I can do that

A fateful conversation in Utrecht, 1971. Later Veltman would claim that the "Harvard mafia" of Glashow and Weinberg had stolen his Nobel prize. For years Veltman's alternative history of the electroweak interactions circulated as a samizdat. He and his former student 't Hooft received their prize in 1999. For more history, see, e.g., here.

Veltman: I do not care what or how, but what we must have is at least one renormalizable theory with massive charged bosons, and whether that looks like Nature is of no concern, those are details that will be fixed later by some model freak ...

’t Hooft: I can do that.

Veltman: What do you say?

’t Hooft: I can do that.

I met Tini Veltman for the first time when I gave a talk at Michigan in the early 90s. I had been at graduate school at Berkeley with his daughter.

Veltman: Where are you now?

Me: At Harvard.

Veltman: Are you proud of dat? (Dutch accent)

Me: I'm just a postdoc.

Veltman: What will you talk about?

Me: The Abbott-Farhi model and gauge-Higgs complementarity.

Veltman: What do you say?

Me: It doesn't work. There is a fermion condensate due to strong coupling.

Veltman: Good. I knew it was crap. But this last part is new.