Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [229]
He left Stockholm for Geneva, where he repeated the talk before a jubilant, reverent audience at Europe’s great new accelerator center, CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research. He said, standing before them in his new dress suit, that the new laureates had been talking about whether they would ever be able to return to normal. Jacques Monod, who shared the prize for medicine, had declared it was a biological fact that an organism is changed by experience. “I discovered a great difficulty,” Feynman said, grinning malevolently. “I always took off my coat in giving a lecture, and I just don’t feel like taking it off.” As he continued, “I’ve changed! I’ve changed!” the audience erupted in laughter and catcalls. He took off the coat.
Once more, he said he would speak as an old man to the young scientists and urge them to break away from the pack. At CERN, as at all the laboratories of high-energy physics, the pack was growing rapidly. Every experiment required enormous teams. Author lists for articles in the Physical Review were beginning to take up a comically large portion of the page.
“It will not do you any harm whatever to think in an original fashion,” Feynman said. He offered a probabilistic argument.
The odds that your theory will be in fact right, and that the general thing that everybody’s working on will be wrong, is low. But the odds that you, Little Boy Schmidt, will be the guy who figures a thing out, is not smaller… . It’s very important that we do not all follow the same fashion. Because although it is ninety percent sure that the answer lies over there, where Gell-Mann is working, what happens if it doesn’t?
“If you give more money to theoretical physics,” he added, “it doesn’t do any good if it just increases the number of guys following the comet head. So it’s necessary to increase the amount of variety … and the only way to do it is to implore you few guys to take a risk with your lives that you will never be heard of again, and go off in the wild blue yonder and see if you can figure it out.”
Most scientists knew the not-so-amusing metalaw that the receipt of the Nobel Prize marks the end of one’s productive career. For many recipients, of course, the end came long before. For others the fame and distinction tend to accelerate the waning of a scientist’s ability to give his creative work the time-intensive, fanatical concentration it often requires. Some prizewinners fight back. Francis Crick designed a blunt form letter:
Dr. Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to:
send an autograph help you in your project
provide a photograph read your manuscript
cure your disease deliver a lecture
be interviewed attend a conference
talk on the radio act as chairman
appear on TV become an editor
speak after dinner write a book
give a testimonial accept an honorary degree
Requests in most of these categories now filled Feynman’s mail (except that his correspondents tended more toward hear my theory of the universe than cure my disease). Mature scientists did become laboratory heads, department chairmen, foundation officials, institute directors. Victor Weisskopf, one of those whom the prize had just barely eluded, was now director of CERN, and he thought Feynman, too, would be driven willy-nilly into administration. He goaded Feynman into accepting a wager, signed before witnesses: “Mr. FEYNMAN will pay the sum of TEN DOLLARS to Mr. WEISSKOPF if at any time during the next TEN YEARS (i.e. before the THIRTY FIRST DAY of DECEMBER of the YEAR ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE), the said Mr. FEYNMAN has held a ‘responsible position.’” They had no disagreement about what that would mean: