Last Tuesday I went up to New York to talk to the seminar at Columbia and to see Rabi’s experiments. I arrived in time for lunch, and then spent a strenuous afternoon touring the laboratories. Rabi himself escorted me some of the time, and I learned a great deal about the way these things are done. What makes all this work so impressive is that it is all done in ten little rooms on a single floor of the Pupin building. Not one experiment takes up more space than ten feet square, and Rabi has no desire to expand his activities at the expense of the people who work in other branches of physics on the other ten floors of the building.
Today came a letter from the Physikalische Anstalt der Universität Basel. They are holding an International Physics Conference, half in Switzerland and half in Italy, during the first half of September. Specifically, they will meet in Basel from September 5 to 9, then in Como from September 11 to 16. I am invited by the organisers to give a talk at the Basel session on the stuff I have been doing. Also talking there will be Rabi, Schwinger, and various other distinguished people. This is a wonderful introduction for me into the European physics world. Also I am pleased with the chance of seeing Switzerland and Italy. My only anxiety is that I have won these laurels a little too cheaply; I had thought I might do some solid work in Europe before this started to happen. I shall soon be in danger of forgetting how to sit down quietly and learn something. However, I am keenly looking forward to the jaunt, and I intend to make the most of it.
Rabi has been travelling around recently and seems to thrive on it, both physically and intellectually. When I was in New York, he told me about his recent trip to Japan. He went to see the emperor and found him a remarkably pleasant and intelligent man; he knew a good deal about Yukawa and other Japanese scientists with whom Rabi has been consulting. When he came home from this trip, Rabi went to see Truman and had a chat with him about the world situation. He found Truman in an extraordinarily optimistic mood. This was so overpowering that he has almost become an optimist himself. I have had letters from Germany, one from my correspondent Richard Käferbock in Stuttgart announcing the birth of a son, and full of enthusiasm. I am pleased with this; it means that new life is at last returning; when I was in Germany two years ago, there were practically no babies.
If life is a drama, here is the beginning of act two. These letters to my parents are not only a record of events but also a piece of the drama. It was important for me, as I was strutting on the stage of my life in America, to have my parents as an audience participating in the drama. Writing the letters was a part of the play.
MAY 23, 1949, PRINCETON
I will not make this a long letter, because in these last days my mind has been completely occupied with problems even more incommunicable than those of mathematical physics. In short, I am in love. And being a person who is unable to concentrate upon more than one thing at a time, I no longer make even a pretence of working or of listening to the people who are still persevering with their calculations at the institute. And this is all to the good, since I needed a holiday anyway. Nor do I find it possible to be interested in politics and to read the newspaper every morning; and this is all to the good too, since my eyes have long been overdue for a rest.
What is not all to the good, and what is a cause of my great woe, is that Fate has played me the trick of setting down before my eyes a woman of altogether exceptional character and quality, with intellect and interests to match my own, and then taking her off to the ends of the earth before I have recovered from the first shock of recognition, and before my slow wits have time to do more than stretch forth my hand in greeting to her. Perhaps this sad little drama is not yet played through to its end. I have still one week left, before this woman, Verena Haefeli, departs for California. So I will write no more about her now; in due course you will hear the end of our story, what little there may be to tell.
MAY 31, 1949, PRINCETON
This afternoon at two oclock, Verena and Katrin and Cécile Morette, in Verena’s car, set forth on their journey to California. Their car was loaded to the roof with provisions and household equipment, and their departure was attended by a great throng of their friends and admirers. It is a hard and ambitious trip for a pair of girls to undertake, especially with Katrin to be looked after; however, as I know that Verena is very competent but also as tough as a horse, I have not much anxiety on this score. They will take it slowly, with a few days halt in Colorado, and expect to be in San Francisco in two weeks. Then Cécile goes for a few weeks to visit Berkeley, and Verena goes for three months to Stanford, some thirty miles to the south. When Verena went away, I sent after her a letter, saying thank you for all she had done for me. Into it I put a verse from a poem of Day Lewis, out of the little collection which you gave me for my birthday (1948). The poem is addressed to Thomas Hardy the novelist; it is not great poetry, but I felt it expressed to perfection what I wanted to say to Verena. And since it was your gift to me, I write it down here again for you.
Great brow, frail frame gone.
Yet you abide
In the shadow and sheen,
All the mellowing traits of a countryside
That nursed your tragi-comical scene;
And in us, warmer hearted and brisker-eyed
Since you have been.
The poem is “Birthday Poem for Thomas Hardy.” Cecil Day Lewis was my favorite poet, speaking for the younger generation in the prewar and wartime years. He is now less famous than his actor son Daniel, who speaks with the same passion on stage and screen.
JUNE 6, 1949, PRINCETON
I can now see what I did not realise while Verena was here, that she occupied a central and important place in this Housing Project community. Partly because of her peculiar circumstances, partly because of her natural beauty and attractiveness of character, everybody knew who she was, and most people considered themselves her friends. During her last days while she was clearing up her house, there were any number of people in the adjoining houses who would have been only too glad to come to her assistance, but seeing that I was in attendance upon her, they tactfully stood aside. I have been fortunate, now that Verena is gone, in inheriting a large measure of the interest and goodwill that she left behind her. It is this inheritance which now makes my days happy and makes me for the first time think of Princeton as a home I shall be sorry to leave.
JUNE 26, 1949, PRINCETON
Said a final good-bye to Oppy; we had nothing much to say to each other, and I hardly gave another thought to the matter; how different from the violent feelings of mixed respect and impatience with which I met him nine months ago. As you may have heard, there has been a major crisis in recent weeks over the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and its policies. Oppy has been completely absorbed in this. He is the one scientist to whom the senators and people are prepared to listen with respect, and so he has a tremendous responsibility. He has fought with all his strength for the freedom of science from political pressures, which is the fundamental issue at stake in the present fight over David Lilienthal. As a physicist, Oppy has his limitations, but as a politician he is really outstanding.
In the many volumes that have been written about Oppenheimer, primary emphasis is always given to the security hearings of 1954 which resulted in the loss of his clearance. He becomes the central figure in a tragedy, and the loss of the clearance becomes the central event in his life. He himself did not look at things this way. He always said that the security hearings were not a tragedy but a farce. Much more important in his view were the nine years, from 1945 to 1953, when he enjoyed enormous respect inside the American government as well as in the world outside. During these years he used his unrivaled influence to drive American nuclear and military policies in directions that he considered wise. David Lilienthal was a prominent liberal who had been the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority and was the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Oppenheimer’s support of Lilienthal was an important part of his political agenda.
SUNDAY, JULY 3
, 1949, PRINCETON
In one of your letters you thank me, because I write to you openly about Verena and the other important events of my life. I think the reason I write so openly is just this, that all these adventures in this strange new world are still somewhat unreal to me, and in writing to you about them, I bring them in contact with my familiar world and lend them some of your reality.
After this letter there is a gap of a year. I spent that year mostly in Birmingham, making frequent visits to my family in London, so there was no need for letters. In August 1949 I met my pen-friend Hilde Jacobs in Germany and spent a week with her, camping and walking across southern Germany all the way to the Swiss border at Lörrach, close to Basel. After two years of literary exchanges, we got to know each other as real people. We liked each other and agreed to stay friends but not to meet again. I was then deeply involved in my interrupted friendship with Verena, and further meetings with Hilde would bave made a complicated situation even more complicated. Hilde and I stayed in touch by letter for sixty years after that. I sent her family news, and she sent me poetic meditations. She lived for some years in Ireland and later returned to Germany with a job as student adviser at the University of Wuppertal. My last letter to her was returned as undeliverable in 2011. The last I saw of her in the flesh was at our parting at Lörrach in 1949, when I walked over the border into the paradise of Switzerland, and she walked back into the desolation of Germany.
I arrived in Basel in time for the International Physics Conference. I was welcomed by Markus Fierz, professor of physics at the University of Basel and local organizer of the conference. We came together into a room where Wolfgang Pauli, the great physicist from Zürich, was talking in German to a group of respectful listeners. Pauli was famous for his strong opinions and his sharp tongue. Pauli told how Schwinger had come to Zürich and explained the new American physics clearly, not like the nonsense that Dyson had been writing. At that moment Fierz pushed me forward and said, “Professor Pauli, please allow me to introduce you to Professor Dyson.” Pauli replied, “Oh, that does not matter, he does not understand German,” and continued his discourse. Afterwards Pauli always treated me with great respect, and we became good friends.
I lived for a year as a lodger in the home of Rudolf Peierls in Birmingham, with a lively family of four children brought up by his Russian wife Genia. Genia was amazingly hospitable, and the house was often full of interesting visitors. One of the friends who came often to the house was Klaus Fuchs, then chief theorist at the British Atomic Energy Establishment at Harwell. Fuchs was a Jewish refugee from Germany who went with Peierls as a member of the British team to Los Alamos. First at Los Alamos and later at Birmingham, he was highly respected as a scientific colleague and also as a helpful baby-sitter. Rudolf and Genia both liked and trusted him. It came as a terrible shock to them when Fuchs was arrested and convicted in 1950 as a Soviet spy.
While I was still in Birmingham, I received a letter from Bethe with the news that Feynman had decided to leave Cornell and move to the California Institute of Technology. Bethe offered me Feynman’s job, a full professorship at Cornell, beginning in September 1951, when my promise to the Commonwealth Foundation to remain in England would expire. I accepted the offer without much hesitation. It gave me what I wanted, a permanent place in the American scientific community. Already I felt more at home in Ithaca than in Birmingham. Bethe and Peierls were both first-rate theorists, but the experimenters at Cornell were doing far more exciting work than the experimenters at Birmingham.
In 1950 I received a dispensation from the Commonwealth Foundation allowing me to visit the United States for six months, provided that I returned to England for the rest of the promised two years. I arranged to spend the summer lecturing at the Ann Arbor Summer School, and to spend the fall at the Institute for Advanced Study. I made no secret of the fact that the purpose of this trip was to be reunited with Verena and to allow us to make decisions about our future.
Oppenheimer invited Tomonaga to come to the institute for the academic year 1949–50. He arrived after I had returned to England. I came back to Princeton in June 1950, one week before he returned to Japan. In that week I was able to get to know him as a friend. We talked at length about physics and also about his life in Japan. I always regretted having missed the chance to spend a longer time with him.
JUNE 24, 1950, PRINCETON
I have been here all this week and have had a pleasant time talking to people about the work they have been doing. I was lucky to meet Tomonaga, the third and most elusive of the Tomonaga-Schwinger-Feynman triangle. He is a charming man, like so many of the really good ones. He talked with me for three hours with much humour and common sense. On Thursday I was luckier still as I was travelling up to New York to say hallo to the Commonwealth Fund, and I found Tomonaga travelling on the same train, so we had another long conversation. That was the last I shall see of him as he now goes to San Francisco to take ship for Japan. He impressed me very much with his open-mindedness and quick grasp of ideas. He is more able than either Schwinger or Feynman to talk about ideas other than his own. And he has enough of his own too.
During this year he says he has not done a lot of work, he has used his time at Princeton as a holiday, and has greatly enjoyed the freedom from lecturing and running his department. Of course he is in Japan besieged with research students clamouring for help and advice, even more than I am in England. I have decided that I shall certainly spend a summer, sometime when I do not feel obliged to come and see you in Europe, visiting Tomonaga in Japan and keeping him in touch with the outside world. Incidentally, on his table when I went to see him was lying a copy of the New Testament. We had so much physics to talk about that I did not question him on that subject. But I have the impression that he is an exceptionally unselfish person.
JULY 11, 1950, ANN ARBOR
I had a pleasant time the night before last. A string quartet was playing Haydn and Bach, and one of them was called away to a long-distance phone call, and they handed his fiddle to me and told me to take over. For fifteen minutes or so I played, and I was amazed to find I could still do it quite tolerably. I enjoyed it very much too. Perhaps I may start some serious practising and get back into regular playing.
AUGUST 5, 1950, ANN ARBOR
I now have another letter from Sir John Cockcroft (director of the British Atomic Energy Establishment) offering me the Fuchs job (chief theorist) and telling me plainly that I am a bad boy for leaving England and taking the Cornell post. This is rather unpleasant, naturally I have a bad conscience about the whole business. But I felt better after talking the situation over with George Uhlenbeck. Uhlenbeck described to me how he had come up against these two problems, (i) when he left Holland and came to America and (ii) recently when he was urged to return to military research (hydrogen bombs). He said on both occasions he was told by many people it was his duty to stay in Holland or to help with the bombs. He decided in both cases that there was not actually any question of duty at all. He would certainly help with the bombs if he were told it was his duty by President Truman or some responsible government authority, but not when he was told this by Edward Teller. He did not advise me directly but implied that I should look at Harwell in the same light. I should do the job if I felt I should enjoy being an important personage with a lot of files and correspondence and secretaries and committees and conferences, but not out of a sense of duty. Of course I am already committed to Cornell, and there is hardly a problem in deciding what to do. I wrote to Cockcroft to that effect.
AUGUST 16, 1950, ANN ARBOR
The wedding was a simple affair. We had two witnesses, Helen Lennox for me and Professor Beno Eckmann, Verena’s mathematics professor and an old friend of Zürich days, for her. Mrs. Uhlenbeck also came, so we were six all together including the judge who officiated. The judge said he was glad to have something to do because legal business was slack that day. For our honeymoon we went up to northern Michigan, a country of lakes and fores
ts and long smooth straight roads. We drove many hundred miles, bathed and sat in the sun, and talked endlessly.
Today we have come through one of the difficult and delicate moments of our marriage, and we have come through it peacefully. Hans Georg Haefeli came for the afternoon to visit us. He brought with him a girlfriend, Inge von Richthofen, a relation of the (Red Baron) flier and a good friend of Verena. I was very glad to have finally met this man and made friends with him. He behaved admirably, indeed I have a great respect for him, and I think he is completely sincere in wishing us the happiness he could never achieve. Because of his tact and good management, the afternoon was not painful to us.
SEPTEMBER 5, 1950, BOSTON
Now we are here at the great International Congress of Mathematicians. There are about two thousand mathematicians here, and most of them seem to know either me or Verena. So we spend our days talking, being entertained and congratulated, and meeting old friends unexpectedly. It is wonderful how well we fit together into this mathematical society. For example, Daniel Pedoe, the man who introduced me to higher mathematics when I was at Winchester, is here, and he and Verena get on with each other like old friends. This is remarkable, because I had always found him rather a dull dog when I met him at Cambridge; but when Verena is around, he is scintillating, as he was when he and I used to walk the streets of Winchester. It is the same with Louis Mordell, the professor at Cambridge with whom I never could get on well in the old days. And I introduced Verena to André Weil, the great French mathematician whom I met in Chicago, and they were chatting together happily for a full hour.
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