My Life as a Quant (14 page)

One of the great pleasures of academic life was that, after you had fulfilled your teaching duties—and there were none at Rockefeller!—your time and space belonged to you alone. I could work when and where I liked; I could decide to take an afternoon off to run six miles in the park or to see an exhibition at a museum, and then work that evening. Heinz and I went to see
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
the weekday afternoon it opened. Such small freedoms, together with the long vacations spent doing physics in interesting places, gave one the sensation of being nonmonetarily rich, and compensated for the low noncorporate salaries. My office was sacred territory; no one walked in after knocking unless I shouted “Come in!” If I locked the door from the inside, wanting to concentrate or be alone, people behaved as though I were not there. I thought that this kind of privacy was a right, but it was a privilege, much rarer than I realized. I was naively shocked, a few years later at Bell Labs, to apprehend that both my time and my office belonged to AT&T, and could be invaded at any moment without apology or warning knock from my boss, my colleagues, or the mail deliverer. Wall Street, of course, would lay claim to even more of my personal space and time. Soon this academic freedom would end for me. But in the meanwhile I did physics, joined the New York Road Runners Club, ran along the East River Drive and around Central Park, and played with Joshua mornings and evenings. It was a good life.

As my two years at Rockefeller rushed by, I grew increasingly uncomfortably with Pais and sensed his disapproval. Perhaps he disliked my relative lack of talent, or my lack of deference on subjects outside of physics, something that he may have perceived as disrespect. I admitted to myself that Pais was a much better physicist than I was, but I could not make myself unquestioningly play second fiddle in conversations on novels, movies, or world affairs. I felt obliged to behave as though my opinions had as much right to be heard as anyone else's, and it probably was not a good idea. At the end of my first year at Rockefeller, Pais's secretary began putting job advertisements for other schools' postdoc positions in my pigeonhole in the departmental office, and I knew I was not going to get a third year in his lab.

Eva, Josh, and I spent one month that summer at the Aspen Center for Physics. Then, in September 1978, I took Pais's hints to heart and started to evaluate my situation. I was 33 years old and halfway through my third postdoc; where was this peregrination going to end? I concluded I either had to find a position as an assistant professor with a good chance of tenure, or else get out of physics.

One day in 1978 I suddenly found myself flirting with the idea of going to medical school and becoming a genuine doctor. My thoughts went pretty much as follows: Physics is a harsh meritocracy. Most of the merit is concentrated in a small number of legendary figures at the top. If you aren't Feynman, you're no one. A competent, but not brilliant, research physicist had little to feel good about; who needs what you provide? You could try to get one of the rare full-time teaching positions in a small college somewhere, but you had to like teaching more than I did to do it that many hours a week. So, though it
was
good to think that I was dedicating my life to what I thought of as transcendental pursuits, it had begun to feel insufficient. In medicine, in contrast, I imagined that I could so some palpable good merely by being competent.

I was not the only person who thought this way. Several medical schools had recently begun to accept applicants with PhDs in the natural sciences but no premed degree into their program. The University of Miami at Coral Gables would transform you from a PhD to an MD in two years, summers included, but in order to apply you need to have passed the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). Now I had never taken the GRE; it was not even administered in South Africa when I applied to Columbia in 1966. I closeted myself in my don't-come-in-without-knocking Rockefeller office, telling no one what I was doing, and spent a week or two taking practice GRE exams. I refreshed my undergraduate physics knowledge, learning the values of natural constants and atomic physics energy levels by heart. I revisited all the topics that I had not studied since my first year in graduate school. Finally, after a sleepless night because Josh was ill and feverish, I took the general and physics sections of the exam one entire Saturday on the Columbia campus; I did well. Coral Gables sent one of their graduates, an intern at Sloan Kettering near Rockefeller, to interview me, and I was accepted.

I couldn't do it—I simply lacked the courage to continue down this path. I would have had to move to Florida for two years, and Eva, whose parents lived in New York and whose career as a biologist seemed to have more promise than mine as a physicist, had no reason to disrupt her work by relocating to Florida. Though I paid the registration fee to keep my place in the program, I knew I would probably renege. Indeed, a few weeks later, pleading family difficulties, I called Coral Gables to back out. I would have had a very different life had I become a practicing physician, and I still envy people whose work does visible good.

During my last year at Rockefeller, I applied only for “real” physics jobs, those tenure-track assistant professorships at schools that took research seriously, or the few longer-term postdoc jobs that promised some semblance of stability. I spent much of the winter traveling around the country giving seminars at whichever department or national laboratory would consider me seriously enough to invite me, and eventually landed two assistant professorships. The first was at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, attractive mostly because of its proximity to Fermilab, which had a giant high-energy particle accelerator and an excellent theory group, too. The second was at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a good school with a physics department of reasonable quality that had received over one hundred applications for their one job in theoretical particle physics. I interviewed there in December 1978 and then waited. After several months, I heard I was third on their list. As time went by, first the female postdoc at the top of their list obtained a better offer elsewhere; then the second choice, a male postdoc with a wife in academia who had already obtained a permanent position on the East Coast, declined in order to stay near his family. The next offer came to me.

I liked Boulder much more than Chicago—I had the chance of a good position in a beautiful town. Eva, however, had no immediate possibility of her own long-term job there, and it made little sense for her to accompany me there without one. So, knowing that I would likely go to Boulder on my own that fall, I shut my eyes and accepted their offer. Though it wasn't ideal for her, Eva agreed to investigate academic opportunities in the Boulder area. I hoped that some way or other she would soon find a reasonably permanent position there or in one of the nearby Denver research hospitals.

This was the start of several difficult years. Despite Eva's own career demands, a part of me expected her to move to Boulder, and I was resentful that she did not. In the meanwhile, the State of Colorado declared a faculty hiring freeze, so that no permanent positions for her could materialize soon. I had moved to new jobs in new cities and countries on my own with regularity the past six years, but this time I would be leaving behind not only a wife, but a son, too. I had been as much a part of his upbringing as anyone over the past two years. At times I proposed that I should take Josh with me to Boulder. Eva and I fought and scrambled. In July the three of us left for a week-long vacation to Abaco, a small and isolated out-island in the Bahamas. On our second day there, returning from an uncomfortable trip on a rented motor boat to a nearby island, I found messages instructing me to call both my home in South Africa and Eva's parents in New York. For years I had always left a vacation phone number with my family in South Africa in case of emergency, so I knew immediately the significance of the call: My mother had just died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ten years after she first became ill. Isolated on Abaco, we had to charter a small plane to fly from Palm Beach and then take us to the mainland. From there we quickly returned to New York, and I flew off to Cape Town for the funeral.

At the end of that summer I packed up my office at Rockefeller. On the Friday at the start of the long Labor Day weekend, I flew out to begin my work in Boulder. Eva was going to stay on at her postdoc job at Rockefeller while she tried to find a faculty position in Colorado.

I had explained to Joshua that I
had
to leave for a while, but that I would phone and write. In retrospect, I am not sure why I thought I “had to”; I left because I felt compelled to continue doing physics. With the precocity of a two-year old who had spent much of his first two years talking to adults, Josh seemed to understand. Eva brought him down to the taxicab to say goodbye to me as I left for Kennedy. As I got into the taxi, I saw him in Eva's arms; he leaned towards me and shouted urgently “Daddy, don't go!” On the flight I drew a picture of myself on the back of an airplane postcard to send to him, and as soon as I landed in Denver I called him. I felt bitter at having left and resentful about my situation.

A two-city family

New age meditations

Karma

Goodbye to physics

In 1979 Boulder's downtown consisted of a pedestrian mall about six blocks long and a couple of blocks wide, lined with hip clothing and hiking stores and natural-food cafes. The summer weather was hot but dry; unlike humid New York, you could feel the cool of the shade as soon as you stepped into it. Winter was crisp. The canyons twisting out of the town and into the foothills of the Rockies beckoned weekend hikers, and Frank Shorter's store was a mecca for long-distance runners. (It was Mecca without the mosque—there was no Tartan running track anywhere in Boulder, although there were many nice runs along the outskirts of the town.) I had a clean white office in the Gamow physics building, and lived a short downhill walk across the campus in a low-rise, dark, dingily wood-paneled and linoleum-floored apartment in faculty housing. It was dated and dusty, but perfectly okay.

Boulder was also home to the Naropa Institute, the trendy center for Tibetan Buddhism in America headed by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, whose final appellation signified something like the Venerable One. In the summers, Alan Ginsberg ran their Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In parallel, the back streets of the town were filled with a ragtag bunch of small cults and their gurus; I particularly remember seeing the recruiting center of the Guru Maharaj Ji, the smug-looking, twelve-year-old Perfect Master who wore a Rolex. Mo Siegel had created Red Zinger and founded the Celestial Seasonings Tea Company in Boulder; it was one of the local legends of commercially successful hippiedom, eventually bought by Hain for about $380 million in March 2000. The campus bulletin boards and the local newspapers were filled with personals for neighborhood masseurs, self-help, the Alexander method, and all sorts of other hope-granting institutions of self-improvement. I had to admit I liked it.

Before moving to Boulder I had received a Department of Energy Young Investigator Award in High Energy Physics Research. As a result, I had no courses to teach that year, only some undergraduate problem sessions to tutor. I was used to rising late, but Boulder ran on an early schedule. Many restaurants opened only for breakfast and lunch, shutting down completely by early afternoon, something I had never seen in New York. Every Tuesday morning I had to start teaching at 8 A.M., one identical problem session after another for about four hours. It shocked my unworldly system. A late riser until then, I never succeeded in going to bed early the night before, and I more or less wearily wasted the Wednesday of every week, trying to get back to my normal working schedule.

The rest of the time I came into my office each day and tried to work on various extensions of one of my models. But I was separated from family and friends and miserable about having left Josh behind, so I worked with a heavy heart. No one in the department spoke to me much during the day. The graduate students were busy with their own lives, and the faculty members, mostly married, worked hard from early in the day and then went home. As time went by, I hit an impasse in the problem I was working on, and there were no colleagues with similar enough interests off whom I could bounce ideas. For months, every new attempt I made to circumvent the sticking point failed; I needed hope most of all. If, early on a given day, I had a sudden idea for a strategy that might solve my problem, I would quit work immediately and go home. In this way I postponed disappointment for one more day. I preferred to do nothing for a little while, and then go to bed savoring the little dollop of optimism that my new strategy would work the following day. Usually, my joy lasted only a few hours; each new method failed pretty quickly.

When I had first arrived in New York, I appreciated the city's street life and diners as an antidote to loneliness. There were always people you could watch coming towards you as you drifted in the ambient currents of people along Broadway until all hours of the night: animated Spanish speakers, bums, people cursing furiously to themselves. Boulder wasn't quite as lively, but the outdoor mall I discovered on my first night there was filled with students and locals and not yet lined with the upscale chain stores that came later. Instead, the mall had a small-scale, local-commerce aura. Hippies with backpacks and sleeping bags slept outdoors in the small park. Every block of the mall teemed with crowds centered around amateur magicians, folk singers, guitarists, belly dancers, jugglers and acrobats, all performing till 10 or 11 P.M. I went there almost every evening, strolling up its length and down again ceaselessly, always alone, stopping for a snack, eyeing the people and watching the shows. Much of the time, I liked standing in the crowd around a hip-looking, mustachioed, good-humored, short, dark guy who juggled, ate fire, swallowed swords, and often used the word
mojo
. He never failed to cheer me up. Saturdays and Sundays, after a run or a movie, I always returned there. Eventually, I began to be embarrassed about being seen, over and over again, by the same storekeepers, waiters, and waitresses. I was always solitary, always reading a book. I had no alternative.