Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  I wonder what kind of people these kids will be. At least they start with one advantage.

  They are tough.

  JULY 5, 1957

  I have been waiting for some definite decision from Verena. So far I heard nothing. I expect a letter one of these days with a final yes or no. I am glad I left the decision to her. In the last resort I am not willing to have on my shoulders the responsibility for separating her from the children. That must be by her own choice if it is to happen.

  JULY 19, 1957

  Yesterday I got the decisive word from Verena. I think I should explain how this decision came to be made, so that you can see how the responsibility for it is shared. I wrote to her saying that I want her to come back to us, and that if she will come back, I shall give her as in the past my undivided care and love. But I said I will accept her back only on two conditions: (1) that after Kreisel flies back to England on August 22, she will neither see him nor communicate with him anymore; and (2) that she must come back for the reason of her love for me and the children, and not for any reasons of duty or obligations to us. She writes back as follows.

  One thing is clear to me, the conditions you set on my coming back to you are unquestionably the right ones, and I am not able to fulfil them. I think we both know that for me at least to refuse to come back means choosing the harder way. For I doubt very much whether I shall ever overcome the emotional regrets for having left my children and for having left this marriage with you uncompleted. On the other hand I must not come back halfheartedly and I think I cannot do it wholeheartedly. Everything that I can produce so far in the way of rationalization seems to me only a vague approximation to the truth, and therefore I have little to say. I want you to know that you have no reason to worry about me. The crisis I went through this spring is overcome. It honestly pains me to send this letter off, and I hope you do not mind my inability to make a final statement with a heroic bang, though I know that things are growing in an irreversible direction. Love and happiness I wish you. V.

  I copy this statement for you verbatim, because it seems to me to sum up in a few words the sensitivity of Verena, the intellectual penetration, and the refusal to compromise her vision of reality with any secondhand sentiments and comfortable simplifications.

  SUNDAY, JULY 28, 1957

  Such a quiet and cozy Sunday! In the morning Esther expressed a desire to go to church, so the party dress was put on, George was likewise washed and polished up, and the three of us walked down the hill to morning service. Imme said she had enough of Lutheran sermons to last her the rest of her life, so she stayed at home to enjoy a little solitude. I chose an Episcopal church to go to because I like to hear the words with which I am familiar. The church was brand new, built last year in a modern but not extreme style of architecture. The service was exactly as it might have been in any church in Kensington, except that the average age of the congregation was lower (there were a number of children besides mine) and the singing more vigorous. A youngish parson gave a quite intelligent sermon. My children sat through all of it (an hour and a quarter) with perfect decorum and almost complete silence. I found the whole thing restful and pleasant. Though I am not in the slightest degree inclined to return to the religious belief I lost at the age of fourteen, still I feel the children ought to be exposed to it, and the younger the better. It is always impressive to find that so many million people all over America are going to church each Sunday morning with the same King Edward prayer book we learned as children.

  After the service we walked merrily up the hill again, and Esther said she wants to go to church every Sunday. But then George said rather apologetically, “I think that for me this church is just a little bit too dull.” That was his first and only complaint, after one and a quarter hours of sitting silent on a hard wooden bench.

  AUGUST 19, 1957

  This morning the kids walked all the way down with me to the office and all the way back alone. This was the second time they had done it. It is only about half a mile, but with many corners and road crossings where cars are all the time passing. Through the summer I have been training them to come with me, each day a little bit further, and now finally they got up to my room and are very proud of themselves. When they walk home alone, I am as anxious as any mother, but I never show them that.

  These children are amazing. They can do everything. I am not only a foolishly proud father, it is really true that they are the despair of all the other parents. This morning I drove over the hill to Walnut Creek to watch the children at their swimming class. The class consists of Esther and George and an unfortunate girl called Paula who is the same size as Esthi and is a quite good swimmer. But at the end of the lesson Paula just burst into tears because she couldn’t stand the competition.

  The real hero of this drama is Katrin. The other day I had a letter from her which quite bowled me over.

  Dear Free, I received your letter this morning I am very glad to hear that you and the kids are having some fun even though all thease things are happining. I hope that you and the kids are not too sad about it. Please do not let the kids see that you are unhappy or they shall be more so. I am very sorry that all this happened, but I know that Mommy did what was best. She spent a very long time thinking about it. I hope that she never marries KREISEL (ugg!). I have cried many nights. (I hate all the people who keep pestering me and asking me what is wrong as if I was a baby.) What should I say to them? Is Imme going to stay with you? I hope that she will, she seems to be very nice to the kids. I would like to know what you are working on this summer. Are you working on a problem or are you just hunting? You know that I do not know anything about PHYSICS but I am interested in what my father does because I am very very proud of you. (I know that you are very clever, nice, and that I love you.) Please excuse me for the awkward way that I write things, but I do not know how to write very well especialy when I am nervous. I cannot wait until September. I will be so happy to see you again. Love Katarina.

  You can imagine how proud and happy I am to get a letter like this. Now I shall have to do some physics and deserve her high opinions.

  OCTOBER 29, 1957

  Tonight when I came home from work, it was already dark, and George said, “I have just been outside and I could see Venus and Orion.” I did not need to check that his statement was accurate. He has his eyes wide open for all natural phenomena, birds and butterflies, worms and clouds. Esther is absorbed with her schoolwork and her friends and has less time for looking at the world. On Thursday afternoon I went down to the school to receive Esther’s report card and spent fifteen minutes talking with her teacher. The teacher was highly impressed with her and said she is cheerful as well as industrious. Next Thursday I shall have an hour with Katrin’s teachers, and that will be a less idyllic picture. But Katrin is working hard and getting good marks, and she is learning to organize her work so it is done with less pain.

  Today the whole institute is buzzing with excitement as the rumours go around that our colleagues Yang and Lee are to get the Nobel Prize. I believe this will be announced officially within a few days. It is a wonderful thing for the institute. (Yang is here permanently, and Lee for the year.) It is quite unprecedented for the prize to be given so soon after the work which earned it. But in this case the epoch-making character of the work was understood unusually quickly, so there is no reason why there should be the customary ten-year delay. I feel a little despondent sometimes when I contrast the magnitude of what Frank Yang has done with the barrenness of my own last few years. But I do not feel any worse because of the Nobel Prize. This prize is only the public recognition of a fact which has been clear to us here for some time, that Frank is the brightest young physicist now living. It will cut Yang and Lee off from normal human relations with their friends for some time. They are besieged by newspapermen and hide as much as they can. Luckily there is Franklin Yang (aged six) and James Lee (aged four) who are good friends to Esther and George and are often running around our house
with their cheerful American voices and Chinese faces. The chilling demands of public fame have no effect on them.

  One name was conspicuously absent in the announcement of the Nobel Prize. Chien Shiung Wu did not share it. She had done at least an equal share of the work. Like Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Burnell, she made a discovery that would certainly have won her the prize if she had not been a woman. Chien Shiung Wu never complained. She shared the attitude of Jocelyn Burnell, the discoverer of pulsars, the rapidly pulsing radio sources that turned out to be rotating neutron stars. Jocelyn was recently asked by a student whether she was annoyed by this lack of recognition. Jocelyn replied, “Oh no, I feel much better when people ask me why I didn’t get the prize, rather than asking me why I did get it.”

  DECEMBER 19, 1957

  Yesterday I went to Trenton and became an American citizen. Somehow this doesn’t seem important. I made up my mind to it long ago.

  I was admitted to citizenship together with a large group of immigrants from various countries. The judge who swore us in made a speech, congratulating us for having moved from lands of slavery to the land of freedom. I felt like shouting that in Britain we freed our slaves thirty years before the Americans freed theirs. But I had the good sense to keep quiet when I shook hands with the judge.

  • 14 •

  A SPACESHIP AND A WEDDING

  FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR 1958–59 I took a leave of absence from the Insitute for Advanced Study to work at the General Atomic laboratory in La Jolla on Project Orion. Project Orion was a wild dream, to change the course of human history by flying into space on a grand scale, using our huge stockpile of nuclear bombs for a better purpose than murdering people. We were a bunch of young people who shared the dream. We believed we could actually build a bomb-propelled spaceship with a thousand-ton payload and fly with it to Mars and to the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. We imagined ourselves cruising around the solar system with our ship and exploring the planets and moons, just as Charles Darwin cruised with the good ship Beagle around the earth exploring the continents and islands. The dream lasted as a real possibility for about a year. In that year we worked out a detailed design for the ship. We convinced ourselves that it was technically possible to survive the thousands of nuclear explosions that it would take to propel it. We persuaded the U.S. government to give us money to explore the possibilities.

  After the first year, two facts became clear. First, the government would support the project as a research venture but not as a real space mission. Second, the radioactive fallout from the bombs would contaminate the environment to an extent that was rapidly becoming unacceptable. After that year, the project continued to do good technical work, but the dream of a real voyage faded. I went back to my earth-bound job in Princeton and kept in touch with the project only as an occasional visitor.

  Forty years later my son George published a book, Project Orion (2002). He was five years old when the project started and was always interested in its history. His book contains far more information about the project than I ever knew when I was working on it. He examined the official documents that I never saw and interviewed the people who worked on the project and were mostly still alive. He brought the dream briefly back to life. But by the time the book appeared, I had long ago given up any desire to revive Orion. Orion was a dream that failed, a great adventure for all of us who took part in it, and perhaps a model for future dreams that will one day come true.

  At the same time as the big drama of Project Orion, the little drama of my family also reached its climax. The letters in this chapter record both dramas, ending with a marriage in the San Diego courthouse. Between those two dramas there is an interlude at the San Diego Glider Club. The Glider Club owns a landing strip between the General Atomic buildings and the Pacific Ocean. The strip points east-west, perpendicular to the cliffs which run north-south along the shore. The lift that a glider needs to stay airborne comes from the wind blowing up over the cliffs. The lift is strongest over the beach. This means that the glider has to take off upwind and land downwind. The downwind landing is scary when the wind is strong. In 1958 the club-owned glider was a big clunky old two-seater airplane with the engine removed. It came in to land downwind at about sixty miles per hour on a short and bumpy runway. Most of the club members owned smaller gliders that they had built themselves. Those who worked at the Convair factory built their gliders out of parts smuggled out of the factory.

  Now, sixty years later, the club is still there, but the old clunky gliders are gone. Instead there are hang-gliders, more beautiful, more convenient, and safer. Next to the landing strip, the elegant modern buildings of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have given the place an air of respectability that it totally lacked in the old days.

  JANUARY 1, 1958, PRINCETON

  I promised a report about my physics and about Sputniks. Here it is.

  The kind of physics I was doing in 1947–50 when I did my major work was to start with a set of specific equations (supposedly given by God but in fact written down by Dirac, Heisenberg, and Yukawa) and calculate whatever could be calculated. These equations were supposed to predict everything that could be observed. But since 1950 it has turned out that there is no way to get definite results from these equations. Nobody knows whether they have solutions, and there seems no way to find out. So the general belief has grown since 1950 that these equations are mathematically meaningless. The results we got in 1947–50 were good as far as they went, but there seemed no way to go further in that direction.

  In 1952 a new point of view was introduced by a young man called Harry Lehmann, then in Göttingen and now spending a year in Princeton. Lehmann’s idea was to build up a physical theory without any equations at all. That is, without any “equations of motion” which tell definitely how a physical system behaves as time passes by. Instead, Lehmann allowed only to use three general principles to limit the behavior of the system: (1) the spectrum (meaning that the masses and charges and spins of the particles are given); (2) causality (meaning that no particle can travel faster than light); and (3) unitarity (meaning that the total probability for anything to happen is always equal to one).

  Starting this radical program in 1952, Lehmann was only able to prove some weak consequences of his three principles, and it did not look to me then as if any interesting physics would ever come out of it. However, he is stubborn, and he was joined by growing numbers of other people with greater mathematical skill. And now from these three principles we are getting more solid and detailed information about the physical world than we had thought possible. The mathematical difficulties are extreme, and this makes it the right kind of exercise for me. It will be many years before we approach an answer to the central problem, which is to find out how many, and of what kinds, the possible worlds obeying Lehmann’s three principles are. I was for many years prejudiced against Lehmann because I thought not enough physics was put into his principles to get anything useful out. It was only this October when Lehmann came to Princeton that I joined in his program. What I have done since is to clean up two mathematical problems that had held him back for a year.

  This work is very long-range. It is not particularly affected by the new ideas of Yang and Lee about space symmetry. They have given us new information about the correct “spectrum” to feed into a theory. We are looking at the deep mathematical structure of the theory, which is largely independent of spectrum. My fault for the last three years has been that I worked on second-rate problems to which one could expect a quick answer. Now I have found the subject for a sustained effort.

  I have nothing original to say about Sputniks. I feel cheerful about them. It seems to me clear that the Soviet government does not intend to throw bombs at anybody but does intend to dominate the earth by rapid scientific and industrial growth. This will in turn stimulate the Americans to undertake major projects which they would be too parsimonious to do otherwise. There is no question that colonization of the moon and planets w
ill be one of them. I expect eventually to take a hand in this. The prospect seems to me exciting and hopeful.

  MARCH 1, 1958, PRINCETON

  Katrin was confirmed on Wednesday. She looked fine in a new pale blue dress, white veil, and a pearl necklace which Imme and I bought her as a surprise present the day before. I was glad to be there and especially to go up with Katrin and stand behind her while she knelt in front of the bishop. The singing was good. They take all the hymns at a fast clip and sound as if they enjoy it. Katrin and her friend Betsy sing regularly in the choir on Sundays. The confirmation service was in the evening, and I took Imme and the little ones along.

  The children go on with their lives as gaily as ever. Breakfast table conversation. George: “I know that first there were only ladies in the world, and then afterwards the men came.” Esther: “But that is all nonsense. Don’t you know that at the beginning there were just two people, Eve and that other guy, what was his name?” Another conversation, showing the difference between the scientific and the practical approach. George: “I can understand how a boat moves along when you push on the oars. You push the water away and so it makes room for the boat to move along.” Esther: “But I can make the boat move along even without understanding it.”