zotero/storage/KKEZ4643/.zotero-ft-cache

THIS BOOK IS PUBLISHED AS PART OF AN ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION PROGRAM

FREEMAN DYSON
DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE
C/3asic C/3ooks, Inc., Publishers
NEW YORK

Portions of this work originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Library of Congress in Publication Data

Dyson, Freeman J

Disturbing the universe.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

l. Dyson, Freeman J. 2. Physicists-United

States-Biography. 3. Scie nce. I. Title.

OC16.D95A33 1979

530'.092'4 [BJ

78-2066,5

ISBN 0-465-01677-4 (paper)

Copyright © 1979 by Freeman J. Dyson
Printed in the United States of America Designed by Sidney Feinberg
87 88 89 90 MPC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

To the undergraduates of the Unive rsities ofl<laho, California-Riverside, Emory, Furman, San Diego State and F lorida State, Reed College and Smith College, with whom I talked as Phi Be ta Kappa Visiti ng Scholar in 1975-76. They asked the q uestions which this book tries to answer.

Contents

Preface to the Series : ix Author's Preface : xi
I. ENGLAND
1. The Magic City : 3 2. The Redemption of Faust : 11 3. The Children's Crusade : 19 4. The Blood of a Poet : 33
II. AMERICA
5. A Scientific Apprenticeship : 47 6. A Ride to Albuquerque : 58 7. The Ascent of F6 : 69 8. Prelude in E-Flat Minor : 84 9. Little Red Schoolhouse : 94 10. Saturn by 1970 : 107 11. Pilgrims, Saints and Spacemen : 118 12. Peacemaking : 127 13. The Ethics of Defense : 142

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vii

viii I CONTEN TS
14. The Murder of Dover Sharp : 155 15. The Island of Doctor Moreau : 167 16. Areopagitica : 179
III. POINTS BEYOND
17. A Distant Mirror : 187 18. Thought Experiments : 194 19. Extraterrestrials : 205 20. Clades and Clones : 218 21. The Greening of the Galaxy : 225 22. Back to Earth : 239 23. The Argument from Design : 245 24. Dreams of Earth and Sky : 254
Bibliographical Notes : 263 fodex : 277

Preface to the Series
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has for many years included in its areas of interest the encouragement of a public understanding of science. It is an area in which it is most difficult to spend money effectively. Science in this century has become a complex endeavor. Scientific statements are embedded in a context that may look back over as many as four centuries of cunning experime nt and elaborate theory; they are as likely as not to be expressible only in the language of advanced mathematics. The goal of a general public understanding of science, which may have been reasonable a hundred years ago, is perhaps by now chimerical.
Yet an understanding of the scientific enterprise, as distinct from the data and concepts and theories of science itself, is certainly within the grasp of us all. It is, after all, an enterprise conducted by men and women who might be our neighbors, going to and from their workplaces day by day, stimulated by hopes and purposes that are common to all of us, rewarded as most of us are by occasional successes and distressed by occasional setbacks. It is an ente rprise with its own rules and customs, but an understanding of that enterprise is accessible to any of us, for it is quintessentially human. And an understanding of the enterprise inevitably brings with it some insight into the nature of its products.
Accordingly, the Sloan Foundation has set out to encourage a representative selection of accomplished and articulate scientists to set down their own accounts of their lives in science. The form those accounts will take has been left in each instance to the author: one may choose an autobiographical approach, another may produce a
ix

x I PREFACE TO THE SERIES
coherent series of essays, a third may tell the tale of a scientific community of which he was a member. Each author is a man or woman of outstanding accomplishment in his or her field. The word "science" is not construed narrowly: it includes such disciplines as economics and anthropology as much as it includes physics and chemistry and biology.
The Foundation's role has been to organize the program and to provide the financial support necessary to bring manuscripts to completion. The Foundation wishes to express its appreciation of the great and continuing contribution made to the program by its Advisory Committee chaired by Dr. Robert Sinsheimer, Chancellor of the University of California-Santa Cruz, and comprising Dr. Howard H. Hiatt, Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health; Dr. Mark Kac, Professor of Mathematics at Rockefeller University; Dr. Daniel McFadden, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Robert K. Merton, University Professor, Columbia University; Dr. George A. Miller, Professor of Experimental Psychology at Rockefeller University; Professor Philip Morrison of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr. Frederick E. Terman, Provost Emeritus, Stanford University; for the Foundation, Arthur L. Singer, Jr., and Stephen White; for Harper & Row, Winthrop Knowlton and Simon Michael Bessie.

Author's Preface
The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: "I don't intend to publish it; I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God." "Don't you think God knows the facts?" Bethe asked. "Yes," said Szilard. "He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts. "
I have collected in this book memories extending over fifty years. I am well aware that memory is unreliable. It not only selects and rearranges the facts of our lives, but also embroiders and invents. I have checked my version of the facts wherever possible against other people's memories and against written documents. For thirty years I wrote home regularly to my parents, and they kept most of my letters. These letters are the source of many details which memory alone could not have preserved.
I am grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for funding the Science Book Program, under whose auspices this book appears. I thank Sloan Foundation Vice-President Stephen White and the members of his advisory committee for inviting me to write the book and for their editorial guidance. I am indebted for help and criticism to many friends, including Eileen Bernal, Jeremy Bernstein, Simon Michael Bessie, Hal Feiveson, Muguette Josefsen, Matthew Meselson, Mike O'Loughlin, Peter Partner, Leonard Rodberg, Barbara Scott, Martin Sherwin, Massoud Simnad, Daniel and Maxine Singer, Ted Taylor, Janet Whitcut, and
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xii I A UT H O R 'S P R E FA C E
my family. Above all I am grateful to my secretary, Paula Bozzay, for typing and retyping the manuscript.
Parts of chapters 10, 11, 12, 13 and 18 have appeared in print before. Detailed references will be found in the bibliographical notes at the end of the book.

I. ENGLAND
Oh England! Oh my lovely casual country! Serenity of meadowland in AprilCarelessly littered with fritillaries, Ladysmock, kingcups, cowslips, and wild apple!
FRANK THOMPSON, 1943
And there's a dreadful law here-it was made by mistake, but there it is-that if any one asks for machinery they have to have it and keep on using it.
E. NESBIT, 1910

1
The Magic City
A small boy with a book, high up in a tree. When I was eight years old somebody gave me The Magic City by Edith Nesbit. Nesbit wrote a number of other children's books, which are more famous and better written. But this was the one which I loved and have never forgotten. I did not at the age of eight read deep meanings into it, but I knew that it was somehow special. The story has a coherent architectural plan, covered with a surface frosting of crazy logic. The Wizard of Oz was the other book that I used to read over and over again. It has the same qualities. An eight-year-old already has a feeling for such things, even if he spends most of his waking hours climbing trees. The Magic City is not just a story about some crazy kids. It is a story about a crazy universe. What I see now, and did not see as an eight-year-old, is that Nesbit's crazy universe bears a strong resemblance to the one we live in.
Edith Nesbit was from every point of view a remarkable woman. Born in 1858, she was intimate with the family of Karl Marx and became a revolutionary socialist long before this was fashionable. She supported herself by writing and brought up a large family of children of mixed parentage. She soon discovered that her survival depended upon her ability to write splendidly bourgeois stories for the children of the rich. Her books sold well, and she survived. She made some compromises with Victorian respectability, but did not lose her inner fire. She wrote The Magic City in 1910, when she was fifty-two. By that time her personal struggles were over and she could view the world with a certain philosophic calm.
There are three themes in The Magic City. Th~ first is the main
3

4 J ENGLAND
theme. The hero is an orphan called Philip who is left alone in a big house and builds a toy city out of the ambient Victorian bric-a-brac. One night he suddenly finds his city grown to full size, inhabited by full-size mythical people and animals, and himself obliged to live in it. After escaping from the city, he wanders through the surrounding country, where every toy house or castle that he ever built is faithfully enlarged and preserved. The book records his adventures as he stumbles through this world of blown-up products of his own imaginings.
The second theme is concerned explicitly with technology. It is a law of life in the magic city that if you wish for anything you can have it. But with this law goes a special rule about machines. If anyone wishes for a piece of machinery, he is compelled to keep it and go on using it for the rest of his life. Philip fortunately escapes from the operation of this rule when he has the choice of wishing for a horse or a bicycle and chooses the horse.
The third theme of the book is the existence of certain ancient prophecies foretelling the appearance of a Deliverer and a Destroyer. Various evil forces are at large in the land, and it is the destiny of the Deliverer to overcome them. But it is also foreordained that a Destroyer will come to oppose the Deliverer a,:td give aid to the forces of darkness. At the beginning Philip is suspected of being the Destroyer. He is only able to vindicate himself by a succession of increasingly noble deeds, which ultimately result in his being acclaimed as the Deliverer. Meanwhile the Destroyer is unmasked and turns out to be the children's nursemaid, a woman of the lower classes whom Philip has always hated. Only once, at the end of the book, Nesbit steps out of character and shows where her real sympathies lie. 'Tll speak my mind if I die for it," says the Destroyer as she stands awaiting sentence. "You don't understand. You've never been a servant, to see other people get all the fat and you all the bones. What you think it's like to know if you'd just been born in a gentleman's mansion instead ofin a model workman's dwelling you'd have been brought up as a young lady and had the openwork silk stockings?" Even an eight-year-old understands at this point that Philip's heroic virtue is phony and the nursemaid's heroic defiance is real. In an unjust world, the roles of Deliverer and Destroyer become ambiguous. 'Think not that I am come to send peace on earth," said Jesus. "I come not to send peace, but a sword."

The Magic City I 5
I do not know how far Nesbit consciously intended The Magic City to be an allegory of the human condition. It was only after I descended from the trees, and tasted the joys and sorrows of becoming a scientist, that I began to meditate upon the magic city and to see in it a mirror image of the big world that I was entering. I was plunged into the big world abruptly, like Philip. The big world, wherever I looked, was full ofhuman tragedy. I came upon the scene and found myself playing roles that were half serious and half preposterous. And that is the way it has continued ever since.
I am trying in this book to describe to people who are not scientists the way the human situation looks to somebody who is a scientist. Partly I shall be describing how science looks from the inside. Partly I shall be discussing the future of technology. Partly I shall be struggling with the e thical problems of war and peace, freedom and responsibility, hope and despair, as these are affected by science. These are all parts of a picture which must be seen as a whole in order to be understood. It makes no sense to me to separate science from technology, technology from ethics, or ethics from religion. I am talking here to unscientific people who ultimately have the responsibility for guiding the growth of science and technology into creative rather than destructive directions. If you, unscientific people, are to succeed in this task, you must understand the nature of the beast you are trying to control. This book is intended to help you to understand. If you find it merely amusing or bewildering, it has failed in its purpose. But if you find none of it amusing or bewildering, it has failed even more completely. It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment. Science is no exception.
My colleagues in the social sciences talk a great deal about methodology. I prefer to call it style. The methodology of this book is literary rather than analytical. For insight into human affairs I turn to stories and poems rather than to sociology. This is the result of my upbringing and background. I am not able to make use of the wisdom of the sociologists because I do not speak their language. When I see scientists becoming involved in public affairs and trying to use their technical knowledge politically for the betterment of mankind, I remember the words of Milton the poet: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that ne ver sallies out and sees her adversary." These words, written three hundred

6 I ENGLAND
years ago, still stand as a monument of human experience, hope and tragedy. They reverberate with echoes of Milton's poetry, his fight for the freedom of the press, his long years of service to the cause of rebellion against monarchy, his blindness, his political downfall, and his final redemption in the writing of Paradise Lost. What more can one say that is not by comparison cheap and shallow? We are scientists second, and human beings first. We become politically involved because knowledge implies responsibility. We fight as best we can for what we believe to be right. Often, like Milton, we fail. What more can one say?
A substantial part of this book is autobiographical. I make no apology for that. It is not that I consider my own life particularly significant or interesting to anybody besides myself. I write about my own experiences because I do not know so much about anyone else's. Almost any scientist of my generation could tell a similar story. The important thing, to my mind, is that the great human problems are problems of the individual and not of the mass. To understand the nature of science and of its interaction with society, one must examine the individual scientist and how he confronts the world around him. The best way to approach the ethical problems associated with science is to study real dilemmas faced by real scientists. Since firsthand evidence is the most reliable, I begin by writing about things that happened to me personally. This is another effect of the same individualistic bias that leads me to listen to poets more than to economists.
But I still have to finish what I was saying about The Magic City and its three themes. That we live in a world of overgrown toys is too obvious to need explaining. Nikolaus Otto plays for a few years with a toy gasoline engine and-bingol-we all find ourselves driving cars. Wallace Carothers gets interested in condensation polymers andzingl-every working-class girl is wearing nylon stockings that are as fancy as the openwork silk that was for Nesbit in 1910 the hated symbol of upper-class privilege. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann amuse themselves with analytical radiochemistry and-booml-a hundred thousand people in Hiroshima are dead. The same examples also illustrate Nesbit's rule about the consequences of wishing for machinery. Once you have wished for cars, nylons or nuclear weapons, you are stuck with them in a very permanent fashion. But there is one great difference between Philip's world and ours. In his world,

The Magic City I 7
every toy castle that he had ever built appeared enlarged. In our world, thousands ofscientists play with millions of toys, but only a few of their toys grow big. The majority of technological ventures remain toys, of interest only to specialists and historians. A small number succeed spectacularly and become part of the fabric of our lives. Even with the advantage of hindsight it is difficult to understand why one technology is overwhelmingly successful and another is stillborn. Subtle differences of quality have decisive effects. Sometimes an accident that nobody could have predicted makes a particular toy grow monstrous. When Otto Hahn stumbled upon the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 he had no inkling of nuclear weapons, no premonition that he was treading on dangerous ground. When the news of Hiroshima came to him seven years later, he was overcome with such grief that his friends were afraid he would kill himself.
Science and technology, like all original creations of the human spirit, are unpredictable. If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
Scientists are not the only people who play with intellectual toys that suddenly explode and cause the crash of empires. Philosophers, prophe ts and poets do it too. In the long run, the technological means that scientists place in our hands may be less important than the ideological ends to which these means are harnessed. Technology is powerful but it does not rule the world. Nesbit lived long enough to see one tenth of mankind ruled by ideas that the man known in the family as "Old Nick" had worked out in his long quiet days at the British Museum. Old Nick, alias Karl Marx, was the father-in-law of her friend Edward Aveling.
Marx was in his own life time a larger-than-life .figure, and after his death became Deliverer to half the world and Destroyer to the other half. There is a deep-rooted tendency in the human soul that builds myths of Deliverers and Destroyers. These myths, like other myths, have a foundation in truth. The world ofscience and technology may appear on the surface to be rational, but it is not immune to such myths. The great .figures of science have a quality, an intensity of will and character, that sets them apart from ordinary scientists as Marx

8

ENGLAND

stands apart from ordinary economists. We shall not understand the dynamics of science and technology, just as we shall not understand the dynamics of political ideology, if we ignore the dominating influence of myths and symbols.
I was lucky to hear the economist John Maynard Keynes, a few years before his death, give a lecture about the physicist Isaac Newton. Keynes was at that time himself a legendary figure, gravely ill and carrying a heavy responsibility as economic adviser to 'Vinston Churchill. He had snatched a few hours from his official duties to pursue his hobby of studying Newton's unpublished manuscripts. Newton had kept his early writings hidden away until the end of his life in a big box, where they remained until quite recently. Keynes was speaking in the same old building where Newton had lived and worked 270 years earlier. In an ancient, dark, cold room, draped with wartime blackout curtains, a small audience crowded around the patch of light under which the exhausted figure of Keynes was huddled. He spoke with passionate intensity, made even more impressive by the pallor of his face and the gloom of the surroundings. Here are some extracts from his talk.
As one broods over these queer collections, it seems easier to understand -with an understanding which is not, I hope, distorted in the other direction -this strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe, at the time when within these walls he was solving so much, that he could reach all the secrets of God and Nature by the pure power of mind-Copernicus and Faustus in one.
A large section, judging by the handwriting among the earliest, relates to alchemy-transmutation, the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life.
All his unpublished works on esoteric and theological matters are marked by careful learning, accurate method and extreme sobriety of statement. They are just as sane as the Principia, if their whole matter and purpose were not magical.
Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. .. . He did read the riddle of the heavens. And he believed that by the same powers of his introspective imagination he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely foreordained, the riddle of the elements and their constitution

The Magic City I 9
from an original undifferentiated first matter, the riddle of health and of immortality.
Newton was admittedly an extreme case. When I quote these words of Keynes I do not mean to imply that every great scientist should devote half his time to magical mumbo-jumbo. I am suggesting that anyone who is transcendentally great as a scientist is likely also to have personal qualities that ordinary people would consider in some sense superhuman. Ifhe were not gifted with extraordinary strength of character, he could not do what he does in science. Thus it is not surprising that traditional mythology links the figure of the scientist with that of the Magus. The Magi were the priests of the ancient Zoroastrian religion of Persia, and the word "magic" is derived from their name. The myth of the scientist-Magus appears in its most complete form in the legend of Faust, the learned man who sells his soul to the Devil in return for occult knowledge and magical power. The remarkable thing about the Faust legend is that everybody to some extent still believes in it. When you say that some piece of technology is a Faustian bargain, everybody knows what you mean. Somewhere below the level of rational argument, the myth is alive.
I shall talk later about various scientists who have acquired public reputations as deliverers or destroyers. Such reputations are often transient or even fraudulent, but they are not meaningless. They indicate a recognition by the public that somebody has done something that matters. The public also recognizes a special personal quality in these people. The greatest and most genuine deliverer in my lifetime was Einstein. His special quality was universally recognized, although it is not easy to describe in words. I shall not talk about Einstein since I did not know him personally and I have nothing to add to what has already been said by others.
In the magic city there are not only deliverers and destroyers but also a great multitude of honest craftsmen, artisans and scribes. Much of the joy of science is the joy of solid work done by skilled workmen. Many ofus are happy to spend our lives in collaborative efforts where to be reliable is more important than to be original. There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use. We do not all have the talent or the ambition to become prima donnas. The

10 I ENGLAND
essential factor which keeps the scientific enterprise healthy is a shared respect for quality. Everybody can take pride in the quality of his own work, and we expect rough treatment from our colleagues whenever we produce something shoddy. The knowledge that quality counts makes e~en routine tasks rewarding.
Recently a new magus has appeared upon the scene: a writer, Robert Pirsig, with a book, Zen and the A rt of Motorcycle Maintenance. His book explores the dual nature of science, on the one hand science as dedicated craftsmanship, on the other hand science as intellectual obsession. He dances with wonderful agility between these two levels of experience. On the practical level, he describes for unscientific readers the virtue of a technology based upon respect for quality. The motorcycle serves as a concrete example to illustrate the principles which should govern the practical use of science. On the intellectual level, Pirsig weaves into the discussion of technology a narrative of his own quest for philosophical understanding, ending with a mental collapse and reintegration. Phaedrus, the alter ego of Pirsig, is a spirit so dominated by intellectual struggle that he has become insane. In order to survive as a human being, Pirsig has driven Phaedrus out of his consciousness, but Phaedrus comes back to haunt him. The small boy Chris who rides on the back of the motorcycle succeeds in the end in bringing Phaedrus and Pirsig together. In a strange fashion, this personal drama adds insight to Pirsig's vision of technology. Pirsig is by profession a writer and not a scientist. But he has struggled to order rationally the whole of human experience, as Newton struggled three hundred years earlier. He has pored over the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers in his study in Montana, as Newton pored over the ancient alchemical texts in his laboratory in Cambridge. The struggle brought both of them to the edge of madness. Each of them in the end abandoned the greater part of his design and settled for a more limited area of understanding. But Pirsig's message to our generation, as we try to come to terms with technology, is deepened and strengthened because he is who he is and has seen what he has seen:
The magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. - • at apparition, sole of men, he saw.

2
The Redemption of Faust
A year before the beginning of the Second World War, I got hold of a copy of Piaggio's Differential Equations. This did not come from my teachers. At that time I had never been near a university or a technical library. My door to knowledge was a little handwritten letter which I sent to various book publishers: " Dear Sirs, Please would you send to the above address a catalog of your scientific publications. Yours faithfully." Sure enough, within a few days the catalog would arrive. The most exciting catalogs came from the Cambridge University Press. They had long lists of books resulting from the Challenger expedition of 1872-76. The voyage of H.M.S. Challenger was the first worldwide scientific exploration of the oceans, and that one little ship brought back such a wealth of material that they were still selling books about it in 1938. I wondered vaguely whether there might not one day be another such voyage, and whether I might not have a chance to sail on it. But the Challenger volumes were far too expensive for me to buy, and so my career as an oceanographer e nded before it began.
Mathematics was cheaper. I had read some of the popular literature about Einstein and relativity, and had found it very unsatisfying. Always when I thought I was getting close to the heart of the matter, the author would say, "But if you really want to unde rstand Einstein you have to understand differential equations," or words to that effect. I did not have a clear idea of what a differential equation was, but I knew it was Einstein's language and I had to learn it. So it was a day of great joy when a skimpy catalog arrived from G. Bell and Sons Limited, containing the item Differential Equations, by H. T.
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H. Piaggio, twelve shillings and sixpence. I had never heard of Piaggio, but twelve and six was within my range, and I went at once to the bookshop to put in my order. In due course the book arrived, rather small and modestly bound in light-blue cloth. I was too busy during the school term to give my attention to it, so I saved it for the Christmas vacation.
My school vacations were mostly spent at a cottage on the shore which my father had bought as a holiday home. He was a musician. He worked for many years as music teacher in the same school which I attended as a boy in Winchester. He enjoyed the life of a schoolteacher, with three months vacation a year and plenty of time left free for conducting and composing even during the school terms. His best-known work is "The Canterbury Pilgrims," a setting of the Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for solo voices, chorus and orchestra. It was first performed at Winchester when I was seven years old. It is dedicated "to M.L.D., who prepared the words." That is my mother, who shared with him an intense affection for Chaucer and for the characters that Chaucer immortalized. We often encountered modern reincarnations of one or another of Chaucer's pilgrims. Then my parents would exchange glances, my mother would whisper a line of Chaucer, or my father would quietly hum the appropriate tune. The well-fed clergy of Winchester would remind them of Chaucer's Monk:
He was a lord full fat and in great point; His eyes were bright and rolling in his head, That gleamed like a fire beneath a pot.
A doctor driving a Rolls-Royce along our street would suggest Chaucer's Doctor of Physic:
He kept all that he won in pestilence. For gold in physic is a cordial, Therefore he loved gold in special.
The sights and sounds of the English countryside would call to mind Chaucer's descriptions of it:
And small birds make melody That sleep all night with open eye, So worketh nature in their hearts.

The Redemption ofFaust I 13
In vacation time, when we were at the cottage, my father regularly composed for three hours every morning. In the afternoons he loved to potter around and improve his forty acres of waterlogged land. The land could do with a great deal of improving, since it lay below sea level on the south coast of England and had been repeatedly flooded with salt water. We were supposed to maintain our section of the dike which kept the sea out. The land was drained by a system of ditches which flowed into bunnies. A bunny was a pipe laid under the dike, with a wooden clapper which opened to let water out from land to sea at low tide and closed to keep the sea from corning in at high tide. The bunnies were my father's pride and joy. He was never happier than when he was standing waist deep in cold black mud to excavate a clogged bunny. When the bunnies were working smoothly he would excavate the ditches. Only one thing was missing. To make his happiness complete he would have liked to have his growing son out there with him in the mud to give him help and companionship.
My idea of a joyful Christmas vacation was different. I arrived at the cottage on the coast with my precious Piaggio and did not intend to be parted from him. I soon discovered that Piaggio's book was ideally suited to a solitary student. It was a serious book, and went rapidly enough ahead into advanced territory. But unlike most advanced texts, it was liberally sprinkled with "Examples for Solution." There were more than seven hundred of these problems. The difference between a text without problems and a text with problems is like the difference between learning to read a language and learning to speak it. I intended to speak the language of Einstein, and so I worked my way through the problems. I started at six in the morning and stopped at ten in the evening, with short breaks for meals. I averaged fourteen hours a day. Never have I enjoyed a vacation more.
After a while my parents became worried. My mother looked sadly at me and quoted from Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford:
Of study took he most care and most heed, Not a word spake he more than was need.
She warned me that I would ruin my health and burn out my brains if I went on like this. My father begged me, just for a few hours, to stop calculating and help him with his ditches. But their entreaties

14 I ENGLAND
only made me more stubborn. I was in love with mathematics, and nothing else mattered. I was also acutely aware of the approaching war. We did not then know that it was our last peacetime Christmas, but we could all see the war coming. I knew what had happened to the English boys who were fifteen at the start of the First World War and arrived in the trenches in 1917 and 1918. In all probability I had not many years to live, and every hour spent not doing mathematics was a tragic waste. How could my father be so blind as to wish to ruin my few remaining days on earth with his dull ditches? I looked on his blindness more in sorrow than in anger.
In those days my head was full of the romantic prose ofE. T. Bell's book Men of Mathematics, a collection of biographies of the great mathematicians. This is a splendid book for a young boy to read (unfortunately, there is not much in it to inspire a girl, with Sonya Kowalewska allotted only half a chapter), and it has awoken many people of my generation to the beauties of mathematics. The most memorable chapter is called "Genius and Stupidity" and describes the life and -:leath of the French mathematician Galois, who was killed in a duel at the age of twenty. In spite of all the sentimental mush that has been written about him, he was a genuine genius and his death was a genuine tragedy. Galois groups and Galois fields are still after 140 years a living part of mathematics. E. T. Bell describes the last night before the fatal duel: "All night he had spent the fleeting hours feverishly dashing off his scientific last will and testament, writing against time to glean a few of the great things in his teeming mind before the death which he foresaw could overtake him. Time after time he broke off to scribble in the margin 'I have not time; I have not time,' and passed on to the next frantically scrawled outline. What he wrote in those desperate last hours before the dawn will keep generations of mathematicians busy for hundreds of years. He had found, once and for all, the true solution of a riddle which had tormented mathematicians for centuries: under what conditions can an equation be solved?" These words added a touch of noble pathos to the long hours that I was spending with Piaggio. If I was destined to die at the age of nineteen, like so many of the junior officers of the First World War, then I would have one year less than Galois.
Our Christmas vacation lasted a full month. Before it was over I was coming near to the end of Piaggio's seven hundred examples. I

The Redemption ofFaust I 15
began to skip a few of them. I was even willing to set aside an hour or two to take a walk with my mother. My mother had been waiting a long time for a chance to talk to me. She was well prepared. So a few days before the end of vacation we went out together.
My mother was a lawyer by profession and intensely interested in people. She loved the Latin and Greek poets. She began her lecture with a quotation from the play The Self-Tormentor by the African slave Terentius Afer, who became the greatest Latin playwright: "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. " "I am human and I let nothing human be alien to me." This was the creed by which she lived a long and full life until she died at the age of ninety-four. She told me then, as we walked along the dike between the mud and the open water, that this should also be my creed. She understood my impatience, and my passion for the abstract beauties of Piaggio. But she begged me not to lose my humanity in my haste to become a mathematician. You will regret it deeply, she said, when one day you are a great scientist and you wake up to find that you have never had time to make friends. What good will it do you to prove the Riemann hypothesis, if you have no wife and no children to share your triumph? You will find even mathematics itself will grow stale and bitter if that is the only thing you are interested in.
I listened to all this carelessly, knowing that I had no use for it yet but could come back to it later. After my mother had finished with Terence the African, she began again with Goethe's Faust. She told me the story of Faust from Goethe's First Part. How Faust works day and night at his books, consumed by the ambition to know everything and command the forc.:s of nature. How he becomes more and more self-centered and more and more dissatisfied. How he goes altogether to the bad and loses his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power. How his attempt to find happiness with Gretchen leads only to misery and tragedy, since he is incapable of unselfish love and can only compel her to love him on his own terms. Some years later when the film Citizen Kane came over from America and I went to see it, I suddenly found myself in tears and realized it was because Orson Welles's artistry made my mother's image of Faust come alive again. Kane and Faust, Faust and Kane and I, each of us damned to eternal friendlessness by our selfish ambitions.
But my mother did not leave me comfortless. She went on to talk !!t length about Faust Part Two, the work of Goethe's old age, in

16 I ENGLAND
which Faust is finally redeemed. It is agreed between the heavenly and infernal powers that Faust will be redeemed if he can ever find a moment of true happiness in which his soul is at peace with itself. Through many tedious pages of verse he searches in vain for the blissful moment. He meets with Helen of Troy and various other mythological personages, tries his hand as a general in command of an army, but finds no satisfaction in it. In the end, when he is old and blind, he comes to a Dutch village where the whole population is engaged in a desperate struggle to defend their land against the sea. The people of the village are out at the dike, Qigging and pumping, working together with all their might against the common danger. Faustjoins them and throws himselfinto the work without a thought for his frail condition. Suddenly he realizes that this is the blissful moment that he has been seeking all his life, the joy of working together with his fellow men in a common endeavor, the joy of being immersed in a cause larger than himself. So he dies redeemed and is carried off to heaven by an angelic choir. Afterward when I happened once to read the closing pages of Faust Part Two, I was surprised to find that this vividly remembered scene of the Dutch villagers at the dike owes more to my mother's imagination than to Goethe. What Goethe wrote is only a pale shadow of it. It is a pity Goethe never heard her version of the story.
So my road to redemption was clear. Down to the ditches with my father. Grudgingly, I joined him in the mud for one afternoon. No angels came to waft me to heaven.
After the vacation was over, I went back to school, quickly finished Piaggio and was ready to begin on Einstein. Unfortunately, none of my book catalogs offered anything written by Einstein, and for a while I was stuck. I ordered from the Cambridge University Press Eddington's Mathematical Theory ofRelativity and made do with that. After Piaggio it went quite easily. Meanwhile my mother's words of wisdom were slowly sinking into the subconscious levels of my mind and preparing fresh surprises for me. I agreed with her in theory when she said that human solidarity and companionship were the essential ingredients of a satisfactory life. But in practice, for the time being, I saw little that I could do about it.
Like everybody else at that time, I worried a great deal about the approaching war. I was not concerned about winning it or losing it. It seemed then that there was equally small chance that anything

J he 11eatJmp1zu11 VJ , .....u. ,

worth preserving would survive the war, whether we won it or lost

it. The war was for me an unconditional evil. I was concerned only

to do whatever I could to stop it from beginning. And the only way

to stop it was to change the hearts and minds of the warmakers on

both sides. It was clear that only a radical change in their way of

thinking could do the job.

I tried hard to understand the deeper causes of the hatreds that

were driving us to war. I concluded that the basic cause of war was

injustice. If all men had a fair share of the world's goods, if all of us

were given an equal chance in the game of life, the n there would be

no hatred and no war. So I asked myself the age-old questions, why

does God permit war, and why does God permit injustice, and I

found no answers. The problem of injustice seemed to me even more

intractable than the problem of war. I was gifted with brains, good

health, books, education, a loving family, not to mention food, cloth-

ing and shelter. How could I imagine a world in which the Welsh coal

miner's son and the Indian peasant would be as lucky as I was?

Enlightenment came to me suddenly and unexpectedly one af-

ternoon in March when I was walking up to the school notice board

to see whether my name was on the list for tomorrow's football game.

I was not on the list. And in a blinding flash of inner light I saw the

answer to both my problems, the problem of war and the problem

of injustice. The answer was amazingly simple. I called it Cosmic

Unity. Cosmic Unity said: There is only one ofus. We are all the same

person. I am you and I am Winston Churchill and Hitler and Gandhi

and everybody. There is no problem of injustice because your suffer-

ings are also mine. There will be no problem of war as soon as you

understand that in killing m~ you are only killing yourself.

For some days I quietly worked out in my own mind the meta-

physics of Cosmic Unity. The more I thought about it, the more

convinced I became that it was the living truth. It was logically

incontrovertible. It provided for the first time a £rm foundation for

ethics. It offered mankind the radical change of heart and mind that

was our only hope of peace at a time of desperate danger. Only one

small problem remained. I must find a way to convert the world to

my way of thinking.

.

The work of conversion began slowly. I am not a good preacher.

After I had expounded the new faith two or three times to my friends

at school, I found it difficult to hold their attention. They were not

18 I ENGLAND
anxious to hear more about it. They had a tendency to run away when they saw me coming. They were good-natured boys, and generally tolerant of eccentricity, but they were repelled by my tone of moral earnestness. When I preached at them I sounded too much like the headmaster. So in the end I made only two converts, one wholehearted and one half-hearted. Even the whole-hearted convert did not share in the work of preaching. He liked to keep his beliefs to himself. I, too, began to suspect that I lacked some of the essential qualities of a religious leader. Relativity was more in my line. After a few months I gave up trying to make converts. When some friend would come up to me and say cheerfully, "How's cosmajoonity doing today?" I would just answer, "Fine, thank you," and let it go at that.
In the summer vacation I made one last attempt at a conversion. I asked my mother to come out for another walk along the dike and I laid before her my message of hope and glory. She was obviously very happy to see that I had discovered there are more things in heaven and earth than differential equations. She smiled at me and said very little. After I had finished talking I asked her what she thought about it all. She answered slowly, "Yes. I have believed something rather like that for a very long time."

3
The Children's Crusade
Wing Commander MacGown was chief medical officer in the Pathfinder Force of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. He was on Lancaster 83Q, taking off for Berlin from Wyton Air Force Base, at a very desperate time in January 1944. Wyton was the home of 83 Squadron, one of the original pathfinder squadrons which had been leading the night attacks on German cities since the pathfinders began. I stood by the runway, facing into a cold wet wind, and watched the twenty Lancasters of 83 Squadron take off into blackness. They were heavily overloaded and took a long time to get airborne. The Lancaster had a phenomenal capacity for carrying bombs. The permissible overload had been raised several times since Lancasters began operations in 1942. After the bombers took off I went inside for a cup of tea.
Wyton was as ugly as a wartime military base can be. Endless puddles, barracks, warehouses full of bombs, rusting wreckage of damaged equipment not worth repairing. For two months 83 Squadron had been going out night after night, whenever the weather was not completely impossible, to bomb Berlin. On the average they were losing an aircraft each time they went out. Each Lancaster carried a crew of seven.
Bomber Command was putting its maximum effort into the repeated attacks on Berlin that winter, because it was the last chance to do decisive damage to the German war economy before the Western armies would begin the invasion of Europe. The boys who flew in the Lancasters were told that this battle of Berlin was one of the decisive battles of the war and that they were winning it. I did not
19

, I

20

ENC L AND

know how many of them believed what they were told. I knew only that what they were told was untrue. By January 1944 the battle was lost. I had see n the bomb patterns, which showed bombs scattered over an enormous area. The bomber losses were rising sharply. There was no chance that our continuing the offensive in this style could have any decisive e ffect on the war. It was true that Berlin contained a great varie ty of important war industries and administrative centers. But Bomber Command was not attempting to find and attack these objectives individually. We merely showered incendiary bombs over the city in as concentrated a fashion as possible, with a small fraction of high-explosive bombs to discourage the fire-fighters. Against this sort of attack the defense could afford to be selective. Important fac tories were protected by fire-fighting teams who could deal quickly with incendiaries falling in vital areas. Civilian housing and shops could be left to burn. So it often happened that Bomber Command "destroyed" a city, and photographic reconnaissance a few weeks later showed factories producing as usual amid the rubble of burnt homes.
On just two occasions during the war, a Bomber Command incendiary attack was outstandingly successful. This happened first in Hamburg in July 1943. We started so many fires in a heavily built-up area that a fire storm developed, a hurricane of flame that killed forty thousand people and destroyed everything in its path. None of our other attacks had produced effects that were a tenth as destructive as the e ffects of a fire storm. The only way we could have won a militarily meaningful victory in the battle of Berlin was to raise a fire storm there. Conceivably, a giant fire storm raging through Berlin could have fulfilled the dreams of the men who created Bomber Command. "Victory through Air Power" was their slogan. But I knew in January 1944 that this was not going to happen. A fire storm could happen only when the bombe rs were able to bomb exceptionally accurately and without serious interference from the defenses. Under our repeated battering the defenses of Berlin were getting stronger, and the scatter of the bombing was getting worse. Only once more, a year after my visit to Wyton, when Germany was invaded and almost overrun, we succeeded again in raising a fire storm. That was in February 1945, in Dresden.
I was a civilian scientist working at Bomber Command headquarters. I had come a long way since the innocent days of Cosmic Unity.

The Children s Crusade I 21
I belonged to a group called the Operational Research Section, which gave scientific advice to the commander in chief. I was engaged in a statistical study to find out whether there was any correlation be• tween the experience of a crew and their chance ofbeing shot down. The belie f of the Command, incessantly drummed into the crews during their training and impressed on the public by the official propaganda machine, was that a crew's chance of surviving a mission increased with experience. Once you get through the first five or ten missions, the crews were told, you will know the ropes and you will learn to spot the German night fighters sooner and you will stand a much better chance of coming home alive. To believe this was un• doubtedly good for the boys' morale. Squadron commanders, all of them survivors of many missions, sincerely believed that they owed their survival to their personal qualities of skill and determination rather than to pure chance. They were probably right. It had been true in the early years of the war that experienced crews survived better. Before I arrived at Bomber Command, the Operational Re• search Section had made a study which confirmed the official doc• trine of survival through experience. The results of that study had been warmly accepted by everybody.
Unfortunately, when I repeated the study with better statistics and more recent data, I found that things had changed. My analysis was based on complete records and carefully excluded any spurious correlations caused by the fact that inexperienced crews were often given easier missions. My conclusion was unambiguous: the decrease ofloss rate with experience which existed in 1942 had ceased to exist in 1944. There were still ma..y individual cases of experienced crews by heroic e fforts bringing home bombers so badly damaged that a novice crew in the same situation would almost certainly have been lost. Such cases did not alter the fact that the total effect of all the skill and dedication of the experienced crews was statistically un• detectable. Experienced and inexperienced crews were mown down as impartially as the boys who walked into the German machine gun nests at the battle of the Somme in 1916.
The disappearance of the correlation between experience and loss rate ought to have been recognized by our commander in chief as a warning signal, telling him that he was up against something new. In the Operational Research Section we had a theory to explain why experience no longer saved bombers. We now know that our

22 I ENG L AN o
theory was correct. The theory was called "Upward-Firing Guns." Each bomber had four crew members constantly searching tht: sky for fighters, the pilot and bomb aimer in front and the two gunne rs in the tail and mid-upper gun turrets. Vertically underneath the bomber was a blind spot. Conventionally armed fighters would not have been able to approach the bomber from underneath and shoot it down without being seen. But increasing numbers of the German fighters were not conventionally armed. They had cannon pointing vertically upward, with a simple periscope gun sight arranged so that the pilot could take careful aim as he flew quietly below the bomber. The main problem for the fighter pilot was to avoid being hit by any large pieces as the bomber disintegrated.
83 Squadron , being an old pathfinder squadron, had more than its share of experienced crews. The normal tour of duty for a crew in a regular squadron was thirty missions. The loss rate during the middle years of the war averaged about four percent. This meant that a crewman had three chances in ten of comple ting a normal tour. The pathfinder crews signed on for a double tour of sixty missions. They had about one chance in e leven of comple ting the double tour. During the winter of 1943- 44, with the repeated attacks on Berlin, the losses were higher than average and the chances of survival smaller.
I had come to Wyton from Command headquarters to see how various radar countermeasures against fighters were working. The radars worked all right, but they were not much use because they could not distinguish fighters from bombers. I also hoped to pick up information at Wyton that would be helpful for my study of the e ffects of experience on loss rates. I thought I might talk with some of the experienced crews, gather firsthand impressions, and get a feeling for what was really happening in the nightly battles over Be rlin. But it soon became clear that serious conversations between crews and civilian outsiders were impossible. Above all, the subject of survival rates was taboo. The whole weight of Air Force tradition and authority was designed to discourage the individual airman from figuring the odds. Airmen who thought too much about the odds were likely to crack up. Airmen who talked about such matters to their crewmates were a danger to the discipline of the squadron. Stringent precautions were taken to ensure that any of our Command headquarters documents that discussed survival rates should

The Children s Crusade I 23
not reach the squadrons. ln the squadrons the old rule "Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die" was still in force.
The crewmen were not forbidden to talk to me. They could talk as much as they liked. But what could they say to me, or what could I say to them, across the gulf that separated us? They were mostly twenty-year-old boys, the same age as I. They had faced flaming death thirty times and would face it thirty times more if they were lucky. I had not, and would not. They knew, and I knew that they knew, that I was one of those college-educated kids who fo und themselves cushy civilian jobs and kept out of harm's way. How could two twenty-year-olds, separated by such a barrier, talk to each other about anything important?
The one person at Wyton to whom I could talk freely was Wing Commander MacGown. He was responsible for the mental as well as physical health of the crews of the eight pathfinde r squadrons. A tall, white-haired officer, he seemed to me very old although he cannot have been much over forty. He was the ultimate authority who decided, when one of the boys began to show signs of mental crack-up, whether he should be kept on operations or transferred out of the squadron. There was no easy way out for boys who cracked. The rules of the Command were designed to ensure that crewmen should conside r transfer a fate worse than death. Whe n a boy was transferred for mental reasons, the cause of transfer was officially recorded as " Lack of Moral Fibre.·• He was, in effect, officially declared to be a coward and thereafter assigned to menial and humiliating duties. In spite of the public disgrace and dishonor that they had to endure, the number who cracked was not small. At Command headquarters, we knew that the num ber transferred out of squadrons before the e nd of their tour was roughly equal to the number comple ting the full tour. We were not allowed to know how many of those transferred were mental cases. But Wing Commander MacGown knew.
I was astonished, at our first meeting, when MacGown told me he was flying to Berlin that night. He said the crews loved to have him go along with them. It was well known in the squad ron that the plane with the Doc on board always came home safely. He had already been to Berlin and back six times in the last two mon ths. At first I thought he must be crazy. Why should an elderly doctor with a full-time staff job risk his life repeatedly on these desperately clan-

24 I ENGLAND
gerous missions? Afterward I understood. It was the only way he could show these boys for whose bodies and souls he was responsible that he really cared for them. It was the only way he could face the boys who cracked and declare them "lacking in moral fibre" without losing his own self-respect.
While MacGown and twenty times seven crewmen were on their way to Berlin, there was a beer party for the spare crews who for one reason or another were not needed on this operation. The boys drank a great deal of beer and sang their squadron songs.
We take our bombs to Germany, We don't bring them back-
they sang, and at the end of each verse the refrain
Eighty-three squadronEighty-three men.
It was the saddest beer party I ever attended. Early in the morning we heard the Lancasters coming home. Only one was missing. It was not MacGow n's.
After my visit to Wyton, I decided that the only honorable thing to do was to quit my job at Command headquarters and enlist as a crewman. Because of my mathematical training I expected they would accept me as a navigator. But before taking any such drastic action I discussed the whole situation with my mother. My mother understood at once what was at stake. She saw that it would be useless to appeal directly to my cowardice. Instead she appealed to my incompetence. "You would be absolutely hopeless as a navigator," she said. "You would get lost every time. Of course I won't argue against your going and getting yourself killed if you think that is the right thing to do. But it would be a terrible waste of an airplane." Her words had the desired effect. I gave up the idea of heroic self-sacrifice and went quietly back to work at Bomber Command.
During that winter, while we were attacking Berlin, the Germans used to send a few bombers over London from time to time. The German attacks were on a minuscule scale compared with ours, and they cannot have had any other purpose than to boost the morale of the Berliners. We had carried out similar token raids on Berlin in 1940 when London was under serious attack. So when the German planes came droning overhead in February 19441 stayed in bed and

The Children's Crusade I 25
did not bother to go down to the cellar. I thought of the German boys up there, risking their lives to provide morning copy for the writers in the Propaganda Ministry. I was meditating upon the overwhelming irrelevance of this game of tit-for-tat bombing to the serious war that we were supposed to be engaged in.Just then came a shattering explosion and my bedroom windows lay in splinters on the floor. The Institut Franc;ais, two houses away on the corner of Queen's Gate and Prince Consort Road, had taken a direct hit. The Institut was the cultural center fo r the French community in London before the war. It was said that the prewar French had not been happy when de Gaulle came over from France in 1940 and without any legal authorization claimed for himself the leadership of the Free French forces. There had been sporadic feuding between the Institut people and de Gaulle all through the war. My mother and I went out into the street to watch the Institut burn. It made a glorious blaze in the winter night. Perhaps, after all, those boys up there were not German but French, sent by de Gaulle to pay off an old grudge. Whichever way you looked at it, it made no sense.
In the Operational Research Section, those of us who studied the causes of bomber losses thought we had a promising idea for reducing the losses. We wanted to rip the two gun turre ts with all the associated machinery and ammunition out of the bombers and reduce the crew from seven to five. The evidence that loss rate did not decrease with experience confirmed our belief that gunners were of little use for defending bombers at night. The basic trouble with the bombers was that they were too slow and too heavily loaded. The gun turre ts we1e heavy and aerodynamically awkward. We estimated that a bomber with turrets ripped out and the holes covered with smooth fai rings would fly fifty miles an hour faster and be much more maneuverable. Bomber losses varied dramatically from night to night. We knew that the main cause of the variation was the success or failure of the German fighter controllers in directing the fighters into the bomber stream before it reached the target. An extra fifty miles an hour might have made an enormous difference. At the very least, we urged, the Command could try the experiment of ripping the turrets out of a few squadrons. They would then soon see whether the gunless Lancasters were shot down more or less than the others. Privately, I had an other reason for wanting to rip out the turrets. Even if the change did not result

26 I ENGLAND
in saving a single bomber, it would at least save the lives of the gunners.
All our advice to the commander in chief was channeled through the chief of our section, who was a career civil servant. His guiding principle was only to tell the commander in chief things that the commander in chief liked to hear. His devotion to this principle earned him the expected promotion at the end of the war and led later to the inevitable knighthood. I still remember the shock I felt the first time I saw our chief in action. I happened to be in his office when a WAAF sergeant came in with a bomb plot of a recent attack on Frankfurt. As usual, the impact points deduced from flash photographs were plotted on a map of the city with a three-mile circle drawn around the aiming point. The plot was supposed to go to the commander in chief together with our analysis of the raid. Our chief looked glumly at it for a few seconds and then gave it back to the sergeant. "Awfully few bombs inside the circle," he said. "You'd better change that to a five-mile circle before it goes in." After this experience, I was not surprised to learn that our chief took a dim view of our suggestion that bombers might survive better without gun turrets. This was not the kind of suggestion that the commande r in chief liked to hear, and therefore our chief did not like it either. To push the idea ofripping out gun turrets, against the official mythology of the gallant gunner defending his crewmates, and against the massive bureaucratic inertia of the Command, would have involved our chief in a major political battle. Perhaps it was a battle he could not have hoped to win. In any case, the instinct of a career civil servant told him to avoid such battles. The gun turrets remained in the bombers, and the gunners continued to die uselessly until the end of the war.
I shared an office at Command headquarters with a half-Irish boy of my own age called Mike O'Loughlin. He had been a soldier in the army, developed epilepsy, and was given a medical discharge. He knew less mathematics than I did but more about the real world. When we looked around us at the brutalities and stupidities of the Command, I got depressed and Mike got angry. Anger is creative; depression is useless.
One of the things that Mike was angry about was escape hatches. Every bomber had a trap door in the floor through which the crew was supposed to jump when the captain gave the order to bail out.

The Children s Crusade I 27
The official propaganda gave the crews the impression that they had an excellent chance of escaping by parachute if their plane should be so unlucky as to be shot down. They were generally more worried about being lynched by infuriated German civilians than about being trapped in a burning aircraft. In fact, lynching by civilians never happened, and only a small number of airmen were shot by the Gestapo after being captured. A far larger number died because they were inadequately prepared for the job of squeezing through a small hole with a bulky flying suit and parachute harness, in the dark, in a hurry, in an airplane rapidly going out of control. The mechanics of bailing out was another taboo subject which right-thinking crewmen were not encouraged to discuss. The actual fraction of survivors among the crews of shot-down planes was a secret kept from the squadrons even more strictly than the odds against their completing an operational tour. If the boys had found out how small was the fraction who succeeded in bailing out after being hit, some of them might have been tempted to jump too soon.
Mike was no respecter of official taboos. He managed to collect fairly complete information concerning the numbers of crewmen, from missing aircraft of various types, who turned up as prisoners of war. The numbers that he found were startling. From American bombers shot down in daylight, about fifty percent escaped. From the older types of British night bomber, Halifax and Stirling, about twenty-five percent. From Lancasters, fifteen percent. The Lancaster was our newest bomber and in every other respect superior to the Halifax and Stirling. The older bombers were being phased out and the squadrons were being rapidly converted to Lancasters. Mike was the only person in the entire Command who worried about what this would do to the boys who were shot down.
It was easy to argue that the difference in the escape rate between American bombers and Halifaxes and Stirlings was attributable to the difference in circumstances betwee n day and night bombing. The Americans may have had more warning before they were hit and more time to organize their departure. It was obviously easier to find the way out by daylight than in the dark. No such excuses could account for the difference between Halifaxes and Lancasters. Mike discovered quickly the true explanation for the low escape rate from Lancasters. The escape hatch of a Halifax was twenty-four inches wide; the width of a Lancaster hatch was twenty-two inches. The

28 I ENGLAND
missing two inches probably cost the lives of several thousand boys. Mike spent two years in a lonely struggle to force the Command
to enlarge the Lancaster hatch. Ultimately he succeeded. It was an astonishing triumph of will power over bureaucracy, one epileptic boy overcoming the entrenched inertia of the military establishment. But Mike's progress was maddeningly slow. After he had collected the information on escape rates, it took many months before the Command would officially admit that a problem existed. After the problem had been officially recognized, it took many months to persuade the companies who built the Lancaster that they ought to do something about it. After the companies started to work on the problem, it took many months before a bigger hatch was designed and put into production. The bigger hatch became standard only when the war was almost over and the crews who might have been saved by it were mostly dead. When the total casualty figures for Bomber Command were added up at the end of the war, the results were as follows: Killed on operations, 47,130. Bailed out and survived, 12,790, including 138 who died as prisoners of war. Escape rate, 21.3 percent. I always believed that we could have come close to the American escape rate of fifty percent if our commanders had been seriously concerned about the problem.
We killed altogether about 400,000 Germans, one third of them in the two fire storms in Hamburg and Dresden. The Dresden fire storm was the worst. But from our point of view it was only a fluke. We attacked Berlin sixteen times with the same kind of force that attacked Dresden once. We were trying every time to raise a fire storm. There was nothing special about Dresden except that for once everything worked as we intended. It was like a hole in one in a game of golf. Unfortunately, Dresden had little military importance, and anyway the slaughter came too late to have any serious effect on the war.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book called Slaughterhouse-Five, or The
s Children Crusade about the Dresden raid. For many years I had
intended to write a book on the bombing. Now I do not need to write it, because Vonnegut has written it much better than I could. He was in Dresden at the time and saw what happened. His book is not only good literature. It is also truthful. The only inaccuracy that I found in it is that it does not say that the night attack which produced the holocaust was a British affair. The Americans only came the following

The Children's Crusade I 29
day to plow over the rubble. Vonnegut, being American, did not want to write his account in such a way that the whole thing could be blamed on the British. Apart from that, everything he says is true. One of the most truthful things in the book is the subtitle, "The Children's Crusade." Vonnegut explains in his introduction how the wife of one of his friends got angry and made him use that subtitle. She was right. A children's crusade is just what the whole bloody shambles was.
Bomber Command might have been invented by some mad sociologist as an example to exhibit as clearly as possible the evil aspects of science and technology: The Lancaster, in itself a magnillcent flying machine, made into a death trap for the boys who flew it. A huge organization dedicated to the purpose of burning cities and killing people, and doing the job badly. A bureaucratic accounting system which failed utterly to distinguish between ends and means, measuring the success of squadrons by the number of sorties flown, no matter why, and by the tonnage of bombs dropped, no matter where. Secrecy pervading the hierarchy from top to bottom, not so much directed against the Germans as against the possibility that the failures and falsehoods of the Command should become known either to the political authorities in London or to the boys in the squadrons. A commander in chief who accepted no criticism either from above or from below, never admitted his mistakes, and appeared to be as indifferent to the slaughter of his own airmen as he was to the slaughter of German civilians. An Operational Research Section which was supposed to give him independent scientific advice but was too timid to cliallenge any essential element of his policies. A collection of staff officers at the Command headquarters who reminded me, when occasionally I was invited to go and have a drink with them at the officers' mess, of the Oxford dons that the historian Edward Gibbon described two hundred years ago in his autobiography: "Their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth."
Many of these evils existed in military establishments long before warfare became technological. Our commander in chief was a typical example of a prescientific military man. He was brutal and unimaginative, but at least he was human and he was willing to take responsibiHty for the evil that he did. In himself he was not worse than General Sherman, who also did evil in a just cause. He was only

30

ENGLAND

carrying out, with greater enthusiasm than the situation demanded, the policy laid down by his government. His personality was not the root of the evil at Bomber Command.
The root of the evil was the doctrine of strategic bombing, which had guided the evolution of Bomber Command from its beginning in 1936. The doctrine of strategic bombing declared that the only way to win wars or to prevent wars was to rain down death and destruction upon enemy countries from the sky. This doctrine was attractive to political and military leaders in the 1930s, for two reasons. First, it promised them escape from their worst nightmare, a repetition of the frightful trench warfare of the First World War through which they had all lived. Second, it offered them a hope that war could be avoided altogether by the operation of the principle that later came to be known as " deterrence." The doctrine held that all governments would be deterred from starting wars if they knew that the consequence would be certain and ruinous bombardment. So far as the war against Germany was concerned, history proved the theory wrong on both counts. Strategic bombing neither deterred the war nor won it. There has never yet been a war that strategic bombing by itself has won. In spite of the clear evidence of history, the strategic bombing doctrine flourished in Bomber Command throughout the Second World War. And it flourishes still, in bigger countries, with bigger bombs.
Bomber Command was an early example of the new evil that science and technology have added to the old evils of soldiering. Technology has made evil anonymous. Through science and technology, evil is organized bureaucratically so that no individual is responsible for what happens. Neither the boy in the Lancaster aiming his bombs at an ill-defined splodge on his radar screen, nor the operations officer shuflling papers at squadron headquarters, nor I sitting in my little office in the Operational Research Section and calculating probabilities, had any feeling of personal responsibility. None of us ever saw the people we killed. None of us particularly cared.
The last spring of the war was the most desolate. Even after Dresden, through March and April of 1945, the bombing of cities continued. The German night fighters fought to the end, and still shot down hundreds of Lancasters in those final weeks. I began to look backward and to ask myself how it happened that I let myself become involved in this crazy game of murder. Since the beginning

The Children's Crusade I 31
of the war I had been retreating step by step from one moral position to another, until at the end I had no moral position at all. At the beginning of the war I believed fiercely in the brotherhood of man, called myself a follower of Gandhi, and was morally opposed to all violence. After a year of war I retreated and said, Unfortunately nonviolent resistance against Hitler is impracticable, but I am still morally opposed to bombing. A few years later I said, Unfortunately it seems that bombing is necessary in order to win the war, and so I am willing to go to work for Bomber Command, but I am still morally opposed to bombing cities indiscriminately. After I arrived at Bomber Command I said, Unfortunately it turns out that we are after all bombing cities indiscriminately, but this is morally justified as it is helping to win the war. A year later I said, Unfortunately it seems that our bombing is not really helping to win the war, but at least I am morally justified in working to save the lives of the bomber crews. In the last spring of the war I could no longer find any excuses. Mike had fought single-handed the battle of the escape hatches and had indeed saved many lives. I had saved none. I had surrendered one moral principle after another, and in the end it was all for nothing. In that last spring, I watched the woods come to life outside the window of my office at the Command headquarters. I had a volume of the poet Hopkins on my desk. His last desperate sonnets spoke to my despair.
See, banks and brakes Now, leaved how thick! Laced they are again With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes Them; birds build-but not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, 0 Thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
Thirty years later I stood with my wife and children in the air raid shelter in the garden of my wife's uncle's home in East Germany. My wife's uncle had built the shelte r solidly out ofbrick and steel. Several bomb craters could still be traced in the ground nearby. After thirty years the roof of the shelter was still sound and the floor dry. The house stands in a village southwest of Berlin. During the years I was at Bomber Command, my wife lived in that house. She was still a child. The nights whe n the bombers came over she spent in the shelter. No doubt she was sitting there the night Wing Commander

32 I ENG LA NO
MacGown came over, when I was drinking beer with the boys at Wyton. We tried without much success to explain all this to the children. "You mean Mummy was sitting down here because Daddy's friends were dropping the bombs on the garden?" You really cannot explain things like that to a seven-year-old.

4
The Blood of a Poet
During the time I was at Bomber Command, one of the London theaters put on John Drinkwater's play Abraham Lincoln. Drinkwater wrote it in 1918, when England was in the throes of another war. It is a thoughtful play, using the character of Lincoln to illuminate questions which were tormenting Londoners in 1918 and again in 1944. Is there such a thing as a just war? Does any cause, no matter how just, justify the tragedy and barbarity that war brings with it? In those bleak times, Londoners were hungry for answers to such questions, and the play did well at the box office. The fact that the hero was an American may have helped. We were not in a mood to accept any of our own politicians as heroes. Lincoln was like Gandhi, remote enough to be credible.
We had not been overexposed to American history in our school days, and so we responded nai:vely and intensely to scenes that would make a native American yawn. The high point of the drama comes in the last scene but one, at the courthouse in Appomattox, when the immaculate Lee walks in to surrender to the disheveled Grant. After Lee departs, Grant relaxes with Meade and they discuss the reasons why they finally won the war. "We've had courage and determination," says Grant. "And we've had wits, to beat a great soldier. I'd say that to any man. But it's Abraham Lincoln, Meade, who has kept us a great cause clean to fight for. It does a man's heart good to know he's given victory to such a man to handle. A glass, Meade? [Pouring out whisky]." Whether Grant in real life ever said these words to Meade I had no means of knowing. Nor did it matter. What mattered was that in 1865, at the end of a long and bitter war, somebody might
33

34 I ENGLAND
have used these words without hypocrisy. A great cause clean to fight for. Lincoln had understood that it was important, not just to win his war, but to win it so far as possible with clean hands. Our leaders in 1944 had no such understanding. In 1944 we were well set to win our war, which we had begun in 1939 with a good enough cause. But we were also well set on the path which led to Dresden, to Hiroshima, to the nuclear terror in which the whole world now lives. We had dirtied a good cause, and the dirt stuck to us. It was just as Edith Nesbit said when she wrote the rules of the magic city. We had wished for a force of strategic bombers to fight our war for us, and so we we re condemned to live with strategic bomber forces for the rest of our lives.
A few days after the destruction of Dresden, our daily newspape r, the News-Chronicle, reported the death of Frank Thompson. This was no ordinary death. But to explain the meaning of this death I must go back again to 1936, when I was twe lve and Frank was fifteen.
One of the virtues of the school at Winchester where Frank and I were boarders was that boys of all ages were thrown together in big rooms, ten or twenty to a room. There was no privacy for anybody. The buildings were 550 years old and we lived in them as our fourteenth-century pre decessors had lived, in a constant and cheerful uproar. Coming into this bedlam as a shrimpy twelve-year-old with a treble voice, I crept into a corner, wondered and watched and listened. My main concern was to avoid being stepped on in the verbal and physical battles that unpredictably raged around the room. It was like that marvelous Russian film The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, made in 1938 with Mark Donskoy as director. Alyosha Lyarsky plays the child Gorky, trying to survive in a small house crowded with a family of quarreling Russian peasants. Whenever I get a chance to see that film it reminds me of Frank and of m y early days at Winchester. Among the boys in our room, Frank was the largest, the loudest, the most uninhibited and the most brilliant. So it happened that I came to know Frank very well, and learned from him more than I learned from anybody else at that school, although he may scarcely have been aware of my existence. One of my most vivid memories is of Frank coming back from a weekend in Oxford, striding into our room and sin ging at the top of his voice, "She's got ... what it takes." This set him apart from the majority in our cloistered all-male society.

The Blood of a Poet I 35
At fifteen, Frank had already won the title of College Poet. He was a connoisseur of Latin and Greek literature and could talk for hours about the fine points of an ode of Horace or of Pindar. Unlike the other classical scholars in our crowd, he also read medieval Latin and modern Greek. These were for him not dead but living languages. He was more deeply concerned than the rest of us with the big world outside, with the civil war the n raging in Spain, with the world war that he saw coming. From him I caught my first inkling of the great moral questions of war and peace that were to dominate our lives ever afterward. Listening to him talking, I learned that there is no way to rightly grasp these great questions except through poetry. For him, poetry was no me re intellectual amusement. Poetry was man's best effort down the ages to distill some wisdom from the inarticulate depths of his soul. Frank could no more live without poetry than I could live without mathematics.
Frank wrote little before he died, and published less. I quote here only one of his poems, ad dressed directly to the theme of war. It was written in 1940, shortly after the British Army was driven out of France. Frank sees this event through the eyes of the Chorus in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. The chorus of citizens of Argos is brooding upon the ten-year war as they wait for the return of Agamemnon to his home after the fall of Troy. To Frank it is obvious and natural that the griefand hatred of these Greeks of three thousand years ago, made immortal by a great poet six hundred years later, should mirror and illuminate our own anguish. The essentials of war, the human passion and tragedy, are the same, whether it is the war of Troy or the war of Dunkirk. So Frank weaves these two wars together in his poem, using lines from the Aeschylus Chorus at the ends of his stanzas. The poem is called "Allotrias diai Gynaikos (For the sake of another man's wife), Agamemnon 437-451."
Between the dartboard and the empty fireplace They are talking of the boys the village has lost; Tom, our best bowler all last season, Died clean and swift when his plane went reeling; Bill, who drank beer and laughed, is now asleep Behind Dunkirk, helped others to escape; And Dave went down on that aircraft carrier, Dave, whom nobody minded, But who played the flute rather well, I remember.

36

ENGLAND

"These boys died bravely. We'll always be proud of them, They've given old Adolf something to set him thinking." That was the loudest, the driving wave of opinion. But in the corners hear the eddies singing"For the sake of another man's wife." They died in a war of others' making.
"Helen the Fair went over the water With Paris your friend, one of your own gang, Whom we never trusted, but you feasted For years with fawning, let your lands go hang. We warned you. You could have stopped it. ... But now we have sent our sons from the cornfields. War, like·a grocer, weighs and sends us back Ashes for men, and all our year goes black.
"Yes. They died well, but not to suit your purpose; Not so that you could go hunting with two horses, While their sons touched their caps, opening gates for pennies. Perhaps we shall take a hand, write our own ending." One growls this beneath his breath. Soft, but the Titan heard it waking.
Frank was sensitive enough to feel the enchantment of Winchester but strong enough to react against it. "The culture one imbibed at Wincheste r," he wrote later, "was too nostalgic. Amid those old buildings and under those graceful lime-trees it was easy to give one's heart to the Middle Ages and believe that the world had lost its manhood along with Abelard. One fell in love with the beauty of the past, and there was no dialectician there to explain that the chief glory of the past was its triumph over the age that came before it, that Abelard was great because he was a revolutionary." Frank, at any rate, did not content himself with studying the past. He persuaded one of the teachers to give regular classes in Russian and quickly became fluent in it, finding the modern revolutionary poets, Gusyev and Mayakovsky, more to his taste than the classics. I later joined the class and so was able to share at least this one of Frank's enthusiasms. But his appetite for languages was insatiable. He started an "Obscure Languages Club" among the boys in our room, who then competed with one another in trading insults and obscenities in as many different languages as possible. For a while there was a project to write Russian verses in Glagolitic script, a wonderfully

The Blood of a Poet 37
ornate and curlicued alphabet that flourished briefly in the Dark Ages before the practical Saint Cyril replaced it with Cyrillic. "All the Slav languages are good," Frank wrote, "but beside Russian, Polish and Czech seem nervous and restless, Bulgarian poor and untutored, and Serbo-Croat, which is probably the next most satisfactory, just a little barbarous-a fine language for guerrillas and men who drink slivovitz in the mountains, not yet fitted for the complex philosophies ofour times. But Russian is a sad, powerful language and Hows gently off the tongue like molten gold." Later he changed his mind about Bulgarian.
I saw no more of Frank after he left Winchester in 1938. He went to Oxford, joined the Communist Party, enlisted in the army when war began in 1939, and spent most of the war years in the Middle East. He was in Libya, Egypt, Palestine and Persia, occasionally fighting and always adding to his stock of friends and languages. In January 1944 he was dropped by parachute into German-occupied Yugoslavia. His mission was to make contact and serve as British liaison officer with the underground resistance movement in Bulgaria, organizing air drop support and radio communications with the Allied Command in Cairo. In his last letter home, in April, he wrote, "There isn't really any news about myself. I've been working hard, I hope to some purpose, and keeping brave company, some of the best in the world. Next to this comradeship, my greatest pleasure has been rediscovering things like violets, cowslips and plum-blossom after three lost springs."
We read the end of the story in the News-Chronicle almost a year later. One of the Bulgarian delegates to the World Trade Union Congress in London had been an eyewitness.
Major Frank Thompson was executed about June 10 after a mock trial at Litakovo. He had been in captivity about ten days. With him perished four other officers, one American, a Serb and two Bulgarians, and eight other prisoners.
A public "trial" was hastily staged in the village hall. The hall was packed with spectators. The eyewitness saw Frank Thompson sitting against a pillar smoking his pipe. When he was called for questioning, to everyone's astonishment he needed no interpreter but spoke in correct and idiomatic Bulgarian. "By what right do you, an Englishman, enter our country and wage war against us?" he was asked. Major Thompson answered, "I came because this war is something very much deeper than a struggle of nation against

38

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nation. The greatest thing in the world now is the struggle of An ti-Fascism against Fascism." "Do you not know that we shoot men who hold your opinion?" "I am ready to d ie for freedom. And I am proud to die with Bulgarian patriots as companions." .. .
Major Thompson then took charge of the condemned and led them to the castle. As they marched off before the assembled people he raised the salute of the Fatherland Front which the Allies were helping, the clenched fist. A gendarme struck his hand down. But Thompson called out to the people, "I give you the salute of freedom." All the men died raising this salute. The spectators were sobbing. Many present declared that the scene was one of the most moving in all Bulgarian history, and that the men's amazing courage was the wor k of the English officer who carried their spirits as we ll as his own.
Everything in this account rings true except for one word. The word "Anti-Fascism" is, I suspect, a euphemism supplied by the Bulgarian trade union delegate. Frank always called a spade a spade. I am almost sure that he really said, "The greatest thing in the world now is the struggle of Communism against Fascism." He was, after all, a Communist. His Bulgarian comrades were Communists. They did not live long enough to discover that communism and freedom are not always synonymous. Communism was for Frank not the communism of the intellectuals but the communism of the Soviet truckdriver whom he met once by chance taking a convoy of trucks through a mountain valley in Persia. Here is Frank's account of their me e ting.
"H'are you doing?" I shouted at him in Russian. His grin broadened as he heard his own tongue. He came slowly towards us. "How am I doing? Well. Very well." He came and leaned on the door of my truck, grinning thoughtfully, feeling none of our Western obligation to continue conversation. "Splendid news from Kavkaz," I said. We had just heard of the first victories at Ordzhonokidze. He grinned again. "You think it is good?" "Yes. Very good. Don't you?" He thought and grinned and looked steadily at me for nearly half a minute. "Yes, it is very good." Another half-minute devoted to thinking and grinning. "Yes, it is just as Comrade Stalin said. He said, 'There'll be a holiday on our street, too. ' And so there will! So there will! There'll be a holiday on our street, too!" We both laughed at this. "Yes!" I said. "So there willl There'll be a holiday on our street, tool" The traffic cleared and we moved on. But for hours after, my inner heart laughed and sang as it hadn't done for months.

The Blood of a ?oet I 39
The same laughing and singing must have been in Frank's heart as he gave the clenched fist salute to the crowd in Litakovo. In September 1944, Soviet troops entered Bulgaria, the Fatherland Front took over the government, and Frank was proclaimed a national hero. The railway station of Prokopnik, where the partisans had fought one of their fiercest battles, was renamed Major Thompson Station. He lies now with his comrades on a hilltop above Litakovo village, under a stone with an inscription from the Bulgarian poet Christo Botev:
I may die very young But I shall be satisfied If my people later say "He died for justice, For justice and for liberty."
The news of Frank's death came too late to make any change in the routine of my life at Bomber Command. I continued, during the final months of the war in Europe, to do what I could as a technician to bring the bombers safely home from their missions. But it became clearer and clearer as the weeks went by that our bombing of cities was a pointless waste of lives. Four weeks after Dresden we attacked the ancient cathedral city of Wtirzburg and shattered one of the finest Tiepolo ceilings of Europe in the bishop 's palace. The bomber crews were particularly happy to obliterate Wilrzburg because they knew that the deadly German tracking and fire-control radars were called Wtirzburg radars. Nobody told the crews that the city ofWurzburg had as much to do with the radars as our own cathedral city of Winchester had to do with Winchester rifles. I began more and more to envy the technicians on the other side who were helping the German night fighter crews to defend their homes and families. The night fighters and their supporting organization put up an astonishing performance, continuing to fight and to cause us serious losses until their last airfields were overrun and Hitler's Germany ceased to exist. They ended the war morally undefeated. They had the advantage of knowing what they were fighting for. Not, in those last weeks of the war, for Hitler, but for the preservation of what was left of their cities and their people. We had given them at the end of the war the one thing that they lacked at the beginning, a cause clean to fight for.

40 I ENGLAND
I also envied Frank. Not that I altogether believed in the cause he died for. In 1945 I could already see that the government he helped install in Bulgaria was unlikely to fulfill the hopes he had held for it. It was undoubtedly better in many respects than the government it overthrew. But it was not, and could not have been, a governme nt of justice and liberty. In 1943 Frank had written, "There is a spirit abroad in Europe which is finer and braver than anything that tired continent has known for centuries, and which cannot be withstood. It is the confident will of whole peoples, who have known the utmost humiliation and suffering and have triumphed over it, to build their own life once and for all." It may be difficult, thirty years later, to find much evidence for this spirit in the bureaucrats who are now running the government in Sofia. But I have no doubt whatever that this spirit existed among the Bulgarian partisans with whom Frank lived and fought. And the mere fact that they fought and died in this spirit gave a lasting historical legitimacy to the government they established. However imperfect that government may be as an embodiment of their ideals, the monument on the hill at Litakovo remains as a challenge to future generations to prove that they did not die in vain.
It is a common irony of history that the great prophets often misjudge the place of their ultimate triumph. The Buddha failed to hold India and is revered in Japan. Marx failed to make a revolution in Germany and succeeded against all his expectation in Russia. Likewise, Frank's dream, "the confide nt will of whole peoples, who have known the utmost humiliation and suffering and have triumphed over it, to build their own life once and for all," has failed to come to fruition as he expected in Europe, but it has been magnificently successful as the driving force of political change almost everywhere else-in China, in Africa, in Vietnam, and among the black people of America. I was not wise enough to foresee all these events in the spring of 1945, but I knew already then that Frank had died for a dream larger than Bulgarian politics. I knew that if any hope of salvation for mankind was to emerge from the wreckage of World War II, that hope coulcl come only from the poet's war that Frank fought, not from the technician's war that I was engaged in. It was easy, at that moment in history, to envy the dead.
What lasting lesson can we learn from these experiences? For me, at least the main lesson is clear. A good cause can become bad if we

The Blood of a Poet I 41
fight for it with mean s that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad. And the more technological the war becomes, the more disastrously a bad choice of means will change a good cause into evil. I learned this lesson from my years at Bomber Command, and from the example of Frank's life and death. Unfor tunately, man y of my generation who were on the winning side in World War II did not learn this lesson. If they had learned it, they would not have led us to disaster twenty years later in Vie tnam . I had the advantage, when the American bombers began bombing in Vietnam, of knowing that our cause was hopeless, because I knew that Frank's spirit was out there in the jungle .fighting for Ho Chi Minh.
The Americans in 1945 went th rough an experience directly opposite to mine. I had taken par t in a bombing campaign which caused us enormous losses and failed to achieve any decisive result. I came to the end of it aware that the German defenses had by and large defeated us. The Americans began their campaign of indiscriminate bombing ofcities in Japan just as we were finishing ours in Germany. Their Twenty-first Bomber Command, commanded by General Curtis LeMay and based in the Mariana Islands, attacked Tokyo with fire bombs three weeks after we attacked Dresden and achieved equally spectacular results. In this, the first raid of their campaign, they raised in Tokyo the fire storm that we never achieved in Berlin. They killed 130,000 people and destroyed half of the city in one night, losing only fourteen planes. They continued the campaign in the same style for three months and paused on June 15 because they had run out of cities to burn. The defenses were ineffective and the bomber losses were militarily inconsequential. The urban economy of Japan was shattered. Whe the r the Japanese industrial machine would have recovered, given time, as the German industries recovered from re peated bombings, we shall ne ve r know. The Japanese we re not given time. The American bombing campaign was as cle ar a victory as ours was a clear defeat. Unfortunately, people learn from defeat more than they learn from victory.
While the fire bombing of Japan was in progress, the scientists at Los Alamos were putting the finishing touches to their first atomic bombs, and Secre tary of War Stimson was meeting with his advisers

42 I ENGLAND
to decide how these bombs were to be used. At the time I knew nothing of their activities. All that I knew about such matters was contained in a book which I had ordered from my Cambridge University Press catalog in the old prewar days in Winchester, a book called New Pathways in Science, by the astronomer Arthur Eddington. Eddington's book, published in 1935, has a chapter on "Subatomic Energy." In this chapter are two sentences which had impressed me deeply. Through the long years of war I had kept them in mind.
I have referred to the practical utilization of subatomic energy as an illusive hope which it would be wrong to encourage; but in the present state of the world it is rather a threat which it would be a grave responsibility to disparage altogether. It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand.
Henry Stimson and his advisers were not insensitive to the moral issues with which they were confronted. The record of their deliberations leaves no doubt that they agonized long and hard over the decision to use the bombs, and that they recognized the historic importance of their decision. They had to balance the overwhelming short-term value of a quick and decisive end to the war against the long-term and uncertain dangers to mankind that would follow from the establishment of a precedent for actual use of nuclear weapons. It is still possible to argue that they made the right decision. Many books have been written analyzing their decision with the wisdom of hindsight, in the light of knowledge which they did not possess concerning the political forces that were then struggling within the Japanese government. Nobody doubts that the decision was made by men who sincerely believed that it would save many thousands of lives, Japanese as well as American, that would otherwise have been sacrificed in the continuation of the war.
Two factors made it almost inevitable that Stimson, and President Truman following Stimson's advice, would decide to use the bombs. First was the fact that the whole apparatus for delivering the bombs -the B-29 bombers, the strategic bomber bases in the Mariana Is-

The Blood of a Poet 43
lands, the trained crews, and the bureaucratic machinery of the Twenty-first Bomber Command-already existed. The B-29 had been designed and built for the specific purpose of bombing Japan from distant island bases. Not to use all this apparatus, when it was there ready and waiting for the word Go, would have been a hard decision to make and harder still to justify to the American public if the war had continued. The second factor prejudicing Stimson's decision was the fact that indiscriminate fire bombing of Japanese cities had already occurred and was widely approved. Stimson was well aware of the enormous quantitative difference in destructive potential between nuclear and conventional bombs, but it was difficult for him to feel that there was a difference in the quality of evil between the killing of 130,000 people by old-fashioned fire bombs in Tokyo and the killing of about the same number by a nuclear bomb in Hiroshima. Those who argued against the use of nuclear weapons could only speak about long-range consequences and dangers. They could not say simply, "We should not do this because it is wrong," unless they were also prepared to put a stop to indiscriminate use of conventional bombs, The ground on which Stimson might have been able to make a moral stand was already surrendered when the fire bombing started in March. Long before that, in England and in America independently, the moral issues had been effectively prejudged when the decisions were made to build strategic bomber forces and to wage war with them against civilian populations. Hiroshima was only an afterthought.
Two weeks before he parachuted into Yugoslavia in 1944, Frank Thompson wrote from Cairo, "Yesterday I read over Lincoln's Second Inaugural, which is, I suppose, when one considers the circumstances in which it was written, one of the most remarkable speeches in human history. It made me think that, if anyone wanted to find a classic example of Divine Nemesis, what better than our present war against Japan? All our filthy record in the Far East, beginning with the Opium Wars, being paid for now in rivers of blood." "Fondly do we hope, fe rvently do we pray," Lincoln had said, "that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another

44 I ENGLAND
drawn with the sword- as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"
In August 1945 I was still working at Bomber Command. After the war in Europe ended, it was decided that a force of British bombers should be sent to bases in Okinawa, from which they would add their token contribution to the American strategic bombing of Japan. I was supposed to fly out with them to Okinawa. Then, on August 7, the News-Chronicle arrived at my breakfast table in London with the giant headline "New Force of Nature Harnessed." I liked that. It was big and impersonal. It was childhood's end. Now perhaps we could all start behaving like grownups. Whoever wrote that headline understood that this was something bigger than one side winning a victory in a tribal squabble. It meant, with luck, that we would be finished once and for all with strategic bombing campaigns. I agreed emphatically with Henry Stimson. Once we had got ourselves into the business of bombing cities, we might as well do the job competently and get it over with.
I felt better that morning than I had felt for years. I did not bother to go to the office. Those fellows who had built the atomic bomb obviously knew their stuff.They must be an outstandingly competent bunch of people. The thought occurred to me that I might one day get to meet them. I would enjoy that. I had spent too long messing around with stupid old-fashioned bombs. It was easy, in the happiness of that August morning, to forget what Grant said to Meade at Appomattox, to forget the Agamemnon Chorus, to forget the Bulgarian partisans, to forget Frank's clenched fist salute and the memorial stone at Litakovo, to forget Eddington's warning, to forget Lincoln's Second Inaugural, to forget the agony of the people still slowly dying of burns and radiation sickness in Hiroshima. Later, much later, I would remember these things.

II. AMERICA
Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.
T . s . ELIOT, The Family Reunion, 1939

5
A Scientific Apprenticeship
In September 1947 I enrolled as a graduate student in the physics department of Cornell University at Ithaca. I went there to learn how to do research in physics under the guidance of Hans Bethe. Bethe is not only a great physicist but also an outstanding trainer of students. When I arrived at Cornell and introduced myself to the great man, two things about him immediately impressed me. First, there was a lot of mud on his shoes. Second, the other students called him Hans. I had never seen anything like that in England. In England, professors were treated with respect and wore clean shoes.
Within a few days Hans found me a good problem to work on. He had an amazing ability to choose good problems, not too hard and not too easy, for students of widely varying skills and interests. He had eight or ten students doing research problems and never seemed to find it a strain to keep us busy and happy. He ate lunch with us at the cafeteria almost every day. After a few hours of conversation, he could judge accurately what each student was capable of doing. It had been arranged that I would only be at Cornell for nine months, and so he gave me a problem that he knew I could finish within that time. It worked out exactly as he said it would.
I was lucky to arrive at Cornell at that particular moment. Nineteen forty-seven was the year of the postwar flowering of physics, when new ideas and new experiments were sprouting everywhere from seeds that had lain dormant through the war. The scientists who had spent the war years at places like Bomber Command headquarters and Los Alamos came back to the universities impatient to get started again in pure science. They were in a hurry to make up for
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the years they had lost, and they went to work with energy and enthusiasm. Pure science in 1947 was starting to hum. And right in the middle of the renascence of pure physics was Hans Bethe.
At that time there was a single central unsolved problem that absorbed the attention of a large fraction of physicists. We called it the quantum electrodynamics problem. The problem was simply that there existed no accurate theory to describe the everyday behavior of atoms and electrons emitting and absorbing light. Quantum electrodynamics was the name of the missing theory. It was called quantum because it had to take into account the quantum nature of light, electro because it had to deal with electrons, and dynamics because it had to describe forces and motions. We had inherited from the prewar generation of physicists, Einstein and Bohr and Heisenberg and Dirac, the basic ideas for such a theory. But the basic ideas were not enough. The basic ideas could tell you roughly how an atom would behave. But we wanted to be able to calculate the behavior exactly. Of course it often happens in science that things are too complicated to be calculated exactly, so that one has to be content with a rough qualitative understanding. The strange thing in 1947 was that even the simplest and most elementary objects, hydrogen atoms and light quanta, could not be accurately understood. Hans Bethe was convinced that a correct and exact theory would emerge if we could figure out how to calculate consistently using the old prewar ideas. He stood like Moses on the mountain showing us the promised land. It was for us students to move in and make ourselves at home there.
A few months before I arrived at Cornell, two important things had happened. First, there were some experiments at Columbia University in New York which measured the behavior of an electron a thousand times more accurately than it had been measured before. This made the problem of creating an accurate theory far more urgent and gave the theorists some accurate numbers which they had to try to explain. Second, Hans Bethe himself did the first theoretical calculation that went substantially beyond what had been done before the war. He calculated the energy of an electron in an atom of hydrogen and found an answer agreeing fairly well with the Columbia measurement. This showed that he was on the right track. But his calculation was still a pastiche of old ideas held together by physical intuition. It had no firm mathematical basis. And it was not

A Scientific Apprenticesh ip I 49
even consistent with Einstein's principle of relativity. That was how things stood in September when I joined Hans's group of students.
The problem that Hans gave me was to repeat his calculation of the electron energy with the minimum changes that were needed to make it consiste nt with Einstein. It was an ideal problem for somebody like me, who had a good mathematical background and little knowledge of physics. I plunged in and filled hundreds of pages with calculations, learning the physics as I went along. After a few months I had an answer, again agreeing near enough with Columbia. My calculation was still a pastiche. I had not improved on Hans's calculation in any fundamental sense. I came no closer than Hans had come to a basic understanding of the electron . But t hose winter months of calculation had given me skill and confidence. I had mastered the tools of my trade. I was now ready to start thinking.
As a relaxation from quantum electrodynamics, I was encouraged to spend a few hours a week in the student laboratory doing experiments. These were not real research experiments. We were just going through the motions, repeating famous old experiments, knowing beforehand what the answers ought to be. The other students grumbled at having to waste their time doing Mickey Mouse experiments. But I found the experiments fascinating. In all m y time in England I had never been let loose in a laboratory. All these strange objects that I had read about, crystals and magnets and prisms and spectroscopes, were actually there and could be touched and handled. It seemed like a miracle when I measured the electric voltage produced by light of various colors falling on a metal surface and found that Einstein's law of the photoelectric effect is really true. Unfortunately I came to grief on the Millikan oil drop experiment. Millikan was a great physicist at the University of Chicago who first measured the electric charge of individual electrons. He made a mist of tiny drops of oil and watched them float around under his microscope while he pulled and pushed them with strong electric fields. The drops were so small that some of them carried a net electric charge of only one or two electrons. I had my oil d rops floating nicely, and then I grabbed hold of the wrong knob to adj ust the electric field. They found me stretched out on the floor, and that finished m y career as an experimenter.
I never regretted m y brief and almost fatal exposure to experiments. This experience brought home to me as nothing else could

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the truth of Einstein's remark, "One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." Here was I, sitting at my desk for weeks on end, doing the most elaborate and sophisticated calculations to figure out how an electron should behave. And here was the electron on my little oil drop, knowing quite well how to behave without waiting for the result of my calculation. How could one seriously believe that the electron really cared about my calculation, one way or the other? And yet the experiments at Columbia showed that it did care. Somehow or other, all this complicated mathematics that I was scribbling established rules that the electron on the oil drop was bound to follow. We know that this is so. Why it is so, why the electron pays attention to our mathematics, is a mystery that even Einstein could not fathom.
At our daily lunches with Hans we talked endlessly about physics, about the technical details and about the deep philosophical mysteries. On the whole, Hans was more interested in details than in philosophy. When I raised philosophical questions he would often say, "You ought to go and talk to Oppy about that." Oppy was Robert Oppenheimer, then newly appointed as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Sometime during the winter, Hans spoke with Oppy about me and they agreed that after my year at Cornell I should go for a year to Princeton. I looked forward to working with Oppy but I was also a bit scared. Oppy was already a legendary figure. He had been the originator and leader of the bomb project at Los Alamos. Hans had worked there under him as head of the Theoretical Division. Hans had enormous respect for Oppy. But he warned me not to expect an easy life at Princeton. He said Oppy did not suffer fools gladly and was sometimes hasty in deciding who was a fool.
One of our group of students at Cornell was Rossi Lomanitz, a rugged character from Oklahoma who lived in a dilapidated farmhouse outside Ithaca and was rumored to be a Communist. Lomanitz was never at Los Alamos, but he had worked with Oppy on the bomb project in California before Los Alamos was started. Being a Communist was not such a serious crime in 1947 as it became later. Seven years later, when Oppy was declared to be a Security Risk, one of the charges against him was that he had tried to stop the army from drafting Lomanitz. Mr. Robb, the prosecuting attorney at the trial, imputed sinister motives in Oppy's concern for Lomanitz. Oppy

A Scientific Apprenticeship I 51
replied to Robb, "The relations between me and my students were not that I stood at the head of a class and lectured. " That remark summed up exactly what made both Hans and Oppy great teachers. In 1947 security hearings and witch hunts were far from our thoughts. Rossi Lomanitz was a student just like the rest of us. And Oppy was the great national hero whose face could be seen ornamenting the covers of Time and Life magazines.
I knew before I came to Cornell that Hans had been at Los Alamos. I had not known beforehand that I would find a large fraction of the entire Los Alamos gang, with the exception of Oppy, reassembled at Cornell. Hans had been at Cornell before the war, and when he returned he found jobs for as many as possible of the bright young people he had worked with at Los Alamos. So we had at Cornell Robert Wilson, who had been head of experimental physics at Los Alamos, Philip Morrison, who had gone to the Mariana Islands to take care of the bombs that were used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dick Feynman, who had been in charge of the computing center, and many others. I was amazed to see how quickly and easily I fitted in with this bunch of weaponeers whose experience of the war had been so utterly different from my own. There was endless talk about the Los Alamos days. Through all the talk shone a glow of pride and nostalgia. For every one of these people, the Los Alamos days had been a great experie nce, a time of hard work and comradeship and deep happiness. I had the impression that the main reason they were happy to be at Cornell was that the Cornell physics department still retained something of the Los Alamos atmosphere. I, too, could feel the vivid presence of this atmosphere. It was youth, it was exuberance, it was informality, it was a shared ambition to do great things together in science without any personal jealousies or squabbles over credit. Hans Bethe and Dick Feynman did, many years later, receive well-earned Nobel Prizes, but nobody at Cornell was grabbing for prizes or for personal glory.
The Los Alamos people did not speak in public about the technical details of bombs. It was surprisingly easy to talk around that subject without getting onto dangerous ground. Only once I embarrassed everybody at the lunch table by remarking in all innocence, "It's lucky that Eddington proved it's im possible to make a bomb out of hydrogen." There was an awkward silence and the subject of conversation was abruptly changed. In those days the existence of

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any thoughts about hydrogen bombs was a deadly secret. After lunch one of the students took me aside and told me in confidence that unfor tunately Eddington was wrong, that a lot of work on hydrogen bombs had been done at Los Alamos, and would I please ne ver refer to the subject again. I was pleased that they trusted me enough to let me in on the secret. After that I felt I was really one of the gang.
Many of the Los Alamos veterans were involved in political activities aimed at educating the public about the nuclear facts of life. The main thrust of the ir message was that the Ame rican monopoly of nuclear weapons could not last, and that in the long run the only hope of survival would lie in a complete surrender of all nuclear activities to a strong international au thority. Philip Morrison was especially eloquent in spreading this message. Oppy had been saying the same thing more quietly to his friends inside the government. But by 1948 it was clear that the chance of establishing an effective international au thority on the basis of the wartime Soviet-American alliance had been missed. The nuclear arms race had begun, and the idea of international control could at best be a long-range dream.
Our lunchtime conversations with Hans were often centered on Los Alamos and on the moral questions surrounding the development and use of the bomb. Hans was troubled by these questions. But few of the other Los Alamos people were troubled. It seemed that hardly anybody had been troubled until after Hiroshima. While the work was going on, they were absorbed in scienti£c details and totally dedicated to the technical success of the project. They were far too busy with their work to worry about the consequences. In June 1945 Oppy had been a member of the group appointed by Henry Stimson to advise him about the use of the bombs. Oppy had supported Stimson's decision to use them as they were used. But Oppy did not at that time discuss the matter with any of his colleagues at Los Alamos. Not even with Hans. That responsibility he bore alone.
In February 1948 Time magazine published an interview with Oppy in which appeare d his famous confession, "In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." Most of the Los Alamos people at Cornell repudiated Oppy's remark indignantly. They felt no sense of sin. They had done a difficult and necessary j ob to help win the war. They felt it was unfair of Oppy to weep in public over their guilt

A Scientific Apprenticeship I 53
when anybody who built any kind of lethal weapons for use in war was equally guilty. I understood the anger of the Los Alamos people, but I agreed with Oppy. The sin of the physicists at Los Alamos did not lie in their having built a lethal weapon. To have built the bomb, when their country was engaged in a desperate war against Hitler's Germany, was morally justifiable. But they did not just build the bomb. They enjoyed building it. They had the best time of their lives while building it. That, I believe, is what Oppy had in mind when he said they had sinned. And he was right.
After a few months I was able to identify the quality that I found strange and attractive in the American students. They lacked the tragic sense of life which was deeply ingrained in every European of my generation. They had never lived with tragedy and had no feeling for it. Having no sense of tragedy, they also had no sense of guilt. They seemed very young and innocent although most of them were older than I was. They had come through the war without scars. Los Alamos had been for them a great lark. It left their innocence untouched. That was why they were unable to accept Oppy's statement as expressing a truth about themselves.
For Europeans the great turning point of history was the First World War, not the Second. The first war had created that tragic mood which was a part of the air we breathed long before the second war started. Oppy had grown up immersed in European culture and had acquired the tragic sense. Hans, being a European, had it too. The younger native-born Americans, with the exception of Dick Feynman, still lived in a world without shadows. Things are very different now, thirty years later. The Vietnam war produced in American life the same fundamental change of mood that the First World War producerl in Europe. The young Americans of today are closer in spirit to the Europeans than to the Americans of thirty years ago. The age of innocence is now over for all of us.
Dick Feynman was in this respect, as in almost every other respect, an exception. He was a young native American who had lived with tragedy. He had loved and married a brilliant, artistic girl who was dying of TB. They knew she was dying when they married. When Dick went to work at Los Alamos, Oppy arranged for his wife to stay at a sanitarium in Albuquerque so that they could be together as much as possible. She died there, a few weeks before the war ended.

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As soon as I arrived at Cornell, I became aware of Dick as the liveliest personality in our department. In many ways he reminded me of Frank Thompson. Dick was no poet and certainly no Communist. But he was like Frank in his loud voice, his quick mind, his intense interest in all kinds of things and people, his crazy jokes, and his disrespect for authority. I had a room in a student dormitory and sometimes around two o'clock in the morning I would wake up to the sound of a strange rhythm pulsating over the silent campus. That was Dick playing his bongo drums.
Dick was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody's word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or re invent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said that he couldn't understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning. This was a heroic enterprise. He worked harder during those years than anybody else I ever knew. At the end he had a version of quantum mechanics that he could understand. He then went on to calculate with his version of quantum mechanics how an electron should behave. He was able to reproduce the result that Hans had calculated using orthodox theories a little earlier. But Dick could go much further. He calculated with his own theory fine details of the electron's behavior that Hans's method could not touch. Dick could calculate these things far more accurately, and far more easily, than anybody else could. The calculation that I did for Hans, using the orthodox theory, took me several months of work and several hundred sheets of paper. Dick could get the same answer, calculating on a blackboard, in half an hour.
So this was the situation which I found at Cornell. Hans was using the old cookbook quantum mechanics that Dick couldn't unde rstand. Dick was using his own private quantum mechanics that nobody else could understand. They were getting the same answe rs whenever they calculated the same problems. And Dick could calculate a whole lot of things that Hans couldn' t. It was obvious to me that Dick's theory must be fundamentally right. I decided that my main job, after I finished the calculation for Hans, must be to understand Dick and explain his ideas in a language that the rest of the world could understand.
In the spring of 1948, Hans and Dick went to a select mee ting of

A Scientific Apprenticeship I 55
experts arranged by Oppy at a lodge in the Pocono Mountains to discuss the quantum electrodynamics problem. I was not invited because I was not yet an expert. The Columbia experimenters were there, and Niels Bohr, and various other important physicists. The main event of the meeting was an eight-hour talk by Julian Schwinger, a young professor at Harvard who had been a student of Oppy's. Julian, it seemed, had solved the main problem. He had a new theory of quantum electrodynamics which explained all the Columbia experiments. His theory was built on orthodox principles and was a masterpiece of mathematical technique. His calculations were extremely complicated, and few in the audience stayed with him all the way through the eight-hour exposition. But Oppy understood and approved everything. After Julian had finished, it was Dick's turn. Dick tried to tell the exhausted listeners how he could explain the same experiments much more simply using his own unorthodox methods. Nobody understood a word that Dick said. At the end Oppy made some scathing comments and that was that. Dick came home from the meeting very depressed.
During the last months of my time at Cornell I made an effort to see as much of Dick as possible. The beautiful thing about Dick was that you did not have to be afraid you were wasting his time. Most scientists when you come to talk with them are very polite and let you sit down, and only after a while you notice from their bored expressions or their fidgety fingers that they are wishing you would go away. Dick was not like that. When I came to his room and he didn't want to talk he would just shout, "Go away, I'm busy," without even turning his head. So I would go away. And next time when I came and he let me sit down, I knew he was not just being polite. We talked for many hours about his private version of physics and I began finally to get the hang of it.
The reason Dick's physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations. The usual way theoretical physics was done since the time of Newton was to begin by writing down some equations and then to work hard calculating solutions of the equations. This was the way Hans and Oppy and Julian Schwinger did physics. Dick just wrote down the solutions out of his head without ever writing down the equations. He had a physical picture of the way things happen, and the picture gave him the solutions directly with a minimum of calculation. It was no wonder that people who

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had spent their lives solving equations were baffied by him. Their minds were analytical; his was pictorial. My own training, since the far-off days when I struggled with Piaggio's differential equations, had been analytical. But as I listened to Dick and stared at the strange diagrams that he drew on the blackboard, I gradually absorbed some of his pictorial imagination and began to feel at home in his version of the universe.
The essence of Dick's vision was a loosening of all constraints. In orthodox physics you say, Suppose an electron is in this state at a certain time, then you calculate what it will do next by solving a certain differential equation, and from the solution of the equation you calculate what it will be doing at some later time. Instead of this, Dick said simply, the electron does whatever it likes. The electron goes all over space and time in all possible ways. It can even go backward in time whenever it chooses. If you start with an electron in this state at a certain time and you want to see whether it will be in some other state at another time, you just add together contributions from all the possible histories of the electron that take it from this state to the other. A history of the electron is any possible path in space and time, including paths zigzagging forward and back in time. The behavior of the electron is just the result of adding together all the histories according to some simple rules that Dick worked out. And the same trick works with minor changes not only for electrons but for everything else-atoms, baseballs, elephants and so on. Only for baseballs and elephants the rules are more complicated.
This sum-over-histories way of looking at things is not really so mysterious, once you get used to it. Like other profoundly original ideas, it has become slowly absorbed into the fabric of physics, so that now after thirty years it is difficult to remember why we found it at the beginning so hard to grasp. I had the enormous luck to be there at Cornell in 1948 when the idea was newborn, and to be for a short time Dfck's sounding board. I witnessed the concluding stages of the 6ve-year-long intellectual struggle by which Dick fought his way through to his unifying vision. What I saw of Dick reminded me of what I heard Keynes say of Newton six years earlier: "His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest

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and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted." In that spring of 1948 there was another memorable event. Hans
received a small package from Japan containing the first two issues of a new physics journal, Progress of Theoretical Physics, published in Kyoto. The two issues were printed in English on brownish paper of poor quality. They contained a total of six short articles. The first article in issue No. 2 was called "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields," by S. Tomonaga of Tokyo University. Underneath it was a footnote saying, "Translated from the paper ... (1943) appeared originally in Japanese." Hans gave me the article to read. It contained, set out simply and lucidly without any mathematical elaboration, the central idea of Julian Schwinger's theory. The implications of this were astonishing. Somehow or other, amid the ruin and turmoil of the war, totally isolated from the rest of the world, Tomonaga had maintained in Japan a school of research in theoretical physics that was in some respects ahead of anything existing anywhere else at that time. He had pushed on alone and laid the foundations of the new quantum electrodynamics, five years before Schwinger and without any help from the Columbia experiments. He had not, in 1943, completed the theory and developed it as a practical tool. To Schwinger rightly belongs the credit for making the theory into a coherent mathematical structure. But Tomonaga had taken the first essential step. There he was, in the spring of 1948, sitting amid the ashes and rubble of Tokyo and sending us that pathetic little package. lt came to us as a voice out of the deep.
A few weeks later, Oppy received a personal letter from Tomonaga describing the more recent work of the Japanese physicists. They had been moving ahead fast in the same direction as Schwinger. Regular communications were soon established. Oppy invited Tomonaga to visit Princeton, and a succession ofTomonaga's students later came to work with us at Princeton and at Cornell. When I met Tomonaga for the first time, a letter to my parents recorded my immediate impression of him: "He is more able than either Schwinger or Feynman to talk about ideas other than his own. And he has enough of his own too. He is an exceptionally unselfish person." On his table among the physics journals was a copy of the New Testament.

6
A Ride to Albuquerque
The term at Cornell ended in June, and Hans Bethe arranged an invitation for m e to go for five weeks to a summer school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Julian Schwinger would be lecturing there and would give us a leisurely account of the theory which he had sketched in his eight-hour marathon talk at the Pocono meeting. It was a great chance for me to hear Schwinger's ideas straight from the horse's mouth. But there was a gap of two weeks between the end of term and the beginning of summer school. Dick Feynman said, 'T m driving to Albuquerque. Why don 't you come along?" I looked at the map and saw that Albuquerque was not directly on the way to Ann Arbor. I said yes, I'd come along.
My stay in the United States was financed by a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship awarded by the Harkness Foundation. The fo undation generously included in its stipend the funds for a summer vacation. 1 was expected to travel across the continent and gain a wider perspective of the United States than could be seen from a single campus. A free ride to Albuquerque would make a good beginn ing.
I had Dick to myself most of the time for four days. Not all the time, because Dick loved to pick up hitchhikers. I enjoyed the hitchhikers too. These were American nomads, people with restless feet, moving from one place to another carelessly and without hurry. In England we have our nomadic tribe of gypsies, but they live in a closed-off world of their own. I had never spoken to a gypsy. Dick talked with these nomads as if they were old friends. They told us their adventures and Dick told them his. As we drove far the r south and west, Dick's manner of speech changed . He was adapting to the
58

A Ride to A lbuquerque I 59
accent and idiom of the people we picked up. Phrases like "I don 't know noth'n" became more frequent. The closer we came to Albuquerque, the more Dick seemed to feel at ease with his surroundings.
We crossed the Mississippi at St. Louis and came through the Ozark country into Oklahoma. The Ozarks were the loveliest part of the trip, green hills covered with flowers and woods and an occasional quiet far mhouse. Oklahoma was a diffe rent world, rich and ugly, with new towns and factories springing up everywhere and bulldozers tearing up the earth. Oklahoma was in the middle of an oil boom. We were about halfway to Oklahoma City when we ran into a rainstorm. In that country, it seemed, not only the people were rough and raw, but nature too. It was my first taste of tropical rain. It made the heaviest rain I had ever seen in England look like a drizzle. We crawled for a while through the downpour and then ran into a traffic jam. Some boys told us there were six fee t of water over the highway ahead of us and no way through. They said it had been raining like this for about a week. We turned around and retreated to a place called Vinita. There was nothing to do but get a room and wait for the floods to subside. The hotels were filled to capacity with stranded travelers. We were lucky to find a room, which Dick and I could share for fifty cents each. On the door was a notice that said, "This hotel is under new management, so if you're drunk you came to the wrong place." In that little room , with the rain drumming on the dirty window panes, we talked the night through. Dick talked of his dead wife, of the joy he had had in nursing her and making her last days tolerable, of the tricks they had played together on the Los Alamos security people, of her jokes and her courage. He talked of death with an easy familiarity which can come only to one who has lived with spirit unbroken through the worst that death can do. Ingmar Bergman in his film The SeveTJ th Seal created the character of the juggler Jof, always joking and playing the fool, seeing visions and dreams that nobody else believes in, surviving at the end when death carries the rest away. Dick and Jof have a great deal in common. Many people at Corne ll had told me Dick was crazy. In fact he was the sanest of the whole crowd.
Dick talked a great deal, that night in Vinita, about his work at Los Alamos. It was Bob Wilson, our good friend and the chief experimental physicist at Cornell, who had invited Dick to join the work

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on the bomb. Dick had answered at once by instinct, "No, I won't do it." The n he thought it over, and persuaded himself intellectually that he ought to work on it to make sure that Hitler did not get it first. So he joined the project, first in Princeton and then in Los Alamos. He threw himself furiously into the work and quickly became a leader. He was only twenty-six when they made him head of the computing section. The computers in those days were not electronic machines but human beings. Dick knew how to coach his team of computers so that they put their hearts and souls into the work. After he took over the section the output of computed problems went up ninefold. The section was going full steam ahead, racing against time to have all the calculations done before the first bomb test in July 1945. Dick was organizing them and cheering them on. It was like a grand boat race. They were racing so hard that nobody noticed when the Germans dropped out of the war and left them racing alone. When they passed the finish line, the day of the Trinity bomb test, Dick sat on the hood of a jeep and banged his bongo drums in joy. Only later he had time to think and to wonder whether perhaps his first instinctive answer to Bob Wilson had not been the right one. Since those days, he refused ever again to have anything to do with military work. He knew that he was too good at it and enjoyed it too much.
Dick had his own view of the future of nuclear weapons. Two illusions were current at that time. The conservative illusion was that American leadership in development and production of these weapons could be maintained indefinitely and would give America lasting military and political supremacy. The liberal illusion was that when all governments became aware of the dangers of nuclear annihilation they would abandon war as an instrument of national policy. Either way, nuclear weapons would become in some sense a guarantee of perpetual peace. Dick believed in neither illusion. He thought that wars would continue to occur from time to time, and that nuclear weapons would be used. He felt we were fools to think that we deserved to get away scot-free after letting these weapons loose in the world. He expected that somebody would sooner or later come back to give us a taste of our own medicine. He saw no reason to believe that other countries would be wiser or kinder than we had been. He found it amazing that people would go on living calmly in places like New York as if Hiroshima had never happened. As we

A Ride to Albuquerque I 61
drove through Cleveland and St. Louis, he was measuring in his mind's eye distances from ground zero, ranges oflethal radiation and blast and lire damage. His view of the future was bleak indeed. I felt as if I were taking a ride with Lot through Sodom and Gomorrah.
And yet Dick was never gloomy. He had absolute confidence in the ability of ordinary people to survive the crimes and follies of their rulers. Like Jof the juggler, he would sit quietly sharing his fresh milk and wild strawberries with his guests on the eve of the Day ofJudgment. He knew how tough ordinary people are, how death and destruction often brings out the best in us.
It happened that just a year earlier, in the summer of 1947, I had lived for three weeks in a city of rubble, the bombed-out German city of Munster. The University of Munster had invited a group of foreign students to come there to give the German students their first contact with the world outside. We had a street plan of the city to help us find our way around the mountains of rubble. "Even a city of rubble," it said on the street plan, "in a time of poverty and misery, can express in the appearance of its streets and sidewalks and parks and gardens the pride and the resilience and the public spirit of its people." That was true. Every evening when the weather was not too bad, the hungry people of Munster emerged from their cellars with violins and cellos and bassoons to give first-rate orchestral concerts in the open air. One night they even put on an opera, Cavalleria Rusticana. The opera was not the greatest, but the theater, a grassy amphitheater overshadowed by magnificent beech and chestnut trees, and the beauty of the evening, and the silhouette of the ruined castle, amply made up for the imperfections of the performance. By that time I had become so accustomed to being hungry and walking over piles of rubble that I did not notice it any more. Even in three weeks you get completely used to living in a world of hunger and rubble. I talked to Dick about these experiences in Germany, and he said it was just as he would have expected. He could not imagine that any bombs, even nuclear bombs, could crush the spirit of humanity for long. "When you just think of all the crazy things we have survived," he said, "the atomic bomb is not such a big deal." Death is not such a big deal if you are Jof the juggler and can see the black wings of the angel of death flying over your head as you drive your wagon through the storm.
Afte r the bombs, we talked of science. Dick and I were always

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disagreeing about science. We fought against each other's ideas, and that helped us both to think straight. Dick distrusted my mathematics and I distrusted his intuition. He had this wonderful vision of the world as a woven texture of world lines in space and time, with everything moving freely, and the various possible histories all added together at the end to describe what happened. It was essential to his view of things that it must be universal. It must describe everything that happens in nature. You could not imagine the sum-overhistories picture being true for a part of nature and untrue for another part. You could not imagine it being true for electrons and untrue for gravity. It was a unifying principle that would either explain everything or explain nothing. And this made me profoundly skeptical. I knew how many great scientists had chased this will-o'the-wisp of a unified theory. The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories. Even Einstein had spent twenty years searching for a unified theory and had found nothing that satisfied him. I admired Dick tremendously, but I did not believe he could beat Einstein at his own game. Dick fought back against my skepticism, arguing that Einstein had failed because he stopped thinking in concrete physical images and became a manipulator of equatfons. I had to admit that was true. The great discoveries of Einstein's earlier years were all based on direct physical intuition. Einstein's later unified theories failed because they were only sets of equations without physical meaning. Dick's sum-over-histories theory was in the spirit of the young Einstein, not of the old Einstein. It was solidly rooted in physical reality. But I still argued against Dick, telling him that his theory was a magnificent dream rather than a scientific theory. Nobody but Dick could use his theory, because he was always invoking his intuition to make up the rules of the game as he went along. Until the rules were codified and made mathematically precise, I could not call it a theory.
I accepted the orthodox view of the nature of physical theories. According to the orthodox view, grand unifying principles are not theories. We may hope one day to find a grand unifying principle for the whole of physics, but that is a j ob for future generations. For the present, nature divides itself conveniently into well-separated domains, and we are content to understand one domain at a time. A theory is a detailed and precise description of nature that is valid in one particular domain. Theories that belong to different domains use

A Ride to Albuquerque I 63
different concepts and illuminate our world from different angles. At present we see the world of physics divided into three princi-
pal domains. The first is the domain of the very large, massive objects, planets and stars and galaxies and the universe considered as a whole. In this domain, gravitation is the dominant force and Einstein's general relativity is the triumphantly successful theory. The second is the domain of the very small, the short-lived particles that are seen in high-energy collisions and inside the nuclei of atoms. In this domain, the strong nuclear forces are dominant and there is not yet any complete theory. Fragments of theories come and go, describing more or less satisfactorily some of the things the experimenters observe, but the domain of the very small remains today what it was in 1948, a world of its own still waiting to be thoroughly explored. Between the very large and the very small there is the third domain, the middle ground of physics. The middle ground is an enormous domain, including everything intermediate in size between an atomic nucleus and a planet. It is the domain of everyday human experience. It includes atoms and electricity, light and sound, gases, liquids and solids, chairs, tables and people. The theory that we called quantum electrodynamics was the theory of the middle ground. Its aim was to give u complete and accurate account of all physical processes in the third domain, excluding only the very large and the very small.
So Dick and I argued through the night. Dick was trying to understand the whole of physics. I was willing to settle for a theory of the middle ground alone. He was searching for general principles that would be flexible enough so that he could adapt them to anything in the universe. I was looking for a neat set of equations that would describe accu!ately what happens in the middle ground. We went on arguing back and forth. Looking back on the argument now from thirty years later, it is easy to see that we were both right. It is one of the special beauties of science that points of view which seem diametrically opposed turn out later, in a broader perspective, to be both right. I was right because it turns out that nature likes to be compartmentalized. The theory of quantum electrodynamics turned out to do all that I expected of it. It predicts correctly, with enormous accuracy, the results of all the experiments that have been done in the domain of the middle ground. Dick was right because it turns out that his general rules of space-time trajectories and sum-over-histo-

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ries have a far wider range of validity than quantum electrodynamics. In the domain of the very small, now known as particle physics, the rigid formalism of quantum electrodynamics turned out to be useless, while Dick's flexible rules, now known as Feynman diagrams, are the first working tool of every theorist.
That stormy night in our little room in Vinita, Dick and I were not looking thirty years ahead. I knew only that somewhere hidden in Dick's ideas was the key to a theory of quantum electrodynamics simpler and more physical than Julian Schwinger's elaborate construction. Dick knew only that he had larger aims in view than tidying up Schwinger's equations. So the argument did not come to an end, but left us each going his own way.
Before dawn we succeeded in sleeping a little, and in the morning we started again in the direction of Oklahoma City. The rain continued, more gently than the day before. We came through Sapulpa, a town bursting at the seams as a result of the oil boom, and then the road was blocked again. Trying to detour, we arrived at the water's edge and saw the road disappear into a huge lake. On our way back through Sapulpa we saw a Cherokee Indian and his wife walking groggily along the roadside in the rain. They were soaked to the skin and jumped happily into the car. They were able to guide us onto an unpaved and muddy road which kept to high ground clear of the floods. They soon got dry and cheerful in the car and stayed with us most of the day. They were trying to make their way to Shawnee, where they were working in an oil-field construction camp. Somehow they had acquired five quarts of hooch whiskey, so they walked off the job in Shawnee and took the whiskey home to their family and friends in Sapulpa for a celebration. The celebration ended when the five quarts were gone, the day before we picked the pair up. The floods forced us to de tour along the high ground to the north, farther and farther away from Shawnee. When the Indians finally left us and bade us a friendly goodbye, they were much farther from Shawnee than they had been when we found them.
Our last hurdle was the crossing of the Cimarron River. The river was about half a mile wide, the water brick red and Bowing furiously with large standing waves. I was expecting the bridge to be swept away every minute as we crawled across it. On the other side the skies gradually cleared and we came peacefully into Texas for our last overnight stop.

A Ride to Albuquerque I 65
The cactuses were blooming red in the desert and Dick was beside himself with joy as we sailed into Albuquerque. The sun was shining for us and the police cars were screaming their welcome. It took Dick some time to realize that the police cars were signaling to us to stop. They told us politely that we had violated all the traffic rules in the book and that we should appear forthwith before the justice of the peace. Fortunately the J.P. was on duty and could handle the case immediately. The J.P. informed us that we should pay a fine of fifty dollars, since we had been doing seventy in a twenty-mile-an-hour zone and the fine was one dollar for every mile per hour over the limit. He said that this was the largest speeding fine he had ever imposed. We had broken the Albuquerque record. Dick then put on one of his £nest performances, explaining how he had driven two thousand miles from Ithaca to Albuquerque to visit this girl that he intended to marry, and telling what a great city Albuquerque was and how happy he was to be back again after being away for three years. Soon Dick and the J.P. were swapping stories about the wartime days in Albuquerque, and the end of it was that we were let off with a £ne of $14.50, ten dollars for speeding and $4.50 for the expenses of the court. Dick and I split the fine and we all three shook hands on it. Then we said goodbye and went our separate ways.
I took a Greyhound bus to Santa Fe and made my way by easy stages back to Ann Arbor. I soon found out that the way to enjoy long bus rides is to travel at night and rest or explore the countryside by day. People talk more and are friendlier on the night runs. On the long overnight stretch from Denver to Kansas City I fell in with a couple of teen-agers, a young sailor from San Francisco and a girl from Kansas. We talked the night away, beginning with love affairs, continuing with family histories and God, and ending with politics. It occurred to me that if I had been listening to a conversation between strangers in England, the same subjects would have come up in the opposite order. The two of them were great talkers and kept it up in fine style until the sun broke through on the horizon ahead of us. At times they made me feel very old, and at times very young.
In the five weeks in Ann Arbor I made a host of new friends. The Ann Arbor summer school was in those days, as it had been in the 1930s, the main gathering place for itinerant physicists in summer·

66 I AM ERICA
time.Julian Schwinger's lectures were a marvel of polished elegance, like a difficult violin sonata played by a virtuoso, more technique than music. Fortunately, Schwinger was friendly and approachable. I could talk with him at length, and from these conversations more than from the lectures I learned how his theory was put together. In the lectures his theory was a cut diamond, brilliant and dazzling. When I talked with him in private, I saw it in the rough, the way he saw it himself before he started the cutting and polishing. In this way I was able to grasp much better his way of thinking. The Ann Arbor physicists generously gave me a room to myself on the top floor of their building. Each afternoon I hid up there under the roof for several hours and worked through every step of Schwinger's lectures and every word of our conversations. I intended to master Schwinger's techniques as I had mastered Piaggio's differential equations ten years before. Five weeks went by quickly. I filled hundreds ofpages with calculations, working through various simple problems with Schwinger's methods. At the end of the summer school, I felt that I understood Schwinger's theory as well as anybody could understand it, with the possible exception of Schwinger. That was what I had come to Ann Arbor to do.
During the Ann Arbor days another beautiful thing happened. A long letter came from Munster, from one of the girls that I had got to know in the hungry time a year earlier. We had exchanged letters intermittently during the winter. She wrote in German, but the letter ended with a quotation from Yeats:
I would spread the clothes under your feet, But I am poor, and have only my dreams.
I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.
I wondered whether a girl to whom English is a foreign language could possibly understand how good that stanza is as poetry. I decided she probably understood. I promised myself I would tread softly.
From Ann Arbor I took another Greyhound bus all the way to San Francisco. On this trip the most memorable part was the winding descent down Echo Creek from Wyoming to the Salt Lake basin. We passed through the mountain valleys in which the Mormon pioneers had settled a hundred years before. These valleys were tended and

A Ride l o Albuquerque I 67
cared for like mountain valleys in Switzerland. Nowhere else in America had I seen land so cherished. You could see at once, these people believed they had reached the promised land, and they intended to leave it beautiful for their great-grandchildren.
I stayed ten days in San Francisco and Berkeley, taking a holiday from physics. I read Joyce's Portrait of theArtistasa Young Man and Nehru's autobiography. I explored California a little and decided I liked Utah better. Comparing the achievements of the settlers in Utah and California, who were building their civilizations at the same time, I felt that Utah achieved greatness while California had greatness thrust upon it. There is nothing in California to equal the Mormon valleys, with each village clustering around its big temple and the mountains on each side sweeping straight up to heaven.
At the beginning of September it was time to go back East. I got onto a Greyhound bus and traveled nonstop for three days and nights as far as Chicago. This time I had nobody to talk to. The roads were too bumpy for me to read, and so I sat and looked out of the window and gradually fell into a comfortable stupor. As we were droning across Nebraska on the third day, something suddenly happened. For two weeks I had not thought about physics, and now it came bursting into my consciousness like an explosion. Feynman's pictures and Schwinger's equations began sorting themselves out in my head with a clarity they had never had before. For the first time I was able to put them all together. For an hour or two I arranged and rearranged the pieces. Then I knew that they all fitted. I had no pencil or paper, but everything was so clear I did not need to write it down. Feynman and Schwinger were just looking at the same set of ideas from two different sides. Putting their methods together, you would have a theory of quantum electrodynamics that combined the mathematical precision of Schwinger with the practical flexibility of Feynman. Finally, there would be a straightforward theory of the middle ground. It was my tremendous luck that I was the only person who had had the chance to talk at length to both Schwinger and Feynman and really understand what both of them were doing. In the hour of illumination I gave thanks to my teacher Hans Bethe, who had made it possible. During the rest of the day as we watched the sun go down over the prairie, I was mapping out in my head the shape of the paper I would write when I got to Princeton. The title of the paper would be "The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger and

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Feynman." This way I would make sure that Tomonaga got his fair share of the glory. As we moved on into Iowa, it grew dark and I had a good long sleep.
A few days later I collected my belongings from Ithaca and went on to Princeton. I had grown so attached to Greyhound buses I was almost sorry to be at the end of the journey. But I had work to do in Princeton. On a fin e September morning I walked for the first time the mile and a half from my room in Princeton to the Institute for Advanced Study. It was exactly a year since J had left England to learn physics from the Americans. And now here I was a year later, walking down the road to the institute on a fine September morning to teach the great Oppenheimer how to do physics. The whole situation seemed too absurd to be credible. I pinched myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. But the sun still shone and the birds still sang in the trees. I had better be careful, I said to myself. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

7
The Ascent of F6
Seven years and the summer is over. Seven years since the Archbishop left us, He who was always kind to his people. But it would not be well if he should return.. .. For us, the poor, there is no action, But only to wait and to witness.... 0 Thomas Archbishop, 0 Thomas our Lord, leave us and leave us be, in our humble
and tarnished frame of existence, leave us; do not ask us To stand to the doom on the house, the doom on the
Archbishop, the doom on the world.
I sat in Oppenheimer's office in the fall of 1948 with these lines from T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral ringing through my head. Eight young physicists, six men and two women, were sharing the office while the builders hurried to finish a new building with individual offices for each of us. I wished the builders would never finish. It was much cozier and friendlier in the big office, with the eight of us sitting around a wooden table, chatting and getting to know one another. We had come from many countries to the Institute for Advanced Study, each of us invited by Oppenheimer to work under his supervision. We were young and unencumbered with possessions. Our few books and papers fitted easily on the table. It was lucky for us that Oppenheimer was away in Europe and did not need his office. For six or seven weeks we waited uneasily for his return. As the weeks passed, his absence seemed to loom larger and larger, as the Archbishop's absence looms in the first scene of Eliot's play, leading
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up to his dramatic entry and the swiftly ensuing tragedy. We did not know in 1948 what kind of tragedy was to be played, but the feeling of .impending doom was in the air.
Nineteen forty-eight was the year of disillusion for those who had hoped against hope that a lasting peace would emerge from the chaos of the Second World War. In that fall, while we were sitting helpless around Oppenheimer's table, Jews and Arabs were fighting in Palestine, Berlin was blockaded by Soviet troops and precariously supplied with the necessities of life by airlift, and the United Nations were failing to agree upon a plan for effective international control of nuclear weapons. Europe and half Asia were still in ruins, and already mankind seemed to be rushing into even vaster and more destructive follies. We made grim calculations of the probable course of events if things should go badly in Berlin. A rapid Soviet occupation of what was left of Western Europe, and atomic bombing of Soviet cities. A large part of the American public believed that their stockpile of atomic bombs was by itself enough to defeat the Soviet Union. I knew be tter. I knew that this was the same illusion which had led Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 to disaster. In the fall of 1948 the danger seemed terribly real that the Americans would go the same way as Napoleon and Hitler, dreaming of a quick victory over the Soviet Union and awakening to find themselves in a war without end. I was seriously wondering whether I should go back to my parents in England or try to get them to join me in America before it was too late.
We sat in Oppenheimer's office and waited and worried. We knew that he bore a heavy responsibility, both for helping to bring new evil upon mankind and for trying to mitigate its consequences. We were glad that we had no share in his responsibility. We wanted only to be left in peace, to forget the war that we had survived, to escape the wars that were still to come. We were the women of Canterbury that Eliot uses as his chorus, standing on the steps of the cathedral.
We have seen the young man mutilated, The torn girl trembling by the mill-stream. And meanwhile we have gone on living, Living and partly living. ...

The Ascent of F6 I 71
Building a partial shelter, For sleeping and eating and drinking and laughter.
God gave us always some reason, some hope; but now a new terror has soiled us, which none can avert, none can avoid, flowing under our feet and over the sky.
Oddly enough, Eliot himself was also at the institute, invited like us by Oppenheimer. Prim and shy, Eliot appeared each day in the lounge at teatime, sitting by himself with a newspaper and a teacup. It was thirteen years since he had written Murder in the Cathedral. I wondered if he had any inkling of my private thoughts. Could this man, who had created out of the depths of his faith and despair the drama of the doomed Archbishop, be deaf to the echoes of his own words reverberating through our tragic century? Was he, too, waiting in terror and anguish for some portent of evil attending Oppenheimer's return? I never had the courage to ask him. None of our gang ofyoung scientists succeeded in penetrating the barrier offame and reserve that surrounded Eliot like a glass case around a mummy.
Finally, Oppenheimer returned. We were driven out of our Garden of Eden in his office and exiled to our new building. He did not say, like the Archbishop:
Peace. And let them be, in their exaltation. They speak better than they know, and beyond your understanding.
He had no memorable words of greeting for us. Indeed, he had very little time for us at all, but rushed off almost at once to attend to some political business in Washington. His quick departure was for us a disappointment, but also a relief. We could get on with our work just as well without him. It soon became clear that I had madt: a mistake in trying to cast him in the role of Eliot's Archbishop. Whatever his ultimate fate might be, it would not be a traditional martyrdom. The matter was summed up well by two small boys overheard in conversation as they walked by our building. The building has a spire and a slightly ecclesiastical aura. "Is that a church?" said one small boy. "No, that's the institute," said the other. "The institute isn't a church, it's a place to eat." Oppenheimer heard of this conversation later and was delighted. He vigorously repudiated attempts of his uncritical admirers to turn him into a saint. In 1964 a German writer wrote an

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adulatory play for television, dramatizing Oppenheimer's trial and condemnation. Oppenheimer tried in vain to stop the production of the play by suing the producers on the grounds that it presented ltim in a false light. "They wanted to make that affair into a tragedy," said Oppenheimer, "but it was actually a farce."
Eliot was still at the institute when the news arrived that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Newspapermen swarmed around him and he retreated even further into his shell. The last time I saw him was at the grand farewell party that Oppenheimer gave in his honor before he departed on ltis way to Stockholm. It was a stand-up supper for about a hundred people. Oppenheimer was resplendent in black tie and tuxedo, playing to perfection the part of the gracious host. When he spoke to me, it was to give me the recipe for some excellent Mexican savories that were being served with the supper. Eliot was sequestered in a small drawing room with a group of elderly and distinguished people, apart from the main crowd. I did in the end shake Eliot's hand, but I did not find this a suitable occasion to ask him what he thought of Oppenheimer. Many years later, I asked Oppenheimer what he thought of Eliot. Oppenheimer loved Eliot's poetry and had enormous respect for his genius, but he had to admit that Eliot's stay at the institute had not been a success. "I invited Eliot here in the hope that he would produce another masterpiece, and all he did here was to work on The Cocktail Party, the worst thing he ever wrote."
During the anxious weeks with the young crowd in Oppenheimer's office, I had time to write the paper that set down in detail the thoughts that had come to me in the Greyhound bus in Nebraska. It was finished and sent off to the Physical Review before Oppenheimer returned, so that he had no chance to argue about it. After he returned, I sent him a copy of the paper and waited for sometlting to happen. Nothing happened. That was not surprising. After all, mine was a minor contribution to the grand design of science. All I had done was to unify and tidy up the details of the quantum electrodynamics of Schwinger and Feynman. The big steps had already been taken by Schwinger and Feynman before I began. They had formulated the ideas and left to me the job of working out the equations. I knew that Oppenheimer had always been more interested in ideas than in equations. It was natural that he would have many things to do more interesting and more urgent than reading my paper.

The Ascent of F6 I 73
When after some weeks I had a chance to talk to Oppenheimer, I was astonished to discover that his reasons for being uninterested in my work were quite the opposite of what I had imagined. I had expected that he would disparage my program as merely unoriginal, a minor adumbration of Schwinger and Feynman. On the contrary, he considered it to be fundame ntally on the wrong track. He thought it a wasted effort to adumbrate Schwinger and Feynman, because he did not believe that the ideas of Schwinger and Feynman had much to do with reality. I had known that he never appreciated Feynman, but it came as a shock to hear him now violently opposing Schwinger, his own student, whose work he had acclaimed so enthusiastically six months earlier. He had somehow become convinced during his stay in Europe that physics was in need of radically new ideas, that this quantum electrodynamics of Schwinger and Feynman was just another misguided attempt to patch up old ideas with fan cy mathematics. I was delighted to hear him talk in this style. It meant that my battle for recognition would be much more interesting. Instead of arguing with Oppenheimer about the dubious merits of my own work, I would be fighting for the entire program of quantum electrodynamics, for Schwinger's ideas and Feynman's and Tomonaga's too. Instead of fussing over details, we wo uld be clashing on basic issues. Already I could feel that the Lord had delivered him into my hands.
Oppenheimer ran a weekly seminar, at which I took my turn as speaker. The first two occasions on which I tried to explain my ideas were disasters. After the second defeat, I reported the faltering progress of my campaign to my parents in England.
I have been observing rather carefull y his behavior during seminars. If one is saying, for the benefit of the rest of the audience, things that he knows already, he cannot resist hurrying one on to something else; then when one says things that he doesn't know or immediately agree with, he breaks in before the point is fully explained with acute and sometimes devastating criticisms, to which it is impossible to reply adequately even when he is wrong. If one watches him one can see that he is moving around nervously all the time, never stops smoking, and I believe that his impatience is largely beyond his control. On Tuesday we had our fiercest public battle so far, when I criticized some unwarrantably pessimistic remarks he had made about the Schwinger theory. He came down on me like a ton of bricks, and conclusively won the argument so far as the public was concerned. However, afterwards he was very friendly and even apologized to me.

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The turning point in our struggle came in the third round. My old friend and mentor Hans Bethe came down from Cornell to talk to our seminar. He wanted to speak about some calculations he had been doing with the Feynman theory. My weekly letter home describes the scene.
He was received in the style to which I am accustomed, with incessant interruptions and confused babbling of voices, and had great difficulty in making even his main points clear; while this was going on he stood very calmly and said nothing, only grinned at me as if to say "Now I see what you are up against." After that he began to make openings for me, saying in answer to a question "Well, I have no doubt Dyson will have told you all about that," at which point I was not slow to say in as deliberate a tone as possible, "I am afraid I have not got to that yet." Finally Bethe made a peroration in which he said explicitly that the Feynman theory is much the best theory and that people must learn it if they want to avoid talking nonsense; things which I have been saying for a long time but in vain.
From that point on, my path was made smooth. The next time I was scheduled to speak at the seminar, Oppenheimer actually listened. Twice more I spoke, and on the morning after my fifth talk I found in my mailbox Oppenheimer's formal note of surrender, a small piece of paper with the words "Noto contendere. RO." scrawled on it in his handwriting.
A few days later, Oppenheimer handed me a typed letter appointing me a long-term member of the institute and defining a generous arrangement under which I could come for periodic visits to Princeton while continuing to live in England. As he gave me the letter he delivered one of the Delphic utterances for which he was famous: "You can show this to the harbor master at Lowestoft when you start in your small boat." Perhaps he was thinking of the great physicist Niels Bohr, who escaped from German-occupied Denmark in a small boat in 1943 to get to Sweden and from there went to join Oppenheimer in Los Alamos. But why Lowestoft? I never did figure that one out.
The new year 1949 started with a mammoth meeting of the American Physical Society in New York. Oppenheimer gave a presidential address in the biggest hall, and such was the glamour of his name after his 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

The Ascent of F6 / 75
spoke on the title "Fields and Quanta" and gave a very good historical summary of the vicissitudes of our attempts to understand the behavior of atoms and radiation. At the end he spoke with great enthusiasm of my work 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 was thinking happily to myself: Last year it was Julian Schwinger, this year it is me. Who will it be next year?
After a long winter, spring came to Prince ton with a rush. Oppenheimer was spending more and more of his time in Washington. In addition to his normal government business, he was defending his friend David Lilienthal, the first chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, against a vicious political attack launched by the Republicans in Congress. He defended Lilienthal skillfully and successfully. But the attack was only one of the first stirrings of the hyste ria which was to lead to his own downfall five years later. While he was away in Washington, spring fever overcame our crowd of young physicists at the institute. We gave up the pretense of serious work and started to enjoy ourselves. There were many parties and expeditions to the beach. One morning scene from that spring is particularly vivid in my memory. A battered old Dodge convertible with the roof open, owned by one of the girls at the institute and driven by another, with eight or ten young institute members piled into the seats and hanging on to the back, careening at breakneck speed down through the institute woods to the river, demolishing trees and scaring to death the wild life and the distinguished professors taking their morning stroll. That scene went unrecorded in my weekly le tter home. My proud parents did not need to know that I was running wild in Princeton with a bunch of young hooligans. We had never been teen-agers, having passed through that period of our lives during the years of war and deprivation, and now we were making up for the lost time. Some years later I was married to the owner of the Dodge and wrecked it on an icy road in Ithaca, but that is another story.
The end of this story is that I eventually became a professor at the institute and settled down there and lived happily ever after. I was a friend and colleague of Oppenheimer for fourteen years, from the year before his trial to the year of his death. I had plenty of time to study and reflect upon the qualities of this man who played such a paradoxical part both in my personal destiny and in the destiny of

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mankind. I was rarely privy to his thoughts. During the weeks of his trial, when he was staying in Washington at an address that was held tightly secret to avoid the pestering attentions of the press, my only contact with him was to deliver through a lawyer intermediary a badly needed package of laundry from Princeton. After the trial was over and the government had officially declared him untrustworthy, he came back to the institute and talked about physics. Life continued as before, except that the big steel safe and the two security guards who had watched over it night and day for seven years were no longer there. Some newspaper stories appeared, reporting rumors that the trustees of the institute were preparing to dismiss Oppenheimer on the grounds that a man publicly discredited could not adequately fulfill the duty of the director to represent the institute to the public. The trustees announced that they would be holding a meeting to review Oppenheimer's directorship and to decide upon his continued appointment. I made discreet inquiries among my friends in England to make sure I would have a job there to retreat to, so that I could resign my professorship promptly and dramatically if Oppenheimer was dismissed. The trustees held their meeting and issued a statement confirming his appointment and declaring their confidence in his leadership of the institute. I was glad to be spared the inconvenience of making a noble gesture. I was also glad that I could stay with Oppenheimer in Princeton. So far as I was concerned, he was a be tter director after his public humiliation than he had been before. He spent less time in Washington and more time at the institute. He was still a great public figure, a hero to the scientinc brotherhood and to the international community of intellectuals, but he became more relaxed and more attentive to our day-to-day problems. He was able to get back to doing what he liked best-reading, thinking and talking about physics.
Oppenheimer had a genuine and lifelong passion for physics. He wanted always to keep struggling to understand the basic mysteries of nature. I disappointed him by not becoming a deep thinker. He had hoped, when he impulsively appointed me a long-term membe r of the institute, that he was securing a young Bohr or a young Einstein. If he had asked my advice at that time, I would have told him, Dick Feynman is your man, I am not. I was, and have always remained, a problem solver rather than a creator of ideas. I cannot, as Bohr and Feynman did, sit for years with my whole mind concen-

The Ascent of F6 I 77
trated upon one deep question. I am interested in too many different things. When I came to Oppenheimer asking for guidance, he said, "Follow your own destiny." I did so, and the results did not altogether please him. I followed my destiny into pure mathematics, into nuclear engineering, into space technology and astronomy, solving problems that he rightly considered remote from the mainstream of physics. The same difference of temperam ent appeared in our discussions of the administration of the school of physics at the institute. He liked to concentrate new appointments in fundamental particle physics; I liked to invite people in a wide variety ofspecialties. So we ofte n disagreed, but respected and understood each other better as we grew old together. We agreed on the essentials. We agreed on appointing the Chinese physicists Yang and Lee to institute professorships while they were still young, and we rejoiced together as we watched them grow over our heads into great scientific leaders.
What was so special about Oppenheimer? During the long years of daily contact I often asked myself this question. From time to time, exaggerated journalistic articles and television programs would appear, presenting him as a tragic hero. He dismissed all these effusions as unmitigated trash, but they contained a substratum of truth. I had not bee n altogether wrong at the beginning when I expected him to behave like the Archbishop in Eliot's play. He had a talent for selfdramatization, an ability to project to his audience an image larger than life, to bestride the world as if it were a stage. Perhaps my mistake had been only in choosing the wrong play for him to star in.
Nine teen thirty-five was a time of despair for writers all over the world. Eliot was not the only one who turned to poetic drama as the appropriate medium to express the tragic mood of that time. In the same year, Murder in the Cathedral appeared in England and Maxwell Anderson's Winterset in America. A year later, Auden and Isherwood wrote The Ascent ofF6. F6 was played in London in 1937 with music by Benjamin Britten and marvelously caught the shadow of coming events. F6 is to Murder in the Cathedral as Hamlet is to King Lear. Eliot's Archbishop is a man of power and pride, redeemed like King Lear by serene submission to his fate in the hour of death. The hero of F6 is a more sophisticated, more modern character. He is a mountain climber, known to his friends as M.F., a Hamlet-like figure compounded of arrogance, ambiguity and human tenderness. Over the years, as I came to know Oppenheimer better, I found many

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aspects of his personality foreshadowed in M.F. I came to think that F6 was in some sense a true allegory of his life.
The plot of F6 is simple. M.F. is an intellectual polymath, expert in European literature and Eastern philosophy. The newspaper accounts of his youthful exploits-
Was privately educated by a Hungarian tutor. Climbed the west buttress of Clogwyn Du'r Arddu While still in his teens . . . Made a new traverse on the Grandes Jorasses ... Studied physiology in Vienna under Niedermayer .. . Translated Confucius during a summer. Is unmarried. Hates dogs. Plays the viola da gamba. Is said to be an authority on Goya-
resemble strikingly the stories of Oppenheimer's precosity and preciosity as a young man. As M.F. went to the mountains for spiritual solace, so Oppenheimer went to physics. F6 is an unclimbed mountain of supreme beauty:
Since boyhood, in dreams, I have seen the huge north face. On nights when I could not sleep I worked up those couloirs, crawled along the eastern arete, planning every movement, foreseeing every hold.
It is also a political prize important to the security of the British Empire. It stands on the frontier of the empire, adjoining the territory of a hostile power, and the natives have been led to believe that whoever first climbs the mountain shall rule over the whole region. Lord Stagmantle, representing the political establishment, offers the necessary financial support for an expedition to climb the mountain with M.F. as leader.just as General Groves offered Oppenheimer the resources of the United States Army for the project that he was to direct at Los Alamos. M.F. refuses at first to be a party to the political game, but afterward accepts the offer. As Oppenheimer said at his trial, "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb." F6 was technically sweet too.
The drama of F6 illuminates many aspects of Oppenheimer's nature: His combination of philosophical detachment with driving ambition. His dedication to pure science and his skill and self-assur-

The Ascent ofF6 I 79
ance in the world of politics. His love of metaphysical poetry. His tendency to speak in cryptic poetic images. The harbor master at Lowestoft. The rapid and unpredictable shifts between warmth and coldness in his feelings toward those close to him. I once asked him if it was not a difficult thing for his children to have such a problematical figure for a father. He answered, "Oh, it's all right for them. They have no imagination." This reminded me ofM.F.'s reply to the lady who accused him of being afraid when he at first refused to lead the expedition to F6:
I am afraid of a great many things, Lady Isabel, but of nothing which you in your worst nightmares could ever imagine; and of that word least of all.
At the foot of the mountain stands a monastery at which the expedition halts before beginning the ascent. The activities of the monks are directed toward the propitiation of the Demon who lives at the summit. The abbot carries a crystal ball in which each visitor looks in tum to see his personal vision of the Demon. Each sees an image of his own dreams and desires. When M.F. looks into the crystal, voices are heard coming out of the darkness offstage:
Give me bread Restore my dead Give me a car Make me a star Make me strong Teach me where I belong Make me admired Make me desired Make us kind Make us of one mind Make us brave Save.
The others ask him what he sees. He says he sees nothing. Later, when he is alone with the abbot, he reveals what he saw:
Bring back the crystal. Let me look again and prove my vision a poor fake. .. . I thought I saw the raddled sick cheeks of the world light up at my approach as at the homecoming of an only son.
The abbot, whose role in the story is a little like that of Niels Bohr at Los Alamos, explains the vision:

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The Demon is real. Only his ministry and his visitation are unique for every nature. To the complicated and sensitive like yourself, his disguises are more subtle.. .. I think I understand your temptation. You wish to conquer the Demon and then to save mankind.
The ascent proceeds in desperate haste as it is reported that a rival expedition is already beginning its assault on the other side of the mountain. A young climber in M.F.'s team is killed. M.F. comments:
The first victim to my pride.. .. The Abbot was perfectly right. My minor place in history is with the aberrant group of Caesars: the dullard murderers who hale the gentle from their beds of love and, with a quacking drum, escort them to the drowning ditch and the death in the desert.
So it goes on, until at the end M.F. lies dead at the summit and the monks pronounce over his body the final chorus:
Free now from indignation, Immune from all frustration, He lies in death alone; Now he with secret terror And every minor error Has also made Man's weakness known. Whom history has deserted, These have their power exerted In one convulsive throe; With sudden drowning suction Drew him to his destruction. But they to dissolution go.
When I saw this play in 1937, "Whom history has deserted" meant the bankrupt political leade rship of the British Empire, which was to be swept away in the approaching cataclysm of the Second World War. In 1954 the same phrase meant Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, his apparatus of security officers and informers, and his allies in the press, the government and the military establishment who helped him drag Oppenheime r down in disgrace.
Auden and Ishe rwood succeeded remarkably in painting, or predicting, a good likeness of the character of Oppenheimer as I knew him from 1948 to 1965. But there was one essential feature missing, both from the Oppenheimer I knew and from the portrait in the

The Ascent ofF6 I 81
play. The missing element was a greatness of spirit to which those who worked with him at Los Alamos bear almost unanimous witness. Again and again, in the reminiscences of Los Alamos veterans, we read how Oppenheimer communicated to the whole laboratory a personal style which made the enterprise run in harmony like an orchestra in the hands of a great conductor. Some of these reminiscences may be exaggerated and tinged with nostalgia. But there can be no doubt that Oppenheimer's leadership left on his Los Alamos colleagues an indelible impression of greatness. I often asked myself between 1948 and 1965: What was this greatness, and why was it no longer visible in the Oppenheimer I knew? Then at last, in 1966, I saw it for myself. In February 1966 he learned that he was dying of throat cancer. In the twelve months that remained to him, his spirit grew stronger as his bodily powers declined. The mannerisms ofM.F. were discarded. He was simple, straightforward, and indomitably courageous. I saw then what his friends at Los Alamos had seen, a man carrying a crushing burden and still doing hisjob with such style and good humor that all of us around him felt uplifted by his example.
The last time I saw him was in February 1967, at a meeting of the faculty of the physics school at the institute. We met to decide upon the choice of visiting members for the following year. Each of us had to do a substantial amount of homework before the meeting, reading through a big brown box full of applications and judging their relative merits. Oppenheimer came to the meeting as usual, although he well knew that he would not be there to welcome the new members on their arrival. He could speak only with great difficulty, but he had done his homework and he remembered accurately the weak or strong points of the various candidates. The last words I heard him say were, "We should say yes to Weinstein. He is good." After this supreme effort of will, Robert Oppenheimer went home to his bed and collapsed into a sleep from which he never woke. He died three days later.
His wife, Kitty, called me to discuss arrangements for the memorial ceremony. Besides the music and the talks by Robert's friends describing his life and work, she wanted also to have a poem read, since poetry had always been an important part of Robert's life. She knew which poem she wanted to have read-"The Collar," by George Herbert, a poem that had been one of Robert's favorites and that she found particularly appropriate to describe how Robert had

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appeared to himself. Then she changed her mind. "No," she said, "that is too personal for such a public occasion." She had good reason for being afraid to bare Robert's soul in public. She knew from bitter experience how newspapers are apt to handle such disclosures. She could already imagine the horrible distortions of Robert's true feelings, appearing under the headline "Noted Scientist, Father of Atom Bomb, Turns to Religion in Last Illness." No poem was read at the ceremony.
Now Kitty is dead too, and Robert has passed beyond the reach of any further journalistic distortion. I think it will do no harm if I print Herbert's poem here in full as a memorial to both of them. Perhaps it gives us a clue to Robert's innermost nature, a hint that in his soul the re was after all more of King Lear than of Hamlet.
I struck the board, and cry'd, "No more; I will abroad."
What, shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free; free as the road, Loose as the wind, and large as store.
Shall I be still in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me bloud, and not restore What I have lost with cordiall fruit?
Sure there was wine Before my sighs did drie it; there was corn Before my tears did drown it; Is the yeare onely lost to me?
Have I no bayes to crown it, No Rowers, no garlands gay? all blasted,
All wasted? Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands. Recover all thy sigh-blown age On double pleasures; leave thy cold dispute Of what is fit and not; forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands Which pettie thoughts have made; and made to thee Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law, While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away! take heed;

The Ascent of F6 I 83
I will abroad. Call in thy death's-head there, tie up thy fears;
He that forbears To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load. But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word, Methought I heard one calling, "Childe";
And I reply'd, "My Lord."

8
Prelude in E-Flat Minor
As a mathematically inclined child born into a musical family, I was intrigued by the intricacies of musical notations long before I developed any real understanding of music. At an early age I found my father's copy of Bach 's forty-eight Preludes and Fugues for the we ll-tuned piano, and studied carefull y the arrangements of sharps and flats in the key signatures. My fathe r e xplained to me how Bach worked his way twice through all the twenty-four major and minor keys. But why is the re no prelude in E-flat minor in the second book? My father did not know. Bach just decided when he came to No. 8 in the second book to write it in D-sharp minor instead. All the other key signatures come twice, but E-flat minor comes only once, at No. 8 in the fi rst book. I was also fascinated by double sharps and double flats. Why is there a special sign for a double sharp but none for a double flat? My fathe r did not know that either. I was giving rum a hard time with my questions. I noticed that Prelude No. 3 in C-sharp major is the first one that has double sharps in it, and Prelude No. 8 in E-flat minor is the first one that has a double flat. No. 8 is special again. I asked my fathe r to play No. 3 and No. 8 so that I could hear what double sharps and double Rats sounded like. I never grew tired of hearing the delicious sound of that B double flat in Prelude No. 8.
My father was best known as a composer, but he was also in great de mand as a conductor. He conduc ted choirs and orchestras at all levels from the local music club to the London Symphony. He accepted with good grace the fact that neither of his children inherited his musical gifts, but still he liked to take us along to listen to his concerts. At one of these concerts I was addressed by a distinguished
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Prelude in E-Flat Minor / 85
soloist, who told me how lucky I was to be hearing so much good music at such a young age. I replied, "Music is very nice, but too long," a remark which my father gleefully repeated on many subsequent occasions. He soon discovered the way to stop me from fidgeting during the performances. He supplied me with his vocal and orchestral scores so that I could follow what was happening. I sat quiet and happy, watching in the score for the entrances of the various voices and instruments, delighting in the occasional occurrence of exotic time signatures with five or seven beats to a bar, using my eyes as a substitute for my musically defective ears.
As I grew into adolescence I began to develop a limited but genuine understanding of music. I loved to listen when my father played the piano at home for relaxation. He often played from the forty-eight Preludes and Fugues. I even learned to play some of them after a fashion myself. The Prelude in E-flat minor continued to be my favorite. Quite apart from its unique key signature and its double flat, it is also outstanding musically. It is pure Bach, and yet it carries a distinctive intensity of feeling that foreshadows Beethoven.
My father's finest hour came at the same time as England's, at the beginning of the Second WorId War. He was then no longer a schoolteacher. He had moved to London to be director of the Royal College of Music, one of the two major musical conservatories of England. When the war and the bombing of London began, the government and his own board of trustees urged him to evacuate the college to some safe place in the country. He refused to budge. He pointed out to his trustees that the college provided a livelihood to at least half of the leading orchestral players and concert artists of London. Most of these people came to the college to teach two or three days a week and could not live on concerts alone. If the college were evacuated, one of two consequences would follow. Either the college would lose its best teachers, or the musical life of London would be effectively closed down for the duration of the war. And in either case the careers of a whole generation of musicians would be ruined. So my father had one of the offices in the college converted into a bedroom and announced that he would stay there to keep the place running so long as any roof remained over his head. His board of trustees accepted his decision and the college stayed open. Hearing of this, the other big London conservatory, which had already made plans to evacuate, changed its mind and stayed open too. London re-

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mai ned musically alive, nourishing fresh talents and giving them a chance to be heard, through the six years of war. My father stayed steadfast at his post at the college, helping to put out Sres on the roof at night and conducting student orchestras during the day. The only substantial loss that the college sustained was a little ope ra theater with an irre placeable collection of antique operatic costumes. The damage was done at night when the professors and students were out of the building. Nobody, from the beginning of the war to the end, was injured on the pre mises.
During the war years I often went to lunch wi th m y fathe r and the professors in the college dining room. These people were hardboiled professional musicians, ave rse to any display of sentiment. Their conversation consisted mainly of professional gossip and jokes. But I could feel the warmth of their loyalty to the college and the sense of comradeship that bound them and my father together. The daily expe rience of shared hardships and dange rs created a spirit of solidarity in the college which people who have known academic institutions only in times of peace can hardly imagine. I was reminded of this spirit when I watched the citizens of bombed-out Munster perform their open-air opera in 1947, and when I heard my American friends tell tales of wartime Los Alamos.
I ate one memorable lunch at the College at the height of the V-1 bombardment in the summer of 1944. My fathe r and his professors we re talking merrily about their plans for the expansion of the college to take care of the Rood of students that would be pouring in as soon as the war was over. From time to time there was a momentary break in the conversation when the putt-putt-putt ofan approaching V-1 could be heard in the distance. The talk and the jokes continued while the putt-putt-putt gre w louder and loude r until it seemed the beast must be directly overhead . Again there was a momentary break in the conversation when the putt-putt suddenly stopped, and the room was silent for the Sve seconds that it took the machine to descend to earth. Then an ear-splitting crash, and the conversation continued without a break until the next quiet putt-putt-putt could be heard in the distance. I was thinking lugubrious thoughts about the consequences tha t a direct hit on our dining room would have for the musical life of England. But such thoughts seemed to be far from the minds of my father and his colleagues. During the whole

Prelude in E-Flat Minor I 87
ofour leisurely lunch, the subject of the V-1 bombardment was never once mentioned.
I used to talk a great deal with my father, especially during the early years of the war, about the morality of fighting and killing. At first I was a convinced pacifist and intended to become a conscientious objector. I agonized endlessly over the ethical line that had to be drawn between justifiable and unjustifiable participation in the war effort. My father listened patiently while I expounded my wavering principles and rationalized the latest shifts in my pacifist position. He said very little. My ethical doctrines grew more and more complicated as I was increasingly torn between my theoretical repudiation of national loyalties and my practical involvement in the life of a country fighting with considerable courage and good humor for its survival. For my father the issues were simple. He did not need to argue with me. He knew that actions speak louder than words. When he moved his bed into the college he made his position clear to everybody. When things were going badly in 1940, he said, "All we have to do is to behave halfway decently, and we shall soon have the whole world on our side." When he spoke of the whole world, he was probably thinking especially of the United States of America and of his own son.
Many years later I was reminded of these discussions between me and my father when I read the transcript of Oppenheimer's security hearing. The dramatic climax of the three-week hearing came near the end, when the physicist Edward Teller appeared as a witness for the prosecution and confronted Oppenheimer face to face. Teller was asked directly whether he considered Oppenheimer to be a security risk. He answered with carefully chosen words: "I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more." These words describe rather accurately my father's attitude to my intellectual gyrations during the earlier part of the war. Oppenheimer, like me, was confused and complicated. He wanted to be on good terms with the Washington generals and to be a savior of humanity at the same time. Teller, like my father, was simple. He thought it was a dangerous illusion to imagine that we could save humanity by proclaiming

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high moral principles from a position of military weakness. He did his job as a scientist and bomb designer to keep America strong, and he left moral judgments concerning the use of our weapons to the American people and their elected representatives. Like my father, he believed that if we stayed strong and behaved decently the whole world would before long come to our side. His greatest mistake was his failure to foresee that a large section of the public would not consider his appearance at the Oppenheimer hearing to be decent behavior. Had Teller not appeared, the outcome of the hearing would almost certainly have been unaffected, and the moral force of Teller's position would not have been tainted.
The first time I met Teller was in March 1949, when J talked to the physicists at the University of Chicago about the radiation theories of Schwinger and Feynman. I diplomatically gave high praise to Schwinger and then explained why Feynman's methods were more useful and more illuminating. At the end of the lecture, the chairman called for questions from the audience. Teller asked the first 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?" Since I remained speechless, Teller answered the question himself: "I would consider the man a very sensible fellow."
In 1949 the physics department at Chicago was second only to Cornell's in liveliness. Fermi and Teller in Chicago were like Bethe and Feynman at Cornell. Fermi the acknowledged leader, friendly and approachable but fundamentally serious. Teller bubbling over with ideas and jokes. Teller had done many interesting things in physics, but never the same thing for long. He seemed to do physics for fun rather than for glory. I took an instant liking to him.
I had been told in confidence by my friends at Cornell that Teller was deeply engaged in the American effort to build a hydrogen bomb. As a visiting foreigner I had no business to know about such things, but I was intensely curious to understand how a man with such a jovial and happy temperament could bring himself to work on the perfecting of engines of destruction even more fiendish than those we already possessed. In Chicago I found an opportunity to start an argument with him about politics. He revealed himself as an ardent supporter of the World Government movement, an organization which in those days promised salvation by means of a world