Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [180]
No tricks or fancy calculations would suffice, Feynman said. The only way to solve the problem would be to guess the outline, the shape, the quality of the answer.
We have no excuse that there are not enough experiments, it has nothing to do with experiments. Our situation is unlike the field, say, of mesons, where we say, perhaps there aren’t yet enough clues for even a human mind to figure out what is the pattern. We should not even have to look at the experiments… . It is like looking in the back of the book for the answer … The only reason that we cannot do this problem of superconductivity is that we haven’t got enough imagination.
It fell to Schrieffer to transcribe Feynman’s talk for journal publication. He did not quite know what to do with the incomplete sentences and the frank confessions. He had never read a journal article so obviously spoken aloud. So he edited it. But Feynman made him change it all back.
New Particles, New Language
In the mere half-decade since the triumph of the new quantum electrodynamics the culture of high-energy physics had made and remade itself again and again. The language, the interests, and the machinery seemed to undergo a new transformation monthly. Experimentalists and theorists assembled yearly for meetings called Rochester conferences (after their initial site, Rochester, New York), descendants of the already mythic-seeming Shelter Island–Pocono–Oldstone meetings, but far larger and better financed, scores and then hundreds of participants. By the first of these meetings, at the close of 1950, quantum electrodynamics itself was already passé; it was so perfect experimentally and so far from the frontier of new forces and particles. That year had seen a kind of milestone, the discovery of a new particle not in cosmic rays but in an experimentalist’s accelerator. This was a neutral pi meson, or pion—“neutral” because it carried no charge. Actually, the experimenters did not so much detect the neutral pion as the pair of gamma rays into which it immediately decayed. This particle’s ephemerality made it less consequential in the everyday world of tables and chairs, chemistry and biology, than on this exciting frontier: it typically vanished after a lifetime of a tenth of a millionth of a billionth of a second. This qualified as a short time by 1950 standards. Yet standards were changing. Within a few years particle tabulations would list this fleeting entity in the category of STABLE. And meanwhile the legions of cosmic-ray explorers, many of them British, hoisting their photographic plates skyward with balloons, would find their specialty declining as spectacularly as it had risen. “Gentlemen, we have been invaded,” one of their leaders declared. “The accelerators are here.”
Of necessity physicists dispensed with their earlier squeamishness about the prospect of adding yet another particle to the already rich stew. On the contrary, an experimentalist could hardly aspire to more than the creation and discovery of a new particle. What it meant to measure these particles had also changed dramatically since the days when electrons had held center stage. Inferring the mass of a particle from the arcing traces left in a cloud chamber by its second- and third-generation decay products was not so simple. An enormous range of error had to be tolerated. It had become a serious and worthwhile intellectual challenge merely to identify