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By Root 2384 0

this anguish was a mathematical tendency of certain quantities to diverge as successive terms of an equation were computed—terms that should have been vanishing in importance. Physically it seemed that the closer one stood to an electron, the greater its charge and mass would appear. The result: the infinities with which Feynman had been struggling since Princeton. It meant that quantum mechanics produced good first approximations followed by a Sisyphean nightmare. The harder a physicist pushed, the less accurate his calculations became. Such quantities as the mass of the electron became—if the theory were taken to its limit—infinite. The horror of this was hard to comprehend, and no glimmer of it appeared in popular accounts of science at the time. Yet it was not merely a theoretical knot. A pragmatic physicist eventually had to face it. “Thinking I understand geometry,” Feynman said later, “and wanting to fit the diagonal of a five foot square, I try to figure out how long it must be. Not being very expert I get infinity—useless… .”

It is not philosophy we are after, but the behavior of real things. So in despair, I measure it directly—lo, it is near to seven feet—neither infinity nor zero. So, we have measured these things for which our theory gives such absurd answers… .

Experimental yardsticks for the electron were not so easy to come by, and it was a tribute to the original theory of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Dirac that first approximations matched any experimental results that the laboratories had produced so far. Better results were on the way, however.

Meanwhile, the scientists contemplating the state of theoretical physics descended into a distinct gloominess; in the aftermath of the bomb, their mood seemed postcoital.

“The last eighteen years”—the period, that is, since the quick birth of quantum mechanics—“have been the most sterile of the century,” remarked I. I. Rabi to a colleague over lunch in that spring of 1947, though Rabi himself was thriving as head of a fruitful group at Columbia.

“Theoreticians were in disgrace”—so it seemed to one especially precocious student of physics, Murray Gell-Mann.

“The theory of elementary particles has reached an impasse,” Victor Weisskopf wrote. Everyone had been struggling futilely, he said, especially since the war, and everyone had had enough of “knocking a sore head against the same old wall.”

Merely a few dozen men in mathematical difficulty—or the generation’s deepest crisis in theoretical physics. It was all the same. Weisskopf was preparing for an unusual gathering. A former president of the New York Academy of Sciences, Duncan MacInnes, had been nursing a conviction that modern-day conferences were growing too unwieldy. Hundreds of people would appear. Speakers were starting to cater to these diffuse audiences by delivering generalized and retrospective talks. As an experiment, MacInnes proposed an intimate meeting restricted to twenty or thirty invited guests, to take place in a relaxed, country-inn setting. With “Fundamental Problems of Quantum Mechanics” as a topic, he managed—though it took more than a year—to draw a select group in early June to an inn called the Ram’s Head, just opening for the summer season on New York’s Shelter Island, between the forks of eastern Long Island. Weisskopf was one of those charged with setting the agenda. Other participants were Oppenheimer, Bethe, Wheeler, Rabi, Teller, and several representatives of the younger generation, including Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman.

So two dozen suit-jacketed physicists met on a Sunday afternoon on the East Side of New York and motored across Long Island in a rickety bus. Somewhere along the way a police escort picked them up, sirens wailing, and a banquet was arranged by a local chamber of commerce official who had been serving in the Pacific when, he felt, the atomic bomb saved his life. A ferry carried them across to Shelter Island, and to some of the physicists there was an air of unreality about it all. When they gathered for breakfast the next morning, they noticed