Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [139]
are reasonably confused about this sudden descent of science among them. The principal theory is that the scientists are busy making another type of atomic bomb, and nothing could be farther from the truth… .
Quantum mechanics is the never-never land of science, a world in which matter and energy become confused and where all the verities of day-to-day life become meaningless… .
To those sensitive to small breezes, it was beginning to seem that two of the younger men in particular, Schwinger and Feynman, were engaged in a gestation of fresh ideas. Schwinger mostly kept his own counsel during these three days. Feynman tried his methods out on a few people; a young Dutch physicist, Abraham Pais, watched him derive results at lightning speed with the help of sketchy pictures that left Pais baffled. On the last morning, after some words by Oppenheimer, Feynman was asked to give the whole group an informal description of his work, and he did, happily. No one really understood, but he left the memory of—as one listener recorded in his diary—“a clear voice, great rush of words and illustrative gestures sometimes ebullient.”
Above all, however, it was a conference dominated by news from experimenters, and particularly experimenters in the furnace Rabi was stoking at Columbia. The Columbia groups favored techniques that seemed homely and unspectacular in this era of the burgeoning particle accelerator, though their arsenal also included technologies fresh from the wartime Radiation Laboratory, magnetrons and microwaves. Willis Lamb had just shined a beam of microwaves onto a hot wisp of hydrogen blowing from an oven. He was trying to measure the precise energy levels of electrons in the hydrogen atom. He succeeded—the art of spectroscopy had never seen such precision—and he found a distinct gap between two energy levels that should have been identical. Should have been, that is, according to the clearest existing guide to hydrogen atoms and electrons, the theory of Dirac. That was in April. Lamb had gone to bed thinking about knobs and magnets and a bouncing spot of light from the galvanometer and the clear discrepancy between his experiment and Dirac’s theory, and he had awakened the next day thinking (accurately, as it turned out): Nobel Prize. News of what would soon be called the Lamb shift had already reached most of the Shelter Island participants before Lamb made a detailed report the first day. The theorists present had often repeated the truism that progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory. Rarely had any of them seen such a clean example (more often it was theory that contradicted theory). To Schwinger, listening, the point was that the problem with quantum electrodynamics was neither infinite nor zero: it was a number, now standing before them, finite and small. The alumni of Los Alamos and the Radiation Laboratory knew that the task of theoretical physics was to justify such numbers. The rest of the conference fed off a nervous euphoria, as it seemed to Schwinger: “The facts were incredible—to be told that the sacred Dirac theory was breaking down all over the place.” As the meeting adjourned, Schwinger left with Oppenheimer by seaplane.
Quantum electrodynamics was a “debacle,” another physicist said. Harsh assessments of a theory accurate enough for all but this delicate experiment. But after all, the physicists had known that the theory was fatally pocked with infinities. The experiment gave them real numbers to calculate, numbers marking the exact not-quite-rightness of the world according to Dirac.