George
Speaks
Later it turned out that even a person like Robert
Oppenheimer did not read our paper: he told me so
in person and I have no reason to doubt his word. Anyone
who read our paper and the beautiful paper by Gell-Mann and Feynman
could not fail to notice the essential difference. We analyzed
the data and pointed to the inevitable choice of the
Chiral V-A form despite contradicting experiments,
while they knew our work and elaborated on its elegance
and they added the important concept of conserved vector current.
The Padua-Venice proceedings took two years to appear.
But since then P.K. Kabir's collection "The Development
of Weak Interaction Theory" (Gordon and Breach) has
reprinted both these papers for comparison. But many people chose
to ignore it. In my childhood I was told that: You can wake up
a sleeping person, but you cannot do anything about
a person who pretends to be asleep.
I will briefly mention some other discoveries before
closing. Two of my first batch of graduate students:
Thomas Jordan and Douglas Currie and I proved a No-Interaction
Theorem in Relativistic Classical Mechanics; it asserts that a
Hamiltonian mechanics of particles interacting mutually
and with trajectories which transform as world-lines
has to be trivial. This puts an end to several futile
attempts to construct such a nontrivial theory. A resolution came
only with the use of a constrained relativistic system
by Arthur Komar and followed up by Narasimha Mukunda,
Joshua Goldberg and I, two decades later.
Second is the method of analytic continuation of the
normed vector spaces of quantum theory. It was implicitly
used in our construction of unitary representations
of non-compact groups in a basis which itself is non-compact.
But explicitly it was used by Sudarshan, Vittorio
Gorini and Charles Chiu in 1976.
The idea was to extend the Hamiltonian formalism to
include unstable states. Over the years I have done
more work on both Hamiltonian and Liouvillian dynamics
and formulated the general theory in terms of dual spaces. Despite
this, claimants to this work abound, many of them
my friends and collaborators.
The final discovery is the stronger version of the
Spin-Statistics theorem and the TCP Theorem. Traditional
wisdom was that this could be proved only in relativistic
quantum field theory. To me it was remarkable that the physical
application of quantum statistics is in non-relativistic
physics and that hence there should be a formalism
of quantum field theory without requiring Lorentz invariance.
