The New York meeting was from my point of view a fantastic affair. All my friends from Cornell, Ann Arbor, and Princeton were there, besides many others, and it was a continual social gathering from morning till night. On the first day the real fun began. I was sitting in the middle of the hall and in the front, with Feynman beside me, and there rose to the platform to speak a young man from Columbia whom I know dimly. The young man had done some calculations using methods of Feynman and me, and he did not confine himself to stating this fact but referred again and again to “the beautiful theory of Feynman-Dyson” in gushing tones. After he said this the first time, Feynman turned to me and remarked in a loud voice, “Well, Doc, you’re in.” Then as the young man went on, Feynman continued to make irreverent comments, much to the entertainment of the audience near him. Later on Feynman himself spoke on his own work and created so much uproar with his clowning that the audience voted him twice the usual time for his talk.
On the second day Oppenheimer gave a presidential address in the big hall, and such is the glamour of his name (after being on the cover of Time) that the hall was packed with two thousand people half an hour before he was due to start. He spoke on the title “Fields and Quanta” and gave a good historical summary of the vicissitudes of field theory. What was overwhelming was that at the end he spoke in enthusiastic terms of the work I have been doing and said that it was pointing the way for the immediate future, even if it did not seem deep enough to carry us farther than that. I just sat there feeling small. You can just imagine what my life was like for the next twenty-four hours; one person after another pursuing me and asking to be told all about it, and sometimes several patiently waiting their turn. I am becoming a Big Shot with a vengeance.
I don’t know why Oppenheimer should have been so indiscreet. Perhaps it is partly because I am English, and he is much concerned with impressing upon the nationalistic war generation the fact that science is an international activity. However that may be, I believe I am wise enough to enjoy this sort of success without being taken in by it; if I were not, I have the example of Feynman to instruct me.
I had sent to my parents a copy of “The Open Mind,” an article by Oppenheimer that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, to give them a taste of his style and personality. They found the article puzzling, and I wrote this letter to explain why.
FEBRUARY 15, 1949
Oppenheimer is always so successful in avoiding oversimplifying a problem, and touches so delicately the state of mind of a man who is having to move between the world of ideals and the world of realities, that when he has finished, you ask yourself, “Now just what did he say?” And the answer is that he uses words deliberately to suggest rather than to define, and means to say different things to different people. But I think that to nobody were these remarks meant as an appeal for the abolition of secrecy and coercion. To my mind they were first of all an appeal for patience, and balance, and humility before the unknowable forces of history. They were addressed to the college president from the prairies, who wanted his students to cure the world’s ills by their own efforts. They were also addressed to the scientists who think they could solve the problems of politics if it were not for the politicians. But in addition they were addressed to the politicians, and to the ordinary public which follows the lead of the politicians; to point out to them the essential place in scientific ethics of the ideals of openness and noncoercion, and the vast practical difference between making a compromise between honestly held ideals and expediency and not having any ideals. I don’t know how you can read through this article without being struck by the grimness of Oppenheimer’s philosophy, and his deep awareness of the irresoluble conflicts and tragedies of the present age. It is not for nothing that his chosen model is Lincoln, a liberal not at all of the prosperous aristocratic kind, and a man whose life was spent in the exercise of coercion.
If I know Oppenheimer at all, he had thought all these things out thoroughly before he started making atomic bombs. It was Lincoln’s great achievement, in the long run, that he was able to make effective use of coercion and still create a legend of honesty and magnanimity which influenced his contemporaries and his remote successors. I believe this is not a bad solution. It was always Oppenheimer’s aim, and one which at least partially was achieved, that the American government and people should be honestly convinced of the desirability of handing over their atomic weapons to an international authority. Whether such an international authority could exist, now or in the foreseeable future, was a separate problem and one which only history could answer. But he felt that by making a sincere and extended stand for international control, the American government and he himself could to some extent expiate the guilt of Hiroshima and could create a tradition which would endure like Lincoln’s to influence the minds of future generations.
FEBRUARY 28, 1949, CHICAGO
On Thursday we had Feynman down to Princeton, and he stayed till I left on Sunday. He gave in three days about eight hours of seminars, besides long private discussions. This was a magnificent effort, and I believe all the people at the institute began to understand what he is doing. I at least learnt a great deal. He was as usual in an enthusiastic mood, waving his arms about a lot and making everybody laugh. Even Oppenheimer began to get the spirit of the thing and said some things less sceptical than is his habit. Feynman was obviously anxious to talk and would have gone on quite indefinitely if he had been allowed; he must have been suffering from the same bottled-up feeling that I had when I was full of ideas last autumn. The trouble with him is that he never will publish what he does; I sometimes feel guilty for having cut in front of him with his own ideas. However, he is now at last writing up two big papers, which will display his genius to the world; and it is possible that I have helped to make him do this by making him conscious of being cut in on, which if it be true is a valuable service on my part.
The day before Feynman came, Eugenio Lattes was in Princeton. He gave a first-rate talk to our seminar about the work which is being done at Berkeley. Afterwards I had the luck to talk with him for a long time in private and hear some of his story. It was good for me, for reasons which will soon be clear. Lattes is the young Brazilian physicist, now aged twenty-four, who is the co-discoverer of the heavy meson. He started his meteoric career by joining Powell’s team at Bristol, and with Powell he did very well, and his name was with the others on the paper announcing the finding of the meson. Then last spring he went over to Berkeley, and as soon as he got there, he became the discoverer of the first artificial meson, by the simple process of noticing that the Berkeley people had been developing their photographic plates for too short a time. When he developed some plates the proper way, there were the mesons. Now it happened that the newspapers and the government in Brazil heard about these events and were not well-enough informed to know what it was really about. And so when Lattes went home to see his family last summer, he found that five radio networks had come with microphones to the airfield to broadcast his homecoming speech, and he was received in state by the president of the republic and the governors of three states. In fact, he was the greatest physicist who ever lived.
Now comes the remarkable part of the story. Lattes, in spite of having been the victim of this fantastic accident, is a good physicist. He is also a modest and far-sighted young man. And so he decided to push for all he was worth, while the going was good, for the endowment of a decent Institute of Physics, with enough money to pay for students to study there and to travel to the United States and Europe, and for a good permanent staff of active physicists. Thus he plunged headlong into the arena of politics and high finance and went around interviewing all kinds of people, mainly millionaires and politicians, and in a few weeks he had enough money to get the thing launched. And it is really going to be built, in São Paulo, where Lattes himself was a student.
Lattes himself takes a very long view of all this. He says, with a country as big and as backward as Brazil, it is not to be expected that
a first-class centre of pure science will spring up. Rather he hopes that the opposite will happen, that his institute will be a stimulus to the development of the country and will be exploited by the industries from a practical point of view, as a place where engineers can get a first-class scientific education. He says the most important immediate objective is merely to raise the prestige of science, so that the few people who do get a higher education do not consider science beneath their dignity. It made me feel very strange, to be talking to this young man, a mere boy in appearance, who has had all these responsibilities dropped into his lap by the ironic Fates. Amongst other things, by going back to Brazil and devoting himself to these projects, he is deliberately sacrificing what would be a fine opportunity to continue his own work at Berkeley. He says he will have plenty of time. But most striking of all is the objectivity and sense of humour with which he regards all these events. What a lucky thing it is that it was Lattes this happened to and not someone else! It seems my own history at the moment has a little (very little in comparison) of the same quality, so I am grateful to Lattes for setting such an admirable example.
Shortly after our conversation, Lattes returned to Brazil and successfully raised money to support programs of physical research. After a promising start, he became entangled in financial and political scandals. He escaped from the turmoil but abandoned his hopes of leading a scientific revolution in his homeland. He spent the rest of his life as a professor of physics at various universities in Brazil.
MARCH 11, 1949
I must now start to tell about my adventures in Chicago. This will be a long story, and even so I shall not be able to do the real thing justice; never have I met so many outstanding people and talked so much and eaten so much and drunk so much and slept so little in one week. The head of the cosmic ray division, Professor Marcel Schein, was responsible for my welfare. Schein is a dear old boy, rather garrulous but still energetic, who came to Chicago from Zürich many years ago. When I arrived he was very excited because he had just got his first batch of electron-sensitive photographic plates from the Eastman Kodak company; these plates are a great advance on anything previously known, but are still very hard to make and to handle. The first such plates were made by the English Kodak people at Harrow, but they are so temperamental that they do not usually survive being flown across the Atlantic; that is why Powell at Bristol has been enjoying a monopoly of them for some months. It was important to send such good plates as these up to one hundred thousand feet to record what is happening at the top of the atmosphere, and Schein had the necessary apparatus for this. In England there is not much use in sending up things to one hundred thousand feet, because they will usually come down in the sea. So there were about twenty people gathered on Thursday morning to watch the historic occasion when Schein sent up his first batch of plates. It was a filthy morning, with clouds and strong wind, but they had no choice but to go ahead with the launching, because the plates deteriorate so rapidly. The launching was done with great efficiency, with ten light rubber balloons about ten feet across; each balloon was held by one man on a string, and the string was then fastened to the little box containing the plates and a recording altimeter. One by one the men let go of their balloons, until finally the last man let go and the whole apparatus shot up into the air and majestically disappeared into the clouds.
Two days later the plates returned in triumph, having been brought home from somewhere in Ohio after a successful flight of about ten hours at one hundred thousand feet. And on Monday the plates were developed, and I was looking at them through the microscope. When you look at the plates like that, you see nothing but a maze of rather uninteresting tracks, made by fast particles of unknown speed and nature. It takes several weeks before you have scanned the plates to make sure there is nothing spectacular recorded. To sort out all the detailed information in such plates is a formidable job, which I doubt Schein’s group will ever do adequately. Schein is not enough of a slave-driver; also, he lacks other qualities which make Powell unique in this field.
For the physics talk, I had the satisfaction of being moved from a smaller classroom into a larger one because too many people turned up. I spoke mainly about the way the Schwinger theory and mine link up with each other, and I was very polite to Schwinger. At the end of it, Edward Teller, of whom I shall have more to say later, asked the following question: “What would you think of a man who cried, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,’ and then at once drank down a great tankard of wine?” He said that he himself would consider the man a very sensible fellow. Teller is a Hungarian, being one of the famous four, the others being Wigner, Szilard, and von Neumann, who grew up around the same time in one particular district in Budapest, and who are now all in outstanding positions in the United States. Teller made the move from Europe to America in 1935.
Teller to me has always been something of an enigma; he has done all kinds of interesting things in physics but never the same thing for long, and he seems to do physics for fun rather than for glory. However, during the last few years there have been reports that he has been engaged in perfecting the most fiendish engines of destruction; and I have always wondered how such a man could do such things. In Chicago I found without difficulty the answer; I started a long argument with him about political questions, and it appears that he is an ardent supporter of the World Government movement, an organization which preaches salvation in the form of a world government, to be set up in the near future with or without Russia, and to have sovereign powers over the economic and social policies of its member nations. Teller evidently finds this faith soothing to his conscience; he preaches it with great charm and intelligence; all the same, I feel that he is a good example of the saying that no man is so dangerous as an idealist.
Of the other people whom I met, one was Fermi, the great Italian physicist and one of few men alive who has done first-rate work both in theory and in experiment; during the war he was the boss of the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory which built the first pile and ran the plutonium production project. He came up a few weeks ago with a brand-new theory concerning the origin of cosmic rays. He listened with close attention to everything I said, and said not much himself; in this he differs from Oppenheimer. The most striking thing about these people, and also their wives whom I met as I went from house to house and from family to family, is how happy they seem to be; all of them say they have never found any place on earth so pleasant to be in as Chicago. There seems to be an exceptionally free and easy atmosphere, rather like Cornell, and with the added advantages of a metropolitan city.
Another remarkable man I met was André Weil. I was lucky enough to go for a long walk with him along the lakeshore and to discuss the world’s problems. He is one of the finest living mathematicians, still quite young (about thirty-five), and with a stormy career behind him. He is a Frenchman but has always regarded himself as a citizen of the world; as soon as he had taken his degree, he went to India for two years and learned Hindustani and Indian literature while at the same time teaching mathematics and trying (he says unsuccessfully) to inspire the Indians with a little enthusiasm for the subject. After this he returned to France for a time but was then overtaken by the war; being a conscientious objector, he was put in prison, and there wrote an epoch-making work on topological groups. In the French defeat and ensuing confusion, he managed to escape by a devious route to Brazil and was a professor of mathematics at São Paulo for three years, where he achieved, he said, slightly but not much more than at the Moslem University in India. Then finally he found a haven of refuge at Chicago, where he has lived happily ever after. He takes an extremely dim view of the prospects of the world and expresses this view with the best epigrammatic polish. Particularly he was horrified by the moral decay which he believes to have overtaken France, and he says it is graft and dishonesty which keep Brazil backward much more than material poverty. I was enthralled with his conversation, not so much for the generalizations as for the
particular stories about India, Brazil, etc.
André Weil was the brother of the famous writer Simone Weil who wrote about religious and mystical experiences. Simone died young. André had enormous respect for her and continued for all his life to mourn her death.
Apart from all these great men, there were innumerable other people who came to one or other of the parties with which I was entertained. I felt at the end of a week that I knew Chicago and its people much better than I ever knew Cambridge, and it is precisely this open friendliness that everyone likes about it. Several times it was hinted to me that I could do worse than to settle down in Chicago, and I felt very much inclined to agree.
My position at Birmingham is more or less fixed. Peierls says he can get me a fellowship with no duties to speak of, and I have officially resigned my Trinity fellowship. The details of the Birmingham fellowship will be fixed up in the next month or two. What is more important, Peierls says he can take me in as a lodger in his own house. To live with the Peierls family would be pleasant in many ways, as they are energetic and interesting people.
As you may have guessed, I do not expect that the barrage of invitations and lectures and trips which I am enjoying here will stop when I return to Europe. I intend to travel around a lot under my own steam and try to help pull European physics together. If I am to do this, it is Bohr most of all whose blessing I shall need. I have never met Bohr, and I have undoubtedly a tremendous lot to learn by going and working in his institute at Copenhagen and listening to his views about all sorts of questions.
Niels Bohr was the leading physicist of Europe, second only to Einstein in the world. In his institute in Copenhagen, Bohr had presided over the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and ’30s. I never went to work at Copenhagen. I got to know Bohr under totally different circumstances in California ten years later.
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