Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  My mention of the British concentration camp in Mauritius does not imply that it was equivalent to Dachau. Mauritius is an island in the Indian Ocean that was then a convenient dumping ground for aliens who had been denied entrance to Britain. Aliens were free to live and travel as they pleased on the island but were not allowed to leave it. It was technically correct to call it a concentration camp. The aliens there were effectively in prison, even if they could move around. Mauritius then was similar to Australia 150 years earlier, a humane alternative to hanging.

  My protest against the treatment of refugees was directed against my father, who had been president of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, the musicians’ trade union, before the war. As president, he had acted vigorously to keep refugee musicians out of Britain and to prevent them from taking jobs away from British musicians. One case that I remember vividly was that of Rudolf Bing, a gifted conductor who had taken refuge in London. My father succeeded in blocking him from finding a permanent job in England. He was forced to emigrate to New York, where he enjoyed a brilliant career as conductor of the Metropolitan Opera. My father did not regret his action. My father said, “The Americans can afford Rudolf Bing. We can’t.”

  MONDAY

  The lectures of Jeffreys are great fun. The audience is composed of me only, and Jeffreys has stopped doing aerofoils and is lecturing on all sorts of recondite problems that he has solved during his lifetime. One of these problems is the cooking of porridge in a shallow saucepan. According to the classical mechanics of viscous fluids, the convection currents should always prevent the porridge from overheating at the bottom. The new theory due to Jeffreys, which is very ingenious, shows that stirring will in general be necessary to avoid burning, if the viscosity of the porridge exceeds 6,000. I hope this may alleviate your domestic problems.

  Harold Jeffreys was a geophysicist with a wide range of interests, including the interior of the earth and the dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans. A large part of his course was concerned with ocean tides and their effect on the orbit of the moon. I was always amazed that he took so much trouble to explain these wonders of nature to a single undergraduate.

  This afternoon I spent at the cinema. The programme was Citizen Kane followed by The Ghost Train. Citizen Kane is definitely worth going to see, if you have not already done so. It is the story of an American millionaire, done with incredible artistry and sympathy. You may remember my being enthusiastic last year about a French film, L’Atalante; a few weeks ago there was an article in the Sunday Times devoted to it, which praised it ecstatically. Citizen Kane has some of the same virtues, though it suffers more from the vice of ambitiousness. It was made in England in 1941, which is a cheering thought. The other night we read Heartbreak House aloud; I had the part of the old captain, and enjoyed it immensely.

  Heartbreak House is a play by George Bernard Shaw about England in World War I, with Captain Shotover as the most memorable character. It had a powerful resonance for the generation growing up in England in World War II.

  I was agreeably surprised on Thursday to receive a large envelope stamped Princeton, February 11, 1943, and inside it, lo and behold, “The Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis, by K. Gödel.” This is the first time I have ever been aware, except from an abstract point of view, that a place called America really exists. I have often read about America, but it is quite different when you ask somebody in America to send something to you, and they send it. I have been reading the immortal work (it is only sixty pages long) alternately with The Magic Mountain and find it hard to say which is the better. [Thomas] Mann of course writes better English (or rather the translator does); on the other hand the superiority of the ideas in Gödel just about makes up for that.

  Five years later I was drinking tea with Gödel at his home in Princeton. He had the reputation of an inscrutable genius, but for me he was always a real and friendly person.

  APRIL 25, 1943

  I was pleased to find here awaiting me the proofs of my first two publications, two short notes in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society. I have now finally sent them to the press. Also I found an offer of a job in the Nautical Almanac department, doing computations for various Admiralty purposes. It is no use to me now, but it is gratifying to find that they offer you jobs like that, without your having to apply for them. On Thursday last I met Mr. Clarabut, whom you will remember at Winchester as my chief taskmaster. He is a man who always likes to have a finger in every pie; he works in the Foreign Office and he told us all about the big people there and how they underrate the Japanese, while he, Clarabut, who lived in Manchuria for some years, had been constantly telling them etc. etc. He said he was in Cambridge in order to arrange for an honorary degree to be given to Madame Chiang Kai-shek (not in his official capacity but simply because he thought it ought to be done and he might as well do it as anybody else). I do not know what his job actually is; he looked pale and thin, so I expect he is worked hard; he must be useful in the Foreign Office, as he speaks any number of languages (he is actually a native of Latvia) and he knows everybody who is anybody.

  Clarabut had been librarian at Winchester College when I was a schoolboy and kept me busy with interesting jobs in the school library. Since the school was then 550 years old (it is now 625), the library was full of unexpected treasures.

  MAY 8, 1943

  Owing to a general tightening-up of the red tape, we are all (the college fire parties) being affiliated to the National Fire Service and given blue uniforms. It will not increase our duties in any way; it is just an example of the administrative mind at work. I have already filled up some forms, but with any luck I will be out of the place before the uniforms arrive. My ankle is now quite recovered, but weak from lack of use. To give it exercise, I have started an intensive programme of circumscribing the pillars in Neville’s Court. The object of the game is to get round the big pillars on a ledge six inches above the ground (a) with both hands, (b) with the right hand, (c) with the left hand. (a) is quite hard, and (c) is very hard indeed; all of them are very good practice for the ankle. I have achieved (a) and very nearly (b). I had the good fortune when engaged in this pursuit to meet Littlewood, who invented the game and is the only person who can do all the pillars both ways with either hand. He explained to me at length all the finer points and was only prevented from giving a demonstration by the fact that he was wearing a dressing gown.

  MAY 29, 1943

  I have been seeing a good deal of Oskar Hahn, and like him very much. He introduced me the other night to Matthias Landau, the son of the great mathematician Edmund Landau, and Oskar’s cousin. He is a great wei-chi expert, and we played that game till midnight, Landau needless to say winning. There is something admirable about both of them; as well as being interesting talkers, they have a sense of responsibility which is striking; I suppose that is what makes Kurt Hahn such a success. This man Landau fought for Spain in the International Brigade for a year and a half, and was interned in a foul camp in France for his pains; he said that he played more wei-chi in France than in the rest of his life. Oskar’s father was the owner of a wealthy machine tool factory in Berlin, which during the 1930 slump did very well by supplying gun lathes and such to the big new armaments factories in the Urals. Although a Jew, he managed to keep his business going until 1938 and was actually asked by the government to open his works to foreign visitors to show them an example of the enlightened methods of German industry for the welfare of workers. He refused. Finally in 1938 he decided it was time to go, and he is now running a small aluminium factory in Birmingham.

  The Spanish Civil War was a tragic struggle in which many English students in the years before World War II were deeply engaged. George Orwell, one of the Englishmen who fought in Spain, published in 1938 his book Homage to Catalonia, a truthful account of the feuding and treachery on the government side that led to the victory of General Francisco Franco. During World War II we were grateful to Franco for keeping Spain neutral.
As a result of Franco’s neutrality, many of our bomber crewmen who survived being shot down were able to walk home through Spain and Portugal.

  Wei-chi is the Chinese version of the game that the Japanese call go. The game was invented in China and spread from there to Japan. In those days it was known in England as wei-chi, and the experts spoke scornfully of the Japanese who claimed it as their own.

  JUNE 3, 1943

  This morning I went for a six-mile walk before breakfast. It was a very pleasant walk; it poured with rain all the time, and I was accompanied by Oskar Hahn in his wheelchair. I am acquiring much more factual knowledge about the refugee problem now than I got from anyone else, for Oskar’s mother is boss of the organisation that brought Kreisel and the others over from Germany. She is responsible for ten thousand young refugees, so she really does know something about it.

  Here is a prime example of bureaucracy at its best; I have just received an order to go to the National Fire Service depot and be measured for my new fire party uniform. It was announced at the beginning of this term that the fire party was to be put into uniform; now things are beginning to get moving.

  There is a two-year gap after this letter. Nothing is said about the purpose of the walk with Oskar Hahn. We walked before breakfast several times to train ourselves for a bigger walk, fifty-five miles from Cambridge to London. We both had homes in London and were finishing our time at Cambridge. Oskar had a problem with his wheelchair, which was heavy and awkward to transport by train. He asked me if I would help him to travel by road, and we came to an agreement. He would carry my heavy suitcase on his wheelchair, and I would help to push the chair when we came to steep hills. The weather was fine for the day of our big walk. We completed the trip in seventeen hours. The war gave us a unique opportunity to do it, because there was almost no traffic on the roads. With peacetime traffic, it would be impossible. We arrived at our homes without any fuss and told our parents only later what we had done. Somehow the authorities in Cambridge heard about it, and we received a letter of congratulations from Sir George Trevelyan, the historian who was then master of Trinity College.

  After leaving Cambridge in 1943. I spent two years working as a civilian in the operational research section of Bomber Command. The headquarters were in a forest north of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Our job was to demolish German cities and kill as many German civilians as possible. We killed about four hundred thousand, ten times as many as the Germans had killed in Britain. There are no letters from Bomber Command, since I came home to London for one day every week during the Bomber Command years. After the war in Europe ended, I stayed at Bomber Command, preparing for the move of a substantial British bomber force to Okinawa to take part in the bombing of Japan. It came as a gift from heaven when the Japanese surrendered and our trip to Okinawa was canceled. I was suddenly set free from Bomber Command, discharged just in time to take a position as demonstrator, the lowest grade of teacher, at Imperial College in London, where I continued to work as a mathematician while living at home. During that year I wrote one letter, while my parents were away.

  DECEMBER 16, 1945

  I was rung up by Oskar at ten-thirty on Friday. He spent the railway journey to Cambridge telling me all about his life in Glasgow, which he finds satisfying in spite of hardships which I never had to face at Bomber Command; exhausting physical work, the lack of a private sitting room, and a landlady who drinks whiskey. We arrived at Cambridge at four, and I failed to get a room in a hotel. Oskar was not in the least worried and said he knew just the right place for me to go, which was the house of some friends of his called Robinow. At nine o’clock we went out to the home of the Robinows, where we were welcomed tumultuously in a beautifully bohemian fashion. The household consists of Mr. Robinow who is a cytologist working in a biological research laboratory, his wife Rosie who appeared in trousers and a jersey, exotic both in voice and appearance, and finally the old lady Inona who is the mother of Rosie. Inona was an internationally famous pianist at the age of seventeen and got married and retired at about twenty-five. She was a personal friend of Brahms and used to play his later works for him as he wrote them, and she has a good collection of stories about her past. One was an account of a concert she gave in Amsterdam after coming over from England by boat. As she did not speak Dutch, it was arranged that she should be met at the boat and conveyed straight to the concert hall. The arrangements went without a hitch, the young lady was escorted to the hall, the concert was due to begin, and then for some unaccountable reason she refused to walk out onto the platform, and despite all their efforts she remained in the vestibule behind the platform and burst into tears. Fortunately Inona arrived at the hall just in time to explain to the authorities that there had been some mistake and that the wrong young lady had been met at the boat.

  In the morning we had a riotous breakfast, at which we were joined by the younger generation, consisting of Antony (Nony for short) aged six and Oliver aged two. Both children are extremely good-looking, and Nony is a remarkable conversationalist. After breakfast he remarked, “Would you like to listen to some gramophone records? We’ve got some lovely ones of Menuhin playing Handel sonatas.” And he brought out the gramophone and put on Sonata No. 4 which I was proudly able to say I had played once myself in the past. “Ah, but you didn’t play it as well as Menuhin” was his reply. Afterwards he put on one of the Brandenburg concertos, and finally left me just before the end of it, remarking, “I must go to school now. Don’t try to put the records away as you don’t know where they go. I will do it when I come home.”

  At twelve-thirty I met the Hahn family. Rudolf Hahn, the father, a stout smallish man, taciturn and undistinguished-looking. The mother (Lola), tall and beautiful but with greying hair and haggard-looking eyes. The sister Benita, more English-looking than the others, having been at school at Downe House. All of them speak English with a pronounced foreign accent, and chiefly German to one another. After lunch Oskar retired with Mother to be washed and brushed up and inserted with some difficulty into his dress suit, and then we all went along together to the senate house. I do not know if you have ever been to a congregation of the senate of Cambridge University. To start with, the public orator stands up with an enormous screed of graces to be laid before the senate. In order to get through the screed in a reasonable time, he gabbles the whole thing off as fast as he possibly can, without pausing for breath or for punctuation. After the graces, the conferring of degrees began. Fortunately Oskar came near the beginning, and as soon as he was finished we made an undignified bolt for the exit.

  At three we all piled into the car and set off for Banbury. During the journey I got Mrs. Hahn talking about her work. She started in 1933 in Germany organising the escape of Jews from the country, with the support of her father who was a wealthy banker and always forked out the money necessary for bribing officials, Gestapo men, etc., on a lavish scale. Having got her own children to England, she was reluctantly compelled to follow herself in 1938; however, she immediately took over a big job in the Refugee Organisation in England. All through the war she has been working like a Trojan for the organisation, driving around the country and visiting children and foster parents and local and government authorities, and since last August she has been coping with the thousand children who survived in the concentration camps and have been brought over here. The organisation caters for Jews and Gentiles alike, though most of the children are Jews. The rest of the family say that it is all they can do to stop Mrs. Hahn from adopting one of the children about once a week and from working herself to death.

  Lola Hahn was born Lola Warburg, daughter of Max Warburg, and belonged to the wealthy family of bankers and art collectors who founded the Warburg Institutes in Hamburg and London. Over Oskar’s desk in Cambridge was a photograph of his mother as a beautiful young woman on a horse jumping over a fence.

  The house at which we arrived at six is a beautiful place, built in 1691, in the village of Cheney Middleton, Northamptons
hire. When we arrived, we found a roaring coal fire in the drawing-room, and we sat round it while a sumptuous high tea was served by a real parlourmaid. The house has central heating, running hot and cold water, and two bathrooms, and a large and potentially lovely walled garden. They have been in it just six weeks, which seems almost impossible to believe as the garden is already covered with newly planted flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees (the father is a great gardener, and is particularly fond of fruit tree growing and grafting) and the whole house is furnished with lovely old furniture, Chinese paintings on silk, and spotless internal decoration. We had supper by candlelight with four excellent courses and again the impeccable parlourmaid. After supper we sat round the fire and once more roared with laughter over the antics of the officials of Cambridge University. Rudolf Hahn said that he had bought the house in response to an advertisement in the Times. It is not a big house, but it is roomy inside, and having two resident maids makes any house seem a palace nowadays. Finally I left them at three-thirty, with a large package of sandwiches for the train and a pot of homemade honey for my family. Of course, they keep bees as well as chickens.

  Oskar inherited business skills from both his parents and rose to become chairman of the Federation of British Industries. He kept in touch with us and visited us twice in Princeton. He was a passionate sailor and loved to go sailing with his family. He died as he would have wished, dropping dead suddenly while steering his boat on a summer cruise around Scotland.