s*****V
发帖数: 21731 | 1 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/
今年是费曼诞辰100周年，纪念文章里面大部分都是赞扬费曼的天才，但是也有一些不
同的声音。
夸克发现者盖尔曼的采访，回忆他才去caltech的时候很崇拜费曼，但是发现很难跟费
曼合作。
One of your best-known interactions was with Richard Feynman at Caltech.
What was that like?
We had offices essentially next door to each other for 33 years. I was very,
very enthusiastic about Feynman when I arrived at Caltech. He was much
taken with me, and I thought he was terrific. I got a huge kick out of
working with him. He was funny, amusing, brilliant.
What about the stories that you two had big problems with each other?
Oh, we argued all the time. When we were very friendly, we argued. And then
later, when I was less enthusiastic about him, we argued also. At one point
he was doing some pretty good work—not terribly deep, but it was very
important—on the structure of protons and neutrons. In that work he
referred to quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, of which they were made, but he
didn’t call them quarks, antiquarks, and gluons. He called them “partons,
” which is a half-Latin, half-Greek, stupid word. Partons. He said he didn
’t care what they were, so he made up a name for them. But that’s what
they were: quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, and he could have said that. And
then people realized that they were quarks, and so then you had the “quark-
parton” model. We finally constructed a theory—I didn’t do it by myself;
it was the result of several of us put together. We constructed the right
theory, called Quantum Chromodynamics, which I named. And Feynman didn’t
believe it.
He didn’t believe that the theory was correct?
No. He had some other cuckoo scheme based on his partons. Finally after a
couple of years he gave up because he was very bright and realized after a
while that we were correct. But he resisted it, and I didn’t understand why
he had to be that way. Partons…
John Preskill 也谈到费曼过分强调原创性，不愿意站在别人的肩膀上
Feynman often told students to disregard what others had done, to work
things out for oneself. Not everyone thought that was good advice. One who
disagreed was Sidney Coleman, a Caltech grad student in the late 50s and
early 60s. Coleman says: “Had Feynman not been as smart as he was, I think
he would have been too original for his own good. There was always an
element of showboating in his character. He was like the guy that climbs Mt.
Blanc barefoot just to show it could be done. A lot of things he did were
to show, you didn’t have to do it that way, you can do it this other way.
And the other way, in fact, was not as good as the first way, but it showed
he was different. … I’m sure Dick thought of that as a virtue, as noble. I
don’t think it’s so. I think it’s kidding yourself. Those other guys are
not all a collection of yo-yos. Sometimes it would be better to take the
recent machinery they have built and not try to rebuild it, like reinventing
the wheel. … Dick could get away with a lot because he was so goddamn
smart. He really could climb Mont Blanc barefoot.” |
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