The irreverent, brilliant adventures of one of the greatest physicists of all time — part memoir, part masterclass in curiosity 🔬

• So everybody is disagreeing all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn’t repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who’s the chairman, would say, “Well, having heard all the arguments, I guess it’s true that Compton’s argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead.” It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that at the end the decision is made as to which idea was the best — summing it all up — without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.

• I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these dumb questions: “Is a cathode plus or minus? Isn’t the ion this way or that way?” But later, when the guy’s in the middle of a bunch of equations, he’ll say something and I’ll say, “Wait a minute, there’s an error — that can’t be right.” The guy looks at his equation and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, “How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?” He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have the specific physical example of what he’s trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that’s the wrong way around, I jump up and say, “Wait — there’s a mistake!” So in Japan, I couldn’t understand or discuss anybody’s work unless they could give me a physical example, and most of them couldn’t find one. Of those who could, it was a weak example — one which could be solved by a much simpler method of analysis.

• I never pay any attention to anything by experts. I calculate everything myself. When people said the quark theory was pretty good, I got two PhDs to go through the whole works with me, just so I could check that the thing was really giving results that fit fairly well and that it was a significantly good theory. I’ll never make that mistake again, reading experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all the mistakes and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.

• Started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on the theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, and that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries — that is, the development of new techniques of growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realized that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.