Free My Life as a Quant by Emanuel Derman Page A

went home to Cape Town to visit my family.
    I was restless there, too. Three years had passed since I had left, and one day, confused about my future on all fronts, I visited an Afrikaner psychiatrist named Jannie Louw at the recommendation of my elder sister. He listened to my account of distant loneliness and uncertainty, and then half-pleased and half-displeased me by avoiding specific advice and instead suggesting a philosophical approach to my suffering. I went to see him once more, and when I left, he recommended that I read two books: Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds . I found some solace in Frankl, but never bothered with Steiner until years later.
    One person who made a strong impression on me during that Brookhaven summer was Mike Green, a graduate student in particle physics at Cambridge. Mike was far ahead of me academically, already working on research for his thesis. Everything went enviably faster in British graduate schools. In subsequent years I ran into him regularly at summer research institutes in Aspen and Stanford, and at university seminars at Oxford and Cambridge. Always, he was single-mindedly working away on his beloved string theory, a model that treats elementary particles as tiny, one-dimensional, rubber-band-like, vibrating strings that wiggle and move at relativistic speeds. I always admired Mike’s tenacity, his capacity for banging away at the same problem for years until it yielded. Fifteen years later, when I had already left physics, Mike became famous for proving that string theories could be mathematically consistent only if the universe had either 10 or 26 dimensions. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t feel the smallest pinch of envy or competition at his deserved success. Like the Kaluza-Klein theories I had studied as an undergraduate, Mike’s model of particles was viable only in a large-dimensioned universe, which could be mapped to our apparently four-dimensional universe only if its extent in each of those extra dimensions was so small as to be unobservable. String theory is so arcane that physicists sometimes describe it as “a little bit of twenty-first–century physics that accidentally fell into the twentieth century.”
    The physics department was home to more passionate clashes. Several professors, among them Leon Lederman, Malvin Ruderman, and Richard Garwin, worked part-time for the Jason Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis, a group of elite scientists from elite universities who studied defense-related problems. Norman Christ, my young PhD advisor, was a member, too. During the height of the Vietnam protests, Columbia antiwar student groups picketed these professors at their homes and in their seminars. Though the contents of the Jason reports were presumably secret, the antiwar activists circulated their titles. I recall one, “Interdiction of Trucks by Night,” which we assumed to be about methods of bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail. One fall we heard that antiwar protesters had picketed Ruderman’s home in his suburban neighborhood on the eve of Yom Kippur, pointing out the conflict they perceived between observing the Jewish day of atonement and writing military-related advisory papers. I recall Ruderman responding with great and somewhat disingenuous indignation at the invasion of his personal life. I was most impressed by Richard Garwin. Whereas most of the other professors tried to dodge the moral responsibilities of their military-related activities with a mixture of righteous outrage, wry charm, and vague ramblings about working from within the system, Garwin simply asserted that there was a role for force in the world, and that he believed in what he was doing.
    Jason still exists, though a March 23, 2002, New York Times article reported that the Pentagon has withdrawn its budgetary support. Jason, the article jokingly noted, is rumored to be an