Read My Life as a Quant for Free Online Page B

Each time he paused or took a break, he stopped the clock and he wrote down the number of minutes he had worked since the last interruption. At the end of the day he computed the total. Compulsive myself, I was sympathetic to his counting; I knew how few were the hours in the day one actually works seriously and undistractedly, and was momentarily tempted to start my own time sheet.
    I learned one lesson from the fates of both the professors and students I met at Columbia: In the end, character and chance counted at least as much as talent. Luck, combined with what my mother called sitzfleisch , the capacity to persevere, played an overwhelming role.
    First in Cape Town and then in New York, I had been steadily learning what kind of physics suited me.
    Like most physicists, I was a reductionist: I believed that you can explain complex things by reducing them to their constituents. Biology depends on chemistry; chemistry is merely the physics of molecules and atoms; atoms are made out of electrons and nuclei; nuclei contain protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons seem to be made of quarks. What are the ultimate subnuclear particles at the putative root of this hierarchy, and what are the laws that determine their behavior? These questions are the domain of particle physics.
    Particle physicists are snobs who think that their field is the source of the most fundamental knowledge, and take some mischievous pleasure in denigrating other messier or more complex areas of physics. Gell-Mann, the codiscoverer of the Eightfold Way and the discoverer of quarks, succinctly summarized the latent prejudice of most particle physicists about the superiority of their enterprise when he famously referred to solid state physics, the apparently more mundane study of bulk matter and its variety of forms, as “squalid state physics.”
    Nowadays, not everyone agrees with Gell-Mann’s clever bon mot . Over the last twenty years physicists have discovered a deep commonality between large-scale bulk matter and small-scale particle physics. Much of what is new and interesting in both fields seems to emerge from what is called their “many-body” nature: Both bulk matter and tiny particles can each be viewed as resembling a medium, each made out of a very large number of similar constituents. When many similar constituents are clumped together, their collective behavior can display completely new and unexpected characteristics. A drop of water can suddenly freeze and turn solid in a way that no single water molecule can. A ripple of excitement or a hush of expectation can sweep over a crowd but not over a single individual. In the words of another Nobel Prize-Winner, P.W. Anderson, “More is Different!” He, and many other “squalid-state” physicists believe that there is no single grand reductionist Theory of Everything.
    It is unlikely one will ever know who is right, but, like most aspiring physicists of the postwar period, I was immensely attracted by the reductionist point of view. I wanted to be the ultimate reductionist, a particle physicist.
    Technically, I still had to choose between being a theorist or an experimentalist, but for me, this wasn’t much of a choice. The essence of theoretical physics is the attempt to look at the universe, and then mentally apprehend its structure. If you are right, you emulate Newton and Einstein: You find one of the Ten Commandments. You write down a simple set of laws that, plucked from nowhere, miraculously describes and predicts how God’s world works. This was the struggle to which I aspired. Anything else would have been a compromise that I was not prepared to make.
    Even within theoretical particle physics there are further refinements. Pure theory is the search for abstract laws, for a formulation of the divine commandments that rule the world. But, for every Moses descending from the mountain with a valid new law, there are countless well-intentioned