• 10 •
THE LETTERS in this chapter are from Ithaca unless otherwise indicated. In March 1952 came a big surprise, my election at the age of twenty-eight as a fellow of the Royal Society, the British equivalent of the American National Academy of Sciences. The Royal Society has a longer history and a ceremonial gravitas which the American National Academy lacks.
MARCH 24, 1952
Thank you for your telegram. That was a great joy to greet us at nine o’clock in the morning. I am glad they decided to elect me in spite of my having left the old country. Not so much for the honour and glory, though that is quite considerable over here, where the scientists hold the Royal Society in high esteem. I am chiefly happy about it because the Royal Society does an outstandingly good job in managing public affairs and political problems in which science is involved. The political organization of scientists over here is unsatisfactory, mainly because they lack a Royal Society. There is no organization which is not either politically negligible or dependent on the government. To have a body which is independent and still commands general respect is not easy. I hope I can either be useful to the Royal Society as a representative over here or else keep in touch with them by periodic visits to England.
In 1952 my parents came to the end of their time in London. My father was director of the Royal College of Music from 1938 to 1952. When he retired, they returned to live the rest of their lives in Winchester, where they had lived from 1924 to 1938 and raised their two children. My father said it would be better for his successor at the Royal College if he removed himself from the scene. Winchester welcomed him back by giving him the Freedom of the City in a public ceremony. He continued to be active in public affairs. He was chairman of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, one of the largest British charities, from 1955 to 1960. He continued composing and conducting music occasionally until his death in 1964.
My mother was forty-three when I was born. She already had gray hair, more like a grandmother than a mother. She had a law degree and worked as a solicitor in her father’s law office until she married. 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.
My sister Alice, three years older than me, also remained a close friend. She came several times for long visits to America. She was a medical social worker and worked in the Winchester hospital, a venerable institution with buildings designed personally by Florence Nightingale. Alice took care of our mother in her last years and continued to live in the family house after our mother died. Alice was a Catholic. She was well loved in Winchester, and a huge crowd of friends came to her memorial mass when she died in 2012.
My father’s compositions were mostly choral works designed to be sung by amateur choral societies. His works were popular in Britain, where there is a strong tradition of amateur choral music. They were not well known in America, where popular music has different patterns, such as gospel, country, jazz, and rock. His best-known work was The Canterbury Pilgrims, a dramatic setting of the characters described by Chaucer in his famous poem. “The Merchant” is one of the characters who is sung in joyful fortissimo by the whole chorus.
MAY 21, 1952
What a piece of luck that they should do Pilgrims for the first time, of all places in the United States, in Geneva, New York. Geneva is just forty-five miles from here, at the head of the next lake to ours. We were able to drive it comfortably in one and a half hours. If it had been any further away, we could hardly have made it, as it is the last week of classes and we are both tied up most of the days with students. When we arrived in Geneva, we first bought the local paper to find out where and when the performance was. I can say with certainty, it was a complete success. They had rotten luck with the weather, it rained heavily and continuously from ten a.m. till ten p.m. Still there was a respectable audience, about a thousand in a hall which would seat fifteen hundred. And they clapped like five thousand when the show came to an end.
I don’t know what you would have thought of the performance musically. To my inexpert ear, it seemed that the chorus and the soprano soloist were excellent, the orchestra good, the tenor and bass soloists mediocre. The whole thing came across clearly all the time, it was never confused or dull, everything was lively. As we drove away from the hall after the show, we passed five or six girls of the choir in their long evening dresses, walking home and singing “A Merchant Was There with a Forked Beard” at the top of their voices. That was a beautiful finale. We decided not to introduce ourselves to the performers, partly from shyness and partly because we wanted to get home by midnight. But I wrote Mr. Lafford (the conductor) a note of thanks and congratulations this morning, saying who I am. About the city of Geneva, I know nothing, except that it is about the same size as Ithaca and has a flourishing beer-brewing industry. And I regret to say that until yesterday I had never heard of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Evidently Mr. Lafford is an enterprising fellow.
AUGUST 27, 1952
Verena was invited by one of her classmates from Zürich University, a girl called Edith Müller, to go and stay for a weekend with her in Ann Arbor. Edith has made a good career for herself as an astronomer, and she is now working at the Ann Arbor observatory for two years as a research assistant. She avoided getting married, and she lives in a big comfortable apartment by herself, and she loves her work. So Verena was glad to accept the invitation. Ann Arbor is a beautiful place, and I was happy to walk around and revive old memories. The only trouble with this little holiday was that we had to drive 550 miles each way. 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.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1952,
BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY, LONG ISLAND
I have been living here at Brookhaven for six days. It is a great time to be here, as the lab has recently made a new discovery of major importance. The discovery was made by two people, one an old friend of my own generation called Ernst Courant whom I used to know in Cornell in 1948, the other a professor from MIT with the unlikely name of Stanley Livingstone. Courant is on the regular staff here, Livingstone was here for the summer. The discovery does not sound spectacular. It is a new way of building a magnet so that a proton or an electron can be guided through a narrow tube without hitting the walls. But this rather simple idea will completely change the economics of high-energy particle physics. Also it will have many other uses as time goes on.
Here they have a big proton accelerator called the cosmotron, which Livingstone and Courant designed four years ago. It is just now starting to work. They got protons from it for the first time in June of this year. The protons had an energy of two billion volts. The cosmotron cost $7 million, and this is about the limit of what it is thought reasonable to spend on such machines. It is also well beyond the limit of what any university laboratory either here or abroad can do. So the effect of economic facts has been to concentrate important experiments more and more into government labs and away from universities, also into the United States and away from the rest of the world, two tendencies which everybody deplores.
This new idea of Livingstone and Courant makes it possible to build much more powerful machines for the same cost as the cosmotron. Here they have the preliminary designs for a new machine which will again cost $7 million, to be ready in about four years and giving protons with thirty billion volts. These protons will go round and round a circular steel pipe which will be six hundred feet across the circle but only one inch in cross-section. I have looked at the mathematics, and it seems it will work. The machine will certainly be built, and it will certainly be needed. All it lacks yet is a good-sounding name like the cosmotron. It has been a great pleasure to me to be in at the beginning of this new idea, to see how it has developed. 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.
The new idea was called strong focusing, and it was immediately adopted by builders of particle accelerators all over the world. The new machine that was built at Brookhaven was called the alternating gradient synchrotron. It was for many years the leading instrument for high-energy physics experiments.
SEPTEMBER 24, 1952
Today is the first day of term, and the university feels gay with students swarming everywhere. They look absurdly young and cheerful. I have my first class to teach tomorrow and Verena has hers today. She is teaching calculus to the freshmen (first-year undergraduates) which will not be any intellectual strain for her. She will have a fair amount of work to do correcting the homework, but it will be easier than the differential equations she had last year. She feels happy to be doing any kind of a job, and she also keeps up some contacts with the maths department. 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.
OCTOBER 25, 1952
Now for our main news. Two weeks ago I made up my mind that this life of being a professor with a lot of students to look after, combined with a growing family, is taking up too much of my energies, so that it is not possible for me to do much in the way of serious thinking. I decided that I ought to do serious thinking during the next few years, when I have a chance of making important contributions to science. So I decided to write to Oppenheimer and ask him if he would give me a permanent job at the institute at Princeton. Several times in the past he has said casually he would like to have me with him. So I wrote a carefully worded letter asking what he could offer me, laying all my cards on the table and explaining my difficulties. Two days later there came a long-distance call from Princeton, Oppy on the line. He said, “Certainly I will get you a permanent position at Princeton if you want one. Only it will take a little time before I can get a formal offer approved by my committee and sent out to you.” So it seems definite that we shall move to Princeton, either in fall 1953 or fall 1954. The exact terms of the offer I do not yet know. But I presume they will be satisfactory.
We are both happy about this change. First, it means I will have some mental peace and the best conditions for working. Second, the Princeton climate is much more agreeable. We already had snow which stayed on the ground two days, it is freezing hard tonight, and we now have a solid six months of winter to look forward to. In Princeton the winters are not so exhausting. Third, the friends Verena has in Princeton are closer and more desirable to her than any she has here. This means a lot in the long run. I also find the same thing true of myself. Hans Bethe is the one man here with whom I really feel at home, and he is here so little of the time and he is so busy that I do not see much of him.
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. So it happened that Bethe was away from Cornell for much of the first year after my arrival, and I did not know where he was. He was missing just when I needed him most.
Since I wrote to Oppy, I find there is one more complication. Unknown to me, Bethe himself had recently also been offered a permanent position at Princeton, and he is seriously considering accepting it, for much the same reasons as I. This actually does not make much difference to me. If he goes, it will only be better for me in Princeton and worse here. All the same, I somehow doubt if he will go, he is so much a part of the landscape here, and he feels strongly rooted too. I have no doubt that if I had to stick it out here, I would manage to make life easier for myself and should end up being happy and able to do good work. But since I have this opportunity of escaping, I may as well make the most of it.
Two days after the phone call from Oppy, I had a conversation with Bethe, and out of it I got a new idea for a major piece of research in physics. This has absorbed me completely during the last ten days. It goes ahead well and already has led to good results in understanding some recent experiments in the properties of certain particles called mesons. I have been able to find jobs for some of my students to do in connection with this idea, and this makes them happy too. I have hopes this will lead in a few weeks or months to a big step forward in the clarification of the whole meson theory. These last ten days have been great fun, but they make it even more clear how necessary it is to go to Princeton. I simply cannot go on at this pace. All my routine jobs are left undone and are piling up ahead of me. Still it is good to have such work to do, and in time I shall get it done in spite of exhaustion. Bethe is wonderful, if only I could see more of him and less of the students. We definitely go to California for the summer. That is June to September. I am teaching a summer school in Berkeley. This will be a fine change of air for Verena. We shall go all together and rent a house for the summer.
NOVEMBER 1, 1952 [THE DAY OF THE IVY MIKE TEST]
The decision is now definitely made that we leave here and go to Princeton. Only it is a question whether they can find a successor in time for us to leave next year. The successor is likely to be Ed Salpeter, who is already here as a research associate and does Hans Bethe’s lectures for him on the frequent occasions when Hans is away. Ed is a very good man, and I think they could not do better. I am happy that he is here. It makes me feel less compunction about leaving Cornell that they have such a good man to put in my place. This is still completely unofficial. Ed Salpeter is an Australian originally from Vienna who took his degree with Peierls in Birmingham and came here three years ago. He is not a deep thinker, but he is a productive worker and a good teacher and above all physically and mentally tough, so he should be suitable for this job. He and Hans Bethe are good friends too. He has married a Lithuanian-Canadian girl who was a student here and is now taking a degree in animal psychology. The question whether Hans Bethe will leave is not to be decided for several months. I believe he will not go.
I have been busy this week. It goes well with my new ideas and the calculations connected with them. Now I have about six people here working on this job, including Salpeter. I am rapidly reaching the point where I only talk and the others do the work. I hope it will not stay like that—I need to get back to real work myself if we are to keep on making progress. The most remarkable thing is the way people outside are already beginning to get excited about this work. On Wednesday I had a phone call from Princeton from a young Chinese physicist called Lee. He announced he would arrive on Thursday by air in order to learn what we were doing. He duly arrived, and I spent a day telling him all about it. He is a charming young man and understood everything readily.
Tsung Dao Lee was a brilliant young theorist who had been a student of Fermi in Chicago with his countryman Chen Ning Yang. Lee and Yang together won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for their revolutionary theory of weak interactions. Lee spent most of his life as a professor at Columbia University in New York. In later years he was given a royal welcome in China and organized a program for bringing Chinese students to study physics in America. After one of his visits to China, he told me with pride that he had survived thirty-one consecutive banquets.
Esther is the healthiest baby I ever saw, now that the cold weather is back and her cheeks are red again like ripe apples. But she still doesn’t talk. Katrin is growing up fast and beginning to get more helpful around the house.
My activities in the department are growing by leaps and bounds. I now am directing an empire of eight people who are working hard on the meson calculations which I started six weeks ago. It is amazing how things are humming. Everyone is happy, and they are getting interesting results. It is easy to run such a group once you have a suitable job for them to do. I am happy about it all. When I leave here, they will say “Look how he built the department up in two years” instead of “He didn’t like it so he quit after two years.” This makes a great difference.
The big program of calculations of meson scattering that I had organized at Cornell was intended to explain the big program of experimental measurements of meson scattering organized by Enrico Fermi at Chicago. I took our theoretical results to Chicago and showed them to Fermi. They agreed quite well with his experiments. But Fermi was not impressed. He said, “How many input numbers did you use to fit the experiments?” I said, “Four.” He said, “As my friend John von Neumann likes to say, with four input numbers I can fit an elephant.” 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.
DECEMBER 17, 1952
In the evening there was a big party of the whole physics department, students and staff, about two hundred people. It was not a birthday party for me but the regular annual Christmas party. However, it turned out to be something special. They gave an entertainment which consisted of a representation of a qualifying examination, an oral exam which each Ph.D. student has to take individually before three professors. The professors are always one theoretician, one experimenter, and one mathematician. Each professor has to do these exams rather frequently since there are a lot of students. I do it about once a month. The play was in two parts, first the exam as seen by the professors (with an offensively stupid student and very patient professors) and then as seen by the student (with a clever student falling into traps laid for him by the malicious professors). It was all very funny. But the funniest thing for me was that the theoretical professor spoke with a pure English accent and said “Bad luck” when the student made mistakes, and started to eat a sandwich halfway through the exam. He was unmistakably intended to be Professor Dyson. This was for me completely unexpected, and it is good to find that I have already become enough of a public institution to have such jokes made about me.
DECEMBER 30, 1952
I came back from the Rochester conference with two Japanese physicists, Yoichiro Nambu and Toichiro Kinoshita, who stayed with us overnight, and the next day went out with me and Katrin and helped cut down and carry home the Christmas tree. They were interested in the quaint customs of the Westerners. They have been over here only four months and are at the Princeton institute. I had long talks with them about physics and learned a lot.
I was lucky to get to know these two Japanese geniuses when they were still young and not yet famous. Both of them stayed in America and became central figures of the theoretical physics community, Nambu in Chicago and Kinoshita at Cornell. Nambu won a belated Nobel Prize in 2008 for his theory of broken symmetry. Kinoshita spent his life pushing the calculations of quantum electrodynamics to higher and higher accuracy, barely keeping pace with the increasing accuracy of experimental measurements. In 1952 the theory and experiment agreed to an accuracy of two places of decimals. We all then expected that discrepancies would arise when theory and experiment would go to higher accuracy. In 2013 Kinoshita came to my ninetieth birthday celebration in Singapore to report on the latest comparison, which showed theoretical and experimental results still in agreement to an accuracy of eleven places of decimals. 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.
In the letters, there is no mention of any discussions with our Japanese visitors about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In those days there was a general agreement on both sides that the bombing had saved lives by bringing the war to a quick end. We all had vivid memories of the war and felt that we were lucky to have survived it. Serious questioning of the ethics of the bombing arose later, after the joy of surviving the war had faded.
FEBRUARY 3, 1953
I had a letter from [Maurice] Bowra, vice chancellor of Oxford, offering me the chair from which Sydney Chapman is retiring. You may remember Chapman was my boss at Imperial College in 1946. It is a fine offer, and in many ways both Verena and I would be glad to go. I think if I had not this new job in Princeton, I would have had a hard time making up my mind about it. Oxford would offer just the things we lack here, a more international society, contacts with Europe, longer vacations, and more leisure. However, now that Princeton offers us all the same things and double the salary, we decided without much difficulty to say no to Oxford. Also we both feel appalled at the thought of once more packing up all our stuff to cross the Atlantic. I think I may one day come back and take such a position at Oxford, but it will not be before the children are grown up and able to take care of themselves. Say in twenty years from now. If they still want me.
On March 26, 1953, our son George was born at the Ithaca hospital. Another healthy baby, this time without legal problems. 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.
APRIL 1, 1953
Since Katrin has no school this week, she is allowed to stay up later. The three of us sat over our drinks and discussed the world and its problems. Katrin is coming now for the first time into contact with these questions. It is beautiful to see how she grasps and reacts to them. This evening she started the conversation with a little speech. I do not know where this came from. I did not talk to her about such questions because I was full of the new baby and our family problems. She started off saying, “But it’s true, isn’t it, Freeman, that the world is in bad shape? The whole world, I mean, not just America and Switzerland and stuff like that. There are so many people everywhere who are bullies, and there are so many wars all the time, and there are all kinds of things that hurt people. I don’t see why there should be so many things that hurt people, do you, Freeman? I think I should like not to kill anything, never to kill anything, not even flies and stuff like that, and chickens and rabbits. And then maybe the bees in the garden wouldn’t want to sting us anymore. And the people in different countries could all be friends with us, think how fine it would be, we could all belong to one tremendous big family, and think how many babies we should have to look after, what a big family it would be. And maybe even the lions would get friends with us and we wouldn’t be afraid of them anymore.” All this came out suddenly, out of the blue, and I made an effort to remember it and write it down just as she said it. I love Katrin more and more as time goes on. She has so much tenderness and imagination, and her life is not easy being the eldest in the family.
I am giving my final lectures, ending one week from now, and setting exams, settling the affairs of my students. I enjoy all of it, because this is the last time I do these things. I had yesterday two surprise invitations. One was to serve as assistant editor of the Physical Review, of which there are about twelve; it is a tedious job, but I accepted as a public service. The other was to give two weeks of lectures about physics next year at Harvard. Both these are things I am well fitted for. It is a great advantage of my going to Princeton that I can take on such incidental jobs without difficulty. If I were at Cornell, I could hardly go to Boston for two weeks in term time, and the Physical Review job would be only a burden. But in Princeton I can do such things and have enough time over for myself as well. I feel the move to Princeton will not only be good for my natural laziness but will also be the right thing for increasing my usefulness to society. Anyway let us hope so.