Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  The reason that everyone is so enormously pleased with this work of Tomonaga is partly political. Long-sighted scientists are worried by the growing danger of nationalism in American science and even more in the minds of the politicians and industrialists who finance science. In the public mind, experimental science is a thing only Americans know how to do, and the fact that some theorists have had to be imported from Europe is grudgingly admitted. In this atmosphere, the new Schwinger theory is acclaimed as a demonstration that now even in theoretical physics America has nothing to learn, now for the first time has produced her own Einstein. If the scientists can say that even in this chosen field of physics America was anticipated, and indeed by a member of the much-despised race of Japanese, this will be a strong card to play against nationalistic policies. Apart from these considerations, the flowering of physics in present-day Japan is a wonderful demonstration of the resilience of the human spirit and is admired and welcomed for its own sake.

  Yesterday I went to a lecture on human population and food problems, by our professor of agriculture, a very good speaker. He had a lot of things to say which I did not know, but the total picture was the usual impossibly gloomy one as far as Europe and Southeast Asia are concerned. His hope for the future was the same as mine—more science; he ended up by stating this in a rather arresting way. In 1840 Justus von Liebig started his experiments on the nutrition of plants in Germany. Before that time, no one had ever paused to ask, what is the difference between good and bad soil, and whether anything can be done about it. Since that time, as a direct result of von Liebig’s work, food production over much of the world has been doubled. Scientists now are hard at work trying to answer some of the deeper questions, what makes a plant grow, and how does it photosynthesise. The implications are fairly hopeful.

  JUNE 11, 1948

  The American picnic is not exactly what we understand by the term; it starts out with fried steak and salads, cooked on an open-air grille, and served with plates, forks, and other paraphernalia; this sort of thing, like the elegance of the average American home and of the women’s clothes, seems to me rather a rebirth of the Victorian era, flourishing over here by virtue of the same conditions that nourished it in England. Not only in manners, but also in politics and international affairs, I often feel that Victorian England and modern America would understand each other better than either understands its contemporaries.

  • 5 •

  GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

  MY COMMONWEALTH FUND FELLOWSHIP paid for two academic years of study and a summer of travel in between. I was encouraged to spend the summer of 1948 traveling, to see as much as possible of the United States. That meant at least one coast-to-coast trip with visits to the great universities and natural wonders of California. I made two trips to the West that summer, the first with Feynman in his car, the second alone by Greyhound bus. Between the trips, I attended the summer school in theoretical physics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where Julian Schwinger was the main lecturer. In Ann Arbor I was welcomed by two friends from Cornell: Ed Lennox, the student of Hans Bethe, and Harald Wergeland, a Norwegian physicist on sabbatical leave from his home in Trondheim.

  JUNE 11, 1948, CORNELL UNIVERSITY

  My plans were greatly helped by an offer of a ride across the country by Feynman. He is going to visit his (Catholic) sweetheart at Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is driving across the country starting this week; I am to keep him company on the way out, and I shall leave him and make my own way to Ann Arbor as soon as I have had enough. It should be a fine trip, and we shall have the whole world to talk about. On this visit Feynman intends to make up his mind either to marry the girl or to agree to part; most people are prepared to wager for the former alternative.

  JUNE 25, 1948, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

  Feynman originally planned to take me out west in a leisurely style, stopping and sightseeing en route and not driving too fast. However, I was never particularly hopeful that he would stick to this plan, with his sweetheart waiting for him in Albuquerque. As it turned out, we did the eighteen hundred miles from Cleveland to Albuquerque in three and a half days, and this in spite of some troubles; Feynman drove all the way, and he drives well, never taking risks but still keeping up an average of sixty-five miles per hour outside towns. It was a most enjoyable drive, and one could see most of what was to be seen of the scenery without stopping to explore; the only regret I have is that in this way I saw less of Feynman than I might have done.

  We were lucky to have cool weather all the way. Each day we drove about ten hours and five hundred miles. The first was spent crossing Ohio and Indiana. We crossed the Mississippi at St. Louis at noon on the second. The Mississippi was as I had imagined it, a thick reddish-brown colour, flowing rapidly at the narrow place where the bridge is. After the Mississippi comes the Ozark country, hilly and beautiful with flowers and woods, still poor and backward economically as one could see from the dilapidated farmhouses. On the second day we crossed Illinois, Missouri, and a corner of Kansas and stopped well into Oklahoma. To me, one of the surprising things about the trip was to find how little of it was western in appearance. The country is well wooded, mixed grazing and farming, green and well watered, not unlike New York State, right to the Mississippi and beyond it as far as Oklahoma.

  At St. Louis we joined U.S. Highway 66, the so-called “Main Street of America” which runs from Chicago to Los Angeles via Albuquerque. We thought that from there on would be plain sailing, as this is one of the best-marked and -maintained roads there is. However, at the end of the second day we ran into a traffic jam, and some boys told us that there were floods over the road ahead and no way through. We retreated to a town called Vinita, where with great difficulty we found lodging for the night, the town being jammed with stranded travellers. We ended up in what Feynman called a “dive,” a hotel of the cheapest and most disreputable character, with a notice posted in the corridor saying “This hotel is under new management, so if you’re drunk you’ve come to the wrong place.” During the night it rained continuously, and the natives said it had been raining most of the time for more than a week.

  In the morning we went on our way, the floods having subsided, until we reached a place called Sapulpa. Here we were again stopped, and when we tried to make a detour, we arrived at the water’s edge, where the road disappeared into a huge lake. Returning to Sapulpa, we were fortunate in picking up a Cherokee Indian and his wife. They live on an oilfield construction camp at a place called Shawnee and had moved over for the weekend to visit some friends who had managed to secure five quarts of hooch whiskey. In this country it is illegal to sell liquor of any sort to Indians. Having spent a happy weekend getting through the whiskey, they were now on their way back to the job at Shawnee. They were able to direct us to an unpaved and indescribably muddy road, which kept to high ground and clear of the floods. In this way we came out onto a main road running westward north of U.S. 66. After a time this road too was blocked, and we had to detour still further to the north. Here the Indians left us, approximately as far from Shawnee as they were when they started.

  Later on we had the bright idea of turning on the car radio, and we then picked up broadcasts from Oklahoma City and other places giving detailed stories of the floods. In this way we were able to mark on our map all the places that were under water and plan our route accordingly. The worst disaster was on U.S. 66 west of Oklahoma City, where many cars were trapped and the occupants rescued by boat, a few also being drowned. We were able finally to thread our way back to U.S. 66 a good deal further west. What made these floods remarkable is that the country around Oklahoma City is already the parched sandy rolling country of the prairie and looks as if there never had been any water there, and if there had been, it would have been sopped up at once by the sandy soil. We were sorry not to see Oklahoma City, which is said to be a unique place, a town under which a first-class oilfield was discovered in the last few years. As a result, the town and the oilfield a
re hopelessly mixed up, oil wells being scattered around in people’s backyards, on the roads, and even inside buildings. The parts of Oklahoma and Texas that we passed through were obviously prosperous, partly due to the oil and partly to a general industrial expansion that is going on more rapidly there than anywhere else. Cattle ranching seems to be changing fast from a business to a rich man’s hobby.

  At the end of the third day we were in Amarillo, Texas, in the centre of the Panhandle, a treeless expanse of smoothly carved prairie. The fourth day we drove the last three hundred miles to Albuquerque before one p.m. This was the most beautiful part of the trip, though again I was surprised to find how little of it was typical New Mexico mountains. The prairie extends halfway across New Mexico, and only the last twenty miles of our journey were in mountains, the Sandia range immediately east of the Rio Grande valley in which Albuquerque lies. As we advanced into New Mexico, the prairie grew drier and drier, until a fair proportion of the vegetation was cactus, carrying at this time of year a profusion of large bloodred flowers. Coming down into Albuquerque, Feynman said he hardly recognised the place, so much has it been built up since he was there three years ago. It is a fine, spacious town of the usual American type, very little of the Spanish surviving.

  Sailing into Albuquerque at the end of this odyssey, we had the misfortune to be picked up for speeding; Feynman was so excited that he did not notice the speed limit signs. So our first appointment in this romantic city of homecoming was an interview with the justice of the peace; he was a pleasant enough fellow, completely informal, and ended up by fining us ten dollars with $4.50 costs, while chatting amiably about the way the Southwest was developing. After this Feynman went off to meet his lady, and I came up by bus to Santa Fe.

  All the way Feynman talked a great deal about his sweetheart, his wife Arlene who died at Albuquerque in 1945, and marriage in general. Also about Los Alamos. I came to the conclusion that he is an exceptionally well-balanced person, whose opinions are always his own and not other people’s. He is very good at getting on with people, and as we came West, he altered his voice and expressions unconsciously to fit his surroundings, until he was saying “I don’t know noth’n” like the rest of them.

  Feynman’s young lady turned him down when he arrived in Albuquerque, having attached herself in his absence to somebody else. He stayed there for only five days to make sure, then left her for good and spent the rest of the summer enjoying himself with horses in New Mexico and Nevada.

  Santa Fe sits at 6,900 feet, on the edge of a vast red flat desert, underneath the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. From the mountains comes a little river, fed by snow and rain in the peaks, which runs all the year round and makes the town possible. Other rivers over the plain there are in plenty, but none of them has any water. On a spur above the town is a big stone cross, a monument to the Franciscan friars who were killed when the Indians drove the Spaniards out for twelve years (1680–92). Seeing this country, one cannot help being amazed that the Spaniards were able to colonise it at all, or that they chose to colonise it in preference to the richer lands around. It is merciless country, with not even any mountains steep enough to throw a shadow at midday. At the same time, it is remarkable how little the Spaniards really achieved during their two-hundred-years stay. They never pacified the Indians or improved on the Indians’ methods of architecture and agriculture. Although Santa Fe is proudly proclaimed as the oldest state capital in the U.S. (the governor’s palace dates from 1610), it contains very few old buildings. It is a beautiful town, and a lot of it is built in the attractive adobe style, but most of the adobe houses are post-Spanish, and the style is Indian rather than Spanish. Adobe is the style of the Indian pueblos, red mud bricks and projecting wooden beams. Of the Spanish civilisation, only two things remain, the narrow winding streets and the language of the people. It is surprising to find, in a city which is completely American-built and where every road sign and advertisement and notice is in English, that three-quarters of the conversation in the streets is Spanish. Since the population of the whole state was fifty thousand in 1850 when the U.S. took it and is now half a million, a large proportion of the Spanish-speaking people must be Mexican immigrants. It was only when American railways and roads conquered first the Indians and then the deserts that the territory became habitable.

  There are two kinds of Indians; the Pueblo who live in large communal settlements, which we think of now as villages but which the Spanish conquerors always referred to as cities, and the seminomads of which the chief tribe is the Navajo. The Pueblo Indians are the older and built up a high civilisation during the period 1000–1300; later they were almost annihilated by the nomads and only saved by European protection. They now still live in a few of the original pueblos, but the pueblo was designed as a fortress, and in the peaceful world of today the pueblos are mostly deserted and the inhabitants have built themselves huts scattered around on the fields they till. The nomads are now worse off, being less capable of adapting themselves to peaceful conditions; they live further from contact with civilisation, raising sheep on tracts of desert and forest, and are now suffering badly from overpopulation. All these details, and a great deal more, I learned from the excellent museum of ethnology and archaeology here. I have also wandered about the town and the neighbourhood looking at things for myself, but one sees much more in the museum.

  JULY 2, 1948, CHICAGO

  From Santa Fe to here I came by bus, taking it in easy stages, via Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis. The buses that make these long trips are all run by a group of companies called Greyhound Lines and are uniform all over the country. They are a great institution, and they have beaten the railways at the passenger-carrying game; as roads improve (there is a tremendous lot of new construction going on now, as was plain to see in every state), the victory will be even more decisive. The buses’ main advantage, which must in the long run tell, is cheapness; the railways charge half as much again for a given trip and run at a loss. Also the buses’ routes can be more flexible and reach more places. Santa Fe, which is a state capital, is twenty miles from the nearest railway station. The railways at present are still quicker but not much. (When Feynman and I were driving at seventy mph along a good stretch of road between Amarillo and Albuquerque, we were overtaken by a Greyhound bus doing the same trip.) On the longer runs the buses are air-conditioned, and for night trips they are intermediate in comfort between a railway seat and a railway sleeper.

  For the most part, wishing to see the country, I travelled by day and stopped for the nights. The ride from Denver to Kansas City took twenty hours and included a complete night; we traversed Kansas from end to end, and it was just as I had imagined it to be. (Kansas has always had a romantic attraction since I read The Wizard of Oz at a very early age.) This night in the bus turned out to be one of the best parts of the trip. (Experienced bus travellers usually sleep by day and make their social contacts at night; reading lamps are also provided.) I became involved in conversation with a boy of eighteen who was going on leave from his navy station at San Francisco to his home in Carolina, and a girl of seventeen who was going from one place in Kansas to another place in Kansas. I did most of the listening and little of the talking. The two of them were great talkers and kept it up in fine style until the sun broke through on the horizon ahead of us, ranging over love affairs, family histories, god, and politics in turn (the opposite order to that in which I should have proceeded, and thereby hangs a great part of their character); the two of them were both strongly Christian; leaders of high school religious groups and articulate in their opinions about everything. I learned more in that night about the American Way of Life, and perhaps about the way of life of people in general, than one ever learns by daylight. At times they made me feel very old, and at times very young.

  One may hope one day to see these big buses, and the roads on which they run, flourish in other parts of the world where distances are large and populations scattered. During the last ten years in t
he U.S., the mass of the population, as opposed to the professional people or the pioneering types, has been moving about the country as never before, and this mixing up has already done much, and will do much more, to even out regional differences and fanaticisms.

  It is an interesting study to observe the negroes and their houses, in St. Louis, in Chicago, and in Ypsilanti. All three towns have a large negro minority. In Chicago the negro district looks like a London working-class suburb; in St. Louis it is a great deal worse, and in Ypsilanti a great deal better. In Ypsilanti the negroes draw handsome wages from the car factories where they work.

  Now, sixty-eight years later, Ypsilanti is in a sorry state. The car industry is flourishing, but the number of well-paid manufacturing jobs that it provides is sadly diminished. The workers’ homes that looked so neat and clean in 1948 are now decaying slums.