The Brutality of Physics

I always knew I was at the top until the brutality of physics informed me otherwise. I knew then that my top position was a thing of the past.

For a near genius like me, physics can be brutal. The operative word is near, near genius, not genius, only near genius. For an ordinary genius, physics can be even more brutal. The operative word is ordinary, ordinary genius.

Why is physics brutal? Physics is hierarchical and most physicists know where in the hierarchy they stand. As a young physicist moves into the profession, as physicists begin to settle into the hierarchy above and below him or her, and when brutal physics makes its appearance, fantasies begin to come face to face with reality. Physics is brutal because it is so revealing, so efficiently and accurately revealing.

I was fortunate to have had several conversations with Hans Bethe. In one of these conversations, we talked about the immediate years after World War II when he and Feynman were colleagues in the physics department at Cornell University. They were both working on quantum electrodynamics (QED) and Bethe and I were talking about this. At one point the great Hans Bethe said, “Feynman was just down the hall and I knew he was miles ahead of me.” Bethe was an active physicist from about 1930 until his death in 2005. Throughout this 75-year time span he knew his abilities exceeded those of most other physicists. Bethe also knew early in his career that Feynman’s abilities exceeded his. He knew Feynman could do things he could never do. Physics is revealing…and brutal.

The second-grade classroom was quiet. Mrs. Blake had asked each of us to tell our classmates what we planned to do when we grew up. Some students thought and thought and finally said some predictable answer like “be a nurseryman,” or “be a teacher,” or, sometimes, “I don’t know.” The nurseryman answer was obvious because we lived in northeastern Ohio which was, in a big way, nursery country. When my turn came I said, “I am going to get a BS degree and go to medical school.” Billy, a boy from a nursery family, sat across the aisle from me and, with his hand over his mouth, he said quietly, while laughing softly, “BS? That means Bull Shit.” “No,” I said as I looked directly at Billy, “a BS degree means bachelor of science degree.” Mrs. Blake gave me an almost imperceptible affirmative nod. I think she was pleased.

There were eight grades in the Madison Avenue School – grades one through eight. It was a rural school with two grades in every classroom. The school was in the heart of nursery country where shrubs of various kinds, a large variety of evergreens, and trees were propagated; some of the kids, like Billy, came from nursery families. Back in those olden days there was no time to waste making log cabins out of clay, so there was no kindergarten. Mrs. Blake taught grades one and two.

I was smart and self-confident. Only one time during my public schooling was my confidence challenged. Miss Carrig taught grades three and four and in one of those grades long division was introduced. I got sick and missed the very week of school when long division was introduced. When I returned students were sitting, heads down, pencils in motion. I didn’t know it, but they were struggling to learn this new math. I sat there looking at long division problems and was devastated because I did not know how to do them. Finally Miss Carrig came to my desk, stood beside me, told me how to get started and continued through to an answer. I got it almost immediately and said to her, “Oh I get it. It’s just multiplication backwards.” She smiled at me. By the end of my first day back in school, I was beating all the other kids in long division. I thought I was an intellectual barracuda among intellectual gold fish. I had yet to encounter an intellectual shark.

In grade seven students were given an IQ test. The teacher told my mother that I tested just “a hair below genius” and then the teacher, Miss Goodwin, went on to say, “Be thankful he is not above the genius level.” Miss Goodwin then said that geniuses were weird and that geniuses lived troubled and unhappy lives. I have often wondered why she believed that.

I always led my class in getting assignments done, finishing a test, reading a book, and I always got the highest grades. When I graduated from eighth grade I was clearly the prize student and I received Madison Avenue School’s highest honor, the Good Citizenship Medal.

Physics is a quantitative subject: measurements are made that produce numbers and physical theories are called on to determine whether the experimentally-measured numbers are embraced by the theories. Good theories shrink-wrap the empirically-determined numbers so tightly that there is no wiggle room for those numbers which means that experiment and theory are in perfect agreement. Take for example the orbit of Mercury. The orbit of Mercury around the Sun is an ellipse and the point at which Mercury is closest to the Sun is called the perihelion. That point itself orbits the Sun, but very slowly; specifically, as seen from Earth, the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit is measured to move through an angle of 1.5556 degrees per century. Newton’s theory of gravitation predicted 1.5436 degrees per century so it was short by 0.012 degrees per century. This discrepancy of a little over one hundredth of a degree per century — per century! — provided too much wiggle room. In 1915, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity reduced the wiggle room to zero: Einstein’s theory predicted that the perihelion should advance by 0.012 seconds of arc per century more than that predicted by Newton’s theory. With Einstein’s General Theory, experimental measurement and theoretical prediction were in agreement. It was a monumental intellectual achievement. Among all the great physicists of the 20th century, Einstein stands alone at the top of the hierarchy and all other physicists know it. For Einstein, physics was not brutal.

When I got to high school, things changed slightly for me. The high school was in town and there were a number of elementary schools in the township that were feeder schools for the high school. So I went from 16 classmates to over 180. I was still at or near the top of my class academically, but there was one boy, Dick, and one girl, Molly, who challenged me. We competed. In geometry class, for example, Mr. Shields always gave out the next day’s assignment 10 or 15 minutes before the end of class. I always got the homework done in the minutes before class ended and I beat Dick consistently (Molly wasn’t in the class); however, Dick beat me in Latin class and Molly beat me in the English class. Molly, Dick, and I competed for top standing. Nothing challenged my self-confidence in high school.

College was a repeat of high school. At my parents urging, I went to a small religious college in the Boston area. There were a few really good students at the college, but I had little competition. (One of my chemistry professors used my homework and my exams as his answer sheets to grade other students’ work.) I could still harbor the belief that I was at the top of my class.

Things changed for me in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University.

The scene was an Electromagnetism class. Bob always sat in the front row. I sat a couple of rows behind him. This physics course was a challenge for me partly because the professor developed the subject completely through mathematics. Every class period the professor filled the blackboards three or four times with vector equations and uttered a word or two between every equation. It went like this: equations were separated by words such as, “and now we have”, and “next we see”. In conversations with Bob, I discovered that the equations spoke to him in ways that they did not speak to me. But most of all it was the homework assignments and the exams that forced me to recalibrate myself with respect to Bob. Just like I had done in the high school geometry class, Bob got the assigned work done very quickly; by contrast, it often took me a couple of hours to complete my homework. Bob almost always got a better grade on exams than I did. I couldn’t believe it. I came to recognize that, as far as Bob was concerned, he was above me in the hierarchy. I had to adjust.

But there was worse to come.

My thesis advisor was a good man, but I was not intimidated by his intellectual powers. My dissertation was pretty ordinary. My objective was to finish my dissertation quickly, get my PhD, and get famous later.

After graduate school I had a postdoctoral position at Harvard. There I met people who were distinctly superior to me and I recognized that some of them could eat my lunch intellectually. I remember when I asked my boss a question and, whatever the question I asked, he always preceded in the same way. He would start with something very basic, something I thought I knew well. And then in just a couple of intellectual steps, steps that I followed easily, he would arrive at the doorway to my question. This troubled me because I knew and understood everything he did. “Why did I ask the question?” I would ask myself; “I knew everything he did.” After witnessing this a couple of times I came to the conclusion that my boss, a famous scientist, really had a deeper understanding of the basics from which he started and because of this understanding he could proceed directly to the answer of my question.

As a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, I stayed pretty close to the group I was part of; therefore, I did not get to know other Harvard faculty members very well. Getting to know Harvard physicists came later. Nonetheless, I was constantly recalibrating myself as I compared myself to other physicists I came to know in the department. I struggled with the results of this comparison; I placated myself by saying, “You have always been a hard worker and through hard work you can compete with them.” Sadly, this line of thinking was also to change.

If a person chooses to become a physicist, he or she becomes part of a community populated with some — not all — very smart people. Just as Hans Bethe, then in his 30s, came to recognize that Feynman could do things he couldn’t do, he recognized earlier in his career that Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, and Enrico Fermi could also do things that were beyond his inherent abilities. Here was Bethe who had been the best in almost every group he had been a part of, but he was brought to the recognition about the time he finished his doctoral dissertation that he was not as good as Dirac, Heisenberg, or Fermi. In a somewhat similar fashion, Gino Segrѐ wrote in his book Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbrück, George Gamow and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology (p.xvii) “Max and Geo are not like the three men who helped steer the quantum mechanics revolution.” Even for very good physicists, physics can be brutally revealing.

Bethe did his dissertation under Arnold Sommerfeld at Munich. Sommerfeld was an outstanding physicist who trained some of the best physicists of the 20th century including Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Peter Debye, Paul Ewald, Hans Bethe and others. Sommerfeld was never, ever simply “Arnold” to his students, he wasn’t even Professor Sommerfeld: he was Herr Geheimrat Herr Professor Sommerfeld. Sommerfeld was good and he knew it: he “knew his standing in the profession and his status in the institutional framework”¹; but he also knew that some of his students had abilities that surpassed his own Herr Professor abilities.

Physics is brutal because, even if you are famous, you can be pushed down by your own students.

After my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, I was talked into going back to my undergraduate college to expand a minor physics program into a full major program. I vowed I would stay no longer than five years and then move to a better institution. That meant that I would have to maintain my marketability and be wanted by other physics departments. I was confident that I could do this; I continued to harbor the belief that through hard work I could still compete even though I knew there were physicists who were smarter than me.

My time as a professor at my undergraduate college was not wasted. I got several grants for research, I started a research program, I got papers published, I had great students working into the nights, I got grants to bring equipment into the teaching laboratories. My teaching inspired new interests: interests in teaching itself and in the history of physics. The first course I taught was a physics course designed to meet part of the science requirement for non-science students. I took an historical approach to physics thinking that non-science students might connect better with physics through history and understand the physics better.

At the small college, I was once again a big fish riding a wave of success, but the pond was small and there were no physicists or other standout scientists to measure myself against.

As my five-year time limit approached, I was invited to return to Harvard to participate in Harvard Project Physics (HPP), a project that was just getting underway. The objective of HPP was to design a high school physics course that would attract a large percentage of high school students. To accomplish this objective, the leaders of the project decided to take an historical and more humanistic approach in order to show not only how some of the great physics came to be, but also to showcase the physicists who brought the great physics into being. We would not only describe the path the great physicists took to arrive at their seminal accomplishments, but we would also pull aside the cadaver-like masks that often hide the faces of physicists in textbooks and reveal some of their smiles and frowns.

The textbook being developed consisted of six units; I ended up writing a good part of Unit One: “Concepts of Motion.” In this unit, I had the privilege of writing about the works of Galileo and of Newton, the context of their work, about the men themselves, and about their great physics.

This was a tremendous learning experience: improving my writing and expanding my knowledge of the history of physics. I would hand in a draft of a chapter, thinking my draft could have come off the pen of Herman Melville; however, the pages of my draft copy would come back to me covered with questions, comments, and clarifications - all written with colored felt-tip pens: red, green, blue. At first I was devastated, but then I realized that my colleagues were teaching me a great lesson: what is clear to a writer may not be clear to a reader. And writing about Galileo and Newton in that most interesting 17th century, was, for me, addictive.

Since my long past days at Madison Avenue School I had been attracted to good writing. I would, occasionally, show a sentence or paragraph to one of my classmates and say “Read this.” My classmate would read it and then look at me and say, “Well?” I would respond, “It’s written so nicely. Isn’t it beautiful?” He or she would look at me with a puzzled look, grunt, and say, “I guess so.” So here I was at Harvard, 18 years after Madison Avenue School, writing sentences, paragraphs, and pages about physics and its history and trying to make the words go together beautifully. I left Harvard University and Harvard Project Physics a different person.

Physicists glorify their Nobel Laureates and like many physics graduate students, I fantasized about winning the big prize. For those physicists who work in a small department, have no colleagues who are altering the frontier of physics, and remain somewhat aloof from the larger physics community, those fantasies may never die. There are stories about physicists (some of whom I have known), some pretty well known and some not so well known, who sit by the phone every October waiting for the call from Stockholm and it is also well known that particular physicists became embittered and die embittered because the Swedish Academy passed them by. By contrast, for those physicists who become active in the profession, go to professional meetings, converse with colleagues far and wide, Nobel dreams can die quickly. Self-calibration can place a physicist in the hierarchy and that hierarchical position can clearly reveal to a physicist that a Nobel Prize is not likely to come their way. Physics is always revealing. Physics can be brutal.

Physicists are generally respectful to those above them in the hierarchy, but they can be inconsiderate and even rude to those below them. Bethe mellowed as he grew older, but as a young man, he acknowledged that he was arrogant.

In 1934, Victor “Viki” Weisskopf, who became a prominent physicist, was working as Wolfgang Pauli’s assistant. Pauli asked Weisskopf to do a particular calculation. Weisskopf happened to encounter Bethe and asked him how long he thought it would take to do the calculation. The 28-year-old Bethe responded: “Me it would take three days. You it will take three weeks.”² Weisskopf was below Bethe in the hierarchy.

When Weisskopf was in Copenhagen, he was on the upside. In a 1965 interview Weisskopf said:

I was in right away due to my old friends who were already there….It is very difficult to get into Copenhagen: I have seen cruel things happen if you come and cannot get through the “Guard.” Bohr was surrounded by five or six of his disciples, who were a very arrogant crowd. If you were not accepted by them you would have a very difficult time with him.³

Weisskopf was below some of Bohr’s “disciples” in the hierarchy, but he had friends to help him.

As a young physicist Bethe saw himself above Göttingen’s Max Born (who later won the Nobel Prize). Bethe wrote a paper that superseded an earlier paper by Born. Born wrote him a letter of appreciation for his work. In response, Bethe wrote a letter in which he chided Born for missing an obvious connection in his earlier paper. Later Born described Bethe’s letter as the kind of letter “an angry teacher would write to a feeble student, not that of a young scholar to a much older one.”⁴ Born was below Bethe in the hierarchy.

I have always been a hard worker and for some years after my formal education ended, I tacitly assumed my work ethic together with my abilities would allow me to compete at a high level in the world of physics. However, as I got to know more and more of my colleagues, both near and far, I came to realize that some of my physicist-friends could do in “three days” what would take me “three weeks.” But I shrugged that off because I was willing to work the three weeks. What I could not shrug off was the recognition that I knew physicists who could do in two hours what 100 of me could never ever do. As was written in the business section of the New York Times (June 22, 2014, p. 5): “You could not replace Einstein with 5, 10, or 100 physicists and get the same results. Einstein was Einstein.”

As my ongoing recalibration of myself continued, I also came to what for me was a disturbing recognition: while I knew I could do physics research that would lead to publishable results, I wondered: what difference would it make? I knew physicists whose research and papers published in physics journals modified the frontier of the discipline. I also knew physicists whose research brought them nowhere near the frontier of physics and their papers were of interest to very few. Getting papers into physics journals is very different from altering the subject of physics itself: getting physics manuscripts published is easy; altering the frontier of physics is hard.

Could my research put a little scratch on the frontier? I came to believe that my chances were slim. If slim, why publish? Why add another paper to the already overloaded literature of physics? A comment of Pauli’s kept going through my thoughts: when asked to read a manuscript of another physicist, Pauli made the damning remark, “It’s not even wrong.” Physics is brutal.

Physics is brutal because the evidence that drives physics is so unambiguous, so uncompromising. Research that produces a ground-breaking result can be unambiguously linked to the particular physicist who did the research and that physicist will get the accolades. Every physicist knows those physicists whose research results will command the attention of the entire physics community; likewise, every physicist knows physicists whose published papers are “not even wrong.”

The physics community does not dish out its admiration casually: those who deserve admiration get it; those who do not deserve admiration don’t get it. Physics is brutal.

¹ Silvan S. Schweber, Nuclear Force: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe, Harvard University Press 2012, p. 119

² Personal communication between author and Hans Bethe.

³ Interview of Victor F. Weisskopf by Thomas S. Kuhn and John L. Heilbron on July 10, 1965, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics.

⁴ Max Born, My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate, Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1975, p. 234

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The articles in this issue represent the views of their authors and are not necessarily those of the Forum or APS.