For the next five days we have been taking turns with the Iitakas and the Okabayashis keeping an eye on Sachiko and packing up her household. Mrs. Iitaka is a marvelous lady who is usually walking around and working with a two-month-old baby nursing at her breast. On Monday Taro was cremated, and on Tuesday there was the ceremony of carrying home the ashes. Imme and I and Mrs. Iitaka went with Sachiko to the crematorium. They brought out the tray of ashes from the furnace, just as it was, untouched by anybody. Then Sachiko came with a little white box and a pair of chopsticks. She carefully picked out of the ashes a selection of small pieces of bones. Then each of us in turn was given chopsticks and made additions to the box. The little white box of bones will be kept in the family shrine forever. Sachiko will not let it out of her sight until she has given it to Taro’s mother. The rest of the ashes were poured into a bigger box which is treated much less ceremoniously. It was packed in a suitcase and traveled with Sachiko’s heavy luggage. The ashes in the big box will be scattered somewhere in the country that Taro loved, near to his home in Kanazawa.
After the bones were in her care, Sachiko began to get more and more queer. It looked as if Taro’s unquiet spirit were haunting her. She drove the Iitakas almost to distraction by not sleeping at night and talking incoherently. We brought two doctors to see her, but she got worse day by day. We had arranged for her to fly alone to Tokyo where her family would meet her this afternoon. But we decided at the last moment this was unsafe. The plane has an hour stop in Anchorage with a complete change of crew, and we could not rely on anybody to take care of her during the stop. So at the last moment I hopped onto the plane with her, carrying only some official papers, a passport, and a toothbrush. The fourteen hours to Tokyo with Sachiko were the most harrowing I have ever spent. She was more crazy than ever. Some of the time crazy in a pathetic way, like Ophelia mourning for Laertes. She would look wildly around the airplane and say over and over, “I want to go back to Japan.” Some of the time she was crazy in a sharp way like Hamlet, so that you could not be sure she was unaware of the impression she was making. Some of the time she was as wild as a tiger.
The worst time began with a fight over the official papers which I was carrying to give to Sachiko’s father. Among them were four copies of the death certificate which we had gone to some trouble to have issued with the cause of death “auto accident” and no mention of possible suicide. Sachiko grabbed at these papers and began tearing all the death certificates into small pieces and throwing them around the airplane. I unwisely tried to stop her by physical force, which only made her more furious and did not save the certificates. She then stood up with the box of bones in her hands and shouted in a voice to be heard all down the airplane, in strong and fluent English. I had never heard her before talk English so well. “I am Sachiko Asano,” she shouted, “and I am taking my husband’s ashes back to Japan. And this Professor Dyson who is here is the man who killed him. He killed my husband and he is making plans to kill me too. He is planning to kill me by making me mad just as he did it to my husband. This Professor Dyson and his wife and his children were disturbed by Taro and Sachiko Asano and so they killed us. But they will regret. Professor Dyson’s children will die and he will regret. Professor Dyson’s wife will die and he will regret.” And so she went on and on and on. There was no way to stop her. After she had been through the speech several times in English, she repeated it in Japanese for the benefit of the other passengers. Of course there is a sense in which her accusations are true.
As the hours went by, she became more confused and less vehement. At one point she lay with her head in my lap and slept like a child. After we took off from Anchorage on the second seven-hour hop, she was suddenly playful, fed me by plopping grapes into my mouth, and laughed happily while she made a white beard under my chin with a pillow. Then for a few hours she was lucid and talked about the child she had hoped to have with Taro. Finally as we came close to Tokyo, she became cold and distant. She carefully went through every scrap of paper in her packages and in mine, giving me everything that had the slightest reference to me or to her own medical problems, and taking everything that had reference to Taro. On her package I had written my Princeton telephone number, and she carefully blacked the number over with black ink. Then at the last moment she asked me to write the number back on. Once we had landed in Tokyo she handled all the formalities herself with great competence, including a long argument with the health authority because she had the wrong kind of vaccination certificate.
After that was over we came out into the open, and there was Sachiko’s family, at least ten of them, waiting for her. She turned and said to me, “You are a very bad man,” then ran to them and was swept up in their embraces. Two of the family came up to me, bowed, and said thank you. I shouted good-bye to Sachiko and walked away, feeling as if the burdens of the whole world had fallen from my shoulders. I think there is a good chance that this volcanic outburst of hatred and malediction will have relieved Sachiko’s mind from the unspoken thoughts that were troubling her. I consider it likely that she will now settle down with her family and be her normal self, leaving behind forever the miseries of Princeton. I am glad that I had the final glimpse of her smiling face enveloped in the arms of that big warm Japanese family. I am now flying smoothly home. My charge is done, and I shall enjoy having twenty-four hours of solitary flying to meditate about what it all might mean.
AUGUST 6, 1972, PRINCETON
I came back to Princeton on a bright Sunday morning and found all well at home. But I was wrong in thinking that our part in this story was finished when I said goodbye to Sachiko in Tokyo. Early this morning Sachiko’s brother telephoned Imme from Tokyo to apologize for the fact that they had not had time to thank me properly. A royal welcome had been prepared for me. They had made frantic efforts to find me after I walked away. Sachiko was very confused after she got home. So the happy ending which I had imagined for the story is not the true ending. Life is never that simple. Now it is time to see what we can do to help the Liu family, the people who were in the other car.
SEPTEMBER 5, 1972
The aftermath of the Asano tragedy occupied us for some time. We made friends with one of the Chinese families who were in the smash and invited the children many times to our pool. They were finally patched up well enough to go back to their home in Minnesota. The other Chinese family who were worse injured live in Princeton and have their own friends here. A few days ago I received a letter from Sachiko:
Dear Prof. Dyson, I hope you are all well. While I was in Princeton, you were very kind to me in various ways. I wish to thank you for your having come to Japan with me. I cannot express my thanks for your thoughtful kindness. Many apologies for troubling you. Trusting that you will forgive me. There was his funeral in Kanazawa on August 11. As I lost my husband at a moment, I am very sad. I live in Wazima with my parents. I am getting well gradually. Now I like to listen the old Japanese song which was sung while I was child. Taro respected you very much. He said to me you were a great man. When you come to Japan, I would like to see you again. Please come to my house with your family. I hope I meet you again. Give my kind regards to Imme. I’ll write the letter to you again. Yours very sincerely, Sachiko Asano.
According to Japanese custom, a widow mourns for her husband for only forty-nine days. On the fiftieth day, she puts away the mourning clothes, resumes her maiden name, and returns to her unmarried life. So it was for Sachiko. After a while she remarried, and we lost touch with her. We had no wish to remind her of the tragedy that she had outlived. The robust Japanese acceptance of widowhood is in startling contrast to the Korean tradition. Another of our young physicist friends at the institute died suddenly of natural causes. He happened to be Korean. According to Korean tradition, the widow must stay in mourning clothes for the rest of her life and could never remarry. The widow of our friend could escape this fate only by remaining in the United States.
DECEMBER 1, 1973, LA JOLLA
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sp; I spent three days at the Salk Institute with the biologists. In that marble palace overlooking the Pacific, I met an Englishman who had just been having a long and moving conversation with Walter Oakeshott. He was visiting Lincoln College in Oxford where Oakeshott is just retiring as warden. Oakeshott was in melancholy mood and talked about his life, telling how both at Winchester and at Lincoln he strove through the years to give the boys or the students some experience of a well-regulated communal life to which they could anchor their intellectual development. His ideal was to make the college something like a big family in which the students and the dons would feel an equal loyalty. But he said, now that he came to retire, he realized the students had never really wanted what he had to offer them. And so he is left wondering what his life’s efforts have been worth. I sometimes ask myself the same question in relation to my own children. The only answer is, “Je sème à tout vent” [I sow to every wind]. We do our best and hope that in the next generation some seeds will turn out to have fallen on fertile soil. We cannot know which ones.
Walter Oakeshott was a schoolmaster who taught me history at Winchester College. He was then a young man but already an outstanding teacher. He was also well known in the academic world as the discoverer of the manuscript of the Morte d’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, written shortly before William Caxton introduced printing to England in the fifteenth century. Malory’s work is the main source in the English language of the legends of King Arthur and his knights in their mythical castle of Camelot. Some of the legends may have originated from our real king Alfred who lived in Winchester six hundred years earlier. Oakeshott found smudges on the manuscript proving that it had been used by Caxton in his printing shop. The printed version is not identical to the manuscript. Caxton did some editing to the text before he printed it. Oakeshott found the manuscript in 1934, in the library of our school in Winchester, where it had been sitting for 450 years, mislaid because the front page with the title and author’s name was missing. After this discovery, Oakeshott was offered an academic position at Oxford, but he preferred to continue teaching at Winchester. He moved to Oxford twenty years later to become warden of Lincoln College. In the short time when I knew him at Winchester, he gave me a firsthand understanding of historical research and a lasting love of history.
Three years after I heard the news about Walter Oakeshott at the Salk Institute, Oakeshott wrote a delightful piece in the Winchester College magazine Trusty Servant with the title, “The Malory Manuscript” (1976). He described how he discovered the manuscript and how it happened to be in the Winchester College library. The first clue to the mystery was the words in the Malory manuscript, “Camelott is otherwyse called Wynchester.” Malory and his readers imagined Arthur reigning in Winchester, where Alfred had actually reigned only a little later. The second clue is the coincidence of the date 1485, when Caxton printed the work, with the start of the Tudor dynasty, when Henry Tudor won the battle of Bosworth Field, ending the Wars of the Roses and becoming King Henry VII. Henry had a doubtful claim to the throne and was anxious to establish his legitimacy. He may well have arranged for Caxton to print Malory to strengthen his claim to a royal ancestry. The third and crucial clue is the birth of Henry’s firstborn son in September 1486. The son was named Arthur and was born in the bishop’s priory in Winchester, just across the street from Winchester College. It was certainly no accident that Henry’s queen, Elizabeth of York, the grandmother of the famous Queen Elizabeth who reigned a hundred years later, traveled to Winchester for the birth, and that Arthur was christened with great public ceremony in Winchester Cathedral. The fourth clue is the career of the tutor John Rede who started Arthur’s formal education when the prince was five years old. Arthur was a bright student and quickly became fluent in Latin. John Rede was the retired headmaster of Winchester College. Arthur would probably have fulfilled his father’s hopes and become a capable king, if he had not died of a fever at the age of fifteen. Oakeshott deduces from these clues that the Malory manuscript probably came to Winchester at the time of Prince Arthur’s birth and was probably put in the school library by John Rede.
Walter Oakeshott was one of those rare people who are equally at home in the fifteenth century and in the modern world. Winchester College is one of those rare places where medieval style and beauty are a part of daily life. The man and the place gave me a long view of history, looking at events with a time scale of centuries rather than years or decades. After this digression to Winchester in the fifteenth century, I return to La Jolla in the twentieth.
By coincidence I found my old friend Ted Taylor staying at the same hotel, and just this week the first article describing his life appeared in The New Yorker. Ted was in a state of great tension, and we walked and talked for hours up and down the beach. The articles describe in detail how easy it is to make atomic bombs and how negligent the authorities are in safeguarding the materials. For Ted this move into the public domain is the culmination of years of efforts to get the authorities to take the problem seriously. As Ted says, he has infuriated many of his best friends, and at the worst he may end up in jail. I was happy to be with him at this turning point of his life. I admire him now more than ever.
The New Yorker articles about Ted were written by John McPhee and were published together in John’s book, The Curve of Binding Energy (1974). The book was a best-seller, and Ted did not go to jail. I had also talked for many hours with John McPhee while he was writing the articles. All three of us were struggling with the ethical problem, whether it was right or wrong to make public the facts about homemade nuclear weapons. Were we making homemade weapons less likely by telling the good guys how to safeguard the materials, or were we making homemade weapons more likely by telling the bad guys how to do it? John McPhee made the decision to go public, with moral support from Ted and me. Forty years later we have seen no homemade bombs. Perhaps, after all, John’s decision was right.
• 21 •
WHALE WORSHIPPERS AND MOONCHILDREN
IN 1974 I was working on the theory of adaptive optics. This is the system of control enabling a flexible thin mirror in a big optical telescope to counteract the distortions of the image caused by rapid fluctuations of the atmosphere. The atmospheric turbulence varies on a time scale of milliseconds, and the compensating movements of the mirror must be equally fast. A working adaptive optics system had been developed secretly by the U.S. government for optical imaging of satellites flying overhead. I learned about this secret project as a member of the JASON group of scientists advising the government. Adaptive optics would obviously be of enormous benefit to astronomers peacefully exploring the universe.
Claire Max is a professional astronomer and also a member of JASON. She succeeded in persuading the military to declassify adaptive optics so that we could all work on it openly. Claire continues to be a leader in applying adaptive optics to big telescopes observing faint objects. I solved the problem of designing the best possible computer program that would take the information from the optical image as input and deliver the motions of the flexible mirror as output. I published my solution in a fat paper in the Journal of the American Optical Society. So far as I know, my solution was never used in a working adaptive optics system. Practical systems that are not optimized work well enough. But it is still helpful to practical designers to know how close they are to the theoretical optimum. The advantages of an optimized system may become greater as telescopes become larger and moving mirrors become more complicated. As a consequence of this jump into astronomical engineering, I was invited to spend the academic year 1974–75 at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich. We were delighted to spend a year in Germany and renew our contacts with Imme’s family. We rented a house in Munich and put the children into German schools.
In January 1975 my mother died peacefully at the age of ninety-four. She had seven good years after my father’s death. So long as he lived, she remained his quiet companion, sitting in his shadow while he enjoyed
the limelight. After he died, she came out into the limelight herself, entertaining all of us with her strong opinions and eloquent language. She became once more the forceful personality that she had been as a young woman. Then in her last two years, she was fading and ready to depart. After her death, the letters are to my sister Alice, who remained in our parents’ house in Winchester. Alice was three years older than me, had lived most of her life in London, and had returned to Winchester to take care of the parents when she was needed. I was not able to be with her for our mother’s funeral celebration.
JANUARY 30, 1975, MUNICH
I wish it shall be a beautiful morning for you on Monday and a ceremony worthy of Mum’s demanding spirit. I imagine her floating overhead and inspecting the proceedings with her old sharp eyes now seeing clearly again. Looking at the priest, she would say, “Funny old bird, isn’t he?” She always believed that when she died, she would somehow merge her spirit back into the world-spirit from which she came. But I can imagine that after all these years the world-spirit may be finding her a little indigestible. Perhaps she may have to float around for a while before she can merge. Anyhow, when she finally does merge, I am sure she will make her presence felt. On that day the world-spirit will become a bit more demanding and will look at us all with a slightly more critical eye. I hope all this is not just playing with words but in some rudimentary fashion describes the way things really are.
FEBRUARY 16, 1975
Five days in Geneva with the European Southern Observatory, a group of astronomers from six countries who have a telescope in Chile and are the most go-ahead astronomers in Europe. I finally found some people who take my ideas seriously and may follow them up. I gave three lectures, and the room was packed even for the third. After this experience, I decided it makes no sense to go around universities making everywhere the same speech and receiving polite attention. I shall go only where there is a chance of serious activity being stimulated by my coming.
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