Maker of Patterns

MY COMMONWEALTH FUND FELLOWSHIP paid for two academic years of study and a summer of travel in between. I was encouraged to spend the summer of 1948 traveling, to see as much as possible of the United States. That meant at least one coast-to-coast trip with visits to the great universities and natural wonders of California. I made two trips to the West that summer, the first with Feynman in his car, the second alone by Greyhound bus. Between the trips, I attended the summer school in theoretical physics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where Julian Schwinger was the main lecturer. In Ann Arbor I was welcomed by two friends from Cornell: Ed Lennox, the student of Hans Bethe, and Harald Wergeland, a Norwegian physicist on sabbatical leave from his home in Trondheim.

JUNE 11, 1948, CORNELL UNIVERSITY

My plans were greatly helped by an offer of a ride across the country by Feynman. He is going to visit his (Catholic) sweetheart at Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is driving across the country starting this week; I am to keep him company on the way out, and I shall leave him and make my own way to Ann Arbor as soon as I have had enough. It should be a fine trip, and we shall have the whole world to talk about. On this visit Feynman intends to make up his mind either to marry the girl or to agree to part; most people are prepared to wager for the former alternative.

JUNE 25, 1948, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

Feynman originally planned to take me out west in a leisurely style, stopping and sightseeing en route and not driving too fast. However, I was never particularly hopeful that he would stick to this plan, with his sweetheart waiting for him in Albuquerque. As it turned out, we did the eighteen hundred miles from Cleveland to Albuquerque in three and a half days, and this in spite of some troubles; Feynman drove all the way, and he drives well, never taking risks but still keeping up an average of sixty-five miles per hour outside towns. 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.

We were lucky to have cool weather all the way. Each day we drove about ten hours and five hundred miles. The first was spent crossing Ohio and Indiana. We crossed the Mississippi at St. Louis at noon on the second. The Mississippi was as I had imagined it, a thick reddish-brown colour, flowing rapidly at the narrow place where the bridge is. After the Mississippi comes the Ozark country, hilly and beautiful with flowers and woods, still poor and backward economically as one could see from the dilapidated farmhouses. On the second day we crossed Illinois, Missouri, and a corner of Kansas and stopped well into Oklahoma. To me, one of the surprising things about the trip was to find how little of it was western in appearance. The country is well wooded, mixed grazing and farming, green and well watered, not unlike New York State, right to the Mississippi and beyond it as far as Oklahoma.

At St. Louis we joined U.S. Highway 66, the so-called “Main Street of America” which runs from Chicago to Los Angeles via Albuquerque. We thought that from there on would be plain sailing, as this is one of the best-marked and -maintained roads there is. However, at the end of the second day we ran into a traffic jam, and some boys told us that there were floods over the road ahead and no way through. We retreated to a town called Vinita, where with great difficulty we found lodging for the night, the town being jammed with stranded travellers. We ended up in what Feynman called a “dive,” a hotel of the cheapest and most disreputable character, with a notice posted in the corridor saying “This hotel is under new management, so if you’re drunk you’ve come to the wrong place.” During the night it rained continuously, and the natives said it had been raining most of the time for more than a week.

In the morning we went on our way, the floods having subsided, until we reached a place called Sapulpa. Here we were again stopped, and when we tried to make a detour, we arrived at the water’s edge, where the road disappeared into a huge lake. Returning to Sapulpa, we were fortunate in picking up a Cherokee Indian and his wife. They live on an oilfield construction camp at a place called Shawnee and had moved over for the weekend to visit some friends who had managed to secure five quarts of hooch whiskey. In this country it is illegal to sell liquor of any sort to Indians. Having spent a happy weekend getting through the whiskey, they were now on their way back to the job at Shawnee. They were able to direct us to an unpaved and indescribably muddy road, which kept to high ground and clear of the floods. In this way we came out onto a main road running westward north of U.S. 66. After a time this road too was blocked, and we had to detour still further to the north. Here the Indians left us, approximately as far from Shawnee as they were when they started.

Later on we had the bright idea of turning on the car radio, and we then picked up broadcasts from Oklahoma City and other places giving detailed stories of the floods. In this way we were able to mark on our map all the places that were under water and plan our route accordingly. The worst disaster was on U.S. 66 west of Oklahoma City, where many cars were trapped and the occupants rescued by boat, a few also being drowned. We were able finally to thread our way back to U.S. 66 a good deal further west. What made these floods remarkable is that the country around Oklahoma City is already the parched sandy rolling country of the prairie and looks as if there never had been any water there, and if there had been, it would have been sopped up at once by the sandy soil. We were sorry not to see Oklahoma City, which is said to be a unique place, a town under which a first-class oilfield was discovered in the last few years. As a result, the town and the oilfield are hopelessly mixed up, oil wells being scattered around in people’s backyards, on the roads, and even inside buildings. The parts of Oklahoma and Texas that we passed through were obviously prosperous, partly due to the oil and partly to a general industrial expansion that is going on more rapidly there than anywhere else. Cattle ranching seems to be changing fast from a business to a rich man’s hobby.

At the end of the third day we were in Amarillo, Texas, in the centre of the Panhandle, a treeless expanse of smoothly carved prairie. The fourth day we drove the last three hundred miles to Albuquerque before one p.m. This was the most beautiful part of the trip, though again I was surprised to find how little of it was typical New Mexico mountains. The prairie extends halfway across New Mexico, and only the last twenty miles of our journey were in mountains, the Sandia range immediately east of the Rio Grande valley in which Albuquerque lies. As we advanced into New Mexico, the prairie grew drier and drier, until a fair proportion of the vegetation was cactus, carrying at this time of year a profusion of large bloodred flowers. Coming down into Albuquerque, Feynman said he hardly recognised the place, so much has it been built up since he was there three years ago. It is a fine, spacious town of the usual American type, very little of the Spanish surviving.

Sailing into Albuquerque at the end of this odyssey, we had the misfortune to be picked up for speeding; Feynman was so excited that he did not notice the speed limit signs. So our first appointment in this romantic city of homecoming was an interview with the justice of the peace; he was a pleasant enough fellow, completely informal, and ended up by fining us ten dollars with $4.50 costs, while chatting amiably about the way the Southwest was developing. After this Feynman went off to meet his lady, and I came up by bus to Santa Fe.

All the way Feynman talked a great deal about his sweetheart, his wife Arlene who died at Albuquerque in 1945, and marriage in general. Also about Los Alamos. I came to the conclusion that he is an exceptionally well-balanced person, whose opinions are always his own and not other people’s. 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.

Santa Fe sits at 6,900 feet, on the edge of a vast red flat desert, underneath the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. From the mountains comes a little river, fed by snow and rain in the peaks, which runs all the year round and makes the town possible. Other rivers over the plain there are in plenty, but none of them has any water. On a spur above the town is a big stone cross, a monument to the Franciscan friars who were killed when the Indians drove the Spaniards out for twelve years (1680–92). Seeing this country, one cannot help being amazed that the Spaniards were able to colonise it at all, or that they chose to colonise it in preference to the richer lands around. It is merciless country, with not even any mountains steep enough to throw a shadow at midday. At the same time, it is remarkable how little the Spaniards really achieved during their two-hundred-years stay. They never pacified the Indians or improved on the Indians’ methods of architecture and agriculture. Although Santa Fe is proudly proclaimed as the oldest state capital in the U.S. (the governor’s palace dates from 1610), it contains very few old buildings. It is a beautiful town, and a lot of it is built in the attractive adobe style, but most of the adobe houses are post-Spanish, and the style is Indian rather than Spanish. Adobe is the style of the Indian pueblos, red mud bricks and projecting wooden beams. Of the Spanish civilisation, only two things remain, the narrow winding streets and the language of the people. It is surprising to find, in a city which is completely American-built and where every road sign and advertisement and notice is in English, that three-quarters of the conversation in the streets is Spanish. Since the population of the whole state was fifty thousand in 1850 when the U.S. took it and is now half a million, a large proportion of the Spanish-speaking people must be Mexican immigrants. It was only when American railways and roads conquered first the Indians and then the deserts that the territory became habitable.

There are two kinds of Indians; the Pueblo who live in large communal settlements, which we think of now as villages but which the Spanish conquerors always referred to as cities, and the seminomads of which the chief tribe is the Navajo. The Pueblo Indians are the older and built up a high civilisation during the period 1000–1300; later they were almost annihilated by the nomads and only saved by European protection. They now still live in a few of the original pueblos, but the pueblo was designed as a fortress, and in the peaceful world of today the pueblos are mostly deserted and the inhabitants have built themselves huts scattered around on the fields they till. The nomads are now worse off, being less capable of adapting themselves to peaceful conditions; they live further from contact with civilisation, raising sheep on tracts of desert and forest, and are now suffering badly from overpopulation. All these details, and a great deal more, I learned from the excellent museum of ethnology and archaeology here. I have also wandered about the town and the neighbourhood looking at things for myself, but one sees much more in the museum.

JULY 2, 1948, CHICAGO

From Santa Fe to here I came by bus, taking it in easy stages, via Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis. The buses that make these long trips are all run by a group of companies called Greyhound Lines and are uniform all over the country. They are a great institution, and they have beaten the railways at the passenger-carrying game; as roads improve (there is a tremendous lot of new construction going on now, as was plain to see in every state), the victory will be even more decisive. The buses’ main advantage, which must in the long run tell, is cheapness; the railways charge half as much again for a given trip and run at a loss. Also the buses’ routes can be more flexible and reach more places. Santa Fe, which is a state capital, is twenty miles from the nearest railway station. The railways at present are still quicker but not much. (When Feynman and I were driving at seventy mph along a good stretch of road between Amarillo and Albuquerque, we were overtaken by a Greyhound bus doing the same trip.) On the longer runs the buses are air-conditioned, and for night trips they are intermediate in comfort between a railway seat and a railway sleeper.

For the most part, wishing to see the country, I travelled by day and stopped for the nights. The ride from Denver to Kansas City took twenty hours and included a complete night; we traversed Kansas from end to end, and it was just as I had imagined it to be. (Kansas has always had a romantic attraction since I read The Wizard of Oz at a very early age.) This night in the bus turned out to be one of the best parts of the trip. (Experienced bus travellers usually sleep by day and make their social contacts at night; reading lamps are also provided.) I became involved in conversation with a boy of eighteen who was going on leave from his navy station at San Francisco to his home in Carolina, and a girl of seventeen who was going from one place in Kansas to another place in Kansas. I did most of the listening and little of the talking. The two of them were great talkers and kept it up in fine style until the sun broke through on the horizon ahead of us, ranging over love affairs, family histories, god, and politics in turn (the opposite order to that in which I should have proceeded, and thereby hangs a great part of their character); the two of them were both strongly Christian; leaders of high school religious groups and articulate in their opinions about everything. I learned more in that night about the American Way of Life, and perhaps about the way of life of people in general, than one ever learns by daylight. At times they made me feel very old, and at times very young.

One may hope one day to see these big buses, and the roads on which they run, flourish in other parts of the world where distances are large and populations scattered. During the last ten years in the U.S., the mass of the population, as opposed to the professional people or the pioneering types, has been moving about the country as never before, and this mixing up has already done much, and will do much more, to even out regional differences and fanaticisms.

It is an interesting study to observe the negroes and their houses, in St. Louis, in Chicago, and in Ypsilanti. All three towns have a large negro minority. In Chicago the negro district looks like a London working-class suburb; in St. Louis it is a great deal worse, and in Ypsilanti a great deal better. In Ypsilanti the negroes draw handsome wages from the car factories where they work.

So, finally, to Chicago, where I arrived on Wednesday. I am staying at a big, cheap, and very nice YMCA hotel, in the centre of the city and with one block of buildings and a few hundred yards of park between me and the lake. Since I arrived the sun has been shining and a cool breeze has been blowing in from the lake, and I feel I could very happily stay here indefinitely. There is an excellent art gallery nearby, at which I spent a long time yesterday; also bookshops, theatres, a zoo, and an endless variety of park benches. The city is noisy (they have still an elevated railway), but I am twelve floors up and not bothered by it. Above all, it is the lake which makes the city so pleasant. Because the waterfront is not taken up like New York’s with docks, the lake is accessible. To walk through the centre of this city makes a very fine object lesson in the mutability of human affairs. Among the skyscrapers and the boulevards and the department stores, you come to a little monument which reads “On this spot stood Fort Dearborn, which in 1812 was attacked and besieged by British troops. The garrison, having made an escape by night, was afterwards brutally massacred, together with its women and children, by Indians.” And a little further on is another monument which reads “On this spot in the year 1805 was born Helen, the first child to be born in the city of Chicago.”

AUGUST 8, 1948, ANN ARBOR

The great event of the week was the birth of Ed Lennox’s first, and Helen’s fourth, child. It arrived early on Monday morning and gave very little trouble to anybody. I went to see Helen and the baby yesterday. She is in a very nice small maternity hospital, which is part of the university medical school, and she gets everything done there for a total fee of $120 because Ed is on the university staff. Helen was completely well and walking about the room. Ed is very pleased because the baby has already a nose like his, whereas the other three children still have no noses worth speaking of.

When the baby arrived and turned out to be a boy, Ed asked his daughters Nena and Caroline what he should be called, and they replied immediately, “Nicolai.” So Nicolai he is. The other night I had supper with the Lennoxes and spent a happy hour fighting with Nena and Caroline. I like them very much, and what is more surprising, they seem to like me. Caroline even came back afterwards to kiss me goodnight, an entirely unexpected honour. Caroline, just five years old, is showing many signs of awakening character and intelligence. The other day when she was alone with Helen, she asked for the first time the difficult question, how it was that the first baby got born, since all babies nowadays seem to have mothers to bear them. Helen was not prepared for this and, being a Catholic (though not a very devout one), fell back on the first thing that came to mind and told her the story of Adam and Eve. Caroline listened to this intently, thought it over for a while, and then pronounced, “Well, that is a funny story.”

My days here have been spent going to lectures, working at my own ideas, and reading and talking. I have met a lot of new faces, but most of the time I am with Lennox and Wergeland. The young Mrs. Park came back from the Wallace convention. She told us all about it, and confirmed the picture drawn in the newspapers. The important question we wanted answered was how far the party is in fact Communist and how far merely liberal. She said that she found most of the delegates, like herself, young and enthusiastic and liberal and not noticeably Communist, and this was her prevailing impression of the party as a whole at first. However, toward the end of the convention, a delegate proposed a crucial amendment to the party platform, which ran, “While deploring the foreign policy of the U.S. this Party does not necessarily endorse the foreign policy of any other country,” and this amendment was defeated by a majority vote. Mrs. Park said this was evidence that at least a good proportion of the delegates were Communists, or at least were making no effort to avoid being labelled as such. She continues to work for the party; she says she does not like being used by the Communists, but she prefers that to being used by their enemies. The tragedy of the Wallace party is not that it is being used by the Communists. It has now lost what was at one time a good chance of winning enough popular support to be a strong force in the land.

AUGUST 15, 1948, ANN ARBOR

After nine days in hospital Helen Lennox and the baby came home and are both doing well. Ed recently had a letter from Hans Bethe, who is enjoying himself enormously in his old haunts in Switzerland. He finds it a paradise. I think he suffers in the U.S. from the fact that he is unable to shake off the millstone of Bomb work and responsibility from his neck. It is years since he had a long and complete vacation. Also, he came to Switzerland fresh from Germany, which he found a nightmare. In Germany he was visiting his family, and a family reunion across such a gulf of years and circumstances is a psychological ordeal for all concerned.

My correspondent Hilde Jacobs at Münster has got a permit to work in Switzerland for three months this autumn. This should be a tremendous help to her, both physically and mentally; I hope soon to hear her initial reactions to it. She and I have been getting to know each other pretty well in the last six months. It all began when she wrote to me last Christmas, and I knew then at once that she wanted more than food parcels; she wanted sympathy, companionship, and above all, hope. After thinking it over, I decided that the best I could do for her was to give her all I had and let the consequences take care of themselves. So without making any commitments or promises, I have been writing to her from time to time, letters of various kinds and on various subjects, always with a certain deliberate warmth of feeling. This has been a great pleasure to me, but I think I can say also that it has been justified by its effects on her. She seems to have grown happier and more balanced in these months.

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. That is something that I would not do without much more thought and consideration. I think she herself expressed the dangers of the situation better than I could ever express them, by quoting Yeats:

AUGUST 20, 1948, SAN FRANCISCO

I left Ann Arbor at nine on Monday morning, taking a bus direct for Chicago, and caught the westward express that evening. The route went through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California; one state north of my previous excursion. As far as the end of Nebraska this was the corn belt, and a bumper corn crop at that. We went through Iowa through field after field of corn, the fields not being very big but all uniformly tall, tassel-topped, and lusciously green. Between the cornfields are grazing plots where cattle are either raised or brought in from the west for fattening on the corn.

The real prairie begins only in Wyoming, and there does not last long before it fades into mountain ranch country and finally desert. The most spectacular part of the whole trip was our descent, down the Weber River valley, from the Wyoming desert into the basin of Utah. Here we were following the route of the 1847 pilgrims, which made it all the more dramatic. The Utah basin is not all fertile, but for long stretches round the edge, and in the gorges leading out of it, the rivers have been put to work and the land cultivated intensively. Only in Switzerland have I seen such painful utilisation of every scrap of mountainside. The effect of this careful husbandry, after the wastes of Wyoming, is greatly to increase one’s respect for the Mormons. I think it is typical of them that on their first terrible journey across the mountains, Brigham Young attached a newly invented revolution-counter to the wheels of his oxcart so that he could navigate with greater precision.

In Salt Lake City we stopped for two hours, so I was able to take a rapid glance at the historic monuments. Of these the most interesting was a column set up in 1897 at the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the city, with the names of 143 original settlers engraved on it. Of the 143, twenty-seven were then still alive. Their skill in dealing with natural obstacles, Indians, and their own private quarrels was altogether exceptional. Utah now, with its mixture of small subsistence farms and industrialised cities, its non-Mormon minority of 40 percent rapidly turning into a majority, will inevitably lose much of its homogeneity and character. 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.

The method Calvin uses is the following. You take a large white sheet of blotting paper; on one corner of it you place a drop of liquid, for example the juice of crushed seaweed cells, and let it dry. Then you fix the sheet so that it is hanging vertically with two edges horizontal, and the upper horizontal edge you fasten into a bath of some oily liquid like phenol. The phenol slowly trickles down the sheet, and you let it trickle for some hours. Then you take the sheet out and dry it again. The substances contained in the original drop of juice will be left on the sheet, but they will be carried down by the phenol along a line along one edge. The different substances will get carried down various distances according to how great an attachment they have for phenol. Now you fix the sheet up again, with the edge along which the drop is spread now horizontal and uppermost (i.e., at right angles to its previous position), and let a second oily liquid (not phenol) trickle down it for some hours. Then you dry the sheet a third time. Holding the sheet in its original position, each substance in the cell juice has been carried a certain distance down the sheet by the phenol, and a certain distance across the sheet by the other liquid. Now the remarkable fact is that, if you use the right sort of paper and the right sort of liquids and the right speed of trickle, the various substances in the juice get cleanly separated from each other, and each substance does not get smeared out much but remains as a small splodge at some point on the sheet. These splodges cannot be seen except for the most brightly coloured substances. But suppose that your seaweed has been feeding on radioactive carbon dioxide (made now in adequate quantities in a pile). Then all the substances in the juice contain some radiocarbon, and if you put your sheet of blotting paper against a sheet of photographic film, you get a picture with all the splodges in their respective places.

Now comes the decisive step. Suppose you have a series of samples of seaweed which are not radioactive, having been fed on ordinary carbon dioxide. The first sample you plunge into radioactive carbon dioxide for five seconds, then quickly crush the cells and extract the juice. The second sample you give ten seconds of radiocarbon, the third thirty seconds, the fourth sixty, and so on up to as long as you like. Each sample of juice is then put on blotting paper and photographed. The pictures then show, in the most direct possible way, the progress of the delicate and transitory reactions through which the radiocarbon passes as it is assimilated. After five seconds the radiocarbon is all in one or two substances, after ten seconds in four, and after thirty seconds in ten, and after a minute it has got into the splodge which contains sugar, the final product of the reactions. (This is contrary to all the old theories of photosynthesis.) Before you can interpret the pictures, you have to know which splodge is which. For this it is necessary to go through a long and laborious process, preparing every known constituent of the cells, isolating it chemically, and including in it a sufficient quantity of radiocarbon; then the isolated substance is put onto the blotting paper, and you can see where it ends up. In this way each substance can be identified with a definite position on the picture, and once the identification is made, it is done once and for all; these identifications are taking up most of the time of the workers at present, but later on this will not be necessary.

This simple technique is an immense advance, enabling people to accumulate in a few hours detailed information which before could hardly have been reached in years. Instead of carbon, you can use any other radioactive atom, and you can vary your trickling liquids to suit your conditions. The results that have been got so far are trifling in comparison with what will be done in a few years. The long-sighted people said, when nuclear energy first came on the scene, that the application to biological research would be more important than the application to power. But I doubt if anyone expected that things would get going as fast as they have. This blotting-paper-plus-radioactivity technique is revolutionary because it means that any substance can be fed to a cell and its transformations followed second by second in detail, even in quantities too small to be seen or weighed, and with substances too unstable to stand old-fashioned stewing and chemical extraction.

SEPTEMBER 14, 1948,
17 EDWARDS PLACE, PRINCETON

Today I registered for the U.S. armed forces, as I have to do under the recent draft act. This is nothing to be alarmed about. The point of it is to catch aliens who are permanent residents of the United States. I said, if I am called up, I will join the air force and hope to get stationed in England.

After I wrote to you last, I stayed several days in Berkeley. I read the autobiographies of Jawaharlal Nehru and Oliver Lodge, both very interesting stories. On September 2 I finally boarded the bus for Chicago, going back by the same route on which I came. The Iowa corn was now standing eight feet tall, having greatly benefited by the recent heat and rain. It was still not quite ready for reaping. Out of Iowa (not a big state) comes one-tenth of the whole food output of the United States. Corn is an immensely prolific crop to grow, and you have only to look at an Iowa cornfield to feel this. It is a great pity the stuff will not grow in England.

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. This piece of work is neither difficult nor particularly clever, but it is undeniably important if nobody else has done it in the meantime. I became quite excited over it when I reached Chicago and sent off a letter to Bethe announcing the triumph. I have not had time yet to write it down properly, but I am intending as soon as possible to write a formal paper and get it published. This is a tremendous piece of luck for me, coming at the time it does. I shall now encounter Oppenheimer with something to say which will interest him, and so I shall hope to gain at once some share of his attention. It is strange the way ideas come when they are needed. I remember it was the same with the idea for my Trinity Fellowship thesis.