At that time Einstein was still alive, but he was never interested in the Computer Project. Einstein was also uninterested in particle physics. Since the young physicists were mostly working on particle physics, Einstein took no part in our activities. We saw him each morning walk from his home to the institute, and each afternoon walk back, but we never spoke to him.
OCTOBER 1953
We have meetings which I attend as a member of the faculty, about institute financial policy, new appointments, and so on. I find these absorbing, and I enjoy Oppenheimer’s ability to understand and explain everything. Next Wednesday Oppy will go for a month to London and will give the Reith lectures for the BBC. I hope you will listen and see what you think of him. He has put a lot of work into preparing these lectures. Maybe you might even run into him at some function or other.
NOVEMBER 20, 1953
A political struggle agitated Princeton. A referendum vote was taken to decide whether or not Princeton should be “consolidated.” This was an instructive affair and showed the vigor of local government in America. Princeton consists of two separate entities, Princeton Borough and Princeton Township. The borough consists of the old town and has a population of nine thousand. The township consists of the suburbs and has a population of six thousand. They have separate governments, separate schools, and separate taxes. So some busybody reformers decided we ought to consolidate and distributed a lot of propaganda to this effect. In reply, the shop windows blossomed with posters like this: WE HAVE SAVED PRINCETON FOR 150 YEARS. SAVE PRINCETON NOW. VOTE NO TO CONSOLIDATION. Finally, when the great day came, we defeated the radicals. Both borough and township voted against consolidation by three-to-two majorities. We are happy about this outcome. The schools in the borough where we live are good and not overcrowded, and the population is stationary. The township has a rapidly growing population, and the schools are more crowded every year. So we are happy not to have to share.
A week ago I took a day off and Katrin had a school holiday, and we went to New York for the day. We went first to the tip of Manhattan and took a ferry to Bedloe’s Island, which is a fifteen-minute ride with magnificent views of the shipping and the city. It was a cool day, and we ate hot dogs to keep us warm. On Bedloe’s Island stands the Statue of Liberty which I had never seen at close quarters. We walked up inside her some 330 stairs. This is great fun as she consists of a copper skin with a steel framework inside and the staircase climbing up the steel framework. As you go up, you can see her anatomy from the inside. Finally you go up past her nose and eyes and stand on a platform level with her eyebrows. There is a row of windows along her forehead just under her hair, and you look out of these across the harbour, or upwards at her right hand with the torch, or downwards at her nose and her feet. It is a delightful place. There is also a gallery on the outside at the level of her feet, which is halfway up the whole monument, where you can walk round in the open air. After this we took the ferry back to Manhattan. On Sunday when we went for a walk, Katrin said to me, “Why don’t we have a practice earthquake sometime at home?” I said, “What do you mean?” She answered, “Well, we are always having fire drills in school.”
JANUARY 12, 1954,
PHYSICS DEPARTMENT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Everything goes well here. Last night I went to the Society of Fellows, a group modelled on the Cambridge College system. There are about fifty fellows attached to the society, and they come from all fields. We had a dinner such as Trinity College would have provided twenty years ago, lots of silver plate and a little trolley for pushing the port wine up and down the table. I had the good fortune to sit by Professor Hisaw who is a famous character of the university. He is a biologist and said to be the finest lecturer in the university. He comes from the hills of southern Missouri, the legendary home of American hillbillies and amiable criminals. He is evidently a born showman. We talked mainly about psychical research, as I had been reading some article on the subject by Aldous Huxley appealing for a more open-minded appraisal of the evidence. Hisaw said yes he was very open-minded about psychical research, so much so that he had served for five years on the “Spook Committee” of Harvard University. This committee was set up to administer a bequest of $15,000 a year which some good lady had left to the Harvard Corporation for the support of psychical research.
The committee consisted of professors from various fields, and one lawyer to see that the terms of the bequest were complied with. The committee invited anybody to submit proposals to them for examination, and they had proposals from all over the country which they investigated with great care. Every kind of crackpot came crowding for a share in the money. So the committee spent their days giving interviews, watching dice-throwing experiments, and arguing interminably. After five years they still had not found any applicant who deserved their support. But there was a professor at Columbia whose proposals seemed to be a bit better than the others. They finally decided (1) that the Columbia professor get the use of the money for his experiments for five years, (2) that he report his accounts and his experimental results to the lawyer who should be solely responsible for the execution of the bequest, (3) that the committee be discharged.
The book by Aldous Huxley that I had been reading was The Doors of Perception (1954). Huxley did not succeed in making psychical research respectable. His writings had the opposite effect, blurring the distinction between scientific investigation of psychical phenomena and recreational use of psychoactive drugs.
I met an interesting character at breakfast at the Faculty Club. He is president of a big aircraft manufacturing company, a man of about sixty. Oppenheimer happened to drop in for breakfast, and so I was introduced to him. This man had been travelling round the world making business deals, and had a very poor opinion of the industrial management wherever he went. He said, “People are surprised that the Italian workman votes Communist. By God, if I were an Italian workman, I should vote Communist. That is the only party which says cut the boss’s throat. And that’s obviously the only thing that will do any good.” He also talked to Nehru. Nehru said it would be a fine thing for India to have nuclear reactors to power the new factories, because India has such poor roads and railways and they cannot transport enough coal from the coalfields. So he would like America to supply him with a reactor or two. This American said, “I just couldn’t make the man understand that it’s no good having factories if you don’t have the roads to take away the stuff the factories make.”
Tonight I shall go with Hans Haefeli to watch the big ice hockey game between his university (Boston College) and mine (Harvard). That will be fun too.
The match between Boston College and Harvard was a hard-fought battle. Harvard had better skaters, but Boston College had better teamwork. Boston College won. We were sitting on the Boston College side of the rink, and immediately behind us was a long row of Catholic priests shouting in unison. Not only the players but also the spectators had better teamwork on the Boston College side. I still treasure the memory of that game as an epic encounter of the two cultures coexisting in Boston, the old aristocratic Protestant culture of Harvard and the new team-oriented Catholic culture of Boston College.
MARCH 13, 1954
Since we came back, the main interest has been a talk at the institute on “The Deciphering of the Mycenean Script” by Professor Alan Wace, an English archaeologist. This is a fascinating story, maybe you also have read about it in the papers. In the Cretan civilisation which was destroyed about 1400 B.C., there were three kinds of writing at different periods. Over the last fifty years they have found about two thousand clay tablets, most of which belong to the latest period and are written in B script. I remember being taught in school that these writings would probably never be deciphered, because all trace of the language they were written in had disappeared, and the Greeks who came in from the north about 1400 B.C. had destroyed the native cities and introduced their own language during the following centuries of barbarism. Now during the last five years
the whole picture changed because it was found that the Mycenean civilisation on the Greek mainland was using the same B script in many different places, during a period 1500–1200 B.C. which overlapped with the B script in Crete, and continued until the mainland cities were themselves destroyed by later invasions. In particular about one thousand of these clay tablets were found in the so-called Palace of Nestor at Pylos. So it became clear that the later Cretans were speaking the same language that the mainlanders were using right up to the Homeric period, and this could hardly be anything else but Greek. The archaeologists now consider that the original Greek tribes moved down the mainland about 2000 B.C. and reached Crete about 1600. The older Cretans had their own language and their A script at that time. The Greeks then learned to write their own language, inventing B script for the purpose, and took this art back with them to the mainland.
With these new ideas two gentlemen in London [Michael Ventris and John Chadwick] sat down to decipher the B script, assuming it to be an old form of Greek, and the experts are convinced they have succeeded. The script has eighty-eight signs, each representing a syllable. They worked out by trial and error phonetic equivalents for sixty of the signs, the other twenty-eight being so rare that they are not yet sure what they are. In this way they found the majority of the tablets make clear sense; they are mostly shopkeepers’ accounts and inventories. The decisive check on all this came when some completely fresh tablets arrived from the excavations in Pylos, which had not been used for the analysis. One such tablet was a list of pots, giving on each line a description in words, a number, and then a picture of the pot. The first line was
TI-RI-PO 1 [sketch of pot with three legs]
TI-RI-PO-DE 2 [sketch of pot with three legs]
KE-TO-RO-PO-DE 2 [sketch of pot with four legs]
and so on. All this is enormously exciting to the classical scholars around here, now suddenly to have Greek texts from two hundred to five hundred years before Homer. They say they expect to find lots more of these tablets as soon as they dig for them. The first to be deciphered are the shopping lists, etc., which are easiest and least interesting. They already got one from Pylos which seems to be instructions for making a sacrifice to Poseidon, and more interesting material will become accessible as they learn more about the language. They say also that if they can learn enough about the B script, then they may be able to go back to the A script and discover what the original Cretan language was. For this they would need some kind of bilingual tablets.
For the general public who are not expert in classical languages, the most striking aspect of the Pylos discovery is the fact that the word tripod is preserved all the way from Linear B to modern English. For the experts in classical languages, the most striking fact is that the Linear B word ketero, meaning “four,” is closer to the Latin quattuor than to the classical Greek tetra. For this word, the Latin language has deeper roots than the Greek.
MARCH 30, 1954
I am having trouble with the British authorities here to get Esther accepted as a British subject. I started with the paperwork last December, but it is not half done. People talk so much about the stupidity of the American immigration officials, but I never met anything so bad as these British. Every time I write to them or telephone them, they want more documents and more irrelevant information. After they finally decide that Esther is a legal child, they have to send the documents to Zürich to get her birth officially reregistered there, and then after all that comes back again, we can start getting her a passport. God knows whether all this will be done before May 26. Verena is also having trouble with her Swiss consul getting herself a passport. This may hold us up too. The only one who has no trouble so far is George, who is a bona fide American and gets an American passport. We decided now we shall all become Americans as soon as we are eligible (1956) and have an end to these complications.
APRIL 21, 1954
After four months of delay, we finally today got a note from the British consul that he will not recognize Esther and George as British subjects and will not give them passports. This makes me so raving mad, I do not know what I may not do.
Oppenheimer is still in Washington having his life history examined by the Personnel Security Panel. We expect their verdict in about a week. We have been expecting this case to come up for a long time, and so far it must be said the government has handled it with unusual decency. It all depends now on the verdict. If the verdict is unfavourable, it means a major loss of contact between the government and the people who are supposed to advise the government on scientific questions. This will be bad in the long run. But it will not change anything here at the institute. I just came back from Washington where I attended the three-day physics conference. I took down a huge parcel of clothes for Oppenheimer and his family, which I delivered to the office of his Washington lawyer. His actual whereabouts is kept secret, so he and the family can get quiet evenings without being bothered by newspapermen. Bethe saw him in Washington and said he looks thinner but otherwise in good shape.
MAY 9, 1954
I wrote a strong letter to the British consul in New York, instead of my usual polite requests, and this produced some effect. Though it does not change the facts of the situation, the consul decided to give Esther a passport valid for a year, not renewable unless her status is established in the meantime. From a practical point of view, this is all we need for this summer. The consul, after I had been rude, did exactly what he said was “absolutely impossible” when I was polite.
The facts are these. In 1949 Hans Haefeli divorced Verena in his hometown of Balsthal, canton Solothurn, because according to Swiss law he remains for his whole life legally attached to his place of origin. He was then already resident in Massachusetts. According to British law, this divorce is valid if it is recognized as valid by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but not otherwise. The British consul was told by his lawyers that Massachusetts probably would not recognize the divorce, so he does not recognise it either. Verena and I are therefore not married, our children are illegitimate, and hence not British subjects. The joke is that we heard from Hans Georg when he was here that his lawsuit in Rome has finally succeeded, so the pope has agreed to the marriage being annulled. According to the pope, Verena was never married to Hans. The Swiss government however recognizes both marriages and the divorce, so according to them Esther and George are British.
MAY 23, 1954
Professor Wace, who stimulated my interest in the Mycenean inscriptions, is travelling to Europe the same day as we but on a different ship. He is going to Mycenae to dig, as he did last year, and intends to go on for many years more. I never ventured to ask him his age, but when we went together to Philadelphia, the income tax clerk asked it of him. He said in a sepulchral whisper, “Don’t tell anybody. I am seventy-four.”
I spent most of the summer of 1954 at Cécile DeWitt-Morette’s summer school at Les Houches, with Georges Charpak as my star student. After that I went to the International Congress of Mathematicians at Amsterdam. Verena left the children in a Kinderheim in Switzerland and spent the summer visiting her sister who was living in Damascus, Syria. In those days Syria was a peaceful country friendly to expatriate Europeans. In September 1954 the family was reunited in Princeton.
OCTOBER 18, 1954
You probably have seen in the papers that Robert Oppenheimer got officially reelected to his job as director by unanimous vote of the trustees. So our anxieties about this are over. Everything here is now calm and back to normal. I have been spending the evenings reading the full transcript of the testimony at the hearings. It is a book of 992 pages of small print. I find it so enthralling that I don’t mind the small print. It lays everybody’s soul bare.
After the government decided to deny Oppenheimer’s clearance, there was some speculation in the newspapers that the institute trustees might also decide to fire him from his job at Princeton. If he was not to be trusted with government secrets, the trustees might decide that he was not to
be trusted with institute secrets. The institute faculty, including me, signed a public statement that we had confidence in Oppenheimer and wished him to continue as director. I was prepared, in case Oppenheimer was fired, to resign from my position at the institute and return with my family to England. It came as a big relief when the trustees made their statement reelecting him as director. We did not need to drag our children back across the ocean.
DECEMBER 15, 1954
Esther now is growing up fast. It seems always the rule that the children are most difficult when they are going through some mental development. She is now happier again and with a much wider range of ideas. Esther is fond of the Alice in Wonderland style of conversation. This is a conversation which is brought to an abrupt end by a remark which is at the same time entirely logical and entirely absurd. A good example is this. Esther, “I need a new head.” Freeman, “What do you need it for?” Esther, “For my neck.”
JANUARY 17, 1955
I was invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences to a meeting in Moscow, to discuss the branch of physics in which I am expert. The dates are March 31–April 7. It seems to be a genuine and serious affair. I decided I would make a fight and find out if it is possible to go. I think the chances are small, but one ought at least to try. So I have been busy writing letters to various officials, British and American. As our term ends April 10, there would be no hurry for me to get back to Princeton, but I might get a chance to travel around in Russia or elsewhere in Europe after the conference. In the newspapers today I see that Eisenhower approved a report of the National Science Foundation to Congress in which they said, “We must find out more about what the Soviet scientists are doing.” This perhaps improves my chances.
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