Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [197]
Geniuses change history. That is part of their mythology, and it is the final test, presumably more reliable than the trail of anecdote and peer admiration that brilliant scientists leave behind. Yet the history of science is a history not of individual discovery but of multiple, overlapping, coincidental discovery. All researchers know this in their hearts. It is why they rush to publish any new finding, aware that competitors cannot be far behind. As the sociologist Robert K. Merton has found, the literature of science is strewn with might-have-been genius derailed or forestalled—“those countless footnotes … that announce with chagrin: ‘Since completing this experiment, I find that Woodworth (or Bell or Minot, as the case may be) had arrived at this same conclusion last year, and that Jones did so fully sixty years ago.’” The power of genius may lie, as Merton suggests, in the ability of one person to accomplish what otherwise might have taken dozens. Or perhaps it lies—especially in this exploding, multifarious, information-rich age—in one person’s ability to see his science whole, to assemble, as Newton did, a vast unifying tapestry of knowledge. Feynman himself, as he entered his forties, prepared to undertake this very enterprise: a mustering and a reformulating of all that was known about physics.
Scientists still ask the what if questions. What if Edison had not invented the electric light—how much longer would it have taken? What if Heisenberg had not invented the S matrix? What if Fleming had not discovered penicillin? Or (the king of such questions) what if Einstein had not invented general relativity? “I always find questions like that … odd,” Feynman wrote to a correspondent who posed one. Science tends to be created as it is needed.
“We are not that much smarter than each other,” he said.
Weak Interactions
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the discovery of new particles became more commonplace, physicists found it harder to guess what might and might not be possible. The word zoo entered their vocabulary, and their scientific intuition sometimes seemed colored by a kind of aesthetic queasiness. Weisskopf declared at one meeting that it would be a shame if anyone found a particle with double charge. Oppenheimer added that he personally would hate to see a strongly interacting particle with spin greater than one-half. Both men were quickly disappointed. Nature was not so fastidious.
The methods assembled under the label of field theory just a few years before—direct computation of particle interactions, in the face of those still-troubling infinities—fell out of favor with many. The success of quantum electrodynamics did not extend easily to other particle realms. Of the four fundamental forces—electromagnetism; gravity; the strong force binding the atomic nucleus; and the weak force at work in radioactive beta decay and in strange-particle decays—renormalization seemed to work only for electromagnetism. With electromagnetism, the first, simplest Feynman diagrams told most of the story. Mathematically the relative weakness of the force expressed itself in the diminishing importance of more complicated diagrams (for the same reason that the later terms in a series like 1 + n + n2 + … vanish if n is 1/100). With the strong force, the forest of Feynman diagrams made an unendingly large contribution to any calculation. That made real calculations impossible. So where the more esoteric forces were concerned, it seemed impossible to match the success of quantum electrodynamics in making amazingly precise dynamical predictions. Instead,