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in the Columbia firmament was Tsung-Dao Lee, the embodiment and perhaps even the cause of all the good and bad qualities of the department. He had won his Nobel Prize in 1957, at the age of 31, for theoretical investigations that led to the startling discovery of the so-called nonconservation of parity. Lee and his fellow Prize-winner C. N. Yang had intrepidly suggested that nature’s laws were not symmetric with respect to the seemingly arbitrary human definitions of “left” and “right.” It was an almost unbelievable hypothesis, but they proposed experiments to test it. In less than a year they were proved correct. When I arrived at Columbia only eight years later, the consequences of this discovery were still working their way through the framework of physics.
    â€œT. D.,” as everyone called him, was Pupin’s version of the Pope and the Last Emperor of China rolled into one. He was a holy terror, self-centered and intense. About ten years ago I saw a photograph of him in the literary magazine Grand Street , taken as part of a series of photographs of scientists writing on blackboards. One was of Feynman, lively and jovial, lecturing on QED. Another featured Mitchell Feigenbaum of the Rockefeller University, examining his doubling equations that revealed the hidden order behind apparently chaotic phenomena. Most of the physicists looked prosaic, even Gell-Mann himself. But T. D.’s photo was different. Taken in the 1950s, it showed his fervent young face glowing with light as he spoke, for all the world looking like Moses descending from Sinai. T. D. set the tone at Columbia. His presence could inspire, but it could consume, too.
    The faculty were not the only extraordinary beings at Columbia. Many of the students seemed to be wunderkinder , too. My graduate classes, even the advanced ones, always contained a smattering of precocious smart-aleck American undergraduates. I was envious and wary of them. Some, sporting crewcuts and narrow-shouldered dark suits with ties, were relics of the Fifties; others had lank, long, hair and dressed in faded jeans and sweatshirts. But whatever they wore, they all raised their hands in class to ask questions whose answers they already knew.
    I was awed by these people who knew more than they had been taught. In South Africa I had mastered only a limited number of skills really well, and that knowledge lasted a lifetime. There, I had waited obediently year after year to get to the level at which “they” would begin to teach “me” the things I was able to handle. It had never occurred to me that I could learn what I wanted when I chose. In America, I was alarmed to see students who set about learning things on their own. I’m still embarrassed to admit to myself that I almost never studied anything I wasn’t officially taught. I recall one major exception. In my fourth year of college I spent many months studying unified field theories of gravitation and electromagnetism for my honors’ thesis. My independent investigation of the extension of Einstein’s theory of gravitation exhilarated me, but this autonomy was an exception.
    In 1966 and during subsequent years, I dreamed ambitious dreams about success on the scale of T. D. Lee. By this unrealistic measure, few of the wunderkinder fulfilled the full magnitude of their intimidating promise. One became a think-tank military analyst whom I was pleased to recognize on television during the Gulf War following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Another completed a PhD in physics, moved to medical school, began a residency in psychiatry, and finally became a well-known neural-net theorist. A third, after winning the prize for the best physics undergraduate at Columbia, struggled with manic depression. Determined to keep studying, he would keep a running daily log on his canary-yellow legal notepad of the exact number of minutes he had spent actually working at full concentration.