Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [242]
At first Field met with Feynman one afternoon a week. Feynman did not realize that Field was spending almost every waking hour preparing for their meeting. Their work took the form of predictions in a language well suited to experimenters. It was not abstruse theory but a realistic guide to what experimenters should see. Feynman insisted that they calculate only experiments that had not yet been performed; otherwise, he said, they would not be able to trust themselves. Gradually they found that they were able to stay a few months ahead of the experiments and provide a useful framework. As the accelerators reached higher energies, jets of the kind Feynman and Field had described came into existence.
Theorists meanwhile continued to struggle with their understanding of quark confinement: whether quarks must always be confined under every circumstance and whether confinement could be derived naturally from the theory. Victor Weisskopf urged Feynman to work on this, too, by saying that all he could see in the literature was formal mathematics. “I don’t get any physics out of it. Why don’t you attack the problem? You are just the right guy for it and you would find the essential physical reasons why QCD confines the quarks.” Feynman made an original effort in 1981 to solve this problem analytically in a toy model of two dimensions. Quantum chromodynamics, as he noted, had become a theory of such internal complexity that usually even the fastest supercomputers could not generate specific predictions to compare with experiments. “QCD field theory with six flavors of quarks with three colors, each represented by a Dirac spinor of four components, and with eight four-vector gluons, is a quantum theory of amplitudes for configurations each of which is 104 numbers at each point in space and time,” he wrote. “To visualize all this qualitatively is too difficult.” So he tried removing a dimension. This turned out to be a blind alley, although the freshness of his approach kept the work on some theorists’ reading lists long after they had passed by its conclusions.
In September 1981 a tumor recurred, this time entwined about Feynman’s intestines. The doctors tried a combination of doxorubicin, radiation treatment, and heat therapy. Then he underwent his second major surgery. The radiation had left his tissues spongy. The surgery lasted fourteen and a half hours and involved what the physicians described euphemistically as a “vascular incident”—his aorta split. An emergency request for blood went out at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and donors lined up. Feynman needed seventy-eight pints. When Caltech’s president, Marvin Goldberger, entered his hospital room afterward, Feynman said, “I’d rather be where I am than where you are” and added that he still was not going to do anything Goldberger asked. In visible pain, he entertained his hospital visitors with new stories. Before the operation, the surgeon, Donald Morton of the UCLA Medical Center, had appeared with a halo of residents and nurses. Feynman asked what his chances were. “It’s impossible to talk about the probability of a single event,” he recounted the surgeon as saying, and he replied, “From one professor to another, it is possible if it’s a future event.”
Caltech’s influence in physics had waned. It drew the same extraordinary collection of bright, naïve, gangly undergraduates, all assuming that they would be taking graduate courses by their junior years. The best graduate students, however, went elsewhere. The physics colloquium remained an institution—Feynman usually sitting like a magnet in the front row, capable of dominating every session, visitors