As I stepped into the hall, my heart raced. After all, Murray needed Helen. Along with him and Feynman, Helen seemed to me to form the soul of the department. I, on the other hand, was expendable. Murray could squash my career with nary a thought. I imagined the worst, that I would find myself barred from the department supply of paper and chalk. Or that my office would be moved to the boiler room—or, perhaps with Lisa’s help, Albania. By the time I got to Murray’s door, though, the yelling was over. I was relieved.
I noticed the door was open a crack. This was unusual. Both Murray and Feynman usually kept their doors closed. It helped cut down on interruptions from the students and junior faculty like me. It also helped keep out the occasional nutcases who always plague the top schools. They’d come by with their new discoveries. Particles faster than light, or the universe is a pancake and we are the syrup—it didn’t matter what they believed, they always saw themselves as the new Einstein. If you’re unlucky enough to encounter one of these undiscovered geniuses, it could be a couple of hours down the drain. You had to be careful how you rejected them, because it sometimes turned out they were armed. At Berkeley, there had been a fellow who responded to rejection by hanging out outside the physics building with a knife. My Ph.D. advisor told of a guy at Columbia once who returned with a gun. His professor was out, so he killed his secretary.
I looked through the crack in Murray’s door. I expected to see him leaning back in his chair, smiling over whatever victory he had no doubt just achieved. But what I saw instead was a man who looked broken, his elbows on his desk, his head resting in his hands. His face was full of agony. I had lost all desire to yell at him. Instead, I felt bad for him. I didn’t know why he was upset. The next day I returned to my Greek Oracle, Constantine, for the answer. He told me Murray’s wife had recently died of cancer.
I decided to stop eavesdropping and step away. But it was too late. He had spotted me.
“Can I help you?” he said.
I stood there, busted. What was I going to say? I came over to tell you to stop yelling at people, but then I decided to spy on you instead?
“Oh, hello. Come in,” he said, recognizing me through the crack.
I opened the door and stepped in, feeling awkward.
He added, “I want to thank you again for giving me your brother’s wonderful book.”
A couple of years earlier, while still in high school, my younger brother, Steve, had written a book on the birds of the Chicago area. Murray was an avid bird watcher and conservationist. He could rattle off the identifying characteristics of various birds with the same comfort he had speaking Upper Mayan. He could probably rattle off the characteristics of birds in Upper Mayan. So, when I moved in next door, I had given Murray a copy as a kind of reverse housewarming gift.
“That was very nice of you,” he continued.
“My brother was excited when I told him you were reading it.”
Murray smiled. “So, what can I do for you? I saw you at John’s strings seminar the other day.”
It seemed like an opportunity.
“I was wondering . . . what are your views on string theory?”
“I think it is very promising.”
“Promising in what way?” Given my experience with Feynman, I was proceeding with caution. I didn’t want to say anything stupid. But I just had. How could anyone who had read anything about string theory not know why some people thought it promising? Feynman might have skewered me for that, but Murray didn’t seem to mind the question.
“It could be the theory that unifies all the forces of nature. To have a single theory of the gravitational force, the electric force, of all forces, that was Einstein’s dream. Doesn’t that inspire all of us? Imagine, a single, simple formula that explains the great multiplicity of particles and all their interactions!”
“Yet people are very skeptical.”
“They have a right. But it is still worth pursuing. Look, when I first brought John here almost ten years ago, we didn’t even know the connection between gravity and strings. Back then, I didn’t know what strings would be good for. But I knew it would be great. It was too beautiful not to be. Obviously, not everyone necessarily saw it that way. Then, when John Schwarz and Michael Green found the connection to gravity, it was heartwarming. It made me proud and happy to have John here at Caltech. Still, some influential people don’t understand. There is some crazy opposition. Even hostility.”
“I guess people don’t see its connection to reality,” I said.
“It’s because research on string theory is proceeding in the most unorthodox of steps. Creating this theory is a process of discovery, not invention. They are looking for something that is there, not creating something to fit experimental data. Progress is slow. But the hope is that people are piecing together a unique, self-consistent theory. That’s why I support them. I have a gut feeling there is something there. Let’s just say I’m maintaining a nature reserve for endangered theories.”
As I would learn later, Feynman had no objection to the idea that a theory like string theory was already “there,” waiting to be unearthed, as Murray believed about string theory. But Feynman felt that only a principle or observation of nature could lead us to the right theory, not a scientist’s desire for unification. It was his Babylonian approach—worship the phenomena, not the explanation.
So Feynman scorned string theory, Murray championed it. That was Feynman and Murray—attracted by each other’s genius, repelled by each other’s philosophy, held in orbit by the balance. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine either of them staying put without the other. When Feynman died, it seemed to me, Murray would hurtle out of orbit, the way the moon would if the earth suddenly disappeared.
The goal of science may be to describe reality, but as long as science is carried out by human beings, human qualities will affect the description. The Feynmans will stay close to the data, the Murrays will be guided by their philosophy, their need to classify nature neatly and cleanly. In the end, one or both may succeed, and if they both do, then a peacemaker will show how their theories match up, just as Freeman Dyson had done for Feynman diagrams. Just as in quantum mechanics energy can be viewed as either particles or waves, different visions may both be correct, nothing but different views of the same many-faceted miracle, nature.
Murray proved to be a good conservationist. Though there had been considerable pressure not to renew Schwarz’s position, he had recently instead been given a minor promotion, to senior research fellow, and a new contract for three more years. It still wasn’t what Murray had wanted for him—a regular tenured position—but it worked for the time being.
When I found out about Murray’s wife’s death, I admired him for having the focus to do even that much for John. Margaret had been sick for over a year. It was a hopeless form of cancer, colon cancer that had spread to her liver.
At first, Murray had approached the cancer in much the way Feynman approached his—he learned everything there was to know about it and became integrally involved in deciding the treatment. In the end, their approaches differed. Feynman as usual stuck close to the data—that there was little more they could do for him. But Murray had a hard time accepting that with his genius and with all the resources of modern science available to him, he couldn’t save Margaret, his only true friend. Even after being told there was no hope, he desperately tried to keep her alive with experimental treatments in the hope that in the interim, a cure would be discovered.
And in the midst of it all, he managed to keep John Schwarz afloat at Caltech.
Constantine told me that the prevailing view was that in the short time since Margaret’s death, Murray had mellowed. He didn’t yell as loudly as he used to, or as often. He didn’t quite seem to be the same Murray, Constantine said. I had never known the “old Murray,” but as I observed him over the next year, I did detect a gradual softening. I never again heard Murray yelling through the office wall. I wondered, was it merely that his energy was
sapped, or did it go deeper? Had he, through his loss, somehow found a better way to live? In time, I grew to feel sorry for him. Not because he no longer felt the need to rant and rave, or to constantly prove himself superior, but because, for the first fifty-two years of his life, he had.
XV
Constantine and I walked down the olive walk in the late afternoon. The campus was quiet. It had rained through the night and morning, but the rain had recently let up. The branches of the olive trees glistened in the emerging sunlight. A while back Feynman had suggested I drop by to see an undergraduate who lived in a nearby dorm. I finally decided to go, and I had grabbed Constantine to join me.
His eyes were red. Another long night with Meg. Drinks at some “in” bar in Hollywood. Then his Fiat broke down in the rain. A great car, unless you needed to be somewhere. It worked for Constantine, though. A ride home in a tow truck, and then he and Meg made love all night. Constantine had said a few times that Meg and he didn’t seem to mesh on an intellectual level, but apparently those other levels made it okay. To me, they seemed made for each other, like cover models from Cosmopolitan and Cigar Aficionado.
I was feeling lonely, and glad he’d agreed to come along. Always ready for an adventure, that was Constantine.
“What’s so special about this guy that Feynman sends you there?” he asked.
I shrugged. All I knew was Feynman said it would be interesting, or, as he would pronounce it, IN-ter-ES-ting. Apparently the undergrad had a collection of spiders. I figured it had to be a pretty good collection to make it worth a special look.
Constantine walked gracefully along the wet sidewalk. He didn’t get a drop of water on his elegant Italian shoes. I accidentally stepped in a deep puddle and doused my sneakers. There must have been a pothole in the concrete. As I shook the water off my foot, Constantine asked if I wanted to collaborate with him on his research.
“Forget string theory,” he said. “And forget trying to solve quantum chromodynamics with mathematics. Computers, that’s the answer. Computers are the future. You want to be a success, get in on it now.”
Constantine worked on quantum chromodynamics, but he belonged to a growing number of computer physicists who worked in an area called lattice theories. Since the equations of quantum chromodynamics apparently couldn’t be solved by humans, their approach was to have a computer solve them. And since no computer, no matter how fast, can handle the infinity of points in the space-time continuum, lattice theorists had to rewrite the equations in terms of a finite lattice of points—hence their name, lattice theorists.
Constantine’s proposal caught me by surprise. He sounded a bit like Ray talking about his girlfriend and her work up in Bellevue. “You’ll see,” Ray had said, “someday computers will be everywhere. They’ll be like HAL in 2001.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but will they be able to pick up the garbage?”
“No, I figure my job’s safe,” he said. “But I bet they’ll be able to smoke pot.”
“That’ll be a sad day,” I said.
“Not really,” said Ray. “They won’t replace the human. They will augment him. With HAL getting stoned at your side, the party will just be that much better.”
I had had a little experience programming computers, but I didn’t see them improving any parties. Nor did I see them as the panacea for unsolvable theories. I liked Constantine, but I didn’t really believe in his approach. Getting answers from a computer was like getting them from a black box. I felt they gave solutions—numerical results—without providing the understanding you get when you solve or approximate the equations yourself, mathematically. Because of this, I didn’t even trust computer solutions. I had never mentioned any of this to Constantine, and I didn’t see what good it would do to say it now. Plus, I figured that the fact that I didn’t believe in the approach didn’t mean it wasn’t the right one, or even that I shouldn’t do it. I had to weigh against my personal intuition the fact that lattice theories were a lot more “in” than string theory, and a lot more conducive to a future tenured position. And I’d probably like working with Constantine.
“Hey,” he said, reading my hesitation, “we calculated the mass of the proton. That’s something no one can do using straight mathematics.”
He was right. The mass of the proton was a simple thing for experimentalists to measure, yet theoretically the proton mass depended on the quarks inside it and their interactions via the strong force, and it was one of those problems in quantum chromodynamics that no one knew how to solve. Constantine had made quite a splash doing it via the computer: Even many computer skeptics were amazed at the accuracy of his answer.
He winked at me. “Got me to Caltech, didn’t it?”
We found the room, and Spider Guy answered the door. He was thin, and wore a Caltech T-shirt that was several sizes too big. He had a large room that was bright with the fresh sunlight, but I doubted he appreciated that. He’d have been just as well off in a cave, I thought. The same went for what, from the look of things, were the room’s principal occupants—several hundred spiders.
The room was jammed with card tables, arranged to cover the floor space with mathematical efficiency, but not for human convenience. There was hardly room to walk among them. On the card tables were rows and rows of small plastic cups. Each one contained a spider, or at least a spiderlike bug. Big spiders. Tiny spiders. Hairy spiders. Bald spiders. Here and there were spiders he announced were venomous.
“They can’t crawl out,” Spider Guy said. “See.” And then he tilted one of the cups to demonstrate how it was too slippery for the spider to climb up the side. Was it the wax coating? Had he sprayed it with Pam? I didn’t know, but whatever his trick, it worked. Thank God for that, I thought. Then I wondered what would happen in an earthquake. There had been a 7.2 up near Eureka a year ago last November. Constantine’s thoughts were apparently less theoretical.
“Hey,” he said after checking out the collection, “where do you sleep?”
And it struck me—there wasn’t a bed, or even a chair, in the room. Just these spider tables.
“Under the tables,” said Spider Guy.
“The girls must love that,” said Constantine.
“Oh, I go to their place for that,” said Spider Guy.
Given his interests and the paucity of female students at Caltech, I marveled that he got any of “that.” Or that he especially wanted it. He seemed to be in love with his spiders.
We left.
“I wonder why Feynman sent you to see that?” Constantine said.
“I don’t know. But he was right. It sure was interesting,” I said.
“In a sick way,” he said.
I shrugged. “I thought he seemed pretty happy,” I said.
“Hey—sometimes sick people are the happiest. They’re too sick to know how unhappy they should be.”
He stopped to light a cigarette.
“Schwarz is probably happy, too. He probably sleeps under a pile of strings,” he said. He slowly exhaled a billowing cloud of smoke. Suddenly I wanted a cigarette. It seemed to bring him such deep satisfaction. “Let me know if you want to learn lattices,” he said. “I’ll promise you one thing . . . you won’t have to sleep under a table of spiders—or strings.”
With that we kept on toward the physics building. Then I spotted Feynman in the distance. I had spent the last couple of days on the lookout for Feynman, hoping to manufacture a natural way to bump into him and see if he would still talk to me. I told Constantine I’d see him later. I walked over toward Feynman.
When I got to him, Feynman was gazing at a rainbow. He had an intense look on his face, as if he were concentrating. As if he had never seen one before. Or maybe as if it might be his last.
I approached him cautiously.
“Professor Feynman. Hi,” I said.
“Look, a rainbow,” he said without looking at me. I was relieved that I didn’t detect any residual annoyance in his voice.
I joined him
in staring at the rainbow. It appeared pretty impressive, if you stopped to look at it. It wasn’t something I normally did—in those days.
“I wonder what the ancients thought of rainbows,” I mused. There were many myths based on the stars, but I thought rainbows must have seemed equally mysterious.
“That’s a question for Murray,” he said. I eventually tested Feynman’s theory on this and asked Murray. Sure enough, I discovered that Murray was an encyclopedia when it came to native and ancient cultures. He even collected artifacts. I learned from him that the Navajo people saw the rainbow as a sign of good fortune, whereas some other Indians saw the rainbow as a bridge between the living and the dead. I didn’t quite get the names of those Indians because Murray pronounced them in a manner that was so authentic it was unintelligible.
“All I know,” Feynman continued, “is that according to one legend angels put gold at its ends and only a nude man can reach it. As if a nude man doesn’t have better things to do,” he said with a sly smile.
“Do you know who first explained the true origin of the rainbow?” I asked.
“It was Descartes,” he said. After a moment he looked me in the eye.
“And what do you think was the salient feature of the rainbow that inspired Descartes’ mathematical analysis?” he asked.
“Well, the rainbow is actually a section of a cone that appears as an arc of the colors of the spectrum when drops of water are illuminated by sunlight behind the observer.”
“And?”
“I suppose his inspiration was the realization that the problem could be analyzed by considering a single drop, and the geometry of the situation.”
“You’re overlooking a key feature of the phenomenon,” he said.
“Okay, I give up. What would you say inspired his theory?”
Feynman's Rainbow Page 9