MEMORIES
OF
RICHARD
I
well
remember
my
arrival
at
Caltech
on
a
sunny
Oc-
tober
morning
in
1970.
Fresh
from
the
University
of
Oxford
where
even
graduate
students
at
that
time
wore
ties
and
shirts,
I
was
unsure
what
to
wear
for
my
first
meeting
With
Murray
Gell-
Mann.
I
gambled,
wrongly,
on
a
suit,
and
arrived
at
the
office
of
the
theory
group
see-
retary,
Julie
Curcio,
feeling
more
and
more
overdressed
and
as
if
I
had
a
large
label
dangling
from
my
collar
saying
“New
PhD
from
Oxford.”
I
had
seen
Gell-Mann
once
before
in
England
but
was
unsure
if
the
bearded
individual
dressed
in
an
open-
necked
shirt
and
sitting
in
Julie’s
office
was
indeed
the
eminent
professor:
A
moment
afier
I
had
introduced
myself,
my
doubts
were
dispelled
by
the
man
putting
out
his
hand
and
saying
“Hi,
I’m
Murray.”
This
episode
illustrates
only
a
small
part
of
the
healthy
culture
shock
I
experienced
in
California.
Six
years
in
Oxford
had
left
me
used
to
calling
my
professor
“Professor
Dalitz,
sir.”
At
that
time,
I
would
certainly
not
have
dared
to
address
Richard
Dalitz
as
“Dick.”
One
of
my
first
tasks
on
arrival
in
Pasadena
was
to
buy
a
car.
That
was
not
as
easy
as
it
sounds.
The
used
car
lots
in
Pasadena
are
sprinkled
down
Colorado
Boule-
vard
for
several
miles
in
typical
US
fashion,
and
getting
to
them
in
the
days
when
public
transport
in
Los
Angeles
was
probably
at
its
lowest
ebb
was
not
straightforward.
It
was
only
after
my
wife
and
I
were
stopped
by
the
police
and
asked
why
we
were
walking
on
the
streets
of
Pasadena
that
I
understood
the
paradox
that,
in
California,
you
had
to
have
a
car
to
buy
a
car.
Another
chicken-and—egg
problem
arose
in
connection
with
“ID,"
a
term
we
had
not
encountered
before.
As
a
matter
of
routine,
the
police
demanded
to
see
our
ID
and
of
course
the
only
acceptable
ID
in
deepest
Pasadena
at
that
time
was
a
California
driver’s
license.
A
British
driving
license
without
a
pho-
tograph
of
the
bearer
was
clearly
inadequate,
and
even
our
passports
were
looked
on
with
suspicion.
An
introduction
to
America
via
used
car
salesmen
is
not
the
introduction
I
would
recommend
to
my
worst
enemy,
and
it
is
not
surprising
that
I
sought
advice
from
TONY
HEY
is
the
chair
of
tbe
elertronics
and
computer
science
department
at
Southampton
University
in
tbe
United
K
ingdom.
He
isalso
tbceditorofThe
Feynman
Lectures
on
Comiutation.
sobeduledfiarpublican'on
this
month.
This
artic-
isdncpmdfiom
the
'Afierword'in
that
book,
01996by
Anthony}
.
Hey,
wit}:
mission
ofAddison-Waley
Publishing
Company
Inc.
All
right:
waved.
44
SEPTEMBER
1996
PHYSICS
TODAY
A
‘new’
set
of
lectures—on
computation—by
one
of
the
more
colorful
characters
in
modern
physics,
gives
rise
to
these
reminiscences
by
an
Englishman
in
Richard’s
court.
Anthony
J.
G.
Hey
FEYNMAN
the
Caltech
grad
students.
I
was
pointed
in
the
direction
of
Steve
Ellis,
whose
advice
was
valued
because
he
came
from
Detroit
and
was
be-
lieved
to
be
worldly-wise.
I
tracked
Steve
down
to
the
seminar
room,
where
I
saw
he
was
engaged
in
a
debate
with
a
character
who
looked
mildly
reminiscent
of
the
used
car
salesmen
I
had
re-
cently
encountered.
That
was,
of
course,
my
first
introduction
to
Dick
Feynman.
At
first,
I
did
not
recognize
him
from
the
much
earlier
photograph
I
knew
from
the
three
red
books
of
the
Feynman
Lectures
on
Physics
(Addison-Wesley,
1963).
Curiously
enough,
even
after
ten
years
or
more,
I
always
felt
more
comfortable
addressing
him
as
Feynman
rather
than
Dick.
No
doodling
in
science
Compared
to
my
previous
life
as
a
graduate
student
in
Oxford,
life
at
Caltech
was
like
changing
to
the
fast
lane
on
a
freeway.
First,
instead
of
Oxford
being
the
center
of
the
universe,
it
was
evident
that,
to
a
first
approximation,
Europe
and
the
UK
did
not
exist.
Second,
I
rapidly
discovered
that
the
ethos
of
the
theory
group
of
Feynman
and
Gell-Mann
was
that
physics
was
all
about
attacking
the
outstanding
fundamental
problems
of
the
day:
It
was
not
about
getting
the
phase
conventions
right
in
a
difficult
but
ultimately
well
understood
area.
I
remember
asking
George
Zweig,
a
coinventor
of
the
whole
quark
picture
of
matter,
for
his
cements
on
a
paper
of
mine.
It
was
the
not-about—to-be-very-famous
SLAC-PUB
1000,
a
paper
I
had
written
with
an
experimenter
friend
at
the
Stanford
Linear
Accelerator
Center
(SLAC)
about
the
analysis
of
three-body
final
states.
George’s
uncharacteristically
gen-
tle
comment
to
me
was,
“We
do,
after
all,
understand
rotational
invariance”
In
fact,
the
paper
was
both
useful
and
correct
but,
on
the
Caltech
scale
of
things,
it
amounted
to
doodling
in
the
margins
of
science.
In
those
days,
I
aspired
to
be
as
good
a
physicist
as
Zweig:
This
ambition
strikes
me
now
as
similar
to
wanting
to
emulate
the
achievements
of
Jordan
in
the
early
days
of
quantum
mechanics,
rather
than
those
of
his
collaborators,
Heisen-
berg
and
Born.
One
of
the
nicest
things
about
Caltech
was
the
sheer
excitement
of
being
around
Feynman
and
Gell-Mann.
As
a
postdoc
from
England,
where
one
gains
a
rapid
but
narrow
exposure
to
research,
my
wife
and
I
were
contem-
porary
in
age
with
the
final-year
grad
students,
and
a
lot
of
our
social
life
was
spent
with
them.
Feynman
was
actively
working
with
two
of
them,
Finn
Ravndal
and
Mark
Kislinger,
who
had
just
been
awarded
his
PhD
for
O
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