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Autobiography
The most deeply formative events of my scientific career long preceded my
first contact with the research community; indeed, some of them preceded my
birth. My grandparents emigrated from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, as
young teenagers; on my father's side they came from Poland and on my mother's
side from Italy, near Naples. My grandparents arrived with nothing, and no
knowledge of English. My grandfathers were a blacksmith and a mason,
respectively. Both my parents were born on Long Island, in 1926, and they
have lived there ever since. I was born in 1951, and grew up in a place
called Glen Oaks, which is in the northeast corner of Queens, barely within
the city limits of New York City. I've always loved all kinds of puzzles, games, and mysteries. Some of my
earliest memories are about the questions I "worked on" even before
I went to school. When I was learning about money, I spent a lot of time
trying out various schemes of exchanging different kinds of money (e.g.,
pennies, nickels, and dimes) in complicated ways back and forth, hoping to
discover a way to come out ahead. Another project was to find ways of getting
very big numbers in a few steps. I discovered simple forms of repeated
exponentiation and recursion for myself. Generating large numbers made me
feel powerful. With these inclinations, I suspect I was destined for some kind of
intellectual work. A few special circumstances led me to science, and
eventually to theoretical physics. My parents were children during the time of the Great Depression, and
their families struggled to get by. This experience shaped many of their
attitudes, and especially their aspirations for me. They put very great stock
in education, and in the security that technical skill could bring. When I
did well in school they were very pleased, and I was encouraged to think
about becoming a doctor or an engineer. As I was growing up my father, who
worked in electronics, was taking night classes. Our little apartment was
full of old radios and early-model televisions, and with the books he was
studying. It was the time of the Cold War. Space exploration was a new and
exciting prospect, nuclear war a frightening one; both were ever-present in
newspapers, TV, and movies. At school, we had regular air raid drills. All
this made a big impression on me. I got the idea that there was secret knowledge
that, when mastered, would allow Mind to control Matter in seemingly magical
ways. Another thing that shaped my thinking was religious training. I was
brought up as a Roman Catholic. I loved the idea that there was a great drama
and a grand plan behind existence. Later, under the influence of Bertrand
Russell's writings and my increasing awareness of scientific knowledge, I
lost faith in conventional religion. A big part of my later quest has been
trying to regain some of the sense of purpose and meaning that was lost. I'm
still trying.
I went to public schools in Queens, and was fortunate to have excellent
teachers. Because the schools were big, they could support specialized and
advanced classes. At Martin van Buren High School there was a group of thirty
or so of us who went to many such classes together, and both supported and
competed with one another. More than half of us went on to successful
scientific or medical careers.
I arrived at the University of Chicago with large but amorphous
ambitions. I flirted with brain science, but soon decided that the central
questions were not ready for mathematical treatment, and that I lacked the
patience for laboratory work. I read voraciously in many subjects, but I
wound up majoring in mathematics, largely because doing that gave me the most
freedom. During my last term at Chicago, I took a course about the use of
symmetry and group theory in physics from Peter Freund. He was an extremely
enthusiastic and inspiring teacher, and I felt an instinctive resonance with
the material. I went to Princeton University as a graduate student in the
math department, but kept a close eye on what was going on in physics. I
became aware that deep ideas involving mathematical symmetry were turning up
at the frontiers of physics; specifically, the gauge theory of electroweak
interactions, and the scaling symmetry in Wilson's theory of phase
transitions. I started to talk with a young professor named David Gross, and
my proper career as a physicist began.
The great event of my early career was to help discover the basic theory of
the strong force, QCD. That is the subject of the following lecture. The
equations of QCD are based on gauge symmetry principles, and we make progress
with them using (approximate) scaling symmetry. It was very gratifying to
find that the ideas I admired as a student could be used to get a powerful
and accurate theory for an important part of fundamental physics. I continue
to apply these ideas in new ways, and I am certain that they have a great
future. An aspect of my later work that is not much reflected in the lecture, has
been to use insights and methods from "fundamental'' physics to address
"applied'' questions, and vice versa. I'm not sure that fractional
quantum numbers, transmuted quantum statistics, exotic superfluidities, or
the gauge theory of swimming at low Reynolds number have really arrived as
applied physics (yet?), but I've derived a lot of joy from my discoveries in
these areas. To me, the unity of knowledge is a living ideal and goal. I continue, as
in my student days, to read voraciously in many subjects, and to think about
them. I hope to further expand the horizons of my writing and work in the
future.
I've been blessed with a wife, Betsy Devine, and two daughters, Amity and
Mira, who've been an inexhaustible source of joy and entertainment. |