I met Francis Low as soon as I arrived and he and I worked together. And…

[Q] In fact that was your first paper, first published paper...

... my first published paper was with Francis… was with Francis… Low and unfortunately it was on formalism, which, given my interactions with Viki,  was not something I preferred, but, it was quite useful formalism.

The people at the institute were discussing the Bethe-Salpeter equation for bound states, and of course it could be derived from the Feynman-Stückelberg rules by some generalization that would permit a bound state, and it was fairly obviously correct if one included all the higher terms. But a formal derivation wasn't, hadn't been given and we did that. In the course of that we invented some quite useful bits of formalism, which people have used ever since. But I wasn't terribly proud of it because it was formal; I wanted to do something that really made an improvement in our understanding of physics. I tried to do that... for... Francis and I did that during the... the first term, the spring of ’51. In the fall of ’51, I tried to do something different, actually calculate things, strong coupling or whatever. I played with the idea of a... a classical approximation in quantum field theory, a WKBJ method in quantum field theory and so on. But I didn't really accomplish very much. But one of my problems was that I didn't recognize when I'd done something publishable, and that problem persisted really for years and years and years. I never had any idea what was something new or interesting and what wasn't.