My Life as a Quant (12 page)

The world of theoretical particle physics in the 1970s was filled with antediluvian inefficiencies and oddities. Authors circulated their work as “preprints” before they published them in refereed physics journals. Preprints, which had started out as informal research notes to be circulated among colleagues, had become institutionalized; physicists all over the world sent their preprints to anyone they thought might be interested or influential. They also sent a copy to the library at SLAC, which then compiled a fortnightly list of newly received preprints to its subscribers, who could then request a copy from the original author. The Oxford department of physics was relatively poor.
1
When I or anyone else wrote a new paper, Oxford shipped the preprints by surface mail. As a result, physicists in the United States first received new work four to six weeks after it came out, a significant delay if competitors were working on similar problems. Correspondingly, most physics departments in the United States sent their preprints by surface mail; this doubled the delay. The playing field was thus decisively tilted against small or foreign institutions—their lower budgets meant that they were the last to receive written word of new work. On one occasion, eager to communicate my results and assure my future, I paid to xerox, collate, and airmail 60 copies of a preprint at my own expense. Nowadays, all new research is posted on the Web, itself an invention of physicists at CERN, and can be downloaded at virtually no cost by anyone.

Oxford was proudly old-fashioned. One student I knew carefully peeled his dessert banana and then ate it as though it were a sausage, delicately pinning it down on the plate with his fork while he cut off slices with his knife. I met a fiercely Anglophile Canadian who began to smoke pipes and wear tweed jackets and cavalry twill trousers with handsomely heavy hand-sewn English shoes, all actually ideal (I had to admit) for walking on the muddy footpaths in the mild but perpetually damp climate. Within six months his adopted British accent became indistinguishable from the real thing. Another friend, a Junior Fellow at his College, took me for dinner at High Table. All the dons were overwhelmingly courteous, leaning over to chat with me whenever my friend, the most junior Fellow, was obliged to leave the table in order to pass around the port and walnuts.

While some of the colleges were exorbitantly rich and had Fellows who lived really well, the academic departments in the university were less well off. I shared a crowded office in the Department of Theoretical Physics on South Parks Road with Don Sinclair, a gruffly likeable but difficult Australian who was an early developer of lattice-gauge theories of strong interactions. He worked late into the night, using his vast array of colored felt-tip pens to cover his desk with foot-high reams of paper filled with lattice computation diagrams that looked like Tinkertoy models. Because the university provided no heating on winter evenings when the temperature dropped rapidly in the thinly insulated house that contained our office, Don stubbornly turned up the heat to maximum during the day in a futile attempt to amass warmth for the evening. Our office became virtually uninhabitable, a smelly sauna by day and too cold to hold a pencil without gloves at night, with only a brief transition between the two. Once, when he was having a hard time with a woman, he became much more communicative and commented to me, sadly but accurately, that he was one of those people who became much nicer when they had troubles.

I found the English naturally xenophobic. In America it had been a slight advantage to be South African; foreigners were welcome and considered interesting. In England, you were just another inferior colonial. Eva's Slovak friend Zuza, who like her had left Czechoslovakia when the Russians invaded, had attended Oxford and now taught at a nearby high school. One day, speaking about an English colleague, she commented: “You know, he's really awfully clever, and should be headmaster, but he'll never manage it because his wife is Swedish.” This seemed to require no explanation. I felt similarly discomfited about being Jewish. A graduate student friend asked why we gave our son, Joshua, born at the end of our stay in Oxford, “such a Jewish name.” In response I vainly cited Joshua Nkomo as part of my African heritage. Another student told me how “Jewish” the computer center was about the amount of time they gave you on its machines. One day, my banana-slicing friend informed me that his department would soon be hosting “some Jews from the Weizmann Institute;” he was clearly quite confused about the difference between Jews and Israelis. None of these people was trying to be offensive but, after a year of this, I found myself unthinkingly hesitant to say anything that would reveal my roots.

Many of the foreigners I knew had similar experiences. Savas, a Cypriot friend who had lived in England since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, had a specially restricted British passport that would expire if he spent more than three years out of the country. Soon I realized that any bias against foreigners seemed vaguely plausible. When an Indian postdoc friend bought a slightly battered secondhand car and parked it on South Parks Road near the Clarendon Labs, I teased him by leaving him a note in which I purported to be the head of the department; I informed him that the shabby appearance of his car diminished the dignity of the grounds, and asked him to therefore refrain from parking it so close to the laboratory. He took this in dead earnest and ran off to speak to the head of the department before I could catch him.

The university itself was stuffily bureaucratic, and when you angered them they resorted to reporting you to your superiors. After two years in Oxford and just two months before I was to return to New York, the chief medical officer sent me a letter demanding that I be X-rayed to exclude the possibility of tuberculosis. I wrote back to point out that if they were seriously concerned about my putative tuberculosis, they should have X-rayed me when I first arrived. He forwarded my response to the head of the physics department, adding the following handwritten annotation: “Dear Prof. ——, What charming people you have in your department!” I was astonished that the professor himself then took the trouble to rebuke me.

Some experiences left lasting impressions. At one of my wife's department parties I was introduced to a Swedish woman who turned out to be the daughter of the late Oskar Klein, the codiscoverer of the Kaluza-Klein theories I had studied as an undergraduate in South Africa. Klein was also the master builder of some of the pillars of particle theory, the eponymous Klein-Gordon equation that described spinless quantum particles and the Klein-Nishina formula for Compton (photon-electron) scattering.

Another visiting postdoc, Predrag Cvitanovic, lingered in my mind for years afterwards as someone who seemed to do exactly what he liked, and liked what he did. He was a darkly handsome Croatian who had left Yugoslavia for the United States when he was a teenager. Predrag always spoke as though he had lived a life of enviable independence, free of other people's conventions. He went cycling around the United Kingdom, danced in Oxford night clubs, and acted in a production of Blake's “Songs of Innocence and Experience” that I watched at the University Parks one evening. He wore tobacco-colored Adidas sneakers and blue denim farmer's dungarees over a checked shirt. When his mother visited him briefly, he spoke about her as though she were just another of his fun-loving acquaintances. I was always a little awed by his apparent self-sufficiency. I recall suffering his scorn once at a very-Oxford garden party. I had uttered some sentence that contained the phrases “my wife” and “my car,” and Predrag issued a loud denunciation of people in the world who went around talking about “my this and my that.” I accepted his display of extreme independence at face value, never asking about the difficulties that must have led to it. James Gleick, in his book
Chaos: Making a New Science
, mentions that at precisely the time I knew him, Predrag was working on an aspect of chaos theory that was critical to Mitchell Feigenbaum's subsequent breakthrough in the field. Gleick writes that Predrag was so captivated by the field that he chose to work on it without telling anyone that he was doing so, even though he had been hired to do particle theory. Particle physicists, the ultimate reductionists, might well have looked down on chaos theory, a field that ostensibly had nothing to do with the fundamental nature of matter and could have been invented fifty years earlier. When our son Joshua was born in 1977, shortly before we left Oxford for New York, Predrag brought over a bottle of wine to celebrate, and that was the last time I saw him at any length. I ran into him once more in 1984, shortly after the birth of our daughter Sonya, when I was pushing her in a stroller near the Great Lawn in Central Park. I always remembered him as someone who seemed to be captain of his fate.

Sometime in 1976 Chris Llewellyn Smith brought Stephen Wolfram to the department. A precocious Eton high school student of about sixteen, Stephen was already writing his own research preprints on particle physics. Those early papers were unexceptional, but the mere fact that he could produce them at his tender age justifiably intimidated the Oxford graduate students. I, luckily, was too old to be seriously threatened; he belonged to another generation. Stephen attended Oxford and eventually became the head of Wolfram Research and the creator of Mathematica™, a system for doing symbolic mathematics on a computer that has become widely used by physicists, mathematicians, and quants.

One afternoon I saw an advertisement in the Oxford papers for the Anthroposophical Society, an organization of devotees of the late German guru Rudolf Steiner, whose books had been recommended to me by Dr. Louw in Cape Town eight years earlier. I had taken a glance or two at them over the years and had been left cold. During a lonely day in my first few months at Oxford I walked into the little Steiner bookstore and picked up his
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
. That night in bed I started to read it, and was astounded and exhilarated to experience in the first few sentences the clear and authoritative pronunciations on the complexity and confusion of life. I never became more than a dabbler in the field, but the anthroposophists' books left a strong and uplifting impression on me, despite their turgid, Germanically flavored English.

The anthroposophists didn't reject the scientific approach approach to knowledge, but they rejected the naive and arrogant materialism espoused by so many scientists. Instead, as I understood it, they advocated the reliance on careful external and
internal
scientific observation in the style of Goethe. I liked the fact that Steiner referred to the soul as directly as other people referred to material objects. He attributed a primacy to one's inner perceptions, regarding the interior world to be just as much a part of reality as the exterior. I was pleased, a few years later, to read Bruno Bettelheim's
Freud and Man's Soul
, in which he pointed out that Freud's original German texts had used simple, direct terms to describe the psyche (the Greek word for
soul
). According to Bettelheim, it was James Strachey, Freud's English translator, who had replaced Freud's resonant and easily accessible
Ich
,
Es,
and
Über-Ich
, the German for “I,”“It,” and “Above-I”, with the faux-medical, Latinized
id, ego,
and
superego
. It was also Strachey who, referring to slips of the tongue, replaced the German “Fehlleistung” with the pseudoscientific
parapraxis
.

My interest in the late Steiner intensified following the publicity he and his disciple Owen Barfield received when Saul Bellow—then a Steiner devotee, too—won the 1976 Nobel Prize for literature. The narrator in his novel
Humboldt's Gift
studies Steinerian meditation in Chicago, and Bellow alluded to Steiner and Barfield in several articles and interviews. I went on to read Barfield's
History in English Words
, an enthralling account of his theory of the development of human consciousness as extracted from the parallel development of English vocabulary.

Steiner's views were descended from even stranger turn-of-the-century mystics, Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists, and perhaps Gurdjieff, too. He combined German romanticism with Eastern mysticism. He had theories about everything—from childhood, education and teaching the mentally retarded to art and organic gardening, and I liked whatever I was able to understand. Mostly, whenever I tried to tell my friends about him, I was met with scorn. Over the years, however, I discovered that other people I admired had been influenced by Steiner and his school, in particular several early twentieth-century painters, among them Vassily Kandinsky, Arshile Gorky, and Arthur Dove, who drew on his lectures and sketches of the higher worlds. While at an exhibition in a Soho New York gallery in the late 1990s, I saw large photographs of the colored-chalk illustrations Steiner had scrawled on a blackboard during his philosophical lectures. Later, visiting clients of Goldman's in Madrid, I dropped into the Thyssen Museum, where I stumbled across several Dove paintings whose resemblance to those illustrations was immediately apparent. In The Hague, too, after a Euro-next options conference, I saw early Mondrian paintings of lilies that were influenced by Steiner's attempts to portray the spiritual essence of living beings. More recently, I reread Gleick's book on chaos and was intrigued by his description of the influence of Goethe, Steiner, and Schwenk (another Steinerian artist and observer) on the early chaos investigators Feigenbaum and Libchard. All of them, as he told it, were proponents of the same ideal: Careful independent observation and a reliance on all of one's own senses.

A year passed and I spent most of the summer of 1976 at the theoretical physics institute at SLAC, returning to the United States in order to keep my green card valid. Then, in my last year at Oxford, I began to work on more fundamental theoretical topics with Tim Jones, a fellow postdoc. We developed a theory that tried to explain the near similarity of the electron and the heavier muon by postulating that Nature imposed an additional permutation symmetry between the two particles. Our model was a simple extension of the now popular standard model of weak and electromagnetic interactions that, in addition, linked the electron to the muon. Over the next few years I continued working on this class of models, extending the permutation symmetry to include the newly observed
tau lepton
, an even more massive sibling of the electron and muon. If our model was right, it predicted that the muon, the tau lepton, and the
b
quark should all decay in peculiar and previously unobserved ways.