By the spring of 1935, the campaign for Kapitza’s release was not going well. In Cambridge, Anna could see the vultures circling: several of her husband’s colleagues in the town privately wanted to see Kapitza get his comeuppance after the years he had spent shamelessly fawning on the Crocodile. There were whispers that Kapitza was merely an engineer, that his experiments were leading nowhere and that he had received financial rewards in return for spying for the USSR. Anna’s reports drew from Dirac some uncharacteristically direct advice: ‘You should not pay attention to stupid stories that no one believes in.’44
Kapitza’s Marxist friends sat on their hands, while Rutherford led a discreet campaign for his release. Seeking advice from colleagues all over Europe and working closely with Soviet officials and with the British Foreign Office, Rutherford sought a face-saving solution. He sought to give Kapitza the option of working wherever he liked, though he confided in a letter to Bohr that he was certain Kapitza wanted to return to Cambridge, adding that he found the Soviet authorities particularly mendacious.45 The first Cambridge scientist to visit Kapitza was Bernal, accompanied by his lover Margaret Gardiner, and they spent long afternoons trying to cheer him up over pancakes with caviar and soured cream, washed down with wine.46 ‘I feel like a woman who has been raped when she would have given herself for love,’ Kapitza sulked. He used the phrase repeatedly.47
Gardiner had mixed feelings about Moscow, disturbed by the giant posters of Stalin all over the city and the quarter-mile queues that formed outside the shops the moment new supplies arrived. The Moscow hotels were just as bad as their reputation had led her to believe: rooms heated to a tropical swelter, shabbily dressed waiters pretending to be in a hurry, many of them cadging illegal gratuities. The Muscovites walked around their grey, freezing city ‘wrapped shapelessly in their padded jackets and heavy fur coats’, most of them treading the icy streets with their de-rigueur galoshes. Gardiner believed that the country’s hopes lay in mass education, always an attractive vision for the English left. Decades later, she recalled seeing a platoon of young soldiers marching towards the Military Academy with exercise books under their arms. Her tour guide explained: ‘They are having their illiteracy liquidated.’48
After Manci’s departure in mid-January 1935, Dirac’s routine in Princeton was unchanged. Each morning, he trudged through the snow from his rented home near Nassau Street to his room in Fine Hall, worked alone all morning, and had lunch at Newlin’s restaurant with Wigner and with one of Princeton’s most unusual visitors, the Belgian theoretician Abbé Georges Lemaître. He was an amateur scholar of the playwright Molière, an accomplished interpreter of Chopin and the only member of the physics department to wear a dog collar. Dirac had first seen him, but had apparently not met him, in October 1923, when he began his studies and when Lemaître was one of Eddington’s postgraduate students. Four years later, Lemaître had introduced into science the idea that the universe had begun when a tiny egg, a ‘primeval atom’, suddenly exploded into the matter of the universe.49 Quite independently, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann had applied Einstein’s general theory of relativity to the universe as a whole and demonstrated that some mathematical solutions of the equations correspond to an expanding universe, though his work was published only in Russian and at first went unnoticed.
The Friedmann–Lemaître picture of the universe’s birth seemed to be at odds with the account of creation in Genesis, but this did not bother Lemaître, who believed that the Bible teaches not science but the way to salvation. The science–religion controversy ‘is really a joke on the scientists’, he said: ‘They are a literal-minded lot.’50 Dirac found Lemaître ‘quite a pleasant man to speak with – not strictly religious as one might expect from an Abbé’.51 It was probably during these conversations in Princeton’s diners that Lemaître reawakened Dirac’s interest in cosmology, the study of the entire universe and its workings, soon to become one of his main interests.52 For now, he focused on mathematics and quantum physics, which he studied during the day, and he took it easy in the evening. After dinner, he would read one of the books Manci had recommended to him (including Winnie the Pooh) or go out, perhaps to a movie with the von Neumanns.53 Probably as a result of Manci’s encouragement, he had become much more interested in music: a highlight of the term for him was a university concert, where he heard a searching performance of Beethoven’s last piano sonata by the Austrian virtuoso Artur Schnabel, another Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany.54
Manci was with her children in Budapest. About once a week, in her spidery hand, she sent Dirac four lively pages of news and gossip, urging him to keep in close contact. Unaccustomed to receiving warm and attentive letters, Dirac struggled to respond: ‘I am afraid I cannot write such nice letters to you – perhaps because my feelings are so weak and my life is mainly concerned with facts and not feelings.’55
Manci, ‘very much upset’ by this statement, knew that she would have to take the initiative if she were to stir in him the first quantum of romance.56 Always wearing her heart on her sleeve, she wrote to Dirac about her family and bombarded him with questions about his life in Princeton in all its minutiae. His reply was chilling: ‘You ought to think less about me and take more interest in your own life and the people around you. I am very different from you. I find I can very quickly get used to living alone and seeing very few people.’57
He sent her lists of corrections to her English and answered her queries as tersely as a speak-your-weight machine. When she sent him photographs of herself, he was grateful but critical: ‘I do not like this picture of you very much. The eyes look very sad and do not go well with the smiling mouth.’58 After she complained that he did not answer all her questions, he re-read her letters, numbered them and sent her tabulated responses to every question he had ignored, including:
Letter number Question Answer
5 What makes me (Manci) so sad? You have not enough interests.
5 Whom else could I love? You should not expect me to answer this question. You would say I was cruel if I tried.
5 You know that I would like to see you very much? Yes, but I cannot help it.
6 Do you know how I feel like? Not very well. You change so quickly.
6 Were there any feelings for me? Yes, some.59
When Manci received the list, she thought Dirac was jeering at her but eventually decided that it was ‘quite funny’. Beginning to realise that Dirac did not understand rhetorical questions, she seethed: ‘Most of them were not meant to be answered.’60 It is easy to imagine her tearing out her hair in frustration. But his answers gave her an opportunity to engage with his feelings, and she did not hold back: for his statement that she changed so quickly, she told him he should get ‘a second Nobel Prize, in cruelty’. Manci was tough, but she made sure that Dirac was aware of her vulnerable and sensitive side: ‘I am only a stupid little girl.’61 With each letter, she flirted more audaciously, but Dirac made no comment until he realised that he was being targeted. He snapped: ‘You should know that I am not in love with you. It would be wrong for me to pretend that I am. As I have never been in love I cannot understand fine feelings.’62
But Manci was not to be deflected. Although Dirac parried her repeated requests to join him during his forthcoming trip to Russia, she was determined to see him before the summer was over.
The news of Kapitza’s detention first appeared in the British News Chronicle on 24 April 1935, after a leak. Soon, Kapitza’s case was well known in the British media, and the newspapers featured long reports on the experiments he had been doing in Cambridge.63 In interviews with journalists, Anna Kapitza was distraught. ‘The whole affair has caused great mental pain to both my husband and myself,’ she complained, adding that she was concerned about the effect of the upheaval on her highly strung husband: ‘in his present state of mind he is not in a position to do any serious work’.64 Yet she was underplaying his distress: ‘Sometimes I rage and want to tear out my hair and scr
eam,’ he had written to her.65 Life in the Moscow science community was dismal for him as most of his former friends there were shunning him until they knew officially, from Stalin’s office, whether Kapitza was one of the ‘enemies of the people’. His country’s reward for his scientific success and for not making a fuss was, he wrote to Anna, to treat him ‘like dog’s excrement, which they try to mould in their own way’.66 He knew his letters would be intercepted and read by the police, so he lambasted the agents of his captivity, not the Soviet system that employed them:
‘Not only am I sincerely loyal, but I have deep faith in the success of the [plans for] new construction [in the Soviet Union] […] But even in spite of my cursing, I do believe that the country will come out of all these difficulties victorious. I believe it will prove that the socialist economy is not only the most rational one, but will create a State answering to the world’s spiritual and ethical demands. But, for me as a scientist, it is difficult to find a place during the birth pangs.67
But the Soviet Government had plans to keep Kapitza busy and to give him all the material goods he could wish for. It decided to set up a new Institute for Physical Problems, to make him the founding director, to give him a salary most academics would envy and then to throw in some generous perks, including an apartment in Moscow, a summer house in the Crimea for his family and a brand new Buick.68 From the vantage point of the sofa in his hotel room, however, the future looked so bleak to Kapitza that he considered suicide. His depression was relieved only by trips to the theatre and the opera and by colour reproductions of his favourite modern art pinned to the blank walls. But Cézanne, Gogol and Shostakovich offered only meagre consolation: he longed to return to his experiments in the Mond Laboratory, to be with his family and friends in Trinity College.
On the day news of Kapitza’s detention broke in the UK, Dirac was relaxing with the Gamows in Washington, DC.69 On a fine warm day, the three of them took a forty-minute trip in an airship over the city and looked down on the cherry blossoms in the fullness of their second bloom and on Capitol Hill, where FDR was pushing through his controversial New Deal. Dirac was about to tread the streets of the capital as an unlikely lobbyist, having accepted Anna’s suggestion that he should approach the first Soviet Ambassador to the USA, Stalin’s friend Aleksandr Troyanovsky.
Dirac was officially in Washington to attend three consecutive conferences, where he spent most of his time publicising Kapitza’s difficulties and collecting signatures to petition for his release. Every delegate approached by Dirac agreed to sign, including Léo Szilárd, who hatched a ludicrous plan to smuggle Kapitza out of Russia by submarine.70
Before Dirac could present the petition, some groundwork had to be done. He arranged for a letter to be written to the Ambassador from Karl Compton, brother of the famous experimenter and President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Compton declared that Kapitza’s absence from Cambridge ‘is universally considered by scientists to be a major catastrophe’ but suggested that his return ‘would be universally acclaimed in the scientific world’.71 The letter did its job: Troyanovsky quickly agreed to receive both Dirac and Millikan. Dirac later explained to Anna Kapitza why he wanted to be accompanied by Millikan: ‘[he] is known to be rather opposed to the Soviets but that would be counterbalanced by my being known to be rather in favour.’72
Thus, on the last Friday afternoon of April 1935, Dirac – for a decade regarded as an asocial misfit, out of touch with world affairs – found himself walking to the Soviet Embassy with America’s preeminent scientist-diplomat. The embassy, just north of the White House, was looking magnificent: Moscow museums had supplied antique furniture, paintings and rugs as contributions to its renovation.73 After waiting in the reception room, dominated by a statue of Lenin, Dirac and Millikan shook hands with the lantern-jawed Troyanovsky, whose charm and accommodating manner had made him popular on the city’s social circuit. The half-hour meeting was cordial and relaxed. Over a cup of tea, the Ambassador admitted that he had heard of Kapitza’s case only when he read Compton’s letter and described the Soviets’ hurt when some of its most eminent citizens had failed to return home after travelling abroad. Millikan told him that Kapitza’s health was deteriorating and suggested that the Soviet Union should bear in mind public opinion in other countries as well as its own. The continued detention of Kapitza would seriously damage relations between Soviet and American scientists, Millikan concluded. As the meeting drew to a close, Dirac spoke up and pleaded for Kapitza’s release, in words he recalled the next day in a letter to Anna Kapitza: ‘I have known Kapitza very well for a long time and I know him to be thoroughly reliable and honest […] If he were let out under a promise to return he could be depended on to keep that promise.’74 The Ambassador ended with an assurance that he would raise their concerns with the Soviet Government, so, Dirac told Anna, he left the meeting feeling hopeful.
Yet there was more to do. After the meeting, Millikan wrote to the Ambassador to reiterate the points he and Dirac had made, ratcheting up the diplomatic pressure. Dirac collected the last of the petition’s sixty signatures, which included those of almost all the leading physicists in the USA, including Einstein. Flexner had agreed to send another petition, addressed to the American Ambassador in Moscow, who would be asked to present it to the Government. Dirac concluded his letter to Anna: ‘I feel sure the Soviet Government will do something about it when they see how widespread is the feeling against them. If they don’t, you may rely on me to do all I can when I am in Russia to get Kapitza out in any way.’75
A few days later, at the beginning of June, Dirac left Princeton. Compared with his most successful stays in Copenhagen and Göttingen, this sabbatical had been largely a scientific washout, but for good reasons. He had invested some time in his relationship with Manci, but it was small compared with his commitment to secure Kapitza’s release. Even at the cost of stalling his work, Dirac was not going to abandon his surrogate brother.
Notes - Chapter nineteen
1 Letter from Pauli to Heisenberg, 14 June 1934, reprinted in Hermann et al. (1979).
2 Schweber (1994: 128–9).
3 Letters from Oppenheimer to George Uhlenbeck, March 1934 and to Frank Oppenheimer, 4 June 1934, in Kimball Smith and Weiner (1980: 175, 181).
4 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 8, Salam and Wigner (1972: 3–4). See also Peierls (1985: 112–13).
5 Letter from Rutherford to Fermi, AHQP, 23 April 1934.
6 ‘Peter Kapitza’, 22 June 34, KV 2/777, UKNATARCHI.
7 ‘Note on interview between Captain Liddell and Sir Frank Smith of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Old Queen Street’, 26 September 1934, KV 2/777. Jeffrey Hughes speculates that ‘VSO’ might be the Russian émigré I. P. Shirov (Hughes 2003).
8 Born (1978: 269–70).
9 I am grateful to Igor Gamow for making available home movies, shot in the 1920s, which show his mother dressed in this way.
10 The correspondence between Dirac and Rho Gamow is in Dirac Papers, 2/13/6 (FSU).
11 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 9 April 1935 (DDOCS).
12 Letter from Dirac to Rho Gamow, Dirac Papers, 2/2/10 (FSU).
13 Conversation with Lydia Jackson’s literary executor Rosemary Davidson, 8 January 2006.
14 Letter to Dirac from Lydia Jackson, 20 March 1934, Dirac Papers, 2/2/10 (FSU).
15 Fen (1976: 182).
16 Letter to Dirac from Lydia Jackson, 25 June 1934, Dirac Papers, 2/2/10 (FSU).
17 Letter to Dirac from Lydia Jackson, 5 February 1936, Dirac Papers, 2/3/3 (FSU).
18 Van Vleck (1972: 12–14).
19 The visitor was his sister Manci. M. Dirac (1987: 3–8; see p. 3).
20 The account of Dirac’s early courtship of Manci is taken mainly from M. Dirac (1987).
21 Letter to Dirac from Van Vleck, June 1936, Dirac Papers, 2/2/11 (FSU).
22 Dirac was living at 8 Morven Street. See the Dirac archive in IAS (1935).
23 Quoted in Jerome and Taylor (2005: 11).
24 Jerome and Taylor (2005: Chapters 2 and 5).
25 Blackwood (1997: 11).
26 Testimonies of Malcolm Robertson and Robert Walker, ‘The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s’, available at http://www34. homepage.villanova.edu/ robert.jantzen/princeton_math/pm02.htm (accessed 14 May 2008).
27 The Physical Review received the paper on 25 March 1935: Pais (1982: 454–7).
28 Blackwood (1997: 15–16).
29 Infeld (1941: 170).
30 See ‘The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s’, in particular the interviews of Merrill Flood, of Robert Walker and of William Duren, Nathan Jacobson and Edward McShane.
31 Letter from Dirac to Max Newman, 17 March 1935, Newman archive STJOHN.
32 Dirac alludes to his memories of ice-cream sodas and lobster dinners with Manci in his letters to her of 2 May and 25 May 1935 respectively (DDOCS).
33 Manci was divorced from Richard Balázs on 20 September 1932. See Budapest’s archive of marriages, microfilm repository no A555, Inventory no 9643, Roll no 155. These papers tell us that Manci married Balázs on 27 February 1924.
34 Manci told her friend Lily Harish-Chandra of these relationships. Interview with Lily Harish-Chandra, 4 August 2006.
35 Wigner (1992: 34, 38–9).
36 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 2 September 1936 (DDOCS).
37 M. Dirac (1987: 4–5).
38 Letter to Dirac from Anna Kapitza, dated beginning December 1937, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
39 Hendry (1984: 130).
40 A detailed account of Kapitza’s detention is in: Internal MI5 memo, signed GML, 11 October 3KV 2/777 (UKNATARCHI). See also the letters from Kapitza to his wife in Boag et al. (1990: Chapter 4).
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