Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [260]
“‘The standard model,’” Feynman repeated dubiously.
“SU(1) × SU(2) × U(1). From renormalization to quantum electrodynamics to now?”
“The standard model, standard model,” Feynman said. “The standard model—is that the one that says that we have electrodynamics, we have weak interaction, and we have strong interaction? Okay. Yes.”
The interviewer said, “That was quite an achievement, putting them together.”
“They’re not put together.”
“Linked together in a single theoretical package?”
“No.”
The interviewer was having trouble getting his question onto the table. “What do you call SU(×3)SU(2)×U(1)?”
“Three theories,” Feynman said. “Strong interactions, weak interactions, and electromagnetic… . The theories are linked because they seem to have similar characteristics… . Where does it go together? Only if you add some stuff that we don’t know. There isn’t any theory today that has SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1)—whatever the hell it is—that we know is right, that has any experimental check… . Now, these guys are all trying to put all this together. They’re trying to. But they haven’t. Okay?”
Particle physicists were his community. They were the elite who revered him, who passed along his legend, who lent him so much of his prestige. He rarely dissented publicly from their standard dogma. For the past two decades, he had worked on their problems: try though he might to disregard, in the end he had accepted their agenda.
“So we aren’t any closer to unification than we were in Einstein’s time?” the historian asked.
Feynman grew angry. “It’s a crazy question! … We’re certainly closer. We know more. And if there’s a finite amount to be known, we obviously must be closer to having the knowledge, okay? I don’t know how to make this into a sensible question… . It’s all so stupid. All these interviews are always so damned useless.”
He rose from his desk and walked out the door and down the corridor, drumming his knuckles along the wall. The writer heard him shout, just before he disappeared: “It’s goddamned useless to talk about these things! It’s a complete waste of time! The history of these things is nonsense! You’re trying to make something difficult and complicated out of something that’s simple and beautiful.”
Across the hall Murray Gell-Mann looked out of his office. “I see you’ve met Dick,” he said.
Feynman had always set high standards for fundamental work, although he meant something broader by the word than many particle physicists did. Liquid helium and other solid-state problems had seemed to him as fundamental as the smallest-scale particle interactions. He believed that fundamentalness, like beauty or intelligence, was a multidimensional quality. He had tried to understand turbulence and quantum gravity. Throughout his career he had suffered painful periods of malaise, when he could not find a suitable problem. In later years he and his colleagues had seen their crowded field thin: bright young students, looking for fundamental issues on their own terms, often turned to biology, computation, or the new study of chaos and complexity. When his son, Carl, ended his flirtation with philosophy and took up computer science, Feynman, too, looked again at the field he had helped pioneer at Los Alamos. He joined two Caltech authorities on computation, John Hopfield and Carver Mead, in constructing a course on issues from brain analogues and pattern recognition to error correction and uncomputability. For several summers he worked with the founders of Thinking Machines Corporation, near MIT, creating a radical approach to parallel processing; he served as a high-class technician, applying differential equations to the circuit diagrams, and as an occasional wise man among the young entrepreneurs (“Forget all that ‘local minima’ stuff—just say there’s a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out”). And he began to produce maverick