Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  I am writing a post-mortem description of the Orion Project, the spaceship project which I helped to launch in 1958. It officially ceases to exist today, after a life of seven years. Political difficulties of all kinds killed it. I am rescuing it from oblivion by writing an account of what happened and why, to be published in some magazine of wide circulation.

  My account of Orion was published with the title “Death of a Project” (1965). I described how it happened that a powerful new technology, with immense possibilities for expanding human exploration of the universe, was abandoned for political reasons. My purpose was not to revive Orion but to make the public aware of the costs of saying no to a bold new dream. The reasons for killing Orion were valid and compelling, but the costs were real too.

  MARCH 7, 1965

  We had a treat this week, a reading of his own poems by Cecil Day Lewis. I have always been an admirer of Lewis, and now more than ever. What was impressive about this hour of reading was that I had heard none of it before. Every bit of it was new and just as good as his old stuff.

  APRIL 30, 1965

  Early in the week I heard that Oppenheimer decided to retire as director of the institute. This came as a surprise. He had given no hint of it when I saw him in December. Frank Yang is also leaving to be Einstein Professor at a new university which New York State is building on Long Island. This also is sudden and mysterious. I shall have to think carefully about my own position. If the physics group at the institute is to stay alive, I will have to take more direct responsibility for running it.

  MAY 17, 1965

  Leo Szilard was a friend of mine and also one of the great men of the age. He was the man who originally persuaded Einstein to write his famous letter to Roosevelt to start the atomic energy project. He was also the first to begin agitating seriously about the political consequences of nuclear weapons, during the war years when such questions seemed far in the future. He died a year ago here in La Jolla. It happens that Imme and I have made a close friendship with Szilard’s widow who is still living here. She is a lady of sixty who is left alone in the world and loves our company and our children. She is in the same situation as Helen Dukas, dedicated to the memory of Szilard as Helen is to Einstein. Trude Szilard is a medical doctor specializing in public health and has a job in Los Angeles, so we see her only at weekends. For many years she was a public health administrator in New York. In these last weeks I begin to feel sorry to leave this place. Getting to know Trude Szilard has made a big difference. But we have to pack up our stuff and go.

  I met Leo Szilard for the first time at Pugwash meetings, where he was always one of the most active participants. He liked to talk directly with the Russians and especially with the KGB man Pavlichenko, offering concrete proposals that might later reappear in official government negotiations. I also met him in Washington, where he founded an organization known as the Council for a Liveable World, giving financial support to politicians committed to peaceful solutions of international problems. Following Szilard’s advice, I gave a substantial contribution to the election campaign of a young senator from Delaware, not yet famous. His name was Joe Biden.

  JUNE 17, 1965

  Our trip home was fast and easy. We drove it in six and a half days. The children were glad when we reached home. The reaction of Miriam was unexpected. We did not know how much Miriam understood of the meaning of this long trip, or whether she even remembered Princeton at all. When we arrived at the house, she rushed up the stairs and into her old bedroom and then dropped down onto all fours and crawled around the room with the most blissful expression on her face. Evidently she knew where she was. She had learned to walk in La Jolla, so she had never walked in her Princeton room. The next morning she again crawled around for a few minutes before she remembered to stand up and walk.

  JUNE 22, 1965

  We let Dorothy baby-sit for the first time. I left the telephone number 924-3637 with an arrow over it. Dorothy said, “Why did you draw an arrow?” I said, “So you can be sure which end to begin. I always used to draw an arrow for Esthi when she was baby-sitting when she was your age.” Dorothy replied, “But you don’t need to do it for me. I can see that if I started from the other end the four would be the wrong way round.”

  OCTOBER 23, 1965

  We are all excited because my three friends Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman won the Nobel Prize. You may remember that it was just after their great work in 1947 that I started my career by carrying further what they had begun. I am happy that the prize is given to the three of them equally. To some extent I can take credit for this, since Schwinger originally had all the limelight and Tomonaga and Feynman were struggling in obscurity. It was my big paper “The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman” that first did justice to all three of them. I am now writing the historical account of their work which will appear next week.

  NOVEMBER 19, 1965

  I called up Daniel Singer, the Washington lawyer who works for the Federation of American Scientists. The call lasted over an hour. Singer had just come back from a month in Mississippi where he was working as a volunteer, defending negroes in civil rights cases. None of the local lawyers down there will work for negroes. I admire Singer very much. He has a wife and four small children, and he left them for a month to work without pay and with a considerable risk that he might get shot. He talked for an hour without stopping. He says things there are much worse than even he had imagined. Negroes systematically terrorized and the white people totally uninterested in any kind of reform. There is now a permanent organization of lawyers who take it in turns to go down for a month and get negroes out of jail. Five or six of them are in Mississippi each month, and they are able to do quite a lot, but they get no help from the local white people.

  Daniel’s wife Maxine Singer is now much more famous than Daniel. She became a leading microbiologist and organized the international meeting at Asilomar in 1975 to establish guidelines for the regulation of experiments in genetic engineering. She ended her career as president of the Carnegie Corporation, in charge of research programs in astronomy and geophysics as well as biology. Maxine and Daniel are both heroes. I am lucky to have been a friend to both of them. Their four daughters have done well in various professions. Amy, the oldest, is a professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv and an expert on the Ottoman Empire. In 2015 she was at Princeton as a member of the School of Historical Studies of the institute.

  • 19 •

  TWO DEATHS AND TWO DEPARTURES

  IN 1966 Robert Oppenheimer and Imme’s father, Dr. Edwin Jung, were dying of cancer at the same time. Dr. Jung was sixty-one; Oppenheimer was sixty-two. Both had been looking forward to twenty years of retirement, Dr. Jung with his son Diether gradually taking over his medical practice, Oppenheimer with the freedom of a former institute director. The letters begin with the appointment of the new director.

  FEBRUARY 17, 1966

  A pair of institute trustees came to visit me in a secretive manner and revealed the name of our new director, a man from Harvard called Carl Kaysen. They came to hear any objections I might have before the appointment would be made official. I could honestly say that I am enthusiastic about Kaysen. He is a kindred spirit. He is an economist by trade, but he became involved in military and political problems in the same way I did. While I was receiving my education at Bomber Command from 1943 to 1945, he was just six miles away at the headquarters of the American bomber command at High Wycombe, doing the same job and receiving the same education. We might even have met on the few occasions when I visited the American HQ. He is three years older than me. After the war he went back to university life but continued writing papers on strategy, bombing, disarmament, etc. Once these problems get a grip on a man, they do not let him go.

  When Kennedy became president, he immediately put Kaysen into a high position in the White House. While he was there, he did a great deal to push disarmament and liberalize the government’s foreign policy. While I was
at the Disarmament Agency in summer 1963, Kaysen went to Moscow with the team negotiating the Test Ban Treaty. Everybody I knew in the government had a great respect for him. I will enjoy to have him here and talk politics with him. I imagine he will find it easy to run the institute with a quarter of his time and keep the rest for government affairs.

  After the trustees came, I flew to Florida and spent a weekend with the Space Committee looking at big rockets. The big rockets are now going to start flights leading to the lunar landing. The latest Russian success adds excitement to the race. If all goes according to plan, we shall have some men on the moon before the end of 1968. The main purpose of our meeting was to see what scientific experiments can still be in time to go on these flights.

  Yesterday came the worst bombshell. Oppenheimer has a throat cancer and is in New York having radiation treatment. The doctors say it is a superficial thing, discovered early and with a good chance of being cured. I do not know how much of this to believe.

  FEBRUARY 28, 1966

  I had a great piece of luck. With a young man called Andrew Lenard, I have been in the throes of creation for the last two weeks, and we solved a quite important problem. It is the best thing I have done since the summer of 1961. Now the work is done, but there will be the job of writing it up for publication which I shall also enjoy.

  Andrew Lenard came to the institute as a visiting member from the University of Indiana. He started thinking about the problem which we call “stability of matter.” The problem is to understand by strict mathematical proof why ordinary matter consisting of positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons does not collapse into a state of lower energy. Lenard made some progress with this problem and then came to me for help. We worked together on it for half a year before we had it solved. Our proof was extraordinarily long and complicated. A much shorter and more illuminating proof was found later by Elliott Lieb and Walter Thirring. Lenard and I consoled ourselves by remembering the words of my old teacher John Littlewood at Cambridge: “First-rate mathematicians find bad proofs and then second-rate mathematicians find good ones.” But in this case, Lieb and Thirring were also first-rate mathematicians.

  Last Sunday Kitty Oppenheimer telephoned very distraught, saying she did not believe the doctors were telling her the truth and asking me whether I could find somebody who would. I thought at once of Trudy Szilard, our friend in La Jolla, whose husband Leo had a cancer of the bladder which was completely cured with radiation. She is a medical doctor, and having lived through this crisis with Leo, she knows everything there is to be known about it. I telephoned Trudy’s sister in New York and was delighted to hear Trudy herself answer. She is now in New York and easily accessible. I gave her number to Kitty, and Oppenheimer tells me they had an hour’s conversation which did Kitty enormous good. Yesterday Trudy came down and spent half the day with us here in Princeton. She was as sweet as ever with the children and talked about her various activities, China, Vietnam, and so forth. She is a splendid person, and I was happy to have been able to introduce her to the Oppenheimers at this moment. Oppenheimer continues active and does not look bad to the outward eye.

  MARCH 24, 1966

  I had a telephone call from London, a film magnate called Roger Caras asking me to come to his studio to help them with a science fiction film called Encounter 2001. Stanley Kubrick, who directed Dr. Strangelove, is also doing this one. Caras will send a car to meet my flight from Paris and another to bring me to Winchester in the evening. I will stay with you a day or two longer to make up for it.

  Since I was driven directly from the film studio to my family in Winchester, there is no letter describing the day that I spent with Stanley Kubrick watching him produce the film that became 2001, A Space Odyssey. It is a puzzling film, totally different in style and subject from Dr. Strangelove, but equally memorable. I always considered film to be the most creative art form of the twentieth century, and Kubrick to be one of the great artists.

  MARCH 30, 1966

  I am now finding out how lonely the Oppenheimers really are in spite of their huge number of “friends.” I feel oddly more sad leaving them for two weeks than leaving Imme and the children. These are the last two weeks of Robert’s radiation treatment, and in this time he must know whether it is life or death. I have been over three times to talk with Robert and Kitty. Kitty believes, perhaps rightly, that I can help Robert to keep alive by keeping alive his interest in physics. She feels desperately that he needs to be convinced that he is still needed in the community of physicists. On the other hand, I find that Robert is so physically tired from the radiation that my instinct is to hold his hand in silence rather than burden him with particles and equations. It is odd that I feel so personally responsible for him. I never had been close to him until now. I suppose it is partly the heredity that runs in our family that makes me want to save souls.

  My mother’s mother Eleanor Atkey was a famous faith healer, and my mother inherited some of her talent. Our daughter Mia, who is a Presbyterian minister, has it too.

  Carl Kaysen spent a good two hours talking with me alone. I talked for an hour about the institute as it is, and he talked for an hour about the things he hopes to do with it. We understood each other very well. I shall enjoy having him for boss. He made one memorable remark: “I did not come here to operate a motel.”

  I had recently been interviewed by a journalist about the institute, and I said, “The institute is a motel with stipends,” a remark that attracted some attention. Kaysen objected strongly to my description. Like the first director, Abraham Flexner, Kaysen wanted the institute to be active in public affairs. He did not want it to be merely a rest home for scholars. Kaysen’s plan was to add a new school to the institute, a School of Social Studies, bringing together a group of people dedicated to understanding, and helping to solve, the problems of modern society. Like Flexner, he met furious opposition from the faculty but succeeded in establishing the new school which still flourishes today.

  APRIL 22, 1966

  In Germany we had a warm welcome, and I felt more than ever one of the family. This time I saw them in a crisis, and I saw them as they really are. On the first day I had a talk with [Imme’s brother] Diether, and he explained what has been happening to Dr. Jung. Dr. Jung had recently come out of the hospital after his second operation. The first operation was an ordinary gallbladder removal. The gallbladder was found to be cancerous, so they did a second operation to look for metastases and take out lymph glands. They were able to take out everything that looked unhealthy. But Dr. Jung as a doctor knows that the chance of real success in such an operation is low. During our five days in Germany he was visibly growing stronger day by day. He was also having intermittent attacks of pain. I felt at first horrified to see him suffering, but in the end I felt strengthened by his calm bravery.

  MAY 1, 1966

  I have seen Oppenheimer several times since we returned, and each time he looks better and stronger. He is now recovering from the effects of the radiation. The cancer shrank to a size which is barely visible, and the doctors say they can remove it with a relatively minor operation. He is now working half-days in his office.

  JULY 12, 1966

  I had a phone call yesterday to say that Dr. Jung died. Imme had gone over there in a hurry with the three small children, so she did not come too late. It is a relief to know that this is over. Imme said she intended to ask you to go over there for the funeral, but it all happened so quickly that there was no time to organize anything. I went to see Oppenheimer yesterday and found him considerably better. Next week he will move out of his official residence and will be our next-door neighbour.

  JULY 18, 1966

  The Oppenheimers are now moved into the Yangs’ house. I enjoy having them for neighbours. Kitty comes and gives me expert advice about my garden, which bushes to prune and which to eradicate. Robert is improving slowly. Yesterday we sat in the garden over drinks, and he was chatting for an hour and a half. Last nig
ht I took a bottle of champagne over to the house of my collaborator Andrew Lenard, and we had our little victory celebration which is also a good-bye, for he will be gone to Indiana before I return.

  JANUARY 31, 1967, CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA

  I came back from our three-day weekend in the snowy mountains. We saw a live wombat and a dead kangaroo. But for me it was the human fauna that were the most interesting. The Seymours, English immigrants, have been in Australia fifteen years without changing their characters or habits. They have one adored little boy, Martin, who is the center of their universe. But these good English parents, although they love and care for their Martin so intensely, are not able to express love in a way that a child can understand. He is like a guinea pig in a cage, carefully fed and admired but never handled. So when I came along and gave him a few bear hugs, the effect was electric. He responded passionately, and I became Uncle Freeman for the rest of the trip. He came running with me at every stopping place, and his parents remarked in a rather baffled tone of voice, “Oh, you are so good with him.” I did not try to explain to them that their beloved Martin is emotionally starved.

  FEBRUARY 16, 1967

  We had two faculty meetings. Kaysen is pleased because I steered through the faculty the appointment of a new professor, a friend of mine from La Jolla [Marshall Rosenbluth, a world leader in the field of plasma physics], and this was done without any hostility from the side of the mathematicians. This was Kaysen’s first new appointment, and he was waiting for trouble which did not come. After this good beginning, there is a chance that things will go smoothly for him. Oppenheimer is coming close to his end. He insisted on coming to this faculty meeting, but he can barely speak. We told him how glad we were that he came, but really it is a torture for everybody to watch him sit there speechless and suffering. His doctors have given him up, and we can only hope for a quick end. I had a long conversation with Kitty when I came home from Australia. She sounded close to collapse, and said she hardly sleeps anymore, but she was coherent and rational. The daughter Tony has given up her university studies and taken a job in Princeton so that she is constantly available. Imme remarked that Tony had better be careful or she will find herself nursing her mother for the next twenty years. After saying good-bye to his New York doctors, Oppenheimer has put himself in the hands of our Dr. Blumenthal in Princeton, and Kitty says that Blumenthal has been splendid. Both medically and as a human being, Blumenthal would be a good man to have by when one is dying.