Read My Life as a Quant for Free Online

A’s, you can learn an enormous amount in college.”
    The late Enrico Fermi, a 1938 Nobel Prize winner, was regarded as the spiritual father of the Columbia physics department. His black-and-white three-quarter profile photograph graced the seminar room on the eighth floor of the Pupin Physics Building; he had been on the faculty there during World War II and the Manhattan Project. Fermi was the experimentalist who had created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago, a step on the way to the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Amazingly, he was also the theorist who, in the 1930s, had predicted the existence of the neutrino, a massless and chargeless particle that interacted so weakly with ordinary matter that it wasn’t detected until some twenty years later. He was one of the last physicists to make major contributions to both theory and experiment, an eclectic Goethe of the field.
    Columbia had also been the wartime home of the beautiful Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who later received the 1963 Nobel Prize for her theoretical proposal that the nucleus of an atom, like the atom itself, consisted of shells of orbiting particles. Because of Columbia’s antinepotism laws—her husband Joseph Mayer was a professor of chemistry—she had been only a member of the research staff of the university, and not a full faculty member.
    Closer to the present, Columbia had been at the center of the postwar development of relativistic quantum electrodynamics (QED), the fabulously accurate theory of how electrons emit and absorb light that I would soon struggle to learn. Atoms and the electrons inside them are so small that physicists can only indirectly examine their structure. You cannot actually “see” the inside of an atom; instead, in much the same way that doctors used to tap a patient’s chest and listen to the quality of the sound emitted in order to figure out the state of the patient’s insides, so physicists must poke at an atom and then diagnose the character of its internal electrons from the light they emit. Until the late 1940s, QED was riven by such deep mathematical and conceptual inconsistencies that, in many cases, calculations of the frequencies of emitted light led to literally infinite results.
    In the late 1940s, Feynman and Julian Schwinger in the United States (and, unknown to them, Shin-Ichiro Tomonaga in Japan), in a tour de force of insight and mathematical prowess, showed how to mend the theory of QED. They were then able to predict correctly minuscule and previously unsuspected corrections to the wavelengths of the light emitted by the internal electrons as they jumped from one orbit in the atom to another.
    Willis Lamb and Polykarp Kusch, both at Columbia in the late 1940s, had carefully and accurately measured a variety of these almost infinitesimal corrections, and they found perfect agreement with Feynman and Schwinger. Lamb and Kusch each received a Nobel Prize, as did Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga a while later.
    It didn’t take me long to learn that not all Nobel Prizes are equal. In 1968, when I was the teaching assistant for Kusch’s junior-level course on electromagnetic theory, I met with him regularly. Soon I began to notice that people in Pupin treated him as though his Prize was somehow worthy of less respect than those of the other faculty members. A few years later he left for the University of Texas.
    Also at Columbia, but not yet Nobelists at that time, were Leon Lederman, Jack Steinberger, and Mel Schwartz, all of them renowned even then for a host of elegant experiments and discoveries. In 1988 they received their Nobel Prize for having shown, almost thirty years earlier, that there were not one, but two different types of the neutrino that Fermi had proposed. (The discovery of a third type of neutrino in 2000 was less astonishing and definitely not Nobel-worthy.)
    Finally, fiercely brightest among all the stars