctant to endorse such an action… . Before processing your request, a procedure for which I trust that the Office of the Home Secretary is in some manner prepared, I very much hope that you will let us hear from you further… .

  Feynman wrote again, as plainly as he could. Handler replied:

  I have your somewhat cryptic note… . We are seeking to increase the meaningful roles of the Academy… . Wouldn’t you rather join us in that effort?

  Finally, by 1970, Feynman’s resignation began to seem real even to the academy, though he continued to hear from scientists who wondered whether he would confirm the rumor and explain why.

  He turned down honorary degrees offered by the University of Chicago and by Columbia University and thus finally kept the promise he had made to himself on the day he received his doctorate from Princeton. He turned down hundreds of other propositions with a curtness that impressed even his protective secretary. To a book publisher who had invited him to “introduce a draft of fresh air into a rather stuffy area,” he wrote: “No sir. The area is stuffy from too much hot air already.” He refused to sign petitions and newspaper advertisements; the Vietnam War was now drawing the opposition of many scientists, but he would not join them publicly. Feynman, Nobel laureate, found that even canceling a magazine subscription took an entire correspondence. “Dear Professor Feynman,” began a long letter from the editor of Physics Today, the magazine whose second issue had carried his article about the Pocono conference in 1948:

  The comment you sent back with our questionnaire on our May issue (“I never read your magazine. I don’t know why it is published. Please take me off your mailing list. I don’t want it.”) poses some interesting questions for us… .

  Four hundred words later, the editor had not given up:

  I apologize for asking any more of your time, but all of us at Physics Today will appreciate it very much if we can have amplification of your earlier comments.

  So Feynman amplified:

  Dear Sir,

  I’m not “physicists,” I’m just me. I don’t read your magazine so I don’t know what’s in it. Maybe it’s good, I don’t know. Just don’t send it to me. Please remove my name from the mailing list as requested. What other physicists need or don’t need, want or don’t want, has nothing to do with it… . It was not my intention to shake your confidence in your magazine—nor to suggest that you stop publication—only that you stop sending it here. Can you do that please?

  He was hardening his shell. He knew he could seem cold. His secretary, Helen Tuck, protected him, sometimes sending away visitors while Feynman hid behind her door. Or he would just shout at a hopeful student to go away—he was working. He almost never participated in the business of his department at Caltech: tenure decisions, grant proposals, or any of the other administrative chores that constitute overhead on most scientists’ time. Caltech’s divisions, like the science departments at every American university, were largely financed through a highly structured process of applications to the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and other government agencies. There were group applications and individual applications, supporting salaries, students, equipment, and overhead. At Caltech a senior prof
essor who could arrange to have the air force, for example, pay a portion of his salary was rewarded with a discretionary kitty with which he could travel, buy a computer, or support a graduate student. Alone at Caltech, and virtually alone in physics, Feynman was humored in his refusal to participate in this process. To some colleagues he seemed selfish. It occurred to the historian of science Gerald Holton, however, that Feynman had put on a kind of hair shirt. “It must have been very difficult to live that way,” Holton said. “It does not come easy to make that conscious decision to remain unadulterated. Culture by definition is very seductive. He was a Robinson Crusoe in the big city, and that isn’t easy to do.” I. I. Rabi once said that physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. Feynman clutched at irresponsibility and childishness. He kept a quotation from Einstein in his files about the “holy curiosity of inquiry”: “this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.” He protected his freedom as though it were a dying candle in a hard wind. He was willing to risk hurting his friends. Hans Bethe turned sixty the year after Feynman won his Nobel Prize, and Feynman refused to send a contribution to the customary volume of articles in his honor.

  He was frightened. In the years after the prize he felt uncreative. His Caltech colleague David Goodstein traveled with him to the University of Chicago when he went to address the undergraduates there early in 1967. Goodstein thought he seemed depressed and worried. When Goodstein came down to breakfast at the faculty club, he found Feynman already there, talking with someone who Goodstein gradually realized was the codiscoverer of DNA, James Watson. Watson gave Feynman a manuscript tentatively titled Honest Jim. It was a tame memoir by later standards, but when it was published—under a different title, The Double Helix—it caused an enormous popular stir. With a candor that shocked many of Watson’s colleagues, it portrayed the ambition, the competitiveness, the blunders, the miscommunications, and the raw excitement of real scientists. Feynman read it in his room at the Chicago faculty club, skipping the cocktail party in his honor, and found himself moved. Later he wrote Watson:

  Don’t let anybody criticize that book who hasn’t read it through to the end. Its apparent minor faults and petty gossipy incidents fall into place as deeply 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, finally fully 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 telling 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 embellishments 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 Gell-Mann said, uncontroversially, that he and his colleagues had developed a theory that “works.” He summed it up in one intricately crafted sentence (rather more refined than “All things are made of atoms …”):

  It is of course a Yang-Mills 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 U1 of electromagnetism.

  His listeners recognized vintage Gell-Mann, from the “of course” onward. For aficionados there was a poetry in the jargon, much of which Gell-Mann had invented personally. 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 called 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 really 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. Gell-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. Gell-Mann loved to know things’ names and to pronounce them correctly—so correctly that Feynman would misunderstand, or pretend to misunderstand, when Gell-Mann uttered so simple a name as Montreal. Gell-Mann’s conversational partners often suspected that the obscure pronunciations and cultural allusions were designed to place them at a disadvantage. Feynman pronounced potpourri “pot-por-eye” and interesting as if it had four syllables, and he despised nomenclature of all kinds. Gell-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 Gell-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 all 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 all science to be his territory—his responsibility—but remained brashly ignorant of everything else. Some well-known physicists resented Feynman for his cherished irresponsibility—it was, after all, irresponsibility to his academic colleagues. A larger number disliked Gell-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 still required ties and jackets, would show up in shirtsleeves and demand the most garish and ill-fitting of the spare items kept on hand for emergencies.) Feynman talked with his hands—with his whole body, in fact—whereas Gell-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 spill over into their theoretical work, too. Gell-Mann insists on mathematical rigor in all his work, often at the expense of comprehensibility… . Where Gell-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 Gell-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 Gell-Mann made his vision not only comprehensible but irresistible. Both men were relentless on the trail of a new idea, able to concentrate absolutely, willing to try anything.

  Both men, it seemed to a few perceptive colleagues, 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 filled their masks until reality and artifice became impossible to pry apart.

  Gell-Mann, as naturalist, collector, and categorizer, was well 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 collision tracks—seemed to have spilled open a bulky canvas bag from which nearly a hundred distinct particles had now tumbled forth. Gell-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 Gell-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.

  Much of SU(3)’s power came from the way it embodied a concept increasingly central to the high-energy theorist’s way of working: the concept of inexact symmetry, almost symmetry, near symmetry, or—the term that won out—broken symmetry. The particle world was full of near misses in its symmetries, a dangerous problem, since it seemed to permit an ad hoc escape route whenever an expected relationship failed to match. Broken symmetry implied a process, a change in status. A symmetry in water is broken when it freezes, for now the system does not look the same from every direction. A magnet embodies symmetry breaking, since it has made a kind of choice of orientation. Many of the broken symmetries of particle physics came to seem like choices the universe made when it condensed from a hot chaos into cooler matter, spiked as it is with so many hard-edged, asymmetrical contingencies.