One of the big turning points in my life was a meeting with Enrico Fermi in the spring of 1953. In a few minutes, Fermi politely but ruthlessly demolished a programme of research that my students and I had been pursuing for several years. He probably saved us from several more years of fruitless wandering along a road that was leading nowhere. I am eternally grateful to him for destroying our illusions and telling us the bitter truth.
Fermi was one of the great physicists of our time, outstanding both as a theorist and as an experimenter. He led the team that built the first nuclear reactor in Chicago in 1942. By 1953 he was head of the team that built the Chicago cyclotron, and was using it to explore the strong forces that hold nuclei together. He made the first accurate measurements of the scattering of mesons by protons, an experiment that gave the most direct evidence then available of the nature of the strong forces.
At that time I was a young professor of theoretical physics at Cornell University, responsible for directing the research of a small army of graduate students and postdocs. I had put them to work calculating meson–proton scattering, so that their theoretical calculations could be compared with Fermi’s measurements. In 1948 and 1949 we had made similar calculations of atomic processes, using the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and found spectacular agreement between experiment and theory. Quantum electrodynamics is the theory of electrons and photons interacting through electromagnetic forces. Because the electromagnetic forces are weak, we could calculate the atomic processes precisely. By 1951, we had triumphantly finished the atomic calculations and were looking for fresh fields to conquer. We decided to use the same techniques of calculation to explore the strong nuclear forces. We began by calculating meson–proton scattering, using a theory of the strong forces known as pseudoscalar meson theory. By the spring of 1953, after heroic efforts, we had plotted theoretical graphs of meson–proton scattering. We joyfully observed that our calculated numbers agreed pretty well with Fermi’s measured numbers. So I made an appointment to meet with Fermi and show him our results. Proudly, I rode the Greyhound bus from Ithaca to Chicago with a package of our theoretical graphs to show to Fermi.
When I arrived in Fermi’s office, I handed the graphs to Fermi, but he hardly glanced at them. He invited me to sit down, and asked me in a friendly way about the health of my wife and our new-born baby son, now fifty years old. Then he delivered his verdict in a quiet, even voice.
