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MYCENEAN TABLETS AND SPIN WAVES
IN BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, there was a lively group of solid-state physicists with experimenters and theorists working together. Arthur Kip was the leading experimenter, Charles Kittel the leading theorist. I wanted to move out of particle physics and try my hand at something new, so I arranged to spend the summer of 1953 working with Kip and Kittel. I taught quantum mechanics to a class of summer school students and meanwhile taught myself solid-state physics by working on problems suggested by Kittel. The whole family came to Berkeley, and we rented a beautiful old house on the steep hillside above the campus.
AUGUST 14, 1953
I am getting a lot of good physics done since my lectures stopped. I sent off one paper to the Physical Review, and I am now deep in another one. This latest piece of work is in connection with the solid-state project which is paying part of my salary while I am here. Fortunately they had some problems which I was able to solve, so I am earning my keep. It is good that they get value for their money, so I will find it easy to get invited here again.
The main problem that I solved was to explain Arthur Kip’s experiment on electron spin resonance in metals. Kip put a piece of metal into a cavity filled with microwaves at a fixed frequency with a variable magnetic field and measured the absorption of microwaves by the metal. He found an unexpectedly sharp resonance, which I was able to explain as a consequence of the dynamics of electron spins in the metal. The microwaves only penetrate into a thin skin on the surface of the metal, and the electrons in the metal see the microwaves only for brief snatches of time, but the electrons remember the phase of the microwaves from one snatch to the next. The accurate phase memory of the electrons makes the resonance sharp.
In September 1953 I started my career as professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. We lived for three years in a house rented from the institute, then in 1956 bought the house that became our permanent home. The main change at the institute since my previous visit in 1950 was the Computer Project, bringing together engineers and scientists to build the machine and use it. In 1953 the project was in vigorous operation. My closest friends were the two people who were leading the project, Julian Bigelow, the chief engineer, and Jule Charney, the chief meteorologist. John von Neumann was nominally in charge, but his work designing the machine was finished, and he was spending most of his time in Washington as a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. I looked forward to a future with the institute leading the world in two new sciences, computer science led by Bigelow and climate science led by Charney. 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.
OCTOBER 1953
We have meetings which I attend as a member of the faculty, about institute financial policy, new appointments, and so on. I find these absorbing, and I enjoy Oppenheimer’s ability to understand and explain everything. Next Wednesday Oppy will go for a month to London and will give the Reith lectures for the BBC. I hope you will listen and see what you think of him. He has put a lot of work into preparing these lectures. Maybe you might even run into him at some function or other.
NOVEMBER 20, 1953
A political struggle agitated Princeton. A referendum vote was taken to decide whether or not Princeton should be “consolidated.” This was an instructive affair and showed the vigor of local government in America. Princeton consists of two separate entities, Princeton Borough and Princeton Township. The borough consists of the old town and has a population of nine thousand. The township consists of the suburbs and has a population of six thousand. They have separate governments, separate schools, and separate taxes. So some busybody reformers decided we ought to consolidate and distributed a lot of propaganda to this effect. In reply, the shop windows blossomed with posters like this: WE HAVE SAVED PRINCETON FOR 150 YEARS. SAVE PRINCETON NOW. VOTE NO TO CONSOLIDATION. Finally, when the great day came, we defeated the radicals. Both borough and township voted against consolidation by three-to-two majorities. We are happy about this outcome. The schools in the borough where we live are good and not overcrowded, and the population is stationary. The township has a rapidly growing population, and the schools are more crowded every year. So we are happy not to have to share.
A week ago I took a day off and Katrin had a school holiday, and we went to New York for the day. We went first to the tip of Manhattan and took a ferry to Bedloe’s Island, which is a fifteen-minute ride with magnificent views of the shipping and the city. It was a cool day, and we ate hot dogs to keep us warm. On Bedloe’s Island stands the Statue of Liberty which I had never seen at close quarters. We walked up inside her some 330 stairs. This is great fun as she consists of a copper skin with a steel framework inside and the staircase climbing up the steel framework. As you go up, you can see her anatomy from the inside. Finally you go up past her nose and eyes and stand on a platform level with her eyebrows. There is a row of windows along her forehead just under her hair, and you look out of these across the harbour, or upwards at her right hand with the torch, or downwards at her nose and her feet. It is a delightful place. There is also a gallery on the outside at the level of her feet, which is halfway up the whole monument, where you can walk round in the open air. After this we took the ferry back to Manhattan. On Sunday when we went for a walk, Katrin said to me, “Why don’t we have a practice earthquake sometime at home?” I said, “What do you mean?” She answered, “Well, we are always having fire drills in school.”
JANUARY 12, 1954,
PHYSICS DEPARTMENT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Everything goes well here. Last night I went to the Society of Fellows, a group modelled on the Cambridge College system. There are about fifty fellows attached to the society, and they come from all fields. We had a dinner such as Trinity College would have provided twenty years ago, lots of silver plate and a little trolley for pushing the port wine up and down the table. I had the good fortune to sit by Professor Hisaw who is a famous character of the university. He is a biologist and said to be the finest lecturer in the university. He comes from the hills of southern Missouri, the legendary home of American hillbillies and amiable criminals. He is evidently a born showman. We talked mainly about psychical research, as I had been reading some article on the subject by Aldous Huxley appealing for a more open-minded appraisal of the evidence. Hisaw said yes he was very open-minded about psychical research, so much so that he had served for five years on the “Spook Committee” of Harvard University. This committee was set up to administer a bequest of $15,000 a year which some good lady had left to the Harvard Corporation for the support of psychical research.
The committee consisted of professors from various fields, and one lawyer to see that the terms of the bequest were complied with. The committee invited anybody to submit proposals to them for examination, and they had proposals from all over the country which they investigated with great care. Every kind of crackpot came crowding for a share in the money. So the committee spent their days giving interviews, watching dice-throwing experiments, and arguing interminably. After five years they still had not found any applicant who deserved their support. But there was a professor at Columbia whose proposals seemed to be a bit better than the others. They finally decided (1) that the Columbia professor get the use of the money for his experiments for five years, (2) that he report his accounts and his experimental results to the lawyer who should be solely responsible for the execution of the bequest, (3) that the committee be discharged.
The book by Aldous Huxley that I had been reading was The Doors of Perception (1954). Huxley did not succeed in making psychical research respectable. His writings had the opposite effect, blurring the distinction between scientific investigation of psychical phenomena and recreational use of psychoactive drugs.
I met an interesting character at breakfast at the Faculty Club. He is president of a big aircraft manufacturing company, a man of about sixty. Oppenheimer happened to drop in for breakfast, and so I was introduced to him. This man had been travelling round the world making business deals, and had a very poor opinion of the industrial management wherever he went. He said, “People are surprised that the Italian workman votes Communist. By God, if I were an Italian workman, I should vote Communist. That is the only party which says cut the boss’s throat. And that’s obviously the only thing that will do any good.” He also talked to Nehru. Nehru said it would be a fine thing for India to have nuclear reactors to power the new factories, because India has such poor roads and railways and they cannot transport enough coal from the coalfields. So he would like America to supply him with a reactor or two. This American said, “I just couldn’t make the man understand that it’s no good having factories if you don’t have the roads to take away the stuff the factories make.”
Tonight I shall go with Hans Haefeli to watch the big ice hockey game between his university (Boston College) and mine (Harvard). That will be fun too.
The match between Boston College and Harvard was a hard-fought battle. Harvard had better skaters, but Boston College had better teamwork. Boston College won. We were sitting on the Boston College side of the rink, and immediately behind us was a long row of Catholic priests shouting in unison. Not only the players but also the spectators had better teamwork on the Boston College side. I still treasure the memory of that game as an epic encounter of the two cultures coexisting in Boston, the old aristocratic Protestant culture of Harvard and the new team-oriented Catholic culture of Boston College.
MARCH 13, 1954
Since we came back, the main interest has been a talk at the institute on “The Deciphering of the Mycenean Script” by Professor Alan Wace, an English archaeologist. This is a fascinating story, maybe you also have read about it in the papers. In the Cretan civilisation which was destroyed about 1400 B.C., there were three kinds of writing at different periods. Over the last fifty years they have found about two thousand clay tablets, most of which belong to the latest period and are written in B script. I remember being taught in school that these writings would probably never be deciphered, because all trace of the language they were written in had disappeared, and the Greeks who came in from the north about 1400 B.C. had destroyed the native cities and introduced their own language during the following centuries of barbarism. Now during the last five years the whole picture changed because it was found that the Mycenean civilisation on the Greek mainland was using the same B script in many different places, during a period 1500–1200 B.C. which overlapped with the B script in Crete, and continued until the mainland cities were themselves destroyed by later invasions. In particular about one thousand of these clay tablets were found in the so-called Palace of Nestor at Pylos. So it became clear that the later Cretans were speaking the same language that the mainlanders were using right up to the Homeric period, and this could hardly be anything else but Greek. The archaeologists now consider that the original Greek tribes moved down the mainland about 2000 B.C. and reached Crete about 1600. The older Cretans had their own language and their A script at that time. The Greeks then learned to write their own language, inventing B script for the purpose, and took this art back with them to the mainland.
With these new ideas two gentlemen in London [Michael Ventris and John Chadwick] sat down to decipher the B script, assuming it to be an old form of Greek, and the experts are convinced they have succeeded. The script has eighty-eight signs, each representing a syllable. They worked out by trial and error phonetic equivalents for sixty of the signs, the other twenty-eight being so rare that they are not yet sure what they are. In this way they found the majority of the tablets make clear sense; they are mostly shopkeepers’ accounts and inventories. The decisive check on all this came when some completely fresh tablets arrived from the excavations in Pylos, which had not been used for the analysis. One such tablet was a list of pots, giving on each line a description in words, a number, and then a picture of the pot. The first line was
TI-RI-PO 1 [sketch of pot with three legs]
TI-RI-PO-DE 2 [sketch of pot with three legs]
KE-TO-RO-PO-DE 2 [sketch of pot with four legs]
and so on. All this is enormously exciting to the classical scholars around here, now suddenly to have Greek texts from two hundred to five hundred years before Homer. They say they expect to find lots more of these tablets as soon as they dig for them. The first to be deciphered are the shopping lists, etc., which are easiest and least interesting. They already got one from Pylos which seems to be instructions for making a sacrifice to Poseidon, and more interesting material will become accessible as they learn more about the language. They say also that if they can learn enough about the B script, then they may be able to go back to the A script and discover what the original Cretan language was. For this they would need some kind of bilingual tablets.
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.
MARCH 30, 1954
I am having trouble with the British authorities here to get Esther accepted as a British subject. I started with the paperwork last December, but it is not half done. People talk so much about the stupidity of the American immigration officials, but I never met anything so bad as these British. Every time I write to them or telephone them, they want more documents and more irrelevant information. After they finally decide that Esther is a legal child, they have to send the documents to Zürich to get her birth officially reregistered there, and then after all that comes back again, we can start getting her a passport. God knows whether all this will be done before May 26. Verena is also having trouble with her Swiss consul getting herself a passport. This may hold us up too. The only one who has no trouble so far is George, who is a bona fide American and gets an American passport. We decided now we shall all become Americans as soon as we are eligible (1956) and have an end to these complications.
APRIL 21, 1954
After four months of delay, we finally today got a note from the British consul that he will not recognize Esther and George as British subjects and will not give them passports. This makes me so raving mad, I do not know what I may not do.
Oppenheimer is still in Washington having his life history examined by the Personnel Security Panel. We expect their verdict in about a week. We have been expecting this case to come up for a long time, and so far it must be said the government has handled it with unusual decency. It all depends now on the verdict. If the verdict is unfavourable, it means a major loss of contact between the government and the people who are supposed to advise the government on scientific questions. This will be bad in the long run. But it will not change anything here at the institute. I just came back from Washington where I attended the three-day physics conference. I took down a huge parcel of clothes for Oppenheimer and his family, which I delivered to the office of his Washington lawyer. His actual whereabouts is kept secret, so he and the family can get quiet evenings without being bothered by newspapermen. Bethe saw him in Washington and said he looks thinner but otherwise in good shape.
MAY 9, 1954
I wrote a strong letter to the British consul in New York, instead of my usual polite requests, and this produced some effect. Though it does not change the facts of the situation, the consul decided to give Esther a passport valid for a year, not renewable unless her status is established in the meantime. From a practical point of view, this is all we need for this summer. The consul, after I had been rude, did exactly what he said was “absolutely impossible” when I was polite.
The facts are these. In 1949 Hans Haefeli divorced Verena in his hometown of Balsthal, canton Solothurn, because according to Swiss law he remains for his whole life legally attached to his place of origin. He was then already resident in Massachusetts. According to British law, this divorce is valid if it is recognized as valid by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but not otherwise. The British consul was told by his lawyers that Massachusetts probably would not recognize the divorce, so he does not recognise it either. Verena and I are therefore not married, our children are illegitimate, and hence not British subjects. The joke is that we heard from Hans Georg when he was here that his lawsuit in Rome has finally succeeded, so the pope has agreed to the marriage being annulled. According to the pope, Verena was never married to Hans. The Swiss government however recognizes both marriages and the divorce, so according to them Esther and George are British.
MAY 23, 1954
Professor Wace, who stimulated my interest in the Mycenean inscriptions, is travelling to Europe the same day as we but on a different ship. He is going to Mycenae to dig, as he did last year, and intends to go on for many years more. I never ventured to ask him his age, but when we went together to Philadelphia, the income tax clerk asked it of him. He said in a sepulchral whisper, “Don’t tell anybody. I am seventy-four.”
I spent most of the summer of 1954 at Cécile DeWitt-Morette’s summer school at Les Houches, with Georges Charpak as my star student. After that I went to the International Congress of Mathematicians at Amsterdam. Verena left the children in a Kinderheim in Switzerland and spent the summer visiting her sister who was living in Damascus, Syria. In those days Syria was a peaceful country friendly to expatriate Europeans. In September 1954 the family was reunited in Princeton.
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.
After the government decided to deny Oppenheimer’s clearance, there was some speculation in the newspapers that the institute trustees might also decide to fire him from his job at Princeton. If he was not to be trusted with government secrets, the trustees might decide that he was not to be trusted with institute secrets. The institute faculty, including me, signed a public statement that we had confidence in Oppenheimer and wished him to continue as director. I was prepared, in case Oppenheimer was fired, to resign from my position at the institute and return with my family to England. It came as a big relief when the trustees made their statement reelecting him as director. We did not need to drag our children back across the ocean.
DECEMBER 15, 1954
Esther now is growing up fast. It seems always the rule that the children are most difficult when they are going through some mental development. She is now happier again and with a much wider range of ideas. 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.”
JANUARY 17, 1955
I was invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences to a meeting in Moscow, to discuss the branch of physics in which I am expert. The dates are March 31–April 7. It seems to be a genuine and serious affair. I decided I would make a fight and find out if it is possible to go. I think the chances are small, but one ought at least to try. So I have been busy writing letters to various officials, British and American. As our term ends April 10, there would be no hurry for me to get back to Princeton, but I might get a chance to travel around in Russia or elsewhere in Europe after the conference. In the newspapers today I see that Eisenhower approved a report of the National Science Foundation to Congress in which they said, “We must find out more about what the Soviet scientists are doing.” This perhaps improves my chances.
FEBRUARY 4, 1955
I came home last night from a strenuous week of conferences. My Indian friend Abdus Salam (who is now fixed in Cambridge) flew over for the meetings. Dick Feynman was there from Pasadena. As far as we can discover, Salam and Feynman and I are the only three who have invitations to Moscow. We are all three seriously trying to go. It seems I am the furthest along so far. I had a prompt reply from the British consul in New York saying he has enquired from London, and HM Government will give me all the usual diplomatic protection and has no objection to my making the trip. I also wrote to the American immigration authority demanding a written statement that they approve this journey and will let me back into the country afterwards. If I do not get their approval in writing, I shall not go. The situations of Feynman and Salam are different. Feynman is a U.S. citizen by birth and so could have no difficulty reentering the country. But he has worked at Los Alamos, and so they may not feel inclined to give him a U.S. passport valid for the USSR. Salam has a more complicated problem because he is not resident here but wants to visit here from time to time. He wants the American visa authority to approve his going to Moscow so that they will not hold it against him at some hypothetical future time when he may apply for a visa. I think that of the three of us, I am in the most favorable position, and it may well be that I am the only one who succeeds in going.
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. We knew that there were many excellent physicists in Russia who were not allowed to travel, for example Pyotr Kapitsa, Igor Tamm, Lev Landau, Andrey Kolmogorov, Vladimir Veksler, and Yakov Zeldovich. We could read many of their theoretical papers in the open literature, but they published little about experiments. The invitation in 1955 offered me a chance to make friends with the Russian theorists and perhaps to find out what the experimenters were doing.
MARCH 1, 1955
I discovered some interesting things in the latest issue of the Russian physics journal. There is a string of seven papers describing experiments they have done with a big proton accelerator of 660 million volts. They have had the machine operating for three years, but until now there has never been a word published about any experimental work in nuclear physics. Of course, it was idiotic to keep such a thing secret. (American machines of this kind have never been secret.) It shows some glimmerings of common sense that they now make it public. My trip to Moscow may be more profitable if they are free to talk about their experimental work. What they have done with the machine is competent and careful work, but nothing particularly new or exciting.
MARCH 18, 1955
I am sorry to say that I will not come and see you in April, as the Moscow scheme failed. The crisis came on Monday, when I went to Washington to the central office of the Immigration Service. It was a beautiful day, and Verena drove me to the station full of high hopes at six-thirty a.m. I got to the office about eleven and was received in a friendly and informal way by the big boss. He told me what is written in this letter to Salam which I enclose. After this interview I walked around Washington for some hours, sweating out a decision. I was still free to go to Russia, and I would stand a very good chance of getting back. If I would go and get back safely, it would be a victory for the international brotherhood of science, showing the world that a courageous individual can place his trust in the good faith of Russian scientists and not be disappointed. On the other hand, if I would go and get into trouble, having my name attached to a political statement condemning the American Imperialists, making me appear to be a Communist Dupe, I would show the world exactly the opposite. In that case I would show the world that an individual placing his trust in the good faith of Russian scientists is an idiot. It all depended on whether I myself trust the Russians not to turn the conference into a political junket.
I decided finally, I trust the Russian scientists, who are genuinely interested in discussing the kind of work I have been doing. But I do not believe these scientists would have any control over the situation, if the local political people decided to interfere. So I was forced to the conclusion, I do not trust these people to keep it nonpolitical; and if I do not trust them myself, it is crazy to risk my job for the principle that one ought to trust them. After I made up my mind about this, I walked over to the National Gallery and relaxed my spirit with Rembrandt and Cézanne. Perhaps if Washington had not been so beautiful that day, I would have decided differently. There was such a peace over the city, with its wide grass spaces where you can walk for miles without meeting anybody, its clean white buildings and brilliant blue sky. It would be very hard to say good-bye to all this.
Dear Salam,
I am sorry to say I had to give up the Moscow conference. I feel very bad about this, but I decided not to risk it. Yesterday I went to the head office of the Immigration Service in Washington. They were intelligent people and on the whole cooperative. They said: (1) They are specifically forbidden by law to give me any guarantee that I may reenter the U.S. (2) If I go to the Moscow conference and get involved in no political manoeuvres, this would not be a reason for them to exclude me from the U.S. (3) If I get involved in any political activities, if my name is used by the Russians for any propaganda and gets into the newspapers, if the conference starts to pass resolutions condemning the American imperialists, or anything of this kind, then I am classified as a “Communist Dupe.” (4) The Immigration Service made its own enquiries to find out whether this conference was a bona fide scientific affair or not and was unable to obtain any information. If I rely on my own judgment in believing that the conference is nonpolitical, the risk is entirely my own. If it turns out that I have been duped, I am not to expect any sympathy from the Immigration Service. I myself believe strongly that this is a genuine nonpolitical conference. But the risk is there, and for me the penalty is too heavy to take a chance on it. Best of luck!
Yours ever,
Freeman.
APRIL 14, 1955
I knew you would be opposed to my going to Moscow, and I was glad you had the tact to say nothing about it until the decision was made. I understand very well your point of view. However, I know now that there was in fact no political propaganda attached to it. It would have been perfectly all right if I had gone, and I am now sorry I was not brave enough to take a chance on it. The story came out last Wednesday, when the Moscow radio broadcast a statement that the conference had taken place. The statement was entirely factual and nonpolitical in content, and it was clear that the conference itself had been nonpolitical. The physicist Igor Tamm, whose name I know well, made the broadcast, which was sent out on the day the conference ended. There was a list of the people who were there, and he said, “Unfortunately the Americans Feynman and Dyson, who at first accepted our invitations, were prevented by their government from attending.” That was all he said about us, and I think it is not objectionable.
When this Moscow radio broadcast was received, the New York Times Russian expert called me up and read me the statement, and I told him my side of the story. The result appeared on page one of the Times on Thursday. I was glad to see this account also kept strictly to the facts. It is easy to be wise after the event. If I had to make the same decision again without knowing more than I did at the time, I should again say no.
My parents were against my going to Moscow for the same reason that I decided against it. They were afraid that I might be walking into a political trap.
Of the people who were there, two are personal friends of mine. One is Gunnar Källén, a young Swede who was here at the institute last year. Of course Sweden made him no trouble about such a visit. I am very glad he went, because I shall see him before long and hear about it in detail. He will have picked up whatever there was to be picked up. The other friend of mine is Ning Hu who came from Peking. He was a research associate at Cornell in my time, and we used to talk about all kinds of things, especially about China. After the Communist government was established, he decided to go back home. He was aware of the difficulty of living in a Communist society and expected to have plenty of troubles. He had his roots so strongly in China that he had to go back ultimately, and he thought the sooner he went, the easier it would be. After he went back, I heard nothing about him until now. It is good to know that he has established himself and is in good standing. If this were not so, he would not be sent to Moscow.
The purpose of the 1955 Moscow conference was to open up communication between the USSR physicists and the rest of the world. The conference was only partially successful since few visitors came. In 1956 there was a highly successful conference with a much larger number of visitors. Since that time, the Russian physicists have never been isolated from the world community.
I was invited by Charles Kittel to spend a second summer in Berkeley. We rented the same house that we had occupied in 1953, and I worked again happily with Kip and Kittel on problems of solid-state physics. Out of this work grew a theory of spin waves. Spin waves are waves of magnetization running through the atoms of a solid material. I calculated spin waves by the same mathematical method that I had used for quantum electrodynamics five years earlier. This was the same strategy that failed when I tried to use it to calculate nuclear processes at Cornell. To my delight, the strategy succeeded magnificently when I applied it to spin waves.
OCTOBER 21, 1955
I have been working at high pressure from the day we got home. A lot of accumulated jobs connected with the institute and its affairs. 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.
Bruno Pontecorvo was a brilliant Italian experimenter who worked as a young student with Fermi in Rome and joined the Communist Party in Paris. As an Italian Jew, he had to escape from occupied Europe. He worked at the Canadian nuclear energy project during the war and at the British project at Harwell after the war. In 1950 he was on holiday in Italy and abruptly disappeared with his wife and two sons. In 1955 he reappeared at the meeting in Moscow which I failed to attend. He was working as an experimenter in the Soviet accelerator project. He spent the rest of his life in Russia as a scientist in good standing, hampered by the Soviet bureaucracy that surrounded him. It never became clear whether he had been a Soviet spy in Canada or in England. He died in 1993. His biography was written by Frank Close and published with the title Half-Life (2015).
NOVEMBER 22, 1955
My own work continues to go well. I am beginning to move closer to a field I have for a long time dreamed of working in, the controlled application of thermonuclear (fusion) energy. I shall become a citizen in 1957, and I can start planning to go into secret work about that time. The work itself is getting rapidly less secret, and there is talk of making it completely open. It is no longer necessary to have more than the usual type of clearance to work in it. We are now allowed to mention that there is a big laboratory here in Princeton (connected with the university, not the institute) working on the problem. The director is an astrophysicist called Lyman Spitzer. What they are trying to do is to make a small artificial star. Spitzer is a good man for the job. The problem at the moment is not so much to build gadgets as to explore the basic theory, and I am well qualified to work on it. I believe I shall gradually get more involved in this kind of thing, and I find the prospect exciting. This week I had my first definite offer to work on such problems. It would have been a full-time job in California with a huge salary and an industrial environment. I said no to that. But I will have no difficulty in getting into the work part time without cutting myself off from academic life.
I never worked with Spitzer’s fusion project in Princeton. After sixty years the project is still active, but it never achieved its aim of producing fusion energy at a cost competitive with coal and oil. 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.