Maker of Patterns
Page 4
The young Diracs were stepchildren of the physicist Dirac, children of the physicist’s wife by a previous marriage. They took Dirac’s name when he adopted them.
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WAR AND PEACE
SOMETIMES A GERMAN BOMBER, having lost its way, would fly over Cambridge and drop a couple of bombs. One of these bombs fell on the student union just across the street from my bedroom in Trinity College. Since I belonged to our college fire service, I was ready to spring to action. But the college authorities told us that our job was to protect the historic buildings of the college. We were not allowed to cross the street. So we stood idly watching while the union building burned down.
Notable characters in this chapter are:
Charles Percy Snow, then thirty-eight years old, was technical director of the Ministry of Labour, afterwards famous as a writer of novels and social criticism. He was then a bureaucrat, responsible for assigning technically trained students to wartime jobs. He made the decision to assign me to the Operational Research Section of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, starting in July 1943, when my two-year deferment at Trinity College ended.
John Maynard Keynes, then fifty-nine years old, was effectively running the British economy during World War II. He showed his mastery of economics at three levels, first by becoming wealthy himself, second by making King’s College the wealthiest college in Cambridge, and third by keeping the British economy afloat through the stormy years of war. He died in 1946, worn out by his efforts to manage a fourth even bigger problem, the reconstruction of international economic institutions after the war.
Henry Moseley died at the age of twenty-seven in 1915, before the scientists of my generation were born. By his death, he saved our lives. He was a brilliant young physicist who had been a student of Ernest Rutherford in Manchester. Rutherford was then leading the world in the science that became nuclear physics. He had done the crucial experiment that proved that every atom has a nucleus. In 1913 Moseley made his great discovery, a simple law relating the wave-length of X-rays emitted by an atom to the number of electrons in the atom. When World War I broke out in 1914, Moseley volunteered and enlisted in the army, went to fight in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in Turkey, and was killed. After that war ended, the death of Moseley was recognized as a tragic waste of a rare talent, and the British government decided that in future wars promising young scientists should be kept alive. That is why I was put into a safe job at Bomber Command headquarters while other boys of my age flew in the bombers and were killed. Two of my close friends were killed in the last year of the war while I was at Bomber Command. The gross unfairness of the system left me with a permanently bad conscience for having survived.
JANUARY 24, 1943
Twice I played billiards with Besicovitch, and once won against him (though with a handicap). Each time Hardy came in and took over from Besicovitch; he is teaching me quite a lot about the game; the only trouble is that after an hour of Besicovitch and half an hour of Hardy, I am so exhausted that I miss the ball completely. However I enjoy it very much, and Hardy seems to too, as he seldom finds anybody to play with. Besicovitch refuses ever to play against him, and his only real equal is a don called de Navarro, a lecturer in modern languages, who is sometimes there when I go to see Besicovitch.
The Germans bombed London heavily in 1940–41 and less heavily with V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 rockets in 1944–45. During the years 1942–43 there was very little bombing. Occasionally a few bombers would come over and drop a few bombs, probably to reassure the German home population who were suffering from the growing British and American bombing of Germany. One of the token raids on London happened in January 1943.
I wish I had been in London for the air raid; there is nothing that makes me so happy as a display of fireworks. It seems they have given up the idea of a Baedeker raid on Cambridge, which is a pity. I bought yesterday a set of War and Peace in Russian, the first I have seen in England, published in Moscow in 1941. Rather a wartime production I am afraid, but still readable and with quite large print. I shall settle down to it one day, not in the near future. It is 1,927 pages long. It costs eighteen roubles in Russia, and a pound in England, the difference being several hundred percent; I do not know where the money goes. It says they published 100,000 copies of the edition in 1941–42, evidently as in England there was a great demand for it. I read the concluding paragraphs, which point the moral of the whole work, that human affairs can only be understood by a belief in complete dependence on Providence. They have not, I am glad to say, been interfered with.
I still have on my bookshelf the wartime Russian edition of War and Peace, with wartime paper now brown and brittle. The final paragraph makes a comparison between the ancient astronomical belief in a stationary Earth and the modern belief in human free will. Tolstoy says that both beliefs are illusions. In astronomy, the earth moves, and in human affairs, we are inescapably dependent on providence. The Soviet government in 1941 allowed this radically non-Marxist statement to be published. The Russian people in those days took more comfort from Tolstoy than from Marx.
JANUARY 30, 1943
The other day we had an interesting talk by Littlewood to the Adams Society, on study and research in mathematics, talking about the various techniques of working. He is a marvellous lecturer, so good that he only has to stand in front of the blackboard and say nothing for the audience to burst into roars of laughter. He has made a scientific survey of the effects on himself and his pupils of various habits of work; and he has by now brought the art of research to a high degree of perfection. His own habits are illuminating; he always goes down to Cornwall to the coast for any intensive period of research, and allows no extraneous intellectual strain to disturb him. When he is there, he keeps rigidly to a maximum of 5½ hours a day, and 5½ days a week. The rest of the time is spent rock-climbing, walking, and reading detective stories. Also, whenever he has a bright idea, he immediately stops work for the rest of the day; very frequently this causes another bright idea to occur at the same time on the next day. Another rule is, at least three weeks of continuous complete holiday a year, preferably spent in difficult mountaineering. Also, whenever you start a cold, you should take a complete holiday till it is over. He further discussed the virtues of alcohol and tobacco. He said that to him they both decreased productivity by about one half. At these words he produced a gigantic cigar, lit it, and said, Ah, but it is one of my rules never to work after dinner.
Littlewood was a great joker. On another occasion when he was giving a mathematical lecture, he arrived with his beloved cat resting on his shoulder. All through the lecture, the cat stayed on his shoulder, sometimes sleeping and sometimes walking from one side of his head to the other. The students had a hard time trying to concentrate on the substance of the lecture.
The fact that Littlewood changed his schedule for my benefit is surprising. I suppose that the famous professors were starved for students and valued our listening as much as we valued their talking. My friend James Lighthill and I came from Winchester to take the Trinity College entrance scholarship examination in 1939 when we were fifteen years old and both won scholarships. The college decided that we were too young to be students, so our entrance was delayed to 1941. The professors no doubt heard about this and were expecting something unusual when we arrived.
I am also surprised that I found Arthur Eddington’s course the least worth hearing. Eddington was the astronomer who observed the displacement of star images by the sun during the total eclipse of 1919 and proved that Einstein’s theory of general relativity was correct. I expressed my low opinion of Eddington’s lectures at the beginning. In retrospect I remember the course as one of the best. By the time it ended, I had become a personal friend of Eddington.
I am now going to nine courses of lectures; this is due to the fact that Littlewood refused to go on lecturing unless I should come, and even took the drastic step of changing his time to nine a.m. so that I should have no ex
cuse for not coming. Accordingly I now go at nine a.m. and am very glad because the lectures are the best of my nine courses; Hardy this year is not as good as he was last year, as the stuff he is doing is less monumental. All the courses are well worth hearing. Eddington’s relativity perhaps the least so, as I know the stuff already; but as there are only three of us, we get a good deal of opportunity for asking questions and getting valuable tidbits of one kind and another. Jeffreys on aerofoils is much less deadly than I expected. This morning he was discussing an ingenious method of calculating the effectiveness of various wing-shapes of an aeroplane; usually one calculates the pressure of the air on the aeroplane, but in this method you ignore the aeroplane and get the same answer by calculating the pressure of the air on the ground as the aeroplane passes over.
Enough of mathematics! Last night we all went to a talk by Dr. Snow of the Ministry of Labour about our careers. The government this year will fix people up as soon as possible during the next four months, so that they will go to work immediately after their examinations are over, except in case of failure. So I should know my fate sometime before next June. The Services are establishing what they call operational rather than material research, i.e., research in the use of weapons on the basis of collecting and analysing the experience of actual fighting, and giving it statistical treatment. For this they want only the best people, as the job involves not only technical knowledge but the ability to extract information and give advice to generals. The demand for radiolocation is small now, except for U-boat outfits. He said the government had been caught out by the rise in the production of U-boats since the invasion of Russia, and that everything connected with U-boat-hunting had first priority. The Germans using the methods of operational research were just now discovering how to use large numbers of U-boats to the greatest effect. The demand for operational research workers on our side would rise sharply when England begins serious fighting. As far as our army was concerned, the Middle East campaign counts for very little.
This afternoon I went to see the Joint Recruiting Board. Dr. Snow did most of the talking, and it only took about five minutes. The board after asking perfunctory questions asked me what I wanted to do; I said I did not mind but would prefer something active. They said that they would give me the best job at their disposal in operational research. They could not promise me anything as it depended on the services whom they finally chose. They said it would probably be a civilian job at first, but if I was any good at it, I should get a commission. Also I should likely go abroad soon. They were pleased at my learning Russian but agreed that it would not probably be any use.
I asked Littlewood at the meeting on Tuesday, whether he ever had any trouble in his work, to find problems to research upon. This has always seemed to me the most difficult part of the whole business. He made a noncommittal answer. Then yesterday after the lecture he came up to me and said I must not worry about finding problems for research, that research never mixes well with learning. He said that once learning was finished and you get out on top of mathematics, there is a complete abundance of problems; and he had never had any difficulty, nor his pupils either. I was very pleased to know this, and still more pleased that he should have spontaneously talked to me about it with such earnestness.
One other thing Dr. Snow said, that all war jobs are absolutely foul, and that no one should go into it with rosy and romantic ideas. So I am not expecting to find my position either congenial or important; but it is difficult to dispel rosy illusions until they are knocked out of you.
FEBRUARY 7, 1943
I have just had an interesting talk with an undergraduate called Oskar Hahn who plays the flute in the orchestra. It turns out that he is a nephew of Kurt Hahn and spent five years at Gordonstoun. He is extremely enthusiastic about that school, and I think it does sound about all that can be desired. In particular I like the idea of only having two afternoons of games a week and otherwise doing constructive activities. Whether I should have enjoyed it, I do not know; it is decidedly nonintellectual. It is designed for the ordinary people, not for the intellectuals; instead of giving scholarships by competitive examination, they give them to the children of the local fishermen. Hahn said that they get extraordinarily good results from almost everybody. He is a cripple, having one leg completely paralysed from infantile paralysis (polio) at the age of ten. But that did not handicap him much. For sailing, and most crafts, all you need is a good pair of arms. I shall try to see more of him now that I have discovered his name.
Kurt Hahn was a German Jew who founded a boarding school in Germany with the name Salem, intended to educate an elite group of children in a counter culture opposed to the prevailing academic culture. The school flourished under the Weimar Republic, attracting children from aristocratic German families as well as Jews. In 1933 Kurt had to leave Germany and quickly founded a similar school at Gordonstoun in Scotland. Gordonstoun was equally successful. Several members of the British royal family were educated there. After the war, Kurt returned to Germany and revived the Salem school. Gordonstoun and Salem are both still flourishing. I never met Kurt, but I heard many stories about him from Oskar Hahn. Oskar said that Onkel Kurt was a pompous ass but was also a wonderful teacher and organizer.
Last Sunday we had a very interesting talk on Newton by Maynard Keynes [1946]. He is a great expert on Newton and has gone through a vast amount of unpublished work of Newton’s on every subject under the sun. He spoke extremely well, and his conclusions were amazing. The common picture of Newton, as the great analytical mind sifting the evidence and being satisfied with nothing short of mathematical certainty, is completely wrong. He was essentially a magician rather than a scientist, and all his work was inspired by his studies of the old alchemists, metaphysicians, and apocalyptics. It was known already, said Keynes, that Newton was interested in alchemy and the Book of Daniel; but his papers show that he considered all his activities as in the nature of solving ancient riddles rather than discovering new facts. With any luck, Keynes will write a book about it after the war. Another remarkable feature of the talk was Newton’s perseverance: he used to work incessantly from early morning till late at night, month after month and year after year, until he had a breakdown at the age of fifty. After that he gave up work entirely and became a member of society. It also appeared in the course of the talk that the man who allowed Newton’s papers to be sold in public auction, so that many of them are now lost, was none other than our old enemy Lord Lymington. I think that is a perfect example of Nemesis, that a man of his character should be branded by Providence with such a supremely suitable and permanent notoriety.
Lord Lymington was a notorious admirer of Hitler who owned a large piece of land near to Winchester. He would probably have become our Gauleiter if England had been successfully invaded. I had got to know him while working to bring in the harvest on his land. During the war, most of the young farm workers were away, and high school kids spent several weeks of their summer vacation loading wheat and oats with pitchforks onto trucks. Lord Lymington had us as a captive audience and told us about the kids he had seen in Germany working in the Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) movement organized by Hitler. He told us that the German kids worked better because they had an accordionneuse, a young girl with an accordion who kept them working to her rhythm. He promised to send us an accordionneuse too. Fortunately, the accordionneuse never showed up. We would probably have given her a bad time.
The summers of 1940 and 1941, when I worked for Lord Lymington, were both wet, and we worked much of the time in pouring rain, collecting sheaves of wheat and oats that were already ruined, with green sprouts growing out of the rain-soaked grain. A large fraction of the harvest was lost. Farmers in England were accustomed to such losses and did not know that they were easily preventable. The farms were kept alive through the war by government subsidies. After the war, the farmers found the cure for rainy summers. The cure was drying sheds, developed by tobacco farmers in Virginia. The she
ds are cheap to build and need to be heated for only a few days to dry a rain-soaked harvest. Drying sheds transformed farming in England from a losing to a profitable business. So far as I know, although we were clever high school kids, none of us ever thought of this simple solution to the farmers’ problem.
SUNDAY
I spent last evening talking to Georg Kreisel, the Viennese refugee whom I may have mentioned before as being one of the ablest people here. It is remarkable, but I am finding the refugees on the whole the nicest people. In particular, Kreisel is an outstandingly solid character. It makes one feel very small to talk to a person who has been in Dachau concentration camp; Kreisel was there for a fortnight when he was fifteen and was spared none of the ghastly details. His parents are at present living in our concentration camp at Mauritius, and likely to stay there for the duration. He lives in England almost entirely on his scholarships. Fortunately Trinity College does not as a rule discriminate against foreigners in the election of fellows, and I think he has a good chance of a fellowship which would assure his future. He has no bitterness against anybody; I, on the other hand, get all hot with anger when I think of the incredible lack of human sympathy with which the English allowed these persecutions to be hushed up, and now extend so grudging a welcome to the victims. Please excuse sermon.