You write a book; time passes. Toward the end of Genius I quote a bit of doggerel by “a young friend” of Richard Feynman:

You are old, Father Feynman …
And your hair has turned visibly grey;
And yet you keep tossing ideas around—
At your age, a disgraceful display!

Where did I find that? I have no memory.

Now comes email from Tom Ferbel, a distinguished particle physicist at the University of Rochester, claiming authorship. Ferbel has been around: Fermilab, CERN, the  Max Planck Institute, SLAC—wherever a big high-energy collider can be found. In 1977 he and Feynman met at a conference on multiparticle dynamics in Kayserberg, France. Feynman was 59—about this old:

Also present was Giuliano Preparata, a 35-year-old firebrand from Padua by way of Rome and Princeton, then working as a theorist at CERN. Apparently Preparata and Feynman got into a shouting match about quantum chromodynamics, then in its heyday, and the hypothetical elementary particles known as gluons. (Gluons are needed to bind quarks. They’re the glue in the strong nuclear force—get it?) For some reason, Preparata really didn’t like gluons.

Ferbel immediately set down his poem (with apologies to Lewis Carroll) while sitting in a bus full of physicists. “An amazing confrontation,” he says in his email. “Their argument had to do with QCD, and eventually led to Preparata’s irate and disgraced departure from the conference. I lost the poem, and was very pleasantly surprised to find it in your book.”

Here then, with Professor Ferbel’s permission, is the poem in its entirety: