Can epiphany also apply to physics? In principle, yes. Dyson did think of himself as “an artist with mathematical tools.”6 His liking for Feynman’s geometrically elegant diagrams was practically a form of art appreciation. A semester of heavy discussion with Feynman had primed Dyson’s imagination. A summer with Schwinger and his quantum fields had acquainted Dyson with a completely separate but apparently equivalent view of reality. Dyson personally preferred fields over pictures, but it was thrilling to see how Feynman had turned subatomic reality into geometric patterns.
In A Portrait epiphany didn’t just happen. Stephen Dedalus’s subconscious mind had been prepared. Having been schooled by the Jesuits, Stephen went about things logically and methodically. He relied on Thomas Aquinas, whose thirteenth-century theology was even more comprehensive than Schwinger’s twentieth-century electrodynamic catechism.
Suppose, said the fictional Stephen, that the artist wants to create something beautiful. Aquinas held that the three necessary ingredients of appreciating beauty were integritas, consonantia, and claritas.7 The first of these Stephen translated as wholeness. Perceiving beauty must begin by seeing the thing as a separate entity apart from the rest of the universe. The second ingredient Stephen translated as harmony, the perception of the parts and the synthesis of those parts into a balanced, consistent whole. The third component in Aquinas’s aesthetic triad was harder to translate. Claritas: it sounds like clarity, but Stephen believed Aquinas was aiming more at something like the soul of the object, its quidditas or what-ness.
Words, words, words. Do we really need all these words to describe electrons? Well, we use lots of vocabulary words to describe subtle nuances in basketball, or high cuisine, or religious doctrine, or the anatomy of finches. Therefore it will be useful to stick with the Joyce-Aquinas terms, just for a moment longer, to describe electrons.
Wholeness? An electron isn’t a single pinpoint thing. It’s there but surrounded by that blizzard of virtual particles. Its wholeness has to take into account this extended nature. It can be a particle in a specific place at a specific time, but only when it is detected.
Harmony? The scientific description of an electron, like an artistic description of a person, can come in many forms. Though they might be quite different in appearance, and though they were social constructs cooked up by scientists standing at chalkboards in places like Tokyo, and Cambridge, and Ithaca, the equations of Schwinger and Tomonaga and the diagrams of Feynman both accounted for the observed properties of the electron. This pointed to an underlying kinship.
What-ness? In quantum science, what an electron is consists largely of what an electron is seen doing in a laboratory. Consequently an electron is a thing with a dossier of measurable properties: it has mass, electrical charge, and magnetism. Electron existence emerges from observation.
Words like harmony and wholeness are aesthetic terms, words used in literature or philosophy, and not usually applied to science. Physicists don’t generally consider that they are making electrons more real—much less bringing them more into existence—through improved-precision measurements. Better experiments are done to gain more knowledge about electrons, and the universe.
But Dyson savored the aesthetic side of things. While James Joyce thought of Aquinas, Dyson thought of Feynman and Schwinger. Dyson’s equivalent of Joyce’s Jesuit education had been a rigorous grounding in number theory, including infinite series of numbers. Heaving into a fizz of virtual particles in the universal vacuum was for him a delight.
Dyson was on the bus for three days and three nights. The bumps of the road kept him from doing anything but think. He couldn’t read and he couldn’t write. Jostling along in this way, sleepless and paperless, somewhere in Nebraska a shining forth came to him.8 In his drowsy trance, on the third day into his journey, he saw the way to bring picture and equation together. They were consonantia. In his sleep-deprived mind the exact mathematical bridge between Schwinger and Feynman began to form.
Anxious to record this secret signature of things on paper, the young physicist paused in Chicago for a few days before resuming his trip. Dyson had discovered a sort of Rosetta stone for quantum electrodynamics. He had the mathematical prowess to translate between Feynman and Schwinger. Sensing that he had achieved claritas he was eager to consolidate his explanation. Before he could fulfill his mission, however, he would have to make an important convert.
APOSTLES
J. Robert Oppenheimer had been in Europe and no one knew precisely when he’d return. Meanwhile his office had filled with young physicists all waiting to get started. The mood was both anxious and eager. The situation reminded Dyson of another troubled homecoming.
T. S. Eliot was, like Dyson, newly resident at the Institute for Advanced Study that autumn of 1948. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral was doing well on Broadway. In the opening scene a number of priests have gathered, awaiting their archbishop with a mixture of exhilaration and anxiety. Thomas Beckett, the former friend and now enemy of the king, was returning from the relative safety of Europe to a potentially dangerous environment at home. Beckett was attempting to balance his current position as archbishop of Canterbury with his old position as chancellor under King Henry.
Dyson saw an analogy between the twentieth-century vicar of nuclear weapons and the twelfth-century primate of England. Oppenheimer was struggling just then to reconcile his former job as enthusiastic builder of the atom bomb with his newfound misgivings over the course of postwar nuclear policy. Both Oppenheimer and the archbishop were outgoing yet also deeply introspective.
Oppenheimer was too introspective, some critics felt. He had led the huge wartime effort to build an atom bomb. Now, with the onset of the Cold War, his counsel was more needed than ever. Should a hydrogen bomb be built? Oppenheimer, along with other notable physicists such as Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe, felt that the hydrogen weapon was too large, too destructive. Others, such as physicists Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, disagreed. They felt that the magnitude of the Soviet threat demanded the utmost in military preparedness. This matter gave Oppie heavy eyebrows.
Oppie did some of his best thinking in a workshop environment. As a young professor in Berkeley he maintained an atelier of brilliant young theoretical physicists, whose desks all sat in a single large room. Now in 1948 it seemed as if Oppenheimer wanted to re-create his Berkeley environment. The main building at the Institute for Advanced Study was undergoing remodeling, so all the physicists’ desks were gathered in one room. Oppenheimer, who had been director for about one year, wanted to expand the physics part of the Institute. So he invited a dozen young scientists, ten men and two women, to join him.
Dyson awaited the return of their nuclear archbishop from another of those ecumenical councils scientists keep holding—this time the eighth Solvay conference. In Oppie’s absence the Institute newcomers were getting to know each other through daily discussion, a process helped along by numerous parties. Although Dyson was never a big drinker, alcohol’s role in lubricating colloquy came as a pleasant surprise to him.9 The twelve, including Dyson (with no advanced degree), were no longer students but were young professionals, postdoctoral fellows, who with a little guidance would be ready to branch out on their own.
These colleagues included some students of Schwinger’s, such as Kenneth Case and Robert Karplus; a young French woman, Cécile Morette; and Jack Steinberger, who would later win the Nobel Prize. They didn’t bother speaking with the mathematicians at the Institute, nor any of the professors. The Young Turks felt that they didn’t have anything to learn from these old folks.
For his year at the Institute Dyson considered his best friends to be Steinberger and David Bohm, a former student of Oppenheimer’s and now a junior professor at Princeton University. Dyson and Bohm, both bachelors, would eat dinner together many nights, often at a nearby “soul-food” restaurant. Although advised that eating at such an establishment was unwise, they continued to go anyway.10
The
rivalry between the Schwinger-Tomonaga field theory and the more wayward Feynman picture approach was a prime topic of conversation. Dyson was tempted to blurt out exactly what he had done—namely, that he was about to erect a grand synthesis of the rival views—but to say all that in this way would be unsporting, and so for the moment he held back. He was convinced that with the secret of electrodynamics in his hand he had something that would be of interest to Oppie. He had something that would be able to command his leader’s attention.11
His task now was to gather his Greyhound insights, sort through his hasty Chicago notes, and turn it all into a masterpiece of fluid explanation. On the seventh day of writing he rested. The effort was, he confided to his parents, the best thing he had ever accomplished. His fifty-page manuscript destined for Physical Review might even be great.12
He had not merely shown that Schwinger and Feynman were compatible. Exercising his own mathematical talent, Dyson did what they had not done: demonstrate that the infinities could be tamed at each successive level of complexity. All those “higher-order” terms, those associated with ever more nested groupings of virtual particles rising up out of the vacuum, adding layer on top of layer of additional frothiness—all were manageable. This achievement would be Dyson’s distinctive contribution to the reform of quantum electrodynamics.13
Dyson was struck now by another anxiety. In the paper he had blithely summarized the work of Feynman and Schwinger before either of these gentlemen had officially published his own work. Would they be offended by this? Would they charge that Dyson had cribbed their ideas? In the actual paper Dyson gave frequent credit to them as well as to Tomonaga in Japan. But maybe this wasn’t enough.
Once again, his friend and mentor Hans Bethe helped to put things right. He and Dyson took a stroll through Riverside Park in New York City. Bethe was spending a semester at Columbia University and this is where Dyson delivered a summary of his theory. They decided the paper should go ahead.14 If Feynman and Schwinger hadn’t published anything yet, whose fault was that? Their reticence was, by this point, holding back the progress of science. By publishing, Dyson was pushing matters along. And, as for credit, hadn’t he enshrined the efforts of the three men in the very title of the paper? “The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman” said it all. The paper was sent off. “Of course he had my permission to publish my work in his papers,” Feynman later said. “We were good friends.”15
Dyson sent a copy to Feynman at Cornell and followed up in person. Accompanied by Cécile Morette, Dyson made the ten-hour train journey to Ithaca. Had Feynman read Dyson’s article? Well, Feynman had given it to one of his graduate students and then asked whether it was worth reading. The student said no, so Feynman had not read it. And, as if to show why he didn’t need to read Dyson’s masterpiece, Feynman entertained his visitors from Princeton with a dazzling display, providing solutions on the spot to several difficult physics problems, such as how light can interact with light, dispatching in two hours what had stumped others for years. Dyson took Feynman’s gentle rebuff stoically. Nobody disliked Dick Feynman. You could only be amazed by his effervescent personality and quick ability. Here is how Dyson rationalized his fruitful pilgrimage to Cornell in the fall of 1948:
I know that he is the one man in the world who has nothing to learn from what I have written; and he doesn’t mind telling me so. That afternoon, Feynman produced more brilliant ideas per square minute that I have ever seen anywhere before.16
Back in Princeton, where the archbishop had finally returned, Dyson sought to explain the new quantum ideas. He was invited to give a public talk. On the designated day, things did not go well. Oppenheimer repeatedly interrupted. He bluntly questioned Dyson’s methods and located various errors in Dyson’s reasoning. It became apparent that Oppenheimer, maker of the atom bomb, the weapon that had vanquished the shogun’s heirs, didn’t much relish being taught quantum lessons by this not-yet-twenty-five-year-old.
Dyson himself was irritated. Had Oppenheimer become conservative? Had his upper-echelon government consultancy distracted him from seeing ahead in physics? To Dyson, the older man seemed lethargic. He had acquired a defeatist attitude. Oppenheimer’s outbursts of rudeness seemed compulsive, as if they were a medical tic. Dyson began to think that he should have stayed with Feynman at Cornell. Ithaca had more snow but it was chillier in Princeton.17
Something had to be done. Dyson drafted a manifesto in the form of a memo to his boss. He argued that the new theories had merit. Schwinger’s equations and Feynman’s pictures, together with Dyson’s explanations, would produce sound results. Many of the infinity problems plaguing quantum physics could be explained. Why the resistance?18
Dyson wasn’t sure he should send such an admonitory note to so august a person. But that night, as Dyson ruminated, the night sky put out an omen. A brilliant display of the aurora borealis erupted briefly. Dyson frequently combed events for historical or literary or philosophical, if not exactly divine, portent. The flashing forth of the northern lights he took as a favorable sign, so he sent the memo. To his surprise, Oppenheimer greeted it in a friendly manner and suggested that Dyson deliver a more thorough series of talks in defense of the quantum pictograms.
Dyson resumed his lectures and Oppenheimer resumed his attacks. Oppie, in his clever repartee, was never to be one-upped. You simply could not get the better of any argument. At one lecture the sarcasm and disruptive interruptions became so bad that the other audience members, genuinely wanting to learn something from the presentation, asked Dyson to repeat the whole two-hour talk the next day when Oppie would not be present.19 Only in that way could they listen in peace and get to ask some questions of their own.
The hostilities reached a peak in mid-November. At this point Hans Bethe was instrumental once again in pushing forward Dyson’s career. Bethe came down to Princeton and, in front of Oppenheimer, gave his own account of Dyson’s brand of quantum reality. For the remaining Dyson lectures, Oppenheimer held his tongue. Was he actually listening now, or just simmering? The morning after the last lecture in the sequence, Dyson received one of the most important letters of his life. The text of this missive, coming from the director of the Institute, consisted of only two words. “Nolo contendere.”20 Basically: I surrender.
DYSONMANIA
Dyson was not yet through proving his case. He wanted to be clear. He wanted to win supporters. With so many hours at the blackboard now behind him explaining in person, he had more explaining to do on paper. The fifty-page article, already sent off to Physical Review, was followed now by an eighty-page paper. All together this represented a 130-page quantum gospel. Dyson had been preaching to his own congregation, the physicists at the Institute, including Oppie. He had made a few more converts at Cornell. It was now time to evangelize further afield. He would be the bringer of Feynman diagrams.
At the January 1949 meeting of the American Physical Society, the APS president, Oppenheimer himself, conspicuously praised Dyson. Another speaker referred glowingly to the value of the “Feynman-Dyson” diagrams. At this point, Feynman, who was sitting in the audience, turned to Dyson and said in a stage whisper, “It looks as if you’re in, Doc.”21 The complementary side of Dyson’s achievement exists in the naming of certain “Dyson-Schwinger equations,” also called “Schwinger-Dyson equations.”
Greatness had been thrust upon Freeman Dyson. Like the Beatles in 1964, Dyson in 1949 was young, British, and in demand. Compare and contrast. The Beatles started humbly, as most rock groups do, rehearsing in tiny rooms, playing for their own amusement. They built up stamina and polished their onstage poise by working plenty of mean gigs in Liverpool and Hamburg. The German experience especially paid off, since they got practice performing in front of rowdy, unforgiving audiences.
The Beatles’ manager cleaned them up, got them upstanding engagements, signed them to record contracts, and induced them to wear better clothes. Dyson didn’t need cleaning up, but Hans Bethe shaped him up in
other ways. He gave Dyson a world-class problem to work on—chasing down quantum infinities—introduced him to upper-class physics society, and got him jobs.
The Beatles’ first single release, a song called “Love Me Do,” was nice but didn’t push the charts. Dyson’s first physics single, a paper called “The Electromagnetic Shift of Energy Levels,” had also been nice, but not nice enough to get him invited to the Pocono physics meeting.
Then the breakout came. The Beatles’ January 1963 tune “Please Please Me” went to number one on the British charts, and the lives of John, Paul, George, and Ringo were never the same. For Dyson, his two hit papers, the ones drafted in October and December of 1948, appeared in February 1949 in Physical Review. From then on he and Feynman’s diagrams shot to the top. Dyson’s talk at Columbia had made an impression. His series of talks in Princeton, culminating in Oppenheimer’s surrender, had created a stir. The January 1949 APS meeting was Dyson’s national showing. Feynman was now giving more talks himself, but if you wanted to know how the Feynman-Dyson system worked you had to read Dyson. His papers in Physical Review constituted the entire must-read literature on the subject. For several years to come Dyson’s papers drew more citations than Feynman’s.22 Feynman wasn’t entirely pleased.23
That spring a follow-up to the Shelter Island and Pocono meetings on quantum science was held at the Oldstone Hotel, fifty miles north of New York City, and it was decidedly “Dyson’s show.”24 In March, Dyson gave a talk at the University of Chicago, where he met two great physicists and alumni of the Manhattan Project, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, who, Dyson thought, were equivalent to Bethe-Feynman duo in Cornell, the one man acting as a sort of benevolent king (Fermi) while the other man served as the court jester (Teller).25
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