Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  Job offers accumulated. Columbia University wanted him. Bristol University in the U.K. The Observatory in Greenwich intimated that they would make him an assistant Astronomer Royal.26 A lectureship at Cambridge materialized. Everyone had questions about the new methods. “Soon I shall have to engage a secretary,” Dyson said.27 He missed the old days riding Greyhound buses.

  Dyson had been taking his meaningful bus trips around America just about the same time another young man, Jack Kerouac, was covering similar territory by automobile. When he finally rested from his travels, Kerouac taped together many sheets of paper and fed them into a typewriter. This famous scroll of paper, 120 feet long, became the novel On the Road. Dyson’s equivalent of the scroll, his two articles in Physical Review, were nearly as long as Kerouac’s, at least in typescript. Kerouac’s book, a romantic retelling of his journeys, became a cult favorite and is read by impressionable college students to this day. Dyson’s articles, the upright, mathed-up retelling of his Nebraska cerebral hailstorm, had a cult following among physics graduate students, and provided the best explanation of quantum electrodynamics (QED) for several crucial years.

  Beatlemania reached frenzy proportion when in 1964 the Fab Four flew from Britain to America. Dyson, at the crest of his wave in 1949, was about to abandon America to return to Britain, and he wasn’t happy about it. The terms of his foundation grant, the fellowship that allowed him to come to the United States in the first place, discouraged him from taking a regular job in the States for two years. Dyson could have wiggled out of this restriction, but didn’t: “It was a matter of honor. I’d given my word as a gentleman.”28 Consequently, he didn’t become a professor at Columbia. Instead he chose from among three posts at British institutions.

  His newfound friend, Oppenheimer, gave him blunt advice. At the University of Bristol, Dyson would be able to work with the best experimental physicist in the U.K., Cecil Powell. At Birmingham he would get to work with one of the best theoretical physicists in the U.K., Rudolf Peierls. And at Cambridge he would get, well, the best architecture in the U.K.29

  Oppie, trying to be as cheerful as possible, argued that it would be good to get out and spend time in Europe—seeing what physics was like over there as he himself had done as a younger man—as if Dyson were an American and not a European. And in a sense he was right. Dyson had become American. Oppie hinted, moreover, that Dyson would be welcome back to Princeton on some partial basis, splitting his time among several institutions. For the next five years Dyson could come and go at the Institute as he liked. Only one other foreign scientist had been granted such carte blanche: Niels Bohr.30

  Dyson would miss being so close to the action. He had thought of taking a job at the University of Toronto. At least there he would be on the same continent as Bethe and Feynman. But that didn’t happen. Furthermore, Dyson had another reason to be sad.

  DYSON IN LOVE

  Freeman Dyson and his pretty Institute colleague Cécile Morette had gone out to social events together. No, they were not dating. At least in Dyson’s mind he was sure on this score.31 On one outing they had gone to Manhattan to shop for some presents Dyson wanted to send his family in Britain. At the end of this long day, Cécile was puzzled and even put out. She had helped Freeman but not gotten even a cup of tea out of it. What kind of gentleman was he?32

  Dyson had little experience with females, certainly not at the all-boy schools where he’d spent so many years. “Winchester has a homosexual culture and is famous for producing homosexuals,” said Dyson. “In Winchester you formed these intense emotional ties which are not quite homosexual, but platonic homosexual.… I was not sure at that point whether I was a homosexual.” He was relieved, later at Cambridge while hanging out with his popular friend Oscar Hahn, to find himself smitten by a girl. He was greatly relieved by this feeling, which he regarded as a kind of discovery.33

  His year at Cornell seemed to have been all physics, all the time. But his thoughts about the opposite sex had not vanished. In fact, he envied his married friends. He looked forward to marriage.34

  A year later, as he was ready to leave again, this time from Princeton to Birmingham, Cécile invited him to a picnic. There he met another Institute scholar. He’d seen her before, knew that she was smart, and now he had a chance to speak to her. A week later he chivalrously accompanied her to traffic court—a matter relating to her having run a stop sign—since he felt she shouldn’t have to go alone.

  Verena Huber had traveled more widely even than Dyson. She was born on May 6, 1923, in Naples, Italy, where her father worked as a businessman. She grew up in Athens, Greece, where her father had taken up a post at the International Red Cross. In 1942, at the age of nineteen, she married mathematician Hans Haefeli, four years her senior. Three years later she was the mother of a daughter. The little girl was named Katarina for Catherine the Great, whose biography Verena had been reading.

  The young mother earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Zurich, and then she, Hans, and Katarina embarked for America in January 1948. Verena felt that the marriage was not working out, and by an amicable arrangement, the couple divorced; Hans went to Harvard for a fellowship, while Verena moved temporarily to Urbana, Illinois, taking Katarina with her.

  Verena soon secured a new research spot, at the Institute for Advanced Study, but arrived too late in the fall of 1948 to receive much financial support. Freeman Dyson’s first impression of her was that she was glamorous and brilliant. Her first impression of him? She was intrigued that he possessed enough detachment to be able to fall asleep on the leather couches of the Institute’s common room and to remain asleep even amid the dozens of people around him having their afternoon tea.

  This was an exhilarating moment for Dyson. The rigors of Winchester College and the coming of world war meant that he’d never really been a teenager. Now he had the chance. A hectic ride in Verena’s car was for him living on the wild side.35

  Shortly thereafter, while Verena was preparing dinner one evening and with Katarina playing out front on the lawn, the little girl came inside. “Look who I am bringing you for tea,” she said, pulling Freeman into the room. And since the dinner then under preparation wasn’t fancy enough for guests, that’s all he got—tea. He was offered something stronger to drink but declined.

  A few nights later, Freeman was over again and an awkward conversation took place. Freeman’s mother was getting on in age, he said, and desired to have grandchildren while she could still enjoy them. “Well,” asked Verena, “do you have any suitable girl in mind?” His one-word reply, “You,” took her by surprise. She suspected that he might have been relieved when she quickly declined his preposterous offer. Her actual words were more tactful. They hardly knew each other. They’d just met. Besides, she was already having a pleasant romance with another Institute physicist, Abraham Pais.36

  The academic year was running to a close. Verena secured a job at nearby Goucher College outside Baltimore and would be spending the summer in California. Freeman, with a job waiting in Britain, sailed for Europe in July. While he crossed the ocean east, she drove her Dodge west in the company of Cécile and Katrina. In several cities they passed along the way, in the main post office, under the address of general delivery, was a letter from the persistent and punctilious Englishman.37

  5. Recessional

  Dyson as Professor

  (1949–1953)

  Freeman Dyson was arguably the most in demand physicist in the world. Not the most famous: Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr were still alive. Nor had he outdone Richard Feynman in creativity, pulling new physics ideas out of airy nothingness. But if you wanted to know the new quantum rules of the road, if you wanted to manipulate the new diagrams, then Dyson was the guy you invited to give the departmental seminar. His papers in Physical Review were the ones you had to read. Hans Bethe, commending Dyson for yet another fellowship, called Dyson the best English theoretical physicist since Paul Dirac.1

  BIRMINGHAMr />
  Dyson had returned to Europe for a victory lap. His mission, as he referred to it in self-mocking terms in a letter to his parents, was “to teach these backward Europeans some physics.”2 In September 1949 he attended meetings in Basle and at Lake Como, where he was an object of curiosity, even among the now middle-aged wunderkinder of quantum mechanics. Wolfgang Pauli, a little gruff at first, showed friendly interest. Werner Heisenberg solicited Dyson’s opinion on several topics.

  Just as the British Empire in Victorian times had spread across the globe, so Dyson’s handiwork was making landfall everywhere. Dyson had talked up his QED methods to his Princeton colleagues, who, as they accepted permanent jobs elsewhere, transmitted Dyson’s approach. During the five-year period 1949–1954, 80 percent of the Physical Review papers devoted to the diagrams originated with people who had been at the Institute for Advanced Study.3 The QED diagrams were spreading like an epidemic.4 Even Gregor Wentzel, the man whose textbook had taught Dyson about field theory in the first place, was now at the University of Chicago and was using Dyson’s articles from Physical Review.

  In Britain, Dyson’s new boss, Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham, wanted to learn more about QED and how to wield those doodley diagrams. The man who had coached Dyson through Wentzel’s book, Nicholas Kemmer at Cambridge, also employed using Dyson’s papers. Physicists in Japan, home to Shin’ichiro Tomonaga, were avidly pursuing the papers.5 The same was true for scientists in the Soviet Union.6

  Like Feynman, Dyson allowed himself to believe or at least to hope that quantum electrodynamics was just the starting point for a more comprehensive theoretical description of nature. Here is maximum Dyson, at the high-water mark of his ambition: “We have the key to the universe. Quantum electrodynamics works and does everything you wanted it to do. We understand how to calculate everything concerned with electrons and photons. Now all that remains is merely to apply the same methods to understand weak interactions, to understand gravitation and to understand nuclear forces.”7

  This was Dyson trying to encompass the universe within a single theory. Things were of course going to be more complicated than that. There would be no “merely” about applying the methods of QED to explain the rest of physics.

  Dyson the bachelor moved into Peierls’s home and took many of his meals there. Peierls’s children remember Dyson as being fastidious. He seemingly examined every single pea before eating it.8 Peierls was another of those friendly father figures who helped Dyson through the early phases of his career. Like Hans Bethe, Peierls was an expert in a number of physics areas, especially nuclear physics, and had been a notable contributor to the development of the atomic bomb. He accurately calculated the critical mass of uranium needed for detonation. Niels Bohr’s earlier, larger, and incorrect estimate of the critical mass had made it seem unlikely that a bomb could be built at all. Peierls’s estimate of a much lower amount, by contrast, reassured researchers—if reassurance is the right word for such a thing—that making a bomb was feasible after all.

  Peierls and Bethe had both obtained Ph.D.’s at the University of Munich in the late 1920s and were friends and correspondents for over sixty years. Not only did letters travel between the two men and their respective universities, Cornell and Birmingham, but also people. Dyson was one of a parade of students or postdoctoral fellows who went in one direction or the other. Some of the other prominent physicists included James Langer, Richard Dalitz, Elliott Lieb, Edwin Salpeter, Nina Byers, and Gerry Brown.

  Peierls’s wife, Genia, was also kindly toward their scientist boarders. A few years before, another young physicist, Klaus Fuchs, had roomed at the Peierls home and had taken dinner at this same table. Fuchs still came by for a visit now and then. He was a German by birth but had gone off to do wartime nuclear bomb work for the Allies. With Peierls’s recommendation, Fuchs had been invited to do sensitive research at Los Alamos, the very epicenter of secret nuclear research. On these postwar visits to the Peierls home, Fuchs liked to play with the children. Dyson met him and thought him a fine fellow.

  It came as a great shock when in February 1950 Fuchs was arrested and later convicted of espionage for having passed Los Alamos secrets to the Soviets.9 Rudolf Peierls felt betrayed. It was he who had brought Fuchs into the bomb’s inner circle. Fuchs was not only a spy but the atomic spy. Genia Peierls, so trusting, was even more devastated than her husband.10

  Being back in Britain meant that Dyson saw more of his parents. And while he missed them when he was away in the United States, he found that he quarreled with them when he was in England. Verena was a point of contention. Couldn’t he choose another girl?11

  ANN ARBOR

  Dyson liked Peierls and liked bringing the gospel of electrodynamics to Europe. But he longed to return to the western side of the Atlantic. That’s where the interesting physics was taking place, and that’s where Verena was. He and she had been keeping up a correspondence for the year Freeman was away. Under the terms of his fellowship at Birmingham he would be allowed to come back to the United States for the summer of 1950.

  He would circle back to the same summer school in Ann Arbor where he himself had been a student only two years before. But now he’d be there as a teacher. Couldn’t Verena find a way also of coming to Michigan?

  Freeman was inwardly following a policy of never allowing himself to be attracted to a woman if he wasn’t prepared to marry her.12

  Let’s consider the consequences of this extraordinary injunction. A young man who fills most of his hours with differential equations, who gets the highest scores and wins the best prizes at the top schools, who has carefully cultivated a regimen in which all thoughts are bent toward science—what does he see when he looks up from the page in the presence of a pretty woman? He sees nothing. Or rather he has disciplined himself against this particular force of attraction.

  Or maybe now when he gazed at Verena things were different. Having won a deserved breathing space after this quantum labors and triumphant publications in Physical Review, he allowed himself an extra helping of human feeling. Under these circumstances the pursuit of the lady became as ardent as the pursuit of the Lamb shift had been. In his letters to Verena, however, Freeman had tactfully not renewed his proposal of marriage. Instead he merely pined.

  Actually, Freeman’s gaze had settled on other women, at least a little bit, during the previous year. Freeman wanted Verena to know about Hilde Jacob, the girl he’d met in Germany the summer of 1947. It’s true she didn’t mean that much to him, he said, but he had sort of promised Hilde that he and she would take a hiking tour of Switzerland together. This was confusing enough for Verena—did he love her or this German girl?—but now Freeman was asking Verena’s help in arranging this hike. Freeman was hoping that Verena’s sister, Heidy, who lived in Geneva, could suggest an itinerary. Freeman made clear that he and Hilde would always room separately.13

  Now in 1950, Freeman returned to New York by ship and rushed down to Verena in Baltimore. Together with Katarina they drove up to Michigan. Freeman would teach QED at the summer school and Verena would audit a course taught by a former Zurich colleague. Freeman lived in a dormitory, Verena and Katarina in a small apartment. Although they would see each other many evenings, letters back and forth continued even though now there was no ocean between them.

  Or maybe there was. Verena wanted Freeman to know something important. A few years earlier she had met a man in Europe who proved to be, so she said, the great love of her life. She loved this other man with such deep feeling that she felt that he would always be at the core of her life. He was much older than she, and there was no question of marrying him. He, not her former husband, Hans Haefeli, was Katarina’s father. Hans, informed of all this, had been very understanding; he was willing to go on living with Verena and Katarina. It was Verena who thought that things would be better for Hans if he and she divorced, and he had accepted this judgment.

  Now it was Freeman’s turn to be unreasonably understa
nding. How could he accept such an arrangement? He accommodated the notion that Verena would forever keep an emotional corner of herself in reserve for this other man. Freeman wondered why his colleague at the Institute, Abraham Pais, had not proposed marriage to Verena. It turns out that Pais was not so accepting of Verena’s previous love. “Der alter Mann muss vergessen werden,” Pais had said using the German phrase, meaning that the old man must be forgotten when the new man arrived.14 This Verena could not do, so Pais and she had parted.

  Freeman was attracted to Verena and so, by his particular rules of engagement, marriage was his official aim. His suit was renewed. The mating dance moved to its next level.

  Sexual attraction is naturally a vital force in the lives of women and men. The interaction between two people is more complicated than the interaction between two electrons. Instead of a swarm of virtual photons being exchanged at the microscopic level, the attraction (or its opposite, revulsion) between humans is expressed in waves of emotions sent flying through the nervous system. Surges of hormones launch themselves into the body’s biochemical environment. General attraction begins in adolescence as a ticklish curiosity and then proceeds to an active abiding interest in the other person. But be careful. The first foray into actual sexual practice, when it finally comes, can be a confusing mixture of exhilaration and dismay.

  So it was for Freeman. After several tentative sessions with Verena, success, of a sort, was finally achieved. When he showed his face again the next day at Verena’s apartment, he voiced his ambivalence. According to Verena, Freeman admitted to feeling cheap. On another day he went so far as to say that she, the more experienced one, had made him feel cheap.15 Maybe they shouldn’t have rushed into doing this thing. How was she supposed to feel at the sound of this, especially when Freeman’s formal proposal of marriage remained in force?