Chaos - James Gleick [60]
THEORISTS CONDUCT EXPERIMENTS with their brains. Experimenters have to use their hands, too. Theorists are thinkers, experimenters are craftsmen. The theorist needs no accomplice. The experimenter has to muster graduate students, cajole machinists, flatter lab assistants. The theorist operates in a pristine place free of noise, of vibration, of dirt. The experimenter develops an intimacy with matter as a sculptor does with clay, battling it, shaping it, and engaging it. The theorist invents his companions, as a naive Romeo imagined his ideal Juliet. The experimenter’s lovers sweat, complain, and fart.
They need each other, but theorists and experimenters have allowed certain inequities to enter their relationships since the ancient days when every scientist was both. Though the best experimenters still have some of the theorist in them, the converse does not hold. Ultimately, prestige accumulates on the theorist’s side of the table. In high energy physics, especially, glory goes to the theorists, while experimenters have become highly specialized technicians, managing expensive and complicated equipment. In the decades since World War II, as physics came to be defined by the study of fundamental particles, the best publicized experiments were those carried out with particle accelerators. Spin, symmetry, color, flavor—these were the glamorous abstractions. To most laymen following science, and to more than a few scientists, the study of atomic particles was physics. But studying smaller particles, on shorter time scales, meant higher levels of energy. So the machinery needed for good experiments grew with the years, and the nature of experimentation changed for good in particle physics. The field was crowded, and the big experiment encouraged teams. The particle physics papers often stood out in Physical Review Letters: a typical authors list could take up nearly one-quarter of a paper’s length.
Some experimenters, however, preferred to work alone or in pairs. They worked with substances closer to hand. While such fields as hydrodynamics had lost status, solid-state physics had gained, eventually expanding its territory enough to require a more comprehensive name, “condensed matter physics”: the physics of stuff. In condensed matter physics, the machinery was simpler. The gap between theorist and experimenter remained narrower. Theorists expressed a little less snobbery, experimenters a little less defensiveness.
Even so, perspectives differed. It was fully in character for a theorist to interrupt an experimenter’s lecture to ask: Wouldn’t more data points be more convincing? Isn’t that graph a little messy? Shouldn’t those numbers extend up and down the scale for a few more orders of magnitude?
And in return, it was fully in character for Harry Swinney to draw himself up to his maximum height, something around five and a half feet, and say, “That’s true,” with a mixture of innate Louisiana charm and acquired New York irascibility. “That’s true if you have an infinite amount of noise-free data.” And wheel dismissively back toward the blackboard, adding, “In reality, of course, you have a limited amount of noisy data.”
Swinney was experimenting with stuff. For him the turning point had come when he was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins. The excitement of particle physics was palpable. The inspiring Murray Gell-Mann came to talk once, and Swinney was captivated. But when he looked into what graduate students did, he discovered that they were all writing computer programs or soldering spark chambers. It was then that he began talking to an older physicist starting to work on phase transitions—changes from solid to liquid, from nonmagnet to magnet, from conductor to superconductor. Before long Swinney