MARCH 27, 1949
After a mild winter, spring is coming to Princeton, hot but sunny and pleasant. The squirrels have come out of their holes and are playing in the trees outside my window; the children have come out of doors in summer clothes and are playing underneath the trees. No leaves are yet upon the trees, but the grass is green and the crocuses are out. The children are more brightly coloured than the crocuses.
My last trip lasted ten days, with a week at Ithaca. I always feel attached to Ithaca. Many of my old friends were still there and made me feel nostalgic about the place. I spent a lot of time with Feynman and with Ning Hu. The best thing about the trip was that I spent three days living in the house of the Bethes and so got to know them better than ever before. They are delightful people, especially the younger generation, Henry aged five and Monica aged three, with whom I got on very well. Usually I was given the pleasant job of distracting the children’s attention while Mr. and Mrs. Bethe prepared the meals, a division of labour which suited me very well. Henry and Monica are both bright and are already having trouble with the rigid American educational system which discourages strongly any child getting ahead of its age. So strong in fact is Henry’s thirst for knowledge that he insists in going to Sunday school every Sunday, although his parents do not like the school and do their best to stop him. I think this says a good deal for the Sunday school. The church is making good use of the opportunities offered to it by the slowness of the educational system.
Mrs. Bethe is thirty-two, a tall good-looking young woman and a very efficient person. When they were at Los Alamos, it is said that she contributed more to the success of the project than he, since she was in charge of the living arrangements while he was only doing physics. They are both German, but they came over to the States independently, and they met first at Cornell where Rose was a student while Hans was already a professor. He is about ten years older. Since both of them are such positive and outspoken characters, it is surprising that they live together as harmoniously as they do and not surprising that their children are argumentative. Sample conversation at breakfast: Rose: “Eat up your cereal, Henry.” Henry: “Mummy, are you the boss in this house?” Rose: “Shut up.” Henry: “Well, that’s not a very nice thing to say, is it?”
I have a sad letter from my German friend Hilde Jacobs, who is now in hospital with (she says) pneumonia. I hope this does not mean TB, which is fearfully prevalent in that part of the world. I wish I could do something for her. It seems to grow harder and harder to think across the gulf between my prosperity and her misery, and so our correspondence languishes. When she went to stay in Switzerland, she said she asked herself always, War Gott vielleicht Selber Schweizer? [“Was God himself perhaps Swiss?”] And so to her the United States is something altogether fabulous and dreamlike.
APRIL 5, 1949,
HART HOUSE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
I find the people here most friendly and an interesting crowd; but how different from an American university! Head of the maths department is an old boy called Beatty, humorous and beloved of the students, a very good teacher. Under him are various others, all Cambridge-educated and with the Cambridge easygoing philosophy. The man who looks after me is a man of about forty called Robinson. Robinson is the most active of the lot, does a certain amount of research, and helps to edit a newborn journal, the Canadian Journal of Mathematics. He is also a good amateur photographer, and his wife is a leading light in the Canadian YWCA. Youngest member of the staff is a Cambridge contemporary of mine called Tutte, a shy and silent young man but apparently settling down happily here.
Bill Tutte had spent the war years at Bletchley as a code-breaker. The British policy of total secrecy prevented his achievements at Bletchley from becoming known until many years later. Together with Alan Turing, he had played a major part in the decipherment of high-level German communications. He remained shy and silent to the end of his life and never received the recognition that he deserved.
All in all, it is a well-organised, respectable, and happy society such as one might find at a good English provincial university (though this university is much bigger, with seventeen thousand students). Almost completely lacking are the crowds of young people, interested primarily in research and not in teaching, and the bustling competitive atmosphere of the American university. Beatty himself is conscious of this lack and worried about it. He says all the bright young people he unearths among his students run off to the United States at the earliest opportunity, and he doesn’t blame them. He has neither enough money nor enough glamour to hold them. The great problem is how to provide positions for young people at good salaries in the science faculties without making the other faculties jealous. It is a sad story, and one that is to be found almost all over the world.
Among the physicists here, the chief theoretician is Leopold Infeld. He also suffers from lack of good young assistants; however, he is by nature a rather isolated figure and is quite happy. He works on general relativity and has collaborated a good deal with Einstein. I would like to see more of Infeld. He is, apart from his physics, a highly colourful character, in marked contrast to the British solidity of his colleagues. He is a Polish Jew, a magnificent storyteller and conversationalist, and a gifted writer of English. He has had endless adventures in all parts of the world, knows everybody and all their private scandals, and his tour de force is a scientific autobiography which he published in 1941 at the age of forty-three, and which became a best-seller. It is called Quest. In contains, among other things, a delightful and appreciative description of life (prewar) in Cambridge and a sulphurous and malicious description of life (prewar) at the Institute for Advanced Study; and various libellous anecdotes about Dirac and other geniuses. He was glad to make my acquaintance and listen to all the stories I could tell him about Schwinger and Oppenheimer and such people. I expect to see these stories reappear with embellishments in his next book.
• 9 •
THE PHYSICIST IN LOVE
APRIL 7, 1949, PRINCETON
The New Yorker has published the description of life at the institute which I enclose as I think you will like it. It is a great deal more objective than the accounts in Life and Time, though it makes the same mistake of overestimating the importance of the institute to the intellectual life of the country. Also some of the details are subject to a little poetic exaggeration; the girl who looked about eighteen and is an expert on nonassociative algebras is actually Verena Haefeli, aged twenty-six and mother of a fat two-and-a-half-year-old daughter called Katrina.
I am beginning to find, as usually happens to me when I am a few weeks from leaving a place for good, that there are some people here with whom I might have formed some real friendships if I had got to know them a bit earlier. In particular, the Saturday night dances at the institute have been a tremendous help in getting to know people; these began originally just about the time I was starting on my travels to Chicago and elsewhere, so that I have only taken part in them three or four times. The life of the Housing Project, where all the young married people with their families live, has seemed to me until very recently a Garden of Eden from which I was excluded by an unkind fate; it is just in the last week that I have begun to penetrate into this society.
The dances at the institute were square dances organized by John Tukey, then a young professor at Princeton University, later famous as one of the founders of computer science. He was an expert square dancer and knew how to call the dances, so that an international and multilingual group of institute members could catch the rhythm and keep in step.
This afternoon I had a wonderful piece of luck. I was strolling around by myself, taking the air and feeling somewhat melancholy, and I happened to pass Verena Haefeli’s house on the Housing Project, and little Katrina was standing at the window and began shouting at me as I went by. This was odd, because I had hardly spoken to her before today. I took advantage of the occasion to go in and see Verena’s house and spent a delightful afternoon learn
ing her life history and playing with Katrina. Tomorrow I am invited to join the two of them and two other people in an expedition to the ocean, where there will be picnic and bathing.
Verena was a Swiss mathematician, educated at the University of Zürich and expert in mathematical logic. She had been married to Hans Georg Haefeli, also a mathematician, who had moved to Boston College in Massachusetts after their separation. She wrote an account of her life as a chapter in the book Kreiseliana (1996), celebrating the seventieth birthday of Georg Kreisel, the famous mathematical logician whom I had known as a student in Cambridge.
Verena has a tough time of it, being a mathematician and also bringing up her daughter single-handed. She is from Zürich, and her father was an important person in the Swiss Red Cross; both her parents are now dead, and she has knocked about the world a good deal. Katrina is a beautiful child, with golden hair and dark brown eyes, and already has a mind of her own. She has asserted her independence by forming a close friendship with Ocky, the six-year old son of Professor Uhlenbeck, and showing a certain scorn for her own contemporaries. Perhaps Ocky is to some extent a substitute for a father.
George Uhlenbeck was a famous Dutch physicist who had moved to America before the war and become head of the physics department at the University of Michigan. He organized the summer school in Ann Arbor where I got to know him in 1948, and then spent a sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Study, where his wife Else became a friend of Verena.
Verena’s father Charles Huber spent World War II as delegate for the International Red Cross inspecting prisoner-of-war camps on both sides as allowed by the Geneva Convention. He was mostly visiting Allied prisoners in Germany and German and Italian prisoners in India and in the United States. Soon after the war ended, he was driving his car at night in Germany and died in a collision with a truck that was standing on the road without lights.
Three famous conferences were organized by Oppenheimer to bring together the experimenters and theorists who were leading the revolution in quantum electrodynamics. The first was at Shelter Island in 1947, the second at Pocono Mountain in 1948, and the third at Oldstone in 1949. Bethe and Feynman were at all three meetings and told me what had been done and said. I was invited only to the third.
EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 1949, PRINCETON
On Sunday we started off for the Oldstone Conference, where the big shots of physics were assembled. Oldstone is a country hotel, about fifty miles north of New York, in a splendid situation overlooking the Hudson, with hills behind it and hills facing it across the river. We had lovely weather for the conference and could sit outside whenever we were not conferring. Since the conference was run by Oppenheimer, that was not often. One of the things which amaze me about Oppenheimer is his mental and physical indefatigability; this must have had a lot to do with his performance during the war. There was no fixed program for the conference, and we talked as much or as little as we liked; nevertheless Oppenheimer had us in there every day from ten a.m. till seven p.m. with only short breaks, and on the first day also after supper from eight till ten, this night session being dropped on the second day after a general rebellion. All through these sessions Oppenheimer was wide awake, listening to everything that was said and obviously absorbing it. For my part, knowing my limited capacity for attention, I chose a comfortable chair and allowed nature to take its course; three times during the conference I slept soundly and unnoticed, and the rest of the time I was the better for it.
On the second day I stood up and talked for about an hour. I found this easy, as I did not have to prepare anything but only to answer questions and summarise what the other young people at the institute have been doing. Schwinger and Feynman were there, also Bethe and Teller and Serber and Rabi, among the people you have heard of, and from Princeton Wigner and von Neumann. Among these great names there were just two small ones, the babies of the conference, myself and Aage Bohr. Aage is a nice fellow, and I was glad to have him there.
Aage was a son of the great physicist Niels Bohr. Aage lived for many years in his father’s shadow but later emerged as a leader of European physics, winning a Nobel Prize for Physics in his own right in 1975.
As was expected, the conference did not produce anything startlingly new. The most valuable part of it was a lot of detailed and firsthand reports of the situation in the various big experimental labs, Berkeley and Columbia and MIT. To me, the great thing was to get to know the people and to see how their minds work. I saw a lot of Rabi and of von Neumann, both geniuses of the first order. In the formal sessions the theorists contributed not much, except for some long and confused arguments which were understood by nobody except the arguers and Oppenheimer.
On the way home from the conference, we stopped and looked at the great new cyclotron at Nevis, a village halfway between Oldstone and New York. This is a magnificent machine, belonging to Columbia. It will be running now in a few months. It is rather like the Berkeley machine, only more powerful, and it is more impressive to look at because it has not yet the concrete shield around it. The most remarkable thing about it is the way Rabi has organized it. Everywhere else where a laboratory has undertaken to build a great machine, almost everybody became involved, and gradually the rest of the work of the laboratory came to a standstill. Rabi swore that this would not happen in his lab. With iron determination, he decreed that the whole construction job should be done by two physicists, using otherwise only engineers and labourers. That is the kind of man Rabi is.
Every year the American Physical Society holds one big meeting in Washington and smaller meetings in other places. To be invited to give a plenary talk at the Washington meeting was a big honor.
MAY 1, 1949, PRINCETON
The Washington meeting lasted three days and was on the whole very successful. Fortunately my talk was on the first day, and once that was over, I could devote myself to meeting my innumerable friends who all seemed to be there. Being in the most fashionable branch of physics, I was put into the largest auditorium, a grandiose monstrosity with enormous gold-painted columns stretching up to a domed and bright blue roof. There was an efficient amplifier system so I did not have to shout. About half an hour before I was due to start, I came in and had a look around this place, and the sight of it made me so nervous that none of my previous agony at Chicago and elsewhere could faintly compare with it. For that last half-hour I was in a terrible state, sitting in a chair and sweating all over and feeling I could not even stand up. I was seriously considering sending a message to the chairman of the meeting that I had been taken ill and would not be able to talk. I do not know why it happened like this; perhaps I was worn down by the cumulative effect of the last two months; I had originally intended to write out my talk in full, but from laziness and lack of time had not done this and was equipped only with my usual rough notes. I somehow lived through that half-hour and heard the clock strike the time I was due to start. I staggered into the auditorium and up to the platform while Rabi announced my name and history. As he finished, there was a hushed silence, and I felt ready to collapse completely, but mysteriously the instinct of showmanship triumphed over the instinct of terror. Without thinking, I jumped up onto the platform instead of walking round by the steps. Once I was up on the platform, I began to talk, and when next I paused to consider my situation, I was halfway through my speech and feeling fine. I went a little too fast and finished with some minutes of my time to go, but as it was half-past five and the end of a long day, this was a fault in the right direction. After the talk, Oppy came up and shook me by the hand and said I had done very well, and so did various other people whose praise is more to be valued because it was spontaneous.
MAY 15, 1949, PRINCETON
I write at the end of a long and lovely day, spent with my two newest and firmest friends, Verena Haefeli and her daughter Katrin. We started out, the three of us, at nine o’clock in the morning in Verena’s car and drove sixty miles to a town called Lakewood. The weather is now cooler,
breezy and sunny and ideal for driving. The New Jersey countryside to the east of us is flat and fertile, and the wheat and barley are already almost full grown and only waiting to ripen for the harvest; with these wide open spaces and the richness of the land, to drive along the open road is an exhilarating experience, giving one a vivid feeling of freedom and of the bounty of nature. Arrived at Lakewood at ten-thirty, we descended to a more prosaic plane and went in search of the police station. Here Verena had to appear to answer a summons, which she had been given a week earlier for failing to stop at a stop sign nearby when driving through. We found the chief of police, who was not a formidable person, and he dealt with the whole case in a few minutes, ending up with a fine of ten dollars for Verena. This being duly paid, we set off once more to the east. We came soon to the sea and drove for some way along the coast, which is here low and sandy, with some breakers and a good salt taste in the air. We stopped at a fishing village and bought three fresh flounders for supper. Then we went a little inland and found a place for our picnic lunch, a little clearing in a pine wood, with a floor of dry pine needles to sit on, and with pine trees swaying in the wind over our heads. Here we laid out our provisions and started in earnest on cold roast chicken, bread and cheese, tomatoes and oranges. And afterwards we exercised ourselves mildly by holding the four corners of a rug outstretched and bouncing Katrin up and down in the middle.
In the evening I came round to Verena’s house an hour before supper to wrestle with the task of dissecting three fresh flounders into fillets. This task was accomplished, not without some confusion and a good deal of ribaldry; we had some difficulty persuading Katrin that the fish did not really mind being beheaded and made into fillets. After all this work we sat down to a substantial supper.
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