Over time, I am aware that his vivid sense of Cecilia’s immediate presence receded somewhat, but never disappeared, as did also to some extent his strong motivation to fall and die for the good of others. This was because he became caught up in the fascination of his work itself from day to day to the point where he needed no further motivation to be doing it. But Cecilia and the vision ignited by Dr. Engstrom remained within him as silent justifiers of what he was doing with his life even though his joy in doing it was becoming its own reward.
In those days, wherever he went, whether at home or elsewhere, Steve was met with enthusiastic approbation to which he appeared to be quite oblivious. He needed no external approval for what he was doing. There was little danger in those days that anyone would question his goals or seek to undermine his dedication to them. The ideals to which he was dedicated were being extolled everywhere. Chapel speakers heralded the dawn of the new age of peace and progress and urged students to take their rightful place as Christians in that imminent age. There was much to be done yet before the Kingdom of God could come fully here on earth, and Christiania students were to be among the first to lay the fruits of their efforts in the cause of peace-making and poverty reduction at the feet of King Jesus.
Even more influential on Steve than this overt assurance of the rightness of his course from those whose business it was to know was the tacit approval of it that charged the very air of Christiania College. The spirit of the whole place, from the administration down through the ranks, was vibrant with its own form of missionary zeal:
“Hail to the brightness of Zion’s glad morning,
Joy to the lands that in darkness have lain!
Hushed be the accents of sorrow and mourning,
Zion in triumph begins her mild reign….”
The vocation of a Christian was, after all, no longer so abstruse as it had at one time been considered. Let a man line himself up with the tide of progress by associating himself with a useful occupation in harmony with the better aspirations of humanity. Let him find his own unique way of contributing to improving the conditions of life for his fellowman and he would not only find personal fulfillment but he would be discharging his duty to his Creator. Christ had been a man, after all, and as such had been vitally concerned about the total needs of mankind, both the spiritual and the physical. Why else would He have spent two-thirds of his active life in a ministry of healing? The trouble with past generations was that they had too often spiritualized the religion of Jesus, reversing the Incarnation so that they encouraged people to flee the world rather than face it. Improving living conditions in the world had been seen by them as a trivial concern compared to working to ensure the eternal life of the soul. But Jesus had taught us to pray, “Thy Kingdom come,” had He not? How could God’s Kingdom ever come into a world trapped in ignorance and poverty and suffering?
There were a few dissident voices that dared to question this updated version of the Gospel, but they were dismissed as reactionary and out-of-touch. The tide was definitely moving in one direction in the early 1920s, and if you didn’t want to be labeled old-fashioned, you got on board and let the tide sweep you along with everyone else towards the paradise just ahead.
Although Steve was not especially interested in anyone else’s dreams, the climate in the early 1920s insulated him from any serious misgivings about the rightness of the ground he had plunged himself into. The realm of theoretical physics, which at that time, as I understand it, was just beginning to split open a crack into the world of fundamental particles, held Stephan Pearson spellbound in its grip. Within his own short lifetime, the quantum theory of radiation had been propounded by Max Planck and clarified by Albert Einstein. Within the previous decade the nature of the atom had been determined and then defined by Bohr, and the character of X-rays had been established by Roentgen. In addition, Albert Einstein had reduced the relationship between matter and energy to the simple formula, e=mc2. All of these developments, of course, raised more questions than they answered. The work of Planck and Einstein, for example, had seemed to indicate that light waves were of a corpuscular nature, at least in some important respects. Steve became very curious to discover exactly what is the relation of matter to energy in this marginal area in which one phenomenon partakes of the characteristics of both. And all of this was fermenting in him while he was still at Christiania. He and I talked about such things often in those days.
In spite of the accident and his lackluster record in his freshman year, he graduated with his own class magna cum laude, majoring in physics and mathematics and minoring in chemistry. His parents were both extremely proud of him on graduation day. Old Lars managed to camouflage his disappointment that he would have no successor and heir to the estate. Julia, on the other hand, could not contain her joy. Steve had already shared with her what Cecilia’s death had done for him. To her it was a miracle. Her Stevie was going beyond her wildest dreams for him. He was on a course that was sure to make God very happy.
IV
Like the Magi of old whom a star drew irresistibly into a distant land, Stephan Pearson followed the brightest star on his horizon for the next two years. His professors had secured for him an appointment to a postgraduate position within the circle of aspiring young physicists that surrounded Dr. Albert Einstein in Germany. On the day after graduation, his last in St. Mark before setting sail for Europe, I happened to pass by the open door of his room while he was packing his suitcase. He saw me.
“Paul! Please come in for a minute.”
He stood there looking at me a little oddly, clasping a handful of clean socks which he was about to set into the opened suitcase on his bed.
“You know why I am going to Europe, don’t you?”
I nodded.
Steve swallowed hard.
“She didn’t die for nothing, Paul. There are moments when I feel so alone, even useless without her. But then I look at her portrait. See? There it is.”
It was lying on a bed of underwear in his suitcase.
“Then I remember that she is always right here with me, encouraging me to get back to work when I am discouraged, to accomplish something really good, and to find happiness in doing it. I just wanted you to know for sure. And I want Irv and Ellie to know. She didn’t die for nothing, by God! She didn’t die for nothing.”
“I know, Steve…. God is with you.”
Now I was the one having a hard time holding it together. We stood there looking at each other for a long moment. Then both of us instinctively stepped toward each other and ended up in a bear hug.
Nothing more was said.
And with that we parted for many years.
It is difficult to reconstruct Steve’s two years in Germany. While there he acquired considerable stature as a promising physicist and mathematician. His relationship with Dr. Einstein weaned him still further away from what some might call his “ulterior motives” for devoting himself to science. There was an extraordinary fascination for him in the mixture of mystery and certainty that composes theoretical physics. He found himself near the very center of that tiny circle of men who were intent on prying their way into the atom, first to be startled and then to be baffled by the things they were observing. This was the gathering place for those imaginative men whose minds had reached the frontiers of the unknown by crossing the known on the solid ground of the mathematical unity and consistency of all creation. The sheer thrill of observing even from afar what few men had hitherto considered observable, of building constructs on the basis of demonstrable fact in a domain that had previously been the subject solely of guesswork and conjecture, of working with phenomena whose very existence had been unknown until then, of playing daily with the grand oxymoron of undeniable fact and pure fantasy which is the essence of theoretical physics—this exerted an almost hypnotic power over Steve and his colleagues. Theirs was the challenge of deciphering the mathematical symmetry necessarily inherent in all phenomena, even the least understood. Living
and working within the field of a magnet as strong as this one proved to be, precluded the possibility for many years to come that Steve would wander off in any other direction.
In a seminar one day, after Steve had deftly displayed his gift for correlating several concepts by means of their mathematical interdependence, a feat for which he had had to call upon several mathematical disciplines simultaneously and in German, Albert Einstein remarked to one of Steve’s fellow students: “Keep your eye on that young man.”
Apparently he did not travel around very much on the continent while he was there, although his infrequent letters home indicate that he made at least two trips to Paris. These letters, which I have seen, were respectful, if uninformative, but their arrival at wide intervals kept his mother’s hopes for him alive.
Returning to the United States somewhat reluctantly and for reasons that are not clear, he set about writing his doctoral thesis on matter and energy for an Eastern university. In 1926 at the age of twenty-five he received his PhD in theoretical physics and began a fourteen-year period of pure research under the auspices of the Eintvold Foundation near Boston, Massachusetts.
V
Industrialist Ivor Eintvold was something of an amateur scientist himself. He endowed the foundation that bore his name with ample funds for extensive research in the new physics. It occupied a large new building on the outskirts of Boston and was loosely affiliated with one of the nearby universities. Eintvold had established the foundation shortly after the Great War in an effort to give science a free hand to develop without having to fulfill military commitments. The only stipulation he made with respect to the investigations into the new physics pursued there under his auspices was that he be informed of any discoveries having commercial possibilities.
Originally Dr. Pearson’s position in the foundation was designated as research assistant in which capacity he and other assistants worked with Dr. C. T. Lambertsen in his pioneer investigation into gamma rays. For three years they sought to unravel the basic nature and properties of these electromagnetic emissions, which are the primary and most obvious characteristic of radioactivity. As any radioactive substance breaks down into more stable elements, there is an emission of “pure” electromagnetic energy in the form of gamma rays that possess a remarkable penetrating power. For a long while scientists were unable to verify experimentally that any weight was actually lost in the reduction of radioactive substances, a weight loss which one would expect from Einstein’s formula e=mc2. Already Steve had, with others, postulated the existence of subatomic particles to account for this very minute weight loss and several other phenomena. The whole issue involved him deeply until 1929 when, partially as a result of their work, the government of the United States began using gamma rays to detect internal defects in opaque objects. In that same year Dr. Lambertsen died and Dr. Pearson stepped into his position as research physicist, heading a team of brilliant young assistants and dividing his time now between the study of cosmic rays and the study of the structure of nuclei. Their previous work with gamma rays had laid the groundwork for the field toward which most of the world’s theoretical physicists were now turning their attention.
During Stephan Pearson’s school years most physicists had assumed that cosmic rays were electromagnetic waves on the order of X-rays and gamma rays. But in 1927, just as Steve was beginning his research into gamma rays, an Amsterdam physicist proved that they were particles because they responded to the latitude effect. Around the turn of the decade a world survey was being carried out to determine the exact nature and intensity of cosmic rays and their possible influence on life on earth. Dr. Pearson and his team were major players in this survey.
The results of the survey were fascinating in and of themselves and led to several discoveries of special interest to nuclear physicists. Among other things, it was ascertained that cosmic rays are composed of 92% ordinary protons, 7.5% alpha rays (i.e. helium nuclei), and 0.5% heavier nuclei which all together impact on the earth’s atmosphere with an energy equal to the average starlight. These rather commonplace particles are, however, traveling at accelerated velocities which to this day cannot be approximated even in the largest accelerating equipment made by man. Furthermore (and this was of particular interest to nuclear physicists), very few of these original particles ever reach earth because they collide in the upper atmosphere with other particles and produce a secondary radiation that does reach the earth. Today we know that the Van Allen Belt also runs some interference for the earth. At any rate, this secondary radiation revealed to scientists for the first time a number of previously unknown particles, including a positive electron (i.e. a particle with the same mass as an electron but having a positive charge), so-called “V-particles” which have a mass greater than the mass of protons, and later eight or ten varieties of mesons. In addition, these upper atmospheric collisions form free neutrons which bombard surrounding matter to produce radioactive elements such as H3 and C14. By this examination of the atmosphere, scientists were set on the trail of many phenomena later to be discovered also in the nucleus of the atom, and several possibilities for methods of examining nuclei were suggested to them. The cyclotron, for example, was a noteworthy result of observing the effect of neutrons on surrounding material in secondary radiation.
Dr. Pearson worked assiduously on behalf of this survey and followed its proceedings with keen concern. It occurred to him that whereas Dr. Einstein had associated particles (photons) with light waves, a wave nature now had to be associated with particles. Beams of electrons were behaving like light, responding to defraction and the interference effect. The more involved he became in his work with nuclei, the more he realized how indebted he was to his earlier study of relativity with Dr. Einstein in Germany. For the particles with which he was now dealing were moving at such high velocities that they required the correction of relativity to be analyzed accurately.
For fourteen years Dr. Stephan Pearson was on the front lines of research through his association with the Eintvold Foundation. His colleagues, especially Dr. A. E. Niessen, his only close friend during this period, all assert that he labored with undeterred diligence, as though driven by an inner compulsion. They say that although he was engaged in what could be termed “pure research,” he never lost sight of the potential benefits for mankind of what he was doing. This perspective betrayed itself in virtually everything he wrote, even in unapologetically complex publications intended only for the eyes of fellow scientists. I certainly make no pretense of having unraveled the technical content of the main body of his works, but I can easily discern what I might call a prophetic tinge to them. In his three books and the numerous articles dating from this period in his life, he invariably gets around to a consideration of the practical application of their research to some aspect or aspects of human well-being. He did have the satisfaction of living long enough to see some of these projected benefits become realities.
Aided by his dedicated famulus, Dr. Niessen, and his entire team, he made bold strides into the unknown and probed into many mysteries that had beggared explanation until then. There is a bit of the romantic in every research scientist, whether he wants to admit it or not. And that element of the romantic is woven around the fact that the nature of his work demands the same unwavering devotion demanded by a true and lasting love affair.
VI
For those fourteen years, Dr. Stephan Pearson lived alone in a tiny house he had found about a mile and half out into the country from his place of work. He had purchased it with its acre of land from a retiring farmer who had used it to house his hired man. It lay back from the road a couple of hundred feet behind a thick untrimmed hedge of lilac bushes and maple trees. It looked very shabby indeed until Mr. Eintvold happened to drop in one day. The next day he sent over a painter and a repairman to spruce it up as best they could. But it was certainly more than adequate for Steve’s modest needs.
From the doorway, nearly overgrown with grapevines, one stepped immediate
ly into a 12’x14’ living room quaintly crowded with a big old sofa on the inside wall to the left, an overstuffed chair in the front corner to the right, and an array of green plants stacked wherever there was room for them. In the front wall next to the door there was a window, and in the wall to the right another one. In the summer very little light made it through the big grape leaves into the room. Above the sofa on the wall to the left that partitioned the living room from the bedroom hung six medium-sized frames all in a row, side by side. Each contained a sheet of music staff paper scribbled with musical notations and words. Across the top of the first sheet was scrawled the single word, “Verily.”
The kitchen and bathroom consisted of a small lean-to behind the living room that appeared to have been an afterthought. A cast-iron wood range, a bank of crooked cupboards, a new refrigerator, a hand pump over a porcelain sink, and a small table with two wicker chairs filled this room to capacity. A window that could be swung open looked out over the deciduous woods behind the house and included in its scope an unpainted plank garage in which Dr. Pearson kept his panel truck.
A Grain of Wheat Page 20