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knew, entertainingly or ruthlessly. He could reduce an unwary speaker to tears. He shocked colleagues by tearing the flesh off an elderly Werner Heisenberg, made the young relativist Kip Thorne physically ill—the stories reminded older physicists of Pauli (“ganz falsch”). Douglas Hofstadter, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, gave an unusual talk on the slippery uses of analogy. He began by asking the audience to name the First Lady of England, looking for such answers as Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth, or Denis Thatcher. “My wife,” came the cry from the front row. Why? “Because she’s English and she’s great.” Through the rest of his talk, it seemed to Hofstadter that Feynman continued heckling in the manner of the village idiot. He was no less an institution than ever, but the center of gravity of elementary particle physics had drifted eastward again, toward Harvard and Princeton and other universities. A combined theory of electromagnetism and weak interactions had led to the gauge theories that brought together the strong interactions under the same quantum-chromodynamical umbrella. This resurgence of quantum theory also brought a new appreciation of Feynman’s path integrals, because path integrals proved essential in quantizing the gauge theories. Feynman’s discovery now seemed not just a useful tool but an organizing principle at nature’s deepest levels. Yet he did not pursue the new implications of path integrals himself. At the forefront were such theorists as Steven Weinberg,

Abdus Salam, Sheldon Glashow, and younger colleagues who had seen neither Feynman nor Gell-Mann as the magnets they had once been. Caltech physicists, concerned about the loss of their department’s preeminence, sometimes blamed Feynman for not involving himself enough in hiring and Gell-Mann for involving himself too much.

Ever since his return to high-energy physics with his parton model, Feynman had been struggling against the pull of gray-eminence, elder-statesman status. In 1974 he replied unnecessarily to a standard departmental inquiry by writing a one-sentence memorandum: “I have not accomplished anything this year in the way of research!” Two years later, when a friend, Sidney Coleman, put him on the participant list for a quantum field theory conference sponsored by Werner Erhard’s est Foundation, Feynman summed up his ambivalence about his insider and outsider status by replying in Groucho Marx fashion:

What the hell is Feynman invited for? He is not up to the other guys and is doing nothing as far as I know. If you clean up the invitation list, to just the hard-core workers, I might begin to think about attending.

Coleman duly removed him from the list, and Feynman attended.

He was untroubled by the association with est’s vaguely humbug sixties-inspired self-improvement seminars, suffused though they were with the pseudoscientific jargon that he ordinarily despised—“another piece of evidence,” as Coleman had said, “that we are living in the Golden Age of Silliness.” Erhard’s organization and other postsixties institutions were attracted to quantum theory for what appeared—misleadingly—to be a mystical view of reality, reminiscent, they thought, of Eastern religions and anyway more intriguing than the old-fashioned view that things are more or less what they seem. Such organizations, struggling to emerge from the sixties as ongoing business enterprises, were attracted to quantum physicists for the respectability they could lend. Meanwhile, Feynman was drawn to Erhard and other “flaky people”—as Gweneth referred to some of his new friends—partly because curiosity and nonconformity had long been his own trademarks. The youth movements of the sixties had caught up with him. They had brought his own style into vogue—his tieless, pomp-free outlook, the persona that he and Carl privately spoke of as “aggressive dopiness.” He grew his graying hair in a long mane. As much as he reviled organized psychology for what he considered its slippery use of the forms and methods of experimental science, he loved the introspective, self-examining