Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  After Edward Teller and I and the other summer visitors departed from La Jolla, the people who remained at General Atomic reversed the decision we had made in July. They decided to go ahead with the safe reactor project using my design instead of Teller’s. The main difference between the two designs was that Teller used engineering tricks to make the reactor safe while I used laws of nature. A reactor emerged within a year from my ideas. The company designed it, built it, licensed it, and sold it, all within two years, a time scale that would be unthinkable today. They sold altogether seventy-five reactors, mostly to hospitals. None of them gave any trouble to their owners, and several are still running now after more than half a century. The person who did the detailed design of the reactor was Massoud Simnad, a brilliant Iranian chemist, settled in the United States but enjoying friendly relations with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Nuclear engineering requires more chemistry than physics. The physical ideas that I contributed were simple, while the chemical ideas that Massoud Simnad supplied were complicated and brilliant. The essential trick that made the reactor safe was to load the fuel heavily with hydrogen in a chemical form that remained stable at high temperatures.

  NOVEMBER 13, 1956

  Last Tuesday we sat up with the television at the house of some friends, watching the election results come in. This is a ritual which has a dramatic quality, even when the results are known in advance. In this case the presidential vote was no surprise, but there were many exciting struggles in the Senate and House, and these mostly ended satisfactorily with a Democratic majority. At one-thirty Stevenson came to the camera and made his speech conceding the election, then Eisenhower came and made his speech, and we went home to bed. Eisenhower was impressive and Stevenson not. I guess Stevenson is fed up with the whole business.

  A lot of talk about the affairs of Hungary and Egypt. People here are mostly strong Israel supporters and were happy when England and France attacked Egypt. But it seems this view is not widely supported in the rest of the country outside Princeton and New York City. One hears very often the statement that Nasser is like Hitler and it is necessary not to repeat the mistake made in 1936 when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland without interference from France. My opinion is that this statement is correct and still offers no solution to the problem. I believe if France had invaded Germany in 1936 to remove Hitler from the government, the whole world (especially America) would have held up their hands in horror. And the end would have been a French retreat and German victory, just as it was in 1924. It seems clear now that the policy of attacking Egypt will not be maintained firmly or consistently enough to do any good.

  In 1923 the German government refused to pay the reparations imposed by the Versailles Treaty, and France sent an army to occupy the Ruhr area of Germany and enforce the Treaty. After a while, the German economy collapsed and the French army of occupation withdrew. The main result of the invasion was to strengthen the popular support for Hitler in Germany.

  I heard some interesting remarks about the Hungarian affair from my neighbour George Kennan. He said, from his whole experience of Russia, the behaviour of Russia during the first week of the rebellion could not be explained except by some paralysing crisis in the Russian government. He suggests as the most likely explanation that the Red Army refused to take on the job of policing the satellite countries indefinitely. Then when the rebels went too far in their anti-Russian policy, even the army agreed that they had to put a stop to it.

  The Soviet army occupying Hungary stood aside and did nothing for a whole week, while a group of anti-Communist Hungarian rebels took over the government. The delay of the Soviet response astonished Kennan. At the end of that week, the Soviet troops finally moved to crush the rebellion. The rebels mostly escaped from Hungary to Austria and found refuge in Western Europe and America.

  DECEMBER 14, 1956

  Last weekend we were brave enough to drive up to Ithaca. The children loved to walk on the frozen lake (we have no real winter yet here) and throw snowballs at each other. We stayed with some people called Gold whom I knew well in Cambridge ten years ago. Tommy Gold is a brilliant fellow and is equally at home in physics and astronomy. He got the job of chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal when I refused it four years ago. He was a great success there and got along well with [Harold] Spencer-Jones. Spencer-Jones understood that his own job was to run the observatory and allow the younger people a free hand to research and innovate. Tommy instituted a cosmic ray program at Herstmonceux and was by far the best man they had there. Then came the retirement of Spencer-Jones, and [Richard] Woolley was put into his place. He had other ideas. One day he asked Tommy what he was doing, and Tommy said he was preparing a paper for a conference in Stockholm about the Sun’s corona. Woolley said, “But I never gave you permission to work on the corona.” That was enough for Tommy. He resigned then and there and accepted an invitation from Cornell. Now he has been offered a good permanent chair at the Harvard Observatory, and so he will stay in this country. Woolley seems to be a pathological character. Now that Tommy has left, his friends in the cosmic ray group at Herstmonceux are not allowed to correspond with him. All communications must go through Woolley himself. Tommy showed me the letter from Woolley in which this decision was announced, written in the finest civil service circumlocutions. Really it is a pity this has happened. There was a chance something might have been done for the Greenwich Observatory, but now it is hopeless.

  It was lucky for me that I had the good sense to refuse the job at Herstmonceux in 1952. If I had accepted, I would have ended up as Tommy Gold did, in a bruising fight with Woolley.

  It is good to hear that you in England are making a big effort for the Hungarian refugees. Here there is a great organization for bringing them in and finding them homes and jobs. Luckily there is a substantial population of Hungarian-speaking people already here, and that makes it a lot easier. So far the government agreed to take in 21,500, which is all they can do until Congress is in session. Probably Congress will be happy to raise the number if more want to come here. The only objection I have heard to this is from some physicists who are nervous about the effect of having 21,500 Edward Tellers in the country.

  One of the first things I did when I became an institute professor was to push for the appointment of Bengt Strömgren, a world leader in astronomy. I wanted our School of Natural Sciences to include astronomy as well as physics. Oppenheimer agreed to invite him, and he came in 1957. He was outstanding as an observer as well as a theorist. In his office at the institute he had a little machine of his own design, a personal computer before personal computers existed. He observed A stars in the sky and measured their ages by accurate measurements of brightness in four colors. A stars are bright stars that are easy to measure accurately. He put the data for each star into his machine. The machine then calculated its orbit around the center of the galaxy and deduced the place where it was born. After he had plotted the birthplaces of a few hundred stars, he could see that the births at any time fell into a spiral pattern, and the spiral moved around the galaxy as the time of birth advanced. So the births of the A stars revealed the past history of the spiral arms of the galaxy. This was the most elegant piece of observational astronomy that I ever saw. It was all done on Strömgren’s desk top with a machine costing a few hundred dollars.

  A pleasant thing happened this week. For some years I had had the idea that it would be interesting to look for variable white dwarf stars. A white dwarf is so small and dense that its natural vibration period would be a few seconds, instead of the hours or days which ordinary stars have for periods. So if there is a variable white dwarf, it would not be recognised by the usual method of taking photographs with an exposure time of several minutes. The other day I mentioned this idea to Strömgren who is our leading astronomer, and asked him if anyone had ever looked at a white dwarf with a light detector having a rapid response. He said there is one white dwarf called 02 Eridani B which is most suitable for this experiment. It is reasonably
bright (ninth magnitude) and not close to another brighter star. It happens also to be in the part of the sky (just below Orion) which can best be observed in January. So this is the right time to do it. The chances of finding pulsations in this particular star are quite small. Still it is worth a try. Kitt Peak is a brand-new observatory on a mountain in a remote part of Arizona. It was chosen for the National Observatory because it has better seeing than California. So next January 4, think of 02 Eridani B, and hope for clear skies in Arizona.

  The skies were clear, and Strömgren did the observation. 02 Eridani B did not pulsate.

  • 13 •

  THE FORSAKEN MERMAN

  “THE FORSAKEN MERMAN,” written by Matthew Arnold in 1849, was one of my mother’s favorite poems. Arnold wrote it as a reaction to the Hans Andersen story, “The Little Mermaid,” which was published in 1837 and later made even more famous by Walt Disney. Andersen wrote a wonderfully sentimental tale of the girl who abandons her home in the sea to live with her prince on land. Arnold is telling the same story from the point of view of the husband and children that she abandoned.

  Children dear, was it yesterday

  (Call yet once) that she went away?

  She will start from her slumber

  When gusts shake the door;

  She will hear the winds howling,

  Will hear the waves roar,

  Singing, here came a mortal,

  But faithless was she,

  And alone dwell for ever

  The kings of the sea.

  It is a long poem, with the refrain “Children dear, was it yesterday?” repeated at the beginning of each verse. My mother knew it by heart and used to recite it to my sister Alice and me when we were little and she put us to bed. It is not a great poem, but it was exactly appropriate to my situation in February 1957, when my wife Verena walked out of our home and abandoned her husband and children. In the New Year letter one month earlier, there is no hint of impending drama.

  NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1957

  I shall be five weeks away from home before the Columbia term begins. First a spell with General Atomic at La Jolla, then at Los Alamos, and finally ten days at Aspen, Colorado. For the last ten days Verena will fly out to meet me, and we shall take a real holiday together.

  We had Hans Haefeli to stay over Christmas, and he as usual made up for the aunts and uncles and godfathers which we lack in this new country. A fine and faithful friend he is to all of us.

  At the moment my main reading matter is the history of the Americans in Petrograd in 1917–18 by George Kennan [1965], who occupies the next office to mine at the institute. This book is delightful reading, it is history written according to the maxim Le Bon Dieu aime bien les Détails. I am reading volume one while Kennan is getting volume two ready for printing.

  Kennan became an institute professor in 1956. His two-volume work was published with the title Soviet-American Relations 1917–1920. He remained a friend and colleague until his death at age 101 in 2005. My most vivid memory of Kennan when he came to the institute is his story of the Trotsky papers. In the State Department archive in Washington, he discovered an old shoebox containing a hundred handwritten documents. Before Kennan found them, nobody knew that they existed. They were the first official communications from the newborn Soviet government to the American diplomats in Petrograd. They were written personally by Leon Trotsky. To discover such a treasure is the mark of a first-rate historian. Kennan and I became friends because we were both passionately engaged in the problems of war and peace and nuclear weaponry. He knew more about history, and I knew more about weapons, so we both had something to learn.

  JANUARY 31, 1957, ASPEN, COLORADO

  Now I have a peaceful hour to write you our news before going to bed. Such a beautiful day it was. In the morning brilliant sunshine, dark blue sky, virgin white snow, equally perfect for skiing or for gazing. Verena and I both went up to the top of the mountain and skied down the four-thousand-foot run to the bottom. Verena has made remarkable progress with skiing in only six days here, never having done it before. She has a natural balance and suppleness, and I hope she will have a chance to do much more in the future. We were here just a week, and we go home the day after tomorrow. It was the best, the most complete, the most triumphant holiday I have ever had. Pain and joy, love and bewilderment and laughter, all on top of each other. And in the end, tears and confusion are past, and there remains a shared courage, an understanding, and a lightness of spirit. Now let me explain briefly what has happened. An old friend of mine from Cambridge days has been at the institute for the last year and a half. While I was away in La Jolla and Los Alamos, he and Verena have fallen in love and decided to run away together. Verena came to Aspen to tell me this, and to make a harmonious and dignified end to our marriage.

  Georg Kreisel had become one of the leading experts on mathematical logic during the ten years since I had known him as a student in Cambridge. In 1955 he applied for a membership at the Institute for Advanced Study to work with Kurt Gödel. I wrote an enthusiastic letter of recommendation for him, and he was accepted. We remained friends during his stay at the institute until the end of 1956. The drama that followed came as a total surprise. In my letters I did not mention his name until the affair became public.

  The practical arrangements are simple. I shall keep the children. We have the competent Imme Jung who will take care of them for the time being. Verena will be in Princeton till about April and will be with us to see the new household running smoothly. Verena will not marry this fellow but will eventually find herself a job somewhere and live in the independence which she has always wanted. I will obtain a divorce as soon as possible, and I will not under any circumstances ask her to come back to me as a wife. I hope she will come back frequently as a friend and as a mother. Later I will write in more detail about our plans for the future.

  Just now I want only to make some general remarks about the past. First, about myself. Please do not offer me your sympathy or your pity. I have been happy in this marriage, and I have no regrets now it is over. It has enriched my life in many ways, and this enrichment is permanent. Second, about Verena. You can blame her for what she has done. But I do not. I consider that she has fulfilled her obligation to me, by bearing me two fine children, by caring for all of us through the difficult years when the babies were small and money was short, and by loving me faithfully for seven years. She leaves me now just when our family life is getting to be easy and comfortable, the children soon to be all at school, the finances ample, and a beautiful house to live in. What she has done may be crazy, but it is not irresponsible. I believe that she has earned her freedom, that she is doing the right thing in following her own star wherever it leads. I want you to give her your respect if not your approval. As Blake [1799] says in these lines which I have long known but never rightly understood till now,

  He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy.

  But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun-rise.

  FEBRUARY 7, 1957

  Today I gave my first lecture at Columbia. This is very good fun. I am going up to New York four days a week, and I have a class of twenty-five students who seem interested and intelligent. It is good for me to get back to teaching, and I find even the train rides in the morning and evening peaceful and refreshing. I leave each morning at eight-thirty and return at six-thirty, like a regular bank clerk. Did you hear in your newspapers about the exciting things that have happened this month at Columbia? This makes it especially worthwhile to be at Columbia just now. As a result of a suggestion made last summer by my friend Frank Yang (of the institute) and another young Chinese called Tsung-Dao Lee (of Columbia), the people at Columbia undertook two novel and clever experiments. The leader of the experimental work was a third Chinese called Chien Shiung Wu who is also exceedingly good. The idea of the experiments is to test the possibility that a spinning particle may carry a definite distinction between its North and South
Poles. That is to say, suppose you have a particle spinning in a definite sense (say clockwise) around a north-south axis, and the particle emits an electron, is it possible that the electron will come out with different probability along the north and the south directions? All the theories of the last thirty years assumed that this was impossible. Until Yang and Lee, everybody thought that so obvious that it did not need to be tested. Now the Wu experiment shows an enormous difference between North and South, so big that it could not have been missed by anybody who had looked for it. This is an important breakthrough, and we are all happy about it. Yang and Lee deserve this triumph, as they have been working and thinking about these problems harder than anybody else for the last two years. We have now the job of changing our theories to agree with the new information, and this is likely to lead to substantial progress. It is fine for me to be at Columbia where the experiments are being done, and to have lunch with Lee and Wu and the others whenever I feel like it.

  The more I see of Imme, the more impressed I am with her firm and solid character. Without this, of course, any kind of peaceful changeover would have been impossible. Imme is twenty years old and comes from Berlin, so she is used to a life of unpredictable ups and downs. I hope she will be happy with us and will stay her two years.

  Imme Jung came to our home as an au pair to help care for the children. Verena had met with her in Austria in summer 1956 and offered her the job. Imme obtained a visa that allowed her to work in America for two years before returning to Germany. When she arrived in New York, Kreisel came with Verena to meet her at the boat. Imme assumed that this gentleman who came to the boat was Freeman Dyson. I did not meet her until I returned home from Aspen in February 1957, two weeks after her arrival in America. When she arrived, she had no warning that she was walking into a family crisis.