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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 physicists at the institute have always tried hard to increase the proportion of women but without success. Those who arrived in 1948 had the advantage of growing up during the war when most of the young men were away. They were outstanding in quality as well as quantity. Cécile Morette from France played a leading role in the group. Sheila Power came from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Study, Bruria Kaufman from Columbia University, and Cheng Shu Chang from the University of Michigan. Bruria Kaufman had the distinction of being assistant to Albert Einstein. She published several papers with Einstein, besides other more memorable papers that she published alone. Cécile Morette stayed on at the institute for the year 1949–50, when Bryce de Witt was also a member. She and Bryce were married in 1951. Both had distinguished careers as physicists, and they raised four daughters.
NOVEMBER 25, 1948
My last week has been occupied with the three extra seminars which I had been allotted. I was anxious to finish off the whole theory in these three sessions. Fortunately the audience was also anxious to finish it off, and Oppy was cooperative. It was a hard struggle to get everything covered, but by filling the blackboards with formulae before I started, I had all the main ideas fairly put across. At the end Oppy made a short speech: “It is not possible to say on the basis of these talks that the consistency of the theory is proved, but at least we have all learnt a great deal, and shall have plenty to argue about from now on.” Whereupon the exhausted audience, in no mood to start an argument, quietly departed. I came away from the last talk with a feeling of tremendous relief, my head for the first time for weeks entirely empty of ideas clamouring for expression. It will be possible now to relax, to return to the position of an ordinary young member of the institute, and to go to seminars without having to say anything. Next week Yukawa is to give the seminar, and the week after that Kroll.
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.
Last night the Oppenheimers gave their Thanksgiving party, a stand-up supper for about one hundred guests, mostly the institute and its wives. The party was quite enjoyable as such things go. The young physicists kept pretty much to themselves, and I did not speak to many people outside our circle. There were, however, two exceptions to this rule. First, it was a farewell party for T. S. Eliot, who is returning to Europe to receive his Nobel Prize and go home. Most of the time he was surrounded with elderly and distinguished people in a small drawing room apart from the main crowd; our physicist group was in the main room lamenting the fact that none of us had been brazen enough to go and talk to the great man. This conversation immediately fired the light of ambition in Cécile’s eyes, and she said, “Well, you are a lot of cowards; I’ll go and fetch him out for you.” So she went into the little room where the elderly and distinguished people were, came out a few seconds later with a grinning Eliot in tow, and introduced us to him one by one. After this there was a brief period of rather embarrassed conversation, which was made easier by the fact that Eliot has a sense of humour and some experience in dealing with such situations. Then Cécile returned him to the little room.
All this time Oppy was rushing around, resplendent in black tie and dinner jacket, making sure he met and spoke to everybody. He is a first-rate host and looked happier than I have seen him ever. When he spoke to me, it was to give me the recipe for some delicious Mexican savories that were being served with the supper. (He is an expert cook.) Then he rushed off to the next conversation, which might have been on any subject from football to cuneiform texts. This kind of evening is probably the nearest he ever gets to being relaxed. Mrs. Oppy I also met. She is quick-witted on a much more human level. She struck me as a friendly, direct young person, with no airs and entirely unspoiled by greatness.
The queerest and maddest part of the evening came at the end. People were then trying ineffectively to dance in the constricted space available. I was suddenly seized upon by an absurd and very drunken little woman, who ordered me to dance with her. As she is a pathetic-looking creature with a disfiguring scar on her face, I could not decently reject her. So I danced around with her for about twenty minutes, she evidently not minding how badly I danced. At the end of this she was getting so wild and jumping about so that it made me very uncomfortable, and I finally succeeded in returning her to her husband. The husband, who is a solemn and frightened-looking little man, was standing around by himself miserably while all this went on. He did not seem to talk to anybody all the evening. It makes me feel sick just to think of the horror of the lives these two people may be living. Evidently the reason the wife seized upon me for a partner is that I am the only one of the young men at the party whom she had met before. The name of the husband (I wonder if you guessed it) is Kurt Gödel.
The horror of this scene was real, but Adele Gödel was rarely drunk, and she was a good wife for Kurt when she was sober. She took good care of him and gave him what he needed, a quiet home where he could work and think in peace. When I saw them together at their home, she kept the guests comfortably supplied with tea and cake while Kurt led the conversation.
NOVEMBER 28, 1948
Yesterday a Chinese friend called Ning Hu was here from Cornell, and he and I and Sheila Power went for a long walk. (Ning Hu is a friend of Sheila since he was two years with her in Dublin.) It was warm and sunny and breezy like an English May, and we walked a good twelve miles round Carnegie Lake where Princeton University does its rowing. We talked about Ireland and about China and its problems. Afterwards Ning Hu came to my room, and we talked some more. I was delighted to get to know him. He is lonely and very glad of the company. He is depressed at the state of affairs in China, and even more depressed at the lack of sympathy with which these affairs are talked about by Americans and Chinese in this country. He comes from the generation which grew up in the years 1925–35 and which has produced all the well-known Chinese scientists; for that brief period of years, the Chinese universities began to stir from their slumbers and made astonishing progress in catching up with the rest of the world. The students and young professors were energetic and enthusiastic and had enough material goods to relieve them from constant preoccupation with making a living. Then after 1935 he watched the hard-won progress gradually destroyed; he moved with the university from Peiping to Kunming in the far Southwest and tried to build things up again there; but one by one the bright stars either gave up the struggle or fled in desperation to Europe or the U.S. He himself came to the U.S. in 1941, and he is forced to stay here at least for several years, since only by earning U.S. dollars can he hope to keep his parents alive in China. Like all the people I have met from China, he is no Communist but believes that the only hope now is a complete Communist victory as soon as possible. I hope to see more of him and hear more of his story in the next few days.
That was the last year of the Chinese civil war, when the victorious army of Mao Zedong was defeating the disorganized government forces of Chiang Kai-shek. China, ravaged by years of Japanese occupation and years of civil war, was in desperate need of peace. One year later Chiang with the remnants of his army was driven into exile in Taiwan, and Mao was in Beijing proclaiming the birth of the People’s Republic of China. Ning Hu, well aware of the political risks and material hardships that awaited him, decided to return to China. He returned in 1951 and was well treated by the Communist regime. He enjoyed a distinguished career as teacher and researcher until his death in 1997.
Sheila Power is also a person I am glad to get to know. She is a Catholic like Cécile, but in every other respect as unlike as possible, quiet and unassuming and un-formidable. Cécile now seems to have decided that ordinary buses and trains are much too slow for her; this weekend she is spending at Chicago, flying there and back, and at Christmas she is to fly to Denver, Colorado, for a week’s skiing holiday. Fortunately she always seems to have plenty of money.
I enjoyed having Cécile as a colleague and companion but had no wish to become involved with her personally. The word that best described her was formidable, either in English or French. We liked to make jokes about her role as a modern version of Joan of Arc, the young girl who put on soldier’s clothes and led the French army to defeat the English at Orléans in 1429. Cécile herself accepted this role and later used her summer school at Les Houches to lead a revolution in the teaching of physics in France.
We are all watching anxiously to see if the Soviet physicists are in for serious trouble. The recent newspaper attacks on them are nothing new and are not necessarily indicating anything more than the idiotic arguments that have been going on for twenty years or more. However, in view of what happened to the biologists, the outlook is pretty black. The issue in physics is curiously parallel to the issue in biology. Mendel’s laws imposed limitations on the possibility of improving stocks by selective breeding; Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle imposed limitations on the predictability of atomic events. Such limitations are contrary to dialectical materialism; hence Mendel and Heisenberg are anathema. Also, Mendel and Heisenberg are easy targets for political attack, Mendel for being a priest, and Heisenberg for being head of Hitler’s atomic energy project.
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.” A very fine piece of diplomacy on the part of the editors. With the help of a few sops like this to the rabid Marxists, the physicists up till 1948 have continued to work and publish results, making full use of Heisenberg, Dirac, or anybody else, and their papers are as sensible as anybody else’s.
Now just as in biology a Lysenko can get good results in practice, whether his theory is sound or not, so in physics it happens that nuclear fission is one phenomenon that can be fully understood and exploited, using only the crudest kind of quantum theory. In fact, fission is almost a “classical” phenomenon, in the sense that it takes less quantum theory to understand it than it does to understand the reaction hydrogen plus oxygen goes to water. Not only fission, but most of nuclear physics as it has so far developed, is likewise independent of highbrow theory. In view of this, it would not be at all surprising if the Russian government, wishing to get ahead as fast as possible with atomic energy, should support physicists who work on practical developments in empirical nuclear physics, and should attack those who work on the deeper theories, which everyone agrees will not be of much help to the experimenters in the foreseeable future. It is greatly to the credit of Soviet physics that so far no Lysenko has arisen among the physicists to lead the first group in attacking the second. Perhaps also the government’s tolerance of the theoreticians is an indication that the Soviet atomic energy project is going ahead smoothly without them. But this is wild speculation.
Trofim Lysenko was a plant breeder who did tremendous damage to biology in the Soviet Union, using the power of the Communist Party to kill or imprison many leading biologists. He was a fanatical Marxist and believed that modern molecular biology must be suppressed because it was incompatible with orthodox Marxist dogma. As a result of Lysenko’s persecutions, a whole generation of Soviet biology was devastated. Fortunately, the physicists were able to stand firm against Marxist dogma, and no Lysenko arose to devastate Soviet physics.
On Tuesday I went to have a quiet talk with Oppenheimer reviewing my seminar talks. He was extremely pleasant and said he agreed with all my main contentions. He had no concrete proposals to make for going further with the theory but advised me to follow my destiny and go on thinking about it until I had squeezed all I could out of it. At the end he asked me what I was intending to do after this year, and when I said I would go back to England, he warmly approved, saying I should try hard to resist the temptation to settle permanently in the States. At the end he said, “You know Dirac and Bohr feel that their proper place is in England and Denmark, and I have an arrangement that they can come to the institute one year in three or thereabouts, so as to keep in touch with people over here. Certainly we shall be able to do something of the kind for you too.”
This kind of talk is vastly satisfying to my ego. But I think it is rather silly. Oppenheimer has absolutely no evidence on which he can place me in the same class with Dirac and Bohr, and it is far from clear to me whether I shall ever achieve their kind of distinction. And in any case it would do England no harm if I stayed here for a few years to learn some physics before going back to teach it there. I think his remarks are chiefly interesting as a key to his own character and an explanation of his previous behaviour. It is just this sudden and exaggerated enthusiasm which he showed when Schwinger first produced his theory, and the sudden and exaggerated lack of enthusiasm with which he viewed Schwinger and Feynman when I began my talks. He is a curious mixture, so cool and accurate in his speech and appearance and so nervous and unstable inside.
Sheila Power and Ning Hu arranged on Wednesday to make a joint expedition with me to the Princeton Art Museum where there was a special exhibition of Chinese painting. It was Ning Hu’s last day in Princeton. We had with us also Professor Liu, a delightful man, old and round and exactly like the philosophers depicted in some of the paintings; he is a great scholar (in Chinese classics) and is professor of Chinese here. He was for some years a lecturer at Oxford. The collection was extremely good, just three rooms and as much as one could digest in a morning. Professor Liu told us the personal histories of the painters, the things to look for in the paintings, and translated for us the poems which most of the paintings had written beneath or beside them. It was a delightful morning, and I have never before understood and enjoyed Chinese painting so well. Ning Hu maintains that there are only two outstanding artistic achievements, and he places these two on an equal footing. They are, Western music and Eastern painting. You will realise at once what a difference it makes, when you are confronted with twenty paintings from every school and region of China and from eight centuries of time, to be told which is which and why it is different from the others. Just as it is easier to enjoy European painting after you have been told, and grown accustomed to, the difference in time and place between Botticelli and Constable.
DECEMBER 11, 1948
Bethe was here again on Wednesday, with great news from Cornell. The three places where big synchrotrons are in an advanced stage of construction are Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cornell. Of these places, Berkeley makes the most noise and spends the most money, MIT next, and Cornell least. All three machines are now completely built, and it only remains for difficult final adjustments to be made before they will work. A week ago, as a result of some clever tricks on the part of Wilson, who is in charge at Cornell, the Cornell machine produced a beam of electrons. Wilson had the pleasure of ringing up Edwin McMillan (the original inventor of the synchrotron) on the long-distance phone to California, and telling him how to make his machine work. Three days later, the Berkeley machine produced a beam. The beams so far are at low energies. But once you have a beam it is not difficult to increase the energy gradually to its full value, and this should not take more than a few weeks. The bad situation is when you don’t have a beam and don’t know why you don’t have a beam. When they get the beam up to full energy, then we shall begin to learn something about mesons and nuclear forces. I am planning a long visit to Cornell as soon as this begins, and Bethe said he would be glad to see me.
DECEMBER 24, 1948
There has been great excitement over a new discovery by Powell at Bristol. Powell always keeps one step ahead of everyone else. A year and a half ago he discovered the so-called pi meson and helped very much the people at Berkeley who subsequently made the animals in their machine. Now he has a new meson which is called a tau meson, three times as heavy as the pi. This is likely to be for several years beyond the capacity of any machines to make, because the larger mass takes a proportionately large energy to create it. Powell found his meson in a photographic plate which he put at the top of a mountain in Switzerland. The main reason for the success was that he was using a new and improved type of photographic plate developed by a man called Berriman at the English Kodak company. The whole research is a joint effort between the Bristol group and the photographic companies.