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months, or the timidity that kept them from joining a team embarked on an all-too-promising experiment. Even winners showed how much they cared through small mannerisms, such as the euphemism winkingly employed by Gell-Mann, among others: “the Swedish prize.” The winners formed an elite group—but elite was too weak a word. A sociologist assessing the prize’s stature found herself having to multiply superlatives: “As the ne plus ultra of honors in science, the Nobel Prize elevates its recipients not merely to the scientific elite but to the uppermost rank of the scientific ultra-elite, the thin layer of those at the top of the stratification hierarchy of elites who exhibit especially great influence, authority, or power and who generally have the highest prestige within what is a prestigious collectivity to begin with.” Physicists always knew who among their colleagues had won and who had not.

Few scientists after Einstein, if any, remained larger than the prize—capable of adding as much to its stature as it added to theirs. In 1965 several active physicists at least seemed to be sure future winners, as much because of their dominance in the community as because of their particular accomplishments. Feynman, Schwinger, Gell-Mann, and Bethe were chief among them. The Nobel committee traditionally found it easier to identify worthy candidates than to pinpoint their most worthy particular achievements. Most notoriously, Einstein had won specifically for his work on the photoelectric effect, not for relativity. When Bethe finally did win, in 1967, the prize singled out his parsing of the thermonuclear reactions in stars—important work, but an arbitrary choice from an unusually broad and influential career spanning decades. Feynman could plausibly have won for his liquid-helium work, had that been his only achievement. Each fall, as the announcement neared, Feynman had been alive to the possibility. He and Gell-Mann might have won for their theory of weak interactions, yet Gell-Mann had already moved on to a more sweeping model of high-energy particle physics. The committee found it easier to reward particular experiments or discoveries, and experimenters tended to win their prizes far more promptly than theorists. Broad theoretical conceptions like relativity were the most difficult of all. Even so, it was odd that the Nobel committee had not yet recognized the theoretical watershed reached almost twenty years before with quantum electrodynamics and renormalization. The experimenters Willis Lamb and Polykarp Kusch had long since been recognized, in 1955, for their contributions to quantum electrodynamics.

No more than three people may share a Nobel Prize. That rule may have added to the complications in the case of quantum electrodynamics. Feynman and Schwinger were two. Tomonaga had matched or anticipated the essence of Schwinger’s theory, even if his version had not been quite as panoramic. Dyson was a problem. His contribution had been the most mathematical, and the Nobel Prize abhorred mathematics. Some physicists felt vehemently that Dyson had done no more than analyze and publicize work created by others. Dyson, having settled at the Institute for Advanced Study, drifted away from the theoretical physics community. He had no taste for the involutions of particle physics. He indulged his lifelong passion for space travel by participating in various visionary projects. He grew fascinated with the global politics of nuclear weapons and with the origin of life. The Nobel recommendations of influential American physicists—his old antagonist Oppenheimer among them—may have omitted Dyson, although to a knowledgeable minority it seemed that no one, during the tumultuous birth of modern quantum electrodynamics, had understood the problem more broadly or influenced the community more deeply.

Thus, when the Western Union “telefax” arrived at 9 A.M. on October 21, 1965, it named Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga for their “fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics with deep ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.