Gary Zukav writes, on the opening page of his book The Dancing Wu Li Masters:
"What physicists do...is actually quite simple. They wonder what the universe is really
made of, how it works, what we are doing in it,and where it is going, if it is going anyplace
at all. In short, they do the same things that we do on starry nights when we look up at the
vastness of the universe and feel overwhelmed by it and a part of it at the same time.
That is what physicists really do."
This is an accurate description of the belief that I held about what physicists "really do", as well, a belief that I held well into my career as a graduate student of theoretical physics. It is a belief that is now qualified by the sad addendum that this at least, is what physicists really ought to do.
I have been inspired by the writings and lives of Albert Einstein, Henri Poincaré, of Erwin Schrödinger and Wolfgang Pauli. But I never met these great physicists.
I have met two men in my lifetime that I felt lived up to the expectations that I still hold of what great physicists "really are", that could, in Zukav's terms, be considered Wu Li masters.
The first of these is Tullio Regge of Torino, Italy. My meeting with Regge in May, 1968 was of paramount importance to me, my development as a physicist and as a person.
The other Wu Li master that it has been my privilege to meet is David Finkelstein. David settled the issue of my choice of thesis topic by suggesting that I learn the field theory then under development at our Institute by Arne Kihlberg, which described fields as group representations on homogeneous spaces of the Lorentz group.
My thesis task was to generalize Kihlberg's work to include electrical charge as well as a spin spectrum and to apply the resulting field theory to a description of the strong nuclear force. The thesis Internal Quantum Numbers and Homogeneous Spaces was completed in 1971 after much conflict between myself and my advisor, Arne Kihlberg.
Ostensibly the thesis showed that such a field theory was untenable due to the lack of a "convincing mechanism" to prevent violation of electric charge conservation. In fact, that was a conclusion that Kihlberg insisted that I draw, in spite of the fact that calculations explicitly demonstrated in the thesis showed that the amount of such violation was below the experimental limits established for that principle. Kihlberg then explained to me that "negative results such as these are not usually published in journals."