Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [232]
Late that night in Chicago he startled Goodstein by pressing the book into his hands and telling him he had to read it. Goodstein said he would look forward to it. No, Feynman said. You have to read it now. So Goodstein did, turning pages until dawn as Feynman paced nearby or sat and doodled on a sheet of paper. At one point Goodstein remarked, “You know, it’s amazing that Watson made this great discovery even though he was so out of touch with what everyone in his field was doing.”
Feynman held up the paper he had been writing on. Amid scribbling and embellishments he had inscribed one word: DISREGARD.
“That’s what I’ve forgotten,” he said.
Quarks and Partons
In 1983, looking back on the evolution of particle physics since the now-historic Shelter Island conference, Murray Gell-Mann said, uncontroversially, that he and his colleagues had developed a theory that “works.” He summed it up in one intricately crafted sentence (rather more refined than “All things are made of atoms …”):
It is of course a Yang-Mills theory, based on color SU(3) and electroweak SU(2) U(1), with three families of spin ½ leptons and quarks, their antiparticles, and some spinless Higgs bosons in doublets and antidoublets of the weak isotopic spin to break the electroweak group down to U1 of electromagnetism.
His listeners recognized vintage Gell-Mann, from the “of course” onward. For aficionados there was a poetry in the jargon, much of which Gell-Mann had invented personally. He loved language more than ever. As always, during the next hour he punctuated his physics with a stream of abstruse and punning nomenclatural asides: “By the way, some people have called the higglet by another name [holds up a box of Axion laundry presoak], in which case it’s extremely easy to discover in any supermarket”; “… many physicists—Dimopoulos, Nanopoulos, and Iliopoulos, and for the benefit of my French friends I add Rastopopoulos”; “… O’Raifertaigh. (His name, by the way, is written in a simplified manner; the ‘f’ should really be ‘thbh’)”; and so on.
Some people found his style irritating—among them, those whose names he tried to correct—but that was a minor detail. Gell-Mann, more than any other physicist of the sixties and seventies, defined the mainstream of the physics that Feynman had reminded himself to disregard. In so many ways these two scientific icons had come to seem like polar opposites—the Adolphe Menjou and Walter Matthau of theoretical physics. Gell-Mann loved to know things’ names and to pronounce them correctly—so correctly that Feynman would misunderstand, or pretend to misunderstand, when Gell-Mann uttered so simple a name as Montreal. Gell-Mann’s conversational partners often suspected that the obscure pronunciations and cultural allusions were designed to place them at a disadvantage. Feynman pronounced potpourri “pot-por-eye” and interesting as if it had four syllables, and he despised nomenclature of all kinds. Gell-Mann was an enthusiastic and accomplished bird-watcher; the moral of one of Feynman’s classic stories about his father was that the name of a bird did not matter, and the point was hardly lost on Gell-Mann.
Physicists kept finding new ways to describe the contrast between them. Murray makes sure you know what an extraordinary person he is, they would say, while Dick is not a person at all but a more advanced life form pretending to be human to spare your feelings. Murray was interested in almost everything—but not the branches of science outside high-energy physics; he was openly contemptuous of those. Dick considered all science to be his territory—his responsibility—but remained brashly ignorant of everything