The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  In 1928, when I first saw Michelson he was eating lunch at the Quadrangle Club, and I thought instantly of the opening of Carl Sandburg’s poem, “I saw a famous man eating soup.” One look at Michelson in old age and there could be no doubt that he was famous. He did not eat at the table reserved for the physicists. He ate at a table always reserved for him alone, and he occasionally smiled as he drew on his napkin. The waitress told us he drew sketches of the faculty he did not care to eat with. She said they all had long noses.

  Few of us in these present days of unfamous and infamous men have any idea of what it was like to be one of the two or three most famous physicists of the early twentieth century and to eat your soup at a table reserved for you alone. The meaning of the words “elite” and “aristocratic” have been lost, except in their profane senses, and it is doubtful if we would recognize an aristocrat if there were one and we happened to see him. But at the first general open meeting in 1900 of the American Physical Society (of which Michelson was vice-president seven years before his Nobel Prize), its president, Henry Rowland, addressed his fellow members as follows:

  . . . We meet here in the interest of a science above all sciences which deals with the foundation of the Universe . . . with the constitution of matter from which everything in the Universe is made and with the ether of space by which alone the various portions of matter forming the Universe affect each other. . . .

  . . . We form a small and unique body of men, a new variety of the human race as one of our greatest scientists calls it, whose views of what constitutes the greatest achievement in life are very different from those around us. In this respect we form an aristocracy, not of wealth, not of pedigree, but of intellect and of ideals.

  In case present-day readers might feel this prose is running over with self-anointed oil, they should start jotting down the names of some of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century physicists whom they and the world remember: Madame Curie and her husband, Pierre (radium and radioactivity), Lord Kelvin (as in Kelvinator), James Clerk Maxwell (electromagnetic field), Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (X-rays), and, to end where we began, Einstein and Michelson. Every once in a while science comes to a place where it meets a bunch of great men coming its way who are big enough to overturn it and then set it on its wheels again but going forever in a different direction.

  But his being the first American physicist to win the Nobel Prize still doesn’t give us an adequate measurement of how high Michelson stood in the firmament of men apart from other men. Michelson was a Navy man. He had received his basic scientific training at Annapolis and it was better all around and forever after not to forget he had been a naval officer.

  Shortly before anyone else in the dining room had finished his lunch, Michelson rose and went downstairs. Before long, I heard that he went down to the billiard room and probably at the same time I heard he was a fine billiard player. Nobody in the University, I was told, was good enough to play with him. Immediately, I started arriving earlier for lunch, and, when he folded his long-nosed napkin, I rose and followed him.

  So for at least several months before he left Chicago for good, I sat on one of those high pool-room chairs for ten or fifteen minutes at noon and watched the famous physicist play billiards after he ate soup and sketched the ordinary self-anointed physicists with whom he did not sit. He and I occasionally spoke. Most of our communication, however, was carried on by a lifted eyebrow followed by a nod or shake of the head. He lifted the eyebrow, and I shook or nodded the head.

  I had come here in 1928 to start graduate work with an A.B. in English from Dartmouth, and, since I had taught courses there in freshman English for two years after graduation, I was able to start here as a Graduate Assistant, a form of degradation that has since been abolished, at least in the English Department. As the first half of the title suggests, it was bestowed upon certain graduate students, but the second half of the title, “Assistant,” gives no idea of how little money and how much servility went with it.

  Only a few years later (in 1932), Vanity Fair, the magazine of the sophisticates (The New Yorker just getting under way), started publishing a series of caricatures by Covarrubias entitled “Impossible Interviews,” the one that comes to mind first being between Mae West and Dowager-Queen Marie of Romania. If Covarrubias had seen the young Graduate Assistant in English and the great and aging physicist who was the first American Nobel Prize winner in science gathered each noon around a billiard table he might have included us in his series.

  In 1928 there were two ways graduate students in English without money could see their way to an advanced degree, both involving considerable medical risk. Besides “the Graduate Assistant route,” which was the scenic detour, there was the more common family way which was to marry a fellow graduate student, the marriage vows often consisting only of promises that each would take his or her turn in working on some job until the other received his or her Ph.D. In 1928 (as in 1975) it always fell out that it was the woman’s turn first to give up her graduate studies and become the breadwinner. By the time the male finally fenced in a Ph.D., the female of the species had had so many children and jobs and was so generally worn-out (or dead) that it was too late for her and she could never bear to open a book again, except for pleasure.

  The “Assistant” half of a Graduate Assistant needs a little more defining before one can appreciate the spectator as well as the billiard player in the coming scene. A Graduate Assistant, in addition to taking graduate courses, could teach up to three sections a quarter of the required course in English Composition at the rate of $200 per section. Financially, this meant that a Graduate Assistant who taught the full schedule of three sections for three quarters of a school year made $1,800. Since many of our freshman in 1928 were still from the rural Middle West, being a Graduate Assistant teaching three sections of English Composition spiritually meant going home late Friday afternoon, having a couple of shots of Prohibition gin, going to bed right after dinner and reading thirty (students) times three (sections) of one-thousand-word compositions on “How to Fill a Silo.” By then, he was too weak to get out of bed, and besides he had to start preparing the graduate courses he was taking.

  So the great difference between the two kinds of needy graduate students in English was in how they spent their weekends in bed. As a result of my weekends, I became an expert on corn, but my conversations with the great physicist were still limited to billiards.

  For instance, we never mentioned bridge; yet I was soon to discover he hurried down to the billiard room before anyone else left upstairs because he wanted to play bridge but was not a good bridge player. Although he was too good at billiards to play with anybody in the club, none of the bridge players in the room next to the billiard tables wanted him for a partner. He coordinated these two facts by eating early, getting downstairs before anyone else, playing billiards by himself for ten or fifteen minutes, and then, just before the first big scraping of chairs upstairs, seating himself at the bridge table where there was room for just three others. But, though I also watched him play bridge, we never spoke about anything except billiards.

  Undoubtedly, then, I would never have exchanged a single word with the Master of Light if I had not been brought up in western Montana, where all my generation spent more time in what were then called Card and Billiard Parlors than in school or at home. In the early part of this century the Card and Billiard Emporium was “the home away from home,” and home was only where we ate and slept. Usually, the first table was the billiard table, because in Montana billiards was thought of as the sport of the upper class and was played only by the town’s best barbers and the one vice-president of the bank. Then came three pool tables with dead cushions and concrete balls that hairy loggers hit so hard they jumped off the tables. At the rear, enthroned by several steps as at the Quadrangle Club, was the card room, in the center of which was the poker table under an enormous green shade. In the glare of the circle of light were always two or three po
ker players trying to look clumsy. They were housemen or “shills” waiting for some lumberjack to drop by who had just cashed his summer’s check. If you were any good at cards yourself, you could see it was hard work for them to look clumsy.

  We high school players were pool players, although we should like to have been billiard players if for no other reason than that each billiard player was so elite he had a woman besides a wife, but we could rarely finance our aspirations. It cost twenty-five cents an hour to play billiards, and only ten cents a game for rotation pool and, as any high school rotation-pool player knows, it is no great trick, when the houseman is not looking, to sneak balls back on the table that have already been sunk and thus to prolong the game.

  When I came to the University as a Graduate Assistant then, I was just as good a billiard player as I had had spare twenty-five cent pieces when I was in high school, and still aspiring to be better, I ate my lunch early to get downstairs and watch the club champion.

  Michelson was the best billiard player I have ever seen at the University, and I think I have seen all the really good ones, including the barbers at the Reynolds Club. At first I was somewhat embarrassed to see how good he was, because I did not expect to find any academic type as good at a “man’s sport” as the best we had in western Montana. But the more I thought about it and the more I learned about Michelson, the less surprised I became. Before long, I comforted myself with the question, “Why not? He’s the best head-and-hands man in the world.”

  So it wasn’t just billiards I watched when I arrived early every noon to watch Michelson play billiards. I came to watch his hands. The year 1928 was still in an age which counted men who made machines among its marvels and took for granted that the rest of men could use tools and that women could embroider beautifully. Edison still performed his wonders, but the wonders of Bell and Edison were more or less household utilities. Michelson’s head-and-hands made machines almost godlike in properties, designed to tell us how it was with the universe. His favorite creation was his interferometer, with which, among other things, he (and later his collaborator, Edward Morley) had performed an experiment that shook the old universe and gave Einstein a big push toward creating a new one with his theory of relativity.

  Before the Michelson-Morley experiment, the common scientific assumption was that the universe consisted of bodies of matter moving through and permeated by a substance that, although invisible, had somehow itself to be material. This substance at first was spelled “aether.” Since Michelson tended to believe that the major theories of the universe were already in and that accordingly the chief jobs left to do were to measure what was sailing around in the ether, his head and hands produced his interferometer which split a light wave, sending one half with the orbit of the earth and back again where it met the other half wave length that had been sent on a return trip at right angles to the orbit of the earth. If there were ether out there (unless it were being carried along by the earth as if it were an envelope of the earth), the expectation was that when the two halves of the light wave rejoined they would be “out of phase,” since one had held a course parallel to “the ether drift” and the other had crossed it at right angles and returned. The difference between the two half-light waves would indeed be small, but Michelson was sure he could measure it—and measure it he did, again and again—only to conclude reluctantly that there was no difference and that therefore there was no stationary ether “out there” and that light traveled at equal velocity in all directions.

  In 1928 we only crudely knew how these negative results of the Michelson-Morley experiment opened the universe to Einstein’s theories of relativity and we had even vaguer notions of the kind of machine that left Newtonian physics lying in a heap feebly struggling to get out from under its own ruins.

  I had heard, however, something about the interferometer, and, having worked ten or eleven summers in the Forest Service and logging camps, I had enough feeling for tools to make it hard for me to keep my mind solely on billiards. After Michelson would run ten or twelve billiards with a touch so delicate that the three balls could always be covered by a hat, I found myself wondering how he had ever made a machine so delicate its finding would be invalid if it vibrated half a wave length of light, a whole wave length of light being so small that it can’t be seen by our most powerful microscope. A fancy, wide-angle billiard would also take my mind off the game, because I knew just from the nature of the experiment that the machine had to turn ninety degrees without vibration (in mercury, I later found) so that any change in the pattern of the light waves could be observed. Perhaps the most American, air-conditioned question I kept asking was, “How the hell in the 1880s did he ever keep the machine in a temperature that probably couldn’t vary a tenth of a degree?”

  You don’t have to have a diagram of the interferometer to realize why it was Michelson’s favorite creation or why Michelson must have felt about his interferometer something of the way Galileo felt about his telescope:

  “O telescope, instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any sceptre! Is not he who holds thee in his hand made king and lord of the works of God?”

  But even this poetical outpouring isn’t as moving a tribute to a machine as the factual statement about the interferometer made by Arthur Stanley Eddington, the English astronomer; it is a machine, he said, that can detect “a lag of one-ten-thousand-billionth of a second in the arrival of a light wave.”

  A MASTER’S HANDS

  No wonder that before long the astronomers tried to enlist Michelson’s hands in their service and succeeded. Dissatisfied with their own attempts, they urged him to give them the first accurate measurement of a star. For the first star ever to have its diameter measured accurately he picked a big one with a big name a long way off—Betelgeuse, linear diameter 240,000,000 miles (2,300 times larger than our sun) and 150 light years from the earth.

  His hands were legendary long before I ever saw them. As legend, they were part fact and some fiction. For instance, I soon heard he was a fine violinist and a mini-Stradivarius who made his own beautiful instruments, but I think the truth is that, while his Jewish father was out selling pick-handles to California gold miners, his Polish mother kept him indoors to “practice, practice, practice,” with the result that he became a fine violinist and, in his turn, spent half an hour before going to his lab in passing on his love and skill to his daughters. The business, though, about his making violins was just a fictional tribute to his hands.

  It is a fact, however, that at the end of his first year at Annapolis he stood at the top of his class in drawing and that all his life he expressed himself by sketches and watercolors. Often in late afternoons if you looked over the wall in front of his beautiful home at 1220 East 58th Street (just behind the Robie House) you could see him in the sunshine and shadow of his yard painting shadow and sunshine.

  Many of his last late afternoons in Chicago he spent either in his yard or at the Quadrangle Club. In those days, before so much of the Quadrangle Club was turned into an eating place, there was a beautiful chess room on the second floor, and on late afternoons his slightly stooped shoulders were often reflected in the dark and light squares of ingrained wood. He had been good enough once to play the American chess champion, Frank James Marshall, who however was not overpowered by his unorthodox openings, as most of his opponents were, and is supposed to have remarked that the physicist’s game was a little long on imagination and passion.

  He also had the reputation of having been a very good tennis player, but I have no memory of ever seeing him play; perhaps at seventy-five he had quit the game, but supposedly he had been very good.

  It may not be so surprising as it first seems that he was not a good bridge player, although always wanting to be in the game. It is hard to predict just where there is going to be a gap in somebody’s genetic tape, and, before I ever heard the word “genetic,” I was learning in the Quadrangle Club that a gene can be very narrow and not include what se
ems almost necessarily a part of it. For instance, Leonard Eugene Dickson, the outstanding mathematician, who at the time was writing his classic works on the theory of numbers, was sometimes a poor card player. Anton J. Carlson was also not a good bridge player, although he was nationally famous as an exponent of the scientific method in the biological sciences (“Vat iss da evidence?”). In fact, there were quite a few card players in western Montana who would have taken the money from the world-famous intellectuals who gathered at noon in the card room of the Quadrangle Club in those days (and since).

  After watching Michelson play bridge for a while, you could predict more or less the kind of mistake he would make, and it was not unrelated to the American champion’s description of his chess game. He would make a bid short of game, but, after getting the bid, would see that, if he took and made two long finesses, he could come in with a little slam. Of course, a little slam would make only a few points difference since he hadn’t bid it, but he would take the two finesses and not only lose both but lose his bid on an absolutely “lay-down hand.” He was a rather small man, as you know, and he would look with almost childlike incredulity at the ruined remains of his daring invention of two long finesses where none was a sure thing.

  There may also have been a causal relation between his shortcomings in bridge and chess. As the great head-and-hands scientist, the games that he was really good at involved great skill with a cue, a violin bow, a paint brush or a racket, but chess and bridge required no gift of hands. This is just a guess. The University of Chicago had as yet no Nobel Prize winners by the names of George Wells Beadle and James Dewey Watson to decode the hodge-podge of genetic tape that makes us one, or to explain why Michelson, who when it came to games was a mini–Leonardo da Vinci, with a wide spread of gifts, was not wanted as a bridge partner. It is easier to understand Carlson’s case—we certainly don’t think of there being much connection between animal experimentation and fifty-two cards and two jokers—and there wasn’t.