highlights from maker of patterns

The words maker of patterns had for Hardy a double meaning. Patterns could be made with words as well as with ideas, with books as well as with theorems.
The letters collected in this book record a cycle in the history of the world from 1936 to 1978, from the civil war in Spain to the rise of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. This was a cycle rolling from doom and gloom in the 1930s, to death and disaster in the 1940s, to fear and trembling in the 1950s, to smaller disasters in the 1960s, to recovery and promise in the 1970s.
Soon after I read Watson’s book, I met him in person. I asked him how he could possibly remember the details of the conversations and arguments that he put into his story. He answered, “Oh, that was easy. I wrote a letter every week to my mother in America describing my life in England, and she kept the letters.” I had been writing a letter every week to my parents in England, describing my life in America. That same day I wrote to my mother, urging her to keep the letters. She kept them, giving me the raw material for this book.
I do not have any great discovery like the double helix to describe. The letters record the daily life of an ordinary scientist doing ordinary work. I find them interesting because I had the good fortune to live through extraordinary historical times with an extraordinary collection of friends. Letters are valuable witnesses to history because they are written without hindsight. They describe events as they appeared to the participants at the time. Later memories of the same events may be seriously distorted by hindsight. When I compare my memories with the letters, I see that I not only forget things, I also remember things that never happened.
The details of my work as a scientist are barely mentioned. The neglect of science is mainly due to the fact that my parents were not interested in technical details. I assume that readers of this book will also not be interested in technical details.
I have not yet succeeded in making any new friends. If ever I do need friends, I have no doubt I shall find some on the precipices of Snowdon.
Dirac is very slow and easy to follow; Pars and Besicovitch a bit quicker, but still comfortable; Hardy goes like an avalanche and it is all I can do to keep up with him. One learns about three times as much from Hardy in an hour as from anyone else; it is a testing business keeping the thread of his arguments.
Dirac is the only lecturer who does not break new ground as far as I am concerned, but he suffers from an audience of twenty.
He complained that a river was flowing down his sleeves and out at his boots.
This hospital is a marvellous modern place, reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s “Park Lane Hospital for the Dying” in Brave New World [1932]. Wireless laid on for every bed. Do not worry about me, I shall be out and about by the time you can communicate with me.
Besicovitch told me a grim story about how when he was young in Russia a friend in jest plunged a three-bladed knife into his back, after which he lingered on death’s door for a fortnight.
He always introduces the guests, and escorts them to the door with a low bow, and generally behaves like a landed aristocrat.
I told him a few incipient ideas I had had on the subject, and he was so encouraging that I spent the next two days in a fervour of activity, and actually proved two quite interesting results of which one may be new. This is the way I have always wanted to spend my days, but it is seldom that it really happens.
In 1940 the threat of an invasion had been real, but in 1942 the Germans were heavily engaged in Russia, and nobody took the threat of an invasion seriously.
Both in Britain and in the United States, the governments had a deliberate policy of suppressing information about the killing of Jews, knowing that in both countries the quickest way to lose public support for the war would be to give the impression that we were fighting the war to save the Jews. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt was fighting the war to save the Jews.
also they used to row on the Danube with von Neumann the great topologist, an almost legendary figure now in America.
John Maynard Keynes, then fifty-nine years old,
was effectively running the British economy during World War II. He showed his mastery of economics at three levels, first by becoming wealthy himself, second by making King’s College the wealthiest college in Cambridge, and third by keeping the British economy afloat through the stormy years of war. He died in 1946, worn out by his efforts to manage a fourth even bigger problem, the reconstruction of international economic institutions after the war.
After that war ended, the death of Moseley was recognized as a tragic waste of a rare talent, and the British government decided that in future wars promising young scientists should be kept alive.
Two of my close friends were killed in the last year of the war while I was at Bomber Command. The gross unfairness of the system left me with a permanently bad conscience for having survived.
I wish I had been in London for the air raid; there is nothing that makes me so happy as a display of fireworks.
The Russian people in those days took more comfort from Tolstoy than from Marx.
I asked Littlewood at the meeting on Tuesday, whether he ever had any trouble in his work, to find problems to research upon. This has always seemed to me the most difficult part of the whole business. He made a noncommittal answer. Then yesterday after the lecture he came up to me and said I must not worry about finding problems for research, that research never mixes well with learning. He said that once learning was finished and you get out on top of mathematics, there is a complete abundance of problems; and he had never had any difficulty, nor his pupils either. I was very pleased to know this, and still more pleased that he should have spontaneously talked to me about it with such earnestness.
Last Sunday we had a very interesting talk on Newton by Maynard Keynes [1946]. He is a great expert on Newton and has gone through a vast amount of unpublished work of Newton’s on every subject under the sun. He spoke extremely well, and his conclusions were amazing. The common picture of Newton, as the great analytical mind sifting the evidence and being satisfied with nothing short of mathematical certainty, is completely wrong. He was essentially a magician rather than a scientist, and all his work was inspired by his studies of the old alchemists, metaphysicians, and apocalyptics. It was known already, said Keynes, that Newton was interested in alchemy and the Book of Daniel; but his papers show that he considered all his activities as in the nature of solving ancient riddles rather than discovering new facts.
Another remarkable feature of the talk was Newton’s perseverance: he used to work incessantly from early morning till late at night, month after month and year after year, until he had a breakdown at the age of fifty. After that he gave up work entirely and became a member of society.
After the war, the farmers found the cure for rainy summers. The cure was drying sheds, developed by tobacco farmers in Virginia. The sheds are cheap to build and need to be heated for only a few days to dry a rain-soaked harvest. Drying sheds transformed farming in England from a losing to a profitable business. So far as I know, although we were clever high school kids, none of us ever thought of this simple solution to the farmers’ problem.
He has no bitterness against anybody; I, on the other hand, get all hot with anger when I think of the incredible lack of human sympathy with which the English allowed these persecutions to be hushed up, and now extend so grudging a welcome to the victims.
protest against the treatment of refugees was directed against my father, who had been president of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, the musicians’ trade union, before the war. As president, he had acted vigorously to keep refugee musicians out of Britain and to prevent them from taking jobs away from British musicians.
One of these problems is the cooking of porridge in a shallow saucepan. According to the classical mechanics of viscous fluids, the convection currents should always prevent the porridge from overheating at the bottom. The new theory due to Jeffreys, which is very ingenious, shows that stirring will in general be necessary to avoid burning, if the viscosity of the porridge exceeds 6,000. I hope this may alleviate your domestic problems.
I was always amazed that he took so much trouble to explain these wonders of nature to a single undergraduate.
I was agreeably surprised on Thursday to receive a large envelope stamped Princeton, February 11, 1943, and inside it, lo and behold, “The Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis, by K. Gödel.” This is the first time I have ever been aware, except from an abstract point of view, that a place called America really exists. I have often read about America, but it is quite different when you ask somebody in America to send something to you, and they send it. I have been reading the immortal work (it is only sixty pages long) alternately with The Magic Mountain and find it hard to say which is the better. [Thomas] Mann of course writes better English (or rather the translator does); on the other hand the superiority of the ideas in Gödel just about makes up for that. Five years later I was drinking tea with Gödel at his home in Princeton. He had the reputation of an inscrutable genius, but for me he was always a real and friendly person.
Oskar’s mother is boss of the organisation that brought Kreisel and the others over from Germany. She is responsible for ten thousand young refugees, so she really does know something about it.
There is a two-year gap after this letter. Nothing is said about the purpose of the walk with Oskar Hahn. We walked before breakfast several times to train ourselves for a bigger walk, fifty-five miles from Cambridge to London. We both had homes in London and were finishing our time at Cambridge. Oskar had a problem with his wheelchair, which was heavy and awkward to transport by train. He asked me if I would help him to travel by road, and we came to an agreement. He would carry my heavy suitcase on his wheelchair, and I would help to push the chair when we came to steep hills. The weather was fine for the day of our big walk. We completed the trip in seventeen hours. The war gave us a unique opportunity to do it, because there was almost no traffic on the roads.
I do not know if you have ever been to a congregation of the senate of Cambridge University. To start with, the public orator stands up with an enormous screed of graces to be laid before the senate. In order to get through the screed in a reasonable time, he gabbles the whole thing off as fast as he possibly can, without pausing for breath or for punctuation. After the graces, the conferring of degrees began. Fortunately Oskar came near the beginning, and as soon as he was finished we made an undignified bolt for the exit.
I had killed enough Germans, and I wanted to make peace with the survivors. We all knew that the Germans had committed atrocities, and we had too. The victims who died in the camp at Bergen-Belsen were about as many as those who died in the firestorm at Dresden. I felt some personal responsibility for those who died at Dresden. To reach a tolerably peaceful world, we needed reconciliation more than we needed justice.
very far from moribund.
I have seldom found the Germans so genuinely and obviously happy; a description by the U-boat sailor of what happens when a petrol tanker is torpedoed was given with the most single-minded enthusiasm. It reminded me vividly of the descriptions we used to read at Bomber Command of successful incendiary attacks, and of the elation we felt when such attacks succeeded. It is ironic that when finally enemies meet and come together as friends, they should still be able to entertain each other with such stories.
Now, after going a little further, I am struck by the deep psychological gulf which separates a country like Germany from one like England; here there is no academic and intellectual pessimism but a pessimism which permeates the people’s lives.
A few years later we understood why the attempt by Bomber Command to destroy the German wartime economy had failed. In 1952 Der hochrote Hahn, a book by Hans Rumpf, who had been chief of the German firefighting services throughout the war, was published. The title means “The Flaming Red Rooster.” Before the war, when the plans for Bomber Command were begun, the British made a fundamental strategic mistake. We did trials to measure the effectiveness of high-explosive bombs and firebombs for destroying cities. The trials showed clearly that firebombs were five times as effective, weight for weight, as high explosives. So the decision was made to use firebombs as the primary weapon for destroying Germany. Our bombers were designed and built to carry firebombs in big quantity. High-explosive bombs were a small fraction of the payload. Our attacks were intended to destroy the German war industry by fire. Hans Rumpf understood that there was a simple way to defeat these attacks. The defense could afford to be selective. He put heavy concentrations of firefighters to protect essential military buildings and machinery and let the rest of the buildings burn. As a result, the essential factories in a destroyed city lost only about six weeks of production on the average. The workers were protected by adequate shelters, and the loss of their homes did not stop them from working. The synthetic rubber factory at Huls was a good example. It was repeatedly attacked by Bomber Command with heavy loads of firebombs and lost only a few weeks of production from start to finish. When we saw it in 1947, it looked as good as new.
The choice of Cornell for my first year as a student in America was lucky in two ways. It was lucky professionally, because I fell by chance into a group of exceptionally bright people at an exceptionally exciting moment when they were attacking exceptionally important problems at the cutting edge of science. It was lucky socially, because I was living in Ithaca, a small town with a friendly atmosphere, where people helped and trusted each other, and I found there the warm welcome for which small-town America was famous.
Bethe is an odd figure, large and clumsy with an exceptionally muddy old pair of shoes. He gives the impression of being clever and friendly but rather a caricature of a professor; he was second in command at Los Alamos, so he must be a first-rate organiser as well.
He said at a seminar the other day that he considered the present situation in physics the most exciting there had been since the great days of 1925–30 [when Bethe had been in Munich]; this attitude makes him an ideal disseminator of knowledge and is highly contagious.
Feynman is a man for whom I am developing a considerable admiration; he is the brightest of the young theoreticians here and is the first example I have met of that rare species, the native American scientist.
I am being taken in Feynman’s car, which will be great fun if we survive.
His most valuable contribution to physics is as a sustainer of morale; when he bursts into the room with his latest brain wave and proceeds to expound it with lavish sound effects and waving about of the arms, life at least is not dull.
I found this most enjoyable and decided perhaps I was not so immune as I thought from the common disease of patriotism.
Bethe said that only because of the steel shortage is any nuclear physics worth mentioning done in the United States. This may well be true; the most outstanding experiments in the world are at present being done at Bristol by Powell with no apparatus more elaborate than a microscope and a photographic plate.
Cecil Powell, and his team of sharp-eyed ladies scanning photographic plates with powerful microscopes, discovered particles stopping in the plates with other particles starting where the first ones stopped. This proved that there are two kinds of mesons, later given the names pions and muons, the pions interacting strongly and the muons weakly with ordinary matter. This discovery was a big step forward in the new science of particle physics.
Oppenheimer moved from Berkeley to Princeton in 1947. He invited a group of young physicists to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with the intention of working with them. He hoped to resume his career as an active research physicist after the interruption caused by the war. This hope was never fulfilled. He remained heavily involved in government business and public affairs. He could never again give his full attention to research. As director of the institute, he helped the young physicists as a listener and a critic but never as a collaborator. He did not eat and talk with us at lunch every day as Bethe did at Cornell. He never sat down at his desk doing detailed calculations. I showed him my work to discuss it after it was finished, not while it was in progress. At the institute I learned more from my young colleagues than I did from Oppenheimer.
All this shows how fundamentally right was the idea that made me change from mathematics to physics, in spite of many discouragements. I have done nothing in the last two months that you could call clever or difficult; nothing one-tenth as hard as my fellowship thesis; but because the problems I am now dealing with are public problems and all the theoretical physicists have been racking their brains over them for ten years with negligible results, even the most modest contributions are at once publicised and applauded. If ever I should have the luck to do something clever in this field, I should have to be careful not to have my head turned.
A new period in physics started with the Columbia University experiments last summer which for the first time contradicted the existing quantum theory outside the nucleus. The first step was taken by Bethe when he showed how the theory could be extended to explain the Columbia results. My calculations of last term were part of the detailed carrying out of this extension. Then there was another big step in November when Julian Schwinger at Cambridge, Mass., produced a formally unified theory including Bethe’s work and covering the whole of nonnuclear physics. This Schwinger theory is now generally recognised as correct, at least to a much higher degree of approximation than the old theory. It is rather like the step from special to general relativity; the new theory, although in principle very much superior to the old, only gives exceedingly small differences when applied to practical problems.
Having a new theory at our disposal, the great question is: will it succeed in making sense of nuclear forces, where the old theory so lamentably failed?
He has a type of mind rare among native American physicists, interested in all branches of science and especially biology, and looking on physics more as a hobby than a job.
We had recently a package of physics journals from Japan, which have caused a sensation because they have done such a lot of first-rate work in isolation from the rest of the world.
What makes the story amusing is that the people at California have been making hundreds of mesons a day for several weeks and looking furiously through their microscopes to try to find them in the photographic film; but they didn’t see any because they were not developing the film properly. Fortunately [Eugenio] Lattes, one of Powell’s team, happened to be on a visit to Berkeley, and he told them that the films should be soaked for half an hour instead of for four minutes, and when they did this, lo and behold, there the mesons were.
Lawrence was supreme as a machine-builder and organizer but not so good as a scientist. His competitors were amused that he won the race to produce mesons but needed the help of Lattes from Bristol to see what he had done.
The “European situation” here means the fear that the rising population of Europe would be unable to feed itself. This fear was particularly strong in 1948 in England and in Germany. The expected disaster never happened, partly because birth rates remained lower than expected and partly because the Green Revolution made food production higher than expected.
Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality.
As Feynman says, anyone who has been happily married once cannot long remain single, and so yesterday we were discussing his new problem, this time again a girl in New Mexico with whom he is desperately in love. This time the problem is not tuberculosis, but the girl is a Catholic. You can imagine all the troubles this raises, and if there is one thing Feynman could not do to save his soul, it is to become a Catholic himself.
our Richard Feynman, who always works on his own and has his own private version of quantum theory, has been attacking the same problem as Schwinger from a different direction and has now come out with a roughly equivalent theory, reaching many of the same ideas independently.
The event which caused the heart-searching in the spring of 1948 was the decision of the United States to carry out the Marshall Plan. The plan gave money to Western European states to revive their economies. The crucial economy to be revived was West Germany. This meant a switch from the postwar policy of disarming Germany to a policy of rearming Germany. It meant recognizing West Germany as an equal partner in the military defense of Western Europe. It meant giving up hope of agreement with the Soviet Union about the political future of Europe. The chief architect of the plan was George Kennan, then working in the State Department as adviser to Secretary of State George Marshall. Kennan later became my friend and colleague as professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
The revolutionary thing about the atomic bomb is not that it is so lethal but that it is so cheap.
What Morrison stressed was that no power on earth could maintain five hundred Tinians, by any stretch of the imagination; but one Tinian with five hundred atomic B-29s would be not at all impossible.
The reason that everyone is so enormously pleased with this work of Tomonaga is partly political.
If the scientists can say that even in this chosen field of physics America was anticipated, and indeed by a member of the much-despised race of Japanese, this will be a strong card to play against nationalistic policies. Apart from these considerations, the flowering of physics in present-day Japan is a wonderful demonstration of the resilience of the human spirit and is admired and welcomed for its own sake.
It was a most enjoyable drive, and one could see most of what was to be seen of the scenery without stopping to explore; the only regret I have is that in this way I saw less of Feynman than I might have done.
He is very good at getting on with people, and as we came West, he altered his voice and expressions unconsciously to fit his surroundings, until he was saying “I don’t know noth’n” like the rest of them.
To walk through the centre of this city makes a very fine object lesson in the mutability of human affairs.
I tell you about this rarefied flirtation that has been going on across three thousand miles of ocean, so that you should know who this girl is if I ever invite her for a holiday in England.
I would spread the cloths under your feet, But I am poor, and have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.
But it still remains a strong example in favour of Toynbee’s thesis that in the long run religion counts for more in human history than any other single factor. Comparing the achievements of the settlers in Utah and California, who were building their civilisations at the same time, one feels that Utah achieved greatness while California had greatness thrust upon it.
On the third day of the journey a remarkable thing happened; going into a sort of semistupor as one does after forty-eight hours of bus riding, I began to think very hard about physics, and particularly about the rival radiation theories of Schwinger and Feynman. Gradually my thoughts grew more coherent, and before I knew where I was, I had solved the problem that had been in the back of my mind all this year, which was to prove the equivalence of the two theories. Moreover, since each of the two theories is superior in certain features, the proof of equivalence furnished a new form of the Schwinger theory which combines the advantages of both.
My tremendous luck was to be the only person who had spent six months listening to Feynman expounding his new ideas at Cornell and then spent six weeks listening to Schwinger expounding his new ideas in Ann Arbor. They were both explaining the same experiments, which measure radiation interacting with atoms and electrons. But the two ways of explaining the experiments looked totally different, Feynman drawing little pictures and Schwinger writing down complicated equations. The flash of illumination on the Greyhound bus gave me the connection between the two explanations, allowing me to translate one into the other. As a result, I had a simpler description of the explanations, combining the advantages of Schwinger and Feynman.
A short ride from Philadelphia, across rolling downs and meadows, brought us finally to Princeton, which is a pleasant little old town, entirely supported by the university, and not in the least American-looking.
Tomorrow will be exactly a year since I landed. What a tremendous success the year has been! Who would have dreamed that I should be coming to Princeton with the thought not of learning but of teaching Oppenheimer about physics? I had better be careful.
In 1946 he started a new English-language journal, Progress in Theoretical Physics and succeeded in publishing it in the chaotic conditions of postwar Japan. The early issues of the journal contained amazing work done by Japanese physicists during the war when they were totally isolated from the rest of the world.
They are all struggling to understand the Schwinger radiation theory. I have not told them that I have been struggling to supersede it; that would be bad manners.
After a brief visit to Cornell to collect my belongings, I settled down to work at writing up the physical theories I mentioned in the last letter. I was for five days stuck in my rooms, writing and thinking with a concentration which nearly killed me.
To arrive at the frontiers of physics is like breaking through a crust, after which one finds plenty of room to move in a lot of directions.
Fundamentally, I have fallen in love with the most modern part of physics and cannot now leave go of it. During the next five years, there is a gambler’s chance of my doing something substantial in this field, but only if I give it a lot of my time and attention. The important thing is to use this chance while it is here. By the time I am forty, the game will be played out. I have quite a high opinion of my ability to do most things, but one thing I know I can’t do, and that is to work like Einstein in isolation and produce epoch-making work.
One thing which I must always keep in mind to prevent me from getting too conceited is that I was extraordinarily lucky over the piece of work I have just finished. The work consisted of a unification of radiation theory, combining the advantageous features of the two theories put forward by Schwinger and Feynman. It happened that I was the only young person in the world who had worked with the Schwinger theory from the beginning and had also had long personal contact with Feynman at Cornell, so I had a unique opportunity to put the two together. I should have had to be rather stupid not to have put the two together. It is for the sake of opportunities like this that I want to spend five more years poor and free rather than as a well-paid civil servant.
However, my feeling about that too is that I shall have enough of my life being a professor and I need not be in any hurry to start.
There is no doubt that the great fault of American science is overconcentration on fashionable fields. So long as there are in England a lot of odd groups of people working on odd things, they have nothing to fear from American competition.
I will try to explain why this is baffling. In the first place, there is no question of Gödel suffering from deterioration of intellect; he understands general relativity and its position in physics as well as anybody and knows quite well what he is about. He has found some results which will certainly be of interest to specialists in relativity. On the other hand, it is clear to most people that general relativity is one of the least promising fields that one can think of for research at the present time. The theory is from a physical point of view completely definite and completely in agreement with all experiments. Most of the work that has been done on it recently has been done by mathematicians who were interested in the mathematics of it rather than the physics, and this work was not of much value to mathematics and still less to physics. The best papers on the subject in recent years have been those of Einstein, who has done some good things, but it was generally agreed that he was continuing work on it more as a hobby for his old age than in the hope of important new discoveries. It is the general view of physicists that the theory will remain much as it is until there are either some new experiments to upset it or a development from the direction of quantum theory to include it.
Fortunately, the tricks that we use to make hydrogen bombs explode are quite different from the tricks that Nature uses to make stars explode. Secrecy is a problem for astronomers only if they are observing man-made objects close to the earth.
Niebuhr has the reputation of being gloomy, but I think to anyone who has faced facts squarely, his remarks were exceptionally cheerful.
Oppenheimer shocked me when he arrived by taking a semidefeatist attitude to the whole business and showing complete lack of enthusiasm for a lot of the things I consider most hopeful of fruitful advances.
My young colleagues are unwilling to join me, as they are obsessed with the American idea that you have to work from nine to five even when the work is theoretical physics.
Feynman and I really understand each other; I know that he is the one person in the world who has nothing to learn from what I have written, and he doesn’t mind telling me so. That afternoon Feynman produced more brilliant ideas per square minute than I have ever seen anywhere before or since. In the evening I mentioned that there were just two problems for which the finiteness of the theory remained to be established; both problems are well-known and feared by physicists, since many long and difficult papers running to fifty pages and more have been written about them, trying unsuccessfully to make the older theories give sensible answers to them. When I mentioned this fact, Feynman said, “We’ll see about this,” and proceeded to sit down and in two hours, before our eyes, obtain finite and sensible answers to both problems. It was the most amazing piece of lightning calculation I have ever witnessed, and the results prove, apart from some unforeseen complication, the consistency of the whole theory. The two problems were the scattering of light by an electric field, and the scattering of light by light.
The Harkness Foundation was generously supporting me as a student in America. When I accepted their Commonwealth Fellowship, I solemnly promised to return to England for at least two years after the fellowship. The promise was intended to ensure that the fellowship should not be used as a stepping-stone for permanent emigration of English students to America. If I accepted the Columbia job, I would clearly be breaking my promise and violating the trust of the foundation.
On Tuesday I gave the second of my seminar talks, and Oppy interrupted constantly with criticisms, some relevant and some nonsensical, so that the audience was quite bewildered; as far as I could, I went steadily on and avoided argument. The next morning, the same audience without Oppenheimer asked me to give them another seminar on the same stuff, this time without interruptions, and so I did. To me, the interruptions provided many valuable new ideas.
The millionaire that Cécile brought to the institute was Léon Motchane, a man of many talents. He had achieved fame in three separate careers, as a mathematician, as an entrepreneur, and as an active leader of the French resistance. Cécile’s plan, that Motchane could be cajoled into building a comparable institution in France, succeeded brilliantly. Within a few years, Motchane had helped to found two institutions in France, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette with himself as director, and the Les Houches summer school with Cécile as director. The IHÉS is a smaller version of the Princeton institute, housed in a beautiful château in the village of Bures on the southern edge of Paris. The Les Houches summer school is a high-level school of theoretical physics, meeting for six weeks every summer in the French Alps, attracting first-rate teachers and students from all over the world. Both institutions are still flourishing sixty years later. Cécile kept her promise and invited me to teach at Les Houches in 1954. I taught the brightest class of students that I ever encountered. The brightest of the bright was Georges Charpak, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1992.
Bethe is a great and good man, and I wrote to him and told him so. The tact and strategy which he used, to pull the opinion of the institute onto my side, could not have been more effective.
It seems somehow out of proportion that to clear up a minor muddle in one branch of physics should be such a serious matter. What is even more strange is that I find myself giving these seminars, without notes or preparation, with Wigner and such people in the audience, and without feeling nervous. A year ago this would have been completely unthinkable.
FOUR WOMEN and ten men were young physicist members at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1948–49. That was a record year for female members. The 28 percent fraction of female physicists has never been equalled in the subsequent sixty-seven years.
The day after the last of my talks, I found in my mailbox a little handwritten note saying, “Nolo contendere. R.O.” This was a typically erudite statement from Oppenheimer, telling me that he accepted my arguments. It is the Latin phrase used by lawyers to say that they do not dispute an opinion. It was his formal notice of surrender.
In the Russian translation of Dirac’s book Quantum Mechanics, published as long ago as 1935, there is a preface inserted which says, “Although this book contains numerous errors and fallacies which are in contradiction with the well-known principles of dialectical materialism, nevertheless it contains so much that will be of value to the judicious student that the editors have felt themselves justified in publishing it without correction or alteration.”
What I did in my talk was to take a simple example of the field theory and treat it with the new methods. In no time at all one could see that the point particles were behaving as if they had a finite size, which is just what one wants them to do, and that the forces between them were sensible. Oppenheimer was extremely pleased with this and produced a paper which he had written in 1941, in which he had written down exactly the same formulae as I had for the nuclear force. In his paper these formulae were guesses, based on physical intuition; and now they can at least roughly be derived from a consistent theory. The whole thing is still in a preliminary stage and may not turn out as well as it promises. If it goes, it will give me plenty to think about and enough material for another big paper before long.
Probably the reason for our disagreement is largely a matter of history. Oppenheimer has spent all his life seeing the field theory fail on one problem after another, whereas I have grown up during one of its brief periods of success.
At the end of the war, the contact between the government and the scientific people was practically nonexistent; there were a lot of scientists who were clamouring loudly for internationalization of atomic energy, without being very specific about the methods for achieving it; and the government on the whole was not inclined to take them seriously. In this atmosphere, it was largely the personal persistence of Oppenheimer, who walked uninvited into the State Department and pleaded with the officials to do something about it, that resulted in the government accepting the idea of international control. He succeeded in winning and maintaining the confidence of these officials, and avoided on the one hand giving the appearance of being a fanatic and on the other hand accepting any essential compromise on the main issues. It is unfortunately only too easy to think of many scientists who in his position would have made either the one or the other mistake.
Later on Feynman himself spoke on his own work and created so much uproar with his clowning that the audience voted him twice the usual time for his talk.
It was always Oppenheimer’s aim, and one which at least partially was achieved, that the American government and people should be honestly convinced of the desirability of handing over their atomic weapons to an international authority. Whether such an international authority could exist, now or in the foreseeable future, was a separate problem and one which only history could answer. But he felt that by making a sincere and extended stand for international control, the American government and he himself could to some extent expiate the guilt of Hiroshima and could create a tradition which would endure like Lincoln’s to influence the minds of future generations.
When I arrived he was very excited because he had just got his first batch of electron-sensitive photographic plates from the Eastman Kodak company; these plates are a great advance on anything previously known, but are still very hard to make and to handle. The first such plates were made by the English Kodak people at Harrow, but they are so temperamental that they do not usually survive being flown across the Atlantic; that is why Powell at Bristol has been enjoying a monopoly of them for some months.
Teller is a Hungarian, being one of the famous four, the others being Wigner, Szilard, and von Neumann, who grew up around the same time in one particular district in Budapest, and who are now all in outstanding positions in the United States.
Teller to me has always been something of an enigma; he has done all kinds of interesting things in physics but never the same thing for long, and he seems to do physics for fun rather than for glory.
Mrs. Bethe is thirty-two, a tall good-looking young woman and a very efficient person. When they were at Los Alamos, it is said that she contributed more to the success of the project than he, since she was in charge of the living arrangements while he was only doing physics.
The dances at the institute were square dances organized by John Tukey, then a young professor at Princeton University, later famous as one of the founders of computer science. He was an expert square dancer and knew how to call the dances, so that an international and multilingual group of institute members could catch the rhythm and keep in step.
About half an hour before I was due to start, I came in and had a look around this place, and the sight of it made me so nervous that none of my previous agony at Chicago and elsewhere could faintly compare with it. For that last half-hour I was in a terrible state, sitting in a chair and sweating all over and feeling I could not even stand up. I was seriously considering sending a message to the chairman of the meeting that I had been taken ill and would not be able to talk. I do not know why it happened like this; perhaps I was worn down by the cumulative effect of the last two months; I had originally intended to write out my talk in full, but from laziness and lack of time had not done this and was equipped only with my usual rough notes. I somehow lived through that half-hour and heard the clock strike the time I was due to start. I staggered into the auditorium and up to the platform while Rabi announced my name and history. As he finished, there was a hushed silence, and I felt ready to collapse completely, but mysteriously the instinct of showmanship triumphed over the instinct of terror. Without thinking, I jumped up onto the platform instead of walking round by the steps. Once I was up on the platform, I began to talk, and when next I paused to consider my situation, I was halfway through my speech and feeling fine. I went a little too fast and finished with some minutes of my time to go, but as it was half-past five and the end of a long day, this was a fault in the right direction. After the talk, Oppy came up and shook me by the hand and said I had done very well, and so did various other people whose praise is more to be valued because it was spontaneous.
When he came home from this trip, Rabi went to see Truman and had a chat with him about the world situation. He found Truman in an extraordinarily optimistic mood. This was so overpowering that he has almost become an optimist himself.
Oppy has been completely absorbed in this. He is the one scientist to whom the senators and people are prepared to listen with respect, and so he has a tremendous responsibility. He has fought with all his strength for the freedom of science from political pressures, which is the fundamental issue at stake in the present fight over David Lilienthal. As a physicist, Oppy has his limitations, but as a politician he is really outstanding.
In the many volumes that have been written about Oppenheimer, primary emphasis is always given to the security hearings of 1954 which resulted in the loss of his clearance. He becomes the central figure in a tragedy, and the loss of the clearance becomes the central event in his life. He himself did not look at things this way. He always said that the security hearings were not a tragedy but a farce. Much more important in his view were the nine years, from 1945 to 1953, when he enjoyed enormous respect inside the American government as well as in the world outside. During these years he used his unrivaled influence to drive American nuclear and military policies in directions that he considered wise.
In one of your letters you thank me, because I write to you openly about Verena and the other important events of my life. I think the reason I write so openly is just this, that all these adventures in this strange new world are still somewhat unreal to me, and in writing to you about them, I bring them in contact with my familiar world and lend them some of your reality.
Hilde and I stayed in touch by letter for sixty years after that. I sent her family news, and she sent me poetic meditations.
The last I saw of her in the flesh was at our parting at Lörrach in 1949, when I walked over the border into the paradise of Switzerland, and she walked back into the desolation of Germany.
Pauli was famous for his strong opinions and his sharp tongue. Pauli told how Schwinger had come to Zürich and explained the new American physics clearly, not like the nonsense that Dyson had been writing. At that moment Fierz pushed me forward and said, “Professor Pauli, please allow me to introduce you to Professor Dyson.” Pauli replied, “Oh, that does not matter, he does not understand German,” and continued his discourse. Afterwards Pauli always treated me with great respect, and we became good friends.
I now have another letter from Sir John Cockcroft (director of the British Atomic Energy Establishment) offering me the Fuchs job (chief theorist) and telling me plainly that I am a bad boy for leaving England and taking the Cornell post.
While I was in Birmingham, I had published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London a paper explaining the new ideas which I believed would establish once and for all the mathematical consistency of quantum electrodynamics. When I published that paper, I believed much more, that the same ideas would provide a firm mathematical basis for the theory of nuclear particles. I believed that I was on the way to constructing an exact theory that would encompass the whole of particle physics. In Zürich I discussed my ideas with Pauli, and Pauli remained sceptical. Pauli said he could not prove me wrong, but he had a strong feeling that the crucial high-frequency series that I assumed to be convergent would actually diverge. One afternoon in Zürich, while I was walking with Pauli, I suddenly saw that his intuition was right. I found a simple physical argument showing why the series could not converge. I explained the argument to Pauli, and he said, “I told you so.” I felt happy rather than sad to see my grand program so easily demolished. It was far better for me to have found the flaw in the program myself than to have other people find it later. Now I knew that the program was dead, I could write a short paper explaining why it failed and thanking Pauli for his help. My scientific reputation would be intact. I could recover from this failure and find new problems to work on at Cornell.
The Royal Society has a longer history and a ceremonial gravitas which the American National Academy lacks.
When I was a child in Winchester, she lived like a respectable proper English lady, careful not to let her friends know that she was running a birth control clinic in the town. When I was a teenager and we moved to London, she became my intellectual companion. We spent long hours together at the art galleries and museums and botanical gardens of London. We remained close until she died at ninety-four in 1975.
We had intended to go through Canada, which is the quickest and quietest way. However, we ran into trouble at the border. They would not admit Verena and Katrin into Canada because their papers are not in order. When this was discovered, we were in Canada, since the office is on the Canadian side of the bridge. So the officials had to give us an official order of deportation to get us back into the United States. That is the first time we have ever been deported. It makes us feel very distinguished.
It was only because these people have spent four years building a big machine that they suddenly had the idea how to do it better. Such ideas do not come by abstract thinking about the problem.
My course is Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, also on a more elementary level than last year’s work. This should be an interesting course to teach, the first introduction to quantum theory being the critical step in the education of every physicist, the first time the students meet new and difficult ideas, the first time they are forced to think hard. Usually they go through a stage of complete confusion and depression as a result of meeting the quantum theory. Probably this is unavoidable. It will be fun to see how it goes.
By an unhappy coincidence of which I was unaware, I arrived as a professor at Cornell in September 1951, just at the time when Edward Teller and Stanislav Ulam discovered the trick that makes hydrogen bombs feasible. The secret program to develop hydrogen bombs at Los Alamos changed suddenly from a leisurely stroll to a furious sprint. Hans Bethe was called in to help with the design of the Ivy Mike thermonuclear device, which was built in a hurry, tested on November 1, 1952, and exploded with a yield of ten megatons.
For Fermi, the numerical agreement meant nothing. He said politely that our calculations were worthless because they were not based on a well-defined theory. His intuition told him that our description of nuclear processes by a set of equations borrowed from quantum electrodynamics had missed something essential. Fermi died two years later, long before the missing ingredient in our description was discovered. The missing ingredient was quarks. I returned from Chicago to Ithaca to tell the students the sad news that our whole program of meson scattering calculations was a grand illusion.
It still seems miraculous to me that our makeshift theory, which we expected to be quickly superseded, is still alive. After sixty years of rigorous testing, Nature still dances to our tune.
It came as a great relief to have him born in a country that gave him citizenship as a birthright, even if he was an illegitimate child of two aliens.
My hopes were quickly crushed. Within two years, von Neumann was dying of cancer, and the institute had decided to close the project down. I was the only member of the institute faculty who considered the closing to be a disastrous mistake. Oppenheimer was not interested in keeping the project alive, and I could do nothing to save it.
At that time Einstein was still alive, but he was never interested in the Computer Project. Einstein was also uninterested in particle physics. Since the young physicists were mostly working on particle physics, Einstein took no part in our activities. We saw him each morning walk from his home to the institute, and each afternoon walk back, but we never spoke to him.
For the general public who are not expert in classical languages, the most striking aspect of the Pylos discovery is the fact that the word tripod is preserved all the way from Linear B to modern English. For the experts in classical languages, the most striking fact is that the Linear B word ketero, meaning “four,” is closer to the Latin quattuor than to the classical Greek tetra. For this word, the Latin language has deeper roots than the Greek.
You probably have seen in the papers that Robert Oppenheimer got officially reelected to his job as director by unanimous vote of the trustees. So our anxieties about this are over. Everything here is now calm and back to normal. I have been spending the evenings reading the full transcript of the testimony at the hearings. It is a book of 992 pages of small print. I find it so enthralling that I don’t mind the small print. It lays everybody’s soul bare.
Esther is fond of the Alice in Wonderland style of conversation. This is a conversation which is brought to an abrupt end by a remark which is at the same time entirely logical and entirely absurd. A good example is this. Esther, “I need a new head.” Freeman, “What do you need it for?” Esther, “For my neck.”
All through the years of war and political hostility, some personal contact between Soviet and Western scientists was maintained. Some senior scientists from the USSR were permitted to travel to the West on official business, and a smaller number of Western scientists were admitted to the USSR.
To bring in a few extra dollars, I am translating Russian papers for the American Physical Society. Yesterday I did one written by our friend Pontecorvo. He is certainly not the great genius that the newspapers picture him to be. What he does is solid and sound and useful and a bit dull.
In my opinion, the whole fusion enterprise made a strategic mistake around the year 1960, when it moved too soon from exploratory science to large-scale engineering. After 1960 all the fusion projects were building big machines with a few fixed designs, intended to demonstrate economic production of fusion power. The big machines failed to be competitive, and there was no support for scientific experiments trying out radically different designs on a smaller scale. I was lucky not to become trapped in these fruitless attempts. Instead, I found more exciting challenges in the field of fission energy.
Only by knowing the language can a visitor see below the surface of an alien society. The Russian language is the key to the Russian soul.
The TRIGA differed from other reactors because it was designed with safety as the primary consideration. Other reactors relied on engineering for safety. The TRIGA relied only on laws of nature.
During this week I found time to finish my spin wave papers. I feel quite light-headed after five months with spin waves chasing each other around in my brain.
I have strong opinions about space travel, and I give them to you for what they are worth. Technically there is no doubt it is possible with existing equipment (given five or ten years for building and testing the machinery) to transport a group of people to the moon with enough supplies to last a year or two, and bring them back alive. The weight of oxygen needed to supply one man for a year is surprisingly small, less than the weight of food he will eat; if he stays longer than a year, he will grow plants which produce both food and oxygen. Meteorites; the risk of being hit is very small, except for the very small particles of dust which can be stopped by a thin roof. The question how soon people will go to the moon depends on how much money and effort the human race decides to spend on it. It will certainly be expensive (estimates vary between ten and one hundred million pounds) and not immediately profitable. I believe it will go fast because of the psychological situation in Russia and America. Each side is convinced it has to get ahead of the other in such enterprises. It is probably true that to have an observation post on the moon with a fair-size telescope would be a military advantage for the side which gets there first. I believe the job will be done, by both Russia and America, within the next twenty years, perhaps much sooner. And once the first trip is made, there will be no end to it, it will become as commonplace as flying the Atlantic.
Hermann Weyl was the only person at the institute with world-class stature both as a mathematician and as a physicist. He was largely responsible for making symmetry-groups the central concept of modern particle physics.
I started taking Russian classes at the university, and these I am enjoying very much. It is fun to be a student again and sit with boys and be scolded for making grammatical mistakes.
I have sent in my application for the Russian visa and was happy to find on the application form I must identify myself as Freeman Georgievitch, as in the old Russian novels.
I am amazed to find what an exaggerated reputation I have in Russia. This is partly because I am the one who reads and reviews their papers. They treat me with enormous respect. And they have evidently read what I write, not only in the Physical Review but also in the Scientific American and even the obituary of Weyl in Nature.
You may like to hear the sequel to my quarrel with the AEC. A few days after my previous letter to you, the news came from Washington that I am cleared. But I am only cleared for one project, which is the most secret of all the things General Atomic is doing. The AEC has a logical explanation for this absurd situation. Their regulations say that secret information may be given to a foreigner only when this is necessary to the national defense. Obviously, if the information is not vital military information, it cannot be necessary to the national defense to give it to me. Therefore I can have the important military secrets but not the unimportant civilian secrets. It is the craziest joke I ever heard.
After Edward Teller and I and the other summer visitors departed from La Jolla, the people who remained at General Atomic reversed the decision we had made in July. They decided to go ahead with the safe reactor project using my design instead of Teller’s. The main difference between the two designs was that Teller used engineering tricks to make the reactor safe while I used laws of nature. A reactor emerged within a year from my ideas. The company designed it, built it, licensed it, and sold it, all within two years, a time scale that would be unthinkable today.
Nuclear engineering requires more chemistry than physics. The physical ideas that I contributed were simple, while the chemical ideas that Massoud Simnad supplied were complicated and brilliant. The essential trick that made the reactor safe was to load the fuel heavily with hydrogen in a chemical form that remained stable at high temperatures.
circumlocutions.
Bengt Strömgren, a world leader in astronomy. I wanted our School of Natural Sciences to include astronomy as well as physics. Oppenheimer agreed to invite him, and he came in 1957. He was outstanding as an observer as well as a theorist. In his office at the institute he had a little machine of his own design, a personal computer before personal computers existed. He observed A stars in the sky and measured their ages by accurate measurements of brightness in four colors. A stars are bright stars that are easy to measure accurately. He put the data for each star into his machine. The machine then calculated its orbit around the center of the galaxy and deduced the place where it was born. After he had plotted the birthplaces of a few hundred stars, he could see that the births at any time fell into a spiral pattern, and the spiral moved around the galaxy as the time of birth advanced. So the births of the A stars revealed the past history of the spiral arms of the galaxy. This was the most elegant piece of observational astronomy that I ever saw. It was all done on Strömgren’s desk top with a machine costing a few hundred dollars.
Now let me explain briefly what has happened. An old friend of mine from Cambridge days has been at the institute for the last year and a half. While I was away in La Jolla and Los Alamos, he and Verena have fallen in love and decided to run away together. Verena came to Aspen to tell me this, and to make a harmonious and dignified end to our marriage.
will obtain a divorce as soon as possible, and I will not under any circumstances ask her to come back to me as a wife. I hope she will come back frequently as a friend and as a mother. Later I will write in more detail about our plans for the future. Just now I want only to make some general remarks about the past. First, about myself. Please do not offer me your sympathy or your pity. I have been happy in this marriage, and I have no regrets now it is over. It has enriched my life in many ways, and this enrichment is permanent. Second, about Verena. You can blame her for what she has done. But I do not. I consider that she has fulfilled her obligation to me, by bearing me two fine children, by caring for all of us through the difficult years when the babies were small and money was short, and by loving me faithfully for seven years. She leaves me now just when our family life is getting to be easy and comfortable, the children soon to be all at school, the finances ample, and a beautiful house to live in. What she has done may be crazy, but it is not irresponsible. I believe that she has earned her freedom, that she is doing the right thing in following her own star wherever it leads. I
The leader of the experimental work was a third Chinese called Chien Shiung Wu who is also exceedingly good. The idea of the experiments is to test the possibility that a spinning particle may carry a definite distinction between its North and South Poles. That is to say, suppose you have a particle spinning in a definite sense (say clockwise) around a north-south axis, and the particle emits an electron, is it possible that the electron will come out with different probability along the north and the south directions? All the theories of the last thirty years assumed that this was impossible. Until Yang and Lee, everybody thought that so obvious that it did not need to be tested. Now the Wu experiment shows an enormous difference between North and South, so big that it could not have been missed by anybody who had looked for it. This is an important breakthrough, and we are all happy about it.
Imme obtained a visa that allowed her to work in America for two years before returning to Germany. When she arrived in New York, Kreisel came with Verena to meet her at the boat. Imme assumed that this gentleman who came to the boat was Freeman Dyson. I did not meet her until I returned home from Aspen in February 1957, two weeks after her arrival in America. When she arrived, she had no warning that she was walking into a family crisis.
I feel like a man who has been condemned to death and led before the firing squad, has heard the order to fire and the report of the guns, and then discovered that all the cartridges were blanks and that he is still alive and well. He walks away from the scene of execution with a light heart, the earth is still beautiful, and the problems of life can never seem so frightening again. So much for myself.
But he wanted to have her love without the inconvenience and responsibility of acknowledging her publicly. So she has to suffer the misery of being separated from the children and still within reach. For this I despise him and consider him unworthy of her. I do not know how things are with them now, nor do I care. She is still living with him and will continue to do so for some time, but I think it is rather a question of faute de mieux.
It is just a relief not to keep up this solemn pretence of infallibility anymore.
Are you working on a problem or are you just hunting? You know that I do not know anything about PHYSICS but I am interested in what my father does because I am very very proud of you. (I know that you are very clever, nice, and that I love you.)
One name was conspicuously absent in the announcement of the Nobel Prize. Chien Shiung Wu did not share it. She had done at least an equal share of the work. Like Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Burnell, she made a discovery that would certainly have won her the prize if she had not been a woman. Chien Shiung Wu never complained. She shared the attitude of Jocelyn Burnell, the discoverer of pulsars, the rapidly pulsing radio sources that turned out to be rotating neutron stars. Jocelyn was recently asked by a student whether she was annoyed by this lack of recognition. Jocelyn replied, “Oh no, I feel much better when people ask me why I didn’t get the prize, rather than asking me why I did get it.”
FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR 1958–59 I took a leave of absence from the Insitute for Advanced Study to work at the General Atomic laboratory in La Jolla on Project Orion. Project Orion was a wild dream, to change the course of human history by flying into space on a grand scale, using our huge stockpile of nuclear bombs for a better purpose than murdering people. We were a bunch of young people who shared the dream. We believed we could actually build a bomb-propelled spaceship with a thousand-ton payload and fly with it to Mars and to the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. We imagined ourselves cruising around the solar system with our ship and exploring the planets and moons, just as Charles Darwin cruised with the good ship Beagle around the earth exploring the continents and islands. The dream lasted as a real possibility for about a year. In that year we worked out a detailed design for the ship. We convinced ourselves that it was technically possible to survive the thousands of nuclear explosions that it would take to propel it. We persuaded the U.S. government to give us money to explore the possibilities. After the first year, two facts became clear. First, the government would support the project as a research venture but not as a real space mission. Second, the radioactive fallout from the bombs would contaminate the environment to an extent that was rapidly becoming unacceptable. After that year, the project continued to do good technical work, but the dream of a real voyage faded. I went back to my earth-bound job in Princeton and kept in touch with the project only as an occasional visitor.
As a result of my reputation for being ready and willing to work on all kinds of problems, I find myself now in a group of people, all of us under forty, planning an enterprise which will inevitably grow into colossal dimensions. The feeling and atmosphere we are now in must be similar to the atomic bomb project in the earliest days, before Los Alamos was thought of, when Oppenheimer and Teller and a handful of other people were feeling their way into the problem and establishing the basic ideas for everything which came later. It is characteristic of this very early time that there is no feeling of pressure or urgency. Everything is informal and relaxed, and we have difficulty in taking the whole situation seriously. In years to come, when huge projects and empires have grown out of this, the early period will have become legendary, and we will not be able to distinguish our memories of this time from the legends which will grow around us.
Ted was a graduate student during my time at Cornell. I knew him a bit then, but he was violently unhappy with examinations and coursework. He was clearly not intended to be an academic physicist. I did not think much of him in those days. He had been a student at Berkeley but had been thrown out without a degree. He then went to Los Alamos in a very junior position, at a time when all the clever people had left. (This was around 1947.) At Los Alamos he found the people who were left had no ideas and no desire to do anything new. Ted began stirring them up, telling them better ways to do almost everything, until by 1949 a large part of Los Alamos was working on one or another of his ideas. It became embarrassing that he was in a junior position without any degree. So Los Alamos forced him to go to Cornell. He went back to Los Alamos with his degree and continued pouring out ideas. A great part of the small bomb development of the last five years was directly due to him.
Last night I telephoned and talked to both Imme and Verena. Imme agreed to come out here for a month or two until the new girl is settled in. I felt good talking to her again. Then I talked to Verena and called her an unscrupulous old bitch and that felt good too. I guess that is the end of the story.
It is a great asset of this place that in an hour one can drive across the border into a completely different world.
The days I was there were the last days before the test ban went into effect, and they were throwing together everything they possibly could to give it a try before the guillotine came down.
The astronomers are seriously interested in putting telescopes into space. Martin Schwarzschild in Princeton is a good friend of mine, and last year he flew a twelve-inch telescope several times in a balloon to eighty thousand feet, to take pictures of the sun. He had the telescope point itself automatically at the sun and take the pictures automatically. It all worked well, and he had some pictures sharper than any that had been seen before. Schwarzschild said the problems of operating a telescope in a rocket satellite are in some ways easier. He is already getting ready to send up a small telescope into orbit. I will be surprised if this is not done successfully within two years. I am interested in putting a bigger telescope higher up, for example on the moon. One of the attractions of our spaceship is that it could carry a big telescope up there with enough people and stuff to use it effectively.
For about half an hour Bohr talked to me alone as we walked up and down the beach. It was a tantalizing experience, as his voice is almost too low to hear, and each time a wave broke, his wisdom was irreparably lost. I learnt a lot about his struggles during the war to convince Roosevelt and Churchill that the atomic bomb was not something they could keep in their pockets. He believed then that the Russians would soon be making their own bombs and that the only chance to avoid a catastrophe was to bargain with Russia immediately for an abandonment of secrecy on both sides.
Later, when I looked more carefully at the problem, I concluded that colonization of Venus would not be impossible. If we put a big sun-shade in orbit around Venus, the atmosphere and the surface of the planet would cool down to a comfortable temperature in about five hundred years, and colonization could then begin. After the cooling, the main obstacle to colonization would be lack of water. That could be alleviated by importing water from icy asteroids or comets.
The Foreign Affairs article was a political diatribe, arguing against an international agreement to stop the testing of nuclear weapons. I was emotionally opposed to a test ban treaty because it would forbid the nuclear tests that Orion would need before it could fly. When the Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963, I had changed my mind and gave testimony supporting the treaty at the Senate ratification hearings. The Senate ratified the treaty with my blessing. By that time, I had given up hope that Orion could fly, and I was happy to join the majority who supported the test ban as a way to slow down the nuclear arms race. Orion was already dead, and the treaty was only one more nail in its coffin.
He said the big problem with the listening project is to be on guard against teenage pranksters with radiotransmitters (of which there are thousands in this country alone) who might enjoy fooling Drake with some plausible signals. Drake had a signal which seemed to be genuine for a whole month before he finally proved it came from Earth.
My proposal was to search for alien societies who were not interested in communication and could not be detected by radio. Any advanced society in the sky, whether or not it wished to communicate, could not avoid radiating waste heat into space. We could detect any large emission of waste heat with a telescope sensitive to infrared radiation. Many years later, telescopes in orbit searched for artificial sources of infrared radiation, but found no evidence for high-powered alien societies.
The image of America as a melting pot, in which aliens are absorbed and respected, has remained for me a reality,
We urge the government to decide and publicly declare as its permanent policy that the U.S. shall not use nuclear weapons of any kind under any circumstances except in response to the use of nuclear weapons by others. We urge that the military plans and deployments of the U.S. and its allies be brought as rapidly as possible into a condition consistent with the over-all policy of not using nuclear weapons first.
I had myself been feeling for some time that our greatest danger comes not from having nuclear weapons but from being committed to using them in stupid and disastrous ways.
So at one stroke my reputation as a reactionary war-monger was destroyed, and I became a shining champion of peace.
Notre Dame University is a Catholic foundation, and most of the senior administrative jobs are held by priests. One of my mathematician friends [Paul Erdos] said, “Notre Dame is a very good place, only there are too many plus signs.”
In the evening I went to a bookshop to find a collected edition of Wordsworth. I wanted a motto for a study which I am writing on the changes which are likely to occur in the future in the fields of strategy and disarmament policy. I found what I was looking for: Drop, like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of Time. —WORDSWORTH, Sonnet on Mutability
His biggest contribution to science was the understanding of jet noise. He discovered the famous eighth-power law, which says that jet noise increases with the eighth power of the jet velocity.
This Manned Spacecraft Center has been from the beginning the most unscientific of the space establishments. There are no scientists here, and there is not even a good university within hundreds of miles. The emphasis is entirely on the practical problems of getting people to the moon and back. Nobody cares much about what the people may do when they are there. Space flights are considered as sporting events pure and simple.
The judge who presided over the grand jury sessions shared my doubts about the justice of the jury system. After the last of our sessions ended, he invited us all for a farewell dinner. At the end of the dinner he stood up to make a short speech. “Before we say good-bye,” he said, “I would like to give you some useful advice. If you are ever in trouble with the law, you have a choice, to be tried by a judge or a jury. If you are innocent, choose a judge. If you are guilty, choose a jury.”
Born wrote a bitter letter, complaining because Oppenheimer was ungrateful for his help and had never invited him to Princeton. The unfortunate fact was that Oppenheimer had a difficult temperament and made more enemies than friends.
Oppenheimer’s shifting moods cost him many friendships. I remained his friend because I did not take his temper tantrums personally. In spite of the temper tantrums and shifting moods, he was a loyal public servant and a wise observer of the human scene.
I recently read three books which I found interesting. One is Profiles of the Future by Arthur Clarke [1962], an English science fiction writer. He has written many books, and all of them are good. Another book I read was The Analytical Engine, a popular book about computing machines by Jeremy Bernstein [1964]. The third was brought to our house by Esther from the public library. It is Face to Face, the autobiography of a blind young man who came from India to the United States and became a successful writer [1957]. His name is Ved Mehta. Imme and I, for the first time in years, went to a cocktail party at the home of some friends of ours in New York. We first met Jeremy Bernstein, who I knew would be there, and talked to him about his book. Then I was introduced to a lively middle-aged gentleman who turned out to be Arthur Clarke. I spent an hour monopolizing Arthur Clarke and exchanging ideas with him about space and the universe. While I was talking to him, I saw a blind Indian come in at the door, and Imme said, “I bet you that is Ved Mehta.” I said, “No, that is absurd.” But as usual Imme was right. I spent another happy hour talking with Ved Mehta. I will never believe any more that improbable things don’t happen.
My account of Orion was published with the title “Death of a Project” (1965). I described how it happened that a powerful new technology, with immense possibilities for expanding human exploration of the universe, was abandoned for political reasons. My purpose was not to revive Orion but to make the public aware of the costs of saying no to a bold new dream. The reasons for killing Orion were valid and compelling, but the costs were real too.
He says things there are much worse than even he had imagined. Negroes systematically terrorized and the white people totally uninterested in any kind of reform. There is now a permanent organization of lawyers who take it in turns to go down for a month and get negroes out of jail. Five or six of them are in Mississippi each month, and they are able to do quite a lot, but they get no help from the local white people.
“First-rate mathematicians find bad proofs and then second-rate mathematicians find good ones.” But in this case, Lieb and Thirring were also first-rate mathematicians.
Since I was driven directly from the film studio to my family in Winchester, there is no letter describing the day that I spent with Stanley Kubrick watching him produce the film that became 2001, A Space Odyssey. It is a puzzling film, totally different in style and subject from Dr. Strangelove, but equally memorable. I always considered film to be the most creative art form of the twentieth century, and Kubrick to be one of the great artists.
When we first told the girls that a new member of the family would be arriving, Dorothy said, “No, that is wrong. If a new baby was coming, it would have come last year. We had babies in 1959, 1961, and 1963, so the next one would have come in 1965.” We had to explain to her that babies are sometimes allowed to break the rules.
Did you notice that you and I both used the phrase “if you should slip away” in the letters which we wrote to each other on July 27? I am quite willing to believe that some kind of telepathy may happen at moments of intense feeling such as this. I would like to believe it, because it would be consistent with the idea that some kind of world-soul may exist, an idea that has appealed to both of us. I am a total agnostic, but the laws of physics and chemistry do not exclude a world-soul any more than they exclude our individual beings.
This theorem was published in a little paper with the title “A New Symmetry of Partitions” in a mathematics journal (1969). Through all my years in America, I took occasional short holidays from physics and returned to my first love, the theory of numbers.
I was wakened at six-thirty in the morning by a tremendous crash, followed by some shouts of “help.” I thought somebody must have driven a car into this building at seventy miles an hour. I discovered then that I am after all a coward. Instead of running out immediately to the rescue, I took about a minute to pull myself together, to face whatever had to be faced. In that minute I was somehow paralyzed. And in that minute a man burned to death. I will not forgive myself for this.
I am amazed at the cheerfulness with which some of my scientific colleagues, arguing against the deployment of missile defense, speak of our ability to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against China. Anybody who considers a preemptive strike to be preferable to missile defense has not understood what the Cuban missile crisis was all about. The whole point of the Cuban missile crisis was that President Kennedy succeeded, with great wisdom and some luck, in finding a way to avoid a preemptive strike. Precisely to enable some future president to play it cool like Kennedy, to resist pressures to make a preemptive strike in a moment of desperate crisis, this is to my mind the main purpose of missile defense. It is not so much to save our skins as to save our souls.
Unfortunately our academic experts are always talking about disarmament reached by international negotiation rather than unilaterally. In my opinion, major and important acts of disarmament will always be easier to make unilaterally.
These days while Stephen was here, I was in a state of acute depression thinking about him, except for the hours when I was actually with him. As soon as you are with him, you cannot feel miserable, he radiates such a feeling of strength and good humour.
WHEN I WAS appointed a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, I used to say that my real job was to be a psychiatric nurse, giving consolation and comfort to the young visiting members when they suffered from loneliness or depression. The visiting members were in a highly stressful situation, facing a year or two of complete freedom, with the expectation that they should do something brilliant. If they failed to perform, given this unique opportunity, there was a real danger of psychological collapse. In my time as a professor I lost three young people whom I had invited as members, one by suicide and two who ended up in mental institutions. I do not know how many I saved. I only know that the institute is a dangerous place for young people, and as a professor, I bore a heavy responsibility for their mental health. The letters are as usual arranged chronologically, beginning with family affairs and then telling stories of psychological disasters.
At least I am happy about one thing, that I am not a historian. These historians are so jealous of each other, it is unbelievable. How Einstein would laugh if he could see them quarreling over his relics.
The New Yorker articles about Ted were written by John McPhee and were published together in John’s book, The Curve of Binding Energy (1974). The book was a best-seller, and Ted did not go to jail. I had also talked for many hours with John McPhee while he was writing the articles. All three of us were struggling with the ethical problem, whether it was right or wrong to make public the facts about homemade nuclear weapons. Were we making homemade weapons less likely by telling the good guys how to safeguard the materials, or were we making homemade weapons more likely by telling the bad guys how to do it? John McPhee made the decision to go public, with moral support from Ted and me. Forty years later we have seen no homemade bombs. Perhaps, after all, John’s decision was right.
The lady who opposed my membership was Susanna Waterman, an environmentalist who sincerely believed that DNA research was a violation of nature. The township denied her objection, and I continued to serve on the committee. Quite soon Susanna and I became friends, and I valued her presence as the most thoughtful and eloquent voice on the committee. In the end, I voted with the majority to allow DNA experiments, and Susanna voted with the minority to forbid experiments. But we learned to respect each other’s opinions and stayed friends.
He is the world’s greatest authority on the behavior of ants, and he has written a book, Sociobiology [1975], pointing out the analogies and differences between social behavior in insects and human beings. This is politically dangerous ground, and the young radicals at Harvard have been accusing him of being a fascist and a racist. When he came to give his talk in Washington, a bunch of young hooligans invaded the platform, grabbed the microphone out of his hands, told the audience what an evil character he is, and ended by emptying the speaker’s water jug over his head. After this he gave his talk, and the audience gave him a standing ovation. But he said that is the last time he ever comes to a AAAS meeting.
To describe the sixties in one paragraph would be to describe the color red to someone who is blind. One could ramble on about Vietnam, the riots, the generation gap, any of these things which gave the sixties its label. But the color would be left out. Color is a feeling. The sixties is a feeling, a color. A color seen only by those who lived, fought, loved and survived the sixties.
Pure science is best driven by intellectual curiosity, but applied science needs also to be driven by ethics. Our grandchildren will have a chance to make this happen.