Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  OCTOBER 16, 1950, PRINCETON

  I spent a week at Cornell staying with the Bethes. This was a good and successful visit. I gave one talk of a general kind to the whole physics department, one more specialized to the theoreticians, and about six hours of private talk with Bethe and two others, in which I explained fully my new idea of this summer. I felt very pleased with the whole affair. Perhaps after all they were not so foolish in choosing me for their professor. I came at a good time, with a new idea, and they gave me a royal welcome.

  The new idea which came to me in Ann Arbor was to make a separation between high and low frequencies in the description of processes in quantum electrodynamics. The high frequencies could be effectively eliminated by Feynman’s tricks, and the low freqencies would in the end contain an exact description of the process. The method would give us an exact description of nature, if and only if the series of high-frequency perturbations converged. I preached this gospel to enthusiastic listeners at Cornell, sincerely believing that the series would converge.

  DECEMBER 14, 1950, PRINCETON

  Last night we had our farewell party, a small affair with eleven people. Tomorrow morning we start for New York to get the sailing permits and the reentry permits straightened out. And then Saturday morning walk onto the Queen Mary. Yesterday I managed unexpectedly to think out the solution of the outstanding problem which remained in my physics researches. This is a wonderful piece of luck. I will sit down and write another long paper as soon as we are settled in Birmingham. The new method is sophisticated, and people need a long time before they can assimilate it. People are respectful but also bewildered. This is true even of Oppy.

  I arrived in January 1951 with Verena and Katrin for my second stay in Birmingham. Genya Peierls was enormously helpful in showing Verena how to cope with a English winter. Since Verena was pregnant, she moved to Zürich in April to prepare for the birth of a baby in July. I joined her in June and was invited by Pauli to work at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). Every afternoon while I was there, Pauli would invite me to walk with him around the city, talking about physics and about world affairs. He needed an audience, and I was delighted to be a listener.

  In July Verena announced that the baby was on the way, and we had to walk fast to the Pflegerinnenschule to be there in time. We had a sharp rebuff at the door. The attending nurse told us that no child may be born in Switzerland without a boy’s name and a girl’s name chosen in advance. In Switzerland everything must be done in proper order. We quickly decided that the baby was either Oliver or Esther and were then admitted to tbe building. Esther made her appearance a few minutes later. She was a healthy baby with legal problems. According to Swiss law, she was my legitimate daughter and therefore British. According to British law, Verena was still legally married to Hans Haefeli, so Esther was illegitimate and therefore Swiss. Fortunately the United States was more generous than the other countries and accepted Esther as a stateless immigrant. She remained stateless for many years, with the consequence that she had to have a visa for every country that we passed through when we traveled abroad.

  My parents came to Zürich for Esther’s christening in the English church, with the consequence that there are no letters for this period. In September, Esther took the train with Verena to Genoa to catch a boat to America. There were big problems at the Italian border at Chiasso, where they were thrown off the train by the Italian officials because Esther did not have a visa. She was given an emergency visa just in time to catch the boat, driving overnight by taxi from Chiasso to Genoa. They had no problems with the immigration authorities at New York, where I was waiting with Verena’s car to take them to Ithaca.

  While I was in Birmingham, I had published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London a paper explaining the new ideas which I believed would establish once and for all the mathematical consistency of quantum electrodynamics. When I published that paper, I believed much more, that the same ideas would provide a firm mathematical basis for the theory of nuclear particles. I believed that I was on the way to constructing an exact theory that would encompass the whole of particle physics. In Zürich I discussed my ideas with Pauli, and Pauli remained sceptical. Pauli said he could not prove me wrong, but he had a strong feeling that the crucial high-frequency series that I assumed to be convergent would actually diverge. One afternoon in Zürich, while I was walking with Pauli, I suddenly saw that his intuition was right. I found a simple physical argument showing why the series could not converge. I explained the argument to Pauli, and he said, “I told you so.” I felt happy rather than sad to see my grand program so easily demolished. It was far better for me to have found the flaw in the program myself than to have other people find it later. Now I knew that the program was dead, I could write a short paper explaining why it failed and thanking Pauli for his help. My scientific reputation would be intact. I could recover from this failure and find new problems to work on at Cornell.

  NOVEMBER 2, 1951, ITHACA

  Today it is snowing steadily. Yesterday it began, the first snow of the winter, and now it is nearly three inches deep. It is good that we are warm and dry in our little apartment. Esther is wonderfully healthy and well-behaved. She has not yet started to be noisy. She looks pretty, and her hair grows more blond as time goes on. I have written a short paper which I sent off to the Physical Review yesterday. It is about the ideas I worked out during the summer in Zürich. It is an unusual paper, with not a single equation in it, just some general discussion in the style of Niels Bohr. It is also original and perhaps not correct. I sent it off for what it is worth. It is rather like the famous paper of the Norwegian mathematician Niels Abel, proving that the general equation of the fifth degree cannot be solved. When Abel produced this about 1825, the mathematicians who had been trying for years to solve the equation were not pleased. Most of them did not understand the proof, and some of them said it was wrong. Now I have done the same thing to a lot of physicists, proving that what they have been trying to do is impossible, namely to get convergent series solutions to problems in electrodynamics.

  DECEMBER 20, 1951, ITHACA

  I think Verena already told you how I went off the road and wrecked her beautiful car in which we had had so many fine trips, both together and separately. I was driving to Syracuse to give a seminar talk there. On the icy roads I took good care and drove very slowly at corners and crossroads. But at the end as I came down into Syracuse, there was a piece of straight road, quite empty with no other car in sight, and so I put on speed to about thirty-five miles an hour. At that point there came a sudden strong gust of wind from the left, the road was a bit sloping down to the right, and the car started to skid and went off the road before I had time to do anything. With a tremendous bump, I hit a big wooden light pole, of the size and consistency of a telegraph pole. Luckily I was going by that time backwards, having spun right round, and so I was only thrown back into the soft seat and not forwards. I was completely unhurt. But the car was badly injured, and the people who looked at it agreed it would not be worth trying to mend it. I telephoned the University of Syracuse, and they picked me up and I gave my talk on schedule.

  I was lucky not to be wearing a seatbelt when I crashed. I had time to stretch out on the seat with my head down before the impact. If I had been wearing a seatbelt, my head would have been above the seat back, and my neck might have been broken. It is true, as we are constantly told, that seatbelts save lives on the average. But if you happen to be skidding backward when you hit a light pole, you may be safer without a seatbelt.

  • 10 •

  CORNELL PROFESSOR

  THE LETTERS in this chapter are from Ithaca unless otherwise indicated. In March 1952 came a big surprise, my election at the age of twenty-eight as a fellow of the Royal Society, the British equivalent of the American National Academy of Sciences. The Royal Society has a longer history and a ceremonial gravitas which the American National Academy lacks.

  MARCH 24, 1952
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br />   Thank you for your telegram. That was a great joy to greet us at nine o’clock in the morning. I am glad they decided to elect me in spite of my having left the old country. Not so much for the honour and glory, though that is quite considerable over here, where the scientists hold the Royal Society in high esteem. I am chiefly happy about it because the Royal Society does an outstandingly good job in managing public affairs and political problems in which science is involved. The political organization of scientists over here is unsatisfactory, mainly because they lack a Royal Society. There is no organization which is not either politically negligible or dependent on the government. To have a body which is independent and still commands general respect is not easy. I hope I can either be useful to the Royal Society as a representative over here or else keep in touch with them by periodic visits to England.

  In 1952 my parents came to the end of their time in London. My father was director of the Royal College of Music from 1938 to 1952. When he retired, they returned to live the rest of their lives in Winchester, where they had lived from 1924 to 1938 and raised their two children. My father said it would be better for his successor at the Royal College if he removed himself from the scene. Winchester welcomed him back by giving him the Freedom of the City in a public ceremony. He continued to be active in public affairs. He was chairman of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, one of the largest British charities, from 1955 to 1960. He continued composing and conducting music occasionally until his death in 1964.

  My mother was forty-three when I was born. She already had gray hair, more like a grandmother than a mother. She had a law degree and worked as a solicitor in her father’s law office until she married. When I was a child in Winchester, she lived like a respectable proper English lady, careful not to let her friends know that she was running a birth control clinic in the town. When I was a teenager and we moved to London, she became my intellectual companion. We spent long hours together at the art galleries and museums and botanical gardens of London. We remained close until she died at ninety-four in 1975.

  My sister Alice, three years older than me, also remained a close friend. She came several times for long visits to America. She was a medical social worker and worked in the Winchester hospital, a venerable institution with buildings designed personally by Florence Nightingale. Alice took care of our mother in her last years and continued to live in the family house after our mother died. Alice was a Catholic. She was well loved in Winchester, and a huge crowd of friends came to her memorial mass when she died in 2012.

  My father’s compositions were mostly choral works designed to be sung by amateur choral societies. His works were popular in Britain, where there is a strong tradition of amateur choral music. They were not well known in America, where popular music has different patterns, such as gospel, country, jazz, and rock. His best-known work was The Canterbury Pilgrims, a dramatic setting of the characters described by Chaucer in his famous poem. “The Merchant” is one of the characters who is sung in joyful fortissimo by the whole chorus.

  MAY 21, 1952

  What a piece of luck that they should do Pilgrims for the first time, of all places in the United States, in Geneva, New York. Geneva is just forty-five miles from here, at the head of the next lake to ours. We were able to drive it comfortably in one and a half hours. If it had been any further away, we could hardly have made it, as it is the last week of classes and we are both tied up most of the days with students. When we arrived in Geneva, we first bought the local paper to find out where and when the performance was. I can say with certainty, it was a complete success. They had rotten luck with the weather, it rained heavily and continuously from ten a.m. till ten p.m. Still there was a respectable audience, about a thousand in a hall which would seat fifteen hundred. And they clapped like five thousand when the show came to an end.

  I don’t know what you would have thought of the performance musically. To my inexpert ear, it seemed that the chorus and the soprano soloist were excellent, the orchestra good, the tenor and bass soloists mediocre. The whole thing came across clearly all the time, it was never confused or dull, everything was lively. As we drove away from the hall after the show, we passed five or six girls of the choir in their long evening dresses, walking home and singing “A Merchant Was There with a Forked Beard” at the top of their voices. That was a beautiful finale. We decided not to introduce ourselves to the performers, partly from shyness and partly because we wanted to get home by midnight. But I wrote Mr. Lafford (the conductor) a note of thanks and congratulations this morning, saying who I am. About the city of Geneva, I know nothing, except that it is about the same size as Ithaca and has a flourishing beer-brewing industry. And I regret to say that until yesterday I had never heard of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Evidently Mr. Lafford is an enterprising fellow.

  AUGUST 27, 1952

  Verena was invited by one of her classmates from Zürich University, a girl called Edith Müller, to go and stay for a weekend with her in Ann Arbor. Edith has made a good career for herself as an astronomer, and she is now working at the Ann Arbor observatory for two years as a research assistant. She avoided getting married, and she lives in a big comfortable apartment by herself, and she loves her work. So Verena was glad to accept the invitation. Ann Arbor is a beautiful place, and I was happy to walk around and revive old memories. The only trouble with this little holiday was that we had to drive 550 miles each way. We had intended to go through Canada, which is the quickest and quietest way. However, we ran into trouble at the border. They would not admit Verena and Katrin into Canada because their papers are not in order. When this was discovered, we were in Canada, since the office is on the Canadian side of the bridge. So the officials had to give us an official order of deportation to get us back into the United States. That is the first time we have ever been deported. It makes us feel very distinguished.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1952,

  BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY, LONG ISLAND

  I have been living here at Brookhaven for six days. It is a great time to be here, as the lab has recently made a new discovery of major importance. The discovery was made by two people, one an old friend of my own generation called Ernst Courant whom I used to know in Cornell in 1948, the other a professor from MIT with the unlikely name of Stanley Livingstone. Courant is on the regular staff here, Livingstone was here for the summer. The discovery does not sound spectacular. It is a new way of building a magnet so that a proton or an electron can be guided through a narrow tube without hitting the walls. But this rather simple idea will completely change the economics of high-energy particle physics. Also it will have many other uses as time goes on.

  Here they have a big proton accelerator called the cosmotron, which Livingstone and Courant designed four years ago. It is just now starting to work. They got protons from it for the first time in June of this year. The protons had an energy of two billion volts. The cosmotron cost $7 million, and this is about the limit of what it is thought reasonable to spend on such machines. It is also well beyond the limit of what any university laboratory either here or abroad can do. So the effect of economic facts has been to concentrate important experiments more and more into government labs and away from universities, also into the United States and away from the rest of the world, two tendencies which everybody deplores.

  This new idea of Livingstone and Courant makes it possible to build much more powerful machines for the same cost as the cosmotron. Here they have the preliminary designs for a new machine which will again cost $7 million, to be ready in about four years and giving protons with thirty billion volts. These protons will go round and round a circular steel pipe which will be six hundred feet across the circle but only one inch in cross-section. I have looked at the mathematics, and it seems it will work. The machine will certainly be built, and it will certainly be needed. All it lacks yet is a good-sounding name like the cosmotron. It has been a great pleasure to me to be in at the beginning of this new idea, to see how i
t has developed. It was only because these people have spent four years building a big machine that they suddenly had the idea how to do it better. Such ideas do not come by abstract thinking about the problem.

  The new idea was called strong focusing, and it was immediately adopted by builders of particle accelerators all over the world. The new machine that was built at Brookhaven was called the alternating gradient synchrotron. It was for many years the leading instrument for high-energy physics experiments.

  SEPTEMBER 24, 1952

  Today is the first day of term, and the university feels gay with students swarming everywhere. They look absurdly young and cheerful. I have my first class to teach tomorrow and Verena has hers today. She is teaching calculus to the freshmen (first-year undergraduates) which will not be any intellectual strain for her. She will have a fair amount of work to do correcting the homework, but it will be easier than the differential equations she had last year. She feels happy to be doing any kind of a job, and she also keeps up some contacts with the maths department. My course is Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, also on a more elementary level than last year’s work. This should be an interesting course to teach, the first introduction to quantum theory being the critical step in the education of every physicist, the first time the students meet new and difficult ideas, the first time they are forced to think hard. Usually they go through a stage of complete confusion and depression as a result of meeting the quantum theory. Probably this is unavoidable. It will be fun to see how it goes.