Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [31]
Menge, putting his pragmatism aside for a moment, offered perhaps the only one: Does the student, he asked, “feel the craving of adding to the sum total of human knowledge? Or does he want to see his work go on and on and his influence spread like the ripples on a placid lake into which a stone has been cast? In other words, is he so fascinated with simply knowing the subject that he cannot rest until he learns all he can about it?”
Of the leading men in American physics MIT had three of the best, John C. Slater, Philip M. Morse, and Julius A. Stratton. They came from a more standard mold—gentlemanly, homebred, Christian—than some of the physicists who would soon eclipse them, foreigners like Hans Bethe and Eugene Wigner, who had just arrived at Cornell University and Princeton University, respectively, and Jews like I. I. Rabi and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had been hired at Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley, despite anti-Semitic misgivings at both places. Stratton later became president of MIT, and Morse became the first director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory for Nuclear Research. The department head was Slater. He had been one of the young Americans studying overseas, though he was not as deeply immersed in the flood tides of European physics as, for example, Rabi, who made the full circuit: Zurich, Munich, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Zurich again. Slater had studied briefly at Cambridge University in 1923, and somehow he missed the chance to meet Dirac, though they attended at least one course together.
Slater and Dirac crossed paths intellectually again and again during the decade that followed. Slater kept making minor discoveries that Dirac had made a few months earlier. He found this disturbing. It seemed to Slater furthermore that Dirac enshrouded his discoveries in an unnecessary and somewhat baffling web of mathematical formalism. Slater tended to mistrust them. In fact he mistrusted the whole imponderable miasma of philosophy now flowing from the European schools of quantum mechanics: assertions about the duality or complementarity or “Jekyll-Hyde” nature of things; doubts about time and chance; the speculation about the interfering role of the human observer. “I do not like mystiques; I like to be definite,” Slater said. Most of the European physicists were reveling in such issues. Some felt an obligation to face the consequences of their equations. They recoiled from the possibility of simply putting their formidable new technology to work without developing a physical picture to go along with it. As they manipulated their matrices or shuffled their differential equations, questions kept creeping in. Where is that particle when no one is looking? At the ancient stone-built universities philosophy remained the coin of the realm. A theory about the spontaneous, whimsical birth of photons in the energy decay of excited atoms—an effect without a cause—gave scientists a sledgehammer to wield in late-evening debates about Kantian causality. Not so in America. “A theoretical physicist in these days asks just one thing of his theories,” Slater said defiantly soon after Feynman arrived at MIT. The theories must make reasonably good predictions about experiments. That is all.
He does not ordinarily argue about philosophical implications… . Questions about a theory which do not affect its ability to predict experimental results correctly seem to me quibbles about words, … and I am quite content to leave such questions to those who derive some satisfaction from them.
When Slater spoke for common sense, for practicality, for a theory that would be experiment’s handmaid, he spoke for most of his American colleagues. The spirit of Edison, not Einstein, still governed their image of the scientist. Perspiration, not inspiration.