Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  Ne’eman continued for many years to perform brilliantly in his triple career as physicist, soldier, and politician. He remarked to me once that the greatest joy he had ever experienced was to command a brigade of tanks in battle. After the War of 1967, when Israel defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, Ne’eman proposed to give the populations of all the occupied territories Israeli citizenship. He said this was the great opportunity for making peace in the Middle East, when the shock of defeat would allow the Arab populations to accept annexation into Israel, but the acceptance could work only if they were given full equality and civil rights as Israeli citizens. Unfortunately that opportunity was missed, and we will never know whether it would have succeeded.

  Ne’eman was later known to the public as a right-wing politician who vehemently opposed the Camp David Accords of 1978 between Israel and Egypt. The accords returned to Egypt the entire Sinai peninsula occupied by Israel in the War of 1967. Ne’eman had a vision of the future with Greater Israel, including the Sinai and the West Bank and the Golan Heights, uniting in a single country the old Israel of 1948 and all the occupied territories. Ne’eman saw himself as a liberal humanist, giving generously to the Arab populations all the rights and privileges of Israeli citizenship. His vision might have been realized in 1967, but by 1978 it was certainly too late. Ne’eman continued until his death in 2006 to be a right-wing politician, with an unexpectedly generous grasp of the Arab point of view.

  • 18 •

  SITTING IN JUDGMENT

  THE AMERICAN LEGAL SYSTEM uses two kinds of juries, the petit jury of twelve citizens who sit through criminal trials and decide the guilt or innocence of the accused, and the grand jury of twenty-three citizens who conduct quick preliminary hearings to decide whether accusations should go to trial. I had several times been summoned to serve on a petit jury in Trenton, but each time I was dismissed because the lawyers do not like to have college professors as jurors. Decisions of a petit jury must be unanimous, and college professors are very rarely unanimous. In the fall of 1963 I was summoned to serve on a grand jury, where decisions are by majority vote. The lawyers had no objection to me, and I agreed to serve, beginning in January 1964. In the same month there was a meeting in Boston to make plans for the exploration of Mars.

  JANUARY 13, 1964

  We had three days of Mars meetings. It was a splendid gathering. The two most famous observers of Mars from the French observatory at the Pic du Midi were there; also various astronomers, space experimenters, biologists, and chemists. About twenty-five people altogether. The purpose of the meeting was to advise the Space Agency about the the future of the program for observing Mars, especially to design sensible experiments to find out whether there is life there or not. The two Frenchmen dominated the discussion, since they are the only ones who know their way around on Mars. In three days we all became expert in referring to the regions of Mars by their beautiful classical names, running easily from Syrtis Major through Nepenthes-Thoth and Mare Cimmerium to Amazonis, Arabia, and Hellas.

  The evidence for life is still as tantalizingly inconclusive as it always was. But we are going to know the answer in a few years for sure. The first rocket probe will go to Mars this year and make preliminary measurements. An instrument package should get down to the surface by 1969 and tell us in detail what goes on there. Meanwhile facts are slowly accumulating and theories are growing firmer. The biologists have done experiments which prove that many terrestrial bugs can survive the Mars environment.

  Fifty years later, we still do not know for sure whether there is life on Mars. Large numbers of orbiting instruments have surveyed the planet, and several roving observatories on the ground have explored the surface, without finding any evidence of life. It is possible that life exists or has existed at places below the surface where rocks are warm and water is liquid.

  The grand jury turns out to be fascinating. I go every Tuesday until the end of March. Assuming I can fight my way through the snowdrifts, I will be there tomorrow morning. Last Tuesday we had our first session. We had three larcenies, one assault and battery, one forgery, and one contribution to the delinquency of a minor. We sent five of them to trial and dismissed one. It is fast and sketchy work. The purpose is to stop the police from bringing anybody to trial without a reasonably convincing case. We hear only the prosecution and one or two witnesses for each case. After the evidence, we discuss the case for a few minutes among ourselves and then vote.

  One comes away from these cases with admiration for these people, criminals and victims alike, for their ability to live at all under the conditions they describe. Mostly they are negroes and Puerto Ricans. Such a tremendous gulf between their conditions of life and the lives of the prosperous citizens who sit on the grand jury. I cannot blame them if they have little respect for us. It is difficult for us to deal with them fairly, because the mere fact of their being homeless drifters in the back streets of Trenton makes it too easy to believe them guilty. The most doubtful case was a man accused of breaking and entering a house, the only evidence against him being the word of an accomplice without any material proof. I felt that nobody should be convicted of a crime on this evidence alone and therefore we ought to dismiss the case. But the vote was to send him to trial. It is a good education in legal principles, and I am glad I was chosen to take part.

  Service on the grand jury is a serious commitment. One full day of sessions every week for three months. I was lucky to be able to spare so much time. The jury hears the case for the prosecution and decides either to dismiss the case or to let it go to trial. The proceedings are secret, so if the case is dismissed, the public never gets to hear about it. The defendant needs to prepare a defense only if the case goes to trial. Our meetings were in the Trenton Courthouse. There was no break for lunch, so our decisions tended to become quicker and harsher as we grew hungrier at the end of the day.

  MARCH 27, 1964

  Imme and I went with Emily to buy a birthday present for George [George then aged eleven, Emily aged two years and eight months]. We bought him a plain wooden chest which we hope he will use for storing his belongings. When Emily saw it, she said, “When Kennedy was shot he had a box like that.”

  A case of incest at the Trenton Court. A father accused by his thirteen-year-old daughter of having forced her to bed with him for three years. The girl, being roughly questioned by the prosecutor, broke down in floods of tears and admitted her whole story was false. In this case the grand jury justified its existence in protecting the man from a trial which would have ruined him even if he had been acquitted. Next question, what does one now do with the girl? Luckily this is not our responsibility.

  Our decision to dismiss the incest case was not so obviously right as I implied in the letter. Our jury consisted of eighteen men and five women. The vote in the incest case was eighteen to five. The men all supported the father and the women all supported the girl. If the jury had been five men and eighteen women, the vote would undoubtedly have sent the case to trial. To do justice in such cases is not easy. The mother of the girl was mentally ill and confined to an institution. The father had to deal alone with a rebellious teenager. The girl wanted the freedom to live her own life. After fifty years, I am still not sure whether what we did was justice. The judge who presided over the grand jury sessions shared my doubts about the justice of the jury system. After the last of our sessions ended, he invited us all for a farewell dinner. At the end of the dinner he stood up to make a short speech. “Before we say good-bye,” he said, “I would like to give you some useful advice. If you are ever in trouble with the law, you have a choice, to be tried by a judge or a jury. If you are innocent, choose a judge. If you are guilty, choose a jury.”

  APRIL 25, 1964

  Abdus Salam, a former student of mine, is an exceptionally able young man. After doing a few years as a theoretical physicist at Cambridge and Princeton, he decided to return to his native Pakistan to work for the good of his people. In Pak
istan he was a professor of physics and head of the Atomic Energy Commission, but he could not do anything effective to help the country from the inside. After a few years he left Pakistan to take the chair of theoretical physics at Imperial College. Now from his independent stand in London, he has become a major international figure. He has an excellent department in London, he is official scientific adviser to the president of Pakistan, and he has founded an Institute of Physics with United Nations money in Trieste. The Trieste institute is similar to this institute at Princeton but more easily accessible to people from the poorer countries, especially Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Pakistan. Politically, it has been a great success, and Salam has pushed it through the United Nations in masterly fashion. I believe it will also be scientifically successful. An ambitious young man with a chair at Imperial College can have the world at his feet.

  The main thing we have done recently was to give Oppenheimer a sixtieth birthday party. I sat next to Kitty Oppenheimer. She was in unusually good spirits. The main ceremony at the party was the presentation of the special issue of the Reviews of Modern Physics dedicated to Oppenheimer, on which I had been doing most of the editorial donkey work for the last year. The first copy was rushed down from New York hot from the press the same day. Oppenheimer seemed to be genuinely surprised and moved.

  The letter does not mention the agonizing difficulties that I encountered in putting together a respectable collection of chapters for the Oppenheimer volume. I began by writing letters to all the people who had worked with Oppenheimer, especially in the early years when he was most active as a scientist. Very few responded positively. Most of them made polite excuses for saying no. The saddest reply came from Max Born, one of the bunch of geniuses who invented quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Born had been Oppenheimer’s adviser when he was a student in Göttingen and collaborated with him on the quantum theory of molecules. Born wrote a bitter letter, complaining because Oppenheimer was ungrateful for his help and had never invited him to Princeton. The unfortunate fact was that Oppenheimer had a difficult temperament and made more enemies than friends. I had to write many more invitations before I had enough articles to make a presentable volume.

  Oppenheimer’s shifting moods cost him many friendships. I remained his friend because I did not take his temper tantrums personally. In spite of the temper tantrums and shifting moods, he was a loyal public servant and a wise observer of the human scene.

  MAY 1, 1964

  A bundle of telegrams, one from Kitty and Robert Oppenheimer, said, “Congratulations on your election to the National Academy of Sciences.” Elected at the same time were Tsung-Dao Lee and several other good friends. This honor is the American equivalent of an FRS [Fellowship of the Royal Society]. Like the Royal Society, the National Academy covers all areas of science. It has about nine hundred members compared with the Royal Society’s six hundred. I am now both FRS and MNAS, a rare combination. Apart from honor and glory, being an academy member gives me an official standing which is helpful if I am sitting on committees or advising the government. I now belong to the Establishment.

  Imme and I were invited in 2012 by the Royal Society in London for an official celebration of my sixtieth anniversary as a fellow. Paul Nurse, then the president of the society, gave an open-air lunch party on the roof of the Royal Society building, a magnificent viewpoint overlooking the Horse Guards parade and the historic monuments of central London. It turned out that Queen Elizabeth and I were the only people who had survived sixty years as fellows. The queen was having her annual Garden Party at Buckingham Palace the same day, so she did not come to my party and I did not go to hers.

  MAY 23, 1964

  I recently read three books which I found interesting. One is Profiles of the Future by Arthur Clarke [1962], an English science fiction writer. He has written many books, and all of them are good. Another book I read was The Analytical Engine, a popular book about computing machines by Jeremy Bernstein [1964]. The third was brought to our house by Esther from the public library. It is Face to Face, the autobiography of a blind young man who came from India to the United States and became a successful writer [1957]. His name is Ved Mehta.

  Imme and I, for the first time in years, went to a cocktail party at the home of some friends of ours in New York. We first met Jeremy Bernstein, who I knew would be there, and talked to him about his book. Then I was introduced to a lively middle-aged gentleman who turned out to be Arthur Clarke. I spent an hour monopolizing Arthur Clarke and exchanging ideas with him about space and the universe. While I was talking to him, I saw a blind Indian come in at the door, and Imme said, “I bet you that is Ved Mehta.” I said, “No, that is absurd.” But as usual Imme was right. I spent another happy hour talking with Ved Mehta. I will never believe any more that improbable things don’t happen.

  This unlikely coincidence brought me two lasting friendships. Arthur Clarke and Ved Mehta continued for many years to write wonderful books. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) and Mehta’s Walking the Indian Streets (1960) are for me the most memorable.

  In 1964 I was invited to spend a year at the University of California San Diego, a brand-new and rapidly growing university with a campus adjoining the General Atomic buildings where I had worked six years earlier. In the fall, Imme’s parents came for a month to live with us in California. During that year, I made my last attempt at research in particle physics. In collaboration with the Vietnamese physicist Nguyen Huu Xuong, I worked out a theory of particles based on the group SU6, which gives the particles a six-fold symmetry. We made some bold predictions that could easily be tested by experiments. We predicted some new particles that would have confirmed our theory in a spectacular fashion if they existed. The tests were done, and the particles do not exist. Nature does not dance to our tune. Xuong and I agreed to give up particle physics. I switched my attention to astrophysics, and he switched to a successful career as a biologist.

  During the year at UCSD I frequently visited the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. There I got to know the chemist Leslie Orgel who taught me everything I know about the origin of life. He spent his time inventing theories of the origin of life and doing chemical experiments to test his theories. The experiments never gave him a clear answer. As a result of the friendship with Orgel, I continued to think and write about the origin of life, one of the great mysteries to which we owe our existence.

  OCTOBER 15, 1964

  The first news of Papa’s death came to us from George. He was alone in the house, and there came a call from the New York Herald Tribune asking for information for Papa’s obituary notice. George gave them the information and then came over to my office to give me the news. That evening after supper Edwin Jung [Imme’s father] talked about his experiences of death. In his work he has seen much of it. He said he is rarely depressed by the death of old people. They usually are able to die easily and peacefully. He is only scared when he has to deal with young people dying, especially the young soldiers during the war.

  I visited my father in Winchester for a week, shortly before he died. We knew it would be our last good-bye. Each morning I listened while he played Bach and Haydn on the piano. He could not play modern music anymore, but Bach and Haydn remained with him to the end.

  The letters you have had from Papa’s friends must be a great comfort. It does not surprise me that they remember him primarily for his charm and vitality at meetings and rehearsals. This is what I would have expected. After all, it was for this that they made him director of the Royal College of Music and chairman of the Carnegie Trust. Just being a first-rate musician would not have got him into those positions. What does surprise me is that anyone in this hectic life should find time and energy to sit down and write you a letter. This I consider a real marvel and a clear indication of Papa’s greatness.

  My father died on September 29, 1964, at the age of eighty-two. He had been declining with arteriosclerosis for some months and was afraid of becoming incapacitated. Then h
e caught pneumonia, and his doctor who knew him well made the decision not to give him antibiotics. He died quickly and peacefully, as he would have wished. A full biography by Paul Spicer (2014) was published fifty years later.

  MARCH 1, 1965

  The annual Glider Club meet takes place at the airstrip on the clifftop only a mile from our house. It is a lovely sight, ten or twelve of the big birds in the air at once and weaving patterns in the sky. This year there were a scattering of European designs, one from England, one from Poland, and two from Germany. The European gliders are made by hand with loving care, whereas the American are made in factories. Still it was a prosaic American bird which won the grand trophy. The most dramatic of the competitions was the spot-landing contest. The gliders were required to land on the bumpy airstrip with the wind behind them, so that the front tip of the glider came to rest as close as possible to a marked spot. The competition was won with a distance of one inch. Several others came within a foot. It was good to see the old glider club still flourishing and hanging on to its precarious perch on the clifftop.