27 june 1976
A cottage on Inari lake, 300 km north of the
polar circle.
I dreamt I had just received the Nobel prize. It was vaguely connected to my work on the Yang-Mills infrared problem. The experimental evidence supporting my work was an ancient fish somebody had fished out. The fish was big, black and ugly - looked like the fish we had caught and fried the previous night. I touched it, and a chunk of meat flaked off.
I was very happy - happy because from now on I was free to think as I liked, work hard on whatever I liked; my future as physicist had been secured. Just after the announcement I experienced a surge of anxiety; nobody mentioned it to me, except a young graduate student who came to congratulate me. Finally I asked Bill Bardeen who got the prize. "You, of course" he said offhandedly.
I still remained worried that someone might ask me what I got the prize for; I really did not understand that too well myself. It was hard to see how an ancient fish related to anything I had done.
Everything was very informal; I was a boyish 30 year old, in jeans and a T-shirt, and I did not bother to come to the Stockholm ceremony. Bill agreed with me (we were sitting somewhere on a log in a Finnish forest). "Ever since I got the prize, I have been free to work."
I looked at him. His father got two Nobel prizes, but I could not remember that Bill got one, too.
Instead of me coming to Stockholm, the prize committee came to me, to Inari lake. I talked to them, again sitting on rough hewn tree trunks in the forest. I wondered why they gave the prize to me - was it not so that they always gave them to very old, famous men? They said yes, always old men, but not necessarily famous for their work ("ho, ho" they chuckled as they said that), however, they have changed their policy. They are giving them to young, unknown physicists with promise, and I was the first.
