In mid-September 1967, the Diracs heard that Sir John Cockcroft, one of their closest friends, had died suddenly of a heart attack in the Master’s Lodge of Churchill College. Several of his friends believed that his death had been hastened by his anxiety over a classic Cold War melodrama that had taken place two days before: Soviet Embassy officials abducted his colleague Vladimir Tkachenko – a student protégé of Kapitza – on the Bayswater Road in London and had whisked him off to Heathrow, where they put him on a plane bound for Moscow. But, just as his plane was setting off, it was surrounded by squad cars of airport police and MI5 agents, who boarded the plane and found him looking sick and bleary-eyed, apparently under sedation. They forcibly removed him, outraging Soviet authorities, who protested that he was leaving Britain of his own volition, having been blackmailed and intimidated by British agents. Cockcroft died on the morning after the incident became public, when the story was on the front page of The Times.33
His wife Elizabeth knew she would soon have to leave the Lodge to make way for the next Master, and the College assisted her in making the move. In the opinion of the Cockcrofts’ children, the authorities treated her sensitively and with a good deal of generosity, but Manci disagreed: she told everyone who would listen that the College was shooing Lady Cockcroft out of the Lodge with despicable haste.34 Manci’s patience with Cambridge finally ran out, and she made up her mind that Dirac must move to an institution that behaved better towards its senior academics. She also vowed to take her revenge on Churchill College.
Dirac and Manci began making plans to settle in the USA. Some of its universities were certain to offer Dirac a professorship, and Mary and Monica, both married by the summer of 1968, now lived there. Manci’s brother Eugene Wigner was also in the USA and was one of the elder statesmen of American science, an adviser to the Government, and – to Manci’s irritation – moving politically further to the right each year. From his letters to the Diracs, it is plain that Wigner was a thoughtful and caring member of his family but, in the public eye, his humility had become something of an affectation: he was now so self-deprecating that many of his acquaintances thought he was using it as a subtle form of mockery. Ideally, the Diracs would have liked to have settled in Princeton, but that was no longer an option: after Oppenheimer’s retirement in June 1966 – seven months before he died of throat cancer – the Institute for Advanced Study was unlikely to offer Dirac an academic home, nor could Princeton University be expected to accommodate a physicist so far past his best.
Two branches of Dirac’s family remained in Europe. Betty was a contented housewife in Amsterdam, doing the chores to the soundtrack of the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4) and going regularly to the highest Catholic mass she could find. In 1965, Gabriel was appointed to the mathematics faculty at the University of Swansea soon after the US Government rejected his application for a visa, apparently because of his brief membership of the Communist Party in Cambridge.35 Two years later, he and his family moved to the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and Dirac and Manci visited them during their summer vacations.
Of all their children, Dirac and Manci were most concerned about Judy, who had lost custody of her children after an acrimonious divorce in 1965. Soon afterwards, she moved to Vermont and spent several lonely months each year in the Wigners’ summer cottage on the shore of Lake Elmore. Wigner feared for her mental health. He wrote to Manci, telling her that Judy was desperate for her mother’s affection and pleading with her to support her troubled daughter: ‘You must not abandon her,’ he told Manci in September 1965.36 Two and a half years later, Judy was holed up in a motel near Lake Elmore, lonely, penniless and delusional. She desperately needed psychiatric help, Wigner believed, and he begged his sister to intervene, but Manci told him that she would have nothing to do with Judy until she got a job and that he should stop interfering.37 Manci felt no responsibility for her daughter’s plight, she wrote to Wigner:
Why should I in the name of heaven feel guilty? … I DID my duty, and who can throw a stone at me? J is an expert in hurting deeply, and may be she does this to those she loves. In that case she must seek a remedy.38
Manci’s indignation was suddenly punctured on 17 September 1968, when she read a telegram from her brother: ‘JUDYS CAR FOUND ABANDONED DO YOU KNOW WHEREABOUTS LOVE.’ This was the worst day of Manci’s life, she later said.39 Manci had no idea where Judy was, as they were no longer in touch. In the following days, the Diracs heard nothing from Vermont or from the Wigners. Manci was distraught, lurching between wildly different accounts of Judy’s disappearance, always refusing to believe that her depression had led her to take her life. It was most likely, Manci believed, that Judy had been murdered.40 Dirac’s reactions to all this were known only to Manci, who appears to have shared them with no one.
The Diracs decided not to travel to Vermont but to stay in Britain and monitor events from there: they left it to the Wigners to deal with the authorities in Vermont. In early October, after visiting the site where Judy’s car was found – a country lane near Morrisville, Vermont – Wigner and his wife wrote to the Diracs with details of the police hunt for her in the surrounding countryside and ponds.41 The search parties found nothing. Gradually, the Wigners, tearful and depressed, came to believe that Judy would never be seen again, but the Diracs clung to every last hope. For three years, they tried to imagine scenarios in which Judy might suddenly reappear, but the weight of probability gradually crushed what remained of their optimism. They accepted that it was practically certain that Judy was dead.42
Mary later recalled that her mother was inconsolable, ‘insane with grief’.43 The Diracs kept the pain of their loss private, but two of his later acquaintances, the sculptor Helaine Blumenfeld and her husband Yorrick, the Newsweek journalist, glimpsed deeper feelings.44 The Blumenfelds recall that, two years after Judy went missing, Dirac and Manci were still losing sleep over her fate and talked about it endlessly. From Dirac’s comments about her, the Blumenfelds assumed that he was her biological father – he was as sad and bereft as if he had lost his own daughter.
In the early weeks of 1969, the Diracs were in Miami, pondering life after Cambridge. Of the American universities wanting to employ Dirac, one of the most tempting offers had been made by his former student Behram Kursunoglu at the University of Miami. A wheeler-dealer Turkish theoretician – always smart in his Stetson hat, jacket and tie – Kursunoglu had spent his career searching for a unified theory of fundamental interactions, following Einstein’s agenda.45 Kursunoglu had founded the annual Coral Gables conferences, which gave several leading theorists a good reason to leave their home cities in the depths of January and spend a few days in the bright, warm sun of south Florida. Kursunoglu employed Dirac at the university on a temporary contract and tried hard to persuade him to accept a permanent post, making him and Manci as welcome as family, taking them out on trips round the area and giving Dirac a taste for coconuts, alligators and exotic birds.46 Manci was embarrassed by the time Dirac took to weigh Kursunoglu’s offer, but he was not to be hurried – he disliked Miami’s oppressive heat and felt uncomfortable in a place where recreational walkers are regarded as perverse.47
The most memorable of Kursunoglu’s outings was a trip to the cinema on New Year’s Day. Kursunoglu and his wife asked Dirac to go with them to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film had divided critics and audiences since its release eight months before: it inspired Steven Spielberg and a new generation of filmmakers, but it left John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom bemused and sent his wife to sleep.48 Firmly on Spielberg’s side, Dirac was enraptured: he had seen hundreds of movies, but had never imagined it was possible for a film to have such a powerful impact and enable him ‘to see his dreams’, as he told Mary’s husband Tony Colleraine. Dirac disliked opaque and open-ended narratives, so his love of 2001 was not predictable. It is easy, however, to imagine him being moved by Kubrick’s use of Johann Strauss’s ‘Blue Danube’ and the rest of the classical sound
track and by the appeal of a story told mainly through visual images rather than words. Dirac’s opinion that a good deal of quantum mechanics can be expressed accurately only through mathematics, not words, is echoed by a comment Kubrick made about 2001: ‘I don’t like to talk about [it] much, because it’s essentially a non-verbal experience.’49
Still excited two days later, Dirac saw the film again at a matinee with Tony Colleraine and also with Manci and Mary, who spent most of the two and a half hours in the theatre whispering to each other. Dirac suggested to Tony that they see it again ‘without the running commentary’. Without telling Manci, they stayed to watch the next two screenings and returned home to find their hot dinner left to get cold on the table. But Dirac was too excited to care about food: he was like a child after three consecutive rides on a roller coaster. Several of the scenes had possessed him, especially the Star Gate sequence and the emergence of the grizzled astronaut into the eighteenth-century bedroom: ‘I would not be able to sit alone through that scene,’ he later told Colleraine.50 Manci was not interested in Dirac’s observations on ‘that weird film’; her idea of a good movie was the romantic epic Dr Zhivago, not one whose most memorable character was a talking computer.
2001 stoked Dirac’s interest in the Apollo space programme. During the evening of 20 July 1969, he sat open-mouthed in front of the television in the Kursunoglus’ front room when Neil Armstrong prepared to set foot on the moon. He sat up all night watching the coverage. Kubrick’s images were sharper and his soundtrack was clearer, but the grainy television pictures and the muffled sound of that first moon landing had a compelling reality of their own. And for Dirac, the former engineer, reality mattered most: the first moon-walk was the culmination of aeronautic technology, whose beginnings he had seen as a boy and which now enabled human beings to set foot on a landscape a quarter of a million miles away. The Apollo team, having achieved the most impressive technological feat Dirac had seen in his lifetime, may well have given him a twinge of regret that he had chosen science rather than engineering: he had been a leader of a scientific revolution that, in his opinion, had led to a dead end, whereas the Apollo engineers could declare ‘Mission Accomplished’ and move on.
In the summer of 1969, Dirac prepared to leave his post and say his goodbyes to the few friends left in Cambridge, including Charlie Broad, the philosopher who gave him his first proper introduction to the theory of relativity. Broad, aged eighty-one, still lived in Trinity College, where he died two years later.
On Tuesday 30 September, Dirac spent his final day in Cambridge as its Lucasian Professor, the most distinguished holder of the Chair since Sir Isaac Newton. Dirac’s retirement passed without ceremony, probably because the university authorities assumed that Dirac would feel uncomfortable if he was the cynosure of a leaving party. This was an error, though an understandable one: Dirac would have liked his contribution to the university to be marked officially as his sense of propriety was, contrary to the impression he gave, stronger than his aversion to ceremony.51 Manci was disgusted. But she was gratified by the sensitivity of St John’s College, which extended Dirac’s fellowship for life so that he could return there whenever he wished. Batchelor wanted to be generous, too, and offered Dirac the use of a room in the department whenever he was passing through the town, but he declined. His true home in the university was his college, not his department.
For two years, the Diracs divided their time between the UK and the United States, and, by March 1971, Manci could hardly wait another day to leave Britain, ‘that lazy impossible island’.52 Labour unrest, steadily increasing since the war, had become critical: in the first year of Edward Heath’s government, more working days had been lost to withdrawals of labour than in any year since the General Strike. Postal workers had gone on strike and slowed down communications in the country for seven weeks. Even Rolls Royce had gone bankrupt.
The Diracs were about to move to a country that was no less troubled. The USA’s prosecution of the war in Vietnam was as controversial in the extended Wigner family as it was in thousands of others: the doveish Manci seethed over ‘young American lives mutilated fighting for a bastard government’ and argued with her hawkish brother Eugene, who believed that the war was essential to stem the spread of Communism.53 She did not know that the FBI had opened a file on her and was seeking evidence that she was a subversive.54 Dirac knew that his past political sympathies would raise eyebrows in some American institutions, as he noted when he declined an invitation to the University of Texas at Austin because he was technically ineligible: ‘I do not have strong political views, but […] I am a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and this makes me, according to [the university’s] definition, a member of the communist party.’55
Whenever he left the USA in the late 1960s and 1970s, he was nervous that the authorities might forbid him to re-enter it. As he probably suspected, the FBI was still watching him.56
Dirac, a dissenter from America’s foreign policy in south-east Asia, followed the fierce opposition to the war in American universities through the newspapers and the television news. Although Miami University was one of the less volatile campuses, its students harassed the authorities almost every day, condemning the Vietnam War, demanding free contraception and more support for civil rights. The protestors would talk only to the university’s President, Henry King Stanford, who stood on ‘The Rock’ – a stage-like stone structure in the centre of the campus – making conciliatory speeches to the students and trying to avoid further trouble.57 On the periphery of these crowds, Stanford often saw the slender, inquisitive figure of Dirac.
On Wednesday, 6 May 1971, the students were especially angry. It was two days after the Ohio State Guard had opened fire on student demonstrators at Kent State University, during a protest triggered by the American invasion of Cambodia.58 Thirteen seconds of gunfire had killed four students, wounded nine others and brutally curtailed the flower-power hedonism that had flourished only briefly since the Sgt Pepper summer of love in 1967. The mood of America turned ugly. Even the usually sober campus of Princeton University was unstable: Wigner thought many of the students were ‘selfish and nihilistic’, behaving ‘like the Hitler Youth’.59 Miami University teetered on the edge of anarchy, when its students – supported by many staff – began a four-day strike, joining two hundred and fifty other campuses across the country. After lunch, at the beginning of a warm afternoon, Stanford made his way to The Rock to address a volatile rally of over a thousand students, many of them with their arms folded aggressively or holding banners with messages such as ‘U$ out of S.E. Asia’. Earlier, the crowd had made an effigy of President Nixon out of newspapers, old clothes and firecrackers and then set fire to it. Dirac had seen nothing remotely like it since the Cambridge demonstrations in the 1930s.
During Stanford’s walk towards the crowd, he saw an elderly man on the periphery and was quite taken aback to be approached by him. It was Dirac, who asked gently, ‘Are you afraid?’ Stanford, his heart pumping hard in his chest, replied, his tongue firmly in his cheek, that he was quite looking forward to addressing the students. It seems that Dirac saw that the President was anxious and could use a little reassurance, as he took what was, for him, the unusual step of offering him advice: ‘Tell them what you think and listen to what they have to say.’ The tone of Dirac’s voice gave the impression that he had a ‘spiritual kinship’ with the protestors, as Stanford later wrote, perhaps identifying a faint echo from the days when Dirac was on the fringe of left-of-centre radicalism. In his emollient address, Stanford described the Kent State incident as ‘One of the saddest chapters in the history of higher education’, adding that the students’ deaths ‘dramatise the deterioration of reason’ in the USA.60 Shortly after the speech, the protest ended peacefully, though the university remained on edge for weeks. Dirac probably wondered what future lay ahead of him.
A few weeks later, the Diracs took a break and drove up to Florida’s state capital of Tallahassee
. Compared with tense, crime-ridden Miami, it was as friendly and safe as a village.61 Dirac knew that he was being wooed by Florida State, known best not for its physics department but for its student parties and the high quality of its football team. Joe Lannutti, the physics department’s ambitious leader, saw an opportunity to persuade the dithering Dirac to become a ‘professor at large’ at the university, a mascot for the physics department’s aspiration to be a ‘centre of excellence’.62 Lannutti had already invited the Diracs to Tallahassee in March 1969, when the Holiday Inn welcomed them with banners fluttering over the entrance, and the physics department had given tenure to Mary’s husband Tony a few months later.63 For the Diracs, the prospect of spending their final years near Mary was attractive, and the warm climate would be good for the worsening arthritis in Manci’s hands, but Dirac wanted to delay his decision until he could see how he coped with the fiercest of Tallahassee’s heat and humidity and with the barking dogs that ruined his walks.64 Swimming was now his favourite form of exercise so, in his spare hours, he visited the local lakes and sinkholes, usually taking a thermometer to check the temperature of the water. If it was above precisely sixty degrees Fahrenheit, he would dive in; if not, he would return home.65
In early January 1971, Florida State University formally offered Dirac the post of Visiting Eminent Professor, to be renewed annually.66 The FBI had found no evidence that either Manci or Dirac was a subversive, so there was to be no official barrier to their emigration. After reflecting on the offer for five months, Dirac accepted and shortly afterwards returned briefly to Cambridge with Manci to pack up their belongings. During one of their conversations with the Blumenfelds, Helaine asked Dirac whether he was excited about moving to Tallahassee; he replied, gesturing to Manci, ‘She is, that’s why we’re going. I would like to stay here.’67
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