MARCH 8, 1948
There have recently been a number of articles on political topics in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by Oppenheimer. They are remarkable not only for the breadth of view but for the excellent prose in which they are written, and this stimulated my curiosity so that one day I got Phil Morrison talking about Oppenheimer as a personality. Morrison has known him well since he started working under him at Pasadena, their ages being then approximately twenty and thirty. He said that at that time Oppenheimer was still an exceedingly intense and aesthetic young man and divided his leisure between reading St. Thomas Aquinas in Latin and writing poetry in the style of Eliot. He came of a wealthy American family, but went to Göttingen to study and became thoroughly Europeanised; for a long time he contemplated becoming a Roman Catholic but finally didn’t. To furnish his mind, he learned to read fluently in French, German, Italian, Russian, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. So this to some extent explains the sensitivity of his prose and the awe in which he is held by such close friends as Bethe.
Yesterday I went for a long walk in the spring sunshine with Trudy Eyges and Richard Feynman. Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her, and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war.
I was wrong when I wrote that Feynman found his wife Arlene in New Mexico. He married her first in a city hall on Staten Island and then took her with him to New Mexico. The story is movingly told by Feynman in the book What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988), the title being a quote from Arlene.
As Feynman says, anyone who has been happily married once cannot long remain single, and so yesterday we were discussing his new problem, this time again a girl in New Mexico with whom he is desperately in love. This time the problem is not tuberculosis, but the girl is a Catholic. You can imagine all the troubles this raises, and if there is one thing Feynman could not do to save his soul, it is to become a Catholic himself. So we talked and talked and sent the sun down the sky and went on talking in the darkness. At the end of it, Feynman was no nearer to the solution of his problems, but it must have done him good to get them off his chest. I think that he will marry the girl and that it will be a success, but far be it from me to give advice to anybody on such a subject.
MARCH 15, 1948
On Friday I went to a performance of Winterset by the Ithaca College dramatic society. I do not know whether you know the play, which is by Maxwell Anderson, a tragedy of the deepest dye and in my opinion very fine. But perhaps more remarkable than the play was the way it was performed, which took me completely by surprise and made me revise my ideas about American education. Ithaca College is the local university, typical of the American small-town college. It naturally suffers from an inferiority complex from always having to play second fiddle to Cornell, but it has also benefited from having on its staff a number of young research students and their wives who are nominally attached to Cornell but supplement their incomes by teaching downtown. After sixty years of symbiosis the two institutions have reached a position of equilibrium, in which Cornell is the senior partner, but Ithaca College has concentrated its efforts onto excelling in one field, namely the department of music and drama. I had heard some of the concerts given by their students, and they certainly were good, but I had not before seen their dramatics. It was obvious at once that they completely outclassed anything I had seen the students do at Cambridge. The play was a difficult one, full of passionate passages which could easily fail if badly handled, and full of silences which need careful timing. Though at the back of the hall, we could hear every word that was said. The finest testimony to their acting was this, that after the first act I was told that the play was written in blank verse, as indeed it was; the delivery was so natural that I was quite unconscious of it.
My own work has taken a fresh turn as a result of the visit of [Viki] Weisskopf last week. He brought with him an account of the new Schwinger quantum theory which Schwinger had not finished when he spoke at New York. This new theory is a magnificent piece of work, so at the moment I am working through it and trying to understand it thoroughly. After this I shall be in a very good position, able to attack various important problems in physics with a correct theory while most other people are still groping. One other very interesting thing has happened recently; our Richard Feynman, who always works on his own and has his own private version of quantum theory, has been attacking the same problem as Schwinger from a different direction and has now come out with a roughly equivalent theory, reaching many of the same ideas independently. Feynman is a man whose ideas are as difficult to make contact with as Bethe’s are easy; for this reason I have so far learnt much more from Bethe, but I think if I stayed here much longer, I should begin to find that it was Feynman with whom I was working more.
Victor Weisskopf was an old friend of Bethe from his student days in Germany. He was a professor at MIT, in close touch with Schwinger, who was at Harvard.
MARCH 23, 1948
Ever since 1945 I have maintained, in argument and in my convictions, that England could never fight another war against a power in control of Europe and that it was nonsensical to support any policy that envisioned such a war as a possibility. It was always possible, and indeed likely, that America and Russia would sooner or later be dragged into a war of extermination, but it seemed that the most useful thing one could do in the circumstances was to proclaim as loudly as possible a plague on both their houses. Also one could help to preserve peace by making people as aware as possible of what an atomic war would be like, although this was always liable to produce the opposite effect to what one wanted. The central point in the position was that no European could have any interest in the outcome of such a war, because he could not expect to survive it. He had a moral obligation, no doubt, to do what he could to mitigate the effects of war in his own country, but he should not expect to be able to do much.
The trouble with these beliefs is that if you try to follow them consistently, you are left in a state of paralysis. If you are faced with a situation in which war is possible or probable, there is nothing you can do. This was roughly the state I was in until yesterday. I suppose it was just because I was alone among Americans that I clung so tenaciously to my position and at the same time felt so sorry for myself.
What happened to me yesterday may be described quite simply by saying that I caught the war fever. I have seen it happen to people often before, people from whom one would never have expected a bellicose sentiment and who suddenly one day begin to talk of fighting in a matter-of-fact sort of way. Only the odd thing was that when it happened to me, I knew that it was not a fever. It came with a sudden calmness and a feeling that I was no longer afraid, a strange certainty that in facing these terrible odds without despair lies our salvation. This afternoon, with all this fresh in my mind, I happened by chance to meet a Dutch student of agriculture to whom I had never spoken more than a few words. We happened to start talking, and I soon discovered that he is an unusually well-informed and intelligent person; he seems to know about as much about England as I do, and a great deal more about the United States. He also has had very strong pacifist inclinations during the last three years. Soon we started talking about the recent war, and it turned out that he spent the greater part of it in France as a member of what we used to call “the organisation,” collecting allied airmen and shipping them across Euro
pe to fight another day; he also had a good deal to do with receiving dumps of arms by parachute and supplying them to the maquis. At the end of this story, he said, “And of course, in spite of my pacifist views, if the country is occupied again, I shall be back.” You can imagine that I was pleased to feel that my own change of view came before, and not after, I heard this.
MARCH 29, 1948
A queer thing happened to me the other day that pleased me very much. As I may have told you, when I was at Münster last summer, there were a considerable number of pretty German girls in the party; I probably did not tell you that there was one, by name Hilde Jacobs, who was generally agreed to be the cynosure and probably the most beautiful creature I have seen anywhere. She was usually surrounded with admirers, and I never spoke to her more than an occasional Guten morgen. You can imagine my surprise when I received the other day, forwarded from Cambridge, a letter from this creature, and a very charming letter at that. Needless to say, I wrote back asking for more. I like to keep in touch, however tenuously, with Germany; it seems necessary to keep fresh in one’s mind the life people are living there, so that one may not tire in the effort to bring these things to the attention of comfortably ignorant Americans. My new correspondent does not give much in the way of factual information; she seems to live in a private world of her own; for this one cannot blame her.
It has always seemed to me that Communism can best be understood as a return to mediaeval society and has most of the virtues as well as the vices of that society. Looking back on the political crisis of the last few weeks, one may wonder what there was to get so excited about; after all, we seem to be pretty much where we were. I think, on the contrary, that there was good reason for the excitement. During these weeks a lot of things have been done which will have the consequence of fixing the limits within which future international events will move. It was inevitable that these things should not be done without much heart-searching.
With the benefit of hindsight sixty years later, we can see more clearly the similarity between the threat of militant Communism in twentieth-century Russia and the threat of militant medievalism in sixteenth-century Spain. The United States defeated the threat from Russia as England defeated the threat from Spain, by maintaining a strong military defense and avoiding direct confrontation.
The event which caused the heart-searching in the spring of 1948 was the decision of the United States to carry out the Marshall Plan. The plan gave money to Western European states to revive their economies. The crucial economy to be revived was West Germany. This meant a switch from the postwar policy of disarming Germany to a policy of rearming Germany. It meant recognizing West Germany as an equal partner in the military defense of Western Europe. It meant giving up hope of agreement with the Soviet Union about the political future of Europe. The chief architect of the plan was George Kennan, then working in the State Department as adviser to Secretary of State George Marshall. Kennan later became my friend and colleague as professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
APRIL 4, 1948
I will end up with some more political notes. The revolutionary thing about the atomic bomb is not that it is so lethal but that it is so cheap. There is a famous passage in Philip Morrison’s testimony before the Senate in which he describes the air base at Tinian in the Marianas. Tinian is a small island (about one mile by two) which became the chief base for bombers operating against Japan. The island was first completely levelled with bulldozers, and then six tremendous concrete runways were laid out down the length of the island. (They could be parallel because the wind always blows in the same direction.) When Morrison was there, the island held some five hundred B-29s, enough to wipe out a city in one conventional raid; to maintain them there was a permanent ground staff of twenty thousand men, in addition to some five thousand flying crew; in the harbour there was perpetually at least one tanker being emptied of petrol. Tucked away at one corner of the island was Morrison’s own group; this consisted of three or four huts with a staff of twenty-five; these with the aid of one B-29 could also wipe out a city. What Morrison stressed was that no power on earth could maintain five hundred Tinians, by any stretch of the imagination; but one Tinian with five hundred atomic B-29s would be not at all impossible.
The upshot of this is that when two powers both have even moderate quantities of plutonium at their disposal, to have the greater quantity is not a decisive advantage. The decisive factor in military strength is vulnerability. And the United States is likely to remain enormously more vulnerable to this sort of attack than Russia (let alone Western Europe). Hence in course of time, and especially if Russia starts building a navy, there will be increasing pressure upon the United States to strike before it is too late. As you say, it is very like 1914. I am an optimist too, but only in the very long run.
APRIL 11, 1948
When I was at the conference in New York at Christmas 1947, I noticed that the building where the lectures were given was called Pupin Hall, but I did not pursue further the history of Pupin until this week, when the name caught my eye in a bookshelf in the library; out of curiosity to see who Pupin was, I looked at the book, which happened to be his autobiography. Before I knew where I was, I was deeply absorbed in it, and I thought you might be interested in what is a most remarkable story. Michael Pupin began life as a shepherd boy in a remote part of Hungary but Serb-speaking. At the age of fifteen, having had a little schooling, he decided to run away to America; and having sold his warm clothes to pay his fare, he spent a fortnight almost frozen to death crossing the Atlantic and finally arrived in New York not speaking a word of English and with five cents as his total wealth. He managed to get a job on a farm and so spent five years moving from one job to another, using the intervals to teach himself Latin and Greek and a little science. At the end of this time he considered himself educated enough to compete for a scholarship at Columbia College and astounded the examiners by knowing the first two books of the Iliad by heart; he got the scholarship.
At Columbia he made a brilliant career in athletics and social success, but he decided that he wanted to be a scientist, and he could not find anybody at Columbia who could teach him any real science. One day he happened to pick up James Clerk Maxwell’s little book on the new electromagnetic theory, and this so captured his imagination that he decided he could not rest until he had understood it. So when he had his Columbia degree, he took a ship to England and went to Cambridge to work under Maxwell. The first thing he did was to make a call on one of the tutors at Trinity College, and he was told politely that Maxwell had been dead for four years. However, the tutor was very helpful and said that he could find him a place at Kings if he would be willing to work for the Mathematical Tripos like the other undergraduates. So for two years he worked at what he considered “infernal mathematical conundrums,” until he could stand it no longer; finding time meanwhile to row for Kings and imbibe the traditions of Cambridge. At the end of this he considered himself ready to wrestle with Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and asked for a position as a physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory. He was horrified to discover that the director of the laboratory was only twenty-eight years old, the same age as himself (it was J. J. Thompson) and decided that he must start work somewhere where his mature years would be less noticeable; so he set off again for Berlin and worked under the great Helmholtz, who was a comfortable sixty-five. Here he got his Ph.D. and a wife, and so finally returned in triumph to join the staff at Columbia.
Pupin had a very keen eye for what was going on, scientifically and otherwise, in the various countries he went to, and writes a penetrating study of America and Europe in the 1880s. He describes movingly the long visits to his family which he made in the summers while he was in Europe. His hero in science was Michael Faraday. He and Faraday both had a strongly religious approach to science, idealistic rather than practical. The greater part of his life Pupin spent in a successful campaign to spread the gospel of fundamental scienti
fic research in America. He made some useful discoveries of a practical kind in electrical engineering, but his enduring monument is the Pupin Laboratory at Columbia, which he conceived as a centre for research in the most modern and refined parts of pure physics, to do for America what the Cavendish did for England. It is sad that he did not live to see this dream come true. The three great experiments which during the last year have confirmed the new radiation theory were all carried out first in the Pupin Laboratory.
Pupin’s autobiography has the title From Immigrant to Inventor (1922). Although his chief aim in life was to foster pure science, he never claimed to be a scientist himself. He was an inventor. He was also historically important because he was a friend of Woodrow Wilson and persuaded Wilson to push for the creation of Yugoslavia after World War 1. Yugoslavia united the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes into one country, with the Serbian king as titular leader.
Some more interesting news about the radiation theory came this week, via Oppenheimer. At the Pocono conference last week, Schwinger expounded to the assembled savants the definitive form of the new theory, and he was universally acclaimed as the man of the hour. When Oppenheimer returned from the conference, he found on his desk a letter from Tomonaga, one of the Tokyo physicists, enclosing some manuscripts and saying that these were being sent by post because of the considerable delays of publication in Japan. And one of these manuscripts was a complete account of a theory, almost identical with the Schwinger theory, but with the development carried a good deal farther in certain directions. Oppenheimer considered this sufficiently important to justify a circular carrying the news to all members of the conference. What was perhaps even more remarkable was that Tomonaga developed the essential ideas of the theory in 1943 and only put the finishing touches to it when he heard about the Columbia experiments of 1947. Tomonaga was known before this to be one of their bright young men. I have read several good papers by him on various subjects; he is about the same age as Schwinger.
Maker of Patterns Page 9