NOT LONG after my discouraging talk at the Niels Bohr Institute, the correspondence with the British consulate bore fruit. In the meantime, the consular officials had learned that I had indeed been interviewed by Niels Bohr, had given a talk at the Niels Bohr Institute and had been corresponding with Einstein. I received a letter from a Mr. Greenall, who was a scientific attaché in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in London. He invited me to visit the department in London, suggesting that they could assist me in contacting physicists at universities in England, which might lead to my being able to continue my physics research in an academic environment. I was filled with anticipation and enthusiasm upon receiving this letter, but at the same time I was not surprised. I felt as if things were evolving according to my hopes and expectations.
The government department paid my fare from Copenhagen to London, and I sailed across the North Sea from Esbjerg port in Denmark to Harwich. It was January 1954, the voyage was in rough weather, and the Danish meal I’d had before departure, courtesy of the British government, did not sit well at all. Upon my arrival in London, already displaying a flair for high living, I checked into the Regent Palace Hotel in Piccadilly Circus, putting the bill for the hotel room on the expense account that Greenall had provided for me.
The next day I visited the offices of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, located on Oxford Street not far from my hotel, and was greeted by a cheerful secretary who offered me a cup of tea and biscuits, explaining that Mr. Greenall would be in his office in half an hour. We chatted about my rough trip across the North Sea. She asked me where I was staying and when I said the Regent Palace Hotel, she laughed, which puzzled me.
Mr. Greenall, a tall man in a dark suit, stiff, white-collared shirt and what looked like an old school tie, finally arrived. He took off his bowler hat, revealing his large bald head. He ushered me into his office, invited me to sit down and asked the secretary to also bring him a cup of tea and biscuits. I now recollected that much of what went on in English circles was accompanied by tea and biscuits. Mr. Greenall was friendly as we chatted about the rough North Sea voyage, but when he learned that I was staying at the Regent Palace Hotel in Piccadilly Circus, his friendly smile faded.
“Oh, dear,” he said, “we can’t have this. Far too expensive for a young man like you. We’ll have to find you alternative accommodation in London.” He looked at me penetratingly, and I wondered whether he was regretting having brought this brash young genius to London after all.
“So I understand you have corresponded with Albert Einstein,” Mr. Greenall began, after the hotel arrangements had been cleared up.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve written two papers on his unified theory, and that was what the correspondence was mainly about.”
“So you want to pursue a career as a physicist?”
“Yes, I would like to get into an academic environment.”
“I hear from the British consulate in Copenhagen that you were interviewed by Professor Niels Bohr, and he seems to have taken an interest in your future. He suggested to the consulate that you should pursue an undergraduate education, so that you could be trained properly as a physicist. What do you think about that?”
I recrossed my knees and looked out the window. It had started raining. The secretary came into the office, removed the teacups and smiled at me, and I smiled back. She seemed to have taken a motherly interest in me.
“Well,” I began, feeling awkward about contradicting the great Niels Bohr, but greatly desiring to move forward quickly, “I’ve already learned the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics myself in Copenhagen, and I want to continue my research on Einstein’s unified field theory and other subjects in theoretical physics.”
Greenall looked at me with surprise and said, “Do you really think that you can pursue an academic career without an undergraduate degree?”
“Yes, I think it would be a waste of my time to spend four years relearning what I already know.” I was feeling worried, too, about perhaps being forced into a conventional route in academia, which could, through the typical rote learning, extinguish my creative impulses and my strong motivation to pursue my own path.
Greenall seemed dubious and stared at me intently for a while. “What I plan to do,” he finally said, “is to arrange interviews for you with various well-known physics professors here and see what they think about how you can best continue your research and achieve your goals. We will pay your expenses visiting these professors. I have a list of them. The first one you should visit is William McCrea at Royal Holloway College, not far from London. He’s an expert on relativity theory. After that, we’ll send you to Liverpool. Professor William Bonnor has expressed an interest in talking to you. He’s a mathematical-physics professor at the university and has published on Einstein’s unified theory. Then we’ll send you to Dublin, Ireland, to the Institute for Advanced Studies, where I’ve arranged for you to meet with Professor Erwin Schrödinger, who’s the director of the institute.”
“Aha!” I exclaimed. “I’ve read papers by Professor Schrödinger on unified theory, and he has his own way of attempting to unify gravity and electromagnetism. It would be exciting to talk to him!” Schrödinger was one of the founders of quantum mechanics and had won the Nobel Prize in 1933, jointly with Paul Dirac, for developing this theory. I was thrilled that this would be the second founder of quantum mechanics I would have the opportunity to meet and talk to.
Greenall seemed satisfied with my response to the Schrödinger interview and said, “Crossing the Irish Sea in the wintertime can be a stormy affair. I hope you have an easier time than you did crossing the North Sea. You can stay another night at the Regent Palace Hotel, and I will phone tomorrow with suggestions for cheaper rooms in London. Once you’ve found appropriate accommodation, you can begin your visits to the universities.”
I left Greenall and the cheerful secretary, and the next day I began hunting for accommodations in London using Mr. Greenall’s list, regretfully leaving the luxurious Regent Palace Hotel, where I had enjoyed a final evening in the grand restaurant listening to a musical ensemble. I located a room in a cheap residential area on the outskirts of London, which I could reach by the London underground, the tube. This would be my base in London for a couple of weeks while the secretary at the government department arranged for train and boat tickets. I would have breakfast with the landlady and her husband, and would have to put up with the strong smell of cat urine that permeated the house, thanks to their tomcat, Billy. Greenall sent a message to me at my new address saying that he had now arranged a further visit to Cambridge University after my visit with Schrödinger in Dublin; I was to meet with a Dr. Dennis Sciama at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Professor William McCrea had published a book on special relativity, which I had read during my library studies in Copenhagen. He had also published papers on cosmology. He was head of the Physics Department at Royal Holloway College, then an all-girls college. My visit with him was cordial, although he seemed rather skeptical about my proposed plans for doing research at an English university without an undergraduate degree. He said that he was not an expert on Einstein’s unified theory, whereas Bill Bonnor at the University of Liverpool had published several well-known papers on the subject and he would be a better person to advise me on my future.
A week later, I travelled to Liverpool by train and visited Bon-nor, who was in the Department of Applied Mathematics. We talked about some of the technical aspects of my papers on Einstein’s unified field theory and Einstein’s reactions to them. Bonnor knew a lot about Einstein’s work on unified theory, and described papers that he had written solving Einstein’s field equations, which had been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. I had actually read his papers while I was studying Einstein’s unified theory, so I was able to make reasonably intelligent comments about his work.
The next day, I departed from Liverpool on an overnight steamer to Dublin. As Greenall had predicted, we ran into a storm on the Irish Sea and the crossing was very rough. However, the stormy trip was made more pleasant by my meeting an Irish nurse who worked in a hospital in London and was on her way home to Dublin to visit her family. She was just as seasick as I was.
Greenall had arranged a room in a quaint hotel near the river Liffey, and from my window I could see the famous Guinness brewery across the river. The next morning, I went to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which was a small greystone building not far from the centre of Dublin. A secretary said that I should wait for Professor Schrödinger’s wife, who would drive me to their house outside Dublin. In the meantime, she said, I could talk to Professor Synge, who had published a book on Einstein’s relativity theory, and was related to the famous Irish playwright John Millington Synge.
She took me to an office where a smiling, middle-aged man was standing at a blackboard discussing physics with a younger man who turned out to be Bruno Bertotti, an Italian researcher at the institute. After we had shaken hands, Synge said, “We’re trying to do this integral. Maybe you can help us.” He handed the chalk to me, and I suddenly felt dismayed that I would have to perform for these two physicists.
I looked at the blackboard, rubbed my chin and said, “I think I can do this integral,” and proceeded to work it out.
As I finished, Synge said, “Well done, well done, young man! I hear that you are here to visit Erwin and talk about his work on unified field theory.”
I said, “Yes, I’m looking forward to speaking to him about my work and his work.”
“I dare say that should be interesting,” he said, his eyes twinkling. Bertotti, a studious-looking young man wearing Schubert spectacles, offered, “Physicists today express the opinion that Einstein is wasting his time with this unified field theory business.”
Just then the office door opened and in walked a tall woman in a black leather coat and aviation helmet. Synge introduced me to Mrs. Anny Schrödinger. As we shook hands, she said, “Let’s leave immediately so that we can get home in time for lunch.”
We drove away in an old black Mercedes-Benz, going around the bay outside Dublin to the Schrödinger home, which was a modest and unimposing townhouse, joined on either side to others in an unextraordinary suburb of Dublin.
Upon entering the house, Anny Schrödinger introduced me to another, younger woman, who came out of the kitchen. I later learned that she was actually another liaison of Schrödinger’s, for he was known to have mistresses with the knowledge of his wife. I also learned much later that Anny, for her part, had had a long-term affair with Hermann Weyl, who was one of the foremost mathematical physicists of the twentieth century.
Anny said, “Professor Schrödinger is not well and has to stay in bed. We will have lunch, and you can speak to him afterwards.”
The Schrödinger house was cramped and cluttered: stacks of books and piles of newspapers occupied most surfaces and corners. After lunch, which the three of us ate together in the dining room, the other woman busied herself in the kitchen while Anny and I talked about my situation and the reason that I had come to meet Professor Schrödinger. She appeared to me to be a very intelligent woman with firm views about life. After our chat, she took me upstairs to the top of the house. We entered a small bedroom and Anny introduced me to Erwin Schrödinger. The legendary physicist made an incongruous figure, sitting up in bed in a small alcove, wearing a large white nightshirt and a crocheted woollen bed hat. As we shook hands, I noticed that his hand felt clammy and frail.
“So you are Moffat, the young man who has been writing papers about unified field theory and corresponding with Albert. Do you have copies of the papers that you sent to Albert?” Schrödinger asked, speaking English with a light German accent.
“Yes,” I said. I pulled out the papers from my bag and handed them to him, just as I had done with Niels Bohr a few months previously. Still sitting up in bed with his woolly hat on, Schrödinger started reading the papers, his reading glasses astride his beaky nose. All of a sudden he was overcome by a coughing fit. He looked at me with reddened eyes and said, “I’ve had this bronchitis. You understand this is why I am in bed.” I made a sympathetic response. He returned to my papers, and I sat looking around his little room.
It was even more disorganized than the downstairs rooms. Stacks of books reached up to the ceiling, and untidy piles of papers covered a small writing table. It looked to me as if this was his room only; the bed was a single bed, and there were no feminine articles to be seen. It was amazing to me to ponder that I, two years ago merely a messenger boy and window cleaner, was now sitting in the bedroom of one of the greatest physicists of all time, a Nobel Prize winner, and one of the founders of quantum mechanics.
Schrödinger had invented wave mechanics and what is now called the Schrödinger wave equation, which was compatible with Werner Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics.* Legend had it that he wrote the first important papers developing his quantum wave mechanics while vacationing in the Alps with one of his mistresses, but no one has been able to discover the name of this muse. In addition to all his famous papers on statistical mechanics and colour theory, he also wrote a wonderful book on relativity called The Structure of Spacetime, which was one of the treasured books from which I had learned the basics of relativity and gravitation just over a year before. In 1944, he had even published a groundbreaking book on molecular biology that anticipated the discovery of DNA. I learned that he spoke six languages, including English and German. He had left Austria when he was a professor at the University of Graz because he was concerned about the spread of Nazism, and he had ended up in Dublin. At the time that I met him, Schrödinger was in his late sixties and was about to retire as director of the School of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which he had helped to found.
Schrödinger finished reading the papers, looked up at me sternly and said, “I see that you are using Albert’s method of deriving the unified field equations from a variational principle.” He was referring to an important mathematical derivation of equations that would describe the unified field theory of gravity and electromagnetism. “ Why are you not using my method of deriving these equations?” he continued irritably.
I suddenly felt nervous, and saw my precarious future in physics threatened. “Are you referring to the method you describe in the appendix of your book on spacetime structure?” I asked.
Schrödinger leaned forward and looked at me even more sternly. “Yes, yes, that is what I am referring to. This is the obvious way to derive the unified field equations.”
“But don’t they lead to the same answer?” I asked innocently.
Schrödinger straightened up in the bed and his face flushed. “Well, yes, they may lead to the same result, but my method is far superior to Albert’s! Let me explain to you, Moffat, that Albert is an old fool.”
I said, “I beg your pardon?”
“He’s an old fool,” Schrödinger repeated, “and you should not be following his methods. You should follow what I do because I know how to derive these equations properly.”
I sat stunned in my chair. During the interview with Niels Bohr, Bohr had accused Einstein of being an alchemist and wasting his time. Now another equally famous physicist was accusing Einstein, who had been so kind to me, of being an old fool. What was I supposed to make of this?
A few awkward moments of silence ensued. Suddenly there was a loud crash of porcelain breaking downstairs in the kitchen. Then a spate of angry female voices floated up the stairs. Schrödinger looked irritably at the open door to his room, and then looked back to me and said, “Well, what do you have to say about this?”
I knew that this interview was very important and would decide whether I was going to have a chance for a future in physics or whether I would find myself back in Copenhagen performing least squares calculations at the geophysics institute. I felt like a drowning man whose life is passing by before him. I thought, “I have to say something to assuage his feelings about this.” Later in life, I learned that I had been caught in a crossfire between Schrödinger and Einstein. A war of words had erupted after Schrödinger published a paper about his unified theory in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, a journal that published, among other things, Gaelic poetry. Schrödinger had let it be known to the international newspapers that he had discovered the true unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism. Learning about this in Princeton, Einstein accused Schrödinger of plagiarism and threatened to sue him. Schrödinger counterclaimed that Einstein had plagiarized his work, and threatened a countersuit. Wolfgang Pauli, another founder of quantum mechanics, had to intervene, and managed to cool down the tempers on both sides. I realized that physics was not the pristine endeavour to find the truth that I had idealized as a young man, but it was cutthroat and competitive, and even those who were world-famous were still grasping for even more immortality.
“Well, Professor Schrödinger,” I replied carefully, “if I proceed further with my work on unified theory, I certainly plan to use your method of deriving the unified field equations.”
Schrödinger suddenly smiled and said, “Well, that’s fine, young man. We’ll let it pass.”
We talked for a while longer about the future of unified theory, and the possibilities of verifying or falsifying such a theory experimentally, a prospect that did not seem very promising at the time, and in fact hasn’t improved today. We ended the discussion cordially and I shook his hand. He had another coughing fit and said he needed to rest. I went downstairs and Anny offered tea, which I accepted. Before driving me back to my quaint hotel in Dublin, she took me out into the garden at the back of the house for a tour of her flower beds.
As it turned out, Schrödinger wrote a positive letter on my behalf to Greenall in London, and as far as I know, so did Professors Bonnor and McCrea. I believe that Schrödinger’s letter would have been the important catalyst that led to Greenall continuing to provide me with financial support and promoting my visit to Cambridge University to meet Dennis Sciama.
About a week later, I took the train up to Cambridge from London and met with Sciama at Trinity College. Walking through the Great Gate at Trinity and entering the Great Court, I was impressed with the university surroundings and Trinity College itself. I felt in awe to be standing in the same college where Isaac Newton developed his gravity theory and wrote his great treatise, the Principia, and where many other famous scientists and scholars had produced great works over the centuries.
Dennis Sciama was twenty-eight years old when I met him in his rooms at Trinity, where he was a fellow. He was doing research on Mach’s principle, attempting to incorporate it within a theory of cosmology. The nineteenth-century philosopher-physicist Ernst Mach had the idea that the inertia of a body, which is its resistance to an external force, owed its existence to all the rest of the matter in the universe. A problem with this idea is that it is clearly difficult or impossible to ever verify, for we cannot remove all the rest of the matter in the universe to discover whether the inertia of a body still exists. Sciama was attempting to explain the inertial force of a body by means of a variable gravitational constant, G, following his supervisor, Paul Dirac, who proposed that Newton’s gravitational constant varies in space and time. Dirac and Sciama’s work was the forerunner of later work by Pascual Jordan, Carl Brans and Robert Dicke connecting a variable G with Mach’s principle and the origin of inertia.
Later in his life, when Sciama was a lecturer at Cambridge, he supervised several students who became leading relativists and cosmologists, including Stephen Hawking, George Ellis, John Barrow, Gary Gibbons and Brandon Carter, as well as the astrophysicist Martin Rees.
When I visited him, Sciama had rooms under the big clock in the Great Court. He was an intense, handsome young man. His spacious rooms suggested a wealthy family background. We talked about my correspondence with Einstein, my meetings with Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger, and my desire to become a physicist. Sciama must have been impressed by the letter that Schrödinger wrote, because without further ado, he said, “Come with me. I’ll see that you are matriculated, that is, enrolled, at the college this afternoon. I understand that you don’t have an undergraduate degree.”
I said no, and explained how I had learned physics and mathematics on my own.
“I am matriculating you without requiring you to take the tri-pos exams because I think that you will be capable of doing a Ph. D.,” he said. I was relieved to know that I could go straight into a Ph. D. program without having to endure four years of undergraduate training leading to these infamous, gruelling exams. “I’ve been in contact with Fred Hoyle,” Sciama continued, “who has agreed to supervise you towards your Ph. D.”
He took me to an office at the college and he spoke to a clerk, who made up the papers for me to be enrolled as a student at Trinity. The year was 1954.
How much was my own hard work and how much was luck? In arriving at this turning point in my life, many kind strangers— famous physicists as well as influential bureaucrats—had encouraged me and opened doors for me. I signed the papers at Trinity, shook Dennis Sciama’s hand and started out in earnest on the path that I had chosen, or perhaps the path that had chosen me.
*The wave equation named after Schrödinger describes the wave nature of the electron as opposed to the particle nature of the electron in Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. In quantum mechanics, the electron has the dual nature of a wave and a particle, and both Schrödinger’s and Heisenberg’s interpretations are equivalent.