Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  APRIL 27, 1958, LA JOLLA

  Now I am riding the whirlwind once again. I came here on Wednesday night and had three days of intensive meetings and discussions. Today is Sunday, and I shall spend it alone, thinking over our problems, writing letters, swimming gently in the hotel pool. I have amazing luck in being here [at the General Atomic laboratory] just now. Partly it is not luck. The reason the people here are anxious to keep me is that in summer 1956 I was the only one of the famous visiting scientists who wholeheartedly threw myself into the practical problems of building a reactor and came up with some sensible ideas. Incidentally, the reactor we were so hotly arguing about then is now in material existence and will start to operate on May 6. It is a very small reactor, but it has been a good training ground for the people here. They are ready now to build bigger and better ones.

  As a result of my reputation for being ready and willing to work on all kinds of problems, I find myself now in a group of people, all of us under forty, planning an enterprise which will inevitably grow into colossal dimensions. The feeling and atmosphere we are now in must be similar to the atomic bomb project in the earliest days, before Los Alamos was thought of, when Oppenheimer and Teller and a handful of other people were feeling their way into the problem and establishing the basic ideas for everything which came later. It is characteristic of this very early time that there is no feeling of pressure or urgency. Everything is informal and relaxed, and we have difficulty in taking the whole situation seriously. In years to come, when huge projects and empires have grown out of this, the early period will have become legendary, and we will not be able to distinguish our memories of this time from the legends which will grow around us. When we shall finally be caught in the glare of newspaper headlines and international political disputes (and this in the end must happen to us as it happened to Oppenheimer), it will seem incredible that the basic plans shall have been made in such a light-hearted spirit as we are living in today.

  Since our project never became a huge enterprise like Los Alamos, we never had to face the political storms that engulfed Oppenheimer and Teller. Our project remained active for seven years with a total staff of about fifty people, never attracting much attention, and then quietly disappeared. In the Test Ban Treaty ratification hearings that determined its fate, the project was barely mentioned.

  THURSDAY NIGHT, MAY 1, 1958

  The word finally came from Washington today: “General Atomic has a contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense to carry out an experimental and theoretical feasibility investigation of a concept for propulsion by nuclear energy of a manned space vehicle capable of interplanetary flight.” This statement is not secret anymore, and we are allowed to use it in our efforts to recruit people. However, the Defense Department says we should tell it to people with a request to keep it confidential.

  They will be unhappy if it appears in newspapers or is otherwise spread in public. So please keep it to yourselves.

  MAY 19, 1958, PRINCETON

  I was interested in the reactions to our project at General Atomic. I am something of a fanatic on this subject. You might as well ask Columbus why he wasted his time discovering America when he could have been improving the methods of Spanish sheep farming. I think the parallel is quite a close one. If Columbus had been a patriotic Spaniard, he would have better gone into sheep farming. But he was not serving Spain’s purposes. He was using Spain to serve his own. I am unenthusiastic about schemes for irrigating the Sahara. I suppose it will be done someday. But it will be expensive and will take a long time. It is not likely that it could be done fast enough to keep pace with growing population. And it is a problem for politicians and bankers rather than scientists.

  We shall know what we go to Mars for only after we get there. The study of whatever forms of life exist on Mars is likely to lead to better understanding of life in general. This may well be of more benefit to humanity than irrigating ten Saharas. But that is only one of many reasons for going. The main purpose is a general enlargement of human horizons.

  JUNE 22, 1958, LA JOLLA

  I got two good letters from Imme which make me happy. She writes mainly about the children. I had told her by letter the object of our work here. There did not seem to be any need to keep it quiet any longer. Imme replied, “When I drove George to school this morning, I told him about the spaceship. He was very excited, asked immediately which planet you will send it to, and whether there would be a little seat right next to you for him to come along. I had guessed the secret a long time ago and was a hundred percent sure it couldn’t be anything else.” She also reports, “The kids’ report cards are as good as ever. They will be sent off to you, and you will then be able to boast about your offspring on one of the next beer or martini evenings.”

  JUNE 28, 1958, LA JOLLA

  Los Alamos was beautiful. The air up there at 7,500 feet is so clear and light, now I am down here it feels like treacle. The days in Los Alamos were also exciting. The place is much more alive, and people are much more enthusiastic up there than they were when I went a year ago. I found here a letter from George dictated to Imme. He says at the end, “P.S. I was excited about the spaceship. When we drove home from our big trip we saw a jet plane and a spaceship, and the spaceship was made even before yours. Another love from George.”

  I never discovered what George had seen that he identified as a spaceship made before ours.

  The leader and originator of our project is a young fellow called Ted Taylor, two years younger than I am. He is such a modest and ordinary-looking young man, it is hard to believe when I am chatting with him that this is the Columbus of the new age. But he is it, there is no doubt in my mind about that. He is married to a competent and understanding young wife, and they have four children ranging from ten years to two. I spend a lot of time at their house and enjoy the children. They are not so well-behaved as my children, so you would probably not be too happy in their house. But for me it is fine. On Friday night I went around to their house with a bottle of good cognac, and the three of us, Ted and his wife Caro and I, looked at Jupiter and Saturn through Ted’s six-inch telescope. The seeing was good, and we drank to the moons of Jupiter, to our children, and to the success of our enterprise.

  Ted was a graduate student during my time at Cornell. I knew him a bit then, but he was violently unhappy with examinations and coursework. He was clearly not intended to be an academic physicist. I did not think much of him in those days. He had been a student at Berkeley but had been thrown out without a degree. He then went to Los Alamos in a very junior position, at a time when all the clever people had left. (This was around 1947.) At Los Alamos he found the people who were left had no ideas and no desire to do anything new. Ted began stirring them up, telling them better ways to do almost everything, until by 1949 a large part of Los Alamos was working on one or another of his ideas. It became embarrassing that he was in a junior position without any degree. So Los Alamos forced him to go to Cornell. He went back to Los Alamos with his degree and continued pouring out ideas. A great part of the small bomb development of the last five years was directly due to him.

  In 1956 he came to General Atomic to be head of the theoretical physics division, with complete freedom to do what he liked. He has been producing a lot of good ideas in the reactor business. But he has been living and thinking with bombs for ten years, and he says when he is lying awake at night, he always comes back to bombs. His dream has always been to find some way of putting these tremendous energies to useful work instead of using them for murdering people. Ted got his inspiration last November as a direct result of the Russian Sputniks. He had never been particularly interested in space-travelling. His schemes for peaceful uses of bombs had always been earth-bound and for that reason difficult to put into operation. Then quite suddenly in November he saw that he had the answer to the basic problem of space-flying, how to get enough energy into a sufficiently small weight.

  In Dece
mber Freddy de Hoffmann came to Princeton to tell me of this scheme, and I saw in half an hour that it was the thing all the space-flight projects had been praying for. I have never had any reason to change this opinion. It will work, and it will open the skies to us. The basic idea is absurdly simple. One is amazed that nobody thought of it before. But the only man who could think of it was somebody who had been working and thinking for years with bombs, so that he could know exactly what a bomb of a given size will do. It was not an accident that this man happened to be Ted. The problem is to convince oneself that one can sit on top of a bomb without being fried. If you do not think about it carefully, it looks obvious that you can’t do it. Ted’s genius led him to question the obvious impossibility. For the last six months Ted has spent his time talking to people in the government and trying to convince them that this idea is not crazy. He has had a hard time. But it seems we have now a lot of influential people on our side. Nothing can stop Ted for long. Ted and I will fly to Los Alamos this evening. We travel like Paul and Barnabas.

  JUNE 30, 1958, LA JOLLA

  Luckily the work is not regarded as having military importance. I think this is a mistake, but I am happy to leave the generals out of it as long as possible. If the project is successful, they will certainly regret that they did not get into it at the beginning. But for the time being they are not interested. The political problems have been normal and understandable. We asked the government for a few million dollars to get the thing started. The committee which reviews such proposals has at least five hundred proposals a year to look at, most of them crazy or stupid but all of them asking for a few million dollars to get started, all of them submitted by people who get indignant when they are refused. The committee was inclined to say no to us. The thing looks completely crazy at first sight, and they had not time to go into it carefully. We had to wear down their resistance, getting various influential people in the government to believe in us and put in good words for us. The committee has not treated us badly. They gave us a number of meetings to explain what we wanted to do, and in the end they agreed to give us the money. The whole procedure took about six months, but the time was not wasted, as we have been getting on with the work. The preliminary work has been paid for out of General Atomic’s pocket.

  JULY 13, 1958, LA JOLLA

  Such a lovely day it was! My face is as red as a furnace. I was out in the sun and wind for eleven hours, from eight-thirty till seven-thirty. It was a meeting of the Glider Club, and I came out to put the glider together in the morning and stayed to take it apart in the evening. Most of the day I spent doing odd jobs, pulling the towing wire, wheeling the glider around, and so forth. What I like about gliding is that most of the time when you are not flying, there are jobs to do, and it is a friendly group of people. They are mostly simple people who work in the aircraft industry all the week and build themselves gliders at the weekends. The best part of the day was the two flights which I had myself with the instructor. One lasted fifteen minutes and the other ten. I am still very bad, and the instructor is fierce, and I like that. We fly up on a wire which is pulled by a winch, then let go of the wire and sail around in the wind where it rises over the cliffs. This is an excellent place for learning, because the west wind blows steadily up over the cliffs almost all the year round. Today it was a good strong wind, and we could stay up as long as we liked. The seagulls were enjoying themselves in the same wind. It is a beautiful place, with the ocean far below on one side, the yellow cliffs on the other.

  I decided I will stay here and bring the family out in September. This means only for one year. We will all go back in the summer of next year. I will have a year away from the institute. It is much better doing it like this than trying to attend to both jobs at the same time. After a year our project will either have collapsed, or it will be so successful that there will not be any great need for me to stay with it.

  I talked with Caro Taylor, the wife of our project leader. I was surprised to find her well-informed about English writers of the twentieth century. It seemed odd, because she is an ordinary American girl who married young and has had children to take care of ever since. I found out that her grandmother was a writer called Elizabeth von Arnim, a central figure in the literary society in London fifty years ago. She was for some time mistress to H. G. Wells and afterwards married Bertrand Russell’s brother, who is Caro’s grandfather. But Caro said that Elizabeth von Arnim’s greatest pride was that her grandmother was Bettina von Arnim, who was one of the better-known sweethearts of Goethe.

  JULY 31, 1958, LA JOLLA

  The work goes very well. More people now joined in. We are about twelve altogether. It is very different from a month ago when we were three. It makes me happy to watch the whole thing gradually take shape under our hands, like a figure being chiseled out of a piece of marble. We shall certainly run into difficulties which make us fall into doubts and despair, but so far everything has turned out unexpectedly easy. I am happy I agreed to stay through the first year. One advantage of this is that I am continually flying back and forth across the continent. Last week I had to go east and took advantage of the chance to spend a few days in Princeton. The family was in excellent shape. Katrin seems to love commuting to New York and doing three hours of the most strenuous dancing in the heat of the afternoon. She is outstanding even in comparison with the New York children. Several afternoons I went swimming with the little ones. They were glad to see me, in a relaxed unexcited way.

  When I was in Princeton last week, I had a talk with Oppenheimer and got him to agree to my taking a year’s leave of absence. He was sympathetic and said he felt a certain nostalgia for the days in 1942 when he was in the early stages of his project. He was emphatic that I should refuse to consider staying away from Princeton longer than a year. It may be difficult when the time comes to step out of this project. I am glad that there will be no choice. Unless I leave the institute permanently, I have to return in September 1959, and I am sure this will be the right thing to do. Princeton was beautiful in the summer heat, especially the nights with hundreds of fireflies flashing in the trees.

  AUGUST 16, 1958, LA JOLLA

  Last week to Boston where I had a fruitful time discussing our spaceship with the experts. I left behind a lot of enthusiastic people. They have there a variety of “shocktubes,” long glass pipes down which they make gas flow extremely fast, and these they can use for doing experiments which will help us along with our plans. Yesterday I had a flight to Pasadena which I visited for the first time. I went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the place where Explorer satellites are made. The reception there was rather cool—the lady at the front office decided Taylor and I were a pair of crackpots and tried to get rid of us. After half an hour of arguing we got inside, and then it all went well.

  Today was Saturday, and I went gliding again. It was a lovely day, the wind rather weak but still enough to give some lift on the cliffs. Hot sun and white puffball clouds. I had five flights, and I feel better at it every time. I am not so scared as I was at first. Especially I enjoy the landings, and I am beginning to be able to hit the intended spot instinctively. The greatest achievement today was that I ran the winch all by myself. The winch is the machine which pulls in wire at sixty miles per hour and pulls the glider up into the sky. It is a fearsome machine, you have to jam down the accelerator until it screams at a certain pitch (there is no speedometer) and then let it go gradually up. I was much more scared of the winch than of the glider. But today I gave about ten winch-tows, and the pilots said they were satisfactory. So I am now “checked out on the winch.”

  AUGUST 31, 1958, LA JOLLA

  I have been going through the deeper crisis of my family problem. It has all ended well.

  Kreisel is now in Princeton. He is taking Verena away with him. This time there is no coming back. She will go right away to Reno and get the divorce settled. Then they will probably marry. I am not responsible for her anymore. Imme, Esther, and George will join me he
re in two weeks’ time, and we shall start our family life again as it was last year. Verena will drive the car across the country with them. Katrin will choose whether she wants to come here with us or go to a boarding school near San Francisco which has a good ballet school nearby. The people at the New York school where Katrin spent the summer were enthusiastic about her. They said San Diego is hopeless, and the only good place on the West Coast is this one near San Francisco. Verena and Kreisel will be living at Stanford where Kreisel now has a job. This will also be close to Katrin’s school. So probably she will choose to go there. All this seems to be as satisfactory an outcome as could have been reached. But Verena had still one more trick to play. She said she will not deliver the children until I have agreed in writing I will let them come to her during school holidays. I do not like to agree to this; there might be circumstances in which it would be bad for them. I shall probably agree to these terms. I need these children badly now, and she knows it.

  Last night I telephoned and talked to both Imme and Verena. Imme agreed to come out here for a month or two until the new girl is settled in. I felt good talking to her again. Then I talked to Verena and called her an unscrupulous old bitch and that felt good too. I guess that is the end of the story.

  SEPTEMBER 17, 1958, LA JOLLA

  The family is here, in excellent health, and all have started their new schools. The drive across country was smooth and rapid. We are living in a big house with a private swimming pool which is a great joy. Verena and I are now deep in legal negotiations leading to divorce. This is a black and horrible business, but I see light at the end of the tunnel. It would not have been better to do this in New Jersey. I hope it will all be over in about a week. Margot Kaufner [the new au pair replacing Imme] will be here in two weeks, and Imme will be gone six weeks later. Imme has been wonderful all through these lacerating days. Torments and terror vanish as soon as she is nearby.