Genius (69 page)

By the late sixties and early seventies a new accelerator embedded in the rolling hills near Stanford University in northern California had taken the dominant role in the strong-interaction experiments that were so central to the search for quarks. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) made a straight two-mile cut in the grassy landscape. Aboveground, cows grazed and young physicists in jeans and shirts—nearly a hundred of them—sat at picnic tables or walked in and out of the center’s many buildings. Below, inside a knife-straight evacuated copper tube, a beam of electrons streamed toward targets of protons. The electrons achieved energies far greater than theorists had ever had to manage. They struck their targets inside an end station like a giant airplane hangar and then, with luck, entered a detector inside a concrete blockhouse, lined with lead bricks, riding on railroad tracks and angled upward toward the ceiling. Sometimes high-speed motion-picture cameras recorded the results, and elsewhere in the laboratory teams of human scanners guided an automatic digitizer that could read the particle tracks from—for a given monthlong experiment—hundreds of millions of filmed images. A single bubble chamber at the end of the particle beam, in its five-and-a-half-year useful lifetime, saw the discovery of seventeen new particles.

It was a tool for exploring the strong force—so called because, at the very short distances in the domain of the nucleus, it must dominate the force of electromagnetic repulsion to bind protons and neutrons (
hadron
was now the general term for particles that felt the strong force). Feynman had been thinking about how to understand the working of the strong force in collisions of hadrons with other hadrons. These were complex: at the high energies now available for studying short distances, hadron-hadron collisions produced gloriously messy sprays of detritus. The hadrons themselves were neither simple nor pointlike. They had size, and they seemed to have internal constituents—a whole swarming zoo of them. As Feynman said, the hadron-hadron work was like trying to figure out a pocket watch by smashing two of them together and watching the pieces fly out. He began visiting SLAC regularly in the summer of 1968, however, and saw how much simpler was the interaction offered by electron-proton collisions, the electron tearing through the proton like a bullet.

He stayed with his sister; she had moved to the Stanford area to work for a research laboratory, and her house was just across Sand Hill Road from the accelerator center. The physicists who would gather on the outdoor patio to listen to his stories that summer would see him slamming his open hands together in a boisterous illustration of a new idea he had. He was talking about “pancakes”—flat particle pancakes with hard objects embedded in them.

The Caltech connection was important to experimenters at SLAC, and by the late sixties the connection meant Gell-Mann far more than Feynman. Gell-Mann had created the scientific subculture of current algebra, the mathematical framework surrounding his quarks, and SLAC theorists thought of themselves as trying to generalize these tools to smaller distances, higher energies. At accelerators like SLAC, most of the thinking focused on the simplest reactions—two particles in, two particles out—although most of the actual collisions produced enormous flashes of many more particles. Experimenters wanted the most precise possible data, and precision was impossible in these bursts of detritus. Feynman chose a different point of view. He introduced a formalism in which one could look at the distributions of twenty or fifty or more particles. One did not have to be able to measure the momentum of each particle; in effect one could sum over all the possibilities. A Stanford theorist, James D. Bjorken, had been thinking along similar lines. An electron hits a proton; an electron comes out, along with a burst of immeasurable fragments. The emerging electron was a common factor. Bjorken decided to set aside the miscellaneous spray and simply plot the distribution of the energies and angles of the emerging electrons, averaged over many collisions.

He isolated a remarkable regularity in the data, a phenomenon he called “scaling”—the data looked the same at different energy scales. He did not know just how to interpret this. He had a variety of guesses, most framed in the language of current algebra. When Feynman arrived, Bjorken happened to be away; Feynman saw the graphed data without hearing a clear explanation of its origin. He suddenly recognized it, however, and he calculated long into the evening. It could be viewed as a graph of his pancake theory, the theory he had been toying with all summer on his own.

He had decided to cut through the incalculable swarming muddle of proton pieces by positing a mysterious new constituent that he called a
parton
, a name based inelegantly on the word
part
. (Finally he had an entry of his own in the
Oxford English Dictionary
.) Feynman made almost no assumptions about his partons except two: they were pointlike, and they did not interact meaningfully with one another but floated freely about inside the proton. They were an abstraction—just the kind of unobservable entity that physicists hoped not to have to fall back on—yet they were tantalizingly visual in spirit. They were pegs on which to hang a field theory of the old, manageable sort, with wave functions and calculable probability amplitudes. By analogy, quantum electrodynamics had its partons, too: the bare electrons and photons.

Feynman showed that collisions with these hard nuggets inside the proton would produce the scaling relations in a natural manner, unlike collisions with the puffy whole proton. He chose not to decide what quantum numbers they did or did not carry, and he most emphatically decided not to worry one way or the other about whether his partons were the fractionally charged quarks of Gell-Mann and Zweig.

By the time Bjorken returned, he found the theory group awash in partons. Feynman buttonholed him. He had idolized Feynman ever since taking an old-fashioned, historically organized quantum electrodynamics course at Stanford. “When Feynman diagrams arrived,” he said, “it was the sun breaking through the clouds, complete with rainbow and pot of gold. Brilliant! Physical and profound!” Now here was Feynman in the flesh, explaining Bjorken’s own theory to him with a new language and a new visual image. As he could instantly see, Feynman’s essential insight was to place himself once again
in
the electron, to see what the electron would see at light speed. He would see the protons flashing toward him—and they were therefore flattened relativistically into pancakes. Relativity also slowed their internal clocks, in effect, and, from the electron’s point of view, froze the partons into immobility. His scheme reduced the messy interaction of an electron with a fog of different particles to a much simpler interaction of an electron with a single pointlike parton emerging from the fog. Bjorken’s scaling pattern flowed directly from the physics of this picture. The experimenters grasped it instantly.

The parton model was oversimplified. It explained nothing that Bjorken could not explain, although Bjorken’s explanation
seemed
less fundamental. Partons required considerable hand-waving. Yet physicists clutched at them like a lifeboat. Three years passed before Feynman published a formal paper and many more before his partons finally and definitively blended with quarks in the understanding of physicists.

Zweig’s aces, Gell-Mann’s quarks, and Feynman’s partons became three paths to the same destination. These constituents of matter served as the quanta of a new field, finally making possible a field theory of the strong force. Quarks had not been seen or detected in the direct fashion of more venerable particles. They became real nonetheless. Feynman took on a project in 1970 with two students, assembling a vast catalog of particle data in an effort to make a judgment about whether a simple quark model could underlie it all. He chose an unconventional model once again, using data that let him think in terms of the electromagnetic field theory of the last generation, instead of the hadron-collision data that interested most theorists. For whatever reason, he was persuaded—converted into a quarkerian, as he said—although he continued to stress the tentativeness of any one model. “A quark picture may ultimately pervade the entire field of hadron physics,” this paper concluded. “About the paradoxes of the quark model we have nothing to add, except perhaps to make these paradoxes more poignant by exhibiting the mysteriously good fit of a peculiar model.” Younger theorists learned how to explain confinement—the quark’s inability to appear as free particles—in terms of a force that grew rapidly with distance, in strange contrast to forces such as gravity and electromagnetism. Quarks became
real
not only because ingenious experiments gave an indirect look at them, but because it became harder and harder for theorists to construct a coherent model in which they did not figure. They became so real that Gell-Mann, their inventor, had to endure the after-the-fact criticism that he had not fully believed in them. He never understood why Feynman had created his own alternative quark and maintained a distinction that faded in the end. He missed no opportunity to call Feynman’s particles “put-ons.” Like Schwinger years before, he disliked the fanfare over a picture that he thought was oversimplified—anyone could use it.

Quarks were
real
, at least to physicists of the last years of this century. Partons were not, in the end. What
is
real? Feynman tried to keep this question from disappearing into the background. In a book assembled from his lectures,
Photon-Hadron Interactions
, he concluded:

We have built a very tall house of cards making so many weakly based conjectures one upon the other… . Even if our house of cards survives and proves to be right we have not thereby proved the existence of partons… . On the other hand, the partons would have been a useful psychological guide … and if they continued to serve this way to produce other valid expectations they would of course begin to become “real,” possibly as real as any other theoretical structure invented to describe nature.

Once again Feynman had placed himself at the center of modern theoretical physics. His language, his framework, dominated high-energy physicists’ discourse for several years. He wanted to move on again, or so he told himself. “I’m a little bit frustrated,” he said to a historian soon after he published his first parton paper.

I’m tired of thinking of the same thing. I need to think of something else. Because I got stuck—see, if it would keep going it would be all right, but it’s hard to get any new results… . This parton thing has been so successful that I have become fashionable. I have to find an unfashionable thing to do.

Feynman routinely refused to recommend colleagues for the Nobel Prize, but he broke his rule in 1977—after Gell-Mann had already won the prize once—and quietly nominated Gell-Mann and Zweig for their invention of quarks.

Teaching the Young

R
ICHARD
. [
Humming softly to himself
] Jee-jee-jee-ju-ju. Jee-jee-jee-ju-ju. [
He is
working. Dishes are being cleared from the breakfast table. A tape recorder makes a faint whirr as it eavesdrops: a friend has taken to leaving it running in hopes of capturing stories about Feynman’s past.
] Jee-jee-jee-ju-ju. [
Stops abruptly.
] There’s some fool has made a mistake here. Some damn fool made a mistake here.

M
ICHELLE
. Prob’ly you.

R
ICHARD
. Me? What do you mean, me? [
Pause.
] Some idiot has made an error. [
Sings
] I have an idiot here who made an error.

M
ICHELLE
. Yeah—you!

R
ICHARD
. Michelle, dear, be careful what you say. After all your father is a nice fellow and he doesn’t want that kind of trouble. [
Pause.
] He’s made a mis-too-ko. You know, mistookos happen. You know. You don’t want your daddy to be a bad boy. [
Drums a sharp tattoo with his fingers.
] That is of course wrong! As any fool can see.

It took years for Feynman’s children to realize that their father was not like other fathers. He seemed normally distracted, lounging in his dog-chewed recliner or lying on the floor, writing on notepads, humming to himself in flights of concentration that were hard to break through. He doted on them and told them fantastically imaginative stories. In one ongoing saga they became tiny inhabitants of a gigantic household world; Feynman would describe the forest of brown leafless trees rising around them, for example, until suddenly they would guess that those were the fibers of the carpet. Or he would hold them on his lap and say, “What do you know about? You know about concrete and you know about rubber and you know about glass …” He taught them what he considered the basics of economics: that when prices go up, people buy less; that manufacturers set prices to maximize profits; that economists know very little. There were times when they thought he had been placed on earth mainly to embarrass them in public—pretending to beat them about the head with a newspaper or talking to waiters in his mock Italian. He was always what Michelle thought of as borderline boisterous, singing and whistling to himself. He would make up rhymes under his breath as he walked around the house—“I’m going to pick up my shoe, that’s what I’m going to do”—and when challenged he would be unable to repeat what he had just said. Belatedly it dawned on them that not all their friends could look up their fathers in the encyclopedia. His own mother was still alive, and he seemed to revert to a child in her presence. Lucille would say, “Richard, I’m cold—would you please put on a sweater?” When
Omni
magazine called him the world’s smartest man, she remarked, “If that’s the world’s smartest man, God help us.”