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THE YEAR 1956 was mostly concerned with new ventures going outside my academic role at Princeton. The first venture was an international meeting of physicists in Moscow. I went to the meeting and spent a few days in Leningrad, fulfilling an ambition that dated back to my days as a schoolboy in England. It was a great joy to get to know the Russians, both as scientific colleagues and as human beings. The many hours and days that I had spent studying the Russian language were richly rewarded. Only by knowing the language can a visitor see below the surface of an alien society. The Russian language is the key to the Russian soul.
My second venture was starting a new career as a nuclear engineer. I spent the summer at La Jolla in California, where a group of scientists was invited to launch a new company with the name General Atomic, building and selling fission reactors in the commercial market. In three months we finished a preliminary design for a reactor called TRIGA, the name meaning Training, Research, Isotope-production, General Atomic. The reactor was a commercial success. The company sold seventy-five of them, mostly to hospitals and medical centers where short-lived isotopes were needed for diagnostic purposes. The TRIGA differed from other reactors because it was designed with safety as the primary consideration. Other reactors relied on engineering for safety. The TRIGA relied only on laws of nature.
My job in Princeton gave me unusual freedom to engage in extraneous activities. I always had a short attention span, jumping frequently from one enterprise to another.
JANUARY 3, 1956
We were lucky to have a long spell of hard frost, unusual for Princeton. Lake Carnegie is frozen over with ice eight inches thick. I bought Katrin a pair of skates and took her out to the lake with me every day. She has learned amazingly fast (the ballet must have helped her with this), and we have got along together famously. One afternoon we skated five miles together from one end of the lake to the other and back again. During this week I found time to finish my spin wave papers. I feel quite light-headed after five months with spin waves chasing each other around in my brain.
JANUARY 25, 1956
I have strong opinions about space travel, and I give them to you for what they are worth. Technically there is no doubt it is possible with existing equipment (given five or ten years for building and testing the machinery) to transport a group of people to the moon with enough supplies to last a year or two, and bring them back alive. The weight of oxygen needed to supply one man for a year is surprisingly small, less than the weight of food he will eat; if he stays longer than a year, he will grow plants which produce both food and oxygen. Meteorites; the risk of being hit is very small, except for the very small particles of dust which can be stopped by a thin roof.
The question how soon people will go to the moon depends on how much money and effort the human race decides to spend on it. It will certainly be expensive (estimates vary between ten and one hundred million pounds) and not immediately profitable. I believe it will go fast because of the psychological situation in Russia and America. Each side is convinced it has to get ahead of the other in such enterprises. It is probably true that to have an observation post on the moon with a fair-size telescope would be a military advantage for the side which gets there first. I believe the job will be done, by both Russia and America, within the next twenty years, perhaps much sooner. And once the first trip is made, there will be no end to it, it will become as commonplace as flying the Atlantic.
This prediction turned out to be half right, half wrong. The last sentence is extravagantly wrong. I wonder now why I was wrong. Perhaps the main reason is that I grew up during World War II, when big enterprises were started and finished regardless of cost. I was still thinking in the wartime way. During the war, money did not matter. In peacetime, the political game was played with different rules. Money mattered.
FEBRUARY 13, 1956
Today I made a speech at the institute and let them have my spin wave theory for the first time. It went well. Oppenheimer and Pauli (from Zürich) were there and seemed to be excited too. On Friday I shall repeat it at Columbia, and later on at Pittsburgh. It is fun to go around with something new to talk about. The last two days I spent digging up information about Hermann Weyl for an obituary notice which will appear in Nature. The difficult part was deciding what to leave out, as they gave me a total of only 750 words. I could easily have written three thousand.
Hermann Weyl was the only person at the institute with world-class stature both as a mathematician and as a physicist. He was largely responsible for making symmetry-groups the central concept of modern particle physics. He retired from the institute and returned to Switzerland one year after I joined the faculty. I was lucky to make friends with him during his final year in Princeton. He died one year later in Zürich.
I got invited again to Moscow, this time to a conference from May 14 to 20, and this time I intend to go. The arguments which persuaded me not to go last time are entirely absent, now that I know last year’s conference to have been a genuine and nonpolitical affair. I still shall take a risk not to be readmitted to the United States when I return, but this I am prepared to accept; in case of trouble my position will be strong enough to fight it through successfully—the whole American scientific public will fight for me. I shall probably leave for Russia on May 12. Already I started taking Russian classes at the university, and these I am enjoying very much. It is fun to be a student again and sit with boys and be scolded for making grammatical mistakes.
The death of Stalin in 1953 started a period of rapid change in Soviet society. Symbolic of the changes was a novel, The Thaw, by Ilya Ehrenburg (1955). Ehrenburg was a friend of Nikita Khrushchev, who became leader of the USSR in the same year and made the thaw real. Four important consequences of the thaw were: (1) the release of millions of prisoners from the gulag camps, (2) a speech by Khrushchev officially denouncing the abuse of personal power by Stalin, (3) loosening of censorship of speech and writing, and (4) the opening of the USSR to foreign visitors and international meetings. Ehrenburg was a loyal Communist, considered by dissident Russians to be a party hack. His novel carried a powerful message, with dripping icicles and budding leaves of spring presaging the rebirth of human feelings after a long freeze. In 1956 when we visited Russia, the thaw was in full swing and hopes of further liberation were high. In retrospect, we can now see that the thaw was real and permanent, but the hopes for the future were exaggerated. The USSR never went back to Stalinist terror and never went forward to Western-style freedom.
MARCH 17, 1956, PITTSBURGH
There is much talk about Russia. Invitations have been sent out wholesale, not only to our high-energy conference in Moscow but also to a solid-state conference a week later in Sverdlovsk just the other side of the Urals. Everybody who is invited is happy because the others decided to accept. No one is refusing to go. We shall be a big and merry crowd. Amongst others, Peierls is definitely going and also Bethe from Cornell. I have sent in my application for the Russian visa and was happy to find on the application form I must identify myself as Freeman Georgievitch, as in the old Russian novels.
The American Atomic Energy Commission has completely reversed itself since last year when they stopped Feynman from going to Moscow. I am at the moment under investigation because I am applying for AEC clearance to do secret work during the summer in California. I wrote a letter, not asking the AEC for permission to go to Moscow, but informing them that I shall go and that I shall understand it if in consequence they do not want to give the clearance. The reply came back by telephone that the clearance will not be affected one way or the other. The AEC has also given its blessing to Bethe who knows much more about hydrogen bomb secrets than Feynman ever did. It seems some common sense has finally penetrated into the AEC.
Just before I left Princeton, there came a telephone call from the AEC asking, “Who are the Princeton people who are going to the Moscow conference?” I thought, “Well now, here starts the trouble.” Then the AEC official said, “Please tell them that if any of them are working on AEC supported contracts, we shall help pay their fares to Russia.” It looks as if this opening of communications will be more or less permanent, and there will be many more trips to Russia in years to come. This makes me happy that I did not lose much by being cautious and refusing to go last year.
APRIL 4, 1956, ROCHESTER, NEW YORK
Today I had the pleasure of putting to good use the Russian I have been studying for so many years. I had supper with Veksler the Russian accelerator expert. After a while I found myself saying “Nyet spasibo” to the American waitress, which caused some amusement. Veksler said they are all so much looking forward to having me in Moscow that I must be careful not to be questioned to the point of exhaustion by eager young theoreticians. It is lucky that we got this chance to make friends and overcome the language problems before the trip to Moscow. I shall feel no strangeness at all when I go there. Veksler said I was welcome to come to lecture in Moscow for a few months “whenever you find it convenient.” It is all somehow intoxicating.
MAY 15, 1956, HOTEL MOSKVA, MOSCOW
I am safely here and settled in. I feel as if I had already been here a long time. The Russians work terribly long hours. We have meetings every day from ten till two and from five till nine. For each session we drive half an hour in a bus there and back, so not much of the day is left. I am amazed to find what an exaggerated reputation I have in Russia. This is partly because I am the one who reads and reviews their papers. They treat me with enormous respect. And they have evidently read what I write, not only in the Physical Review but also in the Scientific American and even the obituary of Weyl in Nature. The meetings themselves, apart from being too long, are lively and interesting. The Russians are informal, more like Americans than Western Europeans, and they contradict and argue and make jokes freely in the meetings. Last night I managed to get out for an hour and walk around the streets. It is a little like Paris. Lots of cheerful people strolling around and enjoying the warm evening, chattering and laughing. Most of the houses in a state of genteel decay with plaster and paint flaking off. Many cafés open with tables and chairs on the sidewalk and people drinking wine or coffee. How I should love to be here for two weeks with nothing to do but sit around and explore the city. But we shall be organised almost every hour of our stay. After two weeks I shall be ready to come home.
The Russia that I saw in 1956 and on several later visits was no Potemkin village. I knew the language well enough to see the fears and tensions below the surface of the society. Russians talked to me with astonishing freedom about the corruption and incompetence of their government. The thaw was real, and the ice that held Stalin’s Russia in place was softening. Russia was already moving, in a slow but massive slide, towards the peaceful collapse of the USSR that took us all by surprise thirty-five years later.
In 1955 there was an international conference in Geneva, at which government officials from countries with nuclear projects met to decide how much of their secret information should be made public. Until that meeting, all of nuclear science and engineering was secret. It clearly made no sense to keep secret the basic facts about peaceful uses of fission and fusion energy. Delegates from the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and Canada agreed to share and publish nuclear information that was not related to bombs. One of the American delegates at Geneva was Freddy de Hoffmann, a young scientist from Los Alamos. He understood that the Geneva agreement opened up the field of peaceful nuclear energy to private business. After the meeting, he resigned his position at Los Alamos and founded a nuclear start-up company which he called General Atomic. He raised enough money to rent a schoolhouse in San Diego for the summer of 1956 and to invite a big group of experts to sit in the schoolhouse for three months and decide what the new company should do. The group had roughly equal numbers of physicists, chemists, and engineers. I was one of the physicists. I arrived at the schoolhouse in June 1956 knowing nothing about nuclear reactors but eager to learn. I was housed with the other visitors in a big motel in La Jolla.
My first impressions of La Jolla were unfavorable. It seemed to be a good place to take a holiday but a bad place to live. Abundant flowers that were actually real but looked artificial beause they were too brightly colored. Houses with big swimming pools but no books and no reading lights. Streets full of big fast cars with few pedestrians. After we lived in La Jolla with our family for a few months, we began to like it better. There was a good public library where our children could borrow unlimited supplies of books. There was a good local hospital where one of our babies was born. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography was a world-class research center where we made lasting friendships. The famous Doctor Seuss, author of children’s books that our children loved, came in person to spend a morning with our son’s first-grade class, collecting ideas from the class for his next book. In the end we liked La Jolla so much that we bought an apartment there.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 1956, LA JOLLA
The work may turn out to be very exciting, or it may be a terrible flop. It is hard to say at present. In many ways it reminds me of Bomber Command. A group of us has been given the job of thinking up a nuclear reactor which shall be absolutely safe, so it can be played around with by untrained people and there can be no question of it blowing up. Such a reactor would be greatly in demand for hospitals and such places where they need a reactor but do not want to maintain a staff of physicists to take care of it. This is a clear enough assignment, and if we can do something along these lines, it will be exciting. On the other hand we have the feeling, as we did at Bomber Command, that we are remote from real life. Few of us know anything about the practical construction of reactors, and we do not have any experimental facilities here. So all we can do is to think up general ideas and follow them to a preliminary design stage. Perhaps something good will come out of it.
Edward Teller was a famous Hungarian physicist who came to the United States in 1935 and became passionately involved in both the military and civilian applications of nuclear energy. He had two obsessions, the hydrogen bomb and civilian reactor safety. The hydrogen bomb obsession was well known to the public and made him generally unpopular. The reactor safety obsession was not so well known but equally important to Teller himself. He was chairman of the Reactor Safeguards Committee of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for many years. He was a friend of Freddy de Hoffmann at Los Alamos and was an enthusiastic supporter of Freddy’s venture into civilian nuclear technology. He came to General Atomic in 1956 because he saw it as an opportunity to build reactors far safer than any existing reactors. He believed passionately that nuclear energy could be a blessing to mankind if reactors were perceived by everybody as safe. It was not enough to solve the technical problems of safety. If nuclear energy were to be acceptable in the long run, it was necessary to make it visibly and obviously safe, so that we could operate a reactor in the middle of a city and insurance companies would not hesitate to insure it. When the visitors assembled at General Atomic, Edward Teller immediately took charge of the group working on the design of a safe reactor. He announced that our goal was to design a reactor so safe that we could hand it over to a bunch of high school kids to play with and they could not get hurt.
JULY 15, 1956
I am more deeply involved in nuclear reactors than I would have believed possible four weeks ago. There is lots to be done, and this is a good place to do it. Our group which is working on safe reactors has done so well that people are now being transferred into it from the two other groups (test reactors and ship reactors). I was responsible for most of the new ideas which gave us our lead. The rest came from Edward Teller who is also in our group. It is exciting and infuriating to work with Teller. I had often heard about scientists behaving like prima donnas, and now I know what it means. We had yesterday a long meeting at which I disagreed with him, and he was in a filthy temper. Finally he won the argument by threatening to leave the place if we would not do things his way. I did not know whether to laugh or cry, but it was clear that the best thing was to laugh and go along with him. I do not have to take this seriously. But I understand now what a misery he must have been for Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer could not let him run the whole show his own way. I am glad I am not likely ever to be Teller’s boss.
We are trying to design reactors which shall be intrinsically safe against blowing up or melting down, so that one can put them in hospitals or factories, and the neighbors will not be afraid of them. Our quarrels arise because I have a scheme which will take two or three years to develop and is very good, while Teller has a scheme which can be done with luck in one year but is not so good. Teller says, since this is a small company, we ought to drop everything else and work on his scheme to get it done as quickly as possible. We decided yesterday to do this. I am not particularly unhappy about it. I shall enjoy working on his scheme. But I am glad I put up a fight and made myself heard. It is astonishing how quickly one can become the world’s greatest expert on safe reactors. It is like Papa and his handbook of grenade fighting. I have never seen the inside of a reactor, and I did not even read about one till four weeks ago. Teller is in roughly the same situation. What makes me happy is that I have now an established reputation as a reactor expert, whether my ideas are ever adopted or not. I shall have to do nothing more, and invitations to consult with various companies will come flowing in. And I find this reactor business genuinely exciting. As time goes on, I begin to like this place better. Today I shall go down to Mexico and see my first bullfight.
My father was a professional musician who volunteered to be a soldier when World War I broke out in 1914. He was quickly appointed grenade officer for his infantry unit, since nobody else wanted the job. He wrote the official handbook of grenade fighting (1915), never having seen a real grenade. His handbook was used by the entire British army thoughout the war, and also by the American army when the United States joined the war in 1917. He was thirty-one when he became the expert on grenade fighting, and I was aged thirty-two when I became the expert on safe reactors. All it takes to become an expert is a little common sense and a little imagination.
AUGUST 12, 1956
I am having a joyful time here. I seem to have made quite a dent in the atomic energy business and their security regulations. What I have done for this company seems to have impressed them. They are begging me to stay here and be the head of the theoretical division. They offer to do absolutely anything to make it agreeable to me. Luckily we had here for the last week a young man called Lewis Strauss, Jr., who happens to be the son of the Lewis Strauss who is the head of the whole AEC. Strauss Junior is a physicist, and I found him congenial and easy to talk to. The old Strauss is a firm Republican and would decide the question in favor of General Atomic if it ever came to his notice. Yesterday before he left to go back to Washington, young Strauss whispered in my ear, “We will have you cleared inside two weeks.” So I imagine the old-fashioned power of family influence will be brought into action on my side. Meanwhile I am amusing myself with reactors, and I find it absorbingly interesting to think about them. Probably this summer is a turning point in my life. I find the atomic energy business congenial, and also I am good at it. My real talent is perhaps not so much in pure science as in practical development. Just as Papa would never make music to himself in an ivory tower but always in the context of a particular group of people who would play it.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26, 1956, LA JOLLA
You may like to hear the sequel to my quarrel with the AEC. A few days after my previous letter to you, the news came from Washington that I am cleared. But I am only cleared for one project, which is the most secret of all the things General Atomic is doing. The AEC has a logical explanation for this absurd situation. Their regulations say that secret information may be given to a foreigner only when this is necessary to the national defense. Obviously, if the information is not vital military information, it cannot be necessary to the national defense to give it to me. Therefore I can have the important military secrets but not the unimportant civilian secrets. It is the craziest joke I ever heard. A few days after the clearance, there came a telephone call from Los Alamos asking me to sign on with them as a consultant and to stay a week on my way home from here in September. The contract allows me to go to Los Alamos anytime I like. I have agreed to sign on.
SEPTEMBER 20, 1956,
THE LODGE, LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO
I finally managed to get here. Yesterday came the news that my clearance has been approved. I flew to Albuquerque in the evening and this morning took the little five-seater plane which comes up here. The trip from Albuquerque to here is marvelous, mountains and deserts glittering in the morning sun. The plane lands on a little mesa not much wider than the runway, perfectly flat on top and with a deep canyon on each side. From up above Los Alamos looks like a village, tiny among these vast distances. Most conveniently, I took the last of my fourteen rabies injections in La Jolla yesterday. I got through that very well. Now I have two days here, then on Saturday I fly east. Today I spent absorbing all the information I could at tremendous speed. My clearance is good for everything, all kinds of bombs included. I have done pretty well learning all this stuff in one day.
The rabies injections were needed because I had been bitten by a stray dog in Mexico. In those days the injections were made from rabbit brains containing antibodies to the virus, so there was a risk that the brain tissue might cause an encephalitis as disabling as rabies. Edward Teller helped me to evaluate the risks of encephalitis and rabies with and without the injections. He advised me to take the injections.
I never needed to worry about all the bomb secrets that I was carrying around in my head. Fortunately, there was always a clear separation between the secret stuff and the open science and the political activities that I was free to talk about. I did not worry whether my letters from Los Alamos to my parents might be read by some snooping security people. I did not know whether they were snooping, and I did not care. They had the right to snoop if they wished. There was never anything in the letters that came close to being secret.
After Edward Teller and I and the other summer visitors departed from La Jolla, the people who remained at General Atomic reversed the decision we had made in July. They decided to go ahead with the safe reactor project using my design instead of Teller’s. The main difference between the two designs was that Teller used engineering tricks to make the reactor safe while I used laws of nature. A reactor emerged within a year from my ideas. The company designed it, built it, licensed it, and sold it, all within two years, a time scale that would be unthinkable today. They sold altogether seventy-five reactors, mostly to hospitals. None of them gave any trouble to their owners, and several are still running now after more than half a century. The person who did the detailed design of the reactor was Massoud Simnad, a brilliant Iranian chemist, settled in the United States but enjoying friendly relations with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Nuclear engineering requires more chemistry than physics. The physical ideas that I contributed were simple, while the chemical ideas that Massoud Simnad supplied were complicated and brilliant. The essential trick that made the reactor safe was to load the fuel heavily with hydrogen in a chemical form that remained stable at high temperatures.
NOVEMBER 13, 1956
Last Tuesday we sat up with the television at the house of some friends, watching the election results come in. This is a ritual which has a dramatic quality, even when the results are known in advance. In this case the presidential vote was no surprise, but there were many exciting struggles in the Senate and House, and these mostly ended satisfactorily with a Democratic majority. At one-thirty Stevenson came to the camera and made his speech conceding the election, then Eisenhower came and made his speech, and we went home to bed. Eisenhower was impressive and Stevenson not. I guess Stevenson is fed up with the whole business.
A lot of talk about the affairs of Hungary and Egypt. People here are mostly strong Israel supporters and were happy when England and France attacked Egypt. But it seems this view is not widely supported in the rest of the country outside Princeton and New York City. One hears very often the statement that Nasser is like Hitler and it is necessary not to repeat the mistake made in 1936 when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland without interference from France. My opinion is that this statement is correct and still offers no solution to the problem. I believe if France had invaded Germany in 1936 to remove Hitler from the government, the whole world (especially America) would have held up their hands in horror. And the end would have been a French retreat and German victory, just as it was in 1924. It seems clear now that the policy of attacking Egypt will not be maintained firmly or consistently enough to do any good.
In 1923 the German government refused to pay the reparations imposed by the Versailles Treaty, and France sent an army to occupy the Ruhr area of Germany and enforce the Treaty. After a while, the German economy collapsed and the French army of occupation withdrew. The main result of the invasion was to strengthen the popular support for Hitler in Germany.
I heard some interesting remarks about the Hungarian affair from my neighbour George Kennan. He said, from his whole experience of Russia, the behaviour of Russia during the first week of the rebellion could not be explained except by some paralysing crisis in the Russian government. He suggests as the most likely explanation that the Red Army refused to take on the job of policing the satellite countries indefinitely. Then when the rebels went too far in their anti-Russian policy, even the army agreed that they had to put a stop to it.
The Soviet army occupying Hungary stood aside and did nothing for a whole week, while a group of anti-Communist Hungarian rebels took over the government. The delay of the Soviet response astonished Kennan. At the end of that week, the Soviet troops finally moved to crush the rebellion. The rebels mostly escaped from Hungary to Austria and found refuge in Western Europe and America.
DECEMBER 14, 1956
Last weekend we were brave enough to drive up to Ithaca. The children loved to walk on the frozen lake (we have no real winter yet here) and throw snowballs at each other. We stayed with some people called Gold whom I knew well in Cambridge ten years ago. Tommy Gold is a brilliant fellow and is equally at home in physics and astronomy. He got the job of chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal when I refused it four years ago. He was a great success there and got along well with [Harold] Spencer-Jones. Spencer-Jones understood that his own job was to run the observatory and allow the younger people a free hand to research and innovate. Tommy instituted a cosmic ray program at Herstmonceux and was by far the best man they had there. Then came the retirement of Spencer-Jones, and [Richard] Woolley was put into his place. He had other ideas. One day he asked Tommy what he was doing, and Tommy said he was preparing a paper for a conference in Stockholm about the Sun’s corona. Woolley said, “But I never gave you permission to work on the corona.” That was enough for Tommy. He resigned then and there and accepted an invitation from Cornell. Now he has been offered a good permanent chair at the Harvard Observatory, and so he will stay in this country. Woolley seems to be a pathological character. Now that Tommy has left, his friends in the cosmic ray group at Herstmonceux are not allowed to correspond with him. All communications must go through Woolley himself. Tommy showed me the letter from Woolley in which this decision was announced, written in the finest civil service circumlocutions. Really it is a pity this has happened. There was a chance something might have been done for the Greenwich Observatory, but now it is hopeless.
It was lucky for me that I had the good sense to refuse the job at Herstmonceux in 1952. If I had accepted, I would have ended up as Tommy Gold did, in a bruising fight with Woolley.
It is good to hear that you in England are making a big effort for the Hungarian refugees. Here there is a great organization for bringing them in and finding them homes and jobs. Luckily there is a substantial population of Hungarian-speaking people already here, and that makes it a lot easier. So far the government agreed to take in 21,500, which is all they can do until Congress is in session. Probably Congress will be happy to raise the number if more want to come here. The only objection I have heard to this is from some physicists who are nervous about the effect of having 21,500 Edward Tellers in the country.
One of the first things I did when I became an institute professor was to push for the appointment of Bengt Strömgren, a world leader in astronomy. I wanted our School of Natural Sciences to include astronomy as well as physics. Oppenheimer agreed to invite him, and he came in 1957. He was outstanding as an observer as well as a theorist. In his office at the institute he had a little machine of his own design, a personal computer before personal computers existed. He observed A stars in the sky and measured their ages by accurate measurements of brightness in four colors. A stars are bright stars that are easy to measure accurately. He put the data for each star into his machine. The machine then calculated its orbit around the center of the galaxy and deduced the place where it was born. After he had plotted the birthplaces of a few hundred stars, he could see that the births at any time fell into a spiral pattern, and the spiral moved around the galaxy as the time of birth advanced. So the births of the A stars revealed the past history of the spiral arms of the galaxy. This was the most elegant piece of observational astronomy that I ever saw. It was all done on Strömgren’s desk top with a machine costing a few hundred dollars.
A pleasant thing happened this week. For some years I had had the idea that it would be interesting to look for variable white dwarf stars. A white dwarf is so small and dense that its natural vibration period would be a few seconds, instead of the hours or days which ordinary stars have for periods. So if there is a variable white dwarf, it would not be recognised by the usual method of taking photographs with an exposure time of several minutes. The other day I mentioned this idea to Strömgren who is our leading astronomer, and asked him if anyone had ever looked at a white dwarf with a light detector having a rapid response. He said there is one white dwarf called 02 Eridani B which is most suitable for this experiment. It is reasonably bright (ninth magnitude) and not close to another brighter star. It happens also to be in the part of the sky (just below Orion) which can best be observed in January. So this is the right time to do it. The chances of finding pulsations in this particular star are quite small. Still it is worth a try. Kitt Peak is a brand-new observatory on a mountain in a remote part of Arizona. It was chosen for the National Observatory because it has better seeing than California. So next January 4, think of 02 Eridani B, and hope for clear skies in Arizona.
The skies were clear, and Strömgren did the observation. 02 Eridani B did not pulsate.