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Professor Marshak suggested that I study this
problem and continued his generous help in discussing
my findings and supplying some answers to questions.
After about six months of intense study of the empirical data two
things became clear to me. First, there was no
beta interaction consistent with
all the data; and therefore some carefully done experiments should
be wrong.
Second, the only possibility of a universal Fermi interaction
lay in having an axial vector component
in beta decay. The details on the beta decay angular
correlation's could be consistent with a scalar-tensor or a vector-axial
vector structure. With these, Marshak and I had all
the necessary results of the Universal
V-A interaction by the time of the Rochester Conference in 1957.
But I did not get a chance to present this discovery
and had the strange experience of
listening helplessly to distinguished scientists puzzling over a
problem that I had solved already!
That summer, Marshak was at RAND Corporation in Santa
Monica; so I spent a month in Los Angeles. By this
time the work was done but not publicly presented.
One day in June, Marshak arranged a lunch with Murray Gell-Mann,
Leona Marshall, Ronald Bryan, AH Wapstra and others
at a Santa Monica restaurant. I was
asked to give a report on our work on weak interactions
beginning with a survey of the crucial experimental
results, the clear evidence of inconsistency amongst
them and our resolution of the puzzling situation and
the hypothesis of the universal Fermi interaction of the V-A form
with left chiral fields.
Wapstra added some comments on the status of some experiments.
Gell-Mann was very appreciative of the presentation
and gave his blessings. I had also mentioned
that the choice of the interaction that Marshak and I made required
four crucial experiments to be wrong. Some of these
were done by, or under the supervision
of people like CS Wu and Herbert Anderson. These included
the angular correlation in He%$^b$ beta decay, the sign
of the Muon polarization, the decay
of oriented neutrons and the branching ratio in pion
decay into the electron-neutrino mode.
We suggested that these experiments be redone. To our
gratification they were all done
with the reversal of the wrong predictions within the year, so
that the 1958 ``Rochester Conference" at CERN
(to which I was not invited) recognized that the chiral
V-A interaction was correct for all the classic weak
interactions. Professor Marshak was to attend the Conference on
Mesons and Newly Discovered Particles in Padua-Venice
in 1957 September. He asked me to compile a joint paper
on the V-A interaction; this was done in June and was
titled ``The Nature of the Four-Fermion Interaction". I left it
with Marshak, who got it typed in Rochester and
presented it at the Conference. He was satisfied
that this presentation and the preprint dated 16 September 1957
(my 26th birthday!) was tantamount to publication.
I went that September to join Julian Schwinger at Harvard
as a postdoctoral fellow. Nobody
there in the theory group knew anything about the developments
in weak interaction, nor did they care. But Sheldon Glashow told
me about a manuscript written by Murray Gell-Mann and
Richard Feynman postulating a V-A
form for beta decay that was submitted to the Physical
Review.
I called Professor Marshak on the phone, but he
assured me that our priority was
protected by the Rochester preprint and by the conference presentation.
That was a mistake since most people would not acknowledge
having seen or heard of our work (including the late
J.J.Sakurai who got the preprint and a private
presentation by Marshak in the latter's office in Rochester).
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