The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(46)

As in the Chinese curse?

Something like that I suppose. The reason for point particles is that if you stick something ugly in there—such as physical reality—the equations dont work. A point devoid of physical being leaves you with location. And a location without reference to some other location cant be expressed. Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.

And yet it moved.

And yet. Anyway, the whole idea of point particles is contrary to common sense. Something is there. The truth is we have no good definition of a particle. In what sense is a hadron “composed” of quarks? Is this making reductionism put its money where its mouth is? I dont know. Kant’s view of quantum mechanics—and I quote—is “that which is not adapted to our powers of cognition.”

Kant’s view of quantum mechanics.

Sure.

Jesus, Western.

You dont think that he was talking about the supernatural do you?

Probably not.

To the skeptic all arguments are circular. I guess that means even this one. Anyway, I dont want to get into some aimless flap about the meaning of quantum mechanics. It’s the most successful physical theory we’ve ever had. If there’s anything wrong with Copenhagen it’s that Bohr had read a lot of bad philosophy. Perhaps we should move along.

All right. Chew.

Well. Maybe not that far along.

You’re joking.

Yes.

Chew thought that S-Matrix theory was the theory that would take high energy physics forward.

Yes.

Did it?

It was the theory of the week. For about a year.

No pun intended, I suppose.

Two, actually. Sorry. It actually originated with Heisenberg in the early forties. With Wheeler even earlier.

But now we’re in the sixties.

Yes. The particle zoo. Quantum field theory was in their sights for a while but they should have known better. S-Matrix theory was a very ambitious theory. Bootstrap theory, Chew liked to call it. His version, anyway. It got ahead of itself and Geoffrey Chew was at the helm.

And your father was fully aboard.

Yes.

Did your father know David Bohm?

Yes. He liked him very much.

I would think they might have had very different political views.

They did. David went to see Einstein one day to try to explain to him why his—Einstein’s—objections to quantum mechanics were wrong. They spent two hours in Einstein’s office at IAS and when Bohm came out he had—as Murray put it—lost his faith. He wrote a really good book on quantum mechanics trying to get it all down but it didnt help and he spent the rest of his life trying —in effect—to find a classical description that fit the theory. A quantum equivalent of squaring the circle. In the meantime he was hounded out of the country by the State Department.

Hidden variables.

Yes. Very well hidden. The problem is the reverse of Feynman’s path-integrals. You cant visualize Feynman’s theory but the mathematics is sound. You can visualize hidden variables. That is, you can visualize how they might work. Sort of. You can draw a picture. But they dont work.

Western stopped. Asher was writing in his notebook. He didnt look up.

The bootstrap theory was eclipsed by the arrival of the quark.

Earlier, actually. Murray and Feynman shared a secretary at Caltech and they were pretty jealous of each other’s work. But it was mostly on Murray’s part. Still, on the day that Murray delivered his paper on the eight-fold way George Zweig encountered Feynman coming up the hallway bent over and shaking his head and as he passed in the hallway George heard him mutter to himself: He’s right. The son of a bitch is right. A short time later when George was at CERN he woke up one night with the suspicion that nucleons were not basic particles.

It just came to him.

Not exactly. Still, it’s a simple enough idea. That nucleons are composed—as it were—of a small companionship of lesser particles. Groups of three. For the hadrons. All but identical. He called them aces. He told me he didnt think anyone else could figure this out and that he had all the time in the world to formalize it. He didnt know that Murray was on his trail and that he had less than a year. In the end Murray called the particles quarks—after a line in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, referring to cottage cheese. Three quarks for Muster Mark. And he swept the field and won the Nobel Prize and George went into therapy. But George came out the better for it.

This is a true story.

You can look it up. Well, actually you probably cant. Not all of it. But it’s also true that Murray originally presented the theory as speculative. As a mathematical model. He always denied this later but I’ve read the papers. George on the other hand knew that it was a hard physical theory. Which of course it was.

Feynman was George’s Faculty Advisor.

Yes.

Bootstrap theory would have self-destructed eventually.

Murray says that it morphed into string theory. Eventually. But it was made irrelevant by the success of gauge field theory anyway.

What happened to Chew?

He’s still at Berkeley. He’s had a good career. But nothing like what he once envisioned. And string theory is still a mathematical morass.