knowledge—quantum mechanics, for example—must be provisional and imperfect does not mean that competing theories cannot be judged better or worse. He was not what philosophers called a realist—by one definition, someone who, in asserting the existence of, say, electrons, adds “a desk-thumping, foot-stamping shout of ‘Really!’” Real though electrons seemed, Feynman and some other physicists recognized that they are part of a never-perfect, always-changing scaffolding. Do electrons really travel backward in time? Are those nanosecond resonances really particles? Do particles really spin? Do they really have strangeness and charm? Many scientists believed in a straightforward reality. Others, including Feynman, felt that in the late twentieth century it was not necessary or possible to answer a final yes. It was preferable to hold one’s models delicately in the mind, weighing alternative viewpoints and letting assumptions slide here and there. But to physicists the scaffolding was not all. It did imply a truth within, toward which humans might perpetually strive, however imperfectly. Feynman did not believe, as many philosophers did, that the now-famous “conceptual revolutions” or “paradigm shifts” to which science seemed so prone—Einstein’s relativity replacing Newton’s dynamics—amounted to the replacing of one socially bound fashion by another, like hemlines rising and falling year to year. Like most members of his community, he could not abide in his business what one philosopher, Arthur Fine, called “the great lesson of twentieth-century analytic and continental philosophy, namely, that there are no general methodological or philosophical resources for deciding such things.” Scientists do have methods. Their theories are provisional but not arbitrary, not mere social constructions. By means of the peculiar stratagem of refusing to acknowledge that any truth may be as valid as any other, they succeed in preventing any truth from becoming as valid as any other. Their approach to knowledge differs from all others—religion, art, literary criticism—in that the goal is never a potpourri of equally attractive realities. Their goal, though it always recedes before them however they approach it, is consensus.
The Swedish Prize
When Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize, it did not create a stir. Although Einstein could command front-page coverage in the New York Times merely by delivering a public lecture, the detail of the prize impressed the editors only to the extent of a one-sentence notice inside the newspaper, lumping him with the next year’s winner, a more obscure professor whose name they misspelled:
The Nobel Committee has awarded the physics prize for 1921 to Professor Dr. Albert Einstein of Germany, identified with the theory of relativity, and that for 1922 to Professor Neils Bohr, Copenhagen.
Gradually the awards gained in stature. Longevity contributed: there were other prizes, but the foresighted Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, had established his early. The particular contributions of scientists grew more difficult to describe to a lay public, and the awarding of such a distinguished international honor provided a useful benchmark. A physicist’s obituary in the late twentieth century would almost have to begin with the phrase “won the Nobel Prize for …” or the phrase “worked on the atomic bomb,” or both. The prize committee arrived at its judgments with care: it made errors, sometimes serious ones, but it generally reflected a conservative consensus of leading scientists in many countries. Scientists began to covet the prize with an intensity that they suppressed as well as they could. Their interest could be felt nonetheless in the ways scientists did and did not discuss the prize. Any potential prizewinner exhibited an extreme reluctance to mention its name. The distinguished group of those who had almost won revealed a forlorn tendency to rehearse for the rest of their lives the slight contingencies that had stood between them and the prize—the indecision that made them delay a paper for a crucial few