Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  NOVEMBER 14, 1948

  After I wrote to you from Boston, I had an unequalled opportunity of seeing the real Boston, when I went out onto Boston Common (a very small park about one-tenth the size of Hyde Park) on a night which happened by good luck to be a coincidence of Sunday, Halloween, and Election Week. The common was seething with people, talking every possible language but mostly Irish, and there were innumerable speakers standing on soapboxes in the best Hyde Park tradition, denouncing the wickedness of the world, Mr. Dewey, Mr. Truman, Mr. Stalin, and the Roman Catholic Church. I had never before seen an American crowd taking religion and politics seriously. Boston is the most European of American cities, superficially reminiscent of London. Even the slums are old and built of brick, in contrast to the typical American slums which are built of wood and corrugated iron. After two hours pleasantly spent listening to the various orators, ending with the best of them all, a little Italian who stood high up on a bandstand and periodically pointed an accusing finger at some defenceless member of his audience, exclaiming ferociously “There stands Satan”; after two hours of this I knew less than nothing about Boston politics but a lot about Boston character. The drive back from Boston was as lovely as the drive there; trees everywhere, and of a brilliance of scarlet and gold colouring such as I had never seen even in this country. Boston may be like London, but the New England countryside is nothing like England.

  Oppenheimer is in California this weekend, talking to people there. He returns on Tuesday. It is no wonder he is such a nervous wreck, with all this gadding around. The wonder is rather that he manages to keep as clear-headed as he does. I have been observing rather carefully his behaviour during seminars. If one is saying, for the benefit of the rest of the audience, things that he knows already, he cannot resist hurrying one on to something else; then when one says things that he doesn’t know or immediately agree with, he breaks in before the point is fully explained with acute and sometimes devastating criticisms, to which it is impossible to reply adequately even when he is wrong. If one watches him, one can see that he is moving around nervously all the time, never stops smoking, and I believe that his impatience is largely beyond his control. On Tuesday we had our fiercest public battle so far, when I criticised some unwarrantably pessimistic remarks he had made about the Schwinger theory. He came down on me like a ton of bricks and conclusively won the argument so far as the public was concerned. However, afterwards he was very friendly and even apologised to me. When life is like this, the great thing is to keep a sense of proportion and avoid becoming a nervous wreck like Oppy. So far I think I am succeeding, but you should not be surprised when I write melancholic letters occasionally.

  Fortunately there are occasional diversions. On Friday a carload of us young people drove to a local cinema where we saw Rope, a new film. It is a masterpiece, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in his best style. After the film, we got back into the car and hardly had we driven a block when we saw a genuine corpse, with an ugly wound on its head, stretched out across the pavement. Pais, who owns the car, drove off to fetch a doctor while the rest of us joined the gathering crowd around the corpse. The wife of the corpse turned up, not at all perturbed. She shook the corpse vigorously, and it opened its eyes and snorted something incomprehensible at her. “I told him he shouldn’t go out,” she said to the crowd. “He was dead drunk when he left the house. Mind you, this is not the first time this has happened.” At this point a police car arrived and carried the corpse away to hospital, and the crowd dispersed. Several minutes later Pais returned, fortunately having failed to find a doctor. After this episode we assembled to drink wine in Pais’s rooms.

  Norman Kroll is the most mature and quiet of the young people and is married to an equally quiet biologist wife; I met them at Ann Arbor in the summer, and I like them very much though I do not see much of them now. Norman has done during the last two months some work which I consider first rate, on the Schwinger theory. I am hoping that as soon as I can get through with my series of talks to the seminar, he will take over and talk about what he has done. However, I go ahead so slowly under Oppenheimer’s fire that an end is hardly yet in sight. Kroll is wisely not pressing his claims. Kroll was a pupil of Lamb at Columbia, but this is the first important thing he has done. I shall be surprised if Rabi does not now invite him back to Columbia to fill the place he offered me. Kroll deserves it as much as I do, and I shall not grudge it to him. It is pleasant to find that Kroll has been quietly going ahead with the theory and making progress, undeterred by the floods of scepticism which Oppenheimer pours on the whole business. This has a good effect on the morale of the young people, who were getting thoroughly confused and discouraged, in spite of all I could say.

  Rabi did offer the job at Columbia to Kroll, and Kroll accepted it. Kroll stayed for many years as a mainstay of the Columbia physics department after Rabi retired. Kroll was particularly well suited to be in the Columbia department, since he had been a leader in the development of high-frequency radar equipment during the war. He could talk as an expert with experimenters as well as with theorists. In that way, he was better qualified for the Columbia job than I was.

  Cécile amused us all yesterday by bringing down a French millionaire to see the institute (an industrial magnate of some kind). She said she hinted to him strongly that France could do with an institute of a similar sort; she said if she were made director of the French institute, she would invite all of us to come and lecture there. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it.

  The millionaire that Cécile brought to the institute was Léon Motchane, a man of many talents. He had achieved fame in three separate careers, as a mathematician, as an entrepreneur, and as an active leader of the French resistance. Cécile’s plan, that Motchane could be cajoled into building a comparable institution in France, succeeded brilliantly. Within a few years, Motchane had helped to found two institutions in France, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette with himself as director, and the Les Houches summer school with Cécile as director. The IHÉS is a smaller version of the Princeton institute, housed in a beautiful château in the village of Bures on the southern edge of Paris. The Les Houches summer school is a high-level school of theoretical physics, meeting for six weeks every summer in the French Alps, attracting first-rate teachers and students from all over the world. Both institutions are still flourishing sixty years later. Cécile kept her promise and invited me to teach at Les Houches in 1954. I taught the brightest class of students that I ever encountered. The brightest of the bright was Georges Charpak, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1992.

  NOVEMBER 21, 1948

  During the past week I at last began to make some progress in explaining my ideas. Up till this week I had given only two talks in two months, and those two were mainly occupied with fighting Oppenheimer; several times I had been scheduled to talk and then put off at the last moment because something else had to be discussed; you can imagine how frustrating it was to go on for two months like this. However, at last on Wednesday of this week, Bethe came to my rescue. He came down to talk to the seminar about some calculations he has been doing with the Feynman theory. He was received in the style to which I am accustomed, with incessant interruptions and confused babbling of voices, and had great difficulty in making even his main points clear; while this was going on he stood very calmly and said nothing, only grinned at me as if to say, “Now I see what you are up against.” After that he began to make openings for me, saying in answer to a question, “Well, I have no doubt Dyson will have told you all about that,” at which point I was not slow to say in as deliberate a tone as possible, “I am afraid I have not got to that yet.” Finally Bethe made a peroration in which he said explicitly that the Feynman theory is much the best theory and that people must learn it if they want to avoid talking nonsense; things which I have been saying for a long time but in vain.

  After the seminar Bethe had supper with the Oppenheimers; I did not see him
except during the seminar. But the next morning I found that my triumph was complete; three extra seminars had been arranged for me in one week. And in the first of these on Thursday Oppenheimer actually listened to me and did not interrupt. The next two are on Monday and Tuesday, and that will be enough for me to get the main essentials done with. Bethe is a great and good man, and I wrote to him and told him so. The tact and strategy which he used, to pull the opinion of the institute onto my side, could not have been more effective. My own researches meanwhile go on with renewed momentum. I have already enough material for a new paper to the Physical Review. I am in no hurry to write it, and I am taking things as easy as possible. As I expected at the time, the result of writing the first paper so quickly is that there is very little of it that I should not like to change now. It was right to publish it fast for the benefit of people in Europe and Japan.

  It is strange how easily and unintentionally I have slid into the position of a pundit. Now when I give a seminar, I usually find that [Eugene] Wigner has come over from the university to listen to it, and he has once come up to me afterwards to talk. Wigner is the chief professor of theoretical physics at the university, a man with a tremendous reputation and perhaps the greatest living expert on the theory of piles. He is a Hungarian by birth and a very polished and pleasant personality. It is strange that my modest contribution to physics should bring me such a reward as this. It seems somehow out of proportion that to clear up a minor muddle in one branch of physics should be such a serious matter. What is even more strange is that I find myself giving these seminars, without notes or preparation, with Wigner and such people in the audience, and without feeling nervous. A year ago this would have been completely unthinkable.

  The word pile was then used for the objects which we now call nuclear reactors. Enrico Fermi built the first nuclear reactor in Chicago in 1942, with Wigner working out the theory of its operation. Wigner then used the theory to design the first high-power reactor that was used to produce plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb. Reactor engineers all over the world have used Wigner’s theory as the basis of their designs. For Wigner, the theory of reactors was only a sideline. He had broad interests in physics and in public affairs. He was one of the group of brilliant Hungarian physicists who came to America in the 1930s. He came as an immigrant, not as a refugee. His main contribution to science was to understand the laws of nature as consequences of mathematical symmetry. He showed how general ideas of symmetry could lead to detailed understanding of the behavior of atoms and nuclei.

  • 7 •

  NOLO CONTENDERE

  FOUR WOMEN and ten men were young physicist members at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1948–49. That was a record year for female members. The 28 percent fraction of female physicists has never been equalled in the subsequent sixty-seven years. The physicists at the institute have always tried hard to increase the proportion of women but without success. Those who arrived in 1948 had the advantage of growing up during the war when most of the young men were away. They were outstanding in quality as well as quantity. Cécile Morette from France played a leading role in the group. Sheila Power came from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Study, Bruria Kaufman from Columbia University, and Cheng Shu Chang from the University of Michigan. Bruria Kaufman had the distinction of being assistant to Albert Einstein. She published several papers with Einstein, besides other more memorable papers that she published alone. Cécile Morette stayed on at the institute for the year 1949–50, when Bryce de Witt was also a member. She and Bryce were married in 1951. Both had distinguished careers as physicists, and they raised four daughters.

  NOVEMBER 25, 1948

  My last week has been occupied with the three extra seminars which I had been allotted. I was anxious to finish off the whole theory in these three sessions. Fortunately the audience was also anxious to finish it off, and Oppy was cooperative. It was a hard struggle to get everything covered, but by filling the blackboards with formulae before I started, I had all the main ideas fairly put across. At the end Oppy made a short speech: “It is not possible to say on the basis of these talks that the consistency of the theory is proved, but at least we have all learnt a great deal, and shall have plenty to argue about from now on.” Whereupon the exhausted audience, in no mood to start an argument, quietly departed. I came away from the last talk with a feeling of tremendous relief, my head for the first time for weeks entirely empty of ideas clamouring for expression. It will be possible now to relax, to return to the position of an ordinary young member of the institute, and to go to seminars without having to say anything. Next week Yukawa is to give the seminar, and the week after that Kroll.

  The day after the last of my talks, I found in my mailbox a little handwritten note saying, “Nolo contendere. R.O.” This was a typically erudite statement from Oppenheimer, telling me that he accepted my arguments. It is the Latin phrase used by lawyers to say that they do not dispute an opinion. It was his formal notice of surrender.

  Last night the Oppenheimers gave their Thanksgiving party, a stand-up supper for about one hundred guests, mostly the institute and its wives. The party was quite enjoyable as such things go. The young physicists kept pretty much to themselves, and I did not speak to many people outside our circle. There were, however, two exceptions to this rule. First, it was a farewell party for T. S. Eliot, who is returning to Europe to receive his Nobel Prize and go home. Most of the time he was surrounded with elderly and distinguished people in a small drawing room apart from the main crowd; our physicist group was in the main room lamenting the fact that none of us had been brazen enough to go and talk to the great man. This conversation immediately fired the light of ambition in Cécile’s eyes, and she said, “Well, you are a lot of cowards; I’ll go and fetch him out for you.” So she went into the little room where the elderly and distinguished people were, came out a few seconds later with a grinning Eliot in tow, and introduced us to him one by one. After this there was a brief period of rather embarrassed conversation, which was made easier by the fact that Eliot has a sense of humour and some experience in dealing with such situations. Then Cécile returned him to the little room.

  All this time Oppy was rushing around, resplendent in black tie and dinner jacket, making sure he met and spoke to everybody. He is a first-rate host and looked happier than I have seen him ever. When he spoke to me, it was to give me the recipe for some delicious Mexican savories that were being served with the supper. (He is an expert cook.) Then he rushed off to the next conversation, which might have been on any subject from football to cuneiform texts. This kind of evening is probably the nearest he ever gets to being relaxed. Mrs. Oppy I also met. She is quick-witted on a much more human level. She struck me as a friendly, direct young person, with no airs and entirely unspoiled by greatness.

  The queerest and maddest part of the evening came at the end. People were then trying ineffectively to dance in the constricted space available. I was suddenly seized upon by an absurd and very drunken little woman, who ordered me to dance with her. As she is a pathetic-looking creature with a disfiguring scar on her face, I could not decently reject her. So I danced around with her for about twenty minutes, she evidently not minding how badly I danced. At the end of this she was getting so wild and jumping about so that it made me very uncomfortable, and I finally succeeded in returning her to her husband. The husband, who is a solemn and frightened-looking little man, was standing around by himself miserably while all this went on. He did not seem to talk to anybody all the evening. It makes me feel sick just to think of the horror of the lives these two people may be living. Evidently the reason the wife seized upon me for a partner is that I am the only one of the young men at the party whom she had met before. The name of the husband (I wonder if you guessed it) is Kurt Gödel.

  The horror of this scene was real, but Adele Gödel was rarely drunk, and she was a good wife for Kurt when she was sober. She took good care of him and gave him what he needed, a quiet
home where he could work and think in peace. When I saw them together at their home, she kept the guests comfortably supplied with tea and cake while Kurt led the conversation.

  NOVEMBER 28, 1948

  Yesterday a Chinese friend called Ning Hu was here from Cornell, and he and I and Sheila Power went for a long walk. (Ning Hu is a friend of Sheila since he was two years with her in Dublin.) It was warm and sunny and breezy like an English May, and we walked a good twelve miles round Carnegie Lake where Princeton University does its rowing. We talked about Ireland and about China and its problems. Afterwards Ning Hu came to my room, and we talked some more. I was delighted to get to know him. He is lonely and very glad of the company. He is depressed at the state of affairs in China, and even more depressed at the lack of sympathy with which these affairs are talked about by Americans and Chinese in this country. He comes from the generation which grew up in the years 1925–35 and which has produced all the well-known Chinese scientists; for that brief period of years, the Chinese universities began to stir from their slumbers and made astonishing progress in catching up with the rest of the world. The students and young professors were energetic and enthusiastic and had enough material goods to relieve them from constant preoccupation with making a living. Then after 1935 he watched the hard-won progress gradually destroyed; he moved with the university from Peiping to Kunming in the far Southwest and tried to build things up again there; but one by one the bright stars either gave up the struggle or fled in desperation to Europe or the U.S. He himself came to the U.S. in 1941, and he is forced to stay here at least for several years, since only by earning U.S. dollars can he hope to keep his parents alive in China. Like all the people I have met from China, he is no Communist but believes that the only hope now is a complete Communist victory as soon as possible. I hope to see more of him and hear more of his story in the next few days.