3
The measure of friendship
T were simple. If John Ellis lost at darts, he
had to get the word ‘penguin’ into his next scientific paper. It was
1977, and Ellis and his colleagues were in a pub near the CERN
particle physics laboratory, just outside Geneva. Ellis was playing
against Melissa Franklin, a visiting student. She had to leave before
the end of the game, but another researcher took her place and
sealed the victory. ‘Nevertheless,’ Ellis later said,[1] ‘I felt obligated to
carry out the conditions of the bet.’
That raised the question of how to sneak a penguin into a physics
paper. At the time, Ellis was working on a manuscript that described
how a particular type of subatomic particle – the so-called ‘bottom
quark’ – behaved. As was common in physics, he sketched out a
diagram with arrows and loops showing how the particles would
transition from one state to another. First introduced by Richard
Feynman in 1948, these ‘Feynman diagrams’ had become a popular
tool for physicists. The drawings provided Ellis with the inspiration he
needed. ‘One evening, after working at CERN, I stopped on my way
back to my apartment to visit some friends living in Meyrin where I
smoked some illegal substance,’ he recalled. ‘Later, when I got back
to my apartment and continued working on our paper, I had a sudden
flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins.’
Ellis’s idea would catch on. Since the paper was published, his
‘penguin diagrams’ have been cited thousands of times by other
physicists. Even so, the penguins are nowhere near as widespread
as the figures they are based on. Feynman diagrams would spread
rapidly after their 1948 debut, transforming physics. One of the
reasons the idea sparked was the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey. Its director was J. Robert Oppenheimer,
who’d previously led the US effort to develop the atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer called the institute his ‘intellectual hotel’, bringing in a