My Life as a Quant (13 page)

Just as beauty in art and music often emerges from the tension of creating something new within the limitations of an accepted framework, so it is that many of the deep truths of theoretical physics emerge from the attempt to describe Nature's laws within the confines of very general guiding principles. If one is lucky as well as clever, the principles will rule out everything except the one true theory. The extensions to the standard theory Tim and I worked on were not particularly profound, yet it was exciting to be guessing at the existence of new symmetries and new particles—and to dream of being right. I felt a hint of the potentially deeper joy that came from trying to divine God's laws, which was quite different from the everyday happiness that came from the workmanlike comparison of other peoples' theories against other peoples' experiments. I also sensed, however, the potential of a much greater disappointment: One was most likely to be wrong.

Thinking back, I am reminded of reading about Feynman's excitement at being one of several physicists to first guess the correct form of the parity-violating weak interaction initially observed by Madame Wu and her collaborators in 1957. Feynman's more technical and singular work on the renormalizability of quantum electrodynamics in the late forties was a
tour de force
that created the formalism used by physicists for years afterwards. Yet he was apparently more excited by his joint discovery of the true form of the parity-violating weak interaction, because, for a brief period before he communicated his results, he felt he knew something about the nature of the universe that no one else did. This was the attraction of working on new theories.
2

Then, in the autumn of 1976, with one year at Oxford over and one year remaining, it was time to begin searching for my next position. Though the department told me I could stay on a third year, it was clear to both Eva and me that Oxford was only a temporary stopping point. A few weeks later at a conference at the Rutherford Laboratories near Oxford, I was introduced to Bram Pais, a professor at the Rockefeller University in New York. He knew of my work on dimuons, which he and Treiman had so clearly trumped. I knew interesting things about him, too. I recalled that years earlier, during an invited seminar at Columbia, I had seen him casually and charmingly deflect an intellectual attack by T. D. Lee. Chris Llewellyn Smith had told me that Pais had been in hiding during World War II in Holland, much like Anne Frank. Finally, I had coincidentally read bits of his doctoral thesis. As a student at Columbia ten years earlier, I had been required to demonstrate translation proficiency in two foreign languages used by scientists. Even as long ago as 1967 that was an already archaic requirement, a relic of the prewar era when many original physics papers were still written in German, French, or Russian. Since I had studied Afrikaans, itself a sort of kitchen Dutch, at school in South Africa, I decided to demonstrate my proficiency at Dutch translation. Searching through the Columbia physics library for Dutch papers to practice on, I stumbled across Pais's PhD thesis on Finsler spaces in differential geometry; he had written it in Dutch before he emigrated to the United States in the late 1940s. I recalled it well, not only because I had studied Finsler spaces in South Africa when I worked on unified field theories, but also because he had dedicated his thesis “Aan Mammie en Pappie” (To Mommy and Daddy). Speaking with him in Oxford, I found it difficult to reconcile this childlike dedication with his aggressively urbane persona, part New York street smarts and part European suavity. Nevertheless, with a job at stake, I tried to be charming, too, and told him I had seen both his thesis and the reference to his parents.

A few months later, I sent off a hopeful application for my next postdoc to Pais at Rockefeller. I thought a position there would be perfect for my wife and me: Our first child was on the way, we thought of New York as home, and there were plenty of academic opportunities for Eva in New York. But I could not count on a job where I wanted one, and so I applied to many other schools. Then I waited.

A high school friend in the corporate world passed through Oxford that spring and asked me pointedly where I would be in the fall. I said I was still waiting to hear who would offer me a job. “You mean you really might have no work at all?” he asked, demanding of me a degree of uncomfortable explicitness that made me doubt his benevolent intent. My nonacademic friends could not understand the code we postdocs lived by. I once proudly told a South African friend that an article of mine had been accepted in
Physical Review Letters
, one of the most prestigious journals in the physics community. He asked me how much they paid me to publish there. I was embarrassed to explain that it worked the other way: My physics department had to pay the American Physical Society several hundred dollars in page charges to see the paper into print. This was beyond his understanding; he thought I was indulging in vanity publishing.

I was lucky that year. In the spring of 1977 I received a letter offering me a two-year position at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. It was tempting, but I wanted to go back to the States. A few weeks later, to my relief, a postdoc offer from Rockefeller arrived and, since Eva could get work there too, I immediately accepted. I was safe for a couple of years.

The summer of 1977 was England's hottest for many years—each weekend the pubs ran out of ice. We spent the long clear days punting, picnicking, and working, until our son Joshua was born on August 1. Because he was born abroad, Joshua was British, and was obliged to endure an extended interview about his political beliefs and jail record at the American Embassy in London a week later. I answered for him and he was given his own green card. It had been a good two years, and a week later we returned to New York, confident and happy.

1
Back in academic life after years on Wall Street, I now sometimes feel I have been spoiled by the resources available at investment banks in the 1990s, where offices were plush, the costs of research journals were unquestioned, the latest color printers abounded and you simply called System Administration when you had a computer problem.

2
In the end, the fairly pedestrian theory Tim and I developed was not right. But an ex-physicist I hired at Goldman, who had searched the academic citation databases to see with whom he was coming to work, told me that there are still occasional contemporary references in the literature to the papers I wrote then.

Research and parenthood on New York's Upper East Side

A good life, but ... the tensions of twin careers

The Rockefeller University was a little pocket of privilege. Its faculty and postdocs lived on their academic salaries in elegant subsidized apartments near Sutton Place on New York's Upper East Side. Rockefeller was not so much a university as it was a large research organization. Established in 1901 as a medical research institute, it evolved in the boom years of American research funding into a luxuriously equipped and accredited university that awarded only graduate degrees. In the expansion of the 1960s, Rockefeller hired not only biologists but also mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, psychologists, linguists, and physicists. Then, in the late 1970s, as the good times receded, they slowly rolled the odometer back until they once again focused predominantly on biomedical work.

It was gratifying to tell people you worked at Rockefeller; it had a sort of elitist ring because of the famous biologists and logicians who had worked there. At Rockefeller in 1944, Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty discovered that genes were made of DNA. The famous analytical philosopher Saul Kripke worked there in the early 1960s. In the elevator of the Tower Building where I worked, I used to see Mark Kaç, the stocky, red-faced, bald, and charmingly accented Polish-Jewish mathematician whose masterly lecture on drum shapes I had heard as a student at Columbia. At that time I knew little about the Feynman-Kaç theorem that linked Feynman's view of quantum mechanical evolution to the solution of the partial differential equations of quantum mechanics, statistical physics, and options theory. Years later I read Kaç's short, fascinating intellectual autobiography; I discovered how much work he had done on defining the nature of randomness. On the wall outside his office he had pinned a large American Mathematical Society photo-poster of the attractively regal-looking Polish mathematician Sonya Kovalevskaya. When I once commented on it, he told me in his heavily accented English that she was “certainly the best looking mathematician of either sex.”

Rockefeller seemed luxurious and aristocratic, an enclave of gardens, auditoriums, high-rises, and labs peopled by intellectuals devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. No teaching, no courses, no undergraduates—just research. You felt like a philosopher-king in the middle of grimy 1970s Manhattan. We lived in a university-owned high rise on York Ave., near New York Hospital and only one block from my office and Eva's lab. I had a private office larger than any I have had before or since, with at long last more than enough bookshelves, all wood-paneled and adjustable. My office and our apartment both looked out on the East River, a heliport and the FDR Drive. Looking through the windows at any time of the day or night, one saw helicopters bearing presidential candidates or trauma victims while cars snaked up and down the Drive and large boats cruised along the river. If you narrowed your field of vision just enough to see only the traffic, it resembled nothing so much as a 1950s comic strip about life in the city of the future that my father used to read to me as a child.

In homage to Oxbridge, Rockefeller had no traditional departments of study. Instead, individual professors ran their “labs.” There were several senior professors of theoretical particle physics. Pais, a tiny man and the most renowned professor, had hired me into his lab; his former collaborator Mirza Abdul Baqi Bég, a burly Pakistani with a Pancho Villa mustache who always cited the famous German-Jewish physicist Rudolf Peierls as his mentor, ran another lab. In a much more low-stakes version of the Lee–Yang quarrel, Pais was rumored to be at war with Bég, and we heard reports of prolonged shouting matches. We also heard that Pais had made a bitter enemy of Murray Gell-Mann, his 1950s collaborator, who, according to George Johnson's biography of Gell-Mann, always referred to Pais as “the evil dwarf.” After what I had seen of Lee and Yang, I was not overly surprised by these feuds.

How hard and how long you appeared to work at Rockefeller was irrelevant; what counted was what you accomplished (and, perhaps, the aura you radiated of how much you might accomplish). I went in to work in the late morning and sometimes worked late into the evening, and spent much time with Josh at both ends of the day.

I was happy at Rockefeller. Josh would wake very early and I would take him out for long walks in his stroller through East Side neighborhoods, stopping for early morning bagels or Egg McMuffins. We had long conversations; I was always tired, but it was immensely satisfying. I was ecstatic about child rearing, open to all sorts of only half-plausible Steinerian theories of education. Steiner advocated talking to children above their level of understanding, since, he argued, every word you said to them when they first entered the world was above their level, and yet they learned to understand. I did this naturally. What counted in the end was the time spent with Josh. Watching him through his first two or three years, I developed a great appreciation for the mystery of life and the strange abstractness of time. He learned and remembered locations in space, the names of objects, even adjectives and adverbs, without visible effort and much more easily than locations in time (
yesterday, tomorrow
) or states of color (
red, green
). Long after he could make sophisticated statements (“I'm mad at myself!” he once exclaimed when he broke a toy), he would still confuse
yesterday
with
tomorrow
and
red
with
green
. I began to half-believe the theory that time and color were not as self-evident as they seem, but rather inventions or discoveries made at some earlier point in human history, like the discovery of farming, and then internalized and transmitted to us through the generations. Perhaps, when a child remarks that both a leaf and a sweater are green, he or she is isolating some immensely abstract quality of two vastly different objects that was once beyond human comprehension.

One of the more interesting Rockefeller physics faculty members was Heinz Pagels, the author of
The Cosmic Code
, a popular book on quantum mechanics. Heinz was the first person I ever saw combine a business suit with white Adidas Country sneakers. He was charming and easy to like, with a penchant for trying to impress people by referring to his rich social life outside of physics. He was a humorously compulsive name dropper. He could not simply remark “I had dinner with McNamara last night in Aspen;” he felt obliged to add “. . . you know, Johnson's Secretary of Defense.” He was preternaturally attuned to conversational trends, with an uncanny knack for anticipating the future trajectory of someone else's sentence, especially someone politically more powerful. Speaking with Pais, Heinz could quickly complete a remark that Pais had just begun, first grabbing hold of Pais's train of thought in mid-sentence by echoing it softly, and then, growing louder and bolder and swifter, taking ownership of the sentence and running it to its conclusion as though it had been entirely his idea. I liked talking to him. Sadly, he fell and died a few years later while hiking in the mountains near Aspen where he and his family spent most summers.

Heinz was friendly with Jeremy Bernstein, the physicist and
New Yorker
writer whom I admired because he, too, seemed to be living a more rounded life than most physicists I knew. Bernstein had written a paper or two with Feinberg and T. D. Lee, and I had once been amazed to see T. D. harass him during colloquium at Columbia. Bernstein had been writing books and
New Yorker
articles on physics for the general public since the 1960s, starting with a profile of Lee and Yang after they won the Nobel Prize. He wrote honestly and clearly, trying hard to demystify the subtleties; as a result, I think, his books never sold as well as those of the more sensational popularizers of quantum mechanics and cosmology.