Physics is Fun
Memoires of Richard Wilson
Version of September 25th 2009
(page numbers may not be accurate as further details are added)
Introduction
3
Personal activities
Early Years.
The War Years
Oxford University
Girls, Walking and Climbing
Graduate Work
Mrs Wilsons’ at Hillend Farm
Morris Dancing
Christchurch SCR
Dick Wilson discovers America
Andrée
Headington, Binsey and the Scuttle
Cambridge and Arlington
Palaiseau
Chocorua
The trips west
Aspen and Wyoming
Glacier National Park
Berkeley
UK and Vienna
TMI and Russia
Puerto Rico and the Carribean
Family Cars
Visits to the Middle East
Andrée comes to the Middle East
Kuwait Oil Fires
Arab Fund consulting
Iraq
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16
30
37
40
45
47
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53
61
64
72
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77
81
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88
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91
92
102
107
118
124
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126
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Scientific work
Beginnings
Nucleon-Nucleon (and nucleus) interactions
CEA
Form Factors
Fermilab
Visit to USSR
Colliding beams of electrons and positrons
Parity Violation experiments
Medical Experiments and Treatments
Atlantic Legal Foundation
Nuclear Power and other Energy Issues
Chernobyl
Safety Committees
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138
141
148
151
154
157
168
170
173
177
192
195
Risk Analysis
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Sabotage and Terrorism
Chemical Carcinogens and risks thereof
The role of bioassays in understanding risks of chemicals
Uses of Risk Analysis for Regulation
Arsenic
Electromagnetic Fields
NIGEC
Armenia and Azerbaijan
Russians
Sergei Kapitza
Yuri Orlov
Andrei Dmitrevich Sakharov
Pietr and Anna Kapitza
Fadhel and Sarah Jamali
Conclusion
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213
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235
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239
244
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Publication List
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Introduction
In writing these reminiscences for others to understand my life, I break it into sections.
For a scientist, the science and his personal life are closely intertwined. But the scientific work
has already been put in front of the public in 911 published papers and letters, either alone or in
collaboration. As with all scientists I believe that my work should speak for itself in my
various publications and reports. In the text therefore, I mostly write about the context of these
reports and personal notes on why an experiment was done or not done. If a search is made on
the web, a click will pick up the full paper in the most recent instances.
In my office I keep a
copy of all of these not on the web. I attach the full list of these reports and papers at the end
and refer to them by number in the text. I therefore put the more personal section of these
reminiscences first. These include of course discussions of the many interesting trips that we
made as a family, often as an adjunct to work. I then discuss my scientific career. I start with
nuclear and elementary physics, including some major disappointments. I then go on to how I
branched out into other applications of physics. My friend, the late Edwin Land, used to pose a
conundrum. In answering a question; “What is a physicist?” he would say: “a physicist is a
person who works on physics.”. When asked what physics is, he would reply: “physics is what
a physicist does”. With less of a conundrum my former colleague Professor Ed Purcell would
say: “Physics is where you find it”.
Finally, in response to a direct request of some young
Russian friends I add some short pieces about Russians that I have known and admired.
I recognize that I am one of the lucky members of the human race. Many studies have
suggested that only 20% of people enjoy their work. I am one of the 20%. On the whole I
believe I have been successful. It has been said that mankind is basically monogamous. Until
problems set in. I have been lucky. I found, or she found me, a beautiful, intelligent and
interesting girl to marry. I loved her in December 1951 and fall in love with her again and
again and again. I thank her for putting up with me and for bringing up our six fine children.
She is also an avid gardener and makes the garden of our house one of the most beautiful in
Newton. We invite people to visit it with one major warning: “Beware of the Gardener: she
talks.”
I hope that our children and grandchildren will find these lengthy pages as interesting as
I found my grandfather Wilson’s, much briefer, description of his early years.
Early Years.
My earliest memory is of crawling on the floor; putting 2 fingers of one hand into the
230 volt electricity outlet and retiring with curiosity satisfied.
At least that is what I was told
so that my memory is probably merely a memory of being told.
Another early memory of
what I was told was when Geoffrey and I decided to clone the small apple tree in the garden.
We cut a dozen blossoms and planted them in several places around. Grannie Wilson, who
was with us at the time thought that we should be soundly spanked. Mother was much more
lenient and merciful. She explained what we had done wrong and we promised not to do it
again.
3
I was born at home on April 29th during the general strike of 1926 and thankfully the
midwife was not on strike, Nowadays I like to jest that I am a born strikebreaker. This, in
some quarters, cancels my support for trades unions when appropriate. I am told that I was
scheduled on the day that Princess, now Queen, Elizabeth was born but was late. Again, I
argue that this is why I am always slow on the uptake! We lived in Putney, SW 19, London
at 48 Clarendon Road, now renamed Clarendon Drive to distinguish it from another Clarendon
Road in London.
My father, Percy Wilson was born in Halifax on March 8th 1893, the eldest
son of a poor family. My paternal grandfather has left a 30 odd page handwritten account of
his early life and his struggles. My grandmother, born Emma Tomlinson, came from a
Derbyshire family of stone masons.
Emma in particular was a very strong person but she had
little education. At age 14 her mother, my great grandmother, hung herself and her father and
elder brother left home leaving her to bring up 3 younger siblings.
When my father, her eldest
son, was 14, school leaving age, he was expected to go to work and augment the family
income. But his school teacher came to the house to persuade his parents to let him continue at
school. The family story is that she pawned her wedding ring to allow that to happen. A few
years later he came around again, to persuade them to let my father compete for a scholarship at
Oxford.
“Your son is a born mathematician. Mathematicians are born: not made” then he
made an offer that I try, on appropriate occasions to emulate.
“I will pay for the fee to
compete and he can pay me back after he gets his first job.” My father went on and got first
class honors in both Honor Moderations after the first year and Finals after three. He was the
first in his family to go to school after age 14. At college to save money he ate breakfasts in his
room using canned goods sent by his parents from their wholesale supplier. After the first class
honors his parents sent him a silver pocket watch which he always wore on a chain. It is a
treasured possession of mine although I do not wear it. In the USA buildings are too warm to
wear a waistcoat with a watch pocket.
My mother, Dorothy Kingston, was a couple of years older, born December 23rd 1890,
from a prosperous middle class merchant family. My maternal grandfather was a successful
small businessman who, at the time of their marriage, was running the Castle Laundry in
Wandsworth which continued after his death until about 1950.
She also was the first in her
family to go to college, and spent 3 years in London University, followed by a year staying with
a French family in Paris, and a year in a teachers training college, now defunct, in Oxford whose
buildings were taken over by St. Hilda’s college.
At the time both were Unitarians. At
Oxford, Manchester College may be found. It is not an official part of the University but it
existed and exists today to train Unitarian ministers.
The master of Manchester College
entertained one Sunday afternoon at his house at 10 South Parks Road. There my parents met,
and my father walked with my mother the 2 miles back to college.
A couple of years later
when the first world war had begun and my father had entered the Royal Navy as an instructor
Lieutenant, a smart young naval officer turned up at the Wandsworth Unitarian church and after
the service asked for Miss Kingston. “Which one?” was the reply. It turned out that my
mother had stayed at home that morning cooking the Sunday dinner.
My grandfather, Thomas
Kingston, invited the handsome young Naval Officer home for dinner, and then he stayed for tea.
A warning to the reader: be careful. It is hard to get rid of a Wilson.
My parents got married
just after the end of the world war (WWI) while my father was still in the Navy, teaching in
Devonport, I believe. My mother remembered long walks on Dartmoor.
Then my father
applied for the Administrative Civil Service and after passing the rigorous examination joined
4
the Board of education. They then bought the house in Putney. My father would walk to
Putney station on the Richmond line of the Southern railway to take a train to Waterloo, from
where he would walk to the Board of Education building just off Whitehall. He could have
taken the district line (Underground) to Westminster station, which was closer to his office, but
he preferred the comfort of the main line suburban train.
Around the corner was a bridge taking the road over the 4 track “Richmond Line”. I
used to go there and ask to be picked up to look over the parapet to the trains below.
Half a
mile west was Barnes Common and a special treat on a Sunday morning was to walk up the hill
to Putney Heath. I am not sure why it was, and is, a heath and not a common. My mother was
usually with us on these walks, and I do not remember an occasion when my father came. One
or two days we continued walking until we reached the windmill on Wimbledon common
which was contiguous to Putney Heath..
Maybe we would stop briefly at the house of my
grandmother Kingston.
I have a very brief memory of the outside of my grandmother’s house
at 337 Upper Richmond Road but very soon she moved with her two unmarried children, Aunts
Kathie and Nora and often a widowed child, Auntie May, to Gwendolen Avenue, just south of
Upper Richmond Road the other side (south side) of the railway tracks.
It was a close family
and the married children lived close by. Another memory was of a sunny Sunday when the
routine was varied. Joined by one of my aunts and cousins, we went to Richmond, and walked
along the towpath to Teddington lock. Then we took a couple of buses back. Just after leaving
Richmond following the tow path upstream we found a fine meadow of buttercups and daisies.
It is the only time I remember making a daisy chain. An early photograph shows me and my
three elder brothers in our garden in Putney.
I always looked up to Laurie, the eldest child in
our family. I have n early memory of his Hornby O guage model railway. He set it up at
Christmas time, probably in 1932, to form a loop around his bedroom, run down the hall, and
then loop under the bed in my parents front room. Half the engines were clockwork, but a
couple were electric.
When I was 7 years old Granny Kingston had moved again to a large house in
Wimbledon on Worple Road on a 2 acre plot
As our family grew bigger, in size but not in
numbers, we also moved to a larger house. It had to be close to Granny so it was “Penshurst”
in Merton Park, near Wimbledon. I did not see the move because my mother sent all her 4
rambunctious children to stay with one or another of her sisters: I stayed with Florence
Nightingale (Birdie) Barron in Sutton, whose son Hugh is nearly the same age as myself. I was
taught at home till that time, but then went to the local elementary school in September 1933,
which had large classes of 50 students each. Normally promotion was at the end of the year
but for some it was half yearly. The half yearly promotion through the classes was limited by
the space available in the next one but I was quickly moved up the classes to leave as top student
in the top class in July 1935 after my 9th birthday. I liked walking to school and - it was just
over one block. We walked back for lunch.
I remember also playing in the school yard at
recess. One game we played was enacting the Battle of Waterloo, and I was Blucher coming at
the last moment to turn the tide against Napoleon.
Little did I think that I would in later years
get to know a Corsican, Jean Baptiste Orsini, Andrée’s step father, who admired Napoleon and
kept pictures of him all over his apartment!
All the teachers in the elementary school were
ladies. At 9 years old I was the top boy in the top class.
I was too young, by definition, to
go to the next state (government) school so I was taught at home for another year.
During that
5
year I learned some world history by listening to the afternoon broadcasts on the BBC’s school
broadcasting system. That was aided by my father being in the Board of Education and on the
School Broadcasting Committee. There were school broadcasts for languages and mathematics
too, but they were less fruitful. My mother was a good teacher but I never was as good at her
subject - French - as I would have liked. One summer in the 1930s a young French girl came
to stay with us in a system we would now call, in the USA “au pair”. She, Ginette Ginelle, was
the daughter of the French family with whom mother stayed in 1912. As the later pages will
recount, Ginette’s daughter came to stay with us in Arlington and Newton “au pair” in 1962-3.
In 1936 I went to Colet Court Preparatory School on Hammersmith Road which my three elder
brothers had attended and Geoffrey was still attending.
I went to Colet Court school for three
years.
One feature about our move in 1933 was a large upstairs room into which my father and
Laurie thought we should put a model railway. Not on the floor as before, but a semi
permanent installation on tables supported by trestles. The start was the original Hornby
“tinplate” track. But there was a grandiose scheme for making more “realistic” track with
metal rails, fastened onto roofing felt, sanded to look like ballast, on pieces of wood. My
father made a little gadget for cutting pieces of cardboard into realistic model sleepers. A hole
was made in the wall into the corridor to allow for a turntable at the end of the station tracks.
About 1936 Laurie carefully constructed a beautiful scissors crossover for the entry from the
double track into the station. I did what I could to help. But after a couple of years the
interest of both Laurie and my father flagged and as I seemed to be the only boy interested I
could get little of the help I needed.
The initial project was never completed and the whole
was a disappointment. By the time I was capable of doing the work on my own, the war had
come. I always wanted for Christmas a scale model of the LNER engine: the Flying Scotsman.
But it was expensive: a full 5, and I was saving up for it when the war came.
I was never a real “train spotter” taking down the numbers of engines as they passed.
That seemed to me a little dull but I found another pastime. It was about 1935 and 1936 that I
became interested in track and signal layouts. It stated when there was a “fly over” built at
Wimbledon to let the arriving slow trains heading for Waterloo go over the fast tracks so that
they did not have to do so in the complex switch arrangements at Waterloo.
Someone bought
me a copy of the Railway Gazette describing this. During that year until about 1940, I bicycled
over much of the area, peering over road bridges and foot bridges to make plans of the tracks,
and occasionally buying for a penny a platform ticket to see more carefully. On longer sections
I would look out of the window, often poking my head out as was possible, and even allowable,
at the time. The line from Waterloo was in a paper roll which is now lost. But the track and
signaling diagrams are also in an old note book that my father brought from the Board of
Education.
I have always thought that American children are somewhat deprived. America
celebrates independence day with fireworks. But fireworks in July have to be very late in the
day. English children celebrate Guy Fawkes day to celebrate the time on November 5th 1605
when Guy Fawkes was caught under the houses of parliament with kegs of gunpowder hoping to
blow it up when King James I (of England James VI of Scotland) was opening parliament.
6
Remember, remember
The fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and Plot
I see no reason
Why gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot
Some children would make a stuffed effigy of a person and wheel it around the
neighborhood. “Penny for the guy, sir, Penny for the guy”. These pennies were spent on
fireworks. We made a guy once but it was financially more effective to skimp on my lunch
and have the rest to spend. A penny would buy a box of sparklers or some jumping crackers.
A rocket would cost sixpence or more. Roman candles were intermediate.
Laurie organized
us and was very safety conscious. Whereas most children set off a rocket by dangerously
holding in the hand, or , better, putting the stick handle in a milk bottle, Laurie built a wooden
stand for setting off the rockets, with a place for Roman candles also.
I remember setting this
up in Cannon Hill Park, 1 mile SW of our house a couple of nights, and when we celebrated the
25th anniversary of the reign of King George V we all went up to Wimbledon common.
But I
th
suspect that safety issues now prevent children doing this, as they have on July 4 in the USA
It is interesting in the 2008 context that this was a “Papish Plot”. The conspirators all claim ed
to be Roman Catholics who objected to the Protestantism of King James. But it was a catholic
peer who told the authorities about the plot and there is no indication that Roman Catholics as a
whole approved of it.
In 2008 it is the Moslems who are blamed for terrorism in spite of the
fact that terrorism is against their religion.
When we moved to the house at Merton Park, with its’ large garden (enough for 1 ½
tennis courts) my father took to gardening. A gardener-odd job man, Mr Shepherd, came every
Saturday. In addition to gardening they concreted some paths and built an incinerator for
garden waste. We were all given a little garden plot for our own. I decided to grow radishes.
But it was a dry summer and I did not water them The radishes survived with roots many
inches long but very spindly and uneatable. My enthusiasm for gardening vanished.
But
my father was proud of his tennis court, One day he offered us a penny each for each weed we
could pull out. He revised his offer after I collected about 30 pence in an hour. But there were
very few weeds. Rolling the lawn was a penny. It had to be done every day and it was hard
work. Not as hard as Laurie’s job of mowing the lawn (with a hand mower) for threepence.
Our house was nearly a mile south of Wimbledon station on the District Line of
London’s underground system. This took a full 15 minutes walk or perhaps 13 minutes with a
run at the end. I used to try to catch the 8.44 am train but often missed it and caught the 8.49.
If that was on time it would be alright. A run down the escalators at Earl’s Court Station took
me to the Piccadilly Line where a train would come in a couple of minutes to Baron’s Court.
Then a walk (or run if I was late) of 5 minutes or so to school by 9.20. I hated to be late. The
formal penalty for being late more than three times in the term (without adequate excuse) was
three of the best with a cane on the part of the anatomy intended for the purpose: the backside.
I was never late more than once in the term.
When there was fog and delays, (and bad
London fogs occurred for about 3 weeks every autumn) it was always an inadequate excuse that
the 8.49 was late. The school masters knew the schedule. “You should have caught the
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8.44". But if the 8.44 was late and did not depart till 8.52 (for example) that was OK. By the
time I was 13, I was in the top form and remember Mr Berry, who I believe was the history
teacher, explaining one day why he was late. He came down from Watford, with a “fast” train
every 20 minutes only - and then there was the connection at Willesden Junction. He had to
run from the train at the lower level up two sets of stairs tor the train to Addison Road,
Kensington which was at the highest level.
That ran every twenty minutes also so if he
missed that one he was not just a minute late but 20 minutes late. We were all delighted by his
candor! In general I liked all the school masters. But there were only masters. There were
no ladies teaching boys over 10 years old in that school until of course the second world war
came.
In 1938 an extra minute got added on to the journey. Before 1938 the trains had doors
which slid open manually. If I was in the front car I could jump off the train while it was
slowing to a halt at Earl’s Court and be the first down the escalators (2 steps at a time) to the
Piccadilly line at the bottom. I could sometimes jump on the train at Wimbledon just as it was
moving away. But in 1938 London’s underground system got new cars with doors which were
opened and shut by the guard. I tried for awhile beating the crowd of people who came out of
the train ahead of me and who stood on the escalators, ignoring the sign “stand on the right walk;
on the left”, by that means blocking legitimate impatient school children who wanted to run on
the left. I avoided this for awhile by running down the spiral emergency stairs at the front of
the platform. This was a little faster but the hand rail was filthy and I had to wash my hands
when I got to school! (But I did not always).
When I went back to Earls Court station in
2004 I looked again at the emergency stairs. They were still there and still filthy.
We had “Season” tickets for the train each term from Wimbledon to Hammersmith via
Earl’s Court. Occasionally I would go to Merton Park Station and catch the small local to
Wimbledon. It ran every 20 minutes and if trains were on time, the connection was good. So
Geoffrey and I thought about getting the season ticket from Merton Park. But that turned out
to be a bad idea. For reasons we never figured out, it cost more than the Wimbledon fare plus
one way tickets Merton Park to Wimbledon! I mostly enjoyed the school which was every day
till 4 pm (4.10 pm allowing for assembly and prayers), and Saturday morning till noon.
Walking to Baron’s Court I could usually catch a train at 4.18 or so and then the 4.23 pm at
Earl’s Court. It was due in at Wimbledon at 4.40, but often a couple of minutes late because it
waited at the junction at East Putney for an “empty” train coming from the yards at Wimbledon
Park and turning across our tracks to go to Waterloo for the evening rush hour. Then
sometimes I would miss the 4.44 pm to Merton Park.
Somewhere I have a photo of Geoffrey
at Merton Park station taken with my “Baby Browney” camera
It was probably 1938, when I was 11 or 12 years old that the mathematics master
asked the class what we wished to do when we were adults and independent (over 21).
I
immediately expressed a desire to join the British foreign service.
War intervened and my
ability (and interest) in mathematics and physics led the joint recruiting board to suggest I study
radar - and this led after the war to my career in physics. But my interest in foreign countries
remained and I was fortunate that my field of experimental particle physics led to many overseas
journeys and friendships that I will describe later.
8
My parents gave me one shilling and threepence as an allowance for lunch and I usually
spent most of it. I liked the “Empire” restaurant, upstairs in a small room on the south side of
Hammersmith Road, which had a three course meal for one shilling - and lambs’ hearts on
Thursdays. But my school friends preferred other places and we often went in the other
direction to the Lyons Corner House in their headquarters in Cadby Hall in Kensington. At a
table by the window was a chess board and chess men - which we used. It was some time
before I realized that they belonged to the employees of Lyons, and when our game went on past
1 pm - as it did when we got better, they were upset at not having the chess set available.
On
Tuesday and Thursday afternoons there were sports. I am not sure what I did the first year but
then I remember going to the playing fields in Chiswick to play football - Association football or
“Soccer”. I was never very good at it but enjoyed it anyway. I was very short, not quite the
shortest in the class but was teased a little because of it. A boy would pick me up, turn me
upside down “to see what came out of the pockets”. I did not like it but deemed it wise to
accept the indignity
My apparent equanimity persuaded my friends to stop.
During my teen aged years I was ill a lot of the time. Indeed I had at various times
almost all the so-called “childhood” diseases. Scarlet Fever. Chicken Pox. Mumps,.
Measles. German Measles. I was also sick for unspecified reasons a lot of the time. Many of
my school mates thought I was a malingerer - an accusation some of my own children faced
later. But I was really sick. One feature of Colet Court was, I believe, bad. The insanitary
toilets. They were in a separate building and one had to go outside to reach them. There was
water on the floor most of the time. Whether that was from cleaning, or bad aim by the boys, it
was repulsive. The boys called the toilets;”the bogs”. Although one had to use the urinals, I
tried to avoid using the stalls, but when I was coming down with some diarhoeal attack it was
necessary. But there is often a bright side to unpleasantness. I was prepared for my visits to
Russia and other USSR countries and their “eastern” style toilets. Several of my Russian born
friends have commented how much better, and more civilized and sanitary, the “western”
toilets are. But to travel on a Pakistani airways plane where obviously many of the passengers
did not know how to use a western style toilet brings these bad memories back.
I never
complained about this to anyone in the family being too shy to refer to these necessary functions
of the human body. Indeed this was a general reticence at this epoch. When in 1939 we were
visiting Mother’s friends in South Shields on Tyne, we visited a Norwegian passenger ship.
Mother was surprized at the urinals in the men’s room – apparently she had never seen one
before.
In those days dentists regularly used gas as an anesthetic. That was used when the
dentist got rid of the last of my baby teeth; The first dentists visit I remember I was about 7
years old. He had to work fast to pull out 6 teeth in the 30 to 50 seconds. He was just fast
enough. I woke up to see a couple of my discarded teeth flying across the room!
My grandmother (Kingston) had bought a bungalow (Sea Dreams) on the Beach on
the south coast at Elmer Beach half way between Bognor Regis and Littlehampton. She rented
it in August to recoup expenses, but allowed her children to use it for a week another part of the
summer. Then she built another, larger house (Glenvar, named after a house she had owned in
Chiswick) next door to increase capacity. My Uncle Charlie bought a house across the street.
Between the houses and the beach was an earthen mound to keep the tide out. I remember
9
being taken on our first visit to the earthen mound at high tide to see the sea. The waves were
breaking. I was scared and cried. We spent many happy summer weeks in Elmer Beach
during the next 6 years and occasionally at spring or autumn breaks also.
There, and at my
grandmother’s house in Wimbledon, I got to know most of my Kingston cousins. It was a
happy time.
My father bought his first car about 1931 - a Singer, I believe, but I do not remember it.
Then in 1933 or so he bought an Invicta touring car. This was one of only about 50 that were
made, I believe in 1927. It was bright yellow, and had running boards on the side. The seats
were inflatable, and constantly had to be fixed - like a bicycle tire. At the back was a rack for
holding a food hamper in which was placed all the proper stuff for a picnic. There were plates,
knives, cups, saucers, and a small paraffin stove for making tea. This car was “laid up” during
the war from 1939 to 1945, but lasted till about 1953.
When we went on holiday to the beach
my father drove us all down to Elmer Beach (40 miles), or sometimes Granny would lend us her
car and chauffeur. Chauffeurs changed of course but the chauffeur that I remember was called
Kirby and he lived in an apartment above the garage . I remember one occasion when Kirby
had driven another family of cousins down, and he and my father “raced” back each on a slightly
different route just west of Horsham.
The car I was in “won”. I suspect, but am not sure
that I was with Kirby. We were on the A29 and took a cut off to join the A 24 at Kingsfield and
saw my father waiting at the stop sign at Bourne end as we passed.
For as long as I remember, until 1940 as detailed below, we had a live in maid. The
advertisement for such positions said “maid-general”. She cooked, cleaned and helped my
mother in everything. She was paid one pound a week and accommodation.
If my mother
was busy on a Sunday walk the maid would come with us. I remember one year we had a
Yorkshire lass from Rotherham. That summer when we went up to Hipperholme on Wakes
Week to bring my grandfather and grandmother south, we dropped her off at he parents house.
Wakes Week in Yorkshire is a week when the whole town takes a holiday. Everything,
including my grandfather’s bakery shuts down. Most people go off to the seaside at Blackpool
on the west coast of Lancashire or Bridlington on the east coast of Yorkshire. I still remember
the row house in Rotherham where the maid’s family lived, with no garden in a poor smoke
ridden community. Fortunately Grandpa and Grandma Wilson were by that time on top of the
hill in Hipperholme. Then we had a German girl, Friedel Weidinger, from the Black Forest
in southern Germany. I am not sure when she first arrived, but probably about 1935 or 1936.
To us children, she seemed an ardent Nazi supporter when she came. I remember an argument
about “Kyrstalnacht” ,November 9, 1938, when about 3,000 Jews were rounded up and killed.
Hitler (or rather Goebbels) announced that there were only 200 and that they were enemies of
the state. We had a hard time persuading Friedel that they deserved a trial. Later she changed
and in 1939 she was saying: “I would like to boil that man (Adolph Hitler) in oil”. Her elder
brother was in the German Navy. In summer 1939 she wrote him a letter warning him not to
believe everything Hitler said. We were appalled. That letter may have been her brother’s
death warrant. Be this as it may, Friedel never saw her family again. Although all the Wilson
children were away from home after 1939, except for holidays, Friedel stayed with my parents
till about spring 1941 when she left to work in a factory using a capstan lathe. She married a
petty office from the Royal Navy. When he and his ship went to the Mediterranean there was a
deliberate embargo from the British admiralty on information. She had not heard from him for
10
6 months. One day, when I was home on holiday, she came to the back door and fell against it.
She was in a state of nervous collapse. So Mother, without the slightest hesitation, put her to
bed where she recovered after a few days. This behavior of my mother surprised many friends
who might not have looked after a “servant”.
Across the street the family had a Viennese
maid. During the war the British government had a curfew for enemy aliens. They had to be
home by 10 pm. One day the Viennese maid came back at 9.55 pm and a policeman came out
of the shadows and said “Just in time, miss. Just in time”. Neither Friedel nor her Viennese
friend ever cut it so fine again.
When Friedel first came she knew English but only the proper
words. When she called me once a naughty little bugger, instead of naughty little beggar, I
could not help laughing. I had already read the bible with its story of Sodom and Gomorrah
and knew what both words meant. But I was too shy to explain it to her and Laurie had to do
so. For some reason my family was not adventurous in cooking and eating. That got worse
during the second world war when imported foods were hard to get. We ate peas, carrots,
cabbage, and if we were lucky russel sprouts. But when Friedel was around we sometimes had
a treat. She was from Bavaria and made an excellent Wiener schnitzel.
It was not till I got to
America in 1950 that I really had tasty food frequently.
In 1935 to about 1937 we went for many long walks in the countryside of Surrey on the
Sunday.. Always with my mother and only on vacation with my father. We could get a
special excursion ticket for a shilling. Go to one station, and come back from another. I
remember the first visit to Boxhill by traveling to Boxhill and Burford Bridge Station, just north
of Dorking, and walking up the steep path on Boxhill to the east. Another day we walked in the
other direction from Boxhill station up to the downs, and came back from Effingham Junction.
On still another day in summer 1938 we traveled on the same line one station further to Dorking
North. Then a bus a few miles west where we walked a 3 mile path to Leith Hill, and back to
Holmwood station. My aunt Winifred Smith (Derek and Graham’s mother) had joined us with my cousin Graham I believe - in Epsom, as we came through on the train.
Later on in
the day we saw my other cousin Derek who had left ½ hour earlier, collecting butterflies on the
path. The train home was a small electric train to Dorking. A week or so before it had been a
steam train but the line had just been electrified and they were running the electric train on the
same schedule as the steam train with a change at Dorking. Later that fall (1938) the train from
Wimbledon went all the way to and from Horsham. On the line at that time each train was
advertized by a wooden sign plugged into the socket at the station by a porter. He was busy at
rush hours at Wimbledon station because a train came every 3-5 minutes! In 1980 or so, long
after I had left England, the wooden signs were replaced by a computer driven electronic board.
Some old signs were bought up by a second hand dealer in Newton and we bought one of the
old signs which we hang in our eating porch. “Dorking, Epsom, Wimbledon and Waterloo”.
That was obviously used at Horsham station and was the sign for trains in the line we traveled
on to get to Boxhill or Leith Hill.
Our son Michael has a sign, Ashford, Folkestone Dover and
Sandwich from the south eastern part of the Southern Railway.
I was close to my brother Geoffrey. We were only 18 months apart in age and we shared
a bedroom. I admired my brother Laurie as only oldest siblings can be admired, and especially
his construction of a scissors cross over for our model railway. In later years Laurie and I drew
closer. But I have fewer memories of my brother Arthur. He was called Arthur Hey in
honour of my great uncle Hanson Hey who was a tobacconist and secretary of the Tobacconists
11
union in Halifax. Hanson Hey died, I believe, before I was born. In summer 1937 I remember
that my parents were worried about his work at school. I understand that he was picked on by
various people, especially the French teacher, E.A.C. Downes, a French veteran of World War I
who had survived a gas attack.
My mother decided to give Arthur extra tuition personally.
But on December 2nd 1937 it all came apart.
I had gone to bed and was asleep. There was a
small workshop opening from the drawing room which was one floor with flat roof. It had
been raining and rain was overflowing the gutters. My father set out to clean them that night.
He walked out onto the balcony of the bedroom which Arthur and Laurie shared, climbed over
the railing into the flat roof, and started to clean the gutter. Arthur followed, paused to put a
light in the window, and walked onto the flat roof. He had his hands in his pockets as he often
had. He went too far and hit his head on the concrete below. Apparently he said one word:
‘Oh!” as he fell
He seemed semiconscious and was brought inside where my mother had
made tea. But he was in a coma and was taken to Nelson’s hospital where he died about 11 am
the following day. My father while waiting for the sad news fainted. My mother had to look
after him too.
As I remember it that was always her chosen role. Making sure everyone was
looked after.
The following morning as I was preparing to go to school, my mother told me the news.
I could not believe that Arthur would not recover, but could do nothing so I went to school. I
got back from school at, I suppose 5 pm as usual and Auntie May who had come to support her
sister, told me what had happened.. I took my bicycle and went out for ½ hour or more. It
must have been dark. I do not know now, and never could remember where I went. It is all
blanked out. I do not know what other sad memories are blanked out, but no doubt a lot of
happy ones too.
Why did I not grieve publicly as other people do? I do not know.
I did
not have time to mope. Almost at once I came down with a bad attack of chicken pox. With a
high fever, I was in bed for a week. I am not sure but believe that Geoffrey got the chicken pox
too. Although I was told not to scratch, I scratched anyway and for many years my arms and
back showed signs of my lack of control.
Mother, as usual, was a fine nurse. Arthur was
cremated in Mitcham and his ashes scattered there. I never got to the funeral but would not
have gone to the crematorium. It was the custom in the Kingston family, which custom my
father agreed to, for only men to go to the grave side or crematorium.
Christmas in our house that year was very restrained. My parents decided that the
school fees to St. Paul’s school that they had been paying for Arthur would continue to be paid
as a charitable contribution to their benevolent fund. No one was officially supposed to know
which of the schoolboys was thereby helped but I found out that my friend Klaus Roth, of whom
more later, was thereby helped.
Since I became prosperous I have been making yearly
contributions. It may have been that year but more probably the year before that we were all
contributing to the “the home for little wanderers”. Again it was mother who suggested we do
this. Each of us contributed what we wanted out of our pocket money, and mother sent it all off
just before Christmas.
It was mother’s practical way of doing something and ensuring that the
happy memories of Arthur would not be forgotten.
My father was devastated and returned to a family belief I had never heard about Spiritualism. He hoped to have a communication from Arthur and to apologize to him. My
mother grieved about Arthur too, very obviously, but was not consumed by this need that my
12
father had. I had not known that as a boy his family held sances, and according to my father,
my grandmother would go into trances and when trying to “communicate” by “table-tilting’
would end up running across the room with a tilted table. It became clear that my father
desperately wanted to communicate again with Arthur and say he was sorry and get Arthur’s
forgiveness.
My parents got a new circle of friends We rearranged the house. An
upstairs, inside, workshop became a sance room and the tools were taken to a workshop outside
next to the living room. Then, being technically included, father thought that if a person could
materialize with “ectoplasm” and be made visible and talk to the sitters, then it could materialize
inside a box with a microphone.
This appealed to this 12 year old. The box was made and
the microphone connected to the amplifier in the living room where I could listen to anything
that went on. But never did a voice materialize in the box. Over the years I read all about the
growth of modern Spiritualism. The knockings on the wall that were heard by the Fox sisters
in Rochester, NY in 1847. The séances held by Sir William Crookes in 1870, with Florence
Cook as a medium, which he described in detail and which marred his scientific reputation so
much that he dropped the subject until a return to it at his Presidential Address to the British
Association for Advancement of Science (British Ass for short) in 1897. Of the Society for
Psychical Research of which my father was a member, which I joined as a life member when I
was 20 and became a member of their council.
I was learning to be a scientist and looked at
all of these with a mixture of awe and skepticism.
Over the years I went to séances with 100
or so different mediums.
They were nice, ordinary, people. Were they frauds, or what?
One thing worried me always. The claims were so huge, so fantastic, so central to our
transitory existence on earth, that I had to think about them if I was ever to claim to think about
the important issues in science.
Laurie, who had always been closer to Arthur was convinced
about the reality of most spiritualist claims.
I never understood my mother’s reaction to the
turn to the spiritualist movement. I do not believe that she was ever even a partial believer, but
she understood my father’s need for solace and was fully supportive of everything my father
wanted to do. She invited the Spiritualist friends into the house. She prepared meals after the
seances. Only once do I remember that she balked and not because of my father or religious or
spiritual beliefs. A regular friend was Joseph Newton, who lived near Edgeware in North
London, but had a tailor’s shop near the Elephant and Castle. He said he could bring the food
for the dinner after the next week’s séance. It was a succulent leg of lamb. It had been bought
on the “black market”. Mother rejected the offer on future occasions. She would stick with
the food ration and unrationed foods and not accept anything from the black market.
She felt
very strongly that we should all stick together during the war and not try to gain a little
advantage one over the other.
I am sure my father agreed with this too, but did not want to
antagonize Joe.
In 1940 Mr Morgan, a medium who worked with a lathe at a munitions factory next to
Croydon airport needed somewhere to live and became a lodger.
As far as I remember he had
three “spirit guides” who turned up regularly.
One was Bishop Samuel Wilberforce who was,
when he was alive, active anti evolution in the late 1800s, an American Indian who always had
lofty thoughts, and a Chinese or Tibetan who only turned up occasionally.
One or another
would say “Arthur is here” or “Hanson Hey is here”. I did my reading.
In William James’
“Principles of Psychology”, he mentions the spirit guides of the medium with which he was well
acquainted - his housekeeper, Mrs Piper. She also had a set of three guides and James
commented that this was usual.
I read Frederic Myers “Human Personality and its survival
13
of Bodily Death”. A fine book with lucid accounts of various stories that convinced him. I
also went out and read Myers and Gurney’s paper, “Malobservation and Lapse of Memory “ in
the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research about 1882. This is a classic study of
how one tends to remember only those predictions which later turn out to be true (veridical). I
was, tentatively, prepared to believe that telepathy might occur, but such physical phenomena as
materializations seemed to me most unlikely.
It was in spring 1944 that we all became involved with Helen Duncan.
She was a
materialization medium. I could possibly accept the thought She claimed to be a vehicle for
physical phenomena whilst in a trance state. A precious gift that brought comfort to many.
'Dead' loved ones appeared in physical form, spoke to and touched their earthly relatives and in
this way brought both proof of survival and much comfort to many traumatized and grieving
wartime families. Some years later, in 1949 I believe, Brigadier Firebrace, head of security for
Scotland, told me the following story.
On the morning of 24th May 1941 the battle cruiser Hood was sunk in a 19 minute
interchange with the German battleship and battle cruiser, Bismarck and Prince Eugen in the
Denmark Strait between Denmark and Greenland. The latest battleship, the Prince of Wales,
came back to port stern first. At 1.30 pm that day Brigadier Firebrace was at a séance in
Edinburgh with Helen as a medium. This level headed officer described how Mrs. Duncan's
ghostly “ guide’, Albert, materialized and claimed that a great British battleship had just been
sunk, and named the Hood. Brigadier Firebrace checked with the Admiralty immediately after
the séance and was told that no ship had been sunk. A few hours later the admiralty called
him back. They had just been informed that H.M.S. Hood had gone down in with the loss of
1,418 lives. He believed that, at the time of the séance, not even the Admiralty had known of
the disaster. Whether or not this was a psychic experience, from the point of view of the
authorities, Mrs. Duncan was releasing classified information and was a dangerous person who
had to be stopped. More important to the British government was the information about the
cruiser HMS Barham which had been sunk in the Mediterranean in 1941. The British
government wanted to keep this a secret from the Nazis, because this ship had been the one ship
which had been able to intercept Nazi troop traffic from Italy to North Africa, and we
desperately wanted to prevent a build up of forces to attack Egypt.
Incidentally Friedel
Weidinger’s British husband was on a ship in the Mediterranean at this time, and the it was this
official secrecy that had prevented his letters from reaching her and had worried her as described
earlier. During a séance in Portsmouth during the end of November of 1941, Helen
“materialized” a sailor from the HMS Barham who told of his ship being sunk. The sailor was
wearing a hat with the name of the ship on the hat band, a practice not done by active duty
sailors to prevent the name of their ship being revealed if they were captured. The sailor
allegedly gave the name, location and time of the HMS Barham sinking as well as the exact
number of dead and several of the names of those killed. It seems that Naval intelligence
wanted Helen Duncan out of the way for good during the build up to the invasion of France,
where the biggest counter intelligence operation ever was being carried out to persuade Hitler
that Allied forces were going to attack at the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy, and as we now
know, the Panzer divisions were employed accordingly.
The opportunity came at a séance in a private house in the home port of Britain's Royal
14
Naval fleet , the southern coastal city of Portsmouth on the evening of January 19 1944.
Lieutenant R. Worth of the Royal Navy intelligence attended this séance. He bought two
tickets for a guinea ($5 at the time) each and gave one to an undercover policeman. The
policeman blew his whistle to launch a raid. Police hands made a grab for the “ectoplasm”,
which he thought was merely a white sheet, but, according to Mrs Duncan’s supporters, the
spirit world was too quick for them and it dematerialized quicker than they could catch.
Nothing was produced in evidence. Thus Helen Duncan was brought before Portsmouth
magistrates and charged with Vagrancy under the Vagrancy act of 1824, under which anyone
pretending to tell fortunes was tried. The act allowed no jury trial. There was no possibility of
explaining that the claim was true. At the first such conviction the maximum penalty was small
but if there was a previous conviction under that act and she would have been called an
“incorrigible rogue”. But there was no chance of a long jail sentence, and with that no chance
of a jury trial. Helen was refused bail and instead tried under the witchcraft act of 1735,
resurrected after nearly a century of disuse which stated that anyone who "pretend to exercise or
use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration,' shall be liable on conviction to
a year's imprisonment”. This act had a long enough jail period, 3 months, that it allowed a
jury trial. But as the judge said in his summing up, the court had no concern with whether
“genuine manifestations of the kind are possible . . .this court has nothing whatever to do with
such abstract questions”.
Mr Loseby, the defending Q.C., made an offer that Mrs Duncan would hold a special
séance for the court. But would she be mentally able to do it? To determine this we had a
special séance at our house.
Of course the box with its’ microphone was switched on, and I
listening downstairs heard everything. It seemed no different, from another of the many
séances I had heard or attended, but it was deemed a success. The court, however, denied the
suggestion and offer of proof
.
It came to my father’s notice in February 1944 that a man, or maybe two men, who I
will call Messrs X, in Oxford had been in a pub in 1943 where a Lieutenant Worth, probably
while “under the influence”, made a bet that within 6 months Helen Duncan would be behind
bars.
Geoffrey and I were asked to interview Mr X and get him to make a statement. We
went to a local lawyer on Queen street who said that the statement was useless in law because it
had to be in the right form. But he signed it anyway. I no longer have a copy.
Mr
Loseby, Q.C., defending Mrs Duncan at the old Bailey, referred to this briefly and the judge
perked up at the thought of a conspiracy which would render the whole proceeding moot.
Geoffrey was at the trial taking notes. Messrs. X were in London, waiting to be called. But
for some inexplicable reason Loseby declined to call him (or them). A lot has been written
about the trial but very little about this incident. In the 1990s a film was made of the trial at
the Kingston criminal court as a substitute for the Old Bailey. I was in Kingston the day it was
shot, visiting Kingston University to discuss the International Sakharov Environmental
University, and I was filmed describing the missing testimony. The film was shown on British
TV, and also on USA TV. My next door neighbor, Ed Farr, was surprised to see me thereon.
I never saw it on TV but I was given a copy of the tape.
A few years later both the Vagrancy act and the Witchcraft acts were amended by the
“Fraudulent Mediums” act of 1951:. This was “An Act to repeal the Witchcraft Act, 1735 and to
15
make, in substitution for certain provisions of section four of the Vagrancy Act 1824, express
provision for the punishment of persons who fraudulently purport to act as spiritualistic mediums
or to exercise powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or other similar powers.” The presumption that
any pretense must be fraudulent was removed. The maximum penalty under the Vagrancy act
was increased by one day, thereby automatically allowing for a trial by jury. It was my brother
Laurence (Laurie) Wilson who drafted this brief bill which passed the House of Commons by a
unanimous vote. Spiritualists understood. In the “Psychic News” when Laurie died one can
find a head line which I quote from memory: “The man who won us our freedom died.”
I
have no doubt in my mind that Lieutenant Worth and Naval Intelligence conspired to get Helen
Duncan out of the way. As time went on I believe she was a fraud - but one who brought solace
to many people in a very difficult time in England’s history.
When I say that I now believe
she was a fraud I mean it in the same sense that many well meaning religious leaders perpetrate a
fraud on their flocks. I do not, for example, believe in the virgin birth. But that is a complex
discussion.
It was in the summer of 1938 and 1939 that I really got to bicycling. In 1933 when I
got my first real bicycle I was restricted. I was only supposed to bicycle on side roads. I was
to cross the main roads on foot, wheeling the bicycle. Geoffrey and I found a myriad of ways
for bicycling long distances.
The restrictions were never formally withdrawn but by 1938 I
had slowly violated them although I still preferred side roads. Getting home from school just
before 1 pm on a Saturday, I was out of the house about 1.30 or so, meeting my friend Philip
Bachrach at the “Ace of Spades” roundabout on the Kingston bypass. Philip lived an equal
distance the other side of the Ace of Spades in Hounslow. There were bicycle paths on either
side of the 30 foot wide by pass road as far as this roundabout. Then we would desert the main
road and head south on the Leatherhead Road and turn to Hook, Claygate, or Cobham. Then
we got more venturesome and cycled down to Abinger Hammer beyond Dorking, or even the
road to Farnham. On one occasion we returned to Philip’s house in Hounslow. I then
bicycled home. I tried to do this as fast as possible. I bicycled about 13 miles in 40 minutes
or 20 mph. Not bad for a 13 year old on a fixed gear 24 inch wheel bicycle. I remember that
the lights were in my favor as I went through Kingston. The struggle up Kingston Hill delayed
me but I sped across Kingston by pass (with the green light) in fine style. Philip Bachrach was
bigger and stronger than I. In fact he was the principal boy who turned me upside down to my
annoyance as described earlier. About that time he was observed dropping a piece of metal
from the back of a District line train from Hammersmith to Hounslow to cause sparks. The
owner of a house backing onto the line reported him and as a punishment he got 6 of the best on
the part of the anatomy intended for the purpose. But in 1939 he was a fine companion and
was a strong and safe bicyclist. After July 1939 I lost track of him and have never again met
him. Alas Bachrach is too common a name for me to easily locate him.
But then the war came.
The War Years
I suppose that I began to think that war with Germany was inevitable in mid September
1938 when, at age 12, I was issued my first gas mask. This was a funny device. Closely fitting
the face with a rubber seal; breathing in through a graphite filter, and exhaling by blowing air out
16
of the sides with a funny noise that made us all laugh. In mid September 1938 plans were
made for evacuating school children from London in anticipation of air raids and a gas attack.
The upper forms (maybe only the Upper first) of Colet Court were sent to a camp at “Big Wood”
in Radley just south of Oxford.
We got there by train from Paddington station. We were
there less than a week before the Munich agreement postponed our concern for awhile and we
had to return to school from our brief holiday. I remember the concern in March 1939 when
the German army took over Bohemia and Moravia, which was what was left of Czechoslovakia,
and our Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave his famous undertaking to Poland. If
Germany attacked Poland we would go to war.
Much has been written, particularly in the
United States, about British appeasement. Everyone in our family was against appeasement
and Laurie, then in Oxford, actively worked in September 1938 for the candidate opposing
Quintin Hogg, the sitting conservative MP, in a by election. But it was complex. France
was very weak. They had lost so many young men in WWI and an equal number in the
influenza epidemic in the year following, that they did not want a war. They could have
opposed Hitler’s military reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 but declined to do so. France
had made an undertaking to Czechoslovakia which they did not want to honor. England had not
made any undertaking to Czechoslovakia,. The USA seemed completely uninterested in
opposing Hitler’s Germany or at times they even appeared to support it. Ambassador (to the
UK) Joseph Kennedy and the aviator Lindbergh were among those praising achievements of
Nazi Germany. But in 1939 England was reluctantly getting ready. Watson Watt was
developing his radar system and “Chain Home” was ready by the outbreak of war. My cousin
Derek in the first summer in college (Cambridge) in 1938 worked on radar with John, later Sir
John) Cockroft. By 1939 Derek had left college and was installing and calibrating radar
stations.
But this “Chain Home” had a problem that it could not detect low flying aircraft
because of the “Lloyd’s Mirror” effect. The reflection of the radio waves at the surface of the
sea created an interference pattern with a zero at zero degrees. It was impossible to detect any
low flying aeroplane close to the surface of the sea. So it was followed soon by “Chain Home
Low” at a shorter wavelength and taller towers.
We were on a short holiday in South Shields, County Durham, staying with an old
school friend of my mother’s, Maggie Dawson (née Ridley). There we saw the newspaper
report of the Stalin-Ribbentrop pact and my father immediately said “this means war” and we
went home. The German Army invaded Poland shortly thereafter and Britain gave an
ultimatum on September 1st, and at the same time started the evacuation of children from
London. By this time I had been accepted into St Paul’s School so that was where I went. On
the afternoon of September 1st, my older brother Geoffrey and myself set off on our bicycles for
Crowthorne in Berkshire. We had rucksacks on our backs, a box on a rear carrier with panniers
hanging from the carrier.
I was not sure what was going to happen. I do clearly remember
my mother (then 48) running down the road with us to the corner of Mostyn Road, before
letting us go.
My memory of that is still very clear.
I did not want to leave home, and
was very deeply sorry for the obvious worry that my mother had, but at the same time I was
excited about new happenings in my life. Was the evacuation to be like the 1938 evacuation
which seems like a small holiday? I thought intellectually of course that I might not see my
family again, but could not bring myself to think about it emotionally. I suppose that many
English people felt that way: it enabled us all to keep going.
17
That day, Friday September 1st and the next day, Saturday September 2nd, evacuation
was organized. Probably 2 million children left London on these afternoons by various
transportation methods. The dual highway, the “Kingston Bypass” was one way on each
roadway going out of London. Our route had been specified in advance. Down the bypass to
Esher, on to Claygate, Byfleet, Camberley and up to Crowthorne.
A 40 mile ride which took
a little over 3 hours. We arrived just before dark and people were not prepared. They were
anticipating arrival the next day. We reported to a schoolmaster, Mr Harbord, who was staying
with a friend in Crowthorne. We ended up in a large house, Alderbrook, Duke’s Ride,
Crowthorne, Berkshire, sleeping under the table in the billiard room.
A couple of days later
the billiard table was taken apart, and the slate parts of the table were stored by the wall (beside
my bed). This house, with a two car garage and chauffeur’s quarters on top, had 7 acres
attached, and was owned by Major (old man) Knowles.
He and his wife had dinner every
night served formally by the two maids - and if I remember aright, produced by a third servant,
a cook. Two sons were already in the army. We were invited to join them and everything was
formal. We all waited behind our chairs as they came in, and one of us had to hold Mrs
Knowles’ chair as she sat down.
At the end of dinner we all stood and waited till they left.
Major Knowles told us many fascinating stories of his life, particularly his young life. He had
been a railroad engineer in China in the late 1890s.
He was playing golf northwest of the
Celestial City while the Boxer rebellion was going on . He described how the Chinese
workmen would rest for lunch when they were digging a hole - for a well for example. They
seemed to have no concept of safety. They would haul to the top of the digging tower the digging
tool so that they could get a good start after lunch.
And then they would sit in the hole, under
the tool to eat their lunch oblivious to the idea that the rope might suddenly give way and
annihilate them.
There were 8 (later 6) of us boys were billeted on him and his wife (and servants).
It
turned out very soon that 3 of us boys were christened Richard so that a problem of
distinguishing us arose. There was Dick Stock; then there was Richard XX, whose surname I
have forgotten, and then me. I was the youngest so I clearly had to change my name to avoid
confusion. and then the oldest boy, Bill Stock, said that I was a Mugwump. So Mugwump I
became, (Wump for short) to everyone in the school including the school masters.
What is a
Wump?” Bill was asked. “Here he is, that is a Wump”.
I never liked being called
Mugwump. But it seemed unwise to protest.
It was a case of preferring to fit in and go
along with my friends, peers, and teachers.
When I got to college 4 years later the opportunity
came to drop the name and until recently I have not been willing to talk about it except with
close friends - all of whom have gone along with my desire to drop the nickname. Similarly
Andrée dropped the nick name Dizzy when we got married and she acquired a new circle of
friends.
The school met in Easthampsted House in a large park belonging to an Irish peer, the
Earl of Downshire. It was 4 miles away, which was reached in 20 minutes by bicycle when the
bicycle was working. Boys and masters shared the same problems. I remember passing one
master with an upturned bicycle and helped to fix his puncture. It seemed the natural thing to
do. It was still 2 weeks before the start of term. These were spent in preparing for the worst.
We dug trenches in which to shelter during an air raid. This turned out to be a silly way of
protecting oneself. We practiced decontamination, from mustard gas, with the local first aid
18
party. Mustard is not actually a gas but a liquid and therefore persistent. The procedure was
to wash it down the drain rapidly with any hose available. Only after that is done, need there be
careful measurements of the contamination. Individual decontamination was necessary if
contamination was suspected. There were showers in the decontamination trailer, and all
clothes would be immediately destroyed. Hopefully others will be provided.
But safety
must, and did, take precedence over modesty. In the practice, though, we were allowed to
continue to wear a bathing suit and our clothes were not burnt. We got the clothes back.
I
still have my little book on poison gases. They were never used in WWII, so actually the book
describes the experience of the poison gases in WWI.
We cut down trees on one of the acres of “old man” Knowles property to prepare
firewood for a hard winter. We anticipated that little coal would come because the miners
would be in the army. It was then I learned how to use a felling axe but was unsuccessful in
another more technical endeavor. One tree had a diameter of 24 inches - to big for my axe, so
we tried to bring it down by making a small cut, and filling it with gunpowder that we mixed
with materials purchased from the chemists shop. Welit a fairly long fuse and went to the end
of the wood. But the gunpowder merely burnt - and did not explode. We gingerly went back
to the tree to see what had happened. But someone else had to cut down that tree
professionally. I learned later that a Russian scientist, Dr Nikitin of Leningrad, who I met
later in 1957, had better luck when he was a teenager in1938. He synthesized nitroglycerine
and exploded it under a snowman in the schoolyard. Two windows were broken and he was
almost expelled from his school by the principal. But his chemistry teacher pointed out that he
had managed to synthesize nitroglycerine and it would be wrong to interrupt a promising career!
A more successful activity in 1939-1940 was to go the golf course behind the house on
the busy weekends and pick up golf balls that had been accidentally sent into the trees and
bushes. We sold them back to the golf “professional” for a penny each. But soon
schoolwork took over.
I had been put into a form (class) 5X, that was supposed to be on a fast
track for getting to the forms where one studied for University scholarships and entrance.
But
I found the classes absurdly easy and lobbied to be promoted in mid year from 5X to 6X,
jumping ahead a year. I would then take the “School Certificate” at the end of the year.
This
lobbying was successful at Christmas time.
But I then had to catch up to the class.
I was
told that for the English school certificate examination, the class would be reading Shakespeare’s
“Julius Caesar” and the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
The usual terrible
procedure for the class was to read 2 pages or so for homework and discuss them in class the
next day.
I read both books straight through, with great pleasure, over Christmas. I found
that I got ahead of the rest of the class and by reading the whole book in one session (of 2 days)
it was far more enjoyable than the piece work reading of 2 pages for homework each week. I
had already realized this a couple of years before when we had to translate Jules Vernes’,
“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” 2 pages at a time for Mr Downes of Colet Court.
It was a good idea to have an interesting book for class work, but limiting myself to two pages at
a time was, for me, impossible.
We had mice in our sleeping room (the billiard room). So we devised a very effective
mouse trap. Two bare wires connected to the 110 volt outlet with a piece of cheese in between.
The following morning we found no mouse but a smell of burning. That was the last of the
19
mouse!
I have never been able to persuade Andrée that this was far more effective than the
“humane” trap she uses; to trap the mouse and then move it to the park or some other community
to be exchanged for a mouse caught in the other community.. Geoffrey recently reminded me
that the house had 110 volt DC presumably because when the house was built there was no
connection o the 230 volt line. There was an emergency generator in the garage. Major
Knowles’ chauffeur, a Mr Hand, came and stoked the central heating boiler and we kidded with
him a lot. He had several, maybe 3, maybe 5, children who we obviously called the “fingers”.
One finger I met again later since she was a First Aid Party volunteer. Because we could no
longer get trees, wood or paper from Canada and the USA we had to recycle. I went round
every week with a “trek cart”, usually tying it to my bicycle to pick up waste paper and bottles to
be recycled. I took them to the sorting depot but never did the sorting myself.
My parents had taken their own precautions in our family house that I found in coming
home from school for the Christmas holidays.
In September 1939 every house had to be
prepared for an attack with incendiary bombs and they were duly inspected by the local air raid
warden (a civilian volunteer).
My father cleared the top rooms of our family home in a
London suburb of inflammable material. The wooden tables for the model railroad in the top
floor were taken apart - and the trains never ran again! My box full of railroad magazines had
to be trashed but it was up to me to do the trashing. I understood the need and wanted to play
my part. Into the waste paper (recycled as of September 1939) they went. Later I regretted
that disposition particularly when I became friendly with another younger boy (Geoffrey Best)
interested in railroads.
In later years my son Nicholas has also commented on their loss.
But the trains themselves were another matter. In summer 1940 I tried to convert the layout
into a portable one able to be set up and dismantled on the living room floor. But that was
never finished either.
In the place of the magazines and the model railway were buckets full of water and sand,
and a small hand “stirrup” pump was there to put out incendiary bombs. There was a
maximum of three minutes before a bomb on the top floor would burn through the floor and set
the fire below, and after 1940 there was a maximum of three minutes before the small explosive
charge blew the fragments of burning magnesium around. It was easier as a two person job.
The stirrup pump was pumped by one person and the water was directed by another. The
pump had two settings. The “Jet” and the “Spray”.
The spray was for the bomb itself and the
jet for the surrounding fire. History records that in many situations those two minutes were
enough. Jokes about the difference between the jet and the spray continued for a decade or so
after the war.
In autumn term 1939 the boys were encouraged to find an extracurricular interest by a
school prize for so doing. One of my interests in railroads was in track and signaling layouts.
So I chose to spend time at the weekends exploring the railroad tracks with my bicycle and
looking over the railroad bridges. I won a prize by submitting drawings of every switch and
signal in the quadrangle Ascot, Aldershot, Hook and Reading. I do not have the roll up paper
chart I submitted but of course I transcribed them also into my big book of track layouts that I
still have. I completed Basingstoke and Worting Junction later in the summer when Geoffrey
and I did a weekend camping trip there in Summer 1940. As a result I was able to complete
the location of every signal and every switch on the main line from Waterloo to Basingstoke.
20
I later added Winchester and Salisbury but were never able to connect them up at Micheldever.
These drawings are in my book which I still keep. Most of the line remains the same, although
it is electrified and I suspect that the signals have been improved.
On my return to school just after Christmas I got sick. I had discharges from
the left ear, diagnosed as “otitis media”. I knew enough Latin to realize that just mean middle
ear, and was one of the many ways a doctor had of saying “we don’t know”. I had to stay in
bed most of a month. This was the time I learned calculus by reading the book and working the
examples. Whether it was because I learned on my own or something else, I found that when I
got back to school I was really ahead of the class. So when I got back to school I was put in a
small group of three doing extra work in the class of 30. At the end of the year I took the
“School Certificate” exam and was head of the class - especially in mathematics.
I am not sure whether it was in spring 1940 or autumn 1940 that a crippled boy called
Goldstein, whose given name I have forgotten, came to the school. He was very good at
mathematics and he, like myself, were put at the table at the back of the classroom to do more
advanced work. The other boys ignored him. I am not sure to this day why I befriended him.
Maybe because he and I both enjoyed mathematics, or maybe because I was sorry for him as a
cripple. Maybe a bit of both. But during the vacation my father, presumably because he had
been so advised by the mathematics master Chris Heath, told me not to be too friendly with
Goldstein. He never explained why, nor did I know why. Goldstein left in the middle of the
next term. Was it naked anti-Semitism on the part of Chris Heath who, up to that time seemed
to me to be without many flaws?
It still worries me but at the time I resolved to try to be
more open minded.
I thought again about this when on Christmas day about 1998 I visited
Chris and his wife at his house in Tattenham Corner with Andrée and Annette. Chris was at
that time mostly confined to a wheel chair. My daughter Annette at once thought that Chris
was anti-Semitic. Yet it was more complex than that. At that meeting Chris asked me whether
I knew what several of his best students were now doing. He was clearly proud of them They
were all Jewish.
It was about this time I realized that our bicycling route to Crowthorne, through
Cobham, and Byfleet is about 10 miles longer than through Chertsey and Chobam Common.
It took 3 ½ hours compared to 2 ½ hours for the shorter route. So on one weekend home I
proposed to go that way.
I was meeting Geoffrey after school at the bicycle racks to ride
home. Then I attempted a practical joke about which I will always feel badly. I waited, with
another schoolfriend, probably Geoffrey Best who was going to come with us, 100 yards down
the hill in the bushes out of the line of sight. The idea was to surprise Geoffrey. But
Geoffrey came by cycling very fast. As he passed I tried to catch up with him. But he was
going too fast, presumably to catch up with me. I presume he had assumed that I had gone
ahead. Our ways diverged 3 miles ahead, and I took the short route home and got back sooner
than Geoffrey who took the longer route.
Geoffrey never took me to account for this failed
practical joke. I presume that I apologized but probably not very graciously. I keep
remembering this incident but as the song, then popular said in a somewhat different context:
“what is done one never, never can undo.”
21
In April 1940 we made our last visit to Elmer Beach during a brief school holiday.
While my mother went down by car, probably Grannie’s car, from Merton Park, Geoffrey and
I put our bicycles on the train from Crowthorne to Guildford, and set off down the Portsmouth
road past Godalming and on to Petworth. There was a strong opposing wind and I got
extraordinarily tired. I could not face climbing the South Downs so we diverged and went to
Pulborough, 5 miles to the east, and downhill. There we put our bicycles on the train to Ford
Junction and bicycled on the three miles to Elmer Beach. The weather was brisk, the sea too
cold for bathing, but we walked on Elmer beach for what turned out to be the last time.
On May 10th 1940 that the Nazi armies invaded Belgium and Holland.
They quickly
th
overcame the frontier forts, and on May 28 King Leopold of the Belgians surrendered, leaving
the British and French armies to face the blitzkrieg alone. This left over 350,000 British troops in
a difficult position. They fell back on Dunkerque and were surrounded except for the sea. At
home we braced ourselves for the news of capitulation and capture of the army. That would
have left England undefended, and we anticipated invasion within a week.
The last week of
May and the first of June we began to be prepared for invasion. I remember two items. We
had a few days off school. The evacuated troops landed at Dover or thereabouts and were
loaded into trains. Many trains went around London on the line passing through Crowthorne.
I remember going down to the station where a women’s auxiliary group was making tea and
sandwiches. When a train stopped, as many did waiting for the track to be clear at Wokingham
and Reading, they handed the sustenance up through the windows to the soldiers.
I talked to
one group of soldiers. They had left all their arms behind on the beach and had nothing to eat or
drink for 24 hours. Being a rail buff, I asked the engine driver where he was headed. “I don’t
know mate” he replied. “I will go wherever the signal at Reading tells me to go.” I envisioned
then that as the soldiers came off the 2,000 boats bringing them to England, they were pushed
onto a train. No one knew where the train was going. It was extraordinary improvisation..
I envisioned the 330,000 men without weapons ready to save England. I also
remember being taught unarmed combat. I had learned how to box at Colet Court, being
taught by a former WWI army sergeant. I was taught the Queensborough rules - never hit
below the belt. I now learned: “always hit below the belt” “Knee him in the crotch. Stamp
on his instep. If you can creep up behind, cut off his head with a cheese wire.”
Recently
Pat Pankhust, Geoffrey’s wife for 53 years, told us that as a 14 year old school girl in Sevenoaks
in SW London they practiced making Molotov cocktails. As I write this my mind goes at
once to Churchill’s famous speech:
“We shall go on to the end,
we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender.”
22
For us teenagers it was not mere rhetoric as some of my American colleagues thought at
the time. It is what we proposed to do. If we had been tested there would of course have been
carnage. Most of us knew that at the time. But talking with the refugees from Europe at
school had convinced me that we had no alternative. Indeed I believed in September 1939 that
there would not be a Jew alive in areas of Nazi domination at the end of the war. That turned
out to be overly pessimistic. Many years later, when I read “Bram” Pais’, memoires I was
surprised that he was walking unconcerned in Amsterdam in summer 1941 and only went into
the attic in 1943.
I was also buoyed by Churchill’s earlier speech to the House of Commons:
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
Few weeks had as much influence on my later life as this one.
I am a member of a
Permanent Terrorism Monitoring Panel of the World Federation of Scientists (WFS). In my
mischevousness I like to say that in 1940 I was trained as a terrorist.
Few people understand
this but a Belgian on the WFS understands this and says that he was a terrorist too.
We were home on holiday in August 1940 when the bombing began. It was a fine
summer afternoon and we were having tea by the bay window in the dining room when we saw
the dog fight. About fifteen Junkers 87 dive bombers (Stukas) were diving followed by a dozen
British fighters - Spitfires or Hurricanes. Only half the Stukas got out of the dive. The
Stukas were not again used in the UK but were used effectively in summer 1941 against an
unprepared Russia. One plane was out of formation and dropped a single bomb- about 50 - 100
lb TNT - on a house in Hatfield Road just ½ mile away from our house and we went round to see
the damage afterwards. The bomb had exploded after it had passed through three floors, and
the house was destroyed. One person was killed.
Nowadays I remind people that this is one
billionth of the explosive power of a big hydrogen bomb. This is discussed later when I was
informed of the first atomic bomb explosion over a city in 1945.
It was a few weeks later, just
before I went back to school, that there was a major air raid, at night, on east London and the
docks. We could see the red sky of the fires from 30 miles away. The bombs set a paper
warehouse alight and the next day our garden was covered with burnt paper.
We were glad
we did not live near the docks but sorry for the people who did.
It was probably about this time that Katherine Shroeder, daughter of the Reverend
Shroeder who was minister of the Unitarian church in Halifax when my father was a boy, wrote
and offered to make a home for Geoffrey and I in America. Katherine was a ballet dance
teacher and choreographer, who married a widower, Howell Forbes who was a stockbroker in
New York. I am not sure whether we would have stayed in New York, or in Cambridge, MA
with Eric Shroeder, who was curator of Islamic Art at the Fogg art museum at Harvard and had
married the daughter of the head of the museum, a Forbes who was a cousin of Howell. I had
met Katherine once before, about 1935, when she came home on a vacation.
I do not
remember talking to Geoffrey about this but I told my mother that I did not want to leave the
family.
We stayed in England; evacuated in Crowthorne in term time and at home in SW
London during holidays. But I called on Howell and Katherine in New York City when I
arrived in the US in June 1950. After I married, I found that about 1948 Andrée had met
Katherine when she went to New York in an attempt to become a ballet dancer. Katherine had
been a ballet dancer and was an instructor. Andrée and I met Howell and Katherine by chance
23
at a Boston Symphony orchestra concert at Tanglewood in 1956 and we stayed another time at
their summer house above Stockbridge. Howell somewhat later lost his mind and while
remaining unfailingly courteous, could not remember anything more than 10 minutes or so.
My father had built an air raid shelter in the house. Taking a workshop next to the living room,
he sandbagged the windows, added 6 inches of concrete to the flat roof, and 4" X 4" wooden
pillars to support it. We all slept there when an air raid was anticipated.
To keep the air
tolerable, we generated ozone as an oxidizing agent. I have wondered since whether this was
sensible because the oxidant, ozone, is a carcinogen and regulated as such by the US
Environmental Protection Agency. But even with my present knowledge, I suspect we selected
the lesser of two risks.
I think it was early in September 1940 that the first air raid came on the London docks
which were 20 miles away from our house to ENE. We could at night see the red sky in the
east. A paper storage warehouse was set alight. The next day our garden - and many others was covered with burnt paper. When back at school in late September 1940, we saw, on a
beautiful Saturday afternoon a squadron of a dozen Junkers 88 (a newer and faster dive bomber
than the Stuka) proceeding, at high altitude, towards Reading. 10 minutes later they came
back. But this time the vapor trails told the story. British fighters were weaving in and out.
It was not only a beautiful sight but a welcome one.
Sometime that winter a lone German aircraft came near the school at low altitude - about
500 feet. The enthusiastic members of the Officers Training Corps ran up to the roof with a
machine gun to try and shoot it down. There was not much chance of shooting it down, of
course, but we cheered. In retrospect that endangered the school. The pilot could easily have
taken shooting from the large building as an excuse to bomb a civilian target. But for all of us
the enthusiasm for fighting the Nazis was enormous.
The second year of the war, 1940-41, we also planned to spend at Alderbrook, but now
there were only 6 boys. The Knowles felt that 8 was too many. Bill Stock had left school.
Another boy - probably David Parsons - was now the senior boy, and neither Geoffrey nor I were
comfortable with him. So we asked to be transferred somewhere else. We also decided that
it would be better if we were separate although our different “billets” were only 5 minutes
walking apart.
I in particular wanted to be thought of as myself rather than as a younger
brother who needed his elder brother’s protection. So in January 1941 we moved. Geoffrey
spent 1941-1942 at a large house run as a hostel by schoolmasters Mr and Mrs Monk Jones
before going to Queens College, Oxford (in 1942), and I went to Meadhurst run by Chris Heath.
There at Meadhurst, and also in the top mathematics form, (Maths 8) I got to know Klaus Roth
who had come over from Breslau in 1934. Klaus and his mother and younger brother walked
over the mountains from Germany to Austria, carrying all the money they had. If they had
traveled normally they would have only been allowed by Hitler’s government to take $100 out of
the country. Then the Roths came to England and they leased a house in Stanmore. His
father, a lawyer, waited a year and followed but died soon thereafter. In 1939, Stanmore was
the area for the Royal Air Force home command and where Air Vice Marshal Dowding set up
his command headquarters for defending SE England. Enemy aliens had to leave. Mrs Roth
had to break her lease, and the landlord sued. The landlord was clearly legally in the right but,
I am glad to say the judge was sufficiently scathing that he dropped the case. Klaus moved
down the northern line to Hampstead where Mrs Roth ran a boarding house for elderly Jewish
24
refugees.
I noted that there was an interesting geographical progression about the Jewish
refugees. The poorest refugees came to Shoreditch on the east of London. As they got a bit
more money they moved to Edgeware or Stanmore. Then gentility set in and they moved to
West Hampstead or Golders Green.
My parents friend Joe Newton (who ran a tailors’ shop
near the Elephant and Castle under the name John Newton) lived in Edgeware.
Klaus was a maddening character at times but we became good friends. In 1942-3 Klaus
and I were put in a little attic room by ourselves. Just room for 2 beds and to stand in between.
I had, at that time, the duty of fixing everything that went wrong in the house. I had to replace
tap washers. I had to remount door hinges. I had to repair window glass and fix broken chairs
and table legs. Klaus had the duty of keeping the central heating boiler stoked. Klaus was also
in the top Mathematics form with me (Maths. 8) with a group of four working for university
Scholarships
I got a scholarship to Christchurch Oxford, Michael Burns an exhibition (a sort
of junior scholarship) to Hartford College, Oxford and Klaus an exhibition to Peterhouse,
Cambridge. Klaus got 4th class honors at Peterhouse in 1945. The low degree almost
doomed him as I feared that my second class degree would doom me. But Klaus was no
ordinary academic.
Klaus got a job as assistant master at Gordonstown School in Scotland, a
school designed to build “character” (whatever that may be) where Prince Philip had gone to
school. In that year he became chess champion of Scotland. In 1946 he persuaded University
College London to accept him for graduate study, where he got his MA in 1948, PhD in 1950,
Reader in 1955, and Professor in 1961. In the 1950s he married a beautiful girl, Melek, who I
understand was a niece of King Farouk Klaus was awarded the world’s most prestigious medal
for mathematics, the Fields medal, at age 33 in 1958. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society - an honor I have never achieved. I saw him occasionally in 1945-6, and indeed we
went on a walking trip together as described later, but after that only intermittently till 1996
when he retired with his wife Melek to the north of Scotland where he is uninterested in meeting
any of his old friends. But I do not forget him and if I ever do it will only be because I forget
everything..
There were “first responders” in wartime England who were volunteers as Air Raid
Wardens and First Aid Party members. It was not necessary for them to be as fast as the 3
minutes of responding to an incendiary bomb that I described earlier but their speed probably fits
any ordinary definition. At Meadhurst at age 15 I was a First Aid Party messenger and later a
First Aid Party member. On a YELLOW warning (enemy planes are massing over northern
France) the telephone would ring in our hostel and all the boys in one of 5 rooms would dress
quickly for their various duties. Within a few minutes we would get the RED warning (enemy
planes have crossed the coast). Within seconds I was on my bicycle. My immediate duty
was to bicycle about 2 miles. Blowing a whistle because much of the area had no air raid siren.
I had to wake up 3 first aid party members who had no telephone. One, Ms. Hand, was the
daughter of Major Knowles chauffeur (Mr Hand) who was described earlier. Then we all
assembled at the first aid post in the church hall. Some members were already there but others
arrived (on their bicycles ) within a few minutes and we sat down to wait for the emergency
which, fortunately, never came on my shift.
In summer 1941 I and some other boys were asked to work on a farm. Most of
Britain’s farm laborers were in the army - out of the country, probably in the middle east or far
25
east. So we helped to bring in the harvest. The farm belonged to an old Pauline, a Mr Morgan,
who also ran a dairy, Morgan’s dairy, in Wandsworth. So I bicycled to Tibbets Corner, where
the Portsmouth Road from Wandsworth westward crosses Wimbledon Common Road. There
the Morgan’s dairy milk delivery lorry picked up a couple of us. For the next 50 miles we sat
on the empty milk churns in the back making sure our bicycles did not fall off. There were a
dozen of us camping in the Morgan’s orchard at Fullerton. I cannot remember who the others
were. Most days we took the sheaves of wheat that were thrown out by the “combine” harvester
and put them, 6 at a time, onto a “stook” to dry. The tractor pulled the combine starting at the
outside of the field leaving a smaller and smaller area in the middle. We would then stop
stooking, pick up a stick and wait, joined by other farm hands now, for rabbits to escape the
diminishing cover. Stun the rabbit with the stick, pick it up and break its neck. Then we could
have rabbit stew for supper, although we actually ate the rabbit caught the previous week after it
had hung for awhile.
We worked from 9 to 6 with only a short break. At 6 pm one night the
other farm laborers invited us all to join them at the local pub. I was only just 15, and looked
11, but they swore I was 16 - the legal age for drinking at that time. I had my first pint of
farmhouse cider - probably 8% alcohol. But I was able to cycle back to camp with no problem.
It was expected (at Meadhurst) that any boy who was a Christian would go to church on
Sunday. I, brought up as a Unitarian, had not gone to the “ordinary” Church of England
services. But I did go out of curiosity to the church in Crowthorne which was dull. I went
once or twice, at Chris Heath’s suggestion, to hear a sermon by a clergyman in Sandhurst who
was particularly interesting.
The nearest Unitarian Church was in Reading - about 20 miles
away. On many Sundays Geoffrey and I would bicycle there. In 1940-1942 our grandmother
(Kingston) rented some rooms in a boarding house in Reading to escape the air raids on London
and we would stop there for lunch. It was there, in summer 1940, that I was introduced to
Alexis Kougoulsky who was about to come to our school. He was a son of the Yugoslav
ambassador to Belgium, and when Belgium capitulated to the Nazi armies in May 1940 his
parents told him: “Go! Don’t Wait! Walk to the British Army at Dunkerque” As the British
army evacuated he swam a couple of miles out to a troop ship and was taken to England where
he stayed with an aunt in Notting Hill.
I lost track of him after school but I don’t think that he
ever saw his parents again. At the time I thought that Alexis was Jewish but now I am not so
sure. There were many refugees from the Nazis with other backgrounds.
Meadhurst was a large private house, not as large as our present one in Newton Centre,
which hosted 25-30 boys. I remember 3 upstairs bedrooms with 6 boys each and another
down. A bedroom for Chris Heath and his wife and one for Chris’ sister who helped out.
Each of the rooms had 6 beds and a small bedside cupboard for belongings and more in a
suitcase under the bed. We were all assigned Air Raid Precaution duties. Each room was “on
duty” on an assigned roster. In my room I was assigned to be a First Aid party messenger.
When the air raid warning yellow was given the telephone rang in the corridor. An air raid
warning yellow meant that German airplanes were assembling over northern France. Air raid
warning red meant that they had crossed the south coast. All of us in the room on duty had to
roust out of bed. By the time we had thrown our clothes on, the red warning came. I bicycled
2 miles blowing a whistle to warn people (there was only one air raid siren for the whole village)
waking up the first aid party, most of whom had no home telephone. I took between 5 and 10
minutes for the ride - perhaps going as fast as 20 mph. By that time unlike the prewar years,
26
when I rode 13 miles in 40 minutes, I had a bicycle with a three speed, Sturmey Archer, gear.
I had already joined the “air scout” troop, hoping eventually to be come a pilot. But in
that fall I also joined the Air force Officer Training Corps which was an activity that replaced
organized sports.. But it was as an air scout that I got my most interesting experience. Chris
Heath was both the “housemaster” at Meadhurst, my mathematics master and scoutmaster. He
had arranged for a visit for several days to a Fleet Air Arm training airfield - HMS Kestrel, on
Worthy Down just north of Winchester. This was in October or November 1942.
That
field was a race course before the war. Not an ideal airfield because it was on a slope. The
slope meant that when a US lend lease plane tried to land it crashed and remained on the field.
We stayed in the youth hostel in Winchester in an old mill on top of the river. We then
bicycled out to Worthy Down every day.
Chris Heath also thought of the evenings. On two
of them we did a play reading of Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man”, and on another we read
James Elroy Flecker’s “Hassan - a confectioner of Baghdad’. I remember them, and
occasionally reread them, with pleasure to this day. Indeed “Arms and the Man” got me
interested in the Balkans, and Yugoslavia in particular.
At HMS Kestrel the training was primarily the training of navigators.
It was very
important that they be able to find their way. If they failed to get back to their aircraft carrier,
the prospect of survival was bleak. They had 6 weeks training in “ordinary” navigation and
were now being trained for a week in using radar.
They were flown out every day to any
destination the pilot chose and had to find their way with the rear cockpit closed. But there was
a spare seat - with a spare control, beside the pilot and this was a place for us to have joy rides.
The planes were Fairey Sharks, and a monoplane whose manufacture I cannot now remember. I
had a ride in each.
We had to put on a warm flying suit and have a parachute clipped to a
harness over the chest. There was no runway at HMS Kestrel - only a sloping grass field.
Alas, I was airsick each time. The first time I had contained myself till the pilot, at 300 ft, took
a turn around a small town (Wantage) and asked me to identify it. There was the town
revolving around the church steeple!. My lunch went that way (in a bag fortunately) . The
second time, in a Shark this time, I was not so lucky. I spewed up all over the pilot’s flying suit!
After this, we had to bicycle the 40 miles back to Crowthorne in the drizzle. Chris went ahead
with the stronger boys and I was left to look after the younger ones. It was nice to be trusted
with responsibility but I had a completely empty stomach and was very tired. I remember as we
passed Hook and looked up at the 150 Kev electricity transmission lines there was a blue
discharge around the wet insulators. It looked very eerie. I had to reassure one of the younger
boys that it was alright and not dangerous. I think I calmed him but was somewhat concerned
myself!
The pilots welcomed us, and after the first day one of the boys thought he recognized
one. Indeed he had. He was Lieutenant Laurence Olivier, RNVR, better known for his acting
in Hollywood films. He had learned to fly when in Hollywood, and volunteered in 1939 - but
at age 27 he was already too old to be a fighter or bomber pilot so he was in this useful but less
romantic job flying navigators on training runs.. Soon afterwards he was released from active
duty for another job - making and acting in the film of Shakespeare’s Henry V. That film was
clearly an important morale booster for beleaguered Englishmen, although the war was just over
when it was released in summer 1945.
I have seen Henry V several times since. But the
27
Olivier version is the one I will always remember.
Although when I tell this story orally to
airline pilots I say, to be impressive, that I threw up over Lt. Olivier’s flying suit, I actually
threw up over another pilot’s flying suit. It was a more senior boy, Dick Stock who had been
one of the boys at Alderbrook, who flew with Lieutenant Olivier.
Dick did not have a queasy
stomach.
All the rest of my life I have had motion sickness, but I learned to be careful. The
early airliners such as the DC3 had fixed wings Fortunately aircraft nowadays have wings that
flap and that gives a smoother flight. But again at age 81 I traveled in a small plane (De
Havilland Beaver) piloted by Bill Anders, former fighter pilot, astronaut, ambassador and
company President, I am glad that I treated my friend Bill better than the I treated the pilot from
HMS Kestrel.
The next year when I was 16 I went to work again on a farm The work this time was
arranged more directly by the school masters, in summer 1942. This was at Tetbury in
Gloucestershire. We traveled down in a very crowded train - myself sitting with the bicycles on
the floor of the guard’s van.
Then a change at Kemble, for the small train to Tetbury. We
camped on the village green, which was also the cricket field, bicycling out each day to a farm
which needed help. My main task for 3 weeks was weeding cail on a farm in Didmarton. Then
we went to a farm just south of Barton End. The work was somewhat back breaking. But
there was no question whether I was allowed to drink this time. I was 16 which was above
drinking age at the time. The schoolmaster organizers clearly stated the rules. “You are doing
a man’s job. You will be treated as men”. But I did get a problem with a parasite which
burrowed under the skin. I went to the doctor and got an ointment to kill it. It had a name.
The “Harvester’s Bug.” The farm laborers thought that going to a doctor was a waste of time
and money. “You should just piss on it,” they said. This was the old time-honored remedy
which was not in the British pharmacopeia.
The school years 1942-1943 were spent in the most advanced mathematics class. The
“Maths 8". The master in charge was Chris Health although we had other another mathematics
teacher, Mr Moakes who also taught physics, for some classes. We met in small groups in the
same classroom. I was in a group of four as we progressed, and there was another group,
including Geoffrey, a year ahead. In my group there was, in addition to myself, Klaus Roth,
David Parsons, and Michael Burns.
One of Chris’s methods of teaching was to test us on an
examination paper from previous examinations for scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge. We
had a three hour test, as if we were taking the examination, and then later in the week we tackled
the problems that we had failed to answer in the “time test”. I found this to be challenging, but
it led me to think not only about meeting the requirements of a specific examination, but also to
get an answer by a deadline - which is so important in life. If one of our solutions was well
written, it was compared with previous solutions in Chris’ file.
If it was better, perhaps
shorter in argument, than what was there before from a previous year, it replaced it. My
solutions replaced one or two but not many.
We were also exposed to physics and to a more limited extent, to Chemistry. I
remember in particular Mrs Monk-Jones, wife of the master Monk-Jones who I believe taught
Latin and Greek She was one of the few ladies teaching in the boy’s school. She was recruited,
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as my mother had been 25 years befoe, because of the war.
She was more inspiring than the
other, more senior, physics teachers, Mr (Jack) Moakes and Mr Peters. One fine day in
summer 1942 she decided to spend the hour with an experiment to measure the velocity of
sound. We spread out on a long 1 ½ mile section of straight road, inside Wellington College
grounds, whose old physics laboratories we were using. One boy continuously banged a
dinner gong at one second intervals. We walked away from him and the sight of the hammer
hitting the gong no longer was synchronized. Then, as we walked on we found a place where
the sight and sound were synchronized again. That was the distance sound traveled in one
second (assuming of course that the velocity of light was much greater than the velocity of
sound). I thereby learned that physics can be fundamental but simple. I learned mechanics
from Mr Moakes, and was able to fit into my understanding at the time that mechanics was what
led Newton to differential calculus whereas Leibnitz looked at it from a more abstract point of
view.
But Mr Peters also influenced us. He was a chain somker and his fingers were
yellow with cigarette tar.
By that time I already know from my father’s experience, but not
with as much detail as I know today, that cigarette smoking was medically stupid. Mr Peters
assigned and oversaw several experiments. In one, we were all asked to look through a
microscope at a lens superimposed on a flat piece of glass and saw Newton’s rings. We had to
write up a report on our observations. Mr Peters sardonically commented that none of our
reports matched the mystery of the observations and he read out to us the relevant section of
Newton’s “Opticks” which describes the rings so eloquently.
Indeed Mr Peters was right.
Indeed it makes a great deal of difference when a laboratory report is well written. It is of
course necessary to write well in order to get the interest of others, but I find it a source of
pleasure to myself.
Oxford University
Then in December 1942, at age 16, I traveled by train to Oxford to sit for a scholarship
examination. The Oxford colleges had two scholarship examinations; one group (including
Christ Church) in December and one group in March. Although my father and my brother
Laurie had been at Queen’s College with scholarships, and Geoffrey had just taken up his
scholarship there, the scholarship examinations to Queens were in March 1943 and I planned to
try then if I failed in December. So on Chris Heath’s recommendation, I put Christ Church first
on the list. After 2 days rest at home in London I returned to school to be told that the
Mathematics tutor at Christchurch, Theodore Chaundy, had telephoned Chris to say that I was
awarded the mathematics scholarship.
Christ Church, an English translation of the Latin, Ædes Christi, the temple or house of
Christ, and thus sometimes known as The House, is one of the largest constituent colleges of the
University of Oxford in England. Christ Church is one of the many colleges in Oxford that make
up the university, and one of the wealthiest. But it has a complex foundation. In 1525, at the
height of his power, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England and Archbishop of
York, suppressed the Abbey of St Frideswide in Oxford and founded Cardinal College on its
lands, using funds from the dissolution of Wallingford Priory. He planned the establishment on a
magnificent scale, but fell from grace in 1529, before the college was completed..
In 1532 it
was refounded by Henry VIII, using Wolsey’s property. He wanted to save money and at the
same time break up the diocese of Winchester so he called it Christ Church and made the college
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chapel the cathedral of the recently created diocese of Oxford. The Dean of the diocese is also
head of the college.
The main quadrangle has a magnificent dining hall at one corner, the
deanery and the cathedral on one side, two canon’s lodgings on another. One enters under Tom
Tower, where the great bell strikes the hours. Amusingly the cathedral clock strikes on mean
sun time which is 5 minutes later than Greenwich mean time. It is muffled to avoid too much
confusion. Opening out of Tom Quad is a residential quadrangle, Peckwater quad. In which I
resided from 1943 to 1946 in staircase 1 room 1.
Oxford in wartime was different from Oxford in peacetime. Intercollegiate sports were
curtailed and in my case were replaced by fire practice. There were about 8 of us on shift when
the red warning came. We sat to await developments in the Chapter House which, being partly
underground, was protected from immediate damage. The eldest member of my shift was
Canon Hodgson, the Regius Professor of Divinity but it was 4 younger guys who would operate
the fire pump, which was a Morris 7 engine mounted on a trailer and started by a crank handle.
We had to learn to run 30 feet with the trailer, stop near a static water tank (putting down the
stands without churning up the grass which was a grievous sin even in wartime) and proceed to
start the engine, connect the suction and hose, and bring water onto the fire. As always in a
University there was intercollegiate rivalry and since there were no other sports the challenge
was who could operate the pumps better. We (Christ Church) won that year, in summer 1944
at 33 seconds. But an untoward incident occurred. Everyone in the quad had been told, of
course, to close their windows, and we were told not to let the water pressure go above 30
pounds per square inch. But try as hard as we could, each team found that the water pressure
kept on rising. One team then found that at 40 pounds per square inch the water went over
the buildings onto St Aldate’s street the other side. A minute later an irate, soaking wet, US
military policeman appeared at Tom Gate accompanied by the college porter. Slowly but
surely each of the 20+ water jets were lowered till they threatened Tom gate. The MP fled!
I was blamed for this escapade. I would gladly have accepted the blame and the peer approval
that went with it, but I was not guilty.
Indeed our pump was too far from the St. Aldate’s side
as a photograph easily showed.
In May 1944, just as I reached age 18, I went before the Joint Recruiting Board. In
the first world war England did not treasure its scientists and one of the brightest, Mosely, the
discoverer as an undergraduate of the Z4 law of X ray spectra, joined the infantry and was killed
at Gallipoli. In the second world war anyone with any scientific training at all was the property
of the Central Scientific Register of the Ministry of Labor. On their behalf, CP Snow was the
Chairman of my board which also included (I believe) an Army Colonel and an Air Force Vice
Marshal. CP Snow became well known later for his book about “the two cultures”. I was
given a choice between two ways of serving the country. I could continue with mathematics for
another year, learn Japanese on the side, (instead of fire practice) with the expectation of going to
Bletchley as a civilian and decipher Japanese codes. Or, switch to Physics, learn about
electronics, radio and radar on the side and then join the Air Force as a radar officer as my
brother Laurie had before me. This was one of many pleasant decisions which I have made;
because each of the choices seemed an excellent opportunity. I was also told that if I really
wanted to do so I could join the infantry. But the choice determined the course of my life
somewhat irrevocably.
If I had come up to Oxford in peacetime, I would have continued in
mathematics till the final year, then do a fourth year in physics. But it was wartime. We were
30
all in a hurry.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had made the decision to
learn Japanese and decipher codes. I would have been working with Alan Turing, the world
famous code breaker.
My friend Konrad Freund was at an army base near Oxford and he came over to Oxford
a few times when in that year (1943-1944). Konrad was about 6 years older than myself but
born in Berlin. He told me that at age 12, in 1932, he went to Hitler youth rallies and was
mesmerized by Hitler. But then he realized that he was Jewish. That made me wonder then,
and wonder still, how well I would have behaved if I, a Gentile, had been born in Germany not in
UK. Would I have behaved well? Would my ambition have got me to join the infamous SS?
I like to think that I would have behaved well. But I thank God, assuming there is one, that I
was never so tested. Konrad came to England about 1935 and went to the Royal School of
Mines in South Kensington. I met him on the District line train from Wimbledon to Earl’s
court. Where our paths diverged.
We both loved trains. That love overcomes all age
differences. We became friends and by 1939 I knew the names of all the subway stations in
Berlin! As I looked over my book of track diagrams recently with my daughter I find a track
diagram of the Hamm marshaling (hump) yard in the Ruhr. This had come from Konrad in
about 1938. In 1939 Konrad was taken to an internment camp on the Isle of Man as an enemy
alien from which he was released in March 1940 to join the British army. But he had, as yet,
no skills of interest to the British war machine, so was put in the “pioneer corps” digging latrines
and so forth. In May 1940, when invasion was expected imminently, all German born British
soldiers were told to take an English name within 24 hours so that if they were captured, they
would not be treated as traitors. Konrad had no chance to talk to his brother, who became
Bruce French, or his mother. Konrad became John Gordon Dennis.
Konrad was camped
near Oxford and I valued his visits when I got to Oxford in 1943. From Konrad and my other
German friend Klaus I learned a lot about why we were in that war and I was determined to help
make it a lasting peace.
Later Konrad married a Scottish girl, Margaret, and to most people
and to his family he was John Dennis. But for me and for Geoffrey he was always Konrad. I
would call at Christmas to wish him greetings, and as soon as I asked for Konrad, Margaret
Dennis knew that it was either me or Geoffrey calling. Konrad ended up as a Professor at the
University of California at Long Beach, where I saw him a couple of times including a few
weeks before his death of a brain tumor.
Konrad had far worse luck throughout his life than I
had. But he never complained and felt himself lucky to be in the UK, lucky in his marriage and
subsequently lucky to be in the USA.
In June 1944 the V1s came over England. I was spending a weekend at home trying to
get some rest before my “first public examination”. Honor Mathematical Moderations.
Although I got a welcome change from studying, I got little rest. The V1 had a 1 ton or 2 ton
warhead - I cannot remember which. It was a pilotless jet aircraft with a simple program. The
fuel was to cut out when the plane was over London, the ailerons would tilt and it would crash.
We all learned that we had 7 seconds from the time the engine went out and the 1 ton exploded.
In that time we learned to get under the table, away from a window or so forth. In that week I
got little rest. I am not sure whether it was then or a week or so later that I was in our outside
workshop (with a glass roof) when I heard one close. I went outside and heard the engine go
out. I looked up and saw a head on view of the V1 which was about 200 yards away. I had
time to call out to Geoffrey who had been in the workshop with me: “This one’s for us” I
31
called, and flattened myself on the ground next to the wall.. Of course the glass roof went.
Geoffrey got out the other side. No one was hurt in our house but a childhood friend was killed
as she and her mother were running to the air raid shelter. We lost half the windows in the
house and part of the front window frame came through the hallway and out of the back window
- over my head . I have often been asked: “were you scared?”. The answer was no. I had
no time at all to be scared. I did what I had prepared for. That and other experiences before
and since have led me to repeat again and again that preparation for a severe untoward event can
mitigate its consequences and in some cases reduce the probability of occurrence. The scary
thing is being unprepared.
The V1s that came to us were launched near Cherbourg, and 6 weeks later the launching
pads were captured by the allied landing troops. The launching sites near Calais and
Dunkerque were still used for another couple of months. But most importantly the Americas
sent over the “proximity fuse” for the anti-aircraft artillery. The V1s were faster than any of our
fighter planes at the time and were hard to shoot down. Anti-aircraft guns were not very
effective because the shell had to actually hit the target before exploding. But the proximity
fuse arrived in mid-July. The shell would be fired, and would explode when it got close to the
target. I believe that, with the help of the proximity fuse, the artillery shot down 90% of the
V1s.
Later that summer the first V2 came about 6.15 in the morning.
I woke and heard it
come.
Being used to the 7 second period for precautionary action, I was under the bed at once
expecting, perhaps, that the ceiling would come down - as it had on another occasion. But then
I realized what I had heard. A bang, and then the inverse of the sound of a bomb falling. It
had come in faster than the speed of sound.
On the radio later that day we were told that a gas
main had blown up in Keswick near Kew Gardens 8 miles or so away. V2s were dubbed flying
gas mains from then on.
This led to a remarkably effective misinformation campaign. The
radio news would rarely announce the exact place that a V2 landed, but described instead a
general area further away from the launch point. In response the V2 range was successively
modified by the Germans till most fell short of London.
In May 1945 Germany was defeated. We celebrated all over the country with VE day,
even though Japan still had to be defeated. Unfortunately Geoffrey was sick at the time and in
bed in his lodgings. That was indeed a pity but we celebrated without him. In retrospect I
regret not having specifically gone to his lodgings that night. I do not know why I did not, and
perhaps it was because I did not know he was sick. After dinner in hall, with free wine of
course, several of us organized a country dance party on the parking lot at Gloucester Green,
with music coming from the amplifiers that Geoffrey and I had built and that we had in the organ
builder’s loft (used as a scout club meeting room) overlooking the parking lot One amusing
incident occurred. We had become friendly with a US Air Force officer, Captain Alan Buster
from Texas, whose job in the air force was examining photographs of the various air raids
over Germany.. His men were not allowed out of camp that day to avoid a possible “over
celebration”. As they proceeded down a “longways set”, where all the men are in a line and the
ladies in a line opposite them and during the dancer they proceed down the line dancing with
various partners in turn. As they progressed, the officer and an airman met each other.
Although they linked arms they, of course, did not, officially, recognize each other. Later that
32
evening, about midnight, a huge bonfire was set in the middle of Carfax which is the origin of
the rectangular coordinate system that describes Oxford. Among other things my gas mask
went in there. A jeep came up St Aldate’s with US military police trying to get through. Five
other young men and I picked it up with wheels spinning and turned it back! Later, after
midnight, I decided it was time to expand my college experience and although Tom gate was
open for this special occasion, I climbed in to college though the Meadows and over the wall to
the Students’ Garden and then to the Cloisters. Another student - possibly David Ritson - went
to various colleges and collected their flags and put them all up over the Deanery. The next day
the Steward made a rare entry into the Junior Common Room Dons were not “allowed”
there. But he needed help in identifying which flag belonged to which college. I was
fortunately in a position to help.
A week or so later I went again before CP Snow and his recruiting board. The war
with Germany was over. The Air Force Vice Marshal said that troops and support staff could
not get to the Pacific fast enough. Some men were already being demobilized. It was
suggested by the recruiting board that I continue my studies for the third year and get a full
degree but be prepared to be called up in case the Pacific war lasted longer than expected at that
time. I was thus in the unusual and fortunate position not of being deferred in the formal sense,
but directed to continue my studies at Oxford.
In July 1945 Chris Heath asked me to help to run a school boy scout camp in Titchfield
Hampshire as an Assistant Scoutmaster. I bicycled the 80 miles from London with a nasty
head wind. The camp site was dull; a big meadow attached to a farm. We sent one boy to pick
up fresh milk from the farm every day. On August 6th he came back with the news - “an atomic
bomb has been dropped on Japan. What is an atomic bomb?”. The war was coming to an end.
I was overjoyed. It was the end of 6 years of war. Some years later, and many times since, I
apologized to my Japanese friends for this pleasure. Maybe the dropping of the bomb was
justified. Maybe not. But it should not have given me pleasure.
Or at least the pleasure
should have been very restrained.
But personal emotions take over intellectual matters.
I
was already 2 years into my undergraduate studies and understood a little nuclear physics so that
I was able to explain a little to the scout troop.
I still think now, of the order:
(a)
A 50 lb bomb destroys a house (as I saw in 1940)
(b) A 1 ton bomb can destroy a city block
(c)
An atomic bomb has 20,000 tons TNT equivalent.
(d)
A large hydrogen bomb such as Andrei Sakharov’s last Nuova Zembla blast has 10
Megatons equivalent.
AND the USA in 2008 still has 10,000 bombs ready to go and perhaps over 1,000 on trigger
alert!
I went straight from the camp to my second summer factory job as “research apprentice”
in Metropolitan Vickers factory in Trafford Park just SW of Manchester.
I was assigned to
the research department and my task was to test the electronics for a mass spectrometer. The
spectrometer was to be used to measure concentration ratios of two isotopes with masses less
than 1% apart in a highly corrosive gas with molecular weight about 400. The material was
highly secret - except the world had been told about uranium hexafluoride somewhat
dramatically just a week before.
I found flaws in the original design of the spectrometer
electronics. The designer used a simple low voltage switch for adjusting a 3 kV high voltage
33
and it arced over when it was switched. I fixed it by putting a capacitor across the switch
contacts so that there was no sudden arc. After a few days VJ day came. I had gone to the
factory as usual dressed in a boiler suit, to find a 2 day holiday had been declared! So I and
another young man, living in the same lodging, took the train to Knutsford on the main road
north and hitch hiked up to the lake district. After buying fish and chips in Grasmere we ate
them by the lake on a beautiful moonlit night. We were hungry so we ordered two threes and a
twelve - two threepenny pieces of fish and twelve penny worth of chips. As I write this I am
reminded of the song:
“Oh me ‘tatas and me ‘ot fried fish.
You can ‘ave a little if you wish
You can ‘ave ‘em on a plate or dish
Or in a little piece of paper”.
The manager of the youth hostel was very suspicious of our dress (boiler suits or
dungarees as described in the US), and he was over booked. But many people failed to turn up
so we got in. Next day we took a bus northwards toward Keswick and climbed Helvellyn,
which I had climbed from the other side a month or so before. We then and set off back to
Manchester and work the next day.
We had a long wait at Preston although there were many
cars passing, but we were eventually taken to Burnley from where we got the electric train to
Manchester and then to Sale where we had our lodging. I also took this other young man to see
Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. He was reluctant at first because he thought it would be too
highbrow for him. But he was agreeably surprised at the exciting action scenes.
Another weekend I went climbing alone in the Peak district. I took a train to Chinley
junction, walked up “The Peak”, down to Edale and a train back to Sale. I left at the end of
August on the 5 pm train on the old Midland line through Darley Dale to St Pancras. The train
took a lot more interesting route than the old LMS line to Euston. Alas, the Midland line is
now gone.
They were a great group of people in Metropolitan Vickers (MetroVicks) and I
lost track of them. Fifty years later they had a reunion. I would have joined them but my step
mother Winnie had just died and her funeral took precedence.
In fall 1945, the war was over. I was pursuing my studies with no need to do fire
watching, act as an assistant firemen or other national duty. Sports were starting again so I
went onto the river.
In March 1946 I rowed as stroke in the Christ Church 2nd torpid. We
did well. If I remember aright, one bump and one over bump. And then I rowed number 6 in
the second eight in May. As happens when a boat is successful, we all gathered outside the
staircase entry number 1 of Peckwater Quadrangle, just outside my room, with the success
chalked on the stone behind, and our photograph was taken. A copy is in my photograph
collection and hanging on my study wall. Men were back from the war. C.I.Mellor (CIM),
who had been one of Chaundy’s students before the war came back and was studying
Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). He was captain of the boat club. Many years later
in 1991 I met CIM again at the Christ Church Gaudy, just after I had got back from the
Armenian-Azeri border as a member of a small party led by Caroline Cox, deputy speaker of the
House of Lords.
This is described in a special section of these memoires, expanded from
short article presented to the first Sakharov Physics conference in Moscow, in 1990, and then a
few days later, given by Elena Bonner to Secretary Gorbachev. I had also sent a copy to Alan
34
Bromley, President Bush’s Science advisor and believe it was shown to President Bush within
the week.
CIM told me that his son Nicholas (also a House man) was working in the
Caucasus and Central Asia so I introduced Nicholas, by e mail, to Caroline Cox.
I have met
Nicholas several times since in London and Andrée and I visited CIM and his wife Elizabeth at
their house in Aldeburgh in East Anglia in 2007.
In June 1946 I took my final examinations at Oxford. There were 5 written papers of
3 hours each and 2 all day practical examinations. In the previous year I had gone through a
different previous examination paper each week for my tutor. I made a list of items that
appeared more than once on the examination papers, to work on the night before each paper.
Then I took a weekend holiday. I hitchhiked to central Wales. I cannot remember where I
spent the Friday night but it was probably at a youth hostel, marked on my map, just short of
Builth Wells. Then at another youth hostel a few miles north of Llanidloes before coming back
to Oxford.
I think that the written examinations were on Wednesday and Thursday with 2 papers
each) and a fifth on Friday morning.
I thought I had done alright on the written examinations
but I was wrong. Apparently my Heat and Thermodynamics paper, the fifth, was bad.
Interestingly, when I arrived at Harvard in 1956-1960 I was asked to teach the subject! It was
an unpopular course with the undergraduates with only 15 or so students. In the following
years I revamped the course and made it much more modern and popular.
In 1956 we had 15
students from both physics and engineering. By 1961 we had 60 in physics and a parallel
course with less emphasis on statistical mechanics was taught in the Division of Applied
Sciences.
Returning to my 1946 final examination, I was much better at the practical
examinations that were on Monday and Tuesday in the week after the written. The first day I
had to measure the dielectric constant of water. We had one hour to describe the equipment I
needed, and then we went upstairs to the laboratory to use the equipment that existed. At that
time everyone in an examination had to wear “sub-fusc” under an academic gown. Sub-fusc
was a dark suit, white shirt and white bow tie. We could take the gown off once one got into
the lab. I was given a valve (vacuum tube) and equipment to make an oscillator and so on. But
the valve was defective. As I explained to the supervisor it heated up but one could not see the
glow of the filament. The vacuum was gone. Moreover one could see that the edges of the
metal on the glass where the “getter” had flashed had got blurred. So with a new valve I
finished in good time
The second day I had to measure the separation between the yellow
lines in a sodium gas discharge. I made a Fabry-Perot étalon, cleaning the glass with chromic
acid (taking care not to spill any on my best and only suit) and we examined the lines with a
simple slit system. Again I finished quickly. The yellow 2P -> 1 S transition was very clear.
I found the higher transitions to the 2P state also.
There were some spurious signals also and
the supervisor (Dr Kuhn) asked whether I could explain them. I could not - but no one else in
the examination even got as far as being asked!
By Wednesday evening the papers had been marked and the examination results were
posted. My parents had driven up to Oxford to bring me and my stuff home. I had hoped for
- and even expected - first class honors. But there was my name, top of the list of the seconds.
35
All my hopes for the future went. With encouragement from the laboratory I had applied for a
graduate fellowship from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Affairs (DSIR) for which a
first class honors degree was needed. But my father at once said: “it will be difficult, but we can
pay for your graduate studies.” Fortunately it was not necessary for him to pay. Since
everyone in the laboratory had expected me to get first class honors, all arrangements had been
made, and it was too late to change them! So after a 2 week rest at home I began graduate
studies in nuclear physics with Carl Collie as my supervisor. Interestingly by the time I had
arrived at Harvard University no one knew or cared about my examination grades. Even now
several colleagues assume, incorrectly, that I got first class honors. As I look back on this, the
fact that I was allowed to continue was a piece of luck which was more than I deserved.
The head of the laboratory was Dr Lee’s Professor of Experimental Philosophy
Professor Lindemann - later Lord Cherwell. Although the professorship carried with it the
membership of the Senior Common Room at Wadham College, Christ Church had offered him
accommodation at the House and he had rooms in Meadow Buildings and was a member of the
SCR.
As the rhyme stated:
Lord Cherwell, when the war began,
was plain Professor Lindemann.
But now midst Ministerial cheers
He takes his place among the Peers.
The House of Christ with one accord
now greets its newly risen Lord.
I am not sure when he was raised to the peerage. Just before the end of the war or just
after. I suspect it was 1944.
Girls, Walking and Climbing
I never had sisters, and although my maternal grandmother had many female
grandchildren, they were all older than I was. I went to a boys school and girls were a mystery
to me. A mystery that began to become clearer at Oxford. There was a good looking girl
from Lady Margaret Hall, Anne Moore, who was also studying mathematics. We tended to
have lectures 9-10, 10-11, and 11-12 in the same lecture room (at the Clarendon Lab) 3 days a
week. I always tried to sit next to her during lectures. We were serious students and paid
attention to the lectures but there was always the 5 to 10 minutes interval in between. I was bold
enough by May to invite her out on a punt on the river and tea in my rooms thereafter. I invited
another man whose name I have forgotten and Margaret Lahee who I had met in the Oxford
University “Scout Club”.
There is a photograph of them in my collection.
But I never got
anywhere with Anne who was reserved, but I became friendly with Margaret who was less
reserved.
Margaret was actually a student at Westfield College of London University
College which was evacuated to Oxford during the war.
She had rooms on New Inn Hall
Street just west of the Cornmarket. Margaret was always smiling and cheerful. She wore
glasses, but a little later on she became of the first girls to wear contact lenses After all; “boys
don’t make passes, at girls who wear glasses”. I was still very shy and reluctant to make
passes anyway. That reluctance diminished rapidly but by then Margaret had looked elsewhere.
I had always enjoyed walking in the country and in 1937-1939 had done many walks,
36
firstly with the family, and then by myself, in the countryside SW of Wimbledon in the North
Downs. We took advantage of the special 1 shilling tickets on the southern railway where you
could travel to one station and return from another. During the war I did much more by bicycle
around Crowthorne. But by 1945 it was possible to be more venturesome.
I am unsure of the exact dates of my venturesome trips, but I believe it was in July 1945,
that a group of 4 of us set off to the Lake District. Margaret Lahee and her room mate were
with me. The other man was probably Peter Cave. We took the underground to Finchley, the
bus to the main road, the A5, and raised out thumbs. There was a civilized behaviour among
hitch hikers. The first person, or group, would stand closest to the roundabout (traffic circle)
where the vehicles coming were the slowest and most likely to be willing to stop. Then others
would spread out with 30 foot or so spacing further along. As one person got a lift, the line
would move up. Some drivers would pass the first group. With our group of 4, few private
cars would stop. But we soon found a lorry (truck) going north We probably had a series of
2 or three trucks but the last that day dropped us at Kendal where we took a bus to Windermere,
walked to the lake at Bowness and slept in a barn. The next morning we walked north up a
valley with an old Roman Road “High Street”. Dropping down to a village (Putterdale) where
we stopped at the first barn where we lit a cooking fire and ate. Then we slept in the hay.
The next day we went west and climbed Helvellyn by Striding Edge (noting nervously the grave
stone on the edge where some one had fallen). Then a bus to Grasmere for tea, and walking SW
up Langdale Fell to another barn at the end (just behind Glyll Hotel).
The next day we set off
west to climb Scafell Pike. It was misty at the top and I did something foolish. The other
three\ wanted to by pass the peak in the mist. I left them, walked up following the cairns and
walked back to the path junction.
I went off, alone, in the mist in the mountains again. I
relied on the existence of a path well signed by cairns. I do not recommend this. I could
easily have got lost in the mist, fallen down a crag, or merely spent a cold night half freezing to
death.
So on down out of the clouds to the head of Wastwater and another barn. The other
three were by now tired and the next day went down the valley to Seascale, where you now find
the Windscale nuclear reprocessing plant ) for a train home. I was more venturesome. It was
now fine weather so I set of by myself to a youth hostel at Buttermere to the north and then
joined a party heading across the hills again to another youth hostel at Coniston.
The next
day, it was a short walk past Hawkshead across the hills to a ferry across the lake to Bowness
and Windermere where I was able to hitch hike back south. I believe it was to Oxford where I
spent a week at the Rover Scout camp at Youlbury.
It was early April 1946, April 8th or 9th, that Margaret, Patricia (Pat) Pankhurst, later to
become my sister in law, and my old friend Klaus Roth set of for North Wales. We again took
the underground to Finchley, the bus to the main road and again raised out thumbs on the A5.
After Shrewsbury the traffic thinned. We agreed to separate. The two girls soon got a lift in a
car and then Klaus and I got a lift, standing up in the back of an army truck carrying German
prisoners of war who had been working in the fields. Although the war was over they had yet
to be returned home to a devastated country. I made a faux pas which has always troubled me.
I was trying to be friendly with these men who, according to my thinking were never our
enemies. They were only the servants of our fascist enemies. I mentioned to one prisoner
that Klaus was born in Breslau. Klaus of course was worried that he would be attacked or
pushed out of the back. He was furious with me. But fortunately nothing happened. We
37
reached the town of Llangollen where we took a train through Corwen to the youth hostel at
Clynyd on the Dolgelly Road, where the two girls who had gone ahead met us at the station;
and we went to the Youth Hostel where they had even prepared supper! The only problem
with that youth hostel is that we had to wash in cold water.
The next day we headed back to
the A5 and on to Bettws-y-Coed. The youth hostel, a small farm house, was 3 miles NE at
Oaklands I believe, and I remember we were given tea. The children could not speak English only Welsh. Margaret and Pat were prepared and gave the three kids candy.
By now the A5 was very empty so we walked all the way to the pass to Caernarvon by
Lake Ogwen to the youth hostel at Idwal cottage. (Maybe I interchange here the names Idwal
and Ogwen cottages) The next day to Llanberis and the day after we walked up to Pen-y-pas and
climbed Snowdon and down the other side to Llyn Cwellyn and a bus to Caernarvon. After a
day looking at the castle and the bridge over the Menai strait at Bangor we decided it would be
easier to get a ride if we set out north of the mountains on the road to Chester. That was fine for
40 miles or so but unfortunately the driver dropped us off on a side road at Shotwick. We then
made a drastic error. Taking the advice of a friendly lorry drive we went into Liverpool and out
on the London Road. By that time it was getting late and the girls were tired, so we went to
Manchester and caught the 5 pm train home.
I had not yet worn out my friendship with Margaret Lahee. Although she was no longer
in Oxford after summer 1945 I met her in London because Westfield college had moved back to
London. That meant that I had to make a special visit to London for a “date”, often in vacation
when she was at home in Enfield.
Enfield West was almost at the end of the Piccadilly line,
just before Cockfosters, and 25 minutes walk or a bus ride from her house. Or I could take the
LNER steam commuter train to Enfield Town from Liverpool Street. I could walk 15 minutes
to South Wimbledon, one stop short of the terminus at Morden on the Northern line.
All in all
it was 1 ½ to 2 hours! Once or twice I went to her house and once she came to ours for tea. But
mostly we met in between. At the end of March 1946 a group of us, including Margaret and
Pat Pankhurst met at Barnes Bridge railway station, and walked up the towpath to watch the
(Oxford and Cambridge) boat race. Probably 300,000 people watched that race along the 4
mile course. But it was disappointing to me. Oxford was 3 lengths ahead as they came past
us, and there was no chance of an exciting finish as the boats rounded the bend to the finish at
the Mortlake brewery.
I do remember one New Years eve party in Cobham in 1947/8 held I
believe by John Coates. It came to an end 10 minutes after 12 as we all had to catch the last
train to town. But two or three times Margaret and I met in London by ourselves for dinner and
a concert or a play and we said goodbye underground at Leicester Square station soon after 10
pm as we took our respective rides home.. This did not leave much opportunity for romantic
moonlight farewells.
My grandchildren have different problems. There is no need to stop a
party so that everyone can catch the last bus. Issues such as who is to be the member of the
party who does not drink are almost beyond my ken.
At the end of March 1947 we spent a holiday hitchhiking again up to Scotland. This
time we stayed only in Youth Hostels. Again we went with two friends - maybe John Cotes was
one - to make a foursome. We stopped at a youth hostel on the way up. My diary says
“Kendal full” and “slow traffic Kendal to Penrith” so the youth hostel was probably at Penrith a
little further north. The next day we got a lift with a lorry driver going to Glasgow. There was
38
room for two of us in the cab, and then the other two had to sit in the open back.
It was fine
till we got north of Carlisle and then it was drizzly. The two men stayed in the back covered
with our waterproof capes. But in the Scottish hills between Carlisle and Glasgow the girls
insisted we change places and they suffer the rain! The lorry driver stopped in the Gorbals, just
short of Glasgow proper, where he invited us into his tenement (a small apartment in a big block
of apartments) for tea with the family. The tenements were 4 stories high. There was no front
yard and barely a back yard. There were washing lines strung across the street to the tenements
on the other side, properly mounted with pulleys to make it easy to bring the washing back from
the middle of the road. . It was very black and grimy. It was worse than Halifax. I learned
later that 3 tons of soot fell per acre per year in that eastern suburb of Glasgow.
People who
have never visited this working class suburb can learn a little of the life there from the film:
“Miracle in the Gorbals”
.
We took the bus to the centre of Glasgow and then the underground (steam) train to
Balloch Pier on Loch Lomond and walked the 3 miles up the lake to a youth hostel which was an
old castle (Arlem castle). The next day we walked a bit further north to Inverbeg, and then
took the ferry across the lake to Ben Lomond, then down the other side to a youth hostel on Loch
Ard. The next day we walked on to Aberfoyle and got a lift on a lorry through Callendar and
Stirling to Dunfermline and a train ride across the Forth bridge to Edinburgh and another youth
hostel on 1st April. The next day we hitched a ride in a car going by Jedburgh to Scotch
corner. By telephone enquiry the York hostel was full so went on down the Great North Road
(A1) to Doncaster where we walked 7 miles to the next hostel at Tickhill The following day 4
miles east to Bawtry on the Great North Road and then home. According to the accounts in my
diary this was a two week holiday for 3 pounds 15 shillings and 7 ½ pence.
But that was close to the end of my clumsy courtship of Margaret Lahee. After
another date in London, she found a more interesting man and married a medical student Dr
Gephardt. I called on them a couple of years later, January 1949, in Brighton, driving down
from Tunbridge Wells with Peter Lund on the pillion of my motor cycle, and to their house in
Kingston near Teddington Lock 20 years later. Their 17 year old daughter looked like their
mother did when she was 20. That was in summer 1966 by which time the Gephardts had 5
children and Andrée and I had 6.
I have heard nothing more from, or about them, since. I
have enquired, but the college does not know My sister in law, Pat Wilson (née Pankhurst)
who was a friend of Margaret at Westfield College does not know either. As I edit this I
remember a song that Margaret used to sing which was prophetic:
‘He may go, he may tarry, he may sink or he may swim
For he doesn’t care for me and I don’t care for him
He may go and take another who I hope he will enjoy
nicer boy.”
For I’m going to marry a far
Graduate Work
By 1946 the war had been over for a year. I took my final examination in June, and my
parents came up just afterwards to drive me and my belongings home. We waited for a day to
see the examination results. My parents and I had confidently expected me to pass with first
39
class honors, as they, and Laurie had. But I was deeply disappointed when I only got a second
class honors degree. This might have meant the end of my education. I was hoping to get a
special government (Department of Scientific and Industrial Research - DSIR) fellowship to
continue graduate work. I had thought that a first class honors was a prerequisite. I will never
forget my father’s almost immediate comment. “It will be expensive, but we can pay for you to
get the D Phil.”. Fortunately it was not necessary. Everyone in the lab had expected me to get
a first and all the paper work had been done. So after a short week of rest at home I started
graduate work on July1st 1946. I believe that I have justified my father’s, and the Clarendon
laboratory staff’s, support of me that time.
But before I got down to real work, I participated with a Rover Scout Camp in Youlbury
where many French Rover Scouts had been invited. After a week there everyone went to North
Wales and camped at Bethelgert just south of Snowdon. I got sick and had to stay in the tent.
At the tail end of this, I went to Cambridge for a nuclear physics conference. I was still in my
scout uniform and stayed in the Youth Hostel in Cambridge, and hitchhiked back to London.
That was my first conference and I remember being excited as Louis Alvarez described the first
work with using the 184 inch cyclotron that had just begun operation with 180 Mev deuterons.
He was scattering the 90 Mev neutrons obtained by stripping the deuteron. Ken Bainbridge
described the plans at Harvard University for a 130 Mev cyclotron, noting that the neutron beam
was headed straight for the divinity school. Little did I know that 9 years later I would be
working with that accelerator. Then I went to Paignton by car with the family for a meeting of
the Spiritualists National Union of which my father had just become President. I spent much of
the time walking on the downs.
My college physics tutor, C.H. Collie, became my supervisor. He suggested that I
work on the photodisintegration of the deuteron, and to measure the angular distribution of the
reaction to determine whether it proceeded by a magnetic dipole transition or an electric dipole
transition. I also met Hans Halban, returning to an academic atmosphere after his wartime work
on the atomic bomb. He became a second supervisor and was, in fact, more important in my
scientific work although I will never forget the hospitality of Collie and his wife to Andrée and
myself the day we arrived back in Oxford. At that time the custom in England was to call
colleagues by their surname. When he was my tutor he was Mr Collie. Now he was Collie.
The head of the machine shop was Mr Stonnard and all other machinists had this honorific.
Only close friendships changed this: Halban’s machinist was not Mr Round but Victor.
Victor he remained to me till his death in fall 2005 . Of course everything has got more
informal since 1945.
Victor was not a scientist but he became a lifelong friend. He was a fine, warmhearted
man with a quick temper. He was a close friend from 1946 till his death in 2005 and his wife
Barbara still is a close friend both of Andrée and myself. Victor was born near Arras in
northern France of an English father and a French mother. Victor’s father was a British
soldier in world war I. Victor, brought up in France, came to England about 1938. I don’t
know the true details of his life, because Victor told slightly different versions at different times
and in different company. But in June 1945 he found himself as Regimental Sergeant Major
leading a group of men at zero hour minus two headed for Sword Beach in Normandy. It was
perhaps even a more dangerous beach than Utah Beach. It was on the extreme eastern end of
40
the allied front. I only have Victor’s account of what happened. Because of the rough sea
they landed further out than originally intended and were almost up to their necks in water. A
50 year old corporal was pulled back by the waves and his heavy pack so Victor went back to
pick him up. They rushed to the safety of the edge of the cliff. The flame throwers had been
there first. About half the flame throwers had given up their lives but the pillboxes were empty
of live soldiers.
That was the front where, by chance, the only Panzer (armored) division was on the
cliffs above. As Victor and his men huddled in the caves below, the order came to re embark
- but the weather was too rough. A day or so later they got to the top and had to clear a potential
minefield. The simple way of clearing a minefield was by crawling along the field with a
bayonet in one hand probing the ground in front. If a mine was there you only lost a hand or
arm. Twenty five years later Victor took Barbara there to show her the landing site. They were
stopped by a gendarme: “You can’t go there: it hasn’t been cleared of mines”. Victor was
able to inform him otherwise. A few days later the British had advanced to the little town and
port of Caen. Cherbourg had not yet been captured. Victor, the only French speaker, was sent
to examine the electric motors on all the cranes and other port equipment to determine the
voltage and current necessary to operate them so that the right diesel generators could be brought
in. As he was finishing the sappers arrived to check for booby traps. Victor had assumed that
there were none. He was lucky. There were none. For a few days he was commander of this
little port.
In September when the British army had swept beyond Paris to Belgium, Victor asked
for 2 days leave to see his family (in Arras I believe). The leave was denied. So hot headed
Victor “borrowed” a motor cycle on Friday night, drove to Arras and returned in time to turn his
men out for parade on Sunday evening. No one said a word. Later that year Victor was sent
to the far east arriving just as the war came to an end. But his courage did not fail him. He spent
the first few days of peace diving into the bay to defuse the mines in the harbor of Saigon.
Victor was decorated by both the British Army and the French Army for his bravery.
I know
of no one who deserved them more. Sixty years later, in 2004, I sent him a letter on the
anniversary of D day to thank him once again for what he had done for us all. Apparently I
was the only one of his friends who remembered.
Victor arrived in Oxford in the fall of 1946. He made some of the equipment I used
as a graduate student. He soon became a favorite of the graduate students particularly those
in the Halban group. He was strong. Picking up a sledgehammer in each hand he would
turn them under his arm - both simultaneously. With effort and practice I could do it with
one! It was in summer 1947 that we, at Hillend farm decided, as noted elsewhere, to make
strawberry jam. I bicycled down to Radley where Victor and Barbara were living with their
new baby Annette to give them a couple of bottles. This was an investment which paid off a
hundredfold in friendship during the following years.
When I left Oxford for the USA in 1955 Halban went to Paris and took Victor with
him and established him as head of the machine shop in the new laboratory at Orsay. From
Barbara’s point of view it was downhill. Instead of their small house on Headington farm,
they had a small apartment in Massy Verrières. I visited them there a couple of times between
1955 and 1960 and in 1960 I went on sabbatical leave to Orsay, staying in the next town of
41
Palaiseau. But in the 1960s matters improved and Victor could afford a nice old house in
Lardy, where Barbara still lives, and also afford a fine car - a Mercedes. One time Frank
Pipkin from Harvard came with me. After dinner at their apartment in Lardy Victor drove us
back to Paris. Frank asked : “How fast can this car go anyway?” At 250 km/hr we soon
reached the outskirts of Paris and had to slow down.
Victor and Barbara had 5 children. Annette, now Grampenau, Bernard, Michael,
Yvette. I tried to see them whenever I visited Paris. I remembered D day in 1944 and 60
years later in 2004, I sent Victor a brief personal letter of thanks for what he did that day. In
late October 2004 I was on my way to a meeting in Lausanne and then to Geneva to discuss
terrorism. I proposed to fly in to Paris and call on Victor and Barbara before taking the train
to Lausanne. I phoned Victor and he said OK. But a day or two later Victor got a heart
attack and he was dead before I could meet with again.
Victor will always remain alive in
my memory.
It was probably in Spring 1947 that one of the lecturers in Oxford, Richard Hull, took a
dozen of us up to North Wales to learn rock climbing. I believe we stayed in the Climbers
Club hut at Ogwen cottage. I remember climbing Glyder Fach and also the Craig-yr-Isfa on
Carnedd Llewellyn. In summer 1947 the family set off for a month in France and
Switzerland. For everyone except my mother it was the first trip overseas. Even my father,
who had left England’s shores when in the Royal Navy in world War I had never set foot on a
foreign country. We drove in the 1927 Invicta which my father had put back into service the
year before. After landing at Calais, we headed through Rheims to Bar-le-Duc, Basle, and on
to Grindelwald in Switzerland where we stayed a week. We walked a lot and I bought my
first ice axe and my first wristwatch. The watch cost 15 I believe, about $60, and was, of
course, not as good as the $3 Walmart watches today.
One day we crossed the glacier and
walked up towards the Wetterhorn. I think we made it to the “Wetterhorn hut” from which
real climbers attempt the ascent of the peak. Another day we took the funicular train up to
Jungfrau Joc from where a guide took Laurie, Geoffrey and I across the glacier and up the
Munch. It was exhilarating. Then we drove back on a more southerly route to Paris where
we were to stay 4 days. The first day was in a “pension” in St Cloud, but my father did not
like so we moved into a hotel just off the Champs Elysees. When in St. Cloud Geoffrey and
I took the metro to Rue Montmartre. The only night life we saw was a movie of a smuggling
group in the Basque area; the American fell in love with a girl who loved a smuggler and
then the American did the “right thing” and protected the smuggler from the police. In
European movies 60 years later, Americans are not portrayed as politely as they were then.
Of course Basque dances are rather like Morris dances, Indeed it is widely believed that the
origin of the Morris dances was in the Basque country.
I still remember a couple of the
tunes and recently replayed them to myself on my concertina.
In summer 1948 Collie and Halban went to a conference and heard a talk by Sam
Devons on the use of coincidence measurements in nuclear physics. He described the decay
scheme of radioactive sodium Na 24 which has a dominant 2.76 Mev amma ray. Moreover
the source can be calibrated by beta gamma coincidence measurements. Sam had described
the procedure in a prewar paper (August 1939). Collie and Halban suggested a change in the
direction of my thesis. I would merely measure the absolute cross section for photo
42
disintegration both by Na 24 and by Th C” . This would tell us the range of nuclear forces.
The change was made and the principal measurements made that autumn (fall 1948).
One of the people in the Clarendon Laboratory from 1945 to 1948 was Jim Tuck. Jim
had designed a betatron in 1939 and would have beaten Kurst to the first operating machine,
but he was taken to Whitehall by Professor Lindemann and became an explosives expert especially on shaped charges. He was sent out to Los Alamos in 1943 and was, so I was told,
instrumental in hydrogen bomb design. After the war the Clarendon had been given a small
betatron and Jim made it work.
I thought at first of using it to measure the threshold energy
for the photodisintegration of the deuteron, but it proved to be unsuitable. Nonetheless Jim
liked me, and I remember him showing us his color slides of a New England fall and of the
New Mexico mesas. I had not seen color slides before and the colors were hard to believe
but my appetite was whetted for visiting the USA.
Jim also described to me his immediate
mentor, R.V. Jones, who also had been pulled to Whitehall by Cherwell. RV Jones was the
architect of the technical part of counter intelligence as described in his book “The Wizard
War.” It was an especial pleasure when Jim introduced RV Jones to Andrée and myself
some years later at a meeting in Los Alamos.
I remembered RV Jones a couple of times
later in my life. In 1983 I was in Kuwait where I met the minister of Health, Dr Abdulrahman
Alawady who got his MD degree in Aberdeen where RV Jones was head of the physics
department. Abdulrahamn told me he used to date RV Jones’ daughter. Then in 2008 at
Erice, Dr Mcloskie mentioned his time as a student in Aberdeen. Dr Mcloskie was a friend
of the whole Jones family.
Another person I remember very clearly was Rudolph Kompfner. Rudi had an
architecture degree from Vienna and in 1938, he presented a plan for a model village to an
architects convention in Glasgow. At Euston station he picked up a copy of the “Wireless
World” for reading on the journey. In it the Varian brothers described their invention of the
klystron. Rudi thought that he could do better and made a paper design for another klystron.
In 1939 he found himself in England, and like many enemy aliens he was asked what he could
do to help the Allied war effort against Hitler. He said “I have designed a model village and
a microwave klystron”. So he was sent to work with Professor Patrick Dee, then working on
magnetrons at the University of Birmingham. There he invented the traveling wave tube. By
1946 he was working for the British admiralty at Oxford and at the war’s end he was allowed
to stay at government expense and study for a PhD in physics. He learned his physics upside
down. I remember trying to explain to him how a synchronous AC motor works. After going
over the details of shunt wound and series wound motors which he did not understand, I
changed my explanation. “It is just like a traveling wave tube.” I said. “The electrons are
catching up with and riding with the wave”. He understood at once - and I understood a bit
more than I had before. In 1953 or so Rudi joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel,
N.J. where I visited him in the late 1950s.
Mrs Wilsons’ at Hillend Farm
In 1944 Geoffrey, began work in the Clarendon Laboratory with Dr Kurt Mendelsohn,
another German refugee physicist, on some radar problem, and then in 1946 continued to work
with him on low temperature problems. Geoffrey and I agreed to share lodgings up in
43
Summertown. This lasted till May 1947 when we went out to Hillend Farm as “caretakers”
with free lodgings. There was one building: the “Green Dragon” which had a kitchen where
we lived; we put out our beds in the adjacent part of the building. Heat was from leaving the
gas stove on.
Hillend Farm on Wytham estate was set up by the late owner, Colonel ffennel (always
spelled with two small “effs”) as a summer camp for miscellaneous children. It was unused
during the war, but I think that it was in summer 1944 that we spent 4 weeks out in Hillend
Farm with Oxford University Rover Scouts running a camp for 100 or so scouts from various
places who had not been able to get to camp during the war.
It was thus that we got to know
Hillend. It is 4 miles due west of Oxford on the Botley Road.
Milk, electricity and gas bills were delivered to us. But the milk supplier could not
believe that “Wilsons” were two brothers and the bills were sent to “Mrs Wilson”. Joining us
very shortly was David Clayson, studying for a D. Phil in chemistry and Peter Lund, lecturing
in engineering. Others spent short periods. George Mayo, John Owens, and David Lancaster.
In Summer 1947 it was time for a party to be held in the big barn. It was Mrs Wilson’s first
birthday party. We sent out written invitations to join us on Mrs Wilson’s first birthday.
The invitations confused many people and confuses the historians of Hillend to this day.
One of the guests was Eleanor Milne, who had been introduced to us by Margaret Chaundy.
Her father was very protective and a little concerned that it would be an “unchaperoned party”.
I could not do much about that but personally went round to collect her from their house in
north Oxford and bicycled out with her. I hoped that I would be considered serious enough.
So it transpired.
It was during this year that I bought my motor cycle from D.K.C.(Keith) MacDonald
who had used it in driving from his home in Shrivenham to Oxford for a year before he found a
house in north Oxford. I paid 80 pounds for this second hand Royal Enfield 350 cc bike with
hydraulic front forks. With it came a crash helmet and a Government surplus flying suit for
the cold weather. I was not content with the way it ran, so I followed Geoffrey’s lead in
putting in new piston rings one fine summer weekend. Geoffrey left Hillend in 1948 when he
took up an appointment firstly with the Admiralty in Portland, and then with the underwater
sound laboratory of the Admiralty in Greenock, Scotland. David Clayson got his D.Phil and
headed up to the University of Leeds where he taught rats and mice to smoke cigarettes to see
whether they got lung cancer. I lost track of David, but 25 years later David invited me (not
realizing I was the same Wilson) to talk on Risk Analysis at a meeting of the Toxicology
Forum in Aspen, Colorado.
I left Hillend, but not Oxford, shortly thereafter when I was appointed Research
Lecturer at Christ Church. I lived, rent free, in Christ Church lodgings at 2 Brewer Street
until I left for the USA in June 1950.
Peter Lund stayed at Hillend longer. Indeed when he
got married in July 1950 he brought his bride (Heather) to live in the building next to the Green
Dragon until Christ Church found him a house - “The Old School House” in Binsey.
When I got my position as Research Lecturer I kept the motor cycle in a little shed in
the meadows just behind the police station.
I used it to go up to London, On one
44
occasion I remember taking another lecturer (Tony Flew) up to North Wales on the pillion.
We got there in late afternoon, parked the bike one mile east of Idwal cottage, and promptly
scaled Milestone Buttress. We climbed for another couple of days and at the bottom of a cliff
on Glyder Fach met Bill Stock, who had been the senior boy at Alderbrook in 1939 - 10 years
before. He was half way up the cliff. I had not seen him for 10 years. Tony Flew went on to
be a Professor at the University of Warwick. This was my last trip to the North Wales
mountain region apart from driving through Bethelgert with Andrée in summer 1998.
As a boy I was always very impatient and sometimes in conversation I was completely
tongue tied trying to get a word out.
I was told:
“There was a young man of Calcutta,
who had an intolerable stutter.
He said: if you please
will you pass me the cheese
and the bbbbb... bbbutter.”
I have got rid of that stutter by now, not so much as by being less impatient, but by
lecturing to undergraduates. Also marrying Andrée went a long way to reducing that trait as
it also reduced my hiccups.
I cannot now remember the exact date in 1949, but I had gone up to London and
stayed at home for a week’s holiday. As I left mother was unwell.
She insisted I go back
to work anyway which I did early Monday morning. Our regular doctor was away on holiday
so mother saw a locum who diagnosed an intestinal obstruction. She was operated on
immediately but never was able to clear the obstruction. On Wednesday there was a message
left at the porter’s lodge to call home. I did so about 7 pm. Laurie told me mother was
dying in hospital. So I went home at once, getting there about 9.30 pm and was at her bedside
with Laurie and my father when she died 2 hours later. I tried to be cheerful but it was hard.
I remember her last words. “I am proud of my children, not because of what they have
accomplished but because they have been so good to me”. I did not feel that I had been
particularly good to her at all. I loved my mother, and was closer to her than to my father largely probably because of the walks we took from an early age till 1939.
When I was a
boy I never thought of her as beautiful but when I look at old photographs I realize that she
was. No wonder that my father fell for her. After I was in college and in graduate work
she confided in me a bit more. I was just beginning to be very aware of young ladies and
their attractions. Mother particularly was concerned that I would make too hasty a union
when I brought Margaret Lahee home for tea one day. She told me that she was never really
in love with my father but admired him immensely.
She had hoped that after us children
were born sex would cease to be a major interest for my father. I did not know what to say.
I was sad. I would not know what to say even now, 60 years later.
Even at ages when
children can no longer be conceived and physical energy is reduced, sex is still of interest and
enjoyment to many people. My mother also commented that when she and my father visited
Grandpa and Grandma Wilson in Halifax during the courtship, she was disturbed that they
would not leave the young people alone but were always entering the room. That infuriated
my father. But it was, and is, understandable. My father was born only a few months after
his parents wedding.
As one biologist pointed out to me, we know fairly well the duration
of the second and subsequent pregnancies. It is a little over 9 months. But the duration of
45
the first pregnancy is highly variable. My grandparents wanted their son and his lady love to
be careful. Likewise my mother wanted me to be careful. “If you can’t be good be careful”
was the motto at the time. To which my college friends would add: “If you can’t be careful
remember the date”.
As noted above, my mother was introduced to Margaret Lahee, my first girl friend. But
I never had the opportunity to introduce her to any of my other girl friends, and in particular I
would have liked her to meet Andrée I know that she would have loved Andrée and
Andrée would have loved her. But that was not to be.
The funeral was at Wimbledon spiritualist church. I went in the car with my father
and Uncle Charlie. I remember my father saying a couple of times; “Charlie; I still find it
hard to believe it”. I cannot remember the service but do remember our physician, Dr Kelly, a
Roman Catholic, coming up and saying to my father afterwards that it was beautiful service.
But did I go on to the crematorium in Mitcham where the ashes were disposed next to those of
Arthur? If not why not? . I have blanked that all out as I had blanked out my thoughts
when Arthur had died 12 ½ years before. I often wonder what that means about life and in
particular about me. Andrée has always wondered why I was not concerned about the
crematorium in Michigan and where both Arthur’s and mother’s ashes were scattered
Should I not have a little plaque there? And later at the site where my father’s and Laurie’s
ashes are scattered in Headington? Neither Geoffrey nor I are concerned. We prefer to
remember our loved ones by other tokens - such as the charities mother sponsored in Arthur’s
memory.
But my children wondered why I did not weep and publicly grieve. I was taught
to be stoic in such matters and perhaps that was an old, somewhat stupid, English custom.
Women may weep but men may not.
But as noted elsewhere I do weep when utter
frustration comes and I do not know what to do.
Then I went with my father, at his request, by train to Bradford to see his father. It
was good to be alone with him and share his grief.
My grandfather was already a widower,
and this was the last time I saw him alive. I continually regret that when Andrée and I drove
north to the lake district in April 1953 that we did not detour through Bradford on the way back
so that he could have meet his first grandson, the baby Christopher.
Morris Dancing
The Oxford University Scout Club enjoyed English, and Scottish, country dancing.
But about 1945 I decided to join the Oxford City country dance group meeting on High Street.
There also I learned Morris dancing.
I first saw a Morris dance on May 1st 1944 . There
was a long tradition of many hundred years of the Magdalen College Choir singing a pagan
hymn from Magdalen College Tower at 6 am on May 1st. The first year at Oxford in 1944, I
joined others in listening from a punt under Magdalen bridge and then taking breakfast on the
river. The next year, 1945, and all subsequent years, I watched the Morris dancing just after
6 am outside St Hilda’s - a tradition started by my mathematics tutor Theodore Chaundy
about 1924.
I decided to learn Morris dancing and by 1946 I myself was dancing with
them. A photograph was taken of the Morris dancing for the Oxford Mail on May 1st 1946.
The photo, of which I still have a copy, shows the six dancers including myself with back to
46
the camera.
The others included two stone masons from Headington, Mr Ludlam a
Summertown Bank Manager; Fred Rock an Income Tax inspector. I forget the profession of
the sixth. In the audience were two sisters, Margaret Leach and Eleanor Leach. Margaret
was a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary and was my next girl friend after Margaret Lahee.
That lasted perhaps a year and a half after Margaret had moved to the Children’s hospital on
Great Ormond Street in London.
On 1st August 1947 there was a folk dance festival at
Stratford on Avon.
I arranged to go, but instead of staying in what were for me expensive
accommodation in Stratford, I organized a camp for a dozen impecunious youthful dancers
including David Chaundy mentioed earlier, and one sixty year old retired civil servant,
Leonard Bardwell, 5 miles south. I borrowed tents from the Scout club. They were
dropped off by a trucker I had hired for a few quid. Again we danced in the streets and a
photograph of us, including David, appeared in the Birmingham Mail and I have a copy.
In college I had got to know the sons of my tutor, Christopher Chaundy and David
Chaundy. While playing our very inexpert tennis with Christopher one afternoon in May
1945, a young girl of 13 or 14 came out to invite us for tea; it was Margaret Chaundy
inviting us to the Chaundy house which backed onto the tennis court.
That was the first
meeting of Margaret and myself.
I suppose it was about three years before I realized that
she was no longer a young girl but was capable of bewitching unsuspecting, or suspecting,
young men. She also was a country dancer and also brought her friend Eleanor Milne to the
dances. Eleanor was the eldest daughter of a mathematics Professor EA Milne whose lectures
on Vector and Tensor calculus I attended. In the ring of four during “La Russe” or other
eightsome dances, Margaret Chaundy, like Margaret Leach before her would delight in
throwing her feet back and letting the men swing her around. Alas, Andrée who is somewhat
taller cannot do this as easily. In the summers of 1948 and 1949 Margaret and I would
bicycle around the countryside together and end up for tea at some interesting little inn.
At
Christmas 1948 the senior common room had a winter party and dance in Christ Church hall.
I cannot remember whether Margaret came as my date or whether she came as Theo and
Hilda’s daughter - as several other young ladies came as daughters of dons. But of course we
danced together and I remember that we were complimented on our Viennese Waltz by the
Steward (called Hookey because of his characteristic stroke when he played cricket for
Warwickshire) ) among others. That became a sine-qua-non of any relationship I had with
young ladies.
They had to waltz well. Margaret had not done well in her examinations and
wanted to wait before our relationship ripened at all. But I was impatient and looked
elsewhere.
Eventually I chose someone, Andrée, who also loves the Viennese waltz.
Andrée and I also danced in Christ Church Hall (in December 1954) and in the Shoenbrum
Palace at each of a couple of conferences in Vienna; a High Energy physics (Rochester)
conference in 1968 and the Young President’s Association, at which I talked about energy,
in 1978 and all too few times in Boston.
Alas, Americans in general seem to think that a
waltz should be slow.
Another celebration was the Corby Pole Fair, at Colby just north of Leicester on 26th
May 1947. This fair occurs every 50 years. We were invited to dance there but the audience
was very limited, and the small town ran out of beer, so to exhaust our frustration we danced
at pubs that we passed on the way home. I particularly remember dancing outside the pub at
Brackley.
47
May Day 1949 was a Sunday so we thought of spending the whole day dancing around
the region. A group of us, including Peter Pauling, the second son of the later Nobel
Laureate Linus Pauling, had learned the North Skelton Sword Dance under the tutelage of
Eleanor Leach, sister of my girl friend at the time. We added this to the repertoire of the
Morris Men and danced it on May Day 1949 firstly outside the Radcliffe Camera, then later
at Eynsham, Witney, Leafield (formerly Fieldtown) and probably Long Handborough before
returning to a final big dance of the Cecil Sharp Club in Oxford
I last danced with the
Oxford Morris men on May Day 1961 when I was in Paris on sabbatical leave and the whole
family came to England for two weeks. At that time we danced the Newbiggin sword dance
on the steps of the Radcliffe Camera. Andrée took a picture thereof.
Some readers will know that a music historian, Cecil Sharp, in the late nineteenth
century had written that the Morris Dance was extinct. But over Christmas 1899 he stayed with
friends in Headington Cottage at the top of Headington Hill on the London Road. The day
after Christmas, Boxing day, a group of Morris dancers led by William (Bill ) Kimber came to
dance outside the cottage. The Headington Quarry Morris Men were not extinct. This
changed Cecil Sharp’s life who set off on a study of the traditional English dances. He later
found that the Bampton men also were still dancing on the traditional Whit Monday. So on
Boxing day in 1949 we had a celebration with a day of dancing around Headington. By this
time I was the fool and a photograph shows me dancing the Fool’s Jig outside the Fox inn. In
1999 I went back to Headington again, and this time danced the jig in Headington Quarry itself.
On that occasion Annette, Michael and Lisa had joined Andrée and myself spend Christmas in
England and came to watch. Lisa was already internationally known as a New England
Country Dance caller.
Some one in the audience, knowing Lisa and not me, asked why she
was there!
Christ Church SCR.
In 1948 I applied for the position of research lecturer at Christ Church. This is a
position for young scholars who are awaiting a more permanent employment, and at the time
did not need a D Phil. I did not get my D. Phil. for another year.. I was fortunate to be
selected. I was asked for an interview one afternoon. A couple of nights before, I was
returning from Oxford to Hillend, with a pillion passenger, Peter Lund, on my motor cycle,
which I had only had for 3 months. It was dark. I passed the sign marking the end of the
speed limit sign on the Eynsham Road and opened up the throttle to 45 mph or so. Then
ahead of me I saw in the headlight a dark car crossing the road in front of me. It was too late
to stop although I tried to get in front. I was told later that a learner driver in the house nearby
had got in his car, started the engine, and put his car in reverse without noticing - all with his
lights off. Then he let the clutch in and sped across the road in the dark. I tried to avoid him
but failed. I hit - with my head - the door of the car and the door handle made a scar just
beside my right eye. I had insisted that Peter not hold on to my waist as a pillion passenger
but hold on to my seat. He did so. He squashed the seat from the usual 18 inches to 6
inches! But he was unhurt. I got a concussion and was out for a few minutes. I am told
that while I was lying on the ground a motor cycle passed at high speed (50 mph) within a foot
from my head. I was taken by ambulance (or maybe a car from a friendly neighbor) to the
48
Radcliffe Infirmary and was released to go to Hillend later.
Two days later in the afternoon I had my interview with a bandage over my eye. I
remember John Lowe, Dean of Christ Church, asking me what spare time activities I had
other than high speed motor cycling!
Fixing the motor cycle cost 50. I claimed this of
course from the other guy. I tried to claim for pain and suffering, noting the concussion and
the dent next to my eye. But the lawyer I hired was not sympathetic. “If you were a girl it
might get you 500. In Germany it might merely be a dueling scar. Then you might have
to pay for it!”
They gave me 20 for pain and suffering on top of the cost of repairing the
motor cycle. I was not to get concussion again for 50 years. I recommend an even longer
interval between such untoward events.
The salary for the research lectureship was a little greater than the DSIR research grant
of 260 per year. It was 400 plus room and board in a rooming house across the street at
2 Brewer Street. One enormous advantage was that I was a member of the Senior Common
Room. The more I look back on the 6 years I was an active member the more I realize how
much my thoughts were influenced by the colleagues who I met there, and the guests they
brought in. Not so much for the science and physics but for the understanding of public
affairs which was a fine extension of what I had learned over the years from my father. I was
told by the Common Room chairman, and on occasion repeat if the situation is
appropriate:“once a member, always a member.” We ate at the high table and after dinner
went downstairs to the Senior Common Room, where we sat around a table, talked and port
circulated (clockwise of course).
There were several young brilliant tutors who were unmarried at the time. I met the
historians Hugh Trevor Roper, (later Lord Dacre) and Charles Stuart, and Robert (Bobby)
Blake (later Lord Blake). Lord Cherwell would drop in after dinner if he was in town, and
sometimes bring a Cabinet minister to dinner.
Roy Harrod, a married economics tutor was
often there. Roy was a great admirer of Lord Cherwell and wrote his biography later. Hugh,
aged 29 or so, was already famous for his book “The Last Days of Hitler” that he had
researched as a young lieutenant in the army. Hugh later married and became a Professor of
History and then moved to Cambridge as head of a college. There he was raised to the
peerage as Lord Dacre. Bobby Blake, as a young army officer, was captured at Tobruk, but
when Italy left the war in 1943, and the prison guards vanished, he walked south past the
German army to reach the Americans coming north. In 1949 or so he stood as a Liberal
candidate to representing Huddersfield, in a by election for the House of Commons, but was
narrowly defeated in a three way race by the labour party candidate. He then became a
conservative and wrote the definitive biographies of Bonar Law and Disraeli. For this he
was gratefully raised to the peerage and became Warden of Queen’s College.
Being a part
of their evening discussions was an unusual privilege for a young man of 22. Bobby Blake
told me of his interview a couple of years before. After dinner at high table, he walked
down the spiral stone staircase to the senior common room. Just ahead of him was Canon
Claude Jenkins, an eccentric but charming bachelor. Claude would take pieces of toast from
high table and secrete them in the pocket of his MA gown to eat for breakfast the following
morning. On the way down Canon Jenkins stumbled and the toast came out of his gown.
This was a challenge for the aspiring Don. Should he stop and help the ageing prelate? He
49
ducked the issue, paused and turned to the man behind him in a brief conversation.
One visitor I remember was Sir Malcolm Trustram Eve. My father had known him
in 1941-45 when they sat together at night on fire watch duty in the otherwise empty
government offices.
After much of the City of London, between the Bank of England and
St Paul’s cathedral was burnt down in an incendiary bomb raid in (if my memory is correct)
December 1940, it was an offense to leave any building empty overnight. The City of
London like many cities, had two million or so day time workers and only 200,000 or so night
time residents.
No one was exempt from this duty. Senior civil servants and company
CEOs shared the task with junior clerks and janitors on shift.
My father and Trustam Eve
were also together on one or another government committees. In 1943 my father was in
charge of post war planning at the Ministry of Transport under his immediate superior Sir John
Tollerton who was Principal Assistant Secretary. The Minister at the time was Cyril Hurcomb
- a man who had personal shipping interests before he was tapped for the government post by
Winston Churchill. I never knew the details but Hurcomb instructed my father to take certain
positions favoring the shipping industry. Both Tollerton and my father refused.
Tollerton
was given no more work and a year or so later died of ill health. My father had a nervous
breakdown and retired at age 59. Cyril Hurcomb was first knighted and later raised to the
peerage as Lord Hurcomb.
Fortunately my father was more resilient than Sir John
Tollerton. He created another job for himself as an audio engineering consultant. This job
lasted till he was well over 80.
Sir Malcolm clearly knew all about my father’s problem. I
introduced myself to Sir Malcolm in the SCR. As he left he took me aside and said “I
want you to know one thing: Your father was right.” I have always been grateful for this
comment, and have always tried to emulate my father’s personal integrity.
The Dean, although head of the college, is only a guest in the SCR. I remember one
summer (probably 1950 just before I left for the USA) when only four young research lecturers
were dining and the Dean came in. I, at age 24, was the most senior. The Dean, Reverend
John Lowe, was born in Calgary, Canada and brought up in Toronto. He regaled us with
fascinating stories of his youth, which included ice sailing on Lake Ontario. He believed he
had reached a speed of 120 mph in this endeavor. A year later when I went through Calgary I
sent him a postcard with a picture of a “Mounty”.
As an MA from Christchurch I am entitled to dine at High Table 3 times a year. After
I left Oxford in 1955 I did not often return to Oxford in term time and even then I was visiting
my father who had moved from Merton Park to Headington in 1955 or my brother Laurie who
moved firstly to Cranfield and then to Buckingham College about 1965. It was not till 2006
did I again dine at High Table. It is not as elegant as I remembered.
There were not so
many undergraduates dining in Hall. But there are the same historical portraits that had
stirred my curiosity 60 years before. There was still the same Latin grace, read by the first
scholar the almoner (the college servant in charge of the hall) could corral.
“Nos miseri homines et egeni, pro cibis quos nobis ad corporis subsidium benigne es largitus,
tibi Deus onmipotens, pater caelestis, gratias reverenter agimus; simul obsecrantes, ut iis
sobries, modeste, atque grate utamur. Insuper petimus, ut cibum angelorum, verum panem
caelestem, verbum Dei aeternum, Dominum nostrun Jesum Christum, nobis impertiaris: utque
illo mens nostra pascatur, et per carnem et snaguinem ejus foveamur, alamur, et corroboremur.
50
Amen,”
With the English translation for those of us who forget our Latin:
“We unhappy and unworthy men do give thee most reverent thanks, almighty God, our
heavenly Father, for the victuals which thou hast bestowed on us for the sustenance of the
body, at the same time beseeching thee that we may use them soberly, modestly and gratefully.
And above all we beseech thee to impart to us the food of angels, the true bread of heaven, the
eternal word of God, Jesus Christ our Lord, so that the mind of each of us may feed on him and
that through his flesh and blood we may be sustained, nourished and strengthened. Amen.”
I no longer can say all of it from memory. I had to remind myself later by googling.
What I quoted is not the exact version as read at Christ Church but a version I found on the
web as read at Worcester college. The Christchuch version was slightly different. Indeed it
ended “...per Jesum Christum Dominum Nostrum, Amen”.
Unlike when the prayers were
said at Colet Court I was unable to keep quiet as I said these words. When I visited C
hristChuch in termtime in 2005 there was no formal sitting around the senior common room
table and no formal circulation of the port in the SCR.
Life moves on and changes occur.
As a member of the SCR I was entitled to attend the Christ Church “Gaudy”, the old
members dinner held at the end of the trinity term on the day after the degree ceremony and
“Encaenia”. The novelist Dorothy Sayers immortalized the Christ Church Gaudy in her
novel “Gaudy Night”. At that time only old members with the MA degree, who compresied
about 1/3 of those with the BA, were invited. They came in rotation every 3 years. Also at
that time Christ Church had established the habit of inviting those who had received honorary
degrees from the University in the morning to come and address us. Since then other
colleges objected to this claim of “superiority” and by 2008 the honorees do not come, and
now that all old members with BA degrees are invited the rotation is every 7 years or so. But
again, I was lucky enough to listen to some of the fine after dinner speeches. Indeed giving a
good after dinner speech is a skill Americans do not have seem to have acquired.
I was recently reminded of one which was by the Archbishop of Canterbury. I
believe it was in 1947. He described his recent visit to America. He started with a joke, as
so many good speeches do. He was being driven to his hotel in New York in a taxi, and the
taxi driver made some illegal manoeuver. As the policeman put his head in the window to
address the driver he saw the Archbishop’s clerical collar in the back seat. “I am sorry,
father” was his comment. “But you had better be careful around the next corner, because the
man there is a perishing protestant”. The Archbishop went on the say that America was a less
class ridden society that England or other European countries with less upper class and lower
class and more middle class than England. This we all applauded. We believed and I still
believe, it was true. But as I contemplate the situation in 2008 the reverse seems now to be
the case. The definition of classes is somewhat different with the financiers of Wall Street
replacing the landed gentry of the early 19th century.
In the subprime mortgage crisis,
financiers who made mistakes in lending beyond the means of the company, lose their jobs
with a $30 million handshake. The poor people who borrowed beyond their means whether
from predatory lending or not, lose their homes
But America has shown itself capable of
change. I hope the trend toward inequality based on the Almighty Dollar will reverse itself.
Another memorable Gaudy speech was by Harry Truman. It must have been after he
left office - probably in 1953.
He discussed the cold war between USSR and USA and UK
51
that had begun. ‘The communist regime in the USSR is not the progressive country in the
world” he said. “The progressive countries are the USA with the New Deal and the UK with
its’ National Health Service”. We all applauded and I suspect that there were very few in the
audience who disagreed. But I was continually reminded of this as since 1990 the USA
dismantled many of the New Deal guidance and restrictions on improper financial practices
and the USA still has not succeeded in getting a national health service.
Dick Wilson discovers America
My father started writing for the “Gramophone” magazine in the 1920s, and later for
“Wireless World” also. His collection of radio books included a number of copies (from
about 1930-39) of the “RCA review”. It was in a 1936 issue of the RCA review that I read
an article about negative feedback amplifiers and built one before any UK manufacturer used
the idea.
My father always told me that I should visit America because that was the land of
future technologies.
The second world war made that even more important. My advisor
Hans Halban (in 1945-1950) was not so insistent but he concurred. The maps of the world
were convincing too. Where else could one see anything like the Rockies?
I never even
had to search for a position. It was done for me by Jim Tuck.
Jim, disgusted with decision making in Oxford physics, as I was to be some years later,
agreed to accept a research position at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1948. Passing
through Rochester NY, he called on an old friend Sidney Barnes, who was just finishing a 250
Mev cyclotron. In response to Sidney’s request: “Do you know a bright young man to come
over and work with it?” Jim nominated me.
In 1949 I therefore got a letter from a person
I had never heard of, Professor Robert Marshak, from a place I did not know, Rochester, New
York. Bob Marshak was then Chairman of the physics department. I was in the middle of an
experiment and delayed a year. I accepted in January 1950 and came to Rochester at the end
of June. I had problems with my visa to enter the USA. In 1949 the nuclear physicist Dr
Alan Nunn May had been arrested as a spy in Montreal, and all foreign nuclear physicists were
suspect. Bob went into action in what I found was his typical enthusiastic way. He called
the Office of Naval Research and the Atomic Energy Commission and pointed out that I would
be doing work of interest to them. This was probably a mistake. It led my being put on a
special list. It got worse. Klaus Fuchs was arrested in March. Although I had applied for a
visa in January, and had my X ray and bought my non refundable steamship ticket,
bureaucratic concerns delayed my visa for 5 months. Dr Ed (Eddie) Salant was in the US
Embassy as special naval attaché for scientific affairs and on a visit to Oxford gave a lecture
in the Clarendon lab.. I explained my problems and he promised to do what he could. He
did just that. He called a colleague in the Navy Department in Washington, who walked over
to State Department at lunch time, called upon the person responsible for visas, and left a note
asking that he be informed of the progress of my file. The visa was issued later the same
afternoon! A week before I was due to sail I got a telephone call from Office of Naval
Research (US Embassy) in London saying that my visa was being sent to London by surface
mail, where it arrived the day before my departure! I went up to London, collected my visa,
went to the Bank of England in London (Threadneedle Street) to argue that they should allow
me to convert some pounds into dollars even though foreign currency was restricted, and the
next day caught the boat train to Southampton to catch the “Queen Elizabeth”. Thus began
52
the next exciting phase of my life. I was told later that the person in the Bank of England
who approved my request was Thomas Armstrong, now Lord Armstrong, who had been an
undergraduate acquaintance of mine, studying economics, and was son of the cathedral
organist “Tommy” Armstrong.
It pays to have contacts.
On the boat there were many students returning to the US from study in Europe. They
got up early as we came into New York. We saw the Nantucket lightship as dawn was
breaking, passed the Statue of Liberty and then ended up on the pier at about 50th street. Then
I took a taxi to the Hotel New Yorker a few blocks away for $5 a night. I was surprised to
find on the boat my friend David Ritson who was also off to Rochester to work on cosmic rays
with Professor Bernard Peters. I had met David my first`day in college 7 years before; he
was also off to Rochester after spending a year in Dublin. Marshak had also offered a job as
Assistant Professor to John Tinlot, who was leaving Columbia to join the Rochester faculty,
and he suggested that John drive us up to Rochester with his family. So on the afternoon of
our arrival we took the train to Tarrytown and walked to the Nevis laboratory of Columbia
University to meet John and make arrangements. It was there that a larger cyclotron - of 400
MeV was being built by Booth, Rainwater and Havens.
Interestingly, although I have been
to the 116th st. campus of Columbia University many times since, I have never been back to
Nevis.
Then I was invited to dinner by Eddie Salant - back in NY with his wife and
stepdaughter, Maedre. I was presented with my first American steak - about 2 weeks meat
ration, and I could not eat all of it. Some things are just not possible. But with experience
what seems at first to be impossible become quite easy.
I learned quite quickly that it is
possible to eat a large steak in one sitting.
Then I took Maedre to the movies - “Kind Hearts
and Coronets” starring Alec Guinness - and escorted her home.
I explored a bit of New York. I had anticpated that clothes would be cheaper in
England and had brought a lot of underwear. But I was wrong! Down on thirs treet I found
I could buy a dozen pairs of socks for a dollar. To have them cleaned in a laundry cost 25
cents each pair. So I enthusiastically joined the throw away society with a dozen pairs of
socks. But being a cheapskate, I wore them 2 days and even sometimes washed them by hand.
I took the ferry out to Staten Island and walked around a bit, buying my first milk shake. I
was to find later that New York milk shakes are despised in California.
Two days later this excitement continued. John Tinlot drove a crowded car. John, his
wife Betty, two children, David Ritson and myself. I can’t remember but I assume that I had
shipped from the pier most of my luggage direct to Rochester by train. We went by Port
Jarvis and up the Delaware River and I was impressed (and still am) by the way the small
towns were laid out - and the absence of fences. Then a stop at teatime at Ithaca where John
called on his college friend Norman Kroll and we were introduced to the great unassuming
physicists Hans Bathe and Robert R. Wilson who, although older, later became close friends
of mine.
The next day, July 1st (I believe) we turned up at the university of Rochester and
Bob Marshak took us straight into a seminar by a 25 year old Chinese - Frank Yang - who was
a research fellow with Fermi in Chicago.
This pace slowed a bit during the summer, but not
much.
I used to eat lunch in one of two places.
53
The University faculty club where we would
sit and discuss physics (and life) with Bob Marshak. And in the other direction from the
cyclotron laboratory I could walk across the two railroad tracks (Lackawanna and Lehigh
Valley) to the Strong Memorial Hospital where I would eat in the cafeteria and talk to the
nurses. I met one 30 year old intern. He was Polish and had been in the Polish
underground and when the Russians came to Warsaw he was one of those who fought in the
sewers as the Russians watched from their camps on the other side of the river Vistula. He
was, so I was told, one of the three who were pulled out alive by the Germans at the end of that
valiant fight. Although he had a medical degree in Poland he had to start all over agin in the
USA and was completing his residency. He was somewhat disillusioned. About 10 years
later I was giving a lecture at Rochester and called him.
By that time he was married to an
American born girl and had two children.
In August, I went to Princeton to see Bob Hofstadter’s work with scintillation counters
at the University, RCA work on photo multipliers at RCA laboratories nearby, and then to
Brookhaven Laboratory to see what they were doing. Eddie Salant was spending the summer
there with his wife and stepdaughter.
Physics was interrupted when it was suggested that I
join Eddie Salant on the beach - with of course his stepdaughter Maedre.
This romance did
not go much farther. I tried to see Maedre in New York on labor day weekend but she
discouraged me. So on a whim I hitchhiked up to Montreal and back to Rochester. As I left
NY I noticed, with approval, the cricket game among west Indians in the park at the end of
the subway line. On Sunday before labor day I found myself in Fairlee, Vermont at a diner.
I noticed a flyer “midnight square dance” at Orford, NH on the other side of the river. I
thanked the driver of the car who had brought me this far and said I was going to the dance.
As I sat there the owner of the diner told me not to wait for the waitress to get off work because
she had a boy friend. It was not in my mind!
I went outside to a junk dealer, slept in the
back of an old car for a couple of hours and walked over the bridge to the dance. Then I
realized why it started at midnight. Dancing on the Sunday was improper and at that time
illegal in new Hampshire.. The enjoyable dance went on till 3 am or 4 am when I went back
to the abandoned car for another rest. At 6 am I was on the road headed north. The first
car took me up through North Troy to the Canadian border and turned right. The road to
Montreal went left (westward). As I waited there, a child came down from the farmhouse on
the corner and invited the ragged hitchhiker to breakfast. Fortunately I spoke French.
Andrée and I passed this way in 2005. The farm house was obviously a farm house no
longer. But I refrained from knocking on the door and saying “bonjour”. So in 1950 I soon
got a lift on to Montreal. After looking around the city I hitchhiked back by the Thousand
Islands bridge to Rochester and work.
A month or so later, in October 1950, I got wanderlust again. It was not yet cold, so I
hitchhiked north, by Toronto to North Bay and down to Deep River, a “company town” for the
Chalk River laboratories of where Atomic Energy of Canada had their laboratories. I got
there on Sunday afternoon. I had met Bennett Lewis at Christchurch, and called on him. I
knew of his work because he had made the first hard tube scaler. He was a bachelor, living
with his mother and I was invited to tea. I had not realized he was Director of the laboratory
but he was very courteous. Then I hitch hiked back to Rochester. In January I joined a
group of undergraduates from the outing club” on a ski trip to Snow Ridge north of Utica.
There I learned to ski. I also met Suzanne (Susie) Willems of whom more later.
54
Leaving them by train from Lyons falls, I went to the New York meeting of the
American Physical Society where my arrangement to go to Stanford the next year was
finalized. There also I met, on the NY subway (Broadway Line) I met Norman Ramsey,
violating the well established rule that on crowded trains short people meet short people and
tall people only meet tall people. Then I hitchhiked to Boston, and caught the 5 pm train to
Concord. I stayed with Richard Conant and family in Lincoln. I had met their daughter in
Oxford’s Cecil Sharp Club when she was visiting England and had an open invitation. She
invited me to the local “English Folk Dance Society” meeting where I learned a new tune for
my concertina that I still remember and play occasionally. I called on Theodore Dunham’s
brother in Brookline, where Ted had stored an old station wagon that he was to lend to me.
I also visited the cyclotron at Harvard, meeting Karl Strauch for the first time and had lunch
with the physics department, being introduced by Norman Ramsey who I had met two days
before. I remember that Van Vleck was the courteous chairman.
Leaving Lincoln early the next day in my station wagon I headed west. I reached
Schenectady with no trouble. But as I headed on route 7 to pick up route 20 west it began to
rain. Then to snow. So I stopped and installed my chains. I moved slowly at 35 mph.
I am never quite sure where it was, but I think it was just before Richland Springs that I
skidded and turned the car onto its side in a snowdrift. Fortunately, there was no damage and
for $10 a tow truck set me straight. But it was now dark and the snow was unrelenting. So
I stayed the night at a house on the hill. Just after I had rented a room a priest and another
man came and wanted space. The B and B owner persuaded me to give up my room to the
priest and sleep on the sofa which I did. The next day it was 20 degrees below zero and the
car would not start. So I pushed until I could roll down the hill to the garage. They found
the ignition points were iced over and the battery was ruined also. So I spent another day on
the hill and turned up uneventfully in Rochester.
Although I had not get very far with Maedre I soon found other female company.
But constraints were different in US universities at the time than they were in Oxford.
At
Oxford a man could not entertain a lady in his rooms after 10 pm unless he had “ladies late
leave” for a party, which leave lasted till midnight. Ladies were not allowed to entertain a
man in their rooms after 7 pm at all. Everyone had to be in college by midnight, or climb in
“secretly”. In Rochester, no man could entertain a lady at all in his rooms! Of course that did
not apply to me who rented an upstairs room in a private house. But neither the gentlemen nor
the ladies had any special time they had to be back in their dormitory. It was suggested that I
meet a young girl who was a freshman.
I took her to the movies one Saturday night and we
had a drink afterwards.
I was scheduled to start a “run” on the cyclotron at 8 am and
would have to stack a ton of lead bricks between the coils the hour before. I wanted to be
home by midnight. But she protested. “If you take me back to the dormitory before
midnight my reputation would be ruined.”
I have always thought that was an unusual way
of ruining a girl’s reputation, but I was adamant. I never saw her again.
After I met
Susie Willems at the ski trip in January I took her out a few times in my station wagon. That
car, like most cars at the time, had a long bench seat in front rather than the two bucket seats
that are now the norm. That made them suited for romance. This led naturally to the
unsafe practice of one arm driving, with the right hand being otherwise occupied. Since the
gear change lever was on the right hand of the steering column, either the right arm had to
temporarily abandon its more interesting occupation, or the girl had to change gear in
55
appropriate synchronism with the driver’s use of the clutch. Susie was good at this. But
there was a defect in the car. The door on the passenger’s side would only open from the
outside. That was a fine for any gallant driver who naturally got out and opened the door for
his guest. But in the laboratory my car became known colloquially as Wilson’s woman trap.
Susie was an interesting girl. She was brought up in Marseilles, Illinois on the Illinois
river, with the flat prairie on the north and south. As early as 10 years old she hung out at the
airport and spent time washing airplanes. Soon she was taught to fly and got her pilot’s
license at age 13 - before she would have been able to drive a car.
So one day she suggested
I join her and another couple and go to Niagara falls - a mere 100 miles away - for breakfast.
But I already know my stomach and declined the small plane trip.
In April vacation time I
went to Chicago for the weekend. I had hoped to see Fermi at the physics department but no
luck. So I took the elevated to the end of the line and hitch hiked toward Marseilles. I got
as far as Joliet where Susie picked me up and I spent the night with her family. She planned
to go to medical school the next year at the University of Rochester.
I thought about staying
in Rochester another year or so that we could be together and even proposed that she join me
back in Oxford and go to medical school in Oxford. Professor Gardner, Regius Professor of
Medicine at Oxford was a member of the Christ Church senior common room and was willing
to arrange it. But Susie felt that being tied down was premature. So we parted on good
terms.
When I had a group working in Fermilab, the large High Energy Physics Laboratory in
Batavia, IL, 40 miles west of Chicago, some 25 years later, one of my research fellows had to
go to the emergency room at the hospital in North Aurora.
The 45 year old physician, Dr
Willems, asked whether they knew a physicist called Richard Wilson. Of course he did and
informed me of the encounter.
But I did nothing at the time. A few years later in 1983,
Susie wrote to the Department chairman, who happened to be me, and asked help in locating
Richard Wilson.
I wrote back. It transpired that she had married but her husband had
recently died.
Obviously she was wondering if any of her older male friends were available.
I was not, of course, but on each of a couple of extended trips to Fermilab I did take her out to
dinner (with Andrée’s approval) to discuss old times, and when I spent six months leave in
Fermilab in 1987, Andrée and I invited her to dinner. She told us about her interesting life.
The summer I left Rochester she and another girl took a job delivering cars to Alaska over the
Alaska highway, and hitchhiking back. The other girl was pregnant and had a baby in Alaska,
and when they got back to mainland USA, Susie took her home to Marseilles. When
Susie’s father came home from work he found Susie, who he had not seen for 3 months, and a
clothes line with baby clothes thereon. At first he suspected Susie was the mother. I was
told later that her father was suspicious of my intentions when I arrived unexpectedly in April,
and maybe this appeared to confirm his suspicions. Susie got her medical degree and for a
couple of years became a flying doctor in the hinterland of North Africa
She got back to
Illinois, married an architect, and started the “trauma center”, (emergency room) at the North
Aurora hospital.
They had a child and a tragedy. The baby swallowed a toy which got
stuck in the windpipe. It took several minutes to extricate the toy.
The baby had lost
oxygen and her brain was damaged. By 1983 she had had a baby herself by an unidentified
father at age 15. This young granddaughter was the joy of Susie’s life.
But since then
Peter and Julie have been in Batavia, I have not been so much in Fermilab, and I have not taken
56
the time to see Susie again. She did call me once for advice on buying water purification
equipment for a camping trip in northern Minnesota, by which means I realized she was alive
and well, but had not at that time found another male companion to share her life.
Andrée
and I have been lucky. We have reached the proverbial four score years (Psalm 90;10) and
still have very little of the labor and sorrow that the psalm promises. But I must return to the
main narrative.
I left Rochester in mid July 1951, and drove along the old Trans-Canada Highway to
the Canadian Rockies. I had bought a 1939 Ford station wagon (woody wagon) for about
$400, loaded it with all my worldly goods and set off for the Canadian Rockies. But the
engine overheated almost at once. I tried what I could but continually had to fill up the
radiator and check the oil level. At Hearst, Ontario, on the trans Canada highway, where the
paved road ended at that time, a gas station attendant put water in the radiator while I was in
the toilet, and the engine was switched off. I went on forty miles, began to camp and
checked the water and oil. The oil sump was overfull - but it was full of water, not oil! I, or
rather the gas station attendant, had cracked the cylinder block.. At first I figured that I
would have to abandon the car, sell what I could not carry, and hitch hike. After beginning to
do so a passing Cornishman took pity on me. A reconditioned truck engine was available in
Hearst - at a cost of $300.
He took me to the local lumber camp, where he was engineer,
for the night, after a stop back in Hearst for a night’s drinking with the Ukrainian crew
manager and another couple. The police raided the front room, but I was told to keep quiet
because they were well paid and they did not need to come to the back of the restaurant
unless we obtruded ourselves on their attention.
But I only had $200 in my pocket, and the new engine would cost $300 plus a little
more for anything else wrong.. I cabled Bob Marshak from the CP station in Hearst and at my
request he cabled my July salary and my one month's vacation salary within 24 hours. In
retrospect I was asking a lot of Bob; but he gave of himself unstintingly in such matters. It
was a sign of Bob's greatness as a man that I had such confidence in him. I doubt whether I
would know how to get the Harvard administration to act as quickly Then I drove steadily
west, driving through two nights, with the help of two hitch hiking truck drivers. After a
change of oil at Medicine Hat and a few more miles across the plains I saw the Rockies for the
first, unforgettable, time. I saw a line of mountains all the way from left to right. Driving
alongside these from Lethbridge to Calgary was a fantastic experience. At Calgary I had a 99
cent meal of steak, blueberry pie and coffee. I never had a better deal. Then to the Kicking
Horse Pass where I parked the car and hiked the 14 miles to the Canadian Alpine Club Camp at
Lake O’Hara, British Columbia. Then began the finest mountain trip of my life.
The club arranged climbs of the surrounding mountains in groups of 4 or 5. The
first few days I climbed Mt Shaeffer, a fairly simple mountain with no snow or ice; although
ropes were desirable. Then I joined a group led by Jack Cade, and climbed Mt. Oderay
where we had to cross a glacier, and finally I joined a party led by Dr Alexander Fabergé
which had three ropes of four climbers each I believe, to climb Mt Victoria. Victoria is on
the continental divide above Lake O’Hara, and can be seen from Lake Louise in Alberta. It
is easily climbed by walking up to the hut at Abbott’s pass, staying the night, and then walking
along the ridge two or three miles to the summit These three miles were glorious.
57
Mountains to left of us, mountains to right of us, mountains in front of us (with apologies to
Lord Tennyson). We were roped in case an overhang on which were walking collapsed or
we went through thin snow into a crevasse. In my photograph collection I have some
photographs of that climb which I scanned and are available on my website.
It was at Abbott’s pass hut that I first met Alexander Fabergé. Alexander was the last
son of the Fabergé family who had made jewelry for the Tsars. I am not sure whether he was
born in Leningrad, and came to England as a child or born in England. It turned out that he
had lived around the corner from us in Mostyn Road, in Merton Park. He was a geneticist in
the University of Texas. I agreed to join him for some further climbing - wilderness climbing
this time and hopefully a first ascent.
So we set off. We bought supplies at Golden down
the valley from Kicking Horse pass. We drove north to Big Bend - the most northerly point
on the Columbia River now under the water of Mica Lake. We had hoped to get the ranger at
Big Bend to take us across the Canoe River in a boat, to climb a mountain the other side, but
that was not available, and after a futile attempt to cross by an overhead cable, (again that can
be seen in a photograph) we decided to try Mt Chapman on the other side of the Columbia
river.
Camping equipment was heavier in these days and we were going in for a week but
prepared for emergencies. Alex’ pack weighed 80 lbs. Mine about 60. It was not a good
pack; a UK “Boy Scout” pack low slung and more suited for skiing.
We set off southwards
up a steep creek where the water cascaded down between steep sides which we had to climb.
The sides were full of Devil’s Club - a creeper with long vines which snaked down the sides
so that if you stepped on them you would slip for 20 feet. You would save yourself by
grabbing the vine, but it was prickly so you wore gloves. All the while there were insects so
you had insect repellant and had a mosquito net over the head.
After a grueling 8 hours we
had advanced no more than 3 miles before we had to camp. I was absolutely exhausted as a
photograph taken by Alex can attest. The next day was better. The creek was not so steep
and we waded up it (water up to our waists) between alder scrub. In the afternoon we went
up a side creek to a col beyond which, at the timber line, was a beautiful alpine meadow
where we camped.
After a day of relaxation we walked on over Mica Peak, which had
been climbed once before as evidenced by a cairn at the top with a note in a Kodachrome can the usual procedure at that time.
We then set out for Mt. Chapman. Unfortunately bad
weather stopped us doing the final stretch and time was running out. We wanted to allow 2-3
days to get down. So we abandoned the ascent and set off downhill. We went down Mica
Creek, and after a wide circuit around the lair of a grizzly that we could smell we camped and
reached the bottom much quicker than we had`thought - noon on the next day. We were at a
surveyor’s camp where surveyors were surveying for the large dam (Mica Dam) that later
flooded the whole area around Big Bend back to Lake Kinbasket.
I was ravenous. I wolfed down a couple of pork chops the surveyors offered, and Alex
commented that I was like a cave man! Then the surveyors kindly drove us the 20 miles back
to the car at Big Bend.
We drove on to Revelstoke, spent the night and had a bath. I actually
had two baths: the water was so dirty after the first I thought I needed a second attempt at
getting clean. We called the ranger back at Big Bend to inform him that we were “out” and
parted. Alex to take the train back home and myself to drive on to Vancouver. I thought
58
about Alex later, but we never met again. But in 1963 when we presented the first results from
the CEA at the APS meeting, and they were written up in the New York Times, he sent me a
letter of congratulation.
In Vancouver I located Christopher Chaundy - eldest son of my tutor Theodore
Chaundy - and a fellow student. He was working at a government lab. He told me that Theo
and Hilda were visiting their daughter Deidre and her husband John Arthur at the lumber camp
where he was manager at Youbou on Vancouver Island. So I resolved to go over and surprise
them the next lunch time. They were agreeably surprised and welcoming. Deidre
commented upon this meeting 55 years later when we met on the occasion of a memorial
meeting for Heather Lund. At that later time she looked just like her mother.
Then I left for Victoria, and took the Princess Margaret, a new Canadian Pacific ferry to
Seattle. This ferry ride was a four hour beautiful cruise in the late evening through the
Sound. As we drove off the ferry in Seattle another small contretemps arose. The car would
not start. The starter motor was shot. So I was pushed off the boat by the car behind, and the
Ford V8 engine easily started. For the next 10 days I either parked on a slope or had to push
the car, jump in quickly and then put the car in gear to start it. But when at Stanford I bought
a new starter motor ($30) and installed it myself. I was reminded of this a few months ago
when I had to have a new starter motor installed for $400. But the dollar was worth much
less then.
The drive down the coast was comparatively uneventful. A brief stop in Portland to buy
some spare tires to replace the 3 (or was it 4?) that had blown out on the long miles of dirt road.
A roadside camp at the Oregon- California border (at the top of a hill!), then to the fine national
park just north of San Francisco. I arrived at Stanford just at noon. My last little joke fell
flat. I parked half a mile from the physics laboratory, took my bicycle out of the back and
bicycled the last half mile saying that I had just come from Rochester. I looked bedraggled
enough I might well have bicycled the whole way.
But no one took notice. But other
research fellows did call me an “Okie” for awhile since I and my car looked like one of the
“Okies” in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”. Thus began the year at Stanford.
Andrée
Pief Panofsky invited me home to his house to stay till I found somewhere to live. I
thus met Adèle and their five children. That weekend we all went to the beach west of La
Honda, then came back a bit further south where we stopped at a restaurant and we all ate
abalones. For me it was the first time. I got sick on the way back and we had to stop while I
walked for 5 minutes. I thought that it was motion sickness because of the twisty roads. But
a few years later when a similar event occurred I realized otherwise. I am allergic to the
abalone that I had eaten. I found a room in Palo Alto very shortly, and then 2 graduate
students invited me to share a house with them in Menlo Park - just across the golf course from
Stanford. I joined a folk dance group and met another young research fellow in physics
Sidney Drell. I decided for some reason to try to understand American Football and bought a
set of tickets to the Stanford Home Games. In mid November Pief invited me to a small
party at his house on the following Saturday - the day of the “Big Game” - Stanford vs. UC
59
Berkeley (Cal). “Bring any finite number of girl friends.” Alas, it was too late to find a date
for that important weekend so I turned up at Pief’s house that evening and asked the crucial
question: “Is zero a finite number?”. “What do you mean,” Pief asked”. I explained. “If
zero is not a finite number, my invitation is invalid”. Without actually venturing an opinion of
whether zero is a finite number or not, I was allowed in, and Pief rushed to the kitchen and
called to his sister-in-law: “Dizzy, (an abbreviation for her middle name Desirée) your boy
friend has arrived. “ “Dizzy” was somewhat annoyed and stayed in the kitchen awhile. But
when that beautiful young lady (now called Andrée by everyone except her sister) came out,
she sat beside me on the floor and that was the beginning.
I can’t remember all the details of our “dates” in the next month. Some of the details I
do remember will remain unrecorded. Andrée came up from Berkeley to join a folk dance
party we had in Menlo Park I believe. On another occasion when she came to Stanford, and I
planned to drive her home to Berkeley, the fog was so thick as I drove through Redwood City
that I turned back and she slept in our house. Andrée in my bed and myself on the floor in the
common living room.
I drove her home and crashed my station wagon in Berkeley on the
way back. Pief lent me his jeep for a week after that and then on Robert Burns birthday I
took her folk dancing. I searched for some Scottish dancing but I could not find any so we
went to the a little restaurant with a dance floor, which played tyrolean music: the “William
Tell” in San Francisco.
As she sat at the table in front of me between dances (mostly
polkas) and flashed her eyes I was captivated for ever. I fell in love with her then and in the
58 years since I have fallen in love with her again and again and again.
Then came Christmas. On December 23rd I went to Pief’s house to wish them all a
Merry Christmas, and that included Jesse DuMond, up from Pasadena to spend the holiday
with his elder daughter (Adèle). This was the first time that I had met Jesse although I had
heard of him as an undergraduate because he had written important papers on the “Least
Squares Adjustment of Atomic Constants” with a student, Dr Richard Cohen. I admired his
work then and since and always found Jesse to be a fine agreeable honorable man. I found out
later, after I was married, that he had had a number of personal problems and his relationship
with people, especially Andrée. But he had certainly mellowed and I always enjoyed being
with him.
After greeting Jesse and Pief I took the night train to Los Angeles where I was collected
by Linda and Peter Pauling with whose family I spent Christmas in their house in the foothills
of Monrovia, east of Pasadena.
The young Paulings and their young friends suggested we
all go down to Tijuana, Mexico for the New Year. I explained I had left my passport behind.
This probably would not, at that time have mattered. But more important I wanted to get back
to Berkeley for the winter meeting of the American Physical Society.
Roy Glauber was a
young theoretical physicist who was a post-doc at Cal. Tech. He dropped by to see the
Paulings and offered to drive me up to Berkeley and I accepted. I remember that Roy teased
me on the way saying that there was a girl in Berkeley he wanted to see. In 2007 he still
reminds me of that! But when I called Andrée, she was free that evening (December 27th)
and we went to Spenger’s seafood restaurant which she thought was perhaps the best restaurant
in Berkeley. But others thought it was the best restaurant too. Shortly another group of
people arrived who had been at the APS meeting that afternoon. Leonard Schiff, the
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department Chairman at Stanford, Jesse DuMond, Pief and Adèle. They were as surprised to
see us as we were surprised to see them. But we did not join them.
We went back to
“Dizzy’s” apartment which she shared with three other young ladies, and that evening we
decided to get married. I stayed on their sofa that night. We were both believers in not
waiting around. But in seaboard states in the US one must have a medical certificate for 3
days before a marriage license can be issued. Driving to Reno, Nevada was not possible
because my car was being repaired. I never thought of renting a car! So we waited.
But
not for long.
The next morning Andrée went to work as usual, and I went to the APS meeting. At
the coffee break Jesse and Pief arrived. I was waiting for them. I took Jesse aside and
thinking it too old-fashioned to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage, merely told him we
were going to get married. After a few second’s pause he said “I am delighted” and went off
to arrange a lunch party. Pief took me by the arm and said “Physics must go on” and led me
into the next talk - on nucleon-nucleon scattering by Owen Chamberlain. It is a credit to
Owen’s lecturing ability that I still remember his talk.
The next week was like a dream.
We had to get medical certificates to be sure we did not have venereal disease, a requirement in
all seaboard states before we could get a marriage license. In principle we could have got
married 3 days later - about New Years day. But Andrée’s father asked for a long enough
wait that we could have at least a small wedding reception. I sent a telegram to my father
Percy Wilson and brother Laurie announcing the wedding in 10 days. “I am marrying
Andrée Desirée DuMond on January 5th. No use objecting.” It was the first they had heard
of Andrée, but the fact that I had not written for well over a month now became clear. At the
time my thoughts were of the old song:
“And when I told the how beautiful you are
they didn’t believe me, they didn’t believe me
Your eyes, your cheeks, your lips, your hair
are in a class beyond compare...”
They didn’t believe me until they met Andrée later that year in September.
We were married in his house on Saturday January 5th 1952 by a judge in Menlo Park,
with Sidney Drell as my best man; and Pief and Adèle gave us a small wedding reception in
their house. Then we set off to Yosemite Valley for a honeymoon. Alas, I had persuaded
Andrée to try skiing and she borrowed some skis and bindings. But they were not safety
bindings. And after ½ hour on the snow she fell and broke her leg. A bad start to married
life that I do not recommend. My friends in Oxford, particularly Victor Round, said: “you
should have tried the easy methods first.”
I am not sure of the exact words of the vows we made to each other in front of the
Judge. Almost certainly it included: to love and to cherish, to have and to hold, in sickness
and in health, till death do us part.” As noted elsewhere, Andree broke her leg on our
honeymoon. We had not expected the sickness part to be tested so soon. Through the years
it has been tested a lot. Andrée has never failed to keep her word when I am sick and I try to
keep my word but I am not good at it. Andrée and I have had a few quarrels in our lives. I
have been at fault in most of them. So I have learned to avoid actions which upset her. But
I have been wrong in many other actions which have not caused a quarrel. That occurs far
more times than is reasonable but Andrée puts up with it.
61
We found a small house at 1435 Tasso Street in Palo Alto which we both remember for
the roses up the front and the fig tree in the garden. The members of Stanford Physics
Department were very welcoming of Andrée..
I remember in particular Willis Lamb and
Leonard Schiff. Andrée and I will always remember the little house and the roses which
grew around the porch and the fig tree the garden. In retrospect I am appalled by my
assumption that Andree could do anything in spite of her broken leg in a cast. Occasionally
she bicycled and I remember her dancing - an action she repeated in February 2006 when she
again had a broken ankle but nonetheless danced at the wedding in Morocco of a former
graduate student Dr Hynd Hoya Bouhia. In the spring we took a weekend trip to Carmel.
Although I had heard of course of morning sickness during pregnancy, it was my first
knowledge of what it was like and it scared me. While eating breakfast at a café Andrée felt
faint, got up and rushed out. The man in the flower store next door let her sit among the
flowers where she recovered. When we returned we found that the café had kept our bacon
and eggs warm.
One evening we were at this nice little house on Tasso Street a fire broke out around the
corner. Not surprisingly for a country with wooden houses, firemen are excellent at
responding in the USA. Better than peacetime England. A eucalyptus tree next to the house
caught fire and crackled. The residents of the house were away and it was I that called the
fire brigade. Within less than 5 minutes the fire engines had arrived from the station 1 ½
miles away on Embarcadero and the freeway.. The first engine was a tank truck. The
driver- fireman jumped out of the truck having started his pump and immediately hosed the
side of the house and tree. I helped him pull the heavy hose. Within a minute the fire was
under control by this prompt action. By the end of the minute the following fire trucks had
connected to the hydrants and were pouring water themselves.
If the response had been a
minute longer more eucalyptus trees would have caught fire and the fire would have extended
from the side of the house into the body of the house itself. We also had a trip to Pasadena in
April to see Andrée’s father and step-mother, in their house.
I think we went down and back
by train which was easy and comfortable in those days.
In September we set out to return to England.
I jettisoned my bicycle, actually
giving it to one of my nephews and also jettisoned some other belongings. Andrée jettisoned
or put in storage a lot more. But we still had one ton of belongings that we packed and sent
by truck to the pier at Oakland, whence to London and on by road to Oxford, as well as 400
pounds or so as forwarded baggage on the train to New York where we caught the “Queen
Mary” to Southampton. A long train trip on the California Zephyr. Willis Lamb, Pief and
Adèle came to the Niles railroad station across San Francisco bay to see us off. Pief had
added a Sears and Roebuck catalogue to our carry on baggage in the hope of persuading us to
come back. Was that the reason that we did return to the USA 3 years later? And to
California for a couple of months in 1959?
After a change at Chicago we went to Rochester
to see my old friends and then to Rockland, Maine before going down to New York to catch
the Queen Mary to England. To our surprise, on our first trip on deck we met our friends
Eleanor and Margaret Milne who had been visiting their step brother and his family in New
Jersey. I had met them while folk dancing in Oxford. I was talking their father’s course at
the time on “Vector and Tensor Calculus” and one week he apologized for having given a
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wooden lecture. I did not know at the time but his wife, Eleanor and Margaret’s mother,
had just committed suicide with post partem depression a month after the birth. Their father
died of natural causes about 1951.
Professor Milne was always a bit removed from ordinary
social interactions but was very protective of his daughters.
It transpired that Andrée had
known Eleanor in school in Pasadena when Eleanor was evacuated to US during the war and
stayed with the astronomer Theodore (Ted) and Miriam Dunham at Cal.Tech.
Peter Lund
had told the Milnes that we were coming so they were prepared to see us. Later showed us
later a picture taken in 1943 or 1944 at their school in Pasadena. It showed Andrée and
Eleanor had marked: “my best friend”. This saddened us a little because Andrée had little
contact with the young Eleanor who was in a class below.
But Andrée has always had
thoughts for the lonely and troubled people of the world and that is one of the reasons I was,
and am, attracted to her.
Headington, Binsey and the Scuttle
The Queen Mary docked at Southampton in the early evening of a mid September day.
But customs and immigration officers had gone home. Laurie had come down to meet his
new sister-in-law at the port, and he was allowed on board to welcome his new sister-in-law.
I never forgot his kindness and helpfulness. He forgot it; but then he was always helpful and
did not remember therefore any particular incident. We could have gotten off for the night but
would have had to come back the next morning for customs and immigration.. We were not
going up to London immediately, and I was being careful about unnecessary hotel bills, so we
stayed on board one more night and caught the 9.30 am train to Oxford in the morning.
Laurie went back to London by train.
Of course we saw him again a couple of weeks later
when we went up to London and Andrée was introduced to my father.
Arriving with our baggage at Tom Gate soon after noon we set out to find
accommodation. We knew that such accommodation would not match our house at 1435
Tasso Street. Peter Lund had suggested Headington cottage at the top of Headington Hill
where a couple of rooms were available. This was a “quaint“ cottage, the same in which Cecil
Sharp had stayed on Christmas 1899 when he first saw Morris dancers, (which he had
believed were extinct) but Andrée at once (correctly) vetoed the cottage as unpractical. My
former tutor, Carl Collie, and his wife Mary put us up for one night. We were offered a 4th
floor apartment with use of a basement kitchen in North Oxford, in the house of Dr De
Mesquita. But we settled for a second floor room (and use of the inevitable basement kitchen)
in Mrs Ogden’s house on Banbury Road. But in November we were rescued by Hans Halban
who offered us temporary use, rent free of a flat (apartment) on the top of the farm house
(Headington Farm) he owned in Forest Hill
Arthur Christopher was born here on December
2nd 1953.
In many ways this was equally or more impractical than some of the others. The
flat was far from flat. We had to go up a wooden outside staircase in the back to a living
room and small kitchen on the first floor, then another staircase to the bedroom on the top. All
coal for the coal burning heating stove to be carried up the wooden steps which were icy on a
few occasions that winter. I remember coming back from the lab one day to find a cold
Andrée in tears. The coal fired stove in the living room was heated by anthracite coal which
was under the stairs. There was another small pile of soft coal. Anyone brought up in
England knew that to light the fire one starts with paper, then wood, then soft coal, finally
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getting the anthracite to burn. Andrée had tried directly from the paper to the anthracite.
But Andrée learned and she was and is not a grumbler One tremendous advantage of this
apartment was that there was a small apartment for Barbara and Victor Round under the farm
house (and later after we had left Binsey, a small house).
Barbara and Victor were both
very helpful to Andrée. Barbara would look after Christopher if Andrée wanted to go out and of course they have been friends ever since.
On the evening of December 1st we went to a little party held, I believe, by Elizabeth
Wilson, Hans Halban’s secretary who I had dated a couple of times in 1950. It was in her
very small apartment on the top floor of a house on Woodstock Road. I believe Margaret
Chaundy was there as was Eleanor Milne and Ann Davis. As I remember it the girls got
together and regaled Andrée with stories of all my faults. Andrée remembers that we drunk
too much alcohol before bicycling back the 4 miles up Headington hill to our (temporary)
home at Headington farm. Maybe the alcohol stimulated action. The next day Arthur
Christopher was born. I called the midwife from Victor and Barbara’s apartment.. She was
quick getting there but Christopher was born twenty minutes after she arrived. The midwife
was the District Nurse, who had already brought some 450 children into the world. As was
usual at the time I was set at once to boil water to keep me out of the way, but was summoned
upstairs when the baby appeared. Andrée was happy and so was I. Andrée’s mother in
Paris, had agreed to come over and help for a couple of weeks. So I telephoned her from
Victor and Barbara’s apartment and she promptly flew to London, took the South Midland bus
from outside the airport, at the Three Pigeon’s pub on the main road (A4) to St Ebbe’s where
I met her and we took the bus up to Headington. 2 days later Andrée’s step father Jean
Baptiste, arrived in full French Army uniform. We had given him detailed instructions but
since he did not speak English, he asked at the airport how to find the place to catch the bus to
Oxford. Instead of directing him to the Three Pigeons the helpful people at the airport sent
him up to London where he caught a later bus to Oxford.
Many young couples think of a name for their child long before he or she is born, and
sometimes before he or she is conceived. Maybe Andrée did, but I did not. Once I had
thought about it I wanted my first child to be called Arthur, in honor of my late brother.
Andrée liked the name Christopher. Christopher Arthur did not sound euphonious so we
settled on Arthur Christopher.
Some time later, Chris Heath pointed out indirectly that these
were his names. We certainly did not deliberately choose Chris’ names and they were not
consciously in my mind or Andrée’s, but obviously if I had not liked Chris Heath there would
have been a mental block.
I had said to Andrée that although my income was only 400 ($1,800 with $4.2 to
1) a year, we would spend some accumulated savings till I got a proper job which paid more
than a research lecturer. I was determined that we would not let our first wedding
anniversary be short changed. We got a taxi, and took Christopher in his baby basket down to
a baby sitter in south Oxford, and then to the Bear Inn at Woodstock. After a fine dinner we
sat in the lounge for port and coffee and took a taxi back. The evening cost us 38 which
was about one tenth of my annual salary. Many people thought we were crazy and
extravagant But I have always felt it was worth it.
I wanted and still want, Andrée to think
that she is worth it.
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Halban made clear that the apartment was just temporary. We set out to look for
alternatives. Buying a house seemed best. We set ourselves a limit of 2,100. We saw
several “between wars” houses at this price, but they had “outside” bathrooms. We saw a
flyer about what seemed an attractive house with a garden in Marston for 1,800. . The real
estate agent told us that it was “an interesting subject for modernization”. One wall was
crumbling. We forgot the house, but remember the phrase to this day. I began to raise the
limit and offered 2,300 for an interesting cottage in North Hinksey, for which the asking
price was 2,900, but this offer was not accepted.
But then Christ Church helped.
Binsey is a small village, 12 houses and cottages, a pub (Perch Inn), a church (with
Alice’s treacle well in the church yard) on the river 1 ½ miles NW of Oxford. It was bought by
Christ Church in the 14th century to provide milk from its two farms. Peter and Heather Lund
already were living in “The Old School House” a 4- 5 room stone house with a garden and
orchard facing the village green on which cows than grazed. Manor Farm cottage, half way
between the old school house and the pub (the Perch Inn), faced the green on one side, the
farmyard on the other and had a common wall with the barn. It had already been modernized
in 1939 when the ladder to the first floor was replaced by a staircase and running water, from a
well with a windmill driven pump was provided to an outside tap to supplement the rainwater
butt.
The rent was 3 shillings and sixpence a week.
Now Christ Church modernized it
again for us. The bullpen at the back of the house was converted into a scullery and bathroom
with running water. A coal fired combined hot water heater and cooking (Raeburn) stove was
installed in the kitchen. To allow for 5% repayment of capital the rent went up to 1 a week.
We had to pay for internal painting and I bought a coal fired enclosed efficient heating stove for
the living room. This was a 50 investment that we left behind.
Andrée was never alone in Binsey. In the back the windows of the cottage looked onto
the farmyard often full of cows. The front of the cottage faced straight onto the green by
which came every cow twice a day. So we tried to enclose a little patch and make a path
around it. I asked the college treasurer, a Mr Grey, whether it was possible to enclose the
patch. He came and looked at it and was non committal. Andrée realized before I did what
he meant. “Go ahead and do it, but I will deny responsibility.” No one in the village
objected and the enclosure is there 56 years later. We were luckier that Heather and Peter
Lund. They left the front door open one day and a cow came past and walked through to the
back, leaving a calling card on the way.
On another occasion the farm cat came through our
“scullery” window and tried to get out. It was unable to locate the window again and bounced
back and forth between the sink and the bathtub. I finally picked him up and took him out of
the back door. I did not succeed until the cat had given me a couple of bites which went down
to the bone. So I went to the Radcliffe Infirmary again for a tetanus shot. On another
occasion Christopher got hold of the bottle of baby aspirin and had swallowed 40 tablets before
Andrée found out what had happened. We took him to the infirmary to get his stomach
pumped before there was any serious damage.
In many ways the life in Binsey was idyllic. I could bicycle across the river on a
footbridge to the lab. But the dampness of this village by the river was bad for Andrée’s
health so in 1954 we looked elsewhere. The most attractive of the possibilities was a solid 4
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room stone Georgian house in Upper Heyford. This is 15 miles north of Oxford, but the
wrong side of Oxford from Harwell and with an infrequent bus to Oxford. Our increasing
prosperity might have diminished these difficulties for my professional life. The 1 acre
property stretched down to the river Cherwell and there was a magnificent view across the
valley. There were fishing and shooting rights on then river - but these did not influence my
decision! The price of 3,000 then seemed reasonable as our income was about to go to
600 per year.. As we were mulling this over, professional considerations led me to accept
in January 1955 the offer from Harvard.
Heather Lund took Andrée under her wing and taught her many of the features of how
to live in England. She bought goods in the old cattle market next to the railway station.
These included vegetables, cups and saucers. The life in this English village had interesting
features. Everyone seemed to know everything that went on and people helped but did not
interfere. One day when I was off at Harwell, Andrée was unwell and stayed indoors. It
was either Heather or the lady in the smaller cottage the other side of the farm, who noticed
that Christopher was not outside in his “pram”. She came around, and without being asked,
washed the baby and cleaned the house.
We still have a water color painted by Reverend
Eva, a retired clergyman in the village. The day after we returned in summer 1953 from
Europe the local policeman on his bicycle asked: “How was France?” We were worried that
the cows walked immediately in front of the cottage. We tried to stop this and I enclosed a
small area which became a little garden. I made a new alternate path around the garden, We
did this slowly with full discussion in the pub. That enclosure still remains. Having no
garden, I also put a clothes line from the cottage across the Green to a telephone pole with a
pulley to haul the clothes in. One day a group of American servicemen came to drink at the
pub. England has always had mixed feelings about American soldiers. Although the
wartime criticism of Americans, “They are over paid, over sexed, and over here” was muted,
it was hard for young 18 year olds in a different culture.. They did not always behave well.
At closing time, 2 pm, the Americans went on drinking, in their car, from bottles and threw the
empties out of the window.
They were met by an angry beautiful young American, in shorts
and a halter top, who told them in her American accent, “Get out and pick up your trash”.
They meekly did so. That evening everyone in the village knew what had happened and
without any specific comment the attitude to Andrée in the pub subtly changed. Andrée has
since mused that the older people in the village, particularly the retired Reverend Eva,
disapproved of her Californian style summer wear. No one said anything directly about that
either before or after this incident. Indeed as we left in September 1955, one of the regulars
asked us to go around for “one last drink”. One then sat down next to us and forgetting that
Andrée was American, said “Do you really want to go to America? It is such a terrible place”.
Reverend Eva painted a water color of the village so that we would remember Binsey. It still
hangs in a prominent location in our house.
In spring 1953 I bought a small Austin Van. I would have had to pay a 66% purchase
tax on a car, but there was a much smaller tax on a commercial van. I had windows put in and
arranged some seating in the back. The lab paid me for moving myself and students to the
experiments in Harwell.
Our first trip in this was in April to the Lake District where Sandy
and Marion offered us the use of a small flat above their house for a week. I had thought of
detouring past Bradford on the way back to see my grandfather so hat he could see
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Christopher. I regret that we did not make the detour for he died a few months later. In
summer 1953 we took a month’s holiday in Europe. One was only allowed to take 40 in
currency at that time. We first stayed with Meme and Jean Baptiste in Rue Clauzel, Paris.
We took a short trip to Chartres and Blois. Among other places we stayed at a little family
hotel 7 km east of Blois called “Auberge de Medici” that we found in the Guide Michelin. It
opened onto a large garden which went down to the river Loire. We played a little on the
bank of the river before dinner. The food was excellent, and although it took 3 hours for the
whole meal to be served, 2 ½ year old Christopher was patient and seemed to enjoy the meal
too. It was firstly at Blois, and then at a couple of Chataux between Blois and Tours that we
were shown the “first spiral staircase in France”. We saw the “first spiral staircase in France”
at several other places since.
We then left Christopher with them and spent three weeks camping.
We went to
the Dolomites in the Italian Alps because we were told that they were always dry. We went
up a small peak the first day and then the clouds came in. . We raced own the mountain path
reaching the car just as the rain came down in torrents and then headed south to get out of it.
When it got dark we camped by the roadside. My US Army surplus tent had a built in
groundsheet. But the tent leaked and we ended up trying to sleep in a few inches of water.
On to Venice and Mestre, Florence, Pisa, the coast west of Genoa, and up through Turin and up
the St Bernard Pass.
I suspect that it was here that I made a mistake of drinking water from a waterfall fed
(unknown to me) by a stream with sheep further up. After climbing (walking on the path
4,000 feet up to a pass) the next day I was sick. We headed west and at a campsite by the lake
in Lausanne realized that my fever was 102 or so. Although at the campsite we saw the first
bikini bathing suits I was too sick to appreciate them or the beauties inside them. We decided
not to seek a doctor in Switzerland, of which Hans Motz had told us discouraging stories, but
to head post haste for Paris. Andrée drove even though she only had a British learner permit.
We got to the French border and found there was a general strike in France. We gave a lift to
priest and a boy scout. Then one event happened where Andrée showed extraordinary driving
skill. Driving along a 2 lane road at 50 mph was a “camion” (truck) in the other direction.
Then another truck pulled out into our lane and overtook the first one completely ignoring us.
Andrée promptly pulled over on to the grass verge and we bounced to a halt. It all happened
too fast to be frightened. Andrée and I remember this to this day. Andrée swore. Then she
apologized to the priest who replied, in French of course, “it was indeed a difficult moment”.
Andrée remembers that I was determined to behave normally although I was sick. In
such circumstances I can often concentrate and accomplish something. But it s not always
the most sensible thing to accomplish!. Ford had recommended oil changes every 500 miles.
It was close to that. So although I was sick and probably had a fever, I insisted on getting
under the car to drain, and then replace the oil! We got to Paris and I was put to bed. The
next day Jean Baptiste got 2 young doctors of the French Army to come around and they
prescribed something. But in the afternoon my fever went to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and I
was losing consciousness. Fortunately a French Army colonel, summoned by Jean Baptiste,
gave me the latest antibiotic and the fever went down in two days. I remember his comment
on the prescription of the two young colleague’s: “Not very strong”.
Because of the
general strike many tourists were stranded and we did not want to give up our reservation on
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the (British) car ferry in Calais.
Andrée was concerned about driving with an invalid
license. The British embassy came to our rescue and gave her (illegally) a temporary
license. We got back to Binsey in one day and I was well enough to do much of the driving.
The Oxford police were very good. Andrée, an alien had by law to register with the police
and report every 3 months. “Don’t bother to report,” the police said when we had arrived a
year before. “We will know where you are.” Indeed they did. The morning after our return
from France I saw the local “Bobby” on his bicycle in the village green. “How was your trip
to France?” was his immediate friendly greeting.
I believe it was in summer 1954 that Geoffrey went to Canada. He came “home” to
Merton Park before leaving and we went up to London in our little Austin Van to see him off.
He was going by boat train to Liverpool and then to Montreal and on to Hamilton, Ontario.
We set out in two cars; father’s Invicta with Laurie and Betty, and Andrée, Christopher and I
with Geoffrey. We were somewhat late as we neared Euston Station and we had lost track of
each other. I reached Euston at 9.50 and we rushed to the platform getting there at 10.00 just
in time to see the Royal Scot, with its brand new diesel engine, go off on the opposite track.
My father and Laurie arrived 5 minutes later. The boat train went at 10:10 with a steam
engine.
I have made many close connections since but none so nerve wracking. But of
course it was Geoffrey’s close connection not ours.
Summer 1954 we had a vacation in the Isle of Wight. Our schedule was dominated by
when we could get the car ferry to and from the island. Not able to travel on the short route,
Portsmouth to Ryde, we went over Southampton to Cowes. We stayed at a guest house in
Ventnor. It was interesting, but not exciting. One memorable day we went up to Cowes.
The question arose, where to have lunch? It was market day. I saw some farmers walking
across the square to a small hotel. That is where we had a fine meal of roast beef. When I
asked for horseradish sauce, instead of complaining as most English waitresses did at the time,
she said “of course.” The little railway line Ryde to Ventnor was still running. We went to
look at it and saw the crew at the station opening up the front of the little tank engine and
cleaning it. Even Christopher, 1 ½ years old, was interested. We could not get a reservation
to leave the island on the Saturday that is the usual “change” day, so went to another little B
and B place where we could also eat “lobster salad” for lunch. We asked for three! They
were not used to the American idea of eating a whole lobster, or two, in a meal.
We stayed
in the Isle of Wight two weeks.
We had to leave by driving to the western end of the island
and caught a boat from Yarmouth to Lymington pier in the late afternoon and then drove back
to Binsey.
In late August I went to a nuclear physics conference in Glasgow. I drove up with
Roger Blin Stoyle and another physicist whose name I have forgotten. I presented our work.
I was by that time impatient at not getting a more permanent position in Oxford. At the
conference I told both Gregory Breit of Yale, Norman Ramsey of Harvard and Arthur Roberts
of Rochester I was thinking of returning to America.
Within 4 months I had offers of an
Assistant Professorship from each of them. At the conference dinner Norman Ramsey was
asked to give a short speech and asked us all to raise a toast to the Atomic Nucleus.
Politicians could learn from it. It has its “independent particle” aspects, as well as its
“collective” aspects and they seemed not to be in conflict. Jesse DuMond was at the
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Glasgow conference and he joined us as we drove back to Oxford. This time we stopped on
the way back at a B and B at Shap, by the pass “Shap summit”, north of Kendal. Jesse and
Louise then stayed with us for a couple of days in our little cottage. We had a little party in
our little cottage and invited Lord Cherwell. He went to the farmhouse next door not
believing that one of his scientists could live in such modest accommodations and not
believing the advice of his chauffeur who knew better.
Michael Thomas Wilson was born in Binsey, at home in March 1955. I telephoned
the midwife from Heather’s house at 4 am. She came around ½ hour later on her bicycle
with a trainee assistant
Strapped to the carrier on the back of the bicycle was some
analgesic equipment. Although I was sent, as usual, to boil water to keep me out of the way
during most of the labor I was permitted to see the actual birth and hold Andrée’s hand during
this painful period..
At Hilda Chaundy’s suggestion we got a lady, Cara Alexander, up
from Somerset, I believe, to help Andrée in the first month. Michael was not well and
screamed a lot. Cara spent much of every night walking with him enabling Andrée to get
sleep. In July I finished the “runs “ on my last experiment which was small angle scattering of
polarized neutrons by lead to demonstrate the neutron electron interaction that Julian
Schwinger had written about. I drove Andrée to the airport to take the children to Paris and
went on a one week
Morris tour (my last) in Gloucestershire. A week later I drove and
joined Andrée in Paris. After a couple of days we took Christopher and Michael to the Loire
valley and Brittany. Auberge de Medici was no longer as good as it had been two years
before so we headed direct for a hotel Jean Baptiste recommened in Pont L’abbe in Brittany.
The hotel there was good, but not suited for children so we headed a few miles south to
Loctudy where we stayed several days; we looked at a small boat and drove over to a sandy
beach. Then back to Paris and to England.
As we packed to go to America in September 1955 I obtained 6 wooden boxes from the
lab. They had originally come from America in 1943 containing bomb sights and were among
a lot of government surplus equipment - which we had learned to use in post war UK. We still
have 4 of these boxes roughly 65 years from their first use!
With a couple of other boxes
professionally packed these were 1 ton of stuff being sent to Boston. I booked the boat from
Tilbury, east of London, to Boston and got British Road Services to take them to Tilbury.
Christopher and I packed them that afternoon. His idea was that we would fill the boxes and
then complete the game by emptying them again. He screamed when I screwed down the top
and he could not see his toys for another 3-4 weeks. Indeed moving was very hard on him.
He had been beginning to talk, somewhat early. But it was another 6 months before he said
much again. Leaving England was hard on both Andrée and myself. Andrée particularly
was sad to leave Heather Lund, our neighbor. She had hoped to help with her third child
Elizabeth who was born a couple of weeks later. But Andrée was able to get to Elizabeth’s
wedding and we have remained friends as described later.
The ship with our boxes never docked at Boston after all; there was too little traffic. It
unloaded at Baltimore, or Philadelphia I don’t remember which, and came up to Somerville by
road. Since that road terminal was closer to Harvard (2 miles away compared to 9 miles) than
the port, that was actually more convenient. This contrasts with the problems in 2006 when
Andrée had some of her mother’s belongings shipped from France. In 2006 the road terminal
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was 40 miles SW of Boston. Not all changes are improvements.
Cmbridge and Arlington
Our arrival at Harvard University was accompanied by a very warm welcome from
everyone in the physics department .
I had already met a few of them, some on my brief
visit in 1952, and others at various meetings and conferences, and knew about the
professional life of most of the others. Professor Nicholas (Nico) Bloembergen had been
living in a little “semidetached” house, built just after WWII, on Alpine Street in Cambridge.
It was arranged that we move in a week after he moved out to a new house in Lexington. Sid
Drell and his family put us up for a couple of days while we bought some furniture. These
were a table and chairs and a studio couch from Sears and Roebuck
We still own the
studio couch!. Then we started looking for a house. We found one in Arlington on 37
Brantwood Road. A large 4 BR plus 2 attic rooms on a 15,000 sq foot lot-and-a-half
overlooking Spy Pond and Boston further east. The price was reasonable - $15,500. For
some reason, sickness I believe, I was not able to go and pay the deposit so Norman Ramsey
kindly did so for me. Norman was living across route 2 in Belmont and we would sometimes
meet on the bus to or from Harvard.
We bought with the house some furniture, some of
which we still have.
In 1955 the physics department held a weekly lunch in the faculty club. at which all
business was discussed. Lunch was at 1.15 and informal discussions took place. Then the
formal business started at 2, but much had been decided informally during the lunch!
I
remember the first lunch. Van (John Hasbrouck Van Vleck) sat beside me. “I am going to
see if you are truly worthy of becoming a Harvard professor” he said. “I will give you a quiz
with two questions. This morning I had clam juice for breakfast. What train was I traveling
on?.” I got that right by simple reasoning. There was no night train down from Maine, and
Van was unlikely to eat on the night train from New York. So I deduced, correctly, that he
had traveled on the New England States express from Chicago.
I made use of this
information a couple of years later when I caught that train and was served, after asking, a
complimentary glass of clam juice for breakfast. The second question stumped me. “What
is the twin importance of the town of Mattoon, Illinois?” I should have known one of the two
facets of the twon which made it important Mattoon is where the New York Central main
line to St Louis crosses the Illinois Central main line. The second is that is where my new
colleague Ed Purcell went to high school.
Van was a delightful man, full of trivia in
addition to his undoubted intellect for which he got the Nobel prize. He was one of
Harvard’s truly great men. Later in these memoires I describe his, and our, love of mountains.
That October we got a car. Ted Dunham had taken the car that I had used in 1951 in
Rochester and stored it in his brother’s place in South Tamworth, New Hampshire. We
bought it for $100. So in early October we took the train up to Mt Whittier station (changing
at Durham NH, and Ted’s brother in law took us to his house where the car would not start!
It was pushed to the gas station where it was fixed. It was now too late to get home that night
so we stayed overnight in his house South Tamworth and drove home.
The next summer (1956) we rented a house, Kendall house, on Sutton’s Island, just
south of Mount Desert Island. This house had been given to Harvard by an alumnus who
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thought of the idea of entertaining faculty even after he was dead.
It was a relaxed 2 weeks.
We had a bedroom downstairs and Chris (3 ½ years old) and Michael (1 year old) shared a
room upstairs with a narrow staircase down. We were woken one morning by Chris calling to
Michael “I wouldn’t do that if I were you”. Michael was at the top of the stairs peering down
and about to fall. Another more benign incident. We found a magnificent bed of mussels
just outside the cottage. We picked four dozen or so, and Andrée prepared something
different for Michael. But Michael’s eyes lit up and he insisted on eating his share of
mussels! Alas, the car, the 1941 Ford “woody wagon” began to use more oil than gasoline
on the way back so we bought another second hand car.
But that car only lasted a few
weeks as someone ran into it and damaged it more than it was worth repairing.
By summer 1956 Andrée was pregnant again with Nicholas; she was in the 8th month
of pregnancy while were at Sutton’s Island.
Although we were by that time living in
Arlington, Nicholas was not born in Arlington but in the Wyman building of Mt. Auburn
Hospital in Cambridge, He showed up on September 9th.. I saw them in a nice ward on
the 4th floor overlooking Fresh Pond Brook Parkway and a view south to the Charles River.
I was to come back to the Wyman building back 51 years later after the hospital had been
reorganized and the Wyman building is now for outpatient surgery for a hernia. Then I was
the center of attention as Dr Russell Nauta, opened me up, put my innards back where they
belonged, and sewed me up again. It was a simple hernia operation. But that same week a
cartoon appeared in the New Yorker magazine. A physician is talking to his patient at a
consultation in his office. “Yes, it is a routine operation” the physician says. “If it is routine
to have someone cut you open with sharp instruments and fiddle around with your insides.”
It all depends on which side of the desk you are sitting.
Andrée had become a great fan of the British system for childbirth of the time and
requested that she not be given an anesthetic.
Our physician, Dr Moran, said that he had
never delivered a baby by natural childbirth, but “the customer is always right.” But when
Andrée was well into labor at the Mount Auburn Hospital she said; “it hurts”, which of course
it did, and she was immediately put under. She therefore never actually saw the childbirth.
For many years she felt peculiar about it, sometimes wondering if Nicholas was really hers!
She was awake at the birth of all the next three children. I was not allowed to be present at
Nicholas’ birth but was summoned soon after. We asked Cara Alexander, who had helped at
the time of Michael’s birth to come and help look after the three children. She stayed for
about 6 weeks.
This enabled me to spend a week in UK immediately after Nicholas was
born as discussed below..
In July 1956 I received a letter from Bill Burcham of the University of
Birmingham inviting me to apply for a Professorial position in the University of Birmingham,
UK. I applied and received a letter immediately thereafter asking me to come and visit,
implying that the job was mine if I wanted it. I talked to Curry Street who was then
Chairman of the Department. Curry said that it was a fine offer that I should take seriously
but urged me to delay because both the Dean and the President of Harvard were on vacation.
I did delay, and went to visit Birmingham in late September after Nicholas was born.
Everyone was very welcoming in Birmingham and I even looked at some houses.
I missed
the first lecture of the term and turned up on Wednesday morning after a night flight from
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London. After my 10 am lecture, I found Curry Street sitting in my office. “We had our
first department meeting on Monday” he said. “And we voted unanimously to offer you
tenure. Yesterday, Norman Ramsey, Ed Purcell and I went to see the Dean and he and the
President agree.” That was a clear sign that if I stayed at Harvard I would get the support I
needed for whatever project I became interested in. After cogitating for 2 weeks I turned
down Birmingham.
In 1957 after a vacation with Geoffrey and Pat on Lake Erie, we spent a long weekend
at an old farm house just west of Camden, Maine which was offered to us free. Our biggest
memory of this was the mice who ate the apples we were given to us from the orchard. These
sloppy rodents spread the half eaten apples on the floor next to the refrigerator. At first
Andrée thought that Chris had been eating the apples and scolded him for being messy and
not finishing his food. As so often happens he was innocent of this terrible crime.
Life in Arlington proceeded. We were very busy. Andrée was busy with the three
children and I was very busy at work. That did not stop Andrée becoming pregnant again.
Elaine was born at the end of February 1958. This time Dr Moran listened a bit more to
Andrée and Elaine was born in the hospital in Arlington by natural childbirth without any
notable complications. We needed help again and Andrée wrote to Heather Lund in Binsey
for advice. Heather was teaching a course in child care and suggested one of her students,
Betty Hewlett. Betty came over, by boat to NY with a train up to Boston where I met her at
South Station. She stayed with us for 6 months I believe and then took a similar job with
another family. She is now Betty Gardescue, and she still lives in the Boston area in Weston.
We had several visits over the years from Andrée’s father and stepmother Jesse and
Louise. Also my father Percy and step mother came over from England occasionally.
Typically we would go out to the local countryside: Percy, having read Thoreau’s Walden
was particularly interested in Walden pond. Concord was also a simple destination. But
for the summer Boston was then too hot for me so we went north for vacations. In 1958 I saw
a little pamphlet, “Maine houses and cottages” so we rented a farm house for a month at
Pemaquid Harbor. We went there after I had made a 10 day visit to Geneva for the
“Rochester Conference”. We spent 3 weeks there and Andy Koehler took the 4th week.
Geoffrey and Pat and their children spent part of a week with us. Across the road was a small
pier where a small boat with outboard motor could take us across the bay to the beach at
Pemaquid Beach. Nicholas, in particular, liked helping with the outboard motor.
But
Andrée had not seen her sister since 1952; and the children had not met their cousins at all.
So in summer 1959 we missed our vacation in Maine or New Hampshire and spent a summer
in Stanford, renting Sid Drell’s house for 2 months. We went west immediately after I came
back from the High Energy Physics conference in Kiev. This is described later under “Trips
West”
But our creative enthusiasm was undiminished. In September 1959 Annette, now André as
noted later in these memoires, was born. There were real complications. Andrée went into
labor and I took her to hospital but after a couple of hours the labor pains stopped. Dr Moran
suggested that he induce childbirth but wanted approval from both us. Of course we accepted
his advice. The physical problem which necessitated this was that Annette was born with one
leg twisted and stuck over a shoulder. This was straightened but we often wonder whether
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that may have been a contributory cause of her later health problems. About that time I had a
stomach ulcer which slowed me down a little, and necessitated a bland diet. So we decided
to go away for 2 weeks. Betty Hewlett came back in September to help for a couple of
months but preferred not to stay longer.
It was then that Angela Holder, now Angela
Aaronson, came over, at Heather’s suggestion from England and stayed 6 months. She, like
Betty before her had to be picked up at South Station. The next day Andrée and I set off for
a 10 day vacation in Puerto Rico leaving the children in the care of these excellent young
ladies.
We had a good time, staying in a cheap room at $5 a night, and the last 2 days
renting a car at $5 a day and going east to Luquillo beach. We stayed again for $5 in a very
run down hotel on the beach in Luquiillo with half a dozen rooms which had padlocks for the
doors in the rooms. It was owned by a Philadelphia lawyer who was obviously waiting for it
to be bought up by real estate developers - which it has been.
On the way back to the airport
we saw a large pineapple at a roadside stand which we bought for $1. But then we had to cut
it. We bought a machete from the next stand for $1 to cut the pineapple. We took this in our
hand baggage on the airlines back to Boston. No one objected.
We went back to Maine in Summer 1960. This time we were at an inland lake,
Norcross Pond. We were there a full month. That summer Jesse and Louise DuMond took
a bus trip around the Gaspé peninsula in Canada and joined us for several happy days. We
met them at the Canadian border where they had taken a bus down from Quebec, and a few
days later drove them to Bangor for the bus to Boston and Hartford Connecticut where they
stayed with Louise’s niece Jackie Zipf.
In those days we visited Boothbay Harbor and took
a boat out to Squirrel Island and around the harbor. I remember looking carefully at the bow
wave of the boat and comparing the angle with calculation. Cerenkov radiation was just
beginning to be used for particle identification and, of course, the calculation was similar.
The pictures taken at the time of the family did not, of course include Peter who was not born
for another 8 months. But I showed them many years later to my colleague Professor Melissa
Franklin who works on CDF in Fermilab. “Do you recognize anyone in the picture?” “Yes,”
was the reply. “That’s Peter”. Indeed Peter in his thirties looked very much like me in my
thirties.
In May or June that year I had an offer of a Professorship at Stanford. Bob
Hofstadter personally proposed me for the position. It was tempting, and the thought of
working close to Pief was attractive. It also seemed attractive to stay at Harvard where the
CEA was soon to come on line. Vicki Weisskopf thought that I should go to Stanford. ‘It
is better to be number 2 or number 3 in a first class lab” he said, “than number one in a second
class one.”. I pondered it all summer and turned it down. One is never quite sure what is
the ultimate item in making a decision, but I think that if I had not married Pief’s sister in law
I would have gone. There were already signs of jockeying for position in Stanford, and Pief
would have been in an impossible position. I had hoped to be able to join in an experiment
from a distance. When troubles between Harvard and MIT arose later, I specifically wrote
to Pief about 1964 that I withdrew some plans for joint work at SLAC because I did not want
to export our local (CEA) problems of Harvard-MIT disagreements to Pief.
Palaiseau
In 1961 I took a sabbatical leave in France. I had a Guggenheim fellowship and we
also had full salary for the half year. So we took the long planned visit to Hans Halban’s
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laboratory at Orsay. We flew to Shannon and on to Paris, Orly airport. There we were met
by George Bishop and Andrée’s Uncle Serge. We then went to our apartment in a high rise
apartment complex in Palaiseau. It was a little cramped but OK. Unfortunately we
overlooked the sewage plant and the smell often prevented us using the balcony. We set out
at once to get some help for Andrée with the 5 3/4 children. We advertised. The first person
was OK but left very suddenly. The second was a young German girl, Halma. She was very
energetic but she only was available for two weeks. Finally we found a girl from
northeastern France - Raymonde, who had a mass of hair dyed red. She arrived two weeks
before Peter was born and stayed with us the whole time. The hospital where Peter was born
was Hospice d’Archange in Orsay. In view of the short labour Andrée had for four of the
other 5 childbirths, I practiced getting there on time. The route involved crossing the
commuter line, the Ligne de Sceaux, on a grade crossing. That would not seem difficult, but a
train ran every 10 minutes in each direction!
We got to the hospital in time, so that I did not
have to learn a new profession. Peter was born with no trouble, but the doctor did not make it.
The nurse-midwives did a fine job. I was outside in the corridor but the nurses did not want
me in the delivery room.
We bought a brand new Peugeot “Limousine Familiale” for traveling for $1,400. It
could take 3 people in the front and 2 in the back and two jump seats in the middle into which
one could squeeze three children. Before it was available Hans lent me a “Deux Chevaux”. A
very small car. We crammed everyone in it on a spring outing to Fontainbleu. We went
walking on an open hillside area just north of Fontainbleu and almost lost Christopher, then 9
years old. We were walking up a hillside to a path at the top. I don’t know why Chris was
last, but when we got to the path at the top we could not find Chris. I ran around the top and
heard Chris coming up the hill a couple of hundred yards away - he was crying because he had
lost us.
In May that year the French army in Algeria revolted and tried to unseat the De Gaulle
Government, who was trying to make peace with the Algerians. Everyone was concerned that
the French Air Force would support the army. So every airfield was blocked by farm carts and
people so that no air force plane could land. We were a mile off the end of the runway of Orly
airport and at dusk every plane had to land before the runway was shut down and blocked.
Andrée felt very silly afterwards. While cooking supper she heard, on the radio, this man
talking incessantly in rapid French. She turned the radio off. It was De Gaulle with is famous
speech to Frenchmen “Aidez moi!”
In the summer we decided to go to the Riviera to see Meme and Jean. We rented
through an English outfit “Rent a Villa” a villa in Roquebrune, and paid for it. But then we
found it did not exist and they offered us another villa in another place and another time that
made no sense. So Meme then found a villa for us in Menton. A better villa in many ways,
but not such a good view and further from the beach. We left Palaiseau at the end of July.
Raymonde took Annette and Peter by plane at once to Nice where they stayed with Meme and
Jean and the rest set off to Austria for 2 weeks. We stopped for lunch in Nancy, and there we
had “tripes a la mode de Caen”. Unlike the Parisian restaurants, who always seemed to
regard children as a nuisance, the restaurant was nice to the children and the children all
enjoyed the tripe. It was, I believe, the first time they had eaten it.
Then we went on
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through Strasbourg and stayed in a small German hotel in Freiberg. It turned out we were all
in one room! This was not what I had expected but it was OK for one night. The we drove
through the black forest to Lech in Austria where we stayed in the best hotel there. We took
the cable car up to Rufikopf on the east of the little town, and walked down - to the surprise
of the hotel staff and other patrons who had not expected that three year old Elaine would be
able to do so.
Another day we were not so successful. We took the cable car to Oberlech
to the northwewt of Lech walked with a plan to reach another mountain, the Kreigerhorn I
believe, but I had over estimated the energy of the children as I often did. We never reached
the top and we took the cable car down again. Another day we drove to the main railroad
line between Switzerland and Austria and took the train through the 6 mile long Arlberg
tunnel, built in 1884, and on down to Innsbruck and back to Lech. Then we went on down
the Engardine to Italy, with a stop at a small hotel near St. Moritz, and the long drive then
through Milan and Genoa to Menton.
The family spent nearly 2 weeks at Menton, including myself taking the train to the
physics meeting at Aix en Provence for 2 days. It was at Menton that I first met Andrée’s
Uncle Robert (Gaebel) who lived in a little house just outside with his wife, Simone.
Andrée’s two uncles, Serge and Robert had run a small photography store in Paris before 1939
and both gone into the French army when called up in September 1939. Serge was captured in
1940, but Robert threw away his uniform and walked back to Paris and reopened the store. I
presume that many of his customers were occupying German troops. Was Robert, therefore, a
collaborator? After the war, the two brothers got together for six months when they quarreled.
They did not talk again for 40 years when our daughter Annette persuaded Robert to take a
train (from Ceret in the Pyrenees) to Paris to meet his brother.
Such divisions existed in
France for 30 years after the war between those who suffered heavily in the German
occupation and those who, for whatever reason, did not.
.
We put the Peugeot on the train at Nice, said goodbye to Raymonde, Meme and Jean
and then flew to London and on to Boston. In London we met Ann, another young lady found
by Heather Lund, - who came back with us to help Andrée with the children. Again it was a
night flight on a turboprop “Britannia”. But bad weather made it overfly Boston and we went
on to New York. Flying back to Boston on Northeast airlines we circled for nearly an hour
when suddenly the pilot said “I see a gap” and we rapidly went down and landed at high speed.
As we descended Andrée looked back and saw the flight attendants were white as a sheet
We landed OK but later that day a plane overran the end of the runway and ended up in the
mud of the harbor.
Chocorua and other Vacations
In summer 1962 we wondered a lot where to spend a vacation. We liked Maine. It
was cool, and we wanted a sea or a lake that was warm enough for the children to bathe in.
We had seen Squirrel Island in Boothbay Harbor, when we had taken a trip to the sea (with
Jesse and Louise ) in 1960 when we stayed at Norcross pond in Maine. We looked for a rental
on the island. Andrée and I were interviewed by phone to see whether we were “OK”.
Harvard professor Konrad Bloch had been similarly questioned by some group and was being
denied a rental until Professor Bloch got a Nobel prize. Then he became acceptable. But
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that was Felix Bloch’s Nobel prize!
When Konrad got his Nobel prize a few years later, he
commented wryly that at last he felt he belonged!
As a result I knew that being OK meant
“Not Jewish”.
Andrée understood before I did and we politely said that were we no longer
interested. in a rental. We did not want to be a party to anti-Semitic behaviour. We did not
like the rentals that were by anti-Semites so we splurged and went to an old hotel on the island.
I remember there we had a storm and we saw the best aurora borealis that I have ever seen on
land. It was great lounging in a porch chair looking north over the water.
Alas, the hotel
burnt down later that year and the island summer residents did not want another hotel there.
A number of the hotel guests were Jewish and that may have upset the racist owners of the
summer houses.
In summer 1963 we went out to California again to work on a summer study for the
SLAC accelerator and that time we stayed in Pief’s house when Pief and his family were
elsewhere. But in summer 1964 we looked again for a house on the mainland near a lake
with warm water. We found one in Chocorua, N.H. It belongs to the descendants of the
Balch family. Dr Balch had married a descendent of Bowditch, the 18th century sailor and
navigator from Salem, MA. Again we were interviewed by Dr Balch and his sister Mrs Lucy
Putnam at their little house in Cambridge. However, we were never asked anything about
religion or ethnic background and we felt there was no anti-semitism involved although I am
not absolutely sure. We spent a month in Chocorua in each of 1964, 1965, and 1967.
It was a really wonderful time and all the children looked forward to it, and look back
with nostalgia. The trees had been cleared so from the house there was a view of the lake and
Mount Chocorua in the distance. We could go down and by the lake there was a small shed
(boathouse) for small canoe that we could use. In between there were two small houses, one
used by Dr Balch and Lucy Putnam and the other used by Cornelia Wheeler, another sister, and
her husband.
One convenient asset was that the bus from Boston to Berlin, N.H passed
Lake Chocorua so that I could stay at work and go up on Friday night for a weekend and go
back to work on early Monday morning.
Over the years we climbed mount Chocorua by almost every route. On the first time
we went up by the Liberty Trail, 3.9 miles, with a guide estimate of 3 hours and 15 minutes.
Nicholas, 8 years old, grumbled the most and it took us 4 hours or so. On the top we saw a
thunderstorm brewing, and not wanting to be in the open as lightning struck we hurried down
getting back into the woods by the time the storm broke. We almost ran down in the rain,
which took less than 1 ½ hours, jumped into the car and went straight to the village store for
an ice cream.
That may have been the last time I was accused by my children of walking
too fast. Certainly within a couple of years the complaint became “Daddy: why are you so
slow?”.
In 2008 we can walk about 1 mph on a fairly level mountain trail. In 2006 at the
end of a trip in Maine Andrée and I spent a couple of days staying at the Tamworth Inn. We
went round to look at the Balch house. A couple of grandchildren of the Balch’s and their
families were there. Trees had grown up and blocked the view of the lake. The wood
stove, on which many pancakes had been cooked, was there but unused.
In 1968, just after returning from the family trip west to Aspen and Wyoming as
described below, Andrée and I went to the high energy physics conference in Vienna, Austria.
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The Austrians made us very welcome. There were receptions in the Hofbrau and in the
Shoenbrum Palace - and at each one there was an orchestra where Andrée and I could waltz.
We visited a village and were plied with the “vin nouveau”. We were take by train to Melk,
50 miles west, and saw a castle, then down the Danube to another village and a train back.
The conference organizers arranged a block of tickets to see the Spanish Riding School horses.
As Bob Wilson commented as we returned to the hotel, they are the “high energy horses.”
The conference was memorable for many reasons; the ambiance was one and another was the
presentation of the exciting new physics results from SLAC which I admit made me a little
jealous.
In 1969 I took a sabbatical again in the spring. This time I wanted to go to Frascati to
help them get their electron positron storage ring going and learn from Bruno Touschek, as
described later. But Chris and Michael were now in high school and it seemed unwise to
disturb them So I went by myself in January and came back for the family in June.I stayed at
a little hotel in Frascati within walking distance from the lab. I learned enough Italian to be
able to talk to the hotel people, and even translate from English into Italian some letters from
prospective customers.
I came back in late February for a meeting of the Fermilab trustees,
and being a fine day took Nicholas out of school for the day and we went up to Gunstock for a
day of downhill skiing. I reckoned I skied downhill 16 miles that day. It was my last down
hill skiing. I had both a Guggenheim fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship, and they also
paid for some lecturing trips. To Athens, in Greece, and to Pavia before Andrée and the
children joined me.
In June, I came home and the day the children got out of school, we all
set off for England.
We rented a 10 passenger van in London and drove to a small place “Little Abbey” in
Great Missenden. Geoffrey was also taking a year’s leave getting a good start on a PhD thesis
at the University of Leicester and we decided on a family reunion. Several of the Kingston
cousins also turned up. After this, and a brief tour of the Cotswolds, we went to Italy. I
picked up my newly purchased VW microbus in Milan airport, where I had left it 10 days
before, and drove to a summer school on Lake Como. Alas, Andrée picked up an infection in
our hotel in London, and became really sick at Lake Como. We are fairly sure that the source
of the infection was that hotel, because the ceiling of the bathroom fell onto two of our children
in the bathtub. Andrée was taken to a hospital and soon recovered with the excellent care by
the nurses who were nuns. From Lake Como we drove south to Frascati and Grotta Ferrata
where we I had rented a villa and planned to spend the next 2 ½ months. A memorable
overnight stop was at Florence. We stayed at a little hotel “Hotel Medici” and ate dinner late
in the square. We thought the children would be tired and fractious, but the evening was
magical and several remember it still.
I had luckily been able to find a very nice little villa half way between Frascati and
Grotta Ferrata. This had a nice garden and was adjacent to the grounds of one of the major
villas in the town. The local restaurant in Grotta Ferrata was very good and made excellent
pasta. One lunchtime they took away the plate of Annette, who was a slow eater and when
she objected they brought her a brand new dish.
We bought food in the supermarket on the
main square in Frascati and there we also bought wine. But the supermarket had no
refrigerator so we bought milk at the bar!. After a week or so Christopher and Michael
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joined us having come from London by train, with a stop of course at Nice to see their
grandmother. I had told Chris to call us from the station in Rome when they had arrived, and
were about to take the local to Frascati. But he did not understand the telephone system.
He called about three times and I tried to say put 500 lire in, but we were cut off each time.
But bearing in mind my own system some 25 yeras before, I assumed he was catching the next
local and I met him at the station. On another day Pater and Annette were chasing each other
around the garden and crashed into each other. Annette’s teeth made a gouge in Peter’s head.
Although we had to go to the doctor to get stitches in Peter’s head, Annette had the most pain.
One day we invited Etim Etim, who had been Bruno Touschek’s graduate student
understanding radiative corrections, and his family out from Rome and we all ate at the
restaurant in Grotta Ferrata. .Etim and his wife told us about Nigeria. Some 20 years later,
they separated and Etim went back to Nigeria and became science advisor to the President.
The last time I heard from him was when he telephoned and asked would I support him if he
decided to be a candidate for President in the next election. Of course I did but I never heard
from him again, nor did Georgio Salvini. But both Georgio and I were called by a newspaper
reporter who asked whether it could be true that Etim had embezzled some 20 million dollars
in a Brazilian deal. I heard no more and am still not sure whether Etim had changed, or
whether he was being set up for a disastrous fall.
We visited the Vatican on a hot day. There was a long waiting line of 1 ½ hours, so
when we finally got to the Sistine chapel everyone was tired and we were soon pushed on and
could not stay in the chapel more than 10 minutes. Andrée and I were to visit the Sistine
chapel under far better circumstances in 2006. One memorable visit was to the Pope’s
summer palace in Castel Gondolfo. Not far from Frascati. In the undergraduate laboratory at
Oxford I had a young Jesuit, Patrick “Patsy” Trainor as a practical partner one year
(1945-1946). Patsy later got a PhD in Astronomy, and the pope decided to revive the
telescopes in the garden of the summer place which had been installed by a previous pope a
hundred years before. Patsy became one of the pope’s astronomers. A set of offices was
built on the top of the palace and there Rev. Trainor, who I was careful to call Patrick in front
of my children, had the best office I have ever seen. He had a huge picture window
overlooking Lake Albano with Mt. Albano behind. The arrival of the pope at his summer
palace was anticipated the next day and the garden was therefore impeccable. We were shown
an area where some 5,000 Jews had camped in the roughest days of the second world war.
The wall was still blackened by the camp fires. The Jews were not protected by an army but
by the moral authority of the pope. When I hear of complaints of how the pope collaborated
with the fascists I think about this little important fact that he did support the helpless to this
extent..
We took Patrick to dinner and the children, particularly Elaine, were enchanted by him.
Patsy has since died. So have two other Jesuit friends from college days: Samuel (Sammy)
Ross and James (Nibs) Fitzsimons who died in Africa. Alas, the lab staff went on strike, a
“sciopero bianco”, where they came into the laboratory but no work was being done. This
lasted a full year and the lab director did basically nothing. Interestingly, Nino Zichichi told
me later that his technicians, employed from his University of Bologna did loyally come in and
work. But with no functioning accelerator, their work was useless.
So a couple of weeks
later we set off northwards to make a couple of sightseeing trips and spend the rest of the
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sabbatical at CERN in Geneva.
Firstly we headed for Trieste where I had been invited to give a lecture or two at Abdus
Salam’s International Center for Theoretical Physics. We had a brief stop at Venice where
were as disappointed as we had been before. We stayed in a little hotel in the main square in
Trieste and I went back to the institute a few miles to the west. The first day was a fantastic
theatrical event We came out of the hotel and walked across the square to eat breakfast on
the wharf. The whole town was watching as a furious Italian lady was gesticulating and
shouting up at another lady with her head out of the window.
It came to my mind the old
English saying that if you tie an Italian’s hands behind his back he is speechless. But we of
course had to have food. The dinner that night on the wharf was memorable: a whole fish for
the family. The next day we ate at a small restaurant nearer the Institute. During the meal
Chris went out to fetch something from the car and locked the keys inside. We called the
Italian Automobile club, fully expecting them to be able to open the car in a few seconds as
Richard Feynman might have done He opened it, but it took half an hour. My prejudice that
Italians are all good petty thieves was demolished.
Then we drove fast, in one day, across northern Italy to Aosta where we stayed at a
little inn. We spent a couple of days exploring the southern Alps. The first we went north
to Champlorencal and then walked up a valley to the east. The next day we drove to
Breuil-Cervinia in a a valley to the east where we took a cable car up to the pass at Plan
Maison where we could see the southern side of the Matterhorn. We rejected going up the
chair cars to further peaks and after walking on the snowfield for half an hour, we walked
merrily down. Then we drove over the St Bernard Pass and on to Geneva where we stayed in
Hotel Terminus at a special rate of $5 a night each including breakfast. We were 3 weeks in
all in Geneva. Leaving there we drove to Lardy (near Paris) where we all stayed with Victor
and Barbara Round. Then we flew home, sending the car to be loaded onto the boat from
which I picked it up in Newark. Elaine left us in Geneva. She went to Denmark to stay for a
few days with her school friend Kaethe whose parents were spending some time there. She
joined us later in London as we changed planes.
The trips west
I was well aware that Andrée was and is, a westerner and her stay with me in the east,
although we have now been at Harvard for nearly 53 years, was only temporary. I took
opportunities to go west.
As noted above, the first opportunity for the whole family came in
summer 1959 when I spent a summer at Stanford to learn about electron interactions in
preparation for the operation of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator. We rented Sid Drell’s
house while he was away for the summer. We went out west just after I had spent nearly a
month at two conferences; one in London, and the other at the Kiev high energy conference
and a few days in USSR and Nice. Angela Holder came with us. We tried to save money,
because I got no “summer salary” for this trip. We went out on a night flight. On an
American DC7 (non stop from New York) and back on TWA via St Louis, Chicago and
New York. Michael was a little scared (and I was worried) about the flames from the back of
the engines in the DC8 on take off. I had not realized that this was normal, and thought it
was a malfunction. Nicholas was airsick on the TWA flight but recovered a bit waiting on the
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top of the steps of the plane at St Louis.
It was on this occasion that Laurose Becker, Pief’s secretary later to become the wife
of Burt Richter, kindly lent us her “mini-minor” and leaving the children behind with Adèle I
suspect, we went to the High Sierras out of Tuolomne Meadows. We hiked in expecting to
stay many days- maybe a week. We had been told that it did not rain in the summer in the
Sierras, but when we were 5 miles from the road rain clouds appeared and we just made it to
the road at Tuolomne Meadows before the downpour came. We drove east to Mono Lake and
then to Carson pass before returning to Stanford.
We remembered Carson Pass fondly and
went back some 10 years later with the family but without Christopher or Michael. We took
the children one day to the beach - the same beach which I had visited 7 years before with Pief,
Adele and their children. We stopped at the same restaurant on the way back and ate
abalones. Again I was sick on the way back and again thought it was due to motion sickness.
But much later, in 1974, I ate an abalone with Alan Litke in a restaurant in Sausalito, and on
returning to Palo Alto I was again ill. I had eaten abalone three times in my life and was sick
each time. I had a food allergy.
I remember being highly embarrassed in 1959 when we were invited to a party with
some of the young research fellows - Henry Kendall, Burt Richter and others were present.
They spent the time criticizing Bob Hofstadter even though two of them were Bob’s research
fellows. I never understood why they would be so open about their criticism of their boss
although I somewhat shared their view. Pief was the better physicist but I could not ignore
that Bob had, by that time, accomplished more than Pief had at Stanford. Later, about 1962,
Pief asked my advice on how to cope with Bob with whom he had difficult relations. This
meeting was a clue to the problem.
Bob’s own colleagues, and research fellows he had
hired, were spreading bad words about him. But the real issue became clear to me later.
Pief was a brilliant and quick thinker and Bob was a slow, but very thorough thinker. Pief was
a little impatient and when he did not get an immediate answer from Bob on an issue he
assumed that the answer was never coming.
A second occasion came to visit Stanford for a SLAC summer study. We went out in
July 1963. This time we stayed in Pief’s house while Pief and their children were camping
in the Cascades east of Seattle, and then stayed in a house with a swimming pool.
This
summer my father and his third wife - Winnie - felt that it was a good time to visit the USA
for 6 weeks. That meant that they arrived in Boston, on a freight boat, just the day before we
left for Stanford. I had arranged for them a transcontinental train trip. Toronto, Vancouver,
Oakland Los Angeles, Chicago and home via New York. We took them to the train station at
about the same time that we went to the airport ourselves.
One long weekend we camped
at Kings’ Canyon National Park. We returned via Oakland where we picked up Percy and
Winnie with at home our rental car.
The car was full with 4 adults and 6 kids.
Percy
and Winnie added their luggage to the mix. Percy was highly amused when at Oakland
station I threw away some old camping equipment to make room.
I was invited that summer to present the new CEA results at an APS meeting in
Edmonton.
So, leaving the children behind, we flew to Edmonton, and after the meeting
took the Canadian National train to Jasper, Alberta, and drove down to Lake Louise. By now
one no longer had to hike to Lake O’Hara - there was a little shuttle van. . Instead of
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camping as I had done in 1951 we stayed in the lodge. Interestingly, as we waited at Lake
Louise for the van to Lake O’Hara, Andrée thought she saw Abigail Van Vleck. Indeed she
had. We found out later that Abigail and Van (John Hasbrouck Van Vleck) had spent the
previous week at Lake O’Hara.
Van appears in many places throughout these pages. He
was a brilliant and friendly man who did a great deal to make everyone in the Harvard Physics
Department comfortable and at home. He, like myself, loved Lake O’Hara. We both
noticed that in the dining room of the Harvard faculty club there hung a painting of the lake by
Sargent which we loved to point out to visitors. It disappeared one day about 1970, and
when I enquired we were told that it was on loan to an exhibition.
I enquired again after a
few months when it had not returned and was told that it was too valuable to show in the
faculty club - and it was being kept for safety in the storage room of the Fogg art museum.
Van and I crafted a letter commenting that in our naive inexpert view the value of a painting
must have something to do with the number of people who saw it and admired it. The
painting was returned to the faculty club. But when ten years later it went on exhibition
again, Van had died by then and my lone entreaties were inadequate. Andrée and I had a
pleasant two days at Lake O’Hara where I attempted, in vain, to get Andrée to walk on a
glacier. Then the shuttle van took our bags down to the motel at Lake Wapstra by the Kicking
Horse Pass, where we joined them on foot in time to catch the night Greyhound bus to
Vancouver and the morning plane back to Stanford.
Aspen and Wyoming
Andrée and I felt that we should take the children to the Rockies as soon as possible.
Not just to California by flying over the mountains but to the Rockies themselves. In 1968 it
seemed to make sense. Peter was 7. Chris was16. It happened that year there was a
summer study for Fermilab to discuss an experimental program. Bob Wilson decided that it
would be at Aspen. Accommodation at Aspen in the summer was actually cheaper than
around Chicago! We were away from home for 8 weeks in all. We went to Aspen for a
month. We drove out in our Peugeot “familiale”.
We had car trouble from the word go.
We first drove west to State College to see Geoffrey and family. At State College we found
that the water in the radiator was gone. There was a leak in the water pump. So we spent an
extra day getting that replaced. We camped the next night just short of Cleveland and the next
day we stopped by the NASA reactor where we spent 2 hours to see whether it was suitable for
my proposed parity experiment.
We went on and in Illinois it came on to rain. So we left
the main highway to look for a motel. As we went under an underpass, under the ATSF main
line, the road was flooded. We went through a lot of water about two feet deep; slowly and
gingerly. But it flooded our brakes and they did not work properly for several miles so we
drove in low gear and found a motel on the corner of route 66 and I 80. We rented two rooms
each with two double beds for the 8 of us. Then we drove on across Iowa to a campsite on the
river just north of Omaha.
The next morning, water had drained out of the car again.
Auto mechanics in Omaha told us that there was a Peugeot dealer in Lincoln, Nebraska where
there was a Frenchman who understood Peugeots.
The pump was replaced again. The
State College repair man did not grind the pump in to the seat in the engine properly. Then
we drove on. We camped at a somewhat bare and disappointing campsite on the prairie just
south of the Platte We had planned to stop near Boulder to look at WWV which was the radio
time station which interested Chris. But we were late and went on into Rocky Mountain
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National Park where we camped for 2 days just west of Estes Park. Then we went west over
the pass and down to Granby, and west to Kemmerling. Then we went south to Breckenridge
and back over the divide at Climax with its old mines and huge tailings ponds, to Leadville and
then over Independence pass to Aspen.
On this trip the children mostly behaved very well. But as I drove there was often a
lot of noise as the children got bored. They had some copies of Mad magazine and were
continually quoting therefrom. After a particular annoying distraction I confiscated the Mad
Magazine. But I undermined my own authority by being seen reading it at the camp site at
Rocky Mountain National Park!
We were given an old little house in Aspen which was just big enough for us with the 6
children. It was a silver miner’s house, which had lasted 60 years, including many years of
neglect, but we enjoyed it immensely. Alas it has gone now to make room for condos . I
was at the Aspen center every day, but at the weekends we went into the mountains. I had an
inkling of further trouble with the Peugeot, when we tried to climb Castle Peak, which is the
highest peak at 14,000 feet.
We had planned on driving to the end of the dirt road with a
parking lot at 12,000 feet but the car would not do it, so we went up a subsidiary peak instead.
On another weekend we went into the Maroon Bells and took a loop around Willow Lake,
climbing through a pass at 10,500 feet.
We then found that Chris had great trouble above
10,000 feet. But he perked up again very quickly as we dropped down again and back to the
road.
Chris had to take his college board entrance exam and we found it could be done in
Glenwood Springs 40 miles down the Roaring Fork river.. So we went there one Saturday.
In Aspen, Christopher made friends with Danny Drell, son of our friend Sid, and arranged to go
on a hike. To go up the ski lift to the top of Aspen mountain, and walk down the other side to
meet the party at a picnic on the road to Ashcroft. They made an estimate of the time that was
way off; they thought they would be down by 5.30. I estimated 7.30 as indeed it turned out.
But Sid was deeply worried. Danny was a diabetic and had to have regular medication.
Fortunately they turned up happy and healthy and were forgiven.
There was an interesting sideline. The Mayor, a local businessman elected to this
position, wanted to make the town more upscale. He got a rule that no one was allowed to
hitch hike inside the town, and anyone who did would be arrested and jailed. The Colorado
police chief’s association did not like this, but they had to go along. It was reported in the
newspaper that a young man from a small group climbing and camping in the mountains south
of Ashcroft had hitchhiked into town to buy food and supplies and was arrested as he tried to
hitchhike the 7 miles back. The same day I wrote a letter to the Director of the summer
study (Ned Goldwasser), with a copy to the newspaper, commenting that while Aspen was a
fine place for a summer study they should not return unless human rights could be guaranteed.
I commented that I imagined myself being arrested 25 years before and my children arrested in
a few years. Ned attached his own letter pointing out that the summer study had spent $½
million in the town. My letter was published in the local newspaper and the Mayor resigned
the next day. Murray Gellman, in an approving comment said that I should try it on
Breshnev next. When appropriate I do so try to ensure that liberty and freedom exists. Not
always to Murray Gellman’s satisfaction, because Murray is a strong supporter of Israel and in
our view, our view because Andrée agrees with me, he is an overly blind supporter. Murray
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has expressed disapproval of our attempts, to ensure that the Prime Minister of Israel does not
behave like the Mayor of Aspen.
After we were at Aspen for a month we spent three further weeks in the Rockies.
Firstly we went on to Wyoming. Coming up from Rock Springs to Pinedale the car slowed
and slowed. We found that the valves were not working and needed re-grinding. We just
found our way to a camp site by Fremont lake. We were lucky to find a mechanic who had
metric wrenches and I translated the instruction book (which was in French) for him. While
we waited for parts to come from Salt Lake city he lent us his car while he and his wife used
their motor cycle. The family camped on Lake Fremont. A bear came to our campsite one
night and scared Elaine in particular. Andrée and I remained fast asleep. One day Chris and
I went on up into the hills to Elkhart Entrance. This, at 9,000 feet altitude was an entry to the
Bridger Wilderness. As we set off on the walk east we saw that only about 30 people had
signed in that month. When I came back 8 years later it was 30 per day. We went as far as
Hobbes Lake and came back When the car was ready we all went on to the Grand Tetons as
we had planned..
The road went through Jackson, Wyoming. Andrée remembered Jackson from her
1938 trip when she was 10 years old, as a sleepy western town. Not now. There was a
MacDonald’s. It had become a typical tourist town. Andrée wept. We went on through
Jackson and stopped at a ranger station at the Teton National Park. “All camp sites are full”
we were told. But we wanted to do off road camping. “That is different”. We hiked 3
miles north to the edge of Leigh Lake where we camped. Annette in particular was tired.
But when we had stopped, made camp and looked at the sunset over the Tetons to the west we
all brightened up.
We only spent one night at Leigh Lake and hiked back on out. As we
got back to the parking lot, they all looked a happy crowd. An elderly tourist looked at us
and said: “you must have had a wonderful time.” I am not sure how our children remember
it now, but at the time, none of the children contradicted her.
Andrée and I went back to
Leigh Lake in 2001 and at that time we stayed at Jenny Lake Lodge where Andrée and her
family had stayed in 1938.
Returning to our 1968 trip, the next day we went on to
Yellowstone, making a brief tour by car and ending up at a camp site on the road to the east.
Then a camp in the “Bitter Roots”, and on past Wall Drug Store. That was a time when there
were advertisements all over the world such as “3,453 miles to Wall Drug Store”. The hamlet
of Wall on the main road thereby became famous! We looked at the store for 10 minutes and
then on to Chamberlain on the Missouri where we stayed in a motel again and Nicholas got a
shot for his allergies. Then we headed for the Mississippi river at Winona. Then we made
a big mistake.
I dreamed of a beautiful campsite by the side of the Mississippi river where we could
relax and enjoy the running water. The campsite was indeed by the river. But we had to
share it with many thousand bugs of various shapes and sizes. The big ones indeed alarmed
Elaine in particular. She became hysterical - unfortunately with good reason. Christopher
got up and walked around half the night. All of us had a rough night. As soon as we could
we set off to cross the river and drive across Wisconsin to Lake Michigan.
We stopped for
our usual sandwich lunch by a lake. We surprised the locals by having a Massachusetts
license plate. A storm came up near Green Bay and there was a tornado watch but
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fortunately no tornado.
We camped at a park by Lake Michigan. It was a fine site with a
fine evening.
The next day we went up by Sault Ste Marie, watched a couple of boats
passing the “Soo” locks and entered Canada.
The Soo locks are where the waters from
Lake Superior enter into Lake Michigan and is a crucial point in the Great Lakes Waterway.
But they don’t look prepossessing. Elaine told me 40 years later that she was disappointed.
She was hoping for “lochs” not locks. I was hoping for a woodland campsite near Sudbury, or
a lake side site above Parry sound. But it was getting late so we took what we could get.
Alas, Peter lost the tent pegs in the dark.
The next day we passed below Niagara falls and
stayed in a motel again. We were all tired and the unanimous vote was to miss the falls so we
came straight home.
We did not forget the Bridger Wilderness. 7 years later we went out again in 1975.
Chris had left home by then, and Michael decided not to come and stayed at home. That time
we had a GM suburban and drove west faster than we had driven in the Peugeot. We stopped
at Omaha for 3 weeks supply of food. There was a contretemps as we passed Laramie. The
gasoline tank fell down, and was dragging on the road making sparks. We were towed back
into town, and had to wait 24 hours for a new tank to be installed. But it was not all bad.
We found the best Mexican restaurant north of the Mexican border.
Then we went on to a
motel in Pinedale. We stayed a couple of nights and put most of the food and stuff on horses
in a pack train that was headed in to the mountains and they dropped the stuff by Island Lake.
A day’s rest, and we drove up to Elkhart Entrance. We camped there a couple of nights
because Annette and Elaine had colds, picked up no doubt in Laramie and at 9,000 feet they
tend to last longer.
I had a guide book from Appalachian Mountain Club. Maps from the
National Park service. But they said 12 miles from Elkhart Entrance to Island Lake. It was
16 miles. Then we set off with little in our packs. All went well till we got to Hobbes Lake
where we had lunch. Then everyone began to get tired - especially Elaine who was not over
her cold. Just after passing Seneca Lake, Nicholas and I pushed ahead to find our food and
tents that had been dropped by the outfitters, and set up camp. We found the tents and started
to set up. Then the others arrived. Elaine was sick and worn out. Andrée and I were quite
scared because of her sickness. At high altitudes, diseases can move fast.
Elaine had
dropped her pack 3or 4 miles back at Julie Lake and I went back to pick it up. As a result I
hiked about 24 miles that day - all at 9,000 to 10,000 feet. Elaine clearly had a small fever.
I insisted that we light a fire and heat up some soup so that Elaine could have something warm
inside.
We stayed at Island lake 10 days or so. Other hikers came by. A group, with a
guide came to climb Mount Lester, just SE of Island Lake. On the way down, the guide was
below the party, (a no no) and someone dislodged a rock that hit him and broke his leg. One
member rushed back to Pinedale and a group on horses came to take him back. An airplane
flew overhead and dropped splints and a stretcher. Unfortunately the rescue party tied him to
the horse so tightly that when the horse crashed into a cliff beside the path, the leg was broken
in more places! Another party came up with pack horses for Titcomb lakes. On the way
back the packers had picked up a girl whose leg had seized up on the way down Freemont
Peak. Her companion brought her down on his back till they met the pack train. We fed
them all for the night. The pack man showed us how to catch fish - by grabbing them as they
went up a stream under the banks. But we never managed to catch fish this way. Nor were
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our fishing rods we had brought of much use!
We spent a day walking up to Titcomb Lakes and the Ice Lake beyond. Another day
we headed for Upper Jean Lake. I had intended that those of who wanted to do so would
climb Mt Freemont or Jackson Peak the next day but I developed awful mouth sores so we
rested that day. The day after Elaine came with me across Indian Basin to Indian pass on the
continental divide just below Jackson peak. The next day I, Elaine, Nicholas and Carol Anne
crossed the Harrowhead Glacier - I had bought everyone ice axes for the purpose - and went up
Knife Edge just south of Indian pass. We did not get to the top: We chickened out on the
knife edge itself although we had a climbing rope. I had said unequivocally to the children
that if any one of them did not want to walk along the knife edge ridge we would not do so but
would turn back. That, to my mind, is the only sensible procedure for a climbing party.
But it was crowded on Island Lake. Another camper came to use the lake! Our food
supply was going down so that we could then carry the rest on our backs. We headed east
across a pass to another lake, just above Wall Lake, where we saw no one for a week. We
spent one day walking up to the Continental divide. I made a mistake on the way up. The
shortest way was across a snowfield and I led the party that way. But that slowed Andrée
down, because she hates snow fields and glaciers, so we came back a longer way around.
After nearly a week, we headed back to Elkhart Entrance by the side of Wall Lake and along
beside the Pole Creek lakes to Eklund lake.
The last night was on Miller Lake just south of
the main path. It was moderately crowded but Nicholas caught a couple of fish. None of the
rest of us did but a but there a fisherman took pity on our miserable failures as fishermen and
gave us most of his catch. The trout certainly tasted good.
We got back to Pinedale and drove to Rock Springs. There I got the train for
California, where I spent three weeks; first at a lepton- photon conference where Luke Mo
presented the results of our Fermilab muon experiment (insisting on saying things which the
group did not believe and which were not true) and then at EPRI in Palo Alto.
Andrée and
the others drove home. After a couple of weeks I came home for the weekend, and Andrée
flew out with me to Los Angeles, where we rented a car and drove up the coast to Palo Alto for
the last week at EPRI.
It was probably in July 1998 that Andrée and I went again to Jackson. This time there
was a meeting of the American Nuclear Society and we flew in to Idaho, crossed the border
just north of the Tetons, and stayed for 2 days in Jenny Lake lodge. This was expensive and
demanded advanced reservations. Andrée had stayed there with her family in 1936 so it was
nostalgic. The lake and lodge itself were fine but the restaurant was snooty because we were
not regular customers. In vain did Andrée say that she had been a customer for over 60 years!
So that is one less place to return to!. We walked past Leigh Lake, which was as beautiful as
we had remembered and on to Jackson Lake.
In July 2007 Andrée and I went again, on a
special trip, to the Bridger wilderness. We were persuaded to do so by one of my freshman
students whose parents had a house in Pinedale, where they kept llamas to take in tourists into
the mountains.
These animals are more sure footed than horses and can go on rocky paths
not suited for pack horses. Although they offered to take us in to Island lake, at ages 81 and
79 we were not enthusiastic to camp. Andrée had both arthritis and bursitis and it was one
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month after my hernia operation. We preferred a bed.
The highest set of cabins were in
Big Sandy Lodge at about 9,200 feet, not far from the continental divide and the “cirque of the
towers”.
From there we hiked in to higher ground but we found that a 5 miles round trip
was already a stretch. Nonetheless we spent a happy two weeks and Nicholas and Carol Anne
joined us for a couple of days. But it was a warning for me. At that altitude I was getting
out of breath.
That was perhaps a forerunner of my problems with allergic reactions and
pneumonia later that year.
Glacier Park
I have to jump a few years by which time the children had all left home. But Andrée
and I still wanted to see the west when we could.
In 1983, I went to a small summer study
in Snowmass, CO on possible uses of the electron-proton collider being built at DESY in
Hamburg. We rented a car from Denver Airport, for a month. After a week in Snowmass we
went to see Andrée’s niece Carol and her husband of the time, Karl in Delta, CO.. Then we
drove to Idaho where we joined a Sierra club trip for a week in the Sawtooth mountains. And
so on up to West Glacier (Apgar). My older colleague and train buff Van (John Hasbrouck
Van Vleck) had spent his honeymoon there in 1930 or thereabouts.
He did so in what was
then the “proper” way. He took the Empire Builder train from Chicago to East Glacier, stayed
at the lodge (called by the Blackfoot Indians the Big Tree lodge) and then by horse to a couple
of tent camps at Two Medicine lake, Cut Bank, Rising Sun and so to Many Glacier Hotel.
Van had given me his topological map to encourage me.
Glacier Park is now full of visitors. Since the “Going to the Sun” road across Logan
pass was finished, the number of visitors jumped to 1 ½ million a year. Even the back country
camp sites are crowded and access is limited by the National Park Service. In early 1970,
some ten years before our visit, three people had been attacked and killed by marauding
grizzlies in different areas. People had got careless about visiting them. So the National
Park service started a campaign to encourage people to be more careful. Do not feed the
bears. Do not leave garbage lying around. At a back country camp site hang your food from
a tree and always eat at least 100 feet from the tents. Two huts, Sperry hut and Granite Park
hut were closed because their sanitary facilities were considered inappropriate. So we
walked one day toward the Granite park hut. from Logan Pass along the highline trail toward
the Granite park hut. Alas, on this path I lost Van’s map.
I hope the bears made full use
of it. The next couple of days, we started our kike at Lake MacDonald, camped beside the
Sperry hut, and crossed the Continental divide at Gunsight Pass. At the last campsite we
became aware of a bigger danger than bears. If you leave your boots outside the tent, a
porcupine may eat them. This happened to another camper. Fortunately it was only a mile or
two to hobble out to the main “Going to the Sun” road.
We hiked with him to the road and
we hitch hiked back across Logan pass to our parked car 30 miles away. While walking
along I made a calculation of the risk of being attacked by bears. The risk depended on the
group of people considered to be at risk. This example has been very popular among
students and is, of course, in our book on Risk-Benefit Analysis (ref 717).
The next couple of times we visited Glacier park were before or after a visit to the
summer meeting of the Bioelectromagnetics Society in Kalispell. We flew to Kalispell,
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rented a car and were able to dive around. On one or another of these trips we stayed in one
of the huts just west of Many Glacier Hotel, now called by the grandiose name, Swiftcurrent
Motor inn. On one we hiked north from the Many Glacier road and camped a couple of
nights returning by the path and tunnel through the Ptarmigan ridge. Van and Abigail had
been through that tunnel on horseback some 50 years before. On that occasion we tried
unsuccessfully to eat at the Many Glacier hotel, but the electricity was out. But the next day I
had to fly back to Washington to testify in favor of the “Integral Fast Reactor” at Argonne
National Laboratory, west, at Idaho Falls.
It was the Senate Energy Committee chaired by
Senator Bennett of Louisiana. Senators Kempthorne of Wyoming and Craig of Idaho were
members and were there. Senator Craig, later to become well known because of a little item
of foot tapping, made a point of saying that “Professor Wilson has made a big sacrifice to
come here. He has come straight out of the wilderness.” The Senate Committee was
positive but the Senate as whole was not. In particular my own senator, John Kerry was
actively opposed the ANL plans and would not even acknowledge my letter to him.
We went again to Glacier park in August 2008. This time it is a special visit.
Andrée had a new hip prothesis and infection and we chose to be nostalgic for what we feared
would be a last time.
The park hotels and lodges get booked a long time ahead so we were a
little constrained because I only booked in April. But we found a small room available for
three nights in August and planned a vacation around them. We came in, as one should, by
the Empire Builder train from St Paul.
We stayed one night at Glacier Park Lodge at East
Glacier, the park entrance. This has big pine trees in the impressive main lodge, giving it an
Indian name the Big Tree lodge. Then we spent 2 nights at the Prince of Wales hotel in
Waterton Park, Alberta, before spending 3 nights in Many Glacier hotel.
Neither of us
have the energy that we had before and I remember with sympathy Van’s remark he made
several times. At age 70 he had a heart problem with a pacemaker, but still loved the
mountains. But he was no longer allowed to go to many of his previous haunts by car,
whereas when he was a vigorous 30 year old the roads were put in, so that less active persons
could also enjoy the mountains.
Berkeley
The above discussion of Glacier National Park bypassed, in time, other trips west.
In 1973 Andrée wanted to go to California again, and I was unwilling, for emotional reasons,
to spend time at Stanford. But the opportunity came in the summer. We were still working
on muon scattering at Fermilab so I arranged a complex trip. I was to spend a month in
Berkeley giving lectures at a summer school on energy at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
arranged by Bob Budnitz. We, minus Christopher and Michael, drove to Fermilab. I stayed
in Aspen East; a lodge created by putting two farmhouses together which made a housing
office with half a dozen rooms above. Nicholas, Elaine and Annette were invited by Jane
Wilson to stay in their old farm house on the site, and Andrée, and Peter stayed in the Aurora
Hilton, now Aurora Best Western on North Farnsworth Avenue. I discussed physics and the
experiment for 2 days. Then, leaving the car at Fermilab we took the train from Aurora west
to Oakland.
We traveled in coach of course, but the children spent much of the time in the
dome car talking with whoever would talk. Then just as we were leaving Wyoming, in
Evanston, the train came to a halt. There had been a derailment of a freight train ahead.
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There was great excitement in the family. We saw the breakdown train pass on the way to the
wreck. Then 12 hours or so later we moved again and slowly moved past the wreck.
We arrived at Oakland nearly a day late. The little house we had rented in Berkeley
was not available for a day, so we rented a car, Andrée went to Los Altos with the children
and I stayed a couple of nights with Bob Budnitz before we all got together in the house on
Euclid Avenue, a mile north of the University. It was a nice house, high enough so that it
was often in the fog in the morning. We had a fine view over the bay to San Francisco,
Alcatraz and the Golden Gate bridge. We enjoyed ourselves. One weekend we went down
to Pasadena to see Jesse who was then in a nursing home after an operation for a hernia and
hemorrhoids. . He was very week, and we all remember that Louise was not very
welcoming and showed the children other patients who were dying.
We went on to a lunch
at a Mexican sidewalk restaurant which was excellent, and then to Malibu where we visited
Andrée’s family’s friend Ethel Kingsbacher who was then a widow.
Then back to Berkeley.
Another time, Andrée and I remembered our rip to Carson Pass some years before and we took
everyone there and camped 3 nights at the 4th of July lake. I thought it was a great weekend.
It was somewhat marred by a group of four young hooligans who were shooting. We could
not tell what they were shooting at, but believe it was with live ammunition. There was no
ranger to report it so we let it go.
We began the way back by driving to Denver. We again camped. The first camp
was at Donner Pass, near the railroad line, where during the night we thought that every train
was coming through the tent. Then through Nevada, with too long a stop to look at old trains
in Ely, and arrived at Humboldt national Forest just after it closed. We camped in the next
hills somewhere. The next day to the Arches National Monument and on to Aspen where
there was another Fermilab summer study. By this time Aspen had got more prosperous and
our little house of 5 years earlier had been replaced by a large condominium. We spent a
week there in a “condo” over the water of the “roaring fork”.
Leaving Aspen by way of the
Independence pass and Salida, we looked at the hanging bridge by which the D and RGW goes
through the canyon and camped at Canon City.
At Canon city we stopped at a restaurant for
breakfast we waited ½ hour to 3/4 hour to get a menu and gave up! So we ate elsewhere and
then drove north to Cripple Creek where we went down an old gold mine. Then we went on
to Woodland Park. The next day we drove to the Denver railroad station for the train back to
Chicago. Leaving the car at the station we had planned to leave a number of old camping
items there too. But the children said that we could take them. We had ½ hour before the
train left. But we had seats in the front and had to carry the stuff 10 cars or so. I thought
Nicholas was going to miss the train as it left, but he got on a car further back and walked
forward.
So we got back to Fermilab, collected the car and then drove home.
UK and Vienna
In 1976, we heard that my father, Percy Wilson, had lung cancer and was dying. We
resolved that we would pay for those of the children who wished to do so to come to England
to visit him. We went over in July with Peter for a three week period.
Peter took his
bicycle and bicycled around the south of England. Andrée and I decided to walk in Cornwall.
We took the train to Penzance and stayed in a B and B. Then a bus to Lands End, and we
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walked east by the northern cliff path. Two days later we were in St Ives. Then we took a
bus around the bay where the path was less interesting. Then we went back to the path and
walked to Portreath.
I had sprained something so we rested a day. I spent that day lying on
a sofa at the B and B. Then we went on by bus and train to Redruth, Bodmin Road, Padstow
and a ferry across the bay. By a mixture of hitch hiking and walking we reached Tintagel.
King Arthur’s castle was less interesting than I had imagined it to be when I was there at the
Scout camp in August 1939.
Then we hitch hiked back to Bodmin Road and took the train
back to Oxford.
It was on this trip that I first met Sir Richard Doll, then Regius Professor of Medicine at
Oxford University. I had lunch with him at Christ Church and went up to his laboratory.
We looked up cancer statistics and the application of them to the multistage model Sir
Richard had developed. Although my father Percy had stopped smoking at age 43, some 43
years before, it was a 3 to 1 probability that the cancer was caused by his smoking.
While in
UK I telephoned Professor Berry, a Canadian who was the world expert on lung cancer at the
time. I had met when he visited the Harvard cyclotron. He convinced me that at his age any
treatment of the lung cancer would be uncomfortable and barely increase his life expectancy.
The unequivocal recommendation was to do nothing. In the US I talked to Marcia Angell,
Editor of NE Journal of Medicine and Michael Goitein’s wife at that time. “He is lucky that
he is in England where they don’t try heroic treatments which only make him uncomfortable”.
For reasons unknown to us, Winnie did not want him to know he had lung cancer.
I suspect
he did know but played along and said he had a weak heart. Because I did not want him to
find out and be angry that he was not told, I talked to his physician and asked him to be sure
that if he found out he would be told that I had assured myself that he was getting the best
possible treatment.
Interestingly, Percy survived 18 months after diagnosis which is
unusually long for an octogenarian. Part of this may be due to the visits to a “spiritual
healer” in Aylsbury who eased his pain. Interestingly as in 2009 we are studying survival
after cancer is diagnosed, we find that for lung cancer there has been no improvement in 25
years.
The day before we left Oxford on this trip I had hoped that we could take Percy and
Winnie to dinner at the Bear Inn in Woodstock which I knew he would enjoy.
At the last
moment Alison had to cancel everything because of a problem in her schedule and we all
went to a small, not very good, fish and chip place on Walton Street.
This was the last time
Andrée saw Percy. She was very disappointed. I fortunately was able to take Percy and
Winnie, and I believe Alison, to the Bear Inn a few months later in February 1977 on one of
my trips to work with Tom Quirk and his analysis of the muon scattering data, They all
enjoyed it. But Andrée was disappointed that she was not able to say goodbye to Percy in
person. Percy knew that these were his last days (he died on April 30th 1977) , and was
insistent that Andrée take the old writing desk that was my mother’s little writing desk. This
is not a desk in the modern fashion but a little 3 foot wide “escritoire”.
We sent that across
the Atlantic. I was also given Grandpa Thomas Wilson’s memoires that he had written in his
own hand and my mother’s account books from the 1920s. Geoffrey put them into computer
text and all the family have a copy. These inspire me in this task.
The next year I was invited to give a talk on the world’s energy issues at a meeting of
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the Young President’s Association in Vienna and I took Andrée.
A week before we left I
got the news we had been half expecting. Percy’s cancer had led to a blood clot and death
from a heart attack while in his chair.
So we advanced our schedule and took the plane
that night to London. I did not have time to book a hotel. We drove to Oxford as soon s we
landed and turned up at the Vicerage B and B on Banbury Road about 9 am or 10 am.. I had
stayed there several times when visiting the Clarendon Laboratory across the street. I had also
taken Percy and Winnie there for dinner. As we walked in the owner said “I was expecting
you. We were sorry to read in the Oxford Mail about your father’s death”. It was nice that
we, and Percy, were recognized.
Percy’s body was cremated in the Oxford crematorium
and the ashes scattered in a small grove of trees.
TMI
One Wednesday morning in April 1978 the Three Mile Island accident occurred.
Bob Budnitz was at that time Director of Research in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and
at 11 am he called a dozen friends to tell us what he knew. I remember a part of the
conversation. And then at 5.45 am “they turned off the primary coolant pump”. ‘they did
what?” I replied. Bob repeated himself so I asked: “Whey did they do that?” “We don’t
know”. That was the step that made a partial meltdown inevitable. I swung into action. I
called other friends. I called the TV stations. Our friend Dr Leo Beranek, was at that time
running TV channel 6 in Boston got me, and Bill Webster in the Department of Radiology at
MGH to be alone on the 11 pm news without advertisements. I had called Bob Budnitz at
10.45 and got the latest NRC press release so we were indeed up to date. I noted that not one
newspaper even got the units straight in discussing the accident. They confused Rems and
milliRems and confused R/hr and R. Not one, not even the Associated Press, quoted the
accurate NRC press releases.
Soon thereafter I was invited to brief journalists in Zurich which I did on my way to a
meeting on our parity violation experiment in Grenoble.
Then in early May I was invited to
Leningrad to discuss parity violation experiments with Vladimir Lobashov. Vladimir had
looked at the polarization of the gamma ray from n-p capture in the research reactor at
Gachina. I had signed an agreement with “scientists for Orlov and Sharansky” not to visit
USSR or invite a Soviet scientist to our laboratories until Orlov and Sharansky were released.
Andrée wanted to come with me so we resolved to violate the promise but to seek out
refuseniks while there.
We knew that they were dismissed from their jobs and denied
access to journals, so we took a suitcase full of journals to give to them and resolved generally
to help them.
.
Our visas for the USSR only arrived by mail on the Saturday morning - and we left on
the Saturday evening with non changeable and non refundable airline excursion tickets.
Boston-Glasgow-Copenhagen and then Copenhagen-Leningrad. I noticed that the visa was
incorrectly written - for arrival on the Wednesday instead of the Sunday. I believe now that
small mistakes such as these were usual for the USSR embassy and were deliberate. It gave
authorities a legal reason for giving you trouble later if they wished to do so.
We arrived
about 5 pm at Leningrad. The passport people left us till last and were giving us a hard time.
The soldier called his boss - a Captain. I explained the error and then I pulled out all the stops
in my request. My rule with all bureaucrats of any country is to make it harder for them to
say no than to say yes. “I understand that we have created a problem that will take time to
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resolve. But can you please tell Vladimir Nazarenko, Stalin prize winner, who is waiting for
us, that we have arrived and will be delayed. He can then also tell Pietr Kapitza, Hero of the
Soviet Union and Nobel Prize winner that we will not be in Moscow on time.” He went
outside and the conversation (according to Vladimir) went like this. “Who is this man
Nazarenko?”. “I am Nazarenko”. “Your friends Wilson from America are here”. “Good”.
“But their visa says they are coming on Wednesday”. “But I invited them for today”. “But
the visa is only valid for Wednesday.” “But I invited them for today. We could ask them to
go home and come back again Wednesday but that seems stupid.” “Yes it would be stupid”.
So the captain let us in.
I found out later that a couple of weeks before a journalist had
arrived three days before the date on his visa. The police took him to his hotel room where
he was confined for the intervening three days.
We spent a week in and around Leningrad and Gachina. Myself mostly in Gachina
and Andrée was escorted by a guide. Andrée asked to go the botanic gardens. There she
met a man whose experience showed a resilience in face of adversity that led the residents of
Leningrad to be admired the world over. He had just written a thesis on tropical plants and
then in September 1941 all the greenhouses were destroyed and there was no heating in the
winter. This scientists kept one particular plant under his coat each winter (41-42, 42-43, one
43-44) till the siege was over. It survived.
It was, I believe on that visit that I was taken to
the famous cemetery in the north of Leningrad and was shown the book in which they
inscribed the names. There were no names in a certain period of cold weather. But I believe
it was February 15th 1942 that the entry simply read: “on this day 15,000 people were buried
here”. They had frozen to death in the preceding weeks and been picked up as the thaw came.
Half way along the road from Leningrad to Gatchina is a monument by the side of the road
with a tank. It was the limit of the German advance. I asked to stop and look and
contemplate the horrors about which I had thought so much when I was 15 years old at school
when these things were happening. Fortunately they were not happening to me.
In Gatchina one older scientist turned out to be an admirer of Andrée’s father. We
had the usual long lunch with vodka (a habit Gorbachev broke later). On the second or third
day I was taken to Petrodvoretz. This was a summer palace of the Tsar, destroyed by the
Germans and rebuilt by the Russians, including the gold leaf.
Andrée joined us by
hydrofoil from Leningrad.
We came back to Leningrad by a hydrofoil boat. I never went
on a hydrofoil in the USA but the next year we went from Kowloon to Guangchow on one.
I also kept our promise to ourselves and telephoned some refuseniks (from a public
phone). We went out to see them at a new restaurant just opened on the edge of the harbor.
Built by the Finns it was to be ready for the Olympics the next year. There we met Victor
Goldfarb and his wife Elena and friends.
Victor was born about 1928. If I understand
aright, his father was a Bolshevik, but Jewish.
Victor had recently lost his job. He was
head of a small plasma research laboratory where a few other Jews worked. Following the
1973 agreement that Russian Jews who wanted to do so were allowed to leave (ostensibly to go
to Israel). Several asked to go and Victor put no obstacle in their path. The authorities felt
that Victor’s laboratory was definitely “unpatriotic” and shut it down. Now Victor, at age 53
or so was out of a job. And he was Jewish. After repairing central heating boilers for awhile
he applied to leave himself and was leaving 14 days later. He was not allowed to take out his
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scientific papers, nor was his wife allowed to take her jewelry, and only 100 roubles.
I
agreed to mix his papers with mine and Andrée agreed to wear Elena’s jewelry. But, we
warned the Goldfarbs that if we were questioned by passport control we would say exactly
what we were doing and explain it. We would do our best, and as noted later we succeeded,
not to be questioned, but made no guarantee. Victor did not have all his papers and we agreed
to meet in Moscow 2 days later. That night, on Thursday evening, at exactly 6 pm, I was to
walk northwards outside Oktoberskaya metro station and Victor walked south. I followed
him around the corner into a car driven by his brother David, a distinguished biologist and
geneticist. After going round the block to be sure he was not followed, David handed me
some papers. As Victor said some 10 years later, “You did not know whether I was KGB”.
True. But one does what one has to do.
That Tuesday evening Vladimir Lobachov and his wife entertained us to dinner at the
Astoria hotel - once known as known as St Petersburg’s best and still good.
We had tried to
keep our visits to refuseniks quiet. We telephoned from public phones in busy places, and met
“on the fly”. But the KGB must have known. Lobachov asked us to keep very distinct our
social visit from our official visit. As usual there was a Russian singer with an overly loud
amplifier. Much was western music with Russian words. It was hard to talk. On a nearby
table a lone man was sitting. It turned out that he was from Finland. He was obviously
inebriated. He then fell sideways. A waiter came along and propped him up. He fell
sideways again. So a couple of waiters carried him up to bed. It seems that Finland had
very strict regulations about drinking, so that busloads of Finnish tourists would arrive in
Leningrad for the weekend “on the bottle (or bottles).” This was one of these thirsty tourists.
We took the 11.59 train, the Golden Arrow, to Moscow. We were then told the reason why
the train had always left at 11.59 and not midnight. If the train had left at midnight or later
the bureaucrats would have not been able to claim the previous day in their expense accounts.
The first day we were in Moscow we went out to Dubna - by train. It was now a
faster train than the one I had taken in 1964 since the line was electrified. Andrée wanted to
walk by the river - by herself - while I was giving my lecture. But her “minder” had orders to
go with her. So our host at Dubna told her to get out of the car quickly as we came to a
railroad grade crossing and he drove across just as the gates closed. Andrée disappeared fast.
I had to give two talks back to back - one on the TMI accident and the other on muon
scattering. The lecture room was packed.
Just before the interval a man muffled in a heavy
overcoat came and sat in the front row. It was Bruno Pontecorvo. “I have a fever of 103
degrees F”, he said, “but I had to come ans say hallo to you” It was the last time I saw Ponte
before he died. I never had the chance to ask him after it became possible for him to speak
openly, and explain why he left England in 1950. None of my Russian friends knew either.
In my talk about TMI I referred to Academician Alexandrov’s statement that “such an accident
could only happen in America where they put profits ahead of safety”. I emphasized that this
was a political statement and if the engineers and scientists believed it they would be doomed
to have a serious accident within 10 years. Unfortunately I was right.
The V.I. Lenin
Atomic Energy Station at Chernobyl blew up in April 1986.
Then in Moscow we were invited to lunch by Pietr and Anna Kapitza in their house at
the Institute for Physical Problems where I had given a seminar in 1965 - some 12 years
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before. Afterwards I was taken around the laboratory by Sergei and Andrée was given a
ride around Moscow by Anna in Pietr’s bright blue Mercedes (which he had bought with his
Nobel Prize money). And then Sergei invited us to dinner in his apartment where he had also
invited the Siberian economist (of Armenian descent) Aganbeghian.
Andrée commented to
Tanya Kapitza that we had been “watched “ all the time and was there a possibility of going to
the country and walking somewhere. “Yes” she said. ”I am going to our dacha tomorrow
and you can come with me”. So on the Friday, I believe, we were dropped on the edge of a
woodland. “Our dacha is 5 km over there. I will see you at lunch”. We almost got lost but
arrived for lunch. There was also Tanya’s father, Dr Damir, who had been head of the main
Moscow hospitals and had been one of the 40 physicians at Stalin’s bedside as he died. He
was also the physician who met, at their airport, America’s foremost heart surgeon who had
arrived in an effort to treat Landau after he became a vegetable in his car crash on the road
from Moscow to Dubna. Dr Damir was originally Turkish. He had three daughters who
inherited his dacha - the one in which were eating. We were to see it more often later.
After lunch we were taken to Pietr’s dacha a mile away where we met Pietr and Anna again,
and saw Pietr’s laboratory that he had built during his exile, and then back to Moscow.
I had been trying several times to reach Andrei Sakharov on his telephone. But each
time I called and spoke English the line went dead. But I figured that even such automatic
machines must get a cup of tea or coffee sometime so I went on trying. So at about 11 that
night we got through and we met Andrei Sakharov for the first time as described later in a
special section about Sakharov . One of the first things Andrei said was “I assume that
everything said in this apartment is recorded.”. That makes it easy. You don’t have to
wonder. But I resolved to leave Moscow by the next available airplane. Fortunately I was
prepared. We were scheduled on an Aeroflot to Paris on the Tuesday, but it flew every day.
As a result of my leaving early in my 1965 trip, I also had the telephone number of the
dispatcher of foreign flights in Aeroflot so at 4 in the morning I phoned to change the
reservation.
At 7.30 I called our “minder” and asked if he could get an Academy car to go
to the airport because we had to leave early. He protested that the Academy travel office was
closed and it would be impossible to change the ticket. He was shaken when I told him it was
already changed, and he actually shook all the way to the airport. At the airport the young
passport control officer was on a dais looking down on us. He ruffled through mu passport
with its Chinese and Saudi visas, very puzzled. Then he ran his finger down a list on the dais
in front of him. We were not (yet) on the list. Then he rang a bell. I froze and was
speechless. The Captain came around and did the same thing - ruffling through the pages of
the passport. Finally Andree found her voice. “ Is there a problem?” “No!” said the
Captain. Shut the passports and we were allowed to proceed. “We are home free, “ said
Andree. “Not until the wheels touch the ground in Paris (Orly) will we be free”. We
passed in the “duty free store”. “Beriozka shop”. A tea cosy of a lady looking just like the
little lady who gave out the keys at our hotel - the Academy hotel. We bought her and have
her still.
.
We arrived in Paris and were nervously exhausted. The capitalist US airlines would
not let us leave on the next plane because the required 14 days minimum stay had not passed.
So we rented a car and went down and collapsed in Lardy with Victor and Barbara.
There is
an epilogue to this story. In about 1983, David Goldfarb met an American journalist, Nicholas
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Daniloff, outside the Metropole Hotel and gave him some papers. They were both arrested
and Daniloff was taken to Lublianka jail.
When I read about this in the New York Times,
I immediately thought: “This could have been me.” David was asked to testify against
Nicolas saying that he was a spy b ut David reused. David’s request to leave Russia for
leukemia treatment in France, I believe, was refused. They were both released later, largely
due to the efforts, I understand, of Armand Hammer. I was invited to a welcoming party for
David, and Yuri Orlov, in the USA but that coincided with a party, in October 1986, that
several graduate students gave for me in Harvard to celebrate my 60th birthday. Since then I
have met Nicholas Daniloff several times at lectures about Russia at Harvard University.
In May 1981 I went on leave again, this time in CERN. I went to work on the UA1
detector for the P-Pbar colliding beam that Carlo Rubbia was working on. I also arranged, in
the fall, to give a course of lectures in Grenoble. We rented a small apartment in Geneva.
Almost at once we had to come back, to St Louis, for the wedding of Elaine to Bradley
Farnsworth.
But Andrée and I made a number of trips. Our big trip was a walking tour
in August in Scotland. It rained every day. I had made many B and B reservations for the
tour from Geneva. We flew to England, saw Laurie and Alison in Grendon Underwood.
Laurie was not feeling well but we then went on as planned.
We took. a night train to
Inverness and then a small train with an old observation car, built for the Great Western
Railway, on the end on the line to Kyle of Lochalsh. That was a fun trip. We got off at
Plockton, just before Kyle of Lochalsh. On the second day we went to the pub and found a
fisherman who took us on his boat the next day, across the loch to a small landing with a path
over the moor to a B and B in Applecross. There was a beautiful view at sunset across the
Inner Sound to the Island of Raasay. The next day we walked on to Kenmore. The landlady
in Kenmore was surprised to see us. When I had telephoned ahead, I said I was calling from
Geneva. The landlady misheard and was anticipating a black couple from Jamaica!. From
Kenmore, it was a one hour walk to the main road, where a car picked up us hitchhikers and
took us past Kinlochleven to Gairloch. It was at Gairloch that World War II convoys of
merchant ships would assemble to cross the Atlantic. Near here was an interesting botanic
garden which included palm trees. Here and in Plockton the climate was warm enough to
sustain them.
Somewhere here we took a boat across the loch to Ullapool, passing by
“anthrax island” where experiments on anthrax were conducted in World War II. In Ullapool
I was impressed by the unloading of herring from the trawlers. They were shoveled out of
the holds by construction shovels, and of course a few fell, to be picked up by scavengers, both
birds and people. Then a bus to Lochinver where in the evening we saw the fish warehouses.
We were disappointed that all these fine fish coming in, both in Ullapool and
Lochinver, that we could not find such fish to eat in any B and B or restaurant. The lodging
houses did not supply us with fresh fish. We just were served the British “Fish-n-chips”.
Then we took a bus to the road intersection at Skiag bridge and changed to a “Post Bus”, to
Kylekin. Post buses are a unique Scottish experience. The Royal Mail had small vans to
deliver the post which also took 4 or so passengers. From Kylekin we walked, in the rain of
course, by Loch Led Veinch to Loch More. There we waited in the rain for the Durness bus
which we took as far as Laxford Bridge, connecting with the post bus which we took to Tarbet
- our next stop. Our destination was the Island of Handa - a bird island. As we walked
from the landing where the little rowboat took us the next day to the main cliff we were almost
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immediately attacked by a low flying Skua. I then became aware why the RAF had named
one of their WWI fighter aircraft the Skua. Indeed it was aggressive.
When I was an “air
scout” in 1941-1943, I was in the Skua patrol. Maybe that is where I get my aggressions
from. It is fascinating to see the different levels on the cliff each with its different birds.
Alas, the puffins has left for the mid Atlantic three weeks before.
After 2 nights at Tarbet
we took the Post bus back to Kyelekin and a B and B across the ferry. Then a bus the next
day to Lairg on Loch Shin which we reached at noon. We had a mile to walk to the railway
station. Instead of waiting at Lairg, we took the train in the opposite direction to Golspie on
the North Sea, before picking up our train south to Inverness. It was still too early for the
night train to London so we took a local to Aviemore where, while waiting, we at last had the
fish we wanted - a fine local trout. It was at Aviemore that my colleague Bob Pound and
his wife Betty had a memorable experience on his sabbatical year in UK in 1951. The
landlady would not let them pay by travelers check. “I don’t take any sort of check.” “But I
do not have enough cash with me.” “Just pay me the next time you come.”
Then we went on to Worthing to see several of my relations, mother’s siblings Aunts
Birdie, Ruth, and May and families. It was the last time we would see Auntie May because
she died 6 weeks later. She was probably 99 years old. On leaving Gatwick to return to
Geneva I called Laurie. We learned that he had been diagnosed with pancreas cancer and was
due for surgery within a couple of weeks.. Andrée and I resolved to return to support Alison
when the surgery occurred. A week or two later we flew to Gatwick and took the train to
Victoria and taxi to Hammersmith Hospital. I remember the surgeon talking to us after the
operation.
The cancer had spread to the liver and all he could do was to bypass the liver so
that Laurie could live a few weeks longer. He told us that it was an awful day. All three of
his patients were in trouble. One was a son of King Hussein of Jordan and had broken open
his spleen. He was patched up in Jordan but the spleen was heavily infected so King Hussein
had him flown to the best available surgeon in UK who incidentally was Jewish.
The
Jordanian prince recovered, but Laurie did not. Alison was in a bad state and we drove her
back to Grendon Underwood.
A week later I went back to England and Hammersmith hospital.
I took the
opportunity to call on Dr. Mary Catterall who was using their 5 MeV cyclotron for neutron
therapy.
She was over optimistic about her results but had persuaded the government to
fund a 70 MeV cyclotron at Clatterbridge in Cheshire.. As far as I know, the Clatterbridge
cyclotron has not been used for neutron therapy but is excellent for eye and small head tumors.
I mentioned all of this to Laurie who was very interested. Then in a characteristic way he
showed that he was still ”with it”. “ I hope you are collecting the receipts so that you can
charge the whole trip against income tax.” I made two more trips in October and November
to see Laurie. I had been on a trip back to Harvard for a few days and doing something or
other, and had a call that Laurie wanted to see me. So I called British Airways, booked on
the flight that night and an hour later was at the airport. It was still 1 1/4 hours before flight
time. They would not let me on. Perhaps they had over booked. The British Airways staff
were lackadaisical and unhelpful. “We can get you on a flight, via Zurich, that gets you in to
London by 6 pm tomorrow.” - 11 hours late. There was no offer of denied boarding
compensation. So I went to the next counter and booked to London via Dublin arriving at
noon, only 3 hours late in Headington. By that time Laurie was in a hospice in Headington
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and was glad to see me. On the previous occasion I had seen him he did not seem to understand
everything. He now asked whether I knew that he was dying.
He was incapable of
taking it in before.
I had a question to ask him. Many spiritualist friends wanted to come
and say “Goodbye” to him. As the drafter of the “Fraudulent Mediums Act” of 1951 he was
a hero and loved by many of them. But knowing Alison’s dislike of Spiritualism these
friends and admirers were reluctant to offend her and asked me what to do. Colin, in his
grief, was saying that the cancer was God’s punishment for being a heretic. What did Laurie
want? What was I to tell his friends? Laurie thought a moment and said “let them come”.
So about 20 did.
In November I was giving some lectures on energy in Strasbourg for the US State
Department.
Andrée and I left Geneva on Saturday morning and drove slowly through the
mountains.
I lectured on Monday and Tuesday morning in Strasbourg and then was given a
phone message. Alison had tracked me down. Laurie was calling for me. At moments like
these one’s priorities are very clear. We canceled the afternoon lecture and we drove to
Dunkerque for the ferry to Dover. We reached Headington about 2 am and the staff put us up
in an empty room. Laurie perked up when we arrived. We spent two whole days in Oxford
with Laurie. Laurie died the day after we left. He had perked up and used his energy for this
last meeting with us.
We drove down to Southampton and took the night boat Southampton to Le Havre and
the by car back to Geneva. Just after we got to the apartment 3 young people from Australia
turned up. A son and daughter of Eleanor (née Milne) and Richard Maddever. They were
traveling round the world with a friend. The Australians stayed with us two days and we
drove them out to the Jura for lunch. They cheered us up immensely.
I was due back in US for a meeting the next week on our proposal for
neutron-antineutron oscillations at Oak Ridge. That was postponed a day so that we could
go to Laurie’s funeral at the Grendon Underwood church.
Immediately after the scattering
of the ashes next to my father’s at the crematorium in Headington, we drove to London and
took the last plane to NY.
Andrée went back to Boston and I went on to Knoxville. We
went back to Geneva 2 days later.
I did not forget that British Airways had denied me boarding and took them to small
claims court, suing for the maximum $1,200. The manager of the Boston office responded
personally at the court hearing. After we had waited and I won the judgement, I think he had
spent over 3 hours. It was, perhaps, the longest time that he had ever spent listening to a
customer complaint. There was a brief accelerator run in December 2001 for P Pbar collisions
and then CERN shut down for Christmas for a month. Andrée and I spent Christmas in
Nice with Meme and Jean Baptiste Then on we flew to Rome and on to Cairo.
As often
happens one checked bag must have been opened and a couple of things removed. Was that
at Rome? Or Cairo? It could have been either. It was the first time I had been to Egypt
and we prepared to enjoy ourselves.
I was officially giving lectures on physics, and energy
issues, for the State Department as I had at Strasbourg. I had already met the Chairman of
Egypt’s Atomic Energy Commission, Dr Ezzat Abdelaziz, in Erice where he had attended a
summer course I had given with Fernando Amman So we were well looked after.
In
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Cairo we were taken, of course, to the Pyramids and a “son et lumière” show by the great
Sphinx. Then Ezzat took us and a Swedish visitor to the “Aubèrge du Pyramides”, an
establishment on the road to the pyramids, where among the entertainment was a belly
dancer. We had dinner by ourselves at the top of the Hilton Hotel where we stayed, and there
was a belly dancer.
Then we went to Alexandria for another couple of lectures, and on our
anniversary, January 5th we had dinner at a fine fish restaurant overlooking the Bay of Aboukir,
just east of the town, where in between gazing at Andrée, I looked at the bay and contemplated
Admiral Nelson’s tactics in 1799 when his fleet destroyed that of Napoleon in his famous
Battle of Aboukir, and drove the French Army from Egypt. The next day January 6th, was
Andrée’s birthday, and we found a little restaurant where we could dance.
At our request
the band played a Viennese waltz of course, but alas, not fast enough. We were surprised to
find that the clientèle consisted mostly of middle aged Egyptian business men with ladies much
younger than themselves. Stimulated by our agility they even began to dance. We never
enquired but only speculated. “Where were their wives?
Then we went on down to Luxor. This is a compulsory tourist destination.
We
stayed at a nice old hotel by the river. Of course at the restaurant there was a belly dancer.
She was older, less sexy but a much better dancer than the two in Cairo. As Andrée
commented, I had found a new research project. I would compare belly dancing in the major
cities of the world.
But the official sights at Luxor were the temple of Karnak on the same
(east) side of the river, the Valley of the Kings where many Pharaohs were buried and the
nearby valley of the Queens.
As we crossed the Nile on the ferry the taxi drivers and bus
drivers were waiting. We hired a taxi for the afternoon for $5 and he took us to the Valley of
the Kings where we saw a couple of magnificent tombs. Then prompted by the guidebook
we asked him to meet us two hours later in the valley of the Queens and set out to walk over
the intervening hill.
The view over the Nile valley was magnificent.
On the way up
we were pestered by a couple of Egyptian boys trying to sell us a little statue of Nephrodite.
We could not get them to stop. Andrée pushed one away. “Wicked woman. You touched
us”. Then a man and woman came up on bicycles and were also approached. The man
pulled a horse whip out of his pannier bag and chased them away. He was an Egyptian
tourist who apologized to us for the behaviour of his fellow countrymen.. Then we walked on
down to the Valley of the Queens, where we saw more antiquities, and got the taxi to take us
back to the ferry and to the hotel
Karnak must be seen at night.
So we left with a small tour of half a dozen people in
buggies from the hotel. I remember one young honeymooning couple from England in their
own horse drawn buggy. Karnal is hard to describe and certainly the description is better in
all the guidebooks than I can attempt here. It was, and of course is, magnificent. Then
we went back on the night train to Cairo feeling satisfied. In Cairo our ways parted. Andrée
came home and began her studies at Massachusetts College of Art. I went on to Kuwait,
Bombay, Bangalore, Karachi, Peshawar, Beirut and back via CERN to America to take up my
new duties as Department Chairman.
Andrée’s studies and degree
Andrée spent about 6 years in her studies at Massachusetts college of art.
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She built a
dark room in our basement, and spent many evenings down there often unitil the wee hours of
the morning. But here health was not good. She would alternate between periods of
activity, and in my view too little sleep, and illness. She was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and I
was deeply worried that she would not recover.
But fortunately she did, and finished her
studies.
In May 1989 Andrée graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art. The
family celebrated of course. Adèle came East, Nicholas came East also. Then Andrée and I
went on a trip west to celebrate. We started in Los Angeles. I had been invited to give a
talk about Chernobyl at the Harvard Club of Los Angeles, but that got canceled at the last
minute because of lack of interest. But we went to Los Angeles anyway since we had booked
our tickets and planned a long return route. Driving east we visited Tehechapi and looked at
the little 20 acre property owned by Andrée and Adèle in Caliente at the bottom of the
Tehechapi pass. From there we went on to Death Valley, Las Vegas, Zion National Park
and the Grand Canyon - the first time I had seen it. We stayed at the North Rim and then
drove around to the South Rim. We were too lazy, and maybe too old, to walk between the
two.
Then through the Navajo reservation to the Hubble Trading post in Ganado. This
trading post had been used as a starting point by Andrée’s grandfather on his painting trips to
the western states and had left two paintings there, presumably in exchange for groceries and
supplies.
Then we stayed in an American Indian run motel at the NW corner of Canyon de
Chelly which we spent a day exploring a canyon where Andrée’s grandfather had painted.
Then on past “Four Corners”, looking at the Hovenweep National Monument and on to
Mesa Verde National Park. We went on by way of Durango to Alamosa where we looked at
the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. Then crossing the Sangré de Cristo Mountains
we went to Westcliff for a couple of days. We had seen Westcliff before in 1979 when
returning from a trip to Los Alamos with Elaine and were enchanted with the small town.
We looked at places where we might stay on another visit and found a 70 acre farm with farm
house and water rights that we could buy for $150,000. It seemed a bargain. We would
have had to close in 2 days. We thought about it and went on to Colorado Springs where we
stayed with Carol Anne and Nicholas and planned to discuss the matter with them.
That night Andrée had terrible digestive trouble. It was similar to what had happened
at Lake Como some 20 years before. I took her to hospital and after a 3 hour wait in the
emergency room she was admitted and I left her. The next day she was a lot better but the
physicians wanted to keep her under observation for a day or two. I was scheduled to give a
talk in Texas about Chernobyl the next day, so after thinking about it I went, with a plan to
return to Colorado the next night. But the next night Andrée was released from hospital;
Nicholas put her on the plane to Boston, a day later than planned, and we went home together
from the airport.
I regret now not having stayed, but there were, in fact, no problems.
But all thoughts of the farm in Westcliff went.
In August 1990 we were less global in our plans for our vacation. As I noted earlier,
we had found a nice little hotel in 1965 when the family came back from the Montreal World
Fair . It was in North Hero, on Lake Champlain in Vermont. We started by driving there.
But either it had changed or our memories were faulty. After a couple of nights we moved
back to the mainland and wandered along the US/Canadian border. Firstly to a town north of
Burlington where we went to a local fair, then on to Quebec where we entered the North Maine
woods from the Canadian side. We had planned to drive through the woods to the south but
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were told that we had to leave by the same exit as we came in. We did not risk it. We
turned round, made a large circuit, and ended up at a cabin resort, on Moosehead Lake at the
southern end of the woods. We spent several fine days there. As will be described we
returned several times later.
Andrée continued her photography intermittently for a few more years and her work
was displayed in a few shows at South Shore Art Center, but as time went on she felt that her
physical strength would not allow her both to work in the garden and to work in the darkroom.
She chose the former, and made our garden into on of the best in Newton and won the Mayor’s
beautification award.
Puerto Rico and the Carribean
As noted above Andrée and I had spent a week in Puerto Rico by ourselves in January
1960, soon after Annette was born.
After that did not go off by ourselves but we went on
various holiday trips with the family and encouraged them in skiing in the winter. But we
had enjoyed Puerto Rico and in Easter 1987 we went again. Andrée thinks that Angela and
Charlie Aaranson came to stay with the children. This time we set off on an island tour.
We rented a car and stayed at a small B and B at a minuscule beach, perhaps Cerro Gordo,
half way to Arecibo. Then we stayed at Arecibo, and saw the traditional Good Friday parade.
On across the island, past the Arecibo radio observatory to Yauco where both of us remember a
fine old inn run by a US couple where they gave us grapefruit to take away with us. Then
two nights at La Parguera and a visit to the phosphorescent bay. We also looked at the Cabo
Rojo light house at the extreme SW of the island. Then back to the NE; my notes say we
stayed again at Luquillo for the night but I cannot remember where
Our next trip to the Caribbean was in the mid 1970s when the children could look after
themselves. On a neighbor’s recommendation we went to San Maartan (Dutch) and Saint
Maartan (French) We did not rent a car on te small island but stayed at a little innin the shore
and went around by “publicos”.
I stayed a week before heading off to Grenoble for my
parity violation experiment, but Andrée stayed a second week.
It was in 1993 (I believe ) that we went to Martinique. We had booked at a seaside
hut resort but after two days we found this to be constricting. So we went back to the capital,
rented a car and drove around the island a bit; it was from a SE beach that we observed
Halley’s comet early one morning.
We had enjoyed Puerto Rico the most so we decided to invite all the children there for
our 40the wedding anniversary in 1992.
After answering an advertisement for an
apartment which was NOT available, we were told of the apartment complex at Playa Azul in
Luquillo.
We rented an apartment for ourselves at a high rise building, Playa Azul, at
Luquillo BeachWe went there just after Christmas1991, and rented 6 or 7 apartments. One
for ourselves and one for each of the children. We also sent tickets for each of the children,
their companions and the two grandchildren.
I met them at the airport and we rented 3 more
rental cars! The idea is that the children did not have to be with each other unless they
wanted to!
I am not sure but suspect that Peter and Julie did nt come on thatv trip. There
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were a few problems and misunderstandings but it was a great success and several of the
children stayed a little longer and toured the island. Others came back by themselves in later
years.
The whole trip was a great success. I had budgeted $20,000 but bu using frequent
flyer coupons only needed $16,000.
It must have been about 1993 that we spent 5 days in Mexico. I had done some
consulting work for a company making a glass wool substitute for asbestos and was asked to
report on our finding sto the annual meeting at the main resort town Cancun.
So we
expanded the trip from one day to four and included a day tour to the famous native monument
inland.
Our next trip was to Costa Rica about 1997.
On this trip hotel arrangements were
made in advance. We stayed in a little hotel in the SW suburbs of San Juan. Initially we did
not rent a car, but went on a “tour” before taking a bus to a hotel on the west coast.
This had
fine beaches but we wanted to see a volvano. So we came back and got off the bus before
San Juan and rented a car for three days and went up to the main volcano area where we
walked a bit Unfortunately we could not find the hotel we had booked at but found another.
It was here in a little cabin removed from the main house that we locked ourselves IN to our
rook with the key on the outside. I had to break a window to open and crawl through it, to
get out. Broken glass outside suggested that we were not the first occupant of the room to be
stuck in this way. Someone else had done that before
Annette in particular had traveled around Puerto Rico after the 1992 Play Azul get
together, and recommended a nice little beach on the south coast just east of Guarica.
So
we went there for a few days in1995.
We also stayed at a little hotel south of Mayaguez,
and after buying snorkeling equipment used it both in Guarnica and on the west coast.
We decided we liked Puerto Rico and went, by ourselves on our 50th wedding
anniversary, in January 2003 again staying in the Playa Azul high rise complex.
But the
children were not content that we had celebrated by ourselves and gave us a marvelous party in
June in Gloucester. They all turned up and insisted that Steven Harrison, Andrée’s firstborn,
turn up also. It was a great occasion and we were glad not to have to arrange it ourselves.
Elaine and the children recommended a little hotel in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in the
Yucatan peninsula, to which we went in 2004.
We rented a car and drove down the coast.
But this trip was cut short by my trigeminal neuralgia and we left for home 4 days early to get
an operation. This was done by the Egyptian born neurosugeon at MGH, Dr Eskandar.
Andree was disappointed in the brevity of this trip so we went to the Yucatan peninsula
again in December/January 2004/2005.
This time renting a villa on the beach below Playa
del Carmen for a week, then a couple of days to the north and 3 nights at an inn in the small
town of xxxxx.
We flew back in time for meeting the students at the reading period but I
had picked up pneumonia on the plane back.
It was full of pre school children who
notoriously carry infections.
We decided against Mexico for our next trip in mid January 2007 and went back to
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Puerto Rico. We spent a whole month in Puerto Rico Rico, renting a villa in a gated estate,
Solimar, in Luquillo just next to Playa Azul. This included a trip to the west coast to
Aquadilla, and Rincon, and another trip to Rincon.
In March 2009 we went t Puerto Rico once again
We had hoped to be renting the
same villa as we had 2 years before but had a misunderstanding and we spent it again in Playa
Azul apartments.
That worked out fine.
Family Cars
It has been said that one can tell a lot about a person by the cars he owns. So I note
here a section on them. My parents’ first car, actually my father’s because my mother did not
drive, was a small Singer about 1928. But about 1933, about the same time that we moved to
Merton Park, my father bought an Invicta touring car. It was bright yellow. Politicians in
1933 were worried about communism being exported from Russia, and Asian immigration
into Australia and other parts of the world - the Red Menace and the Yellow Peril. The
Invicta became the Yellow Peril. It was a touring car with running boards. Seats were
leather with a blow up inner tube. On the luggage rack at the back was a complete picnic case
with cups, saucers, and plates, and a small stove for making tea. There was no synchromesh.
It had “clash” gears that demanded a double de-clutch on changing down. It was one of a
small group made - only a few hundred. My memory is that it gave a lot of trouble.
We used it to drive north to collect my grandparents for Wakes Week. But on two
occasions the “big end”, of the piston drive broke in one cylinder. That happened as we
slowed down from a period of high, 60 mph, speed. The first time we were on the A1 passing
Welwyn Garden City just in the northern suburbs. We came back home by train. I think my
grandparents went north by train. On the second time we were coming south by a long scenic
route through Glossop, Kidderminster, Worcester and Oxford. We had advice. If a “gig end”
fails again, disconnect the spark plug on the offending cylinder, overfill with oil and proceed at
no more than 20 mph. We limped back past Oxford, got a tow up the Nettlebed hill, and
came home. But my father had disconnected the wrong spark plug! The basic problem
was traced then to a defective oil pump.
The car was laid up from 1939 to 1945. Then it was put back into service. I was
allowed to drive it about 1946 and Geoffrey and I borrowed it to bring a lot of stuff home. I
was driving east out of Henley up the hill and had trouble on a turn to the left; I went across the
road to the verge on the right and stopped. Geoffrey took over and drove us both home. It
transpired that it was not my fault but the steering had an intermittent lock.
But it was in 1948 that I bought my motor cycle, a Royal Enfield 350 cc, for 80 pounds.
Which achieved 80 miles per gallon. There was still petrol rationing so I would sometimes
switch to ethyl alcohol, ethanol, at 40 mpg. There were three stores which sold alcohol in
London, and one was on the Great west Road in Hounslow, on the road between Oxford and
London. I would drive up: empty the petrol tank into a spare “Jerry can”; change the
carburetor jet; fill up with ethanol and I was on my way.
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I got my first car in January 1951 in Rochester. Dr Theodore (Ted) Dunham in
Rochester had an old 1941 wooden Ford station wagon, “Woody Wagon”, in US parlance, but
“Shooting Brake” for the British upper class, to which I never belonged or wanted to belong.
He was not using it and it was in storage at his brother-in-laws house in Chestnut Hill,
Brookline. He lent it to me. It was a fine car which used a lot of gasoline. It reached 12
mpg. I drove it to Rochester, turning it on its side in a snowdrift at Richfield Springs with no
real trouble as described elsewhere.. I would have liked to buy it from Ted to drive west, but
he preferred to keep it. So I bought another, 1939, Ford Woody Wagon for $400. But this
gave me trouble in Canada as described earlier. This we sold in September 1952 as we set
off from Palo Alto for England.
In England in 1952 Andrée and I did not have a car at first. But I needed to be able to
take equipment from Oxford to Harwell and in March 1953 I bought a new Ford Van. The
British slapped a purchase tax of 66 2/3 % on private cars, which were deemed luxuries, but a
van was not only cheaper but had only a 35% tax. I then put windows in the back and a
crude seat - a trick I learned from Victor Round.
This was the car we used that year to go to
the Lake district in April, to France, Switzerland, Austria and Italy in August and on a couple
of Morris dance tours. The following year we took it to the Isle of Wight and I went up to the
Glasgow conference with it. In 1955 we drove to Southampton to catch the boat, the Flandre,
to New York and Laurie bought it from me and picked it up in Southampton.
When we reached Cambridge we had no car for a month. But Ted Dunham offered
me his old “woody wagon” for $100. This was the car he had lent me in 1951. We had to
collect it, this time from his brother-in-law’s summer house in South Tamworth. We took the
train north. The 8 am for Bangor, with a stop at Durham where we changed for the train to
Whittier, where we were picked up.
This car was fine for a year. But in summer 1956 the
engine was in deep trouble. It was using more oil than gasoline! It would have cost $500 +
to fix it so we bought another car. A Ford sedan for $150.
This lasted a month when
another car coming fast down Harvard Street ran into me as I was on Trowbridge. The car
again was not repairable. My student, Arthur Kuckes, suggested moving the good engine
from the sedan to the station wagon. But this also was too expensive. This time I bought a
Plymouth sedan from Kurt Gottfried for $300. That lasted 6 years. We drove it to Maine and
New York.
The body was sinking and the seat sat directly on the frame. The gears
were not changing right and I could no longer get into reverse.
We finally drove it to the
junk yard in December 1961.
But in 1951 when we were in France, I bought a French car, a Peugeot 403 “Limousine
Familiale” for $1,400. The SUVs were not yet built in the USA and the US station wagons
had only 2 rows of sets. The limousine familiale had a middle row of jump seats.. This we
drove in France, to England to Austria and to Nice before having it shipped to Boston from
Marseilles We shipped it by train from Nice to Marseilles before taking the plane to London
and on to Boston. But there was a strike in Marseilles and the car sat on the pier for 3
months. When it was finally shipped, the boat decided not to unload in Boston, because there
was too little traffic, and went on to Baltimore. At no cost to me it was shipped up to
Cambridge by truck where I picked it up in January 1962, 2 weeks after the demise of the old
Plymouth.
The Peugeot had various problems. A new gear box after 30,000 miles. As the
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family grew the jump seats were not ideal for a long trip such as when we crossed the country
to Aspen in 1967, but it was fine for awhile. Moreover on that trip the cooling water pump
had to be replaced twice - in Pennsylvania and Nebraska. The valves had to be redone in
Wyoming, after 65,000 miles. So when I went on leave again in 1969 we bought a new car.
This time I bought a VW microbus for $1,400 delivered in Munich, whence I drove to
Rome, back up to Milan to fly to America in June to collect the family, down to Rome, and
back through Geneva to Paris. We then shipped it to Newark where I collected it. And we
sold the Peugeot for $150. The VW had better seating for the family. It was fine when
stationary, but the faster we went, the worse it became. It was not a good car for long trips,
but by the time we next crossed the country fate had intervened.
In April 1974 one of the
children’s friends, Steven Bottomley was driving it with Nicholas as a passenger along
Commonwealth Avenue when another car coming along Cedar street ran through a stop sign
and ruined the front right side. Nicholas got a broken thigh, for which he had to be in
hospital for 3 months, and the car was a dead loss.
This time the US industry had perked up. We were able to buy from a used car
dealer, a GM suburban with three real rows of seats, for about $2,700. This was an excellent
buy. But it lasted only 8 months. On Christmas day that year the dinner was late - about
9pm or 10 pm. I was dead tired and was scheduled to fly on the first plane to Fermilab at
dawn the next day to scatter muons. Margaret Panofsky had spent Christmas with us and
Michael drove her home. On the way home he drove the Suburban into a tree on Tyler
terrace, effectively destroying it.
So in January 1975 we looked for another suburban. We found another, second hand,
one, but it was not such a good buy. It was older and not in such good shape.
Nonetheless
we drove it west to the Bridger Wilderness in the summer.
As noted elsewhere, as we left
Laramie the gasoline tank fell onto the road and sparked as we drove along. We were
delayed a day as bought the new tank.
I think that this car only lasted a few years. Andrée drove Elaine to college in St Louis
in it in 1977.
By now also there was less necessity for a car that could accommodate 6
large teenagers. So we looked around for a better car and found a second hand Mercedes
diesel with 100,000 miles on it for $3,700. I think this was 1979. The body had holes in it,
but Michael, Nicholas and Peter all told me that they would fix it. I went off for a trip to
Geneva, for 3 days and when I got back there was a new floor. Diesels do not have spark
plugs but glow plugs. In this car they had to be heated for a minute before starting. As the
impatient Carlo Rubbia said while waiting for me to start: “it is a car for a man who has arrived
and not for a young man in a hurry”. But Carlo bought a Mercedes, which did not need glow
plugs, soon afterwards. This car was perhaps the most comfortable car we ever owned.
Andrée drove it out west when we collected Elaine from her graduation at Washington
University, and I joined them there and we drove home.
All was fine with this car until I
was caught in a multi car pile up on the central artery as I was going to the airport one day.
We had put 70,000 miles on the car; smoke was coming out of the back and it needed an
engine job. So when the other guy’s insurance offered me $2,600, and I could sell what was
left of the car for $400, I took it and we bought another. On balance I had spent $600 for 6
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years and 70,000 miles. On the whole it was a very good deal.
Our next car was a Chevrolet station wagon. It was bought new for about $6,000 and
we ran it till the mid 1990s.
I was very pleased with the car. It had front wheel drive, with
a McPherson suspension, and did very well in snow. Peter was the first to show this when
driving through 6 inches of snow on Blake Street. My first trip was to Cornell and back. It
was in this car that Andrée and I had an interaction with an uninsured deer on the way to
Cornell.
The front end and radiator had bad damage which was fixed locally.
In the end
I gave it to the high energy group and took a tax deduction, and it was used by myself when I
visited Ithaca and by students at other times. Finally it was junked.
By this time we decided we needed, and we could afford two cars. For a short while
we borrowed Chris’ little VW car while he was in Paris. But in early 1996, I believe, we
saw an advertisement for a second hand Volvo. It was from a dealer who had used it
personally, and he cheated us. The gear box was bad from the word go, and in September
1996 we had to have a new gear box. Then in 1997 we had to have a new cylinder head. It
had become distorted from some earlier overheating.
So we had to replace the cylinder head
but got rid of the car. We then bought a new Nissan sedan.
The Nissan was fine, and was used for about 7 years.
But then we changed in 2001
to a new VW Passat with manual transmission. We still have the Passat, although Andrée
finds it difficult with her arthritis. In 2005 after trying several cars we bought a Honda
accord automatic.
Meanwhile in 1994 or so I had to replace the Chevrolet wagon and we saw an
advertisement for a Ford for $5,100. I bought it and used it for 10 years until someone made
an illegal U turn just in front of me on Commonwealth Avenue without looking. It was
officially totaled, although I could drive it anyway but it would not have passed any safety test.
. I was reminded of my motor cycle accident some 55 years before. After arguing, I got
$2,100 from the insurance company, and sent the car away for a $500 tax deduction and am
now driving Andrée’s Passat now that she has a Honda Accord.
Here I note my various problems. Three times in my life I have fallen asleep when
driving. In January 1951, when driving Boston to Rochester, I fell asleep between Troy and
Schenectady N.Y. Fortunately the car veered into the curb on the busy street and I woke up
at once and corrected it. Later, in early August when driving in Canada from Mica creek
down the gravel road to Revelstoke, I fell asleep again. This time I had Alexander Fabergé
with me to wake me. On my right was a drop off of 100 feet to the Columbia River and on
the left, a cliff. I veered to toward the cliff and woke before hitting it. After that I regularly
picked up hitchhikers and demanded in exchange for a lift that they talk and keep me awake.
Nowadays I am even more careful. I will stop at the side of the road and go to sleep. Once I
was woken by a traffic cop assuming, incorrectly, that I was “under the influence.”
Now I
have a device that I put on my ear. If and when I nod it beeps and wakes me. But I usually
forget it and leave it at home. In the 1980s Andrée got severe depression which she has
controlled with the drug “Parnate” The depression was accompanied by fibromyalgia which
was cured by a skillful physical therapist. Both of us have arthritis, but in Andrée’s case it is
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sufficiently debilitating that she has to take 10 mg per day of a steroid, prednisone, to keep
sane. In 2008 she slipped in the kitchen floor and broke her hip. She had to get a new one.
Three weeks after the skillful surgeon had installed a metal hip prothesis she was beginning to
walk quite well with her new hip. But then it was heavily infected with Methicillin Resistant
Staphyllococcus Aureus or MRSA for short. When the bones or the protheses are infected
only a few antibiotics will work on the biofilm surrounding the part which has no blood
vessels. Only one would do so That is rifamkin, and for reasons unclear to me it has to be
accompanied by another strong one, vancomycin Vancomycin was given intravenously
twice a day but oral rifamkin made Andrée vomit and an anti nausea drug was needed also.
But our neighbours and children were wonderful. Each of the kids interrupted their busy
schedules that spring and came and spent a week or so.
In October 2008 Andrée fell again and broke her elbow in several places. She was in
California, showing Elaine varios places she knew as a girl, and he grandfather’s house in
Monrovia. But she spontaneously fell when walking to the car.
A surgeon called it: “the
terrible triad”. He could have had it fixed in California but everyone recommended coming
home where she could recover at home ans see an expert, Dr Jupiter in MGH., Dr Jupiter could
have operated but it would have taken 2 hours in the operating room to fix the joint. Both
Andrée and Dr Jupiter were worried about a recurrence of MRSA, so she has been building a
new joint, somewhat less flexible than before, with frequent therapy.
As I write this she is
recovering slowly.
Visits to the Middle East.
My visits to the Middle East became a large part of my life after 1978. They were not
all about pure physics.
They were not all about oil. They were not all about
Palestinian/Israeli strife. They were not all about collecting stamps. They were not all about
redressing wrongs. They were not all about adventure. They were not all about curiosity.
They were not all stimulated by the Arabian Nights. Or by Elroy Flecker’s “Hassan, the
Confectioner of Baghdad.” Not only because I wanted to travel the “Golden Road to
Samarkand”.
They were not all missionary. They were not all about my desire to see a
railway, as Cecil Rhodes would say, from Cape to Cairo, or one from Constantinople east to
India. They were about all of these things. In short I was, and am, a dreamer. These
dreams and my understanding of the reality deserve this separate section of my memories.
Of course anyone learning ancient history at all learns about the “cradle of civilization”.
Of the land of Mesopotamia. That Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldees a little NW of
Basra. Bible studies inevitably teach us about Nebuchanezzar, King of Babylon who
conquered Jerusalem. We heard of Cyrus the Persian. Of course we knew about the
attempted Persian conquest of Greece with the valiant, unsuccessful resistance of the Athenians
at Marathon and the famous run to warn the Athenian citizens..
My first knowledge of Iranian-Iraqi difficulties came from reading, in the ancient
Greek, at age 11 or 12 Xenophon’s famous war story: “the retreat to the sea”. Xenophon
was leading an army of about 10,000 mercenary Greek soldiers, fighting for the Iraqis (Medes)
against the Iranians (Persians). The Iranians (Persians) won and Xenophon had the task of
extracting his army through enemy territory. Breaking the ordinary communication channels
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to the Mediterranean, he set out north across Asia Minor (Anatolia) in hope of finding a
friendly Greek town on the southern borders of the Black Sea. The army was, of course
“living off the land” and the local tribes were not usually welcoming. I remember the last
page in particular. As the men saw Black Sea in front of them they cried out “Thalassa,
Thalassa!” (The sea, the sea). When I first reached the Pacific Ocean in summer 1951 I also
cried out “Thalassa!”. That reading was also an indirect way of learning about the sexual
behavior of men deprived for a long period of association with women. But Mesopotamia of
3,000 years ago seemed unrelated to the modern world.
Of course, since I was brought up as a Unitarian I was aware of the doctrinal
differences between various Christian groups but far less aware of other religions from other
places. At Colet Court school and later at St Paul’s school we had morning prayers, with a
hymn or two. If I had wished it, I could have been excused from attending and waiting in
another room. I preferred to stay with the majority and when the prayer or hymn, as it often
did with “In the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost” I was just silent. It became a
sort of game to listen carefully to such doctrinal statements which, for me were, and are,
absurdities.
Thirty per cent of the boys in St. Paul’s school and I believe somewhat less in
Colet Court, did not attend morning prayer. These included Sikhs and Hindus from India.
Moslems also from India, boys from Persia.
Mixed in also were Roman Catholics who
objected to any religious statement of Church of England origin. But I mostly remember the
Jews. Many were refugees from Germany, and as I now know, from Eastern Europe too.
They were less exotic than the boys from India. They looked just like us! It was only after
I met many Moslems that I realize that in religion, Jews, Moslems and Christians have a lot in
common. In principle, rich men and poor men kneel down and pray side by side.
The
Moslem practice is, in my limited experience, better in this.
When prayer time came in a
private house, everyone knelt where he was - literally master and servant side by side facing
Mecca. I would sit quietly at the back and meditate. I will never forget a businessman in
Alexandria stopping at 4 pm, pulling a prayer rug from his brief case, kneeling down and
praying on the sidewalk ignoring everyone around.
But as we all know, there are many
people who are only Christians on Sundays.
I assume that there are also Moslems who only
practice their religion when it is convenient.
In our family we were aghast at the rise of Naziism and the persecution of the Jews in
central Europe. It was many years before I realized the England was far from pure in this
regard. We learned about William the Conqueror at school but I don’t remember being taught
that he brought Jews from France to run the banking system because Christians would not lend
money at usury at that time. Nor did we learn at school that Richard killed 500 Jews
accidentally soon after his coronation; because he thought that a delegation that came to
welcome him as king was trying to kill him. Nor did we learn that Edward I exiled the rest of
English Jewry to Spain. These racist facts were not taught in the elementary history but we
were taught merely that anything English is good. But I still believe the English were more
tolerant in this and other respects than people in many other countries.
I had not heard of
Zionism or saw any reason why Jews would want to return to a land where the present
population were not friendly. Of my school friends, only one, Aubrey Sampson, was in 1943
openly advocating a state of Israel. Soon after I got to Oxford I went to a lecture by Chaim
Weiszman in which he spent most of his time explaining why he felt that it was vital to create a
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state of Israel in biblical Palestine as soon as world War II was over.
He felt that there must
be a place for the vast influx of Jewish refugees from eastern Europe to go. I asked the
obvious question. “Why go to a land where there are already a lot of people, and most of
them don’t want you there? Isn’t that asking for a repetition of just the trouble from which
you want to escape?” As I remember the reply, it was simple. “For a good Jew there is no
alternative”.
I was partially convinced. Not convinced that the reply was, in itself,
sensible, but convinced that enough people in the western world believed it to be so that it
would be inevitable.
In St. Paul’s school I collected stamps, and bought some from a friend at Meadhurst,
Bagnall. I remember some stamps that came from Kuwait. They were issued, I believe by
the British Post Office in Cairo and over stamped Kuwait.
Somewhat later I met Hani
Qaddumi who went to Kuwait from Palestine about 1936, and naturalized while the numbers
were still few, to set up their postal system. Then over stamping an Egyptian stamp was no
longer the procedure.
The Middle East became closer to me when after world war II the British Army tried to
bring peace, without colonialism, in various places.
Former school friends were serving in
the British Army in Palestine. I remember one friend, a year older than myself, whom I had
met at one of our Hillend Boy Scout camps. He then joined some intelligence section in the
army, and he described to me in 1947, maybe with some exaggeration, how he was fighting for
his life when he was chased by terrorists from Irgun Zvai Leumi and had to jump into the harbor
at Tel Aviv and swim across to escape them. But his need to escape was not all governed by
purity of behaviour. He admitted torturing a 14 year old messenger for Irgun to get information
from him. I had just started graduate school when I heard of the bombing of the King David
hotel from a survivor. Whereas it was likely that Palestinian Arabs had been responsible for
terrorist attacks in the late 20s and late 30s, by now the attacks were from Jewish terrorist groups
who were opposed to a division of the country according to the British 1936 white paper.
It
was unclear to me what division was going to be acceptable to the Jewish and Palestinian people.
It seemed to me at the time that Britain was better off getting out from there.
I was glad when Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary, asked the UN what to do when the 25
year old mandate for the British to run Palestine came to an end and said, both formally and
informally, that it was a United Nations problem. I only recently understood why Jewish
groups hated Bevin. I reread Fadhel Jamali’s memoirs and his account of meeting with
Bevin and Creech-Jones at the time. Bevin would have preferred to just give independence
to the majority group who were Palestinians. But Bevin gave in to US pressure on
establishing Israel. I understood and still understand better why Palestinians hated him and
blamed the British. As the Palestinian terrorist said to the confused “heroine” in Carré’s
“The Little Drummer Girl” just before he is killed, “You are the English who gave away my
country”. We had given away a country we did not own.
But to whom did we give it?
Bearing in mind Chaim Weiszman’s response to my question at his lecture, it seemed clear to
me then that the western nations who started the UN would insist on a state of Israel. This
they did, but they should also have insisted on a far better arrangement for the displaced
Palestinians than they were willing to consider. They could very easily at that time have put
firm limits on what they would consider appropriate for Israel. The UN has consistently failed
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in this respect over the years. In a large part, this failure was because the Israeli-Palestinian
quarrel became a pawn in the cold war. I believed then in the 1950s, and now, in 2008, that it
was the cold war that was ultimately responsible for the revolution in Iraq on July 14th 1958
from which the region has never recovered.
But the cold war is now over and that does
not explain the lack of spine in the UN when after a long delay the Arab countries in 2002 have
finally stated their acceptance of resolution 242. Why do the nations of the UN now even
countenance the effective rejection from the other side? As far as I know, none of my
personal school or college friends emigrated to Israel. None of my Jewish friends and
acquaintances who support Israel to the hilt want to live there.
I do not know, and if I ever did I would have forgotten, who said what, and to whom,
and why, about the relationship in that troubled “Holy” land. I don’t believe anyone will ever
know. But some matters are clear. In the 1930s some Arab parents went to the hospital in
Gaza, as others did to Beirut, to have their children born in a good hospital. The change
between Gaza then, and Gaza now, is evident.
All the cities on the Mediterranean coast
were to some extent international tourist locations. But the Gaza of that time is no longer.
No one in the world has a right to say: “ I am not responsible for the disastrous situation”.
The enforced isolation starting in summer of 2007 is a demonstration of everyone’s failure.
When I contemplate, as I do almost daily, whether mankind will destroy itself, with nuclear
war or pestilence, I wonder whether the weak human race has any “right to exist”. It seems to
me that is not a fundamental right but one which must be earned daily. We must earn it in
Gaza, in the land that is holy to so much of the world. We must earn it in every place where
there is human conflict.
In 1973 Department Chairman Bob Pound suggested that I give a special course on
Energy and the Environment which had about 15-20 students. Then Dean Harvey Brooks,
suggested that I team up with AJ Meyer, a senior lecturer in ht economics department, who ran
a weekly seminar “Economics of Energy” . This seminar was one of three well known
“gut“ courses for which it was easy to get credit. It was colloquially called “oil wells” by the
undergraduates. Another gut course was, of course, Roger Revelle’s course on environment
which stimulated Gore, and the third was, I believe about China.
I added this seminar to
my teaching duties. AJ, had taught economics at the America University of Beirut (AUB),
and was then Deputy Director of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). He
brought in as seminar speakers the heads of oil companies and the oil ministers from the
middle east. Many of them had been his students at AUB. They also gave donations to
CMES which paid for the seminar speakers. I brought in coal experts, nuclear experts and
tried to ensure that there was some environmental discussion. We would have a seminar at 4
pm. Discussion went on until perhaps 5.45 pm, and then we would adjourn. The enthusiasts
reassembled in the faculty club at 6.30 pm for dinner and further discussion. This was an
excellent routine which suited me fine. One of the students, or visitors, was a young banker,
Usameh Jamali who was studying at the Fletcher School of Economics at Tufts University.
AJ introduced me to Frank McFadzean, Chairman of Shell Transport and Trading, Abdlatif
Yousef Al-Hamad, at that time Minister of Finance of Kuwait, James Akins, the US
Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Abdulhady Taher, Director of Petromin the Saudi Arabian oil
company, and Zaki Yamani, Minister of Oil of Saudi Arabia.
I was ready for what became
another interesting chapter in my life.
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In 1977 I got a visit from a Syrian who was Deputy Director of Kuwait’s Institute for
Scientific Research. “Would I be willing to come and give some lectures, and discuss
scientific activity at KISR?”. He was, apparently, talking for the Director, Dr Adnan Shihab
Eldin.
Adnan had gotten a PhD in nuclear chemistry in Seaborg’s group at UC Berkeley.
My graduate student Bob Budnitz had gone to LBL from Harvard about 1970 and he and
Adnan became friends. When Adnan was asked to return to Kuwait and run the Kuwait
Institute for Scientific Research he asked Bob to visit. Bob, who is Jewish, did not want to
upset anyone in his or his wife’s Jewish family so he declined. But he suggested that Adnan
contact me. Which Adnan did. My mind went back to 1949 when I just got my PhD. One
position I was offered was to join the Anglo-Iranian oil company which had just got a
concession in Kuwait. It had been an attractive offer. A salary equal to that of an Oxford
Professor. Tax free. All accommodation paid for in Kuwait. A vacation trip back home for
3 months every 2 years with fares paid.
In 1949 I looked up Kuwait in my father’s
Encyclopedia Britannica. - 1897 edition if I remember aright. At that time (1897) Kuwait
was known for pearl fishing and piracy. In 1949 I preferred to visit the USA but I was now
going to see Kuwait at last.
So began a series of visits which have been almost yearly and
have brought me a host of friends.
I chose to go to Kuwait in Spring vacation 1978. I visited Grenoble for my parity
violation experiments, and that March there was a spring school at Les Arcs, near the
French-Italian border, where physicists assembled for a lecture or so in the morning, then
skiing till dark, and physics again till serious drinking began after supper. Tom Quirk was
presenting our muon scattering data from Fermilab. I turned up at the meeting for a day at Les
Arcs to discuss the data with him. The night after my day’s visit there was a big snowfall. I
had to leave soon after dawn and Tom helped me dig out my rental car. I drove through
Annecy to Geneva airport to board the flight to Kuwait.
There was probably a direct flight,
but I thought that it would be interesting to pass through Beirut and see, at least from the air,
what had been happening in Lebanon. On boarding the Middle Eastern Airlines plane,
everyone had to identify his checked baggage sitting beside the plane before it could be loaded.
One man had a very heavy carry on parcel. The contents became clear on security
examination. Thinly wrapped, it was a couple of solid gold bars.
As we came into Kuwait, in a sand storm, we flew over a small oil well. A 6 inch
diameter pipe with a valve on top with a pipe running down toward the sea in the distance. A
small “oasis” of 2-3 palm trees. A Bedouin with half a dozen sheep or goats, and at the side a
small flare of natural gas. No pump like the wells I had seen in LA or Wyoming. I was told
that unless they gave 1,000 bbl a day they would be turned off. I heard of wells in Texas still
producing 15 bbl a day. I was in a different world and was all prepared to enjoy every
minute of my time, and every interaction with the enormous number of new friends that I
hoped to, and did, make.
Usameh Jamali was back in the middle east and working at the Organization for Arab
Petroleum Exporting Countries.
It was Usameh, then a bachelor, made sure that I missed
no important facet of social life. He particularly knew all the expatriate Iraqis, who wanted
to get as close as possible to Iraq without actually going there. I met a couple of Egyptians.
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I was also introduced to the Palestinians, living in an area of Kuwait called, obviously, the
“West Bank”. On this first visit I was approached by Hisham Naquib a Palestinian who was
Dean of Graduate studies at the University of Kuwait. Would I stay a little longer and review
the program and the quality of the faculty? I had planned to spend a couple of days in Cairo
on the way home to see the Pyramids, but visiting people has always been more interesting
than vising places. I accepted of course. The pyramids had already waited 3,000 years for
my visit; waiting a few years more would not be too hard.
After a few days at the University I was about to leave by a plane at 2 am. Usameh
came around to the Sheraton hotel to bid me goodbye. As we were doing so at the bottom of
the elevator a friend came by and started taking. I was introduced. Then another, and
another.
I became clear that these were the heads of all the Arab oil refineries, assembling
for a meeting starting the following day in Kuwait. They were about to go to the 12th floor
of the hotel to start the first informal session. That session consisted of opening a bottle of
scotch in the Syrian’s hotel room. I was invited. As the lone American I knew from
experience that I was personally responsible for each and every failure of US foreign policy.
So I was prepared. One by one they attacked me for the fact that USA always supported Israel
against the Arab countries.
But I counter attacked. “You must realize” I said, “that
Americans are a very generous, but also a very stupid and uneducated people. They do not
know whether Kuwait is north or south of the Equator or whether Baghdad is East or west of
Moscow.
You ask them to be generous to Arab countries, and they will legitimately ask
‘which Arabs?’. They see Arabs fighting Arabs in Lebanon. Which group should they
support? With no clear and unified voice they support the one country in the region which
knows what it wants. Israel.” The conversation switched. It turned out that about half
(including Usameh) had been at the American University of Beirut. “Ah! Lebanon! What a
disaster!”. They all knew the principal problem of the Arab countries and peoples. They
were, and are, unable to unite.
In 1979 I was again going to Grenoble for parity violation so again decided to go on to
the middle east - this time not through Beirut. My host in Kuwait this time was the
Organization for Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC). The director of OAPEC at
the time was a Libyan, Ali Attigha. The Deputy Director was, I believe, an Egyptian, but as
he retired he was replaced by Abdel Asiz Al-Wattari. Abdel Asiz was living his life upside
down. In the late 1960s as a young man he was Oil Minister of Iraq. When the
government changed about 1970 he decided it was wise to leave. Having been incorruptible,
and thereby earned the enmity of Zaki Yamani of Saudi Arabia who he met at OPEC meetings,
he had no money. So he worked for the Libyan Oil company for a couple of years to earn
enough to go to London School of Economics and earn his PhD. Now he was in Kuwait with
an Iraqi diplomatic passport. His wife, Haja was born of an Iraqi father and an Armenian
mother. He had, at the time, two teen aged children now both in the USA. He became a
good friend.
As noted elsewhere I was in CERN on sabbatical leave in May through December 1981
After a brief visit to Egypt, I went on to Kuwait again where Adnan had invited me to give a
few lectures on Risk Analysis in January 1983. This I did, and then on to the meeting on
proton stability in Bombay, India.
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I received an invitation and visa to go to Beirut for a meeting on nuclear energy on the
way home from the visit to Pakistan in January 1982. I rearranged my travel accordingly.
The meeting was arranged, as had been the 1981 meeting in Grado, by the Egyptians with
funding from Libya. There was nothing scientifically interesting about the meeting. But I
remember that by this time the car had to meet me several hundred feet from the terminal and
on the way into town we passed several check points without stopping. I am unsure how
many groups had been appropriately paid off.
I made a point of walking one evening
through one of the Palestinian refugee camps, Shatila, I believe. It was about the size of
Harvard yard and 10,000 people lived there. Six months later many thousands died there.
Our little hotel was in West Beirut, the Moslem side. At the time there was no fighting and I
asked whether it was safe to walk to the east to visit the American University of Beirut.
“Yes,” was the answer. “But it is safer to walk across 2 miles south at the end of the red
line”. That I did. All was peaceful.
But 6 months later Beirut changed again when the
Israeli army occupied it.
I came back to Cambridge in January 1982 ready to start my 3 ½ year stint as
Department Chairman. But in March I was off to the Middle East again. Abdulaziz
Al-Wattari was organizing the first Arab Energy Conference in Doha, Qatar. He invited me
to talk about nuclear energy, at a session chaired by Ali Khalifa Al-Sabah, oil minister of
Kuwait. I explained my view that the world was going to need nuclear energy, and that it in
many ways it was ideally suited to them. As I had explained earlier in Egypt, they were
developing a very competent technical elite who could run the systems. Many westerners
were advocating solar energy. While not decrying this, I pointed out that maintenance would
need, as the Egyptians had already found out, many more technically trained people.
But I
emphasized the absolute necessity of international collaboration. There seemed no way that
the USA, for example, would permit a nuclear reactor on Arab soil which was not open to
inspection by IAEA.
The opening session of the conference was fascinating. In turn a
representative of each Arab country, including of course the PLO, eloquently described
firstly why his country was committed to Arab unity, and secondly why they fully supported
their brothers in Palestine in their search for independence and freedom.
After this stylized
introduction, which I suspect was similar to introductions at most other Arab conferences,
business could commence. Although it was stylized, I seemed to me then, as it does now,
that it expressed a very deep yearning that influences almost every action a leading Arab will
make.
While we were in Qatar, Libya had made a stupid attack on a US warship in the
Mediterranean and th USA came back with a massive response, including what may well have
been an attempt to kill Col. Qaddafi by an air attack. Few of the delegates liked Col. Qaddafi
but they had to say something. The final session of the conference was delayed while the
leaders wrangled. They came out with a bland condemnation of the attack by the USA and
lukewarm support of Libya. While we were waiting I was sitting in the corridor next to Dr
Munir Khan, Chairman of the Pakestani Atomic Energy Commission. His comment was
more practical. ‘The next time you elect an actor as President,” he said, “please elect one
with an Academy Award.”
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Leaving Qatar, I went to another conference in Riyadh where I gave a talk on proton
radiotherapy with the Harvard cyclotron. It seemed then, and it also sees now, sensible for
the Saudis to spend some of their money on the best possible medical treatments.
The
Chairman of the meeting was Dr Rida Obaid, Director of the National Center for Science and
Technology and later President of King Abdelaziz University in Jeddah.
But I specifically
wanted to talk to him about a proposal, made by a Yugoslavian (Serbian) scientist, Bogden
Maglic, to build a multibillion dollar science complex in Jeddah.
But by this time, Bogden
Maglic was already known to me and to some others as a charlatan. I had known him since
1958 when he was a graduate student in physics at MIT. His PhD advisor was Bernard Feld
who suggested using photographic emulsions to look at the Coulomb interference in proton
scattering from carbon, using the Harvard cyclotron. I asked my graduate student Arthur
Kuckes to run the cyclotron for Bogden’s exposures. Arthur came to me in excitement.
“His experiment cannot work,” he said.
“The multiple scattering in the target is greater than
the dip in the scattering due to Coulomb interference”.
I checked. Arthur was right. I
called Bernie Feld and warned him. The next thing I found was a letter published in Physical
Review by Feld and Bogden Maglic finding (incorrectly) the coulomb interference! Rightly
or wrongly I did nothing. Incidentally, Henry Kendall later blamed me personally for this
mistake! Bogden went to Berkeley where by looking at bubble chamber data he found the
omega meson. This was a correct discovery, perhaps his last. Then his career went down.
He found that there was a nonexistent split in the rho resonance, and after becoming a group
leader in CERN proceeded, about 1968, to find a series of excited mesons, on the Reggae
trajectories as predicted, but all completely bogus.
This had all become clear in 1972 some
ten years before when several searches for the “split A2" failed to find the split.
In 1982
Maglic was advertizing “migma fusion” whereby colliding beams of heavy ions would
collide, with a “luminosity” about a billion times greater that was being achieved with
electron-electron or proton-proton rings.
But Bogden was extraordinarily persuasive. He had persuaded the President of
Switzerland to give him Swiss citizenship. He had persuaded one of the Saudi princes to
provide him with $10,000,000 to make a preliminary plan for the big laboratory of which he
would be director.
With this, Bogden had persuaded, with suitable consulting fees, a
number of distinguished scientists, to support his proposal. I am glad to say John Adams,
with whom I had discussed this a few months before I went to Jeddah declined. It was not a
way either of us wanted to behave.
Whatever one thought of Arabs, or of Saudi Arabia, we
felt it would be dishonoring ourselves to become involved. Unfortunately not all physicists
agreed and several including one Nobel Laureate, agreed to talk in defense of the plan.. I felt
that I owed it to my Arab friends to expose this con game and opened a brief conversation with
Rida Obad.. It turned out to be unnecessary. Rida Obad insisted up front that he had read
all about Bogden’s career, and that he had asked the supporters of the proposal to come to
Riyadh to describe all technical details. They, of course declined to do so. I hardly had to
open my mouth!
But, I became a friend of Rida Obaid. Then I spent a couple of days in
Jeddah, giving a talk at the University before returning home.
While there I met Bogden,
maneuvering at higher levels than myself, but still basking in the sun by the side of the
swimming pool.
A year or so later Carlo Rubbia got his Nobel prize, and as Department Chairman I
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held a small party at Harvard in Carlo’s honor. At Carlo’s request I kept it small. Bogden
called up and demanded to know where it was. I stalled him and called Carlo. Do you
want me to let Bogden come or shall I block him? “Let him come,” was Carlo’s reply. I
was sitting next to Bogden’s latest wife who had also been charmed by Bogden and believed
implicitly in his greatness. She came from a wealthy family and the adjective was clearly one
of the reasons that Bogden was attracted to her. It did not seem an occasion to be brutally
honest, but on the contrary it seemed an occasion to be evasive so I was. Bogden still
persisted in his migma fusion for many years and persuaded Glenn Seaborg to be Chairman of
his company. I kept quiet about this for some years until a mutual friend, Paul Lochak,
convinced me that I owed it to Glenn, by now a good friend, to pull him back from the brink.
This I did in the lobby of the Mayflower hotel in Washington over tea. Glenn outlined the
list of new, non existent, particles that Bogden had found.
Then he asked about magma
fusion. At that moment Leon Lederman walked by. “Is there a chance that it will work?’
Glenn asked. ”Not a hope in hell!” was Leon’s prompt, and accurate, reply.
When in Qatar I talked to the Iraqi oil minister about the air raid on the Tuwaitha
reactor and told him my opinion. “You have given up just a little of your sovereignty by
signing the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). I think that was a good idea. But you
have not gained the advantage from that because many countries still believe you want to make
nuclear weapons.” I made a suggestion which has some similarities to the one I made to
India and Pakistan a few months before. “If you have no intention of making nuclear
weapons you should not only welcome IAEA inspections, you must demand them. You must
invite the best nuclear scientists from the west and show them your facilities and ask for their
help in peaceful activities.” The oil minister said that he knew nothing about the subject but
would pass on my thoughts and ideas. Then in December I got a call from what used to be
the Iraq embassy but was officially the Iraqi interests section of the Indian embassy.
“When are you going to Baghdad?”
So I went on December 27th just after a Christmas
party for various friends, including Muhammed Al-Sabah, in our house.
The purpose was
to visit the Iraqi nuclear research center at Tuwaitha, to understand whether the claims of the
Israelis that the reactor had been part of a nuclear bomb program were justified. I described
the visit to Tuwaitha in an article in Nature which is number 295 in my list of references, and a
more recent, retrospective discussion is was presented at a meeting in Erice, Sicily and is in
reference 896 of my list of references.
I was convinced that it was not a critical part of a
bomb program.
In particular it was not a part of a bomb program because it was not suited
to making plutonium. I later became convinced that by their unjustified bombing the Israelis
started a bomb program rather than stopped one.
I believe I stayed in the Baghdad Sheraton. One evening I sat at the bar and got into a
conversation with a couple of young Iraqis. One, aged about 22, was a Captain in the army,
the other his sergeant and aged about 18.
Both were on leave from the fighting that was
going on between Iraq and Iran. They told me that they had been fighting on the outskirts of
Basra the previous week. Officially, the Iranians had not got that far.
Both were
Christians; I did not enquire about their denomination. But when walking on Friday evening I
passed a Christian church. A 7th day Adventist church was holding services just after sunset
on the Friday and the beginning of the seventh day.
I went in. It was like an English
non-conformist church with someone at the door welcoming anyone who wished to enter.
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The service was in Arabic, but a helpful lady translated for me. In the next pew were half a
dozen Rumanian (Christian) oil experts. They had no helpful translator! I went to the souk
and bought a little silver dish from a silversmith who had served in the Iraqi army in World
War II and was proud of his service. I saw the monument to the Unknown Soldier, built after
world War I.
It was already apparent that Saddam’s war against Iran was costing him far
more than he had expected. As I left at the end of the week I saw in the airport three plane
loads of Korean construction workers who had been hired to redo the sewage system of
Baghdad. They were going home. The rebuilding of the sewage system was canceled.
I then went on to Qatar where I had agreed to spend a week lecturing and helping the
physics department at the University.
There were two separate colleges in Qatar. The
men’s University and the women’s university. The physics department in the men’s
university was weak, but in the women’s University physics was bustling. I found two
possible reasons. Qatari men who were qualified tended to go overseas for their education,
whereas women going overseas alone were unusual if not actual sinners. Secondly, men could
do what they wanted after classes, but for women, going to the University was the only
acceptable social activity outside the home. Women would spend hours in the physics
laboratory. One experiment we set up while I was there. Looking for annihilation radiation
by two counters 180 degrees apart. On the Sabbath, I was asked to help set up an experiment
on optical pumping bought from a British outfit. We got it working and then I was asked by
the young lecturer to join his family for Sabbath dinner.
It was interesting. The large,
extended, family were not Qatari but came from Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. They had
been there 25 years, since 1960 or earlier. One helped to set up the National Bank of Qatar.
But he was a Lebanese/Palestinian and therefore a foreigner. When rules were formalized, he
was not considered equal to a Qatari. Not allowed any longer to participate in the Bank or
own land or property in Qatar.
He asked me if I knew Colorado Boulevard in Los Angeles.
I said no, but I knew Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. He had just bought an apartment
building on a mortgage foreclosure. He could not own land in the country where he was born
or in the country where he lived but he could own land in the USA a country that he had
never seen! Whenever I think of the deep problems in the USA. I think of incidents like
this where the USA still remains the dream and hope of so much of the world. The style of
the meal was that the men were all in one room, and the women and girls in another room.
The men were served by the boys from the next room.
Leaving Qatar, I went to Riyadh to attend a meeting chaired by Rida Obad. I cannot
remember for sure what the overall thrust of the meeting was, but I talked about use of protons
for radiotherapy. At Massachusetts General Hospital we had several patients from Saudi
Arabia and I had the idea that they might like to build a cyclotron for the purpose.
But this
was premature. Then on to Jeddah where I talked to various people.
A year later I was asked to be on a committee of the King Faisal Foundation, chaired by
Rida Obqid. That foundation was started by the sons of King Faisal for charitable purposes.
They had decided to award a yearly prize for Science and this was the first time it was for
physics. The Foundation had only sent requests for nominations to Arab Universities and as a
result only got nominations from them. None of the nominees made sense.
So the
committee decided to postpone. Before we did so, I suggested a procedure that we invite all
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former Nobel Laureates in physics, and the heads of a couple of dozen prominent physics
departments in the world. I was able to provide from memory and the High Energy Physics
Diary addresses of all but one of the living Nobel Laureates. I could not do that now.
Then I
went on to Kuwait for a few days to see friends.. I believe it was on this trip that drivers
from two Kuwaiti organizations, probably from the Arab Fund and the University, met me at
the airport:
As I got into my hotel room and had not even put my bag down, the telephone
rang. It was Abdulaziz. “You have been in Riyadh. You must be dry. Come to my
apartment for a drink!” That is friendship. I believe I first visited the University but I did,
however, also visit the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development. I was warmly
greeted by Abdlatif Al-Hamad who become Chairman by that time, and we have remained
friends ever since. A year later I went again to Riyadh to help choose the winner of the King
Faisal prize. There were now several good nominations. I preferred Carlo Rubbia who had
just found the Z0 and W particles. But I was outvoted and the nomination went to the two
discoverers of the scanning tunneling microscope.
That was also a good nomination, and
predated by 18 months the award of the Nobel prize to the same two scientists.
In April 2003 I was invited to the 25th anniversary of the University of Tunis by a
Professor Larbi Bougerra, who taught chemistry at the University
Larbi had attended the
first energy school that Fernando Amman and I had run in Sicily - just across the strait from
Tunis and Carthage. Andrée joined me. I gave special, well attended lectures at the
Universities in Tunis and Monastir.
We also were taken on a tour to Carthage and an old
Roman town, Dougga, 100 km to the west.
There were 12 foreign guests at the anniversary
celebration; 6 French, and 6 others. Rida Obad. was there from Jeddah and it amused me to
introduce him to my other Arab friends! Andrée and I were the only native English speakers.
There was a special dinner and reception. Fadhel Jamali was invited as a special guest of the
President, Habib Bourgiba to whom I was introduced.
I also brought him a formal letter of
greeting from Harvard University prepared by the Marshal’s office.
All this time I had been still peripherally involved with the Center for Middle Eastern
Studies. But then in late October or early November 1983 that AJ Meyer died. Professor
Nadaf Safran, became director of the Middle Eastern Studies Center.
He is Jewish, and I
believe he was born in Egypt. I was scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia anyway in December
2003 for another meeting of the King Faisal Foundation prize committee. I stopped our
President Derek Bok in Harvard Yard and asked whether it was OK for me to try to raise
money from my Saudi and Kuwaiti friends for a memorial in honor of AJ Meyer.
My idea
at the time was a special fellowship program. Professors are interested in people. Deans
and Presidents are interested in chairs, so it became a chair. Derek Bok answered me
immediately, “Yes!”. I had also the support of John Dunlop, a Harvard economist who had
been secretary of labor under President Nixon, and in the late 1970s was the Dean of the
Faculty of Arts and Sceinces. John had for many yeras been chairman of a small economics
advisory committee for the Saudi government. So I started soliciting. One of AJ’s close
friends, Hasib Sabbagh, had already provided $200,000. I talked to the Saudi Minister of
Planning in Riyadh. He was talking about a $10 million endowment.
I went on to Kuwait
and had breakfast with Abdlatif Al Hamad and his family. By that time Abdlatif had become
Chairman of the Board and Executive Director of the Arab Fund for Social and Economic
Development.
I talked to Ali Khalifah Al-Sabah, oil Minister. He also was encouraging.
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I passed though London and called on AJ’s son Peter. I got back home, and got together
with another of AJ’s friends Ed Brooking. We became pan handlers and started to write
around. But then we found a wall of silence.
It turned out that Professor Safran had written
a letter to everyone on AJ Meyer’s address list asking them to contribute. Whether
deliberately or not, he hired a secretary called A. Meyer which confused people. I know
several recipients of his letter who told me that they were insulted. But I never saw the letter
itself.
But it effectively closed off most of the potential donors in the Middle East. So for
that period I deliberately avoided contact with CMES.. During the next three years, many
people in the Arab world from Morocco to Kuwait boycotted the Centre for Middle Eastern
Studies. I call that the “period of confusion”. So for that period I deliberately avoided
contact with CMES.
President Derek Bok wrote several people including me, a letter on January 19th 1984
asking that any approach be coordinated with Vice President Fred Glimp, who of course
approved anything that I wanted to do. As I noted in a memo of May 1984 we had only
collected $334,000. The appeal for the A.J. Meyer Endowment was part of the Harvard
Campaign according to a memo of July 9th 1984. In order to avoid the “confusion” at CMES, it
was to be a chair in Energy and Economic Development, located in the Kennedy School of
Government.
Collecting funds from the Middle East was not possible for the next 3 years.
Meanwhile I also got a FAX from one of AJ’s Japanese friends, Mr Nakahara, Head of Toa
Nenru Kogyo, K.K. in Tokyo, who asked me to call upon Mr Kaneo Nakamura at his business
school reunion. I did so and a total of another $230,000 was made available from five different
Japanese business men in late 1985.
Including that, our total was about $800,000.
I
seemed unlikely to most people that we would get more. So contrary to my recommendation,
and that of Ed Brooking and John Dunlop, the interest on what we collected was used for a
lectureship in the extravagant Kennedy School way. The first AJ Meyer Lecturer was Zaki
Yamani who had by this time retired as oil minister.
There was of course a big reception, but
there was a small dinner. Zaki, Bill Hogan and Robert Reich from the Kennedy School,
Andr\ée and myself. This may have been the only time I talked to Robert Reich who soon
thereafter went on to Washington to be Assistant Secretary of Labor and is now a professor at
Brandeis University
Andrée comes to Kuwait with me
In 1983 I was invited to visit Kuwait again by the Dean of Graduate Studies,
Sabeekah Abdul Razzak, a geologist who is the wife of Kazem Behbehani. She had taken
over from Hisham Naquib. Sabeekah was also a suffragette. She wanted votes for women
in Kuwait, and went to the polling booth. When she was denied the right to vote, this was
shown in front of the TV cameras. When women finally were able to vote in 2006, I
commented to Sabeekah that she had managed this without even having to chain herself to the
palace gates. Andrée came too We took advantage of a “special” frequent flyer trip on
TWA. Two first class tickets to Kuwait, with a return from Tel Aviv.
We went on
December 28th.
When we arrived, Sabeekah was in Riyadh for the formal opening of the
new buildings of the King Saud University. All the Deans and heads of Arab Universities
had been invited. “Suffragette” Sabeekah accepted but insisted that she would arrive dressed
as usual; in western dress. The whole schedule was rearranged to suit her with all banquets
in private houses so that her dress would not cause a scandal. Kazem showed us his uncle’s
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house, where he had played as a boy before 1945; the museum of Islamic art directed by Mrs
Qaddumi, wife of Hani Qaddumi. But Andrée fell sick. As we know now she had
fibromyalgia, and stayed in the hotel by herself for a couple of days. I went by myself to
two New Years Eve parties. One party was of Palestinian refugees (expatriates) and the other
was of Iraqi expatriates. Then we flew to Amman.
I think it was the Jordanian Academy of Sciences who hosted us in Amman
I
lectured at the University. Another day we were driven up to Irbid, near the Syrian border,
where I lectured again. At that University were three Palestinian brothers. Two as
Professors, the other visiting from the University of Illinois where he was a Professor of
Electrical Engineering. Another day we were driven south, past a couple of Crusader Castles
at Karak and Tafila to Petra.
We stayed the night at the tourist hotel in Petra so that we
could enter at sunrise and see the sun on the temple carved into the rock. We walked on
more than most tourists and climbed to a point where we could look over the Wadi Araba to
Israel on the other side. We decided not to climb up to the hill to what, we were told, was
Joshua’s tomb. Petra is, of course, a fascinating tourist place. The residents still live in the
caves, but many have Mercedes cars which they drive to work in Aqaba. One tall lady was
selling trinkets and was jokingly introduced to us as a true Nabatean. She was from New
Zealand, married to a Jordanian.
Then we were driven back to Amman On the way we
were stuck behind a slow “convoy” of 40 trucks, taking goods from Aqaba to Baghdad, since
the port of Basra was closed. This lasted an hour till the convoy turned to the right to
El-Azraq to cross the desert.
Another day we rented a car and set off to a Roman ruin at
Dibbeh I believe, then around by Jarash and Mafrak to Zarqa and back to Amman.
We had arranged to go on to the West Bank part of Palestine. But we did not know
how to get approval from the Israeli occupying authorities. The US Embassy could not, or
would not, help us directly. But they knew how it was done. The Embassy staff
recommended a travel agent in Amman. He sent an urgent FAX to his brother in Texas who
received it at 4 am. “My customers Mr and Mrs Richard Wilson are going to Jerusalem.
Can you please make arrangements for them?”
The response came in 15 minutes. I am not
sure what the agent did, but we got an Israeli visa. We took the bus to the Jordan river at the
King Hussein bridge, formerly the Allenby bridge. After a search and so on, we took a taxi
to Bir Zeit University.
I met the faculty there; talked to the physics department and gave a
lecture. In the garden of the University we met a group of students, and we asked them what
their aims were. The leader was I believe Marwin Barghouti. He described their aims to
us. If the Israelis would withdraw their army to the Green Line he would be at peace with
them.
One evening we spent with Peter Hillman. He was a South African and a PhD
student of Norman Ramsey at the Harvard Cyclotron in 1952 or so. He had come to AERE
Harwell in 1953, and then migrated to Israel. Peter took us to dinner at a little restaurant in
East Jerusalem jointly owned by an Israeli and a Palestinian. It was therefore a target for
extremists on both sides and two Israeli soldiers sat outside to prevent trouble. Peter’s wife’s
family had lived in the area since about 1920. She seemed very reasonable but then was
concerned why any Palestinian would want to learn physics, and understand radiation, unless it
was to make an atomic bomb. That the misunderstanding between Palestinians and Israelis
existed was obvious, but I had not expected to find it here. It became clear that it would be a
long time before the two sides could come together.
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Kamal Araj called at the hotel and insisted that we come and stay with his father’s
family in Beit Jala which we did.
Dr. Gabra Araj, who died on 2007, was a physician with
one son and three daughters who spoiled the son. They came from an old Greek Orthodox
family who can trace their origins back 1,200 years. Gabra had just got married in 1948, and
had a small medical practice in Jerusalem when Israel was created. Their house was 100 feet
west of the green line and they lost it. After 1967, Gabra went back to the house, broke bread
with the Israeli family then living there and told them he had no claim on the house any more.
He wanted peace. He told the Israeli President at a meeting that the Israelis know how to
reign, but not how to rule. This is, indeed, an interesting summary of the problem. We were
given a tour of the city by a friend who was a professional guide.
Then we were invited
to dinner in the Old City of Jerusalem by Kamal’s brother in law, Dr. Manuel Hassassian, at
the house of his father Mr Hassassian, of Armenian origin who had fled Istanbul in 1920.
Dr Manuel, who had married Samira Araj, was at that time Dean at the University of
Bethlehem founded by the Holy See in 1973. One evening at dinner in the house of Gabra
Araj’s brother, the Mayor of Beit Jala, we found another aspect of the problem. A group of
Moslem youths from Hebron had come to Beit Jala looking for a fight. They tried to stop a
group of Christian youths drinking in a local café. Mr Araj, the Mayor, was called but his
Palestinian police had no powers, and no guns. He called the Israelis who sent a patrol from
Jericho that arrived after it was all over. The next day I lectured at the University of
Bethlehem. During the lecture there was a loud noise and the Dean rushed out to quell it.
He was faced by a youth brandishing a knife who he disarmed. It was a group of Moslem
youths, maybe the same ones as the night before, throwing stones at the University students on
the University hill. Then an Israeli patrol car came along. The two sides joined forces and
pelted the Israeli car with stones! One of the few signs I have ever seen of Arab unity.
Manuel is now representative of the Palestinian Authority to Great Britain. The next day we
flew from Tel Aviv to Boston. Andrée’s fibromyalgia got worse and we got a wheel chair for
her in Boston. But she recovered.
In late 1985 or early 1986 Professor Safran accepted funds from the CIA for running
a conference on the future of Islam. He invited people but omitted to state the source of the
funds. The source of funds became clear when it was all exposed on the pages of the Boston
Globe. On arriving at Boston’s Logan airport, the Egyptian delegate turned round and went
home again. “It is more than my life is worth to attend a conference funded by the CIA”.
I was asked by a Harvard Crimson reporter about this. I pointed out that I had been asked to
collect information from the USSR for the CIA in 1959, and declined, although I regularly sent
them a copy of my trip report which they failed to acknowledge and probably ignored.
I
also noted that in 1984 the CIA had offered to fund a trip for me to Libya in 1983. I had
replied that unless the Libyans invited me and paid for the trip, the information I would get
would be valueless. In view of the bad international reputation of the CIA, I certainly
would declare the source of my funds. That did not satisfy the Crimson reporter or some of
my colleagues who accused me of an unfair attack on a Jewish intellectual.
But a year or so later I got a spontaneous apology from one of my critics who had also
become disenchanted with Safran by that time.. “You were right.” Like the gangster Al
Capone some 50 years before Professor Safran slipped up. Al Capone had not paid income
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tax on his ill gotten gains. Safran had not paid Harvard overhead on the CIA grant. He
resigned, and the Dean accepted the resignation “with reluctance.” The doors to the coffers
of the middle east were open again although it was a couple of years before we were actually
able to dip therein. A couple of weeks later I was invited, in February 1986 to a celebration
in Kuwait of the 25th anniversary of Kuwait independence from the UK and to give a talk there
- which I did. It seemed reasonable again for Ed Brooking and myself to aggressively pursue
donors. In March 1989 I went again to Kuwait, where Abdlatif gave me a check for $5,000
and I added on a special visit to Jeddah and called on another of AJ Meyer’s friends. Abulhady
Hassan Taher, Governor of Petromin, who promptly promised me a check for $100,000.
President Bok persuaded Hasib Sabbagh to up his gift from $200,000 to $300,000 and with a
little interest and a push from Professor John Dunlop, by 1990 the endowment for the AJ
Meyer chair was complete. In 1993 Roger Owen resigned from his position at St. Anthony’s
College at Oxford to accept the new chair. He returned the direction of the Center from the
“oil wells” direction of AJ to a the more scholarly discussion derived from Sir Hamilton Gibb,
the first Director of the Middle East Studies Center, of the historical place of the Middle East
in world affairs, with less emphasis on the immediate future. It was some time later, in
September 2008, that I again met AJ’s widow, Anne, again at a welcoming party at CMES.
The Center for Middle Eastern Studies was somewhat worn down after that 3 year
“period of confusion” under Professor Safran. So I decided in 1987 after my return from
sabbatical leave to restart the joint seminar that I had organized with AJ some 14 years before.
I had the same format, but ran it every two weeks, instead of every week, on Monday
afternoons. I called it the Middle East Development Seminar. I would invite friends from
the Gulf and ask them to tell us their dreams for the future to see whether we at Harvard could
help.
One of the first lecturers was Abdlatif Al-Hamad.
He flew to London Sunday
night. He saw the Arab Fund Bankers in London Monday morning before taking the
Concorde to New York and a small plane to Boston where I collected him from the airport. I
parked across from the faculty club at the fire plug. I called it my $50 parking place, which
was the amount of the fine if ticketed. Abdlatif gave his talk,. We went to dinner. After a
night at the Charles hotel, he flew to Washington, saw bankers there, and took a Concorde back
to Kuwait.
As far as I know, Abdlatif has kept up this same hectic schedule ever since. At
the dinner as dessert was being served, Dr Leonard (Lennie) Hausman turned up from the
Kennedy School. He pulled up a chair next to Abdlatif and promptly asked him for money.
I had to apologize to Abdlatif later. Lenny ran a program called the Middle Eastern
Initiative, or something similar, to bring Palestinian and Israeli scholars together for a year at
the Kennedy School. Lennie Hausman was an excellent fund raiser. I wish that I were
even 1/10 as successful.
But the Palestinians in particular were not taken in. All 12 of
the first Palestinian scholars signed a letter to President Bok saying that they had been
deceived as to the purpose of the program. Later Lenny was shown up as a cause of trouble
by one of Peter Rogers’ graduate students working on water in the Gaza strip. Lenny had
been misusing funds for personal purposes, and was in deficit by $250,000. Harvard asked
him to resign, but many donors asked for their money back - which Harvard provided. I
understand that the whole procedure cost Harvard $1,000,000.
The crowning talk of my seminar series was by Fadhel Jamali who I had invited from
Tunis, as described in a special section later. By 1993 Roger Owen had become the
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A.J.Meyer Professor of Middle Eastern History. After a couple of years I left the task of
running a seminar up to him - a task he has carried out well.
In 1991 I went around the world in eight days. Somewhat faster than Philias Fogg in
Jules Verne’s novel. The reason was the start of the study of reactor safety for the Taiwan
government, described in another section. We had a brief meeting in Paris airport with Paul
Lochak and the Director of Framatome, the French company which was the builder of the
French nuclear power plants. That afternoon I spent with my step mother Winnie in Banbury
and Woodstock, I went to Bahrein and called on Abdlatif Al Hamad who had taken the Arab
Fund there in exile from Kuwait which had been occupied by Saddam’s army. Then I went
on to Taiwan where there was a conference on the Taiwan nuclear power program and back
home.
The
Kuwait Oil Fires and Water in the Arab World
When I was with Abdlatif in Bahrein he had an immediate worry. What was the
effect of the Kuwait Oil Fires on public health?
Th sky was somewhat overcast at midday
which was unusual in April. It was the smoke coming from Kuwait.
Abdulatic asked if
Harvard could do arrange a conference to study the problem.
So on Wednesday I spent a
couple of hours writing a proposal. On Saturday, by which time I was in Taiwan, Abdlatif
presented it to his board. On Monday I was back in Harvard, visiting the School of Public
Health, explaining to my friends; “I have committed you.!” John Evans at once said: “I want
to do it.” So in August John ran the highly successful oil fires conference and later on the
Harvard - Kuwait public health program.
When Abdlatif al Hamad gave his lecture at our newly instituted seminar in1987, he
emphasized the importance of water in the Arab World. Water is more important than oil.
Water costs more than oil and is essential for life. Water is more important to the Arab
world than Palestine, because if the Arab world cannot cope with finding homes for 3 million
Palestinians, how can they cope with the 3 million increase in the Egyptian population in 5
years?
I had already had met Professor Peter Rogers in Harvard’s Division of Engineering
and Applied Sciences (DEAS) so I suggested to Abdlatif that Peter might be able to help.
The conference on “Water in the Arab World” was postponed two years while we
started a study of the Kuaiti Oil Fires. Peter suggested athat the conference be a closed,
conference of 30 or so experts.
I did not demur. I wanted it to be formally a part of the
Middle Eastern Studies program to give CMES added visibility. But this may well have been
a mistake. We got into trouble. A visiting Israeli who considers himself a water expert, Hillel
Shuval, wanted to be a part of the conference. Peter and his colleagues, including professor
Myron Fiering who was a Jewish American, had experience with Hillel before and considered
him to be a blow hard. So he was not invited.
But then Hillel put pressure on the Dean of
the Faculty of arts and Sciences (FAS), Henry Rossovsky, and the Director of CMES, and
Bill Graham, to allow Hillel to be a participant. For Rossovsky it was (incorrectly) a
supposed “Arab lover” denying rights to an Israeli. For Peter Rogers it an issue of the right of
a faculty member to choose participants according to his own unfettered judgement.
I
discussed this by telephone with Abdlatif and we came to a resolution that was agreed by Peter
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Rogers. Hillel was allowed to be present at the meetings and listen but not participate.
Abdlatif was also present and was also going to be careful not to participate.
That worked
out fine. There was a much smaller concern. Both I and Abdlatif had suggested that the
program only allow for discussion of the River Jordan in the last half hour of a three day
meeting, because once it was mentioned, then no one would discuss anything else. The River
Jordan in its upper reaches had almost all the water taken away, and by the time it reached the
neighborhood of Jericho was only a trickle. Barely enough to wash John the Baptist. The
Euphrates and the Nile are far more important rivers and Saudi Arabia was mining water at
three times the water flow of the Nile. But someone mentioned the Jordan 3 hours before the
end of the meeting, and as I had anticipated we discussed nothing else thereafter.
These various interactions, with Bogden Magic, with Safran, with Lenny Hausman and
Hillel Shuval all had a common feature. They were “con men” . They took advantage of a
controversial arena, the modern Arab-Israeli disagreements, to work somewhat insulated from
criticism from either side. If opposed, they would call their oppose “anti-Semitic” or
“anti-Islamic”. Who wants to fight such epithets which merely make it difficult to get
anything done? Most people run away from such confrontations and that, of course, is what
many con men wish. Rightly or wrongly it tends to get my adrenalin flowing. When I have
been accused directly of being ant-Semitic, as I have been by Professor Larry Summers when
he was President of Harvard, I reply, if I am allowed to, that “the only evidence you have for
that statement is that I am willing to talk to more Semites than you are”. That reference is to
the fact that Jews were not the only Semites. Most Arabs are semites also. That response
has always silenced the critic, but critics probably go underground as Henry Kendall did when
we had a quarrel about high energy physics.
That was not the end of my peregrinations east of the Mediterranean.
In summer
1991 I was asked by a Syrian, Dr Abdul Aziz who was working for UNESCO to join him on a
review team to review the science programs in the University of Muscat. He was a different
Abdul Aziz from my friend the Iraqi Abdul Aziz Al-Wattari, But that coincided with my
invitation to be Chairman of a special reactor safety review in Taiwan, described elsewhere.
But I got a second such invitation in 1994 to be on a team reviewing the program at the
University of the Emirates at El-Ain, and again in 1999 at the King Fahd University of
Petroleum and Minerals in Dharhan, Saudi Arabia.
Arab Fund Committee
Nor was it the end of my visits to Kuwait. Two separate reasons have taken me there
over the last 15 years. In the late 1990s, Abdlatif Al-Hamad persuaded the Arab Fund to set
up a fellowship program for mid-career Arab scholars to visit the best Universities and
institutions in America and the west - and we included Japan in that list.
I have had the
honor of being on the fellowship planning and selection committee from the start. At the
committee meetings I meet Professor Waterbury, President of the American University of
Beirut, Professor Bakreba, from King Fahd University in Dharhan who I had first met when we
presented the review group’s report in 1994, and Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American who
is Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Center at Columbia University. The Arab Fund get
about 50 applications yearly of which they send 20 to us for careful review and finally accept
about 10. We don’t vote on it but forward our recommendations to Abdlatif’s staff. I take
this task very seriously. Sometimes I know the University, Department, or even the
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Professor who is expected to be the host. On other occasions I call around to find out. For
example, I was able to argue that although the Center for Disease Control is not a University
with the reputation of Harvard, it is nonetheless a first rate institution, and for many scholars
the best. I was able to explain that I am glad to say that my recommendations are almost
always accepted. I have indirectly followed one or two of the awardees.
I believe that their
experiences have shown the program to be successful. In 2007 there were 30 applicants of
high enough quality for Abdlatif’s staff to ask the committee to review them carefully
After the highly successful conference on the Kuwait oil fires in August 1991, and
absolutely fantastic elimination of the last of the 610 or so fires by November 1991, we
heard little from the Kuwaitis. But ten years later, about the year 2000, Kuwaitis decided that
they wanted to add the medical effects of the fires to the list of damages caused by the 1990
-1991 invasion and occupation, from which they were asking damages from Saddam Hussein
and Iraq. After a lot of discussion, and behind the scenes elucidation, a proposal from the
Harvard University School of Public Health was accepted by the Kuwait Public Authority for
Compensation. (PACC). John Evans, merely a Senior Lecturer, was the leader in this. He
had run the successful oil fires conference in 1991. I have given John all the support that I
believe I can usefully give, and visited Kuwait three times for the project. Indeed I had
developed a reputation of knowing everyone in Kuwait. When, in 2003 I walked into the
Kuwait Sheraton Hotel to meet people for dinner, I was immediately greeted by Mahmoud
Yousef Abdul Rahman with a warm embrace. He was there for another conference - on how
to help Iraq. When the visiting Harvard group was taken to see Abadlatif’s beautiful office
building, we met Dr Ikhlas Abdullah, a Sudanese lady working there. I had met Ikhlas and
her physicist husband Mahomed Abdulkarim Ahmed before, and Iklass immediately
recognized me.
Jokingly my colleagues said that I know all the beautiful ladies in Kuwait.
In 1991 I had made an estimate of the effects on health of the particulate emission from
the burning oil fires. I estimated a total of 50,000 deaths. But I was wrong. The more
careful calculation is a hundred times less, a 500 or so. The reasons became clear within a
year. By 1992, at a special conference at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva
the reasons were itemized. Satellite pictures, made available in summer 1991, showed that
on many days the sky over Kuwait itself was completely clear. The prevailing wind, from
NW to SE, took the plume mainly over sparsely inhabited areas, until Dharhan.
Although
these winds were expected to, and did, change in November 1991, by that time the fires were
out. But most importantly, I had not allowed sufficiently for the plume rise caused by the
hot fumes as the oil burnt. I had assumed that the Kuwaitis would be living within the plume
as I did in the London fogs of the 1930s. No. On all but a dozen or so days, the plume lifter
300 feet or so with 100 to 1000 times reduction in ground level pollution. Interestingly the
best detailed computer models from Livermore, although improved since the time of
Chernobyl by adding the effects of rainfall, still were completely unable to predict the day to
day variations. But the general statements from fundamental physical principles survived.
On average, one is able to describe what is happening. In this, the scientists in Saudi Aramco
were much clearer than the modelers who reported at WMO. The more detailed work of the
Harvard SPH Kuwait program 15 years later confirmed this.
But the Harvard Kuwait
program did find a result which for me is fascinating and understated. They found a big
increase in the group of ailments lumped into the general category Post Traumatic Stress
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Disorder.(PTSO). PTSO has been known for centuries. It used to be called Battle Fatigue.
It is hard to study for two reasons. The diagnosis tends to be subjective, based upon a
patient’s reporting, rather than objective. Moreover it is usually hard to find the unique
stress. The Occupation of Kuwait was a unique and well defined stress, and there were good
statistics both before and after.
John Dunlop was never completely happy with the change in the focus of the Middle
Eastern Study Center from oil and its economic impact and the failure to rebuild along AJ’s
lines. So in October 1996 we arranged a special dinner for Hisham Nazer, just retired as oil
Minister of Saudi Arabia on whose advisory committee John had sat for 25 years.
The idea
was to get a major influx of money to restart the “oil wells” program or something similar. I
had to leave early to catch the last plane to Florida. I had to go to Cape Canaveral to see the
launch of the Cassini spacecraft. Professor Kastenburg of Berkeley and I had written the
final report to the President of the United States on the safety of this mission, summarized in a
paper (879) published as Cassini reached Saturn 7 years later, and it seemed wise and honest
for me to put my life where we said it was safe. Andrée and I saw the launch. It was
indeed spectacular. I also have in my office a spectacular photograph of Saturn and its rings
given to me for my service on the final safety recommendation. It hangs beside a photograph
of the earth taken by Bill Anders on his trip 25 years before as an astronaut..
It was the next spring, 1997, that I was asked to be on the review committee for the
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, so on the way home I made a detour to call
on Hisham. As he commented to me, he turned the tables on me. Although he had his car
meeting me at the steps of the airplane, he was not there. He had been summoned to meet the
King. But Hisham and his family were characteristically courteous. His son in law, Zuhair
Fayez, invited me to a family party on the Sabbath. There were 30 men, and a number of
women I did not see, at Raz Hazibah, 20 miles north of Jeddah. I was taken by a son to the
family house in old Jeddah, which had been offered, and used, by King Saud and his party
when the city surrendered to him in, I believe, 1933. Hisham and his wife entertained me for
dinner and met his granddaughter and her husband. But no check for Harvard. Zuhair Fayez
is an architect and head of a partnership with connections throughout the middle east and
Indian continent. He showed me around his office and his proposed computer system
whereby one should be able to keep tack of all the crucial systems, water, electricity, sewage,
etc in a community. He, Zuhair, later gave me $6,000 for the program to help the
Bangladeshis cope with their arsenic pollution.. Abdulhady Taher gave me $50,000 which
got us started and Khaled Al-Turki later gave me $35,000. I describe the arsenic program in
a later section.
Iraq
In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq. Of course I wanted to get rid of Saddam
Hussein. But to enter a country without a single one of its’ neighbors wanting us to do so
seemed preposterous. Ideally, we would have got most or all of the neighboring countries on
board and the first troops across the border would have been joint from Iran on the east, Turkey
on the north, Syria and Jordan on the west, and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait from the south.
Although we had logistic support from Kuwait, for which we paid, and even some from
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Jordan, we and a small group of allies we were on our own. The elder Bush had waited to
fight Iraq until he had full support in the US congress, support in the UN security council and
support of a majority of Arab countries if not support of a majority of Arab peoples. I was
informed then, and I believe it to be so, that the Arab leaders had told the President that if some
progress could be made toward peace between Israel and Palestine, hopefully along the lines of
the March 2002 peace proposal of Prince Abdullah, then the public opinion in their countries
would allow them to support America openly in getting rid of Saddam, who was hated by them
much more than by Americans. Dubya was too impatient. He did not wait for any of this.
I was visiting Los Alamos for the winter and talked to many people. Los Alamos was, of
course, a den of hawks, but everyone seemed to agree that Iraq could not possibly have nuclear
weapons. I have outlined the evidence on this both before and since in published papers,
numbers 295, 472, 487, 885 and 896 in my publication list.
At Los Alamos I watched the
news on NPR. In February I was appalled that one of my colleagues at Harvard, Michael
Ignatieff, Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights, stated that he thought that Saddam had
nuclear weapons. He gave no evidence or reference for this belief. He clearly had not
bothered to walk across Harvard Square and ask someone who knew.
I wrote Michael a
personal letter about this but got no answer. This was a clear example of the saying that
Harvard University is big enough that you are sure to find someone on the wrong side of every
issue. We were less sure about biological and chemical weapons, but the quantity was much
(ten thousand times) smaller than the 15,000 tons of nerve gases in storage at that time at
Umatilla, Oregon, alone.
But the administration was not listening let alone reading.
But once the US forces had invaded Iraq, my opposition changed. It seemed to me to
be vital that we should be successful and I so told my Arab friends, and in particular Adnan
Shihab-Eldin who agreed with me. At Harvard I argued that whatever one’s views about the
war, that the future of Iraq and to some extent the whole middle east depended upon the young
men and women in the universities, and of course, in particular, the University of Baghdad,
which I had visited in early 1983. Henry Rossovsky, a former Dean and now a member of
Harvard Corporation was thinking likewise and I went to a meeting in his office in June 2003.
We needed some money to bring some scholars over. Initially the established ones, but after
that the youngsters who had never seen life outside of Saddam. I expected Henry, who has
Dean had a lot of experience in such matters, to do the fund raising. When nothing had
happened by October I searched for funds myself. After sending requests to 20 foundations
that had said “No!” I got a call from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation who asked me to
submit a brief proposal by e mail that afternoon for presentation to the board.
The board
approved and $50,000 came from the Lounsbery Foundation and $25,000 from the Sloane
foundation. My invitation to Professor al-Musawe, the President of the University of Baghdad
went out at once.
The USA has a huge embassy and a dozen or so military bases in Iraq but no consulates.
We should have no military bases and a dozen consulates.
To get a visa to the USA an Iraqi
must travel to Amman in Jordan along a 600 mile road. My experience with US consular
services prepared me for trouble, but not as much as I got.
But one visit to the consulate was
not enough. Firstly a visit to be interviewed and provide information, all of which would be
provided to “Washington” who in due course would decide whether or not to issue a visa.
After enquiries, it appeared that one person could take all the information for the party of 15 or
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so that was to be headed by the President of the University of Baghdad, Dr Musawe. That one
person was to be Anis Al-Rawi, Dean of the women’s college who went there at the beginning of
March.
Then, hopefully the visa could be issued the day after the rest of the party came .
But I decided that I would try to ensure that there were no problems. I had met the Ambassador
to Jordan, Skip Gnehm, when he was Ambassador to Kuwait where Kazem and Sabeekhah had
invited him to dinner to meet us in 1983
I wrote to him and asked his help to over come any
administrative hurdles.
I also asked that Muhammed Al-Sabah, Foreign Minister of Kuwait
who also knew Skip Gnehm, to make an appeal for efficiency.
I had arranged a busy schedule
for the party in Cambridge and Boston for the 2 week visit. There was an invitation to a joint
meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Boston Athenaum. I had
arranged special dinners with interested faculty. I had organized meetings with Deans and the
President. There were to be TV appearances. I had arranged an excursion to a mansion on
the North Shore.
Everyone in Harvard, MIT and BU was anxious to help. I had arranged
that they were to get a computer loaded with all of MIT’s computer based course instructions.
Bearing in mind the tremendous importance in modern teaching, and scholarship, of computer
access I arranged for each and every visitor to have a laptop computer with wireless access to
Harvard, and to the internet through the hotel computer system. They were to 2 days before
the party was to leave Baghdad, I got a personal telephone call from the vice-consul in Amman.
“We will not be able to issue visas at once to your guests when they come in 2 days. We must
interview them, send the results to Washington, and wait for a response.” Had the rules
changed? Or had we misunderstood? Had I stimulated excessive attention by my attempts the
get help? I did not and do not know what, if anything I had done wrong and what I could have
done better, But I broke down at my desk and wept.
But only for a moment: I soon
recovered and spent the rest of the day canceling appointments and parties.
One Iraqi, Professor Saad El Toufiq, from the technical University of Baghdad went to
Amman and stayed 2 months until in May he got his visa. I was in Erice, Sicily, so I
rapidly, with 2 days notice and with frantic E mails, rearranged a visit in mid-May. The
Universities were closing for the summer, and many arrangements were not possible. But
Saad was received warmly.
He went on to visit his sister in Ohio afterwards. Interestingly
a French newspaper, 3 years later, claimed that a CIA agent had made a secret visit in 1995 to
visit Saad in Baghdad to gather information about the Iraqi bomb program - as described
elsewhere in these memoires. But CIA chose to believe less reliable intelligence. Then in
August I got a call from West Point. We all know that the USA is completely run by
civilians and the military have no especial privileges.
But when West Point University sent
an invitation to the Dean of Science, Dr Abdus Taleb, it was sheer luck that the US military
in Baghdad were able to arrange visas.
They came in August 2004. I was just departing
for Erice, Sicily for the umpteenth seminar on Planetary Emergencies, but he came up to
visit me with a military driver.
I was the only Professor in Harvard Physics around!
But
contact was made.
In December 2004 the Dean of Women, Anis Al-Rawi sent an e mail. His visa was
ready and could he come?
Of course the answer was yes, but when?
I also got a call
from West Point again. President Al Musawe was coming to a conference on higher
education in Atlanta in March and could they visit Harvard immediately thereafter? West
Point would arrange visas. I told Anis Al-Rawi that the should wait until then. Again I
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arranged a major schedule, although my colleagues were less enthusiastic than before. But
they did not turn up at Atlanta. Even the army had trouble in getting visas! Dean Anis
Al-Rawi came by himself, in April 2005,
and the rest of the party came at the end of June
2005. That was a bad time, but at least some of the Harvard, MIT and BU faculty were
around.
Neverthess the meeting was a great success.
The leader of the Iraqi group was
a geologist, Dr. Beriwan Khailani, Deputy Minister of Science. President Musawe came.
The Deans of Science, and Engineering. And the Chairman of the Geology department all
came.
We were then set for the next steps in our proposed interaction with the University
of Baghdad. We wanted to invite young, 30 year old, scholars who had never seen life
without Saddam
These are the future.
I got another $75,000. Dean Taleb and
President Mosawe nominated 20 people I passed around their CVs and four colleagues
agreed to mentor a visitor to make sure that his or her time was well spent.
I arranged their
travel and met each one at Logan airport in January or February 2006.
The visit was for 6
months and they were due to return in July or August 2006.
We extended two of them.
Ms Amal Fahad was working with Professor Zickler in the Computer Science Department and
testing out a simple roof top wireless system. For $1,000 equipment attached to a computer
which had internet access, all other computrs in the line of sight could have wireless access to
the internet. She was proposing to develop this a bit further and take it to Baghdad in
September or October.
But in August 2006, even the University of Baghdad was in deep trouble as violence
broke out. Anyone who had a connection with the wicked American occupiers was in danger
- or at least they thought so. I understand that only 6% of students turned up for classes in
September. Amal was warned not to go home by her family and her department chairman.
As of summer 2007, she is going to graduate school at the University of Rochester with a fully
paid scholarship to get a PhD. Firas Seddeq, another computer scientist is in limbo.
Executive Dean Fawwaz Habbal (himself born in Syria) found him a position for a couple of
years in the “information technology” group. He married a Syrian born Canadian and
hopefully matters will work out. Raied Jamal Kamal was very much liked by the research
group in which he worked, headed by Eric Mazur, who was willing to keep him around a few
more months. But a father’s duty is to be at home twice a year - when the baby is conceived
and when he or she is born. His wife needed him back and he went back to Baghdad in
August. Eric and his group are willing to have him and his family back to study for a PhD
degree but, alas, neither the physics department nor DEAS are willing to accept him because of
what they consider to be inadequately low qualifications. Worse still, it took 4 months for
this bureaucratic refusal to become clear.
Accepting Raied would involve more work on everyone’s part, but his obvious
willingness to work hard, and Eric Mazur’s willingness to go further than usual to help,
convinced me.
But I am no longer a formal member of the department; only a guest at
meetings.
Maybe in 2003 or 2004 the department would have been more willing to help,
but Americans have a short attention span. I did what I knew how to help further. I had
introduced some important Iraqi academics to academics in the Cambridge area. I had hoped
that the project would “take off”. But everyone is busy at Harvard and people are not willing
to continue to spend their time, apparently without limit. But now I am bewildered about
what might be done next.
But someone must help in the many issues such as this if America
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is to regain the international approval of 1945. As I write this in summer 2008, Amal Fahad
took advantage of a lull in fighting around Baghdad and went home to visit her parents. She
found funds and installed the rooftop wireless system as planned 2 years before.
She sent
an e mail to her many American friends from the middle of the science quadrangle. She is a
lady of courage and persistence. There should be many such people. I maintain a weak
connection with CMES to this day.
Scientific autobiography
In this part of my reminiscences I do not repeat all the contents of the many papers I
and my co-authors have written for scientific journals. I mostly describe here the context in
which they are written and merely provide references. These reference numbers refer to the
number of the article in my collected list of references which may be found in the webpage:
http://physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/publication/published_papers.html
Beginnings
As I reviewed recently a paper for possible publication in an epidemiology journal my
mind went back to an event when I was a 6 year old. I had been weighed with great precision
in pounds and ounces probably by a nurse. I enquired of someone, my aunt Mabel (May) I
believe, whether it would make a difference whether I had just had a bowel movement or not.
The answer came back, incorrectly, that it would make no difference.
I pondered this for a
long while (maybe even an hour) and decided that it would make a difference of an ounce or
so. But I did not want to contradict or correct my aunt who I loved, and kept my own
counsel. What does that have to do with epidemiology? The hopeful author of a typical
epidemiology paper gives a table of upper 90% confidence limits to 4 significant figures!
Yet only the first digit had any meaning.
This childhood experience may be the
subconscious reason why I tell my students: “Never quote more figures than are significant;
to do so only displays your own ignorance of the meaning.” As computers have simplified
calculations, they also enable a table to be prepared with numbers unedited straight from the
computer. Maybe the hopeful author understood that most of the digits in the table had no
meaning, but if so, he was wasting the time of his readers by asking them to figure out for
themselves what numbers were significant.
My first technical interest came in 1939 when we were evacuated from London to
Crowthorne, Berkshire. In our billet in the billiard room of Alderbrook, we had no radio.
So I undertook, at age 13, to build one. It was put in a box by my Uncle Gilbert and picked
up the two important stations; the regional and the national BBC stations. On vacations back
home I worked on radio and gramophone (phonograph) systems following my father’s lead.
One of the first moments was when I had built my first audio amplifier at age 14 and my father
came to inspect it and pulled apart several dry soldered joints. I was in tears. But I learned
the judicious use of flux and “tinning” the surfaces in advance
I soon graduated to fixing
radio sets for friends and neighbors. One problem took me 3 hours to discover and fix. It
was a leaking electrolytic condenser (capacitor). By the time it was fixed there was a big mess
on the floor for me to clear up. I was proud of myself for finding the obscure problem. But
the neighbor thought I was dumb. In contrast when I had traveled all the way to Edgeware in
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1946 on the underground (Northern Line) to fix our friend Joe Newton’s radio, I was a genius
for pointing out that the AC plug, behind the sofa, had pulled away from the socket! Our
physician Dr Kelley, who had diagnosed my father’s appendicitis when others had failed,
bought an X ray set - mostly for radiation “treatment” I believed. It was professionally
installed. But people got electric shocks from it. So my father volunteered my help. I
found that the electrician had properly changed a 2 pin socket to a 3 pin one, but had connected
nothing to the ground socket! Although my children sometimes are concerned that in our old
house some of the wring is not up to modern code standards, I am sensitive to the need for
grounding.
I read extensively about electronic circuits. Of special interest to me at the time was
an article on negative feedback in the RCA technical review about 1936, discussing an audio
amplifier with feedback. I built one with modified circuitry, buying the parts from a junk
store on Lisle Street just north of Leicester Square and near Piccadilly Circus. I was also
interested in an interest of my father - in gramophone reproduction. He had a couple of
turntables in his radio console and had special “pick ups” to paly the 78 rpm records. A
couple of his patents were on pick up design.
I decided that the crystal pickup was better
than the magnetic pickups my father had used, but they needed damping so I rebuilt a few with
rubber damping. This got rid of a few objectionable resonances. My father had a collection
of 20 - 30 constant frequency records to test his equipment and I was able to show that my
pickups were not only high quality but gave less wear on the records - especially with fiber
needles.
I remember Joe Newton questioning me about going to this district around Lisle Street
and Piccadilly circus where hookers abounded.. So I told him I was interested in valves
(vacuum tubes) not pick ups!
I built an RF tuner with automatic tuning to the right
frequency. The circuit I built was copied from, I believe, and article in the “Wireless
Magazine”. It was the forerunner of an FM receiver. All of this served me in good stead,
firstly when I had to study radar and electronics during the war to satisfy the recruiting board.
I knew at the time more than the instructor!
My first paper (1A on my list) was on a piece
of equipment I first tested at the undergraduate lab and then built at home. It was on an
electronic device for selecting random numbers The idea was to use it for experiments in
“Extra Sensory Perception” (ESP) to avoid many of the statistical and other pitfalls. I had
been impressed by experiments on “Precognitive Telepathy” by the mathematician SG Soal
and M (Molly) Goldney, with the subject Basil Shackleton. The idea was simple. If no one
knew what was coming till the button was pressed, the possibility of cheating or collusion
would vanish. But it was never seriously used. But the development was fun. It led me to
the fundamental realization that there exists no such thing as a table of random numbers.
Once a series of numbers is written down it is merely a sequence. What can be random is the
procedure for finding the next random number.
I think that this is a fundamental point, but
not many others seem to agree with me.
But I do remember discussing this with Ed Purcell
about 1957. I was explaining the limits of the random number procedures given my the
resolution time and the frequency of circulation in my device. He showed me a book prepared by the Rand Corporation - of 10,000 numbers. I think they were prepared by a
method similar to mine and I was able to show that they showed a small non-random property
in sequence preferences, about the same as in my early device.
But Ed Purcell discussed
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randomness in a characteristic way He held up the Rand book in his hand and tore it in two.
“This is the only book that I know where half the book is worth half of the whole!”
Nowadays one uses a more complex computer based procedure.
But not all
commercial programs work alright. In about 1992 I gave my freshman seminar tables of
ransom numbers produced by Miscrosoft EXCEL but they were far from random.
I have
not looked recently at the EXCEL program but the Open Office random number procedure
seems to be fine. I have realized since in my instructional work that a basic understanding is
rare.
Physical scientists are better off than others. We know that the physical universe is
governed by random motions of atoms and molecules.
The derivation of the basic gas laws
illustrates this. We also know that rare events occur.
As molecules rise to the surface of a
liquid, most of the time they are turned back by the attraction of other liquid molecules that
create the surface tension. But a few in a million get through and evaporate. This rate
process can be calculated precisely and leads of course to the vapor pressure laws.
In mathematics at St Paul’s School I had learned about “Cause and Chance” with
examples from card games. This leads naturally of course to a “frequentist” approach to
statistics and expression of scientific results. When I left St. Paul’s school I was asked to
select a book as a prize for being head of the class. I selected RA Fisher’s “Statistical
Methods for Research Workers”.
This is a bible for biologists and medical people but
overly simplistic for physicists. Nonetheless I keep it and refer to it when I am involved with
epidemiology.
I suppose it was about then that I developed a basic understanding of
statistics.
This was not merely on theorems useable for biomedical studies but what they
might mean. I was explaining a fundamental point to a student who I had hired for a summer
job. She said: “ I got an A in the statistics course but no one ever explained this to me.”
Indeed I think that an understanding of statistics and its limitations should be a prerequisite for
a public policy position of any sort. By implementing such a requirement for employment
now, that would have the additional benefit of reducing the federal bureaucracy one hundred
fold!
I started my D.Phil work at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, in 1946. I note that
Oxford uses the genitive rather than the dative most Universities use) in 1949. The thesis was
on the cross section for photodisintegration of the deuteron (1,2,3,9). I first measured the
absolute cross section, for both the 2.62 MeV gamma ray from Th C’‘, using a 250 millicurie
thorium source, and then for the 2.76 MeV gamma ray from Na 24. We calibrated the
radiothorium source using the procedures from Dr LH Gray, then at Hammersmith Hospital,
and the sodium source using the beta gamma coincidence method suggested by Sam Devons in
1939.
Unfortunately the measurement of the croissection, particularly with the radiothorium
source, was too high.
I was disappointed at the time, and still am, in both Collie and
Halban who never went over the data with me to see whether, or what, mistakes I had made.
The meeting with LH Gray at Hammersmith hospital was very informative and influenced me
later. He was a physicist with no formal medical training yet all the physicians treated him as
an equal and some thought he had a medical degree. He had a young assistant measuring
sodium (using radioactive sodium 24) though the blood.
There was a slight argument about the radiothorium source. There was only one in
UK. Who was to have it? Brian Flowers, a young physicist at Harwell wanted it but Hans
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Halban prevailed. After that Brian switched firstly to theoretical physics, and then to public
policy in which he was very effective ending up in the House of Lords. I remember him most
by a letter he wrote to Sir John Cockroft, head of AERE And his boss. What should one do
with scientists when they get too old? Not till the end of the second page did he say that too
old meant over 30!. In view also of some frustration I got between 25 and 30 I remember
also the comment of the Russian born physicist, Professor Nicholas Kemmer at Edinburgh.
“While there is death there is hope”. I hope I am not too much in the way of my younger
colleagues and do not propose to die yet (at age 83)
To return to my main narrative, I then used these techniques for a variety of small
measurements: such as a search for the “cross over” J=4 to J=0 transition in Na 24 at 4.14 MeV
(present at the level of 10-7) almost all suggested by myself, and moving equipment to the
Harwell “BEPO” research reactor I measured the capture gamma ray in carbon. Alas I also
found some gamma rays which were not there. I should have been alerted by the fact that the
width of the peaks was a little too narrow.
The photodisintegration of the deuteron, is a problem in the interaction of two
nucleons. I read about the work of Bethe and Peirls in 1934 “the quantum theory of the
diplon, (as the deuteron was at one time called)”. I was to meet Peirls at my D.Phil. oral
where he was asked to be the external examiner. I met him later in 1953 at a conference in
Birmingham where he was a Professor, and again when Birmingham offered me a job as
Professor in 1956. I came across Eugene Wigner’s 1935 paper on neutron-proton scattering,
and his work with Gregory Breit, also from eastern Europe. Valentine Telegdi reminded me
later that he and I first met at a nuclear physics conference in Oxford in 1948 and we both met
Eugene Wigner at that time. I was probably introduced by Dr Nicholas Kurti, a low
temperature physicist in the Clarendon Laboratory who, like Wigner, was from Hungary.
I found difficulty in getting ideas in Oxford. So probably at Hans Halban’s
suggestion, I went down to Harwell, 15 miles away, on the number 13 bus. There I met
Bruno Pontecorvo who I got to know and was always Ponte to me. Ponte was an Italian who
had worked with Enrico Fermi in Rome, and later in 1938-1939 in Joliot-Curie’s laboratory in
Paris. Ponte left Paris by bicycle in May 1940 with, I believe, Dr Franzinetti and Dr
Benedetti. Crossing the Spanish frontier 6 hours ahead of the Nazi armies, they went to
Lisbon, and worked their passage to the USA on a freight boat. Ponte then explored for oil in
the west before being tapped by Hans Halban to join his team in Montreal on back up work for
the bomb project. After the war, he spent a coupe of years in the Atomic Energy Of Canada
Laboratory in Chalk River and came to Harwell in 1948 or 1949. I had already read about
his famous measurement, performed in Chalk River, of the decay spectrum of tritium,
obtained by filling a proportional counter with tritium gas. That showed that it was indeed a
three body decay and he looked at the end point of the beta spectrum and hence found the
decay energy. By comparison with mass measurements, this suggested a neutrino mass close
to zero.
There was another paper on tritium decay about the same time by Curran,
Angus and Cockeroft (not Sir John) from Glasgow University.
In that paper they made a
calibration with K X rays and succeeded in separating the two x ray peaks. While that
measurement was basically correct, Ponte pointed out that the separation could not have been
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achieved.. The resolution of the apparatus was inadequate!
I was alerted then and am
alert since, to many times when an experimenter has described incorrect results by selective
use of data.
It especially happens when he thinks he knows the “right” answer. In 1938
Kopferman’s student selected data and found a hydrogen fine structure in agreement with the
then theory. When these data were reexamined some 7 years later, it was realized that there
was a statistically significant shift from the theory, measured later by Willis Lamb using
radio-frequency spectroscopy and appropriately called the “Lamb Shift”.
The 2 Mev
neutron capture gamma ray “discovered” in the “cold fusion” experiment of Pons and
Fleischman can quickly seen to be bogus as it was too narrow for the resolution.
I also
read with interest Fisher’s paper about 1919 that showed that the experimental results that
Mendel relied on for checking his Mendelian theory of heredity could not have been derived
from data.
They were too precise!
No one knows what happened but one suspects that
Mendel’s gardener doctored the results to produce numbers that he thought that his boss
wanted! I always remember the Mendelian theory by the limerick:
There was a young fellow called Sarky
who had an affair with a darky.
The results of his sins were quadruplets not twins,
One white, one black and two khaki”
The controversy about whether electromagnetic fields cause cancer is full of such
problems. It is easy to identify them but, as noted later, not so easy to describe the problem to
a judge and jury in a courtroom.
One day Ponte gave me and another student a lift back to Oxford in his car. He
parked his car just outside the post office in St Aldate’s where no parking was allowed. A burly
“Bobby” came up and reproved him. Ponte let off a string of very rapid Italian and the Bobby
retired in disorder!
As I left for the USA at the end of June 1950, Hans threw a farewell party for me. I am
not sure whether it was at this party or another, but Ponte showed up with his Swedish born wife
and children. “We are just going on vacation and we want to say good bye”. We found out
later what he did but not why he did it.
He emigrated to the Soviet Union secretly. Ponte and
his family first went to see Ponte’s brother, an Italian film producer and communist, in Italy.
Then Ponte and his family, wife and two children, flew to Stockholm to see his wife’s family.
Then a Russian freight boat took them to Leningrad and he went to Dubna. His portrait hangs in
the lecture room in Dubna as one of the founders of that laboratory.
This secret departure
from England leaves us with a difficult question which for me is unanswered. Why did Ponte
go to USSR? I do not believe he could have known that he would be accepted, well treated and
even honored. I think the Soviets had “something on him”. I don’t believe he ever betrayed
secrets, but he could have been a “sleeper”, and once away from Harwell he would have been of
no use to the KGB. They could well have betrayed him. So most of us suspect he was giiven
the choice of working in the USSR or spending 7 years in jail as Alan Nunn May and Klaus
Fuchs did. Dr Alan Nunn May had been arrested as a spy in Montreal in December 1949 and
spent time in a UK jail. Klaus Fuchs was arrested in Harwell in February or March 1950. I
remember that I was in Harwell at the time and the police at the gate told everyone coming out at
5 pm (to catch the 5.10 bus) “don’t talk to the press”. I did not know what not to talk to the
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press about!
The UK government then felt that the only way to be sure about someone was if
he was born, and his grandfathers were born, in the USA. Ponte was told that he had to take
the first University position available where he would not be a security risk. He was
immediately offered, and accepted, a lectureship at Liverpool where they were just finishing a
350 MeV cyclotron. I remember Gerry Pickavance saying at a dinner party in April 1950 or
so, “I will believe that the government procedure makes sense when Pontecorvo is arrested”.
Ponte was never arrested in UK but was arrested (by mistake) in summer 1951 in the Ukraine as
noted later.
Although as noted later I met him in the USSR it was not possible to ask him
directly and his colleagues in the USSR have told me since that they were also puzzled. But
Ponte died before the fall of the Soviet Union so it will always be a mystery.
In a post doctoral year in Rochester New York, I learned a lot of theoretical particle
physics and had great experimental opportunities.
I arrived in late June 1950.
John
Tinlotkindly drove me (and David Ritson also going to Rochester) up to Rochester in his car.
We stopped at Ithaca on the way to call on Norman Kroll, a theoretical physicist who was a
personal friend. That also was my first meeting with Robert R. Wilson, the great accelerator
man, and Hans Bethe, the outstanding theoretical physicist. I knew a lot about Bethe’s work.
Firstly his work on nucleon-nucleon reactions starting with his paper with Rudi Peirls on “The
Quantum theory of the Diplon (now the deuteron)” in 1934. When I was supposed to be
studying for my final examination in 1946, I came across Bethe’s paper on “Order-Disorder”
reactions and got very excited about it. It was the beginning of Hans famous work on
condensed matter physics. The net effect, as noted before, was I neglected the studies for the
exam and that perhaps was the reason for my second class honors. It was one of many
examples of my tendency to get excited about something and diverge from the straight and
narrow path. That makes me admire those who can focus better than I can, such as my friend
Klaus Roth.
.
Arriving in the University of Rochester we (John Tinlot, David Ritson and I), were
immediately herded into a seminar by Frank Yang from Chicago. That July (1950) I began to
learn the latest meson theories and their consequences from Bob Marshak who had a very clear
understanding of as much of the meson theory as could be derived from the first Born
approximation. He had been one of the first, if not the first, to suggest (with Hans Bethe) the
"two meson" ( meson and µ meson) hypothesis and had since described the selection rules that
govern the measurements of capture on hydrogen and deuterium. He was excellent at
explaining it all to the novice. A review paper was in draft as I arrived which we read greedily.
It was exciting stuff to a visitor from the old world.
I learned that it is easy to understand things in first Born approximation - and it is often
not worth the trouble to understand more details. Selection rules often govern what can be
observed. But it is not always the case, and this led me astray. Bob and a student had
suggested that the angular distribution of  rays from proton bremsstrahlung would be very
different for a scalar meson theory and a pseudoscalar meson theory with the ration of intensities
at 90 degrees and zero degrees being 230 for pseudoscalar mesons and 0.8 for scalar mesons.
We now know, of course that this Born approximation does not hold. It seemed here that
even a very crude measurement could give interesting information. I set up and performed
such a crude measurement, using a lead radiator and counter telescope to detect the gamma
132
rays. The angular distribution was usually isotopic (in the center of mass) - indicating a scalar
theory, but I soon realized that the large theoretical differences were not real; and that corrections
to first Born approximation are all important in this case. The bremsstrahlung cannot be
described in Born approximation; to first order it follows merely from the acceleration of the
charged particles and is nearly isotropic in all models. Differences might arise from off shell
effects may arise but are harder to find. I did not forget nucleon-nucleon bremsstrahlung and
had it “on my list” to attempt when I got to Harvard , but it was over 10 years before good
measurements were made by my colleague Bernie Gottschalk at Harvard and a former student,
Ed Thorndike in Rochester.
I reported on my bremsstrahlung experiment at an APS meeting in Chicago. I went by
the Commodore Vanderbilt, one of the last steam trains, and stayed near the University of
Chicago. One afternoon I called on William (Bill) Libby Professor of Chemistry, who I had met
in Christ Church the previous March, when he, as an Atomic Energy Commissioner, was in UK
for a declassification conference. Strangely that was just after Klaus Fuchs was arrested. I
wanted to see his carbon 14 dating system - which won him the Nobel prize. Like all the great
scientists I called on he was gracious and spent an hour with me.
Marshak was very supportive of me as a young physicist. He was also introduced me to
better eating. After the weekly physics colloquium the speaker was always invited to dinner
and perhaps a party at his house. There I met Maurice Goldhaber, whose name I had known
from his first measurement of the photodisintegration of the deuteron in 1934. Maurice had
just arrived in Brookhaven National Laboratory and was enthusiastic about understanding the
nuclear shell model which had Maria Goeppert-M ayer the Nobel prize a few years later (1963).
Maurice and his wife Gertrude (Trudy) had been at the University of Illinois but the University
had a nepotism rule. It was not permitted for a second member of the family to have a paid job
at the University. Trudy wanted to return to physics research after two youngsters were 5 years
old or so, so they moved to BNL where they stayed. I followed the physics careers of both
Trudy and Maurice. When their sons got to college age they came to Harvard and they
suggested that I be their faculty advisor. That was a privilege of mine. Alfred (Freddie)
became a Professor of Physics at Stoney Brook. Freddie’ son David, Mauric’s grandson also
came to Harvard. I was not his advisor but I remember him in the undergraduate physics
laboratory. David is now Professor of Physics at Stanford.
It was at one of these dinners,
though not at Marshak’s house that I first ate a boiled lobster. It was a pleasure that I have
often repeated.
In August I went down to Princeton to call on Robert (Bob) Hofstadter and see how he
arranged his Sodium Iodide (NaI) scintillation counters, followed by a brief trip to Brookhaven
National Lab in Upton, Long Island to see what they were doing. In those days there were not
very many high energy physicists. Remembering the Shelter Island conference of 1947, where
he had gotten the idea that there might be two mesons, Bob Marshak decided to organize a high
energy conference of his own. He persuaded Rochester industry to provide the funding and thus
began the Rochester conferences. The first one, in December 1950, was attended by less than
100 people - fewer than participate in a group meeting of one of our modern experiments! Yet,
so far as I can remember, everyone in the U.S. came, and several from overseas. It was
probably the first presentation by Butler of the particles (now known to be 0 and K0) which
133
had been seen in cosmic rays using Manchester's triggered cloud chamber. I remember
discussing them, sotto voce, with Bob Wilson - we were not sure we believed them and he
suggested taking a vote!
I recollect meeting at that conference Jack Steinberger, Bob Oppenheimer, Bob Wilson,
Lois Alvarez and Pief Panofsky. Pief stayed a full week in Rochester and told us about his
classic experiments on ? meson capture in hydrogen and deuterium. This led me to desert
Rochester the next year and join Pief at Stanford - where I carried out the most important and
enduring research of my life - finding a wife.
In 1952 I began work in earnest on what was probably the most important experiment I
did in Rochester. Since my Ph.D. thesis was on the measurement of the disintegration of the
deuteron; +DN+P (Reference 17on my publication list). I wondered (before I even got to
Rochester) whether the disintegration by a  meson ++DP+P would have a similar (or
greater) interest. It seemed to me that each of the two protons would have a high energy and be
easily detected in a scintillation counter. I had not expected that this was in fact an interesting,
as well as being a possible, experiment.
I asked Bob Marshak. Was the experiment
interesting?. Bob was discouraging. He could find no important interpretation. He and a
student, Warren Cheston, had already been studying the proton reaction P+P++D which had
just been studied at Berkeley by Crawford and Stevenson. The grapevine was fast in those days.
The next day when I met Bob at lunch, where he always tried to talk to students and
research fellows in the department, Bob was excited. He pointed out that a measurement of the
cross section - even to an accuracy of 50% - could distinguish between two possibilities for the
spin of the  meson. Far from merely repeating the experiment at Berkeley we would
compliment it. The two experiments were related by the principle of detailed balanced, but the
relationship contained the all important statistical factor (2S + 1). This statistical factor
would be 3 if S = 1 and 1 if S = 0. We would have a simple measurement of the spin of the 0
meson.
At Rochester we (Arthur Roberts, Donald Clark and myself) had to build a meson beam
with an energy higher than before (40 MeV). We also had to build the detectors. In those days
counting electronics had to be built in the laboratory, not bought from industry. Even if the
industry had existed, funding did not; and we had not yet acquired the habit of spending money.
We still believed in the words of Arthur Roberts popular song "It ain't the money, it's the
principle of the thing."
I proposed to detect the protons using liquid scintillation detectors using a solute diphenylhexatriene - in xylene. Diphenyl hexatriene was a wavelength shifter - absorbing the
scintillation ultraviolet light from the xylene and re-emitting in the green where a photomultiplier
could detect it. This idea was the brainchild of Professor Helmut Kallmann when in Berlin and
then at New York University. He had asked Pilot Chemicals to make the diphenyl hexatriene.
Kallman paid $1,000 for 10 grams. I was the second purchaser - also 10 grams for $1,000. Of
course this second $1000 was all profit for Pilot Chemicals . But then I made a major mistake.
I thought that one could collect the light from each 10 cm square surface of the scintillator by a
tapered light guide onto a 1 inch diameter lucite guide. I had forgotten Liouville's theorem and
Richard Garwin's letter in Physical Review on how to design light guides had not yet appeared.
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Not enough light got to the phototube, so we had to scrap the counters. I still keep the light
guides as an ornament on a chest in my bedroom to remind me of how stupid I can be. We
then spent a lot of money on two sodium iodide crystals which had higher efficiency than the
organic scintillators, and also higher density and therefore a smaller area from which to collect
the light. The apparatus was tried out in mid March 1951. In the first two day run we found
the reaction, and had a measurement of the cross section to the requisite 30% accuracy. It was
reported by Arthur Roberts at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in early April and
by me at the American Physical Society meeting again Washington at the end of April.
Bob had spent some of the summer 1955 lecturing on meson physics at Columbia's Nevis
Laboratories, which had better capability for meson beams). He mentioned my idea to scientists
at Nevis and Jack Steinberger decided to compete. In early April we submitted a 10 minute post
deadline paper (which I gave) to the April APS meeting in Washington and Arthur Roberts
talked about the results at a meeting at the National Academy of Sciences the week before. In
those days, APS did not have computers to slow down the process, so that only 3 weeks notice
was necessary for an abstract! At that time, the APS offices were at Columbia University, and
naturally the abstracts could be seen by anyone interested.
Jack Steinberger, seeing the
abstract, decided to modify the accelerator schedule on ? meson physics, to immediately repeat
and confirm the result, and put in a "post-deadline" paper which was scheduled just after ours.
Unfortunately for them, the Columbia cyclotron had some temporary problems and at the
Washington meeting Jack had no results. We delayed publication to take one more
measurement of the energy dependence of the reaction, and submitted a letter to Physical
Review. By that time the Columbia group had got their apparatus to work and had superior
results (which fortunately agreed with ours). Jack persuaded Physical Review to publish both
experiments in the same issue, holding ours up for a week.
Alas our small “priority” was
widely forgotten and in an article by Pief in the book on a century of physics published by the
APS some 50 years later, Steinberger is credited with the discovery. I had got used to being
ignored by that time but that Pief forgot made me especially sad.
In a real sense as much credit for the experiment belonged to Lynn Stevenson of
Berkeley as anyone else; he had done the first experiment. The idea of using detailed balance
for measuring the spin was not unique with Bob either. MH Johnson had written suggesting it.
We referred to the letter in our publication but I cannot remember who Johnson wrote to.
But Louis Alvarez, in whose group Lynn Stevenson worked at Berkeley, was incensed and
extracted a promise form the APS officers never again to allow competitors to see abstracts or
papers. I found out some 57 years later, in 2008, that Lois Alvarez had been very unfriendly to
Jack Steinberger in summer 1950, less than a year before, and seemed to have taken a dislike to
Jack. That may have contributed to his vigorous attack on Jack in May 1951.
I was not as
worried about it myself. Indeed I might not otherwise have become friendly with Lynn and
Louis! In all of this Bob Marshak's role as an enthusiastic catalyst was characteristic.
Although I have since become good friends with Jack Steinberger I never discussed this
experiment with him. When Jack was invited to give a colloquium at Harvard in 1969 (on K
decay) I broke with the tradition of expecting the speaker to fend for himself and arranged a
dinner at the faculty club. When Andrée and I spent 6 months in CERN in 1981, he and his
wife were the only scientists at CERN to invite us to dinner. When I visit CERN and call on
him in his office, he comments that I am one of the few who do.
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I left Rochester in July 1951, and traveled across Canada, as described earlier, to
Vancouver and Palo Alto. During this second post doctoral year in Stanford University in
1951-2, where I married Andrée Desirée DuMond, I carried out a small experiment
comparing photodisintegration and electrodisintegration. I thought at first as the inverse of
internal conversion. The internal conversion of a gamma ray into an electron depends on the
multipolarity of the gamma ray transition. With electro disintegration I thought that I could
find the multipolarity of the transitions. This would have been true if I had looked at the
scattered electron and seen the scattering peaks. I had yet to realize the power of the
Weiszacker - Williams work which I understood later when making radiative corrections to
electron and muon scattering. I did not completely realize the incorrectness of the
multipolarity approach at any appreciable momentum transfer for another 15 years when I had
been looking at the excited states of the proton by electron scattering at the CEA.
I had hoped that I would be able to carry out, with Pief, some experiments on The Mark
III accelerator. But that was not possible. The accelerator itself had problems and no one had
completely understood how to work with the pulsed electron beam. But I met and discussed
physics with many interesting people.
Of course I talked a lot with Pief, but I talked also with
Ed Jaynes in the microwave laboratory who is now well known for his work on fundamentals of
statistics.
Also Hans Motz, a Viennese who had left in 1933 during the depression. He
had gone to Kiev hoping that he could establish a life in that communist country and bring his
lady love from Vienna. He stayed in an apartment building with Landau and others.
He
became disillusioned and ended up in UK as a lecturer in Engineering with, so he said,
inadequate resources to be married. He became a British subject in 1939 and announced to his
colleagues “Now I am English too!.” “No, Hans” was the precise response that he enjoyed
hugely. “You have become British, but you will never be English”
Hans had been in
Stanford for a year or so and had already invented in theory and then experimentally tested, the
“Undulator” or wiggler where an electron beam is wiggled between magnets and emits X rays in
consequence. An undulator is now used in all dedicated synchrotron radiation devices.
Hans remained unmarried, but had met Andrée the previous summer. We became good friends
and I saw him after he returned to Oxford about 1956 and got married.
He was always a
friendly man but never seemed happy. He was thought of as a dilettante in science, but no
critic can take away his invention of the undulator.
Nucleon -Nucleon (and nucleus) scattering
Returning to Oxford University in 1952, I started an extensive program of work on
nucleon-nucleon scattering using the cyclotron at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment
(AERE) at Harwell.
At first I would park my bicycle at Christchurch and once again took the
number 13 bus to Harwell main gate. It became difficult to carry equipment and in April 1953 I
bought a small Austin van. One Rhodes scholar (Robert G.P. Voss) joined me as a graduate
student shortly to be joined by two others - John Thresher and a year later Chris Van Zyl.. We
built a simple fast neutron counter from a liquid scintillator and used it to detect neutrons
scattered by hydrogen and other elements. The cyclotron, designed by Gerald (Gerry)
Pickavance and John Adams, was in a pit, for shielding, with a long “escape” tunnel down which
air rushed. I arranged that this be the neutron line, and in it we placed a very simple liquid
136
hydrogen target. It was in a vacuum of course, but had no pre cooling. We would pour liquid
hydrogen into it from 2 litre glass Dewars into the open top. The flow of air was adequate to
ensure safety.
Talking the glass Dewars from the liquefier at Oxford to Harwell was more
problematic. I filled the Dewars at the liquefier, and took 4 of them in the back of my car. I
had a rubber bung on each with a rubber tube going out of the window. I drove slowly and
carefully to avoid bouncing.
The small angle measurement was interesting (26). The cross
section near zero degrees was close to that at 180 degrees, in contrast to measurements looking
for earlier recoil protons in a cloud chamber Indeed, the cloud chamber measurements found a
value less than the “optical theorem “which derives the imaginary part of the scattering
amplitude from the total cross section. Bob Marshak was visiting us at the time. He had a
model which fitted the old results but he was impressed with our new results and incorporated
them into a talk he gave that night in London. He was always quick to incorporate new
thinking but, alas, not careful to credit others
He failed to credit us in this lecture, for
example, with the comment about the optical theorem which was new to him just the day
before. For me it was mainly just funny, but this failing of his which drove many scientists
(mostly theorists) wild, was, I believe a reason Bob never got the full credit that he so richly
deserved.
On accepting an appointment at Harvard in 1955 I continued this program at the Harvard
University Cyclotron. I very soon noted one interesting facet. The Harwell machine ran 5
days a week and only 16 hours a day. The Harvard machine ran around the clock. In both
cases, maintenance was done during the day. The cost of living was lower in England and
salaries likewise. Yet the budget for the Harwell accelerator was double that of the Harvard
cyclotron Laboratory. It is hard to be sure of the reasons why. One reason, I believe, is that a
University can run things cheaper than a national laboratory. Much work is done by “slave
labor” (students). But that cannot be all. MIT was not as efficient as Harvard. I think that a
great deal of credit must go to the designers and operators of the Harvard machine; Ken
Bainbridge, Robert (Bob) R. Wilson, and Norman F. Ramsey, who set a tone that was
subsequently followed by William (Bill) Preston, Andreas (Andy) Koehler and others.
The
benefit and success of this organization and approach to running a laboratory became much
more evident in the 1970s when the medical program began. The Laurence Radiation
Laboratory at Berkeley operated and operates like a National Laboratory more than like a
University department. They treated patients with tumors long before we did - Dr John
Lawrence, Ernest Lawrence’s brother, was using neutrons for therapy in the 1930s unfortunately with little success. They operated the accelerators (first the cyclotron and then
the bevatron) with high energy physics funds. In addition they had about $2 million for medical
research from the AEC. In total the LBL medical work cost about 10 times the 1972 budget for
the Harvard cyclotron. Moreover LBL treated 1/10 the number of patients that Harvard treated.
They did not know how to make it cheaper. When the high energy physics program stopped
running the Berkeley accelerators, the 184 inch cyclotron and the Bevatron, the medical
program at LBL shut down but the cheaper Harvard/MGH program kept going.
My main work in the first 6 years at Harvard was a continuation of the Harwell program.
Firstly, I had realized that the energy 95 MeV was too small to achieve polarized beams. We
needed a much higher one. Although it would have been nice to go higher, Norman Ramsey
explained to me that 165 MeV was possible. So that was my first task. As soon as I had
137
accepted the appointment in January 1952 I went to Liverpool to visit their 350 MeV cyclotron
where they had just extracted an external beam.
Professor Le Couteur had written a theory of
the extraction mechanism that enabled a better system than the one Jim Tuck and Teng had
developed at Chicago. Albert Crewe built this (and then went to Chicago and Argonne National
Laboratory). This we copied. A few weeks after my arrival at Harvard, in October 1955 the
faculty and staff of the cyclotron agreed to the upgrade. Andy Koehler and Paul Cooper, with
help over the thanksgiving holiday from the expert Dr. Mackenzie, visiting us en route from
Berkeley to his home in Scotland, modified the oscillator so that it work at a more extended
frequency range. In those days people did such help for free. But he did get a (free)
Thanksgiving dinner with Andrée and our two children in our small apartment. My student
Arthur Kuckes found a “flip chip” as a simple electronic integrator instead of a Gaussmeter, and
a system to rotate it all around the magnet center. Karl Strauch and I shimmed the magnet so that
a larger radius could be used. I remember cutting shims with tin shears till 10 pm on Christmas
eve. Our families forgave us.
Interestingly, the crudely cut shims, the regenerator and the
extraction channel worked untouched till the cyclotron was shutdown 45 years later. I
summarized all of this in the book "Nucleon-nucleon interactions" (Wiley-Interscience) which
was later listed in the citation index as a most quoted book (68,452).
I was invited to talk about our work in many places, including Princeton. I had looked
for Eugene Wigner in Princeton when I first visited in August 1950 on a special visit to Bob
Hofstadter, but he was away, probably at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he spent many
summers, and it was not until about 1957, when I was 31 and Eugene was already 55, that I gave
a colloquium at Princeton on my experiments on proton-proton and proton-nucleus scattering
and really remember meeting Eugene.
I had been warned about one facet of Eugene’s
formidable reputation. This mild looking man would sit in the front row and in the question
time after the lecture would, in a gentle voice, ask the most penetrating, and shattering
questions showing the weaknesses in the lecturer’s arguments. I cannot remember him asking a
question at that colloquium, but I was always able to answer on the later occsasions when he
did.
Valentine Telegdi told me that Eugene was much less gentle in Hungarian and had
learned the gentle courteous behavior believing that was the way Englishmen were supposed to
behave.
Whether or not it was originally a pose I do not know. Suffice to say that for
physicists at least the pose had become the man by the time I knew him. But then, most
physicists do not speak Hungarian. It used to be said that if Eugene entered a revolving door
before another person, he would always come out after him. The opposite was said of his
friend John Von Neuman who would always come out first.
I talked about the nucleon-nucleon scattering at the high energy physics conferences in
Rochester in 1957, in CERN in 1958 and in Kiev in 1959.
I remember the Kiev meeting in
particular. Godfrey Stafford of AERE described Eric Taylor’s work on measuring the
depolarization parameter D. Chester Huang had just got his first results on this, and found the
opposite sign!
I warned Godfrey to be careful but he was not. So I got up and said that I
thought the result was wrong, and we had preliminary data, which we were checking, saying so.
Interestingly the AERE result agreed with calculations based upon a potential by Signell and
Marshak, but our results agreed with a potential by Gammel end Thaler on Los Alamos. This
dramatic difference enhanced my reputation.
138
In 1967 I was already fully engaged in other work, but was asked by Alex Green and
Malcomb MacGregor to help in running a conference on nucleon-nucleon scattering in Florida.
We wanted the best theorists so we invited Gregory Breit saying that his friend Eugene Wigner
was coming, and invited Eugene saying that his friend Gregory Breit was coming. They both
came. It was a stimulating conference and discussions with these great theorists were
particularly fine. We wrote up the results in a useful summary (102).
As I look back on these years the enormous pleasure was in the interaction in those years
with experimental apparatus and making decisions on how to get the job done. The preceding
paragraph describes the beam extraction from the cyclotron. But then when we came to the
triple scattering experiments to elucidate the details of the nucleon-nucleon interaction, I balked
at rotating the apparatus, as Chamberlain and Segré had done at Berkeley, to study spin rotation
in the scattering. We rotated the spins. I designed a solenoid for this. Instead of buying
an AC motor and DC generator to power the magnet Andy Koehler suggested that we use the
new high voltage and high current silicon diodes. The voltage would be controlled by a
saturable reactor.
When we assembled them and switched on, all three components failed.
The magnet, built by the GE coil winding shop, to their own design, in Medford for $5,000
overheated and shorted
I designed another, specifying in detail the phosphor bronze fittings to
be used, to be built by Karl Brown’s firm in Palo Alto for $6,000. The rectifier, made by a
small firm in Englewood NJ for $150 failed quickly.
I visited them (by bus of course) during
the January APS meeting in New York. But they could not get them right, so we bought some
rectifiers for $400 instead of $100 from Westinghouse and put them in our own water cooled
metal plate. The saturable reactor was also mis designed by the supplier for 110 volts instead
of the 200 volt phase to phase that was specified. We ordered another saturable reactor off the
shelf from somewhere.
That all worked within six months and it gave me great satisfaction.
I remember talking to Pief at the NY APS meeting about 1958. I explained to him that this
system would be simpler that the motor-generator system used in his laboratory. It was also
cheaper and that he should suggest it to Bob Hofstadter. “These are fighting words” was his
reply. Bob preferred established and tested technology when available.
But we never
bought a motor-generator set at CEA and were probably the first accelerator laboratory not to do
so.
I always believe in simplicity of apparatus. In my neutron proton scattering experiment
at small angles (26), we filled the target with 2 liters of liquid hydrogen by pouring it in by
hand from a glass Dewar. We filled the glass Dewars from the hydrogen liquefier in the
Clarendon laboratory, put them in the back of my van, with windows open and a rubber hose
taking the gas from the Dewars out of the window. Then we drove slowly and steadily to
Harwell. The targets were in a long “escape” tunnel through which air rushed to an extractor
fan. At the Harvard cyclotron laboratory I was more “sophisticated” . The target cup was
now plastic film glued with epoxy. We bought the hydrogen in a large 30 liter Dewar and I
built a transfer tube as I had learnt at Oxford. Liquid nitrogen, poured in by hand, surrounded
the cold hydrogen. We did put a hood over the target with an extractor fan and I removed the
windows at the top of the experimental area to avoid trapping of hydrogen.
Of course we put
up big non-smoking signs.
On one occasion the ONR representative was being brought
around by the director of the laboratory, Bill Preston. He was smoking. I did not notice, but
Alan Cormack was there and acted quickly. There was no time to call out. Alan moved
139
forward and quickly took the cigarette out of the approaching bureaucrat’s mouth. At the
Cambridge Electron Accelerator we decided on another approach. Every hydrogen target would
have a small helium liquefier attached to cool the hydrogen
My targets were never more than
100ccs,.
There was one concern. When we used an internal hydrogen target the ordinary
plastic suffered from radiation damage. We used “H film” which is radiation resistant. But
still, it would fail after 10 hours or so. On one occasion when it did fail the vacuum chamber
of the accelerator was half filled with hydrogen gas. But as expected, the gas cleaned the
vacuum chamber and it was pumped down again to a vacuum below 10-6 mm mercury in 20
minutes.
This was far simpler than the complex target system we now have at CEBAF.
CEA
I used to go at least once a year to the American Physical Society meetings.
Once, in
1968 I believe, George Chapman, Professor George Chapman from Oxford gave an invited 30
minute talk on geophysics. Jesse DuMond had come east for the meeting. George went out
of his way to emphasize the spirit of cooperation among American physicists and their
generosity to European colleagues who were less fortunate and were still recovering from world
war II. Jesse was surprised and overwhelmed. I was not surprised because I was the
recipient of such generosity and cooperation and indeed that was one of the reasons I decided to
come to the USA in 1955. Alas, I had hoped for, and expected, too much.
One of the reasons for coming to Harvard was the planning for a 6 GeV electron
synchrotron. My year at Stanford, and the following since of the work of Robert Hofstadter
had convinced me of the simplicity of understanding physics with electrons compared to physics
with protons.
The leader in the planning was M. Stanley (Stan) Livingston, who as a graduate
student of Ernest Lawrence had been the actual person who built the first cyclotron, under his
thesis advisor’s direction, about 1928
I joined in the planning with enthusiasm and became
Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee.
I did the calculations for radiation shielding.
I was particularly interested in electron scattering, and made the first calculations on how to
extract an external beam,
Summer 1959 was spent at Stanford trying to understand what
they were planning and how we might coordinate. They were by that time planning for their
20 GeV linear accelerator and I wanted to be sure we were cooperative rather than competitive.
We would have an electron beam 6 years or so before they would and although our energy would
be lower, the duty cycle would be better. But cooperation was not to be.
One consequence,
whether of this summer work or not was that I received an offer in summer 1960 to go to
Stanford as a Professor. After mulling about this a lot, I declined. I often wonder how physics
would have turned out if I had gone to Stanford in 1961. Or later in 1963-4. when the
opportunity recurred. I suspect that being related to Pief by marriage would have made matters
difficult when the inevitable jockeying for position took place.
The enthusiasm for the CEA in the Cambridge area was large.
the Harvard physics
department faculty there were, in addition to myself, Professors Norman Ramsey, Frank Pipkin,
Karl Strauch and Curry Street. At MIT, Louis Osborne, David Frisch, Martin Deutsch, and
Irwin Pless were enthusiastic. Jerry Friedman and Henry Kendall joined the MIT faculty just
before the first beam. We also had groups from neighboring Universities, Brandeis, Tufts,
Northeastern, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and Yale university. At that epoch in
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High Energy Physics, the style was to have a lot of small experiments around one accelerator.
Many professors each forming his own research group. The style of having one or two large
spectrometers with, perhaps, several groups using them had not yet developed. One of the
deep problems at the CEA was a failure to get together to build such a spectrometer. I
remember late in 1961 discussing with Henry Kendall and Jerry Friedman how we might jointly
build a high class, expensive spectrometer to use with the external beam and work either
together, or divide the work between us. We already had a small plan for electron-proton
scattering using the internal beam, using a crude spectrometer, which had its runs a few weeks
later. A little later, Kendall and Friedman set a graduate student on electron-deuteron
scattering with this apparatus. The graduate student thanked us both in wring in his thesis and
orally at a seminar. . Neither Jerry nor Henry ever did. Unfortunately we could not seem to
work together.. I had hoped that by hiring excellent research fellows I could get someone to
help me build such a spectrometer. One such was Lou Hand. It was Lou that brought the
electric and magnetic form factors to my attention.
He was and is very bright but he wanted
to actually do physics at once and not wait a few months for the CEA beam.. He realized what
Lehman, Taylor and Wilson had done at Orsay and wanted to do this with deuterium at
Stanford. He used my targets from the cyclotron.
Recently (2008) he spontaneously told
me that he was wrong and should have been more directly involved in my program for the CEA.
It might have made a crucial difference. Of course I had been disappointed, but accepted Lou’s
decision at the time. I was taken aback by his recent candour and still am.
This was an era of Reggae trajectories. All excited states of protons and other particles
ran on a Reggae trajectory, with interesting consequences for scattering at high energies. Why
not the photon?
There would be exited states of the proton at higher mass. Maybe the rho
or the omega mesons If so, elastic electron scattering would no longer be described by a
couple of Form Factors but the cross section would increase with energy. We disproved that in
the first experiment at the CEA (64). Later runs looked at form factors in a more ordinary
way. Other groups looked for failures of quantum electrodynamics for this and similar reasons.
The cross section for electron-positron pairs produced by high energy photons would be higher
than given by the Bethe-Heitler formula. Frank Pipkin set out to measure wide angle
electron-positron pairs. Jerry Friedman and Henry Kendall joined Weinstein of Northeastern in
looking for wide angle muon pairs. Vernon Hughes of Yale did so also.
Physicists give
much more credit to the first person to have an idea or make an interesting measurement than
they assign blame for an incorrect measurement. There is therefore great incentive to be the
first to find a predicted effect. This may have been the general reason that all three
experiments found a high cross section. But they were all wrong. This threw a shadow on all
CEA work such as Frank Pipkin’s excellent photo production of vector mesons. Indeed the
first reported measurements on vector meson photo production at SLAC and DESY differed
somewhat from Frank’s, and were widely accepted as superior, but Frank was correct.
The CEA had put priority into helping a large bubble chamber to get going. This was to
be a collaborative effort with Irwin Pless of MIT in charge of construction and Karl Strauch and
Curry Street at Harvard and others with analysis capabilities. As a result the bubble chamber
had priority in the machine and assembly shops at CEA since 1959. But it was only ready for
test in summer 1965.
July 4th 1965 was the real disaster. Norman Ramsey and I were, with
our students, beginning electron scattering experiments with the just completed apparatus in the
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external electron beam.
The bubble chamber was being cooled down for the first time, at long
last! I remember Norman and I idly calculated the size of an explosion if something went
wrong!. We went home at 2 am. At 4.33 am the beryllium window failed, pouring 300 liters
of liquid hydrogen into the vacuum system and then onto the floor. The fire burnt 6 hard
working scientists from the waist up. Fortunately the Boston area had previous experience
with large scale burns from a night club fire some years before , in which emergency exit doors
were locked. The fire also set off safety seals on the tanks of propane and the burning gas
added to the conflagration. The roof literally fell in on one of the young scientists - an MIT
undergraduate - and he died a few days later. It also destroyed the electron scattering apparatus.
We had a two year delay in the electron scattering program and DESY caught up and overtook
us. I remember being called at 6 am by the graduate student Bill Shlaer who was running the
cyclotron that night looking for proton bremsstrahlung. He kept on running, but eventually shut
down at fire department request. Five minutes after he rung off I called back. “Please secure
the 2 liquid hydrogen Dewars outside the cyclotron next to the CEA.”
Bob Budnitz also called. He was awoken by the sound of fire engines at 4.47 am, and
went to investigate. He found firemen trying to enter CEA through the emergency exit on
Gorham Street. The firemen would not let him near there. “There is radiation” . And the
firemen went on trying to open the door with axes. “But I have a key of the door”. Still they
would not let him near until Louis Osborne came and said “I am an MIT Professor and I know
about the radiation.” He was allowed in. I assume that everyone who reads this will agree
that emergency plans should be practiced. Less obvious is the that they should be integrated as
far as possible for various accidents. For example both evacuation for a nuclear power accident,
which we hope will be infrequent or never, is similar to evacuation when there is an overturned
freight car with toxic chemicals. The less frequent possibility can be exercised by the frequent
possibility of other accidents if the plans are integrated.
I had only just got to bed and
probably wrongly decided at that time to go on sleeping. In the morning after a few hours
sleep I got to the laboratory at 8 am. I took administrative action for which I doubted that I had
authority. I called the families of everyone who had been taken to hospital and told them that
Harvard would pay for the expenses of anyone visiting their loved ones. Fortunately that
unauthorized promise was confirmed later by the administrators. I organized blood donations at
the hospitals (MGH and Cambridge City Hospital)..
Then began a series of meetings to decide what had happened and what do. If the
accident had been in the UK the death of the MIT student would have forced an inquest. What
follows therefore is only an informal statement of what happened.
I count four major
mistakes.
(1) The beam entry window of the bubble chamber was thin and deliberately of low Z
material, beryllium. It is known to be brittle as machined . It can be made less brittle by
annealing. Apparently this was known to the manufacturers at the time but not to me and not
to the responsible MIT professor (Professor Irwin Pless) or Professor Stan Livingston the lab
director.
(2) There were two windows: from the liquid hydrogen to the vacuum and from the
vacuum to the outside world. It was assumed that if the inner one broke, the spilled hydrogen
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would be rapidly pumped and leave the outer window intact. Yet an experiment by the same
group in a liquid propane bubble chamber at BNL had found that the breaking of the inner
window would break the outer one - probably by a projectile. Indeed, Professor Street, our
Harvard colleague informed us, that he Professor Street, had reported on this at a meeting in
CERN.
(3) The intention was to have a long vacuum beam pipe from the outer window to the
accelerator so that even if the outer window failed there would be less chance of a failure to the
outside. Because of haste in getting the test ready, the beam pipe was not ready and instead of
delaying the test 2 days, a piece of wood was clamped with C clamps to the outside of the
window. As the hydrogen escaped the window, it fell to the floor and ignited. Tom Collins,
Associate Director of CEA estimated that 30 liters out of an inventory of 60 liters burnt rapidly,
within a second. I confirmed his calculation. This was not formally an explosion, because
there was no shock wave, but the pressure went up enough to lift the roof which it was in fact
designed to do.
(4) The MIT members of the management committee all had insisted that Professor Pless
should have complete authority over the bubble chamber engineering. Harvard would have
no authority and they insisted that Stanley Livingston and his staff did not. Stan Livingston
and the Harvard members of the committee, including myself as Chairman, had acquiesced in
this. If it was a problem it would be an MIT problem. I was wrong. The newspapers made
it very clear. It was at the CEA on Harvard property and it was a Harvard explosion.
I had
failed my responsibility.
I do not think I would have made any of mistakes 1 to 3 myself and therefore feel little
responsibility. But I felt, and feel, deeply my responsibility for mistake 4. It has influenced
my opinion on such matters as nuclear power safety. But the three MIT members of the
management committee did not learn. When Professor Pless proposed rebuilding the bubble
chamber with an identical management structure, and in the identical location, Stan Livingston
balked. He wanted to have the ultimate responsibility with a proper safety committee to
exercise it. Stan morosely expressed his concern to me. “I feel I am destroying the CEA.” I
reassured Stan. All three of the Harvard members of the committee agreed with him. So
Professor Pless proposed to move the bubble chamber to Argonne National Laboratory. In
order for that to happen, the AEC had to find the funds, a part of which came from cutting our
(Harvard) budget by about $80,000 at a time we needed it. Worse still the bubble chamber
never operated at Argonne National Laboratory or anywhere else.
But there was further fall
out. The theorist Victor (Vicky) Weisskopf had deliberately got himself on the CEA
management committee to support a continuation of the old administrative structure. Although
I had admired and respected Vicky for his marvelous work in explaining difficult concepts in
physics, and had sought his judgment on many matters up till that time, I never again trusted his
judgment. I found it difficult even to ask him about theoretical matters which were unrelated to
this engineering and safety matter. As noted later, he failed to support us on our colliding beam
proposals and both privately and as first Chairman of the AEC’s High Energy Advisory Panel
(HEPAP) he preferred SLAC. Whether this was the reason or not, Vicky told Andrée some five
years later that I was just a trouble maker.
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In the recovery from the accident and subsequent fire several of us had to spend many
months completely rebuilding. First and foremost were the physical casualties. The death of
the MIT undergraduate and the five scientists burned from the waist up were the most important.
But a non physical casualty was the cooperation between Harvard and MIT.
MIT Professors
began to put all the blame on Stan Livingston - one of their own.. “He is the stupidest person on
two legs” was a rude, and absolutely incorrect, comment by one MIT Professor, not normally
known for such unpleasant thoughts. Indeed, he had not made much of a mark as a nuclear or
high energy physicist. His major contribution in the basic physics itself was being a co-author
with Hans Bethe of one of a famous trilogy of review papers in Reviews of Modern Physics in
1938. But he did have a good instinct for accelerators and both the physics and the engineering
thereof. In addition to the first cyclotron at Berkeley he had built cyclotrons at Cornell, and
MIT. He had contributed to, and had been a director of the very successful Brookhaven
cosmotron, and was one of the three inventors of strong focusing, together with the theorists
Ernie Courant.. Stan had assembled a first rate team.
I had helped a little in this,
particularly in recruiting a couple of Britons - Ewan Patterson and Ron Little. Tom Collins,
who had been working on a mass spectrometer with Ken Bainbridge, went on to be Deputy
Director of Fermilab But regretfully it was clear to me that if CEA was to have a future as a joint
Harvard-MIT facility, another director was needed. I discussed this extensively with Curry
Street and Norman Ramsey at Harvard.
Stan resigned. After some searches Karl Strauch
agreed to be director.
Alas, this willingness to give up research for an administrative duty was
not enough.
Before we could rebuild our external beam scattering apparatus, Dr Brasse of DESY
repeated our internal target experiment on electron scattering with an almost identical technique.
He found an absolute value of the electron scattering a cross section about 20% to 30% less than
we had found.
If we had been able to maintain our lead, we could have corrected it ourselves
as so many scientists in history have been able to do. I note that in this field, for example, that
the first elastic electron scattering cross sections from SLAC that were presented at a conference
were 10-20% high - corrected by the time they appeared in Physical Review Letters a year later.
Our mistake came from a very obscure fault that I found later. The Faraday cup that measured
the intensity of the gamma rays from the bremsstrahlung as electrons struck the target was filled
with pure helium to avoid electron recombination on impurities such as oxygen. But the
helium not only leaked out, but the hole must have been a small one and the air molecules could
not get back in to replace the helium and there was a partial vacuum. Our gauge read zero
when it should have read minus 1/4 atmosphere.
At that time I and others were just testing
our scattering equipment, less sophisticated than I would have had if we had succeeded in a
collaboration, in the external electron beam. But we had to rebuild everything, with less
enthusiasm. Most groups took up to 18 months to rebuild their apparatus.
My stalwart
students quickly rebuilt the electron scattering detectors and we took data scattering electrons
from the external beam off both hydrogen and deuterium on May 6th 1966,, only ten months
later. The notes say it was at a four momentum transfer, of q2 = 7 inverse Fermi-squared or 0.3
(GeV/c)-2,
Just after the explosion, Sam Ting, then an Assistant Professor at Columbia University,
asked me whether we would consider favorably a proposal from him to measure wide angle
electron pairs. Of course, I said: “ you are welcome to propose it, and of course we would
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consider it. But we have three groups who want to repeat their measurements with extra
checks.” I believe I went as far as to say that we needed another one like a hole in our heads!
I thought that the CEA group would want to give the other experimenters a chance to correct
what I thought was an error. I suggested to him that he propose the experiment to DESY.
They had a shortage of experienced scientists, and moreover he could get started 6 months or
more before it could be possible at CEA even if accepted. This he did.
I still believe it was
good advice for him, but maybe not for us at CEA.
After experiments restarted Weinstein,
less Friedman and Kendall who had abandoned CEA for SLAC, and Pipkin repeated their
experiments on wide angle electron or muon pairs with extra checks. Their results never got
published. Jimmy Walker at Harvard made precise total photon (mostly pair production) cross
sections at high energy which agreed with theory.
That unfortunate chapter was closed.
Another facet of CEA organization aroused criticism. MIT and more particularly
Harvard, was and is, restrictive in bestowing the title Professor. It was restricted to those who
taught and went through the formal promotion procedure. Bill Preston, hired as Director of the
Cyclotron became Department Chairman and then Director of the Physics laboratories. But he
was only a Senior Lecturer. In the CEA, only Stan Livingston, who was already a Professor at
MIT had that title. The rest of the CEA staff were senior research associates. But they had as
much a promise of tenure as Professors at SLAC, who did not teach and whose appointment
depended on the contract. Harvard did make a promise of finding them positions if the CEA
contract ceased as it did in 1993.
As a practical matter, we encouraged those who wanted to
carry out research on physics to get an appointment with Harvard or MIT physics departments
and used CEA appointments for those primarily interested in accelerator physics, although
research groups were mixed.
Burt Richter explicitly told me, and no doubt he told others,
that he was recommending people not to come to CEA for that reason.
I found this peculiar.
Since then other young scientists have complained to me that Pief, when director of SLAC had
asked them to decide between working on the physics and engineering of the accelerator physics
or carrying out experiments with the beams provided. The excellent accelerator physicists,
Euan Patterson, and John Rees who went to SLAC never became Professors. Only Herman
Winnick did, working on synchrotron radiation. But the use of the title, Professor to apply to
non Professing scientists is becoming increasingly common.
Basically, in supporting this
restrictive policy I, and Harvard physics department, lost out.
Perhaps the present policy of
appointing “Professors of the Practice” in Engineering and Public Policy departments would
solve this problem.
It was about 1965 that a Professor from Cornell, whose name now escapes me, proposed
to use synchrotron radiation. We discussed this in the management group. I suggested, and
others agreed, that we should of course run the accelerator for him but any capital equipment or
building he would have to provide or help to get extra AEC funding.. Stan Livingston was
forward looking and inclined to do more. In retrospect I think Stan was right and I was wrong.
So Ed Purcell persuaded Ed Land of Polaroid to produce $50,000 for a special building and some
experiments were conducted in this special buillding, including some by Harvard Assistant
Professor Paul Horowitz. The CEA finally closed in 1973. What should be done with it?
“We” at CEA, Harvard and MIT, primarily Herman Winnick, prepared an excellent proposal for
continuing the facility for synchrotron radiation.
There was no hope of getting AEC to fund
this, because of Seaborg’s commitment to Congress to close CEA and the But NSF agreed to
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provide $500,000 for synchrotron radiation which would be adequate to keep a facility going.
Bill Paul of the Department of Applied Sciences would be director.
Again SLAC wanted a
storage ring although it was and still is my view that they were less prepared for it. Again there
was a competition and NSF set up a committee to decide. I heard through the grape vine that
the NSF committee were dubious about the commitment of the Harvard faculty. I had other
fish to fry and was not personally interested but I hated to see a good project go down the drain.
So I proposed to the physics department that we formally tell NSF that if the facility were
approved that we would emphasize an interest in using synchrotron radiation in our forthcoming
search for a “low energy” (solid state) tenure appointment. But the physics department
Chairman, Paul Martin, was against this, and we failed to make such a statement. I believe it
was merely a “New England reticence”.
In contrast, SLAC only had an assistant Professor in
the Stanford physics department who tated his interest. He promptly went on leave. That
turned out not to matter, because Herman Winnick went to SLAC as CEA collapsed. I do not
know the details but am inclined to attribute to Herman the fact that everything worked well at
the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory.. As noted earlier, he was made a Professor
which would not have happened at CEA. At that time Pief could usually get what he wanted
and although he said to the committee recommending government funding, in my presence, that
CEA should get a facility after the SLAC ring was funded, no one took this seriously. That, of
course, is usual. People usually only take the first item on a list seriously.
I proposed first to the physics department, and then in a personal letter to Harvard
President Derek Bok, that we leave the CEA ring and equipment in place until the relevant
funding agencies “come to their senses”. In retrospect “coming to their senses” would only
have taken a couple of years. But the physics department was uninterested and Karl Strauch,
the Director, not unnaturally, wanted a clean end and I was busy on other matters. David
Monckton, a member of the committee told me many years later, that he was unaware at first of
the importance of synchrotron radiation and the committee discussion educated him. Two years
later he proposed a small synchrotron radiation facility for Brookhaven which was funded.
Later he was fingered to run the Argonne National Laboratory 7 GeV facility.
This facility,
finished 25 years after CEA, was not appreciably bigger or better, although it did have an
“undulator”, as proposed by Hans Motz in 1950, and other improvements. These would, no
doubt have been installed at CEA if we had been funded because they were all in our proposal!
The ANL facility cost $900,000,000 whereas we threw away a similar facility that cost 100 times
less when built. In retrospect I think that the failure to keep the CEA alive for synchrotron
radiation was a far more serious issue than my failure to get a storage ring in Cambridge.
Even 7 years later there were more users of synchrotron radiation in the “Greater Cambridge”
area than anywhere else.
It was not only a Harvard failure, but in view of the large sum for
the Argonne facility it was a national failure. But it had less impact on me personally than the
other failures at that time..
Gerhard (Gerry) Fisher, John Rees and Ewan Patterson went on to build the Stanford
colliding beam, Gus Voss went to build PETRA at DESY and then to synchrotron radiation. As
of 2009 he unfortunately has gone completely blind.
Bill Jones (electrical engineer) became
an undergraduate lab instructor first at Harvard and then MIT before he died at age 90.. I lost
track of Ron Little. But Ken Robinson was the big loss to the physics community. He never
did any physics again and died, probably after excessive drinking, unknown and unnoticed in a
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California apartment.
Form Factors
At the same time that I went to Harvard Hans Halban accepted pressure from the French
government to build up a laboratory in France. This was at the University of Paris (Sud) at
Orsay, France, where he built the Laboratoire de l’Accelerateur Lineaire (LAL). He took with
him from Oxford, George Bishop, Pierre Marin, Boris Milman and his wife, a Rumanian born
couple, and of course his technician Victor Round. Partially as a result of my suggestion,
Halban chose to build a 1 GeV linear accelerator like that at Stanford. The actual engineering
was done by Compagnie Sans Fils (CSF). It seemed a good place to go for a sabbatical leave
and also have hands on experience with electrons again. There I carried out my first
experiment on electron scattering with Lehmann and Taylor.
This was the first precise (2%)
cross section measurement (60).
I had already hired as a research fellow, Louis Hand from
Stanford, to arrive in Harvard on my return. He was just finishing his PhD thesis with Pief
Panofsky. He wrote to me that he had realized that one was looking at form factors the wrong
way. One should consider the Hamiltonian as the product of two currents in the Breit frame as
Jµ jµ. If one did this the spins separated well
In particular the interaction could be written
Ge +  x q Gm. This resonated with me and I wrote back and pointed out that the Rosenbluth
formula could be rewritten in a simpler form in terms of these electric and magnetic form factors
rather than the Dirac and anomalous moment form factors that Rosenbluth, and hence Schiff
had used.
Hofstadter in the fine set of electron scattering experiments from 1952 to 1960,
which won him the Nobel prize, had followed the advice of Rosenbluth and Schiff.
Lehman, Taylor and Wilson (50) became the first experiment to describe their results
with these form factors. I then proceeded, with Hand and Miller, to reanalyze all data in
terms of them. These were first presented in the second Lepton-Photon conference in
Cambridge in fall 1961, in a brief letter in Physical Review (61). and later in a review paper,
Hand, Miller and Wilson in 1963 (71). In this review paper all the earlier work is properly
referenced.
We showed that the ratio of the electric and magnetic form factors is almost
independent of four momentum transfer (71) and coined the phrase, still in use today, the “dipole
fit". Also the vector and scalar magnetic form factors, obtained from a combination of the
neutron and proton form factors followed this same rule. This, as explained to me by Abraham
(Bram) Pais, was an important impetus to the theoretical idea of the partial symmetry SU6.
But it was, and to my mind still is, a puzzle. Why should the vector and magnetic form factors
be so closely the same when the former involved a rho meson in the virtual photon line, and the
other omega and phi mesons? We thought that there was some deep meaning to the relationship
that we could not, and still do not, understand.
One problem we had was notation.
Hofstadter had often used the expression electric
form factor Fe for what we now call the Dirac form factor, and Fm for the anomalous moment
form factor. So we could not use this notation. So we went up one in the alphabet and used
Ge and Gm. This is now the universally used notation although most authors don’t understand
the reason for using G rather than F and they do not know who made that change in notation.
Ernst, Sachs and Wali had discussed these “true”electric and magnetic form factors but had
failed to realize that these actually came more directly out of the data than the ones Hofstadter
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had used. They are therefore often called the Sachs form factors.
I have often wondered if
the fact that the work Hand started is ignored because of a bias described to me by my
colleague Bob (Robert V.) Pound. Experimenters are not supposed to make suggestions on
theory and theorists are not supposed to do experiments.
In writing the review paper on
nucleon form factors (71) I had in mind the sensitivity of Bob Hofstadter. As noted before,
Pief had found difficulty in working with him because of what seemed to be a possessiveness
about his field. Here was I reanalyzing Hofstadter’s data!
I therefore wrote to him with
drafts and so on. He was very courteous. I thought at the time that he was pleased that
someone had taken his work so seriously. Later, at the lepton-proton conference in Stanford in
1987 or so, I expected to see Bob at the sessions. But he was not there. I called him up to
see whether he was coming, and if not whether I could come to see him. He insisted on coming
especially to talk with me about physics and how I was doing.
At the CEA we began our series of electron scattering experiments, extending these
measurements to higher momentum transfers (70,94,126,139). When the accelerator
commenced operation in 1962, I and my group carried out the first experiment and embarked
on a program of electron scattering from hydrogen (protons) and deuterium (proton + neutron).
At that time the only experiments had been those of the two Bobs. Bob Hofstadter’s group at
Stanford and a few by Bob Wilson at Cornell. They disagreed at high momentum transfers.
The potential describing nucleon-nucleon scattering had a hard core. Bob Wilson had a high
cross section for electron proton scattering and that suggested to him that there was a “hard core”
to the proton itself. The students John Dunning and Wendell Chen showed that Bob Wilson
was wrong and the form factors continued to fall.
We also were able to excite the first
nucleon resonance at 1238 MeV, and another student Al Cone looked briefly for structure in the
region beyond.
I note that the amount of accelerator time SLAC was able to put on these
studies vastly surpassed ours, and they had a higher energy. We therefore missed out on the
discovery of scaling of the inelastic form factors. Would we have found it a few years later if
SLAC had not existed?
It is not certain but I suspect so. We were looking in the right
general direction.
When we stated measurements with the external beam we were able to corrected an error
in the normalization of the first, internal beam, experiments.
We had already had informal
reports that experimenters in DESY found smaller cross sections. They were right.. These
external beam experiments confirmed that the form factors follow the “dipole fit” noted earlier.
That works over 4 orders of magnitude of the cross sections. Only 30 years later did
measurements at CEBAF, using polarized electrons and measuring the polarization of the recoil
proton to separate the form factors, find that the ratio Ge/Gm ratio of electric to magnetic form
factors falls below the value of unityat higher momentum transfers.
. When we discussed the form factors we realized that we should love the form factors for
their own sake and not take the Fourier transform all the time and discus charge distributions as
Hofstadter had done. In what frame of reference should one discus the charge distribution? I
was sensitive to this because of my correction of Gammel and Thaler who tried to compare p
nucleus and PP scattering each in its own center of mass frame, whereas the approximations
work in the laboratory frame. Lou Hand pointed out to me that Gregory Breit had discussed this
in the 1930s and everything was simpler in the “Breit frame”. But then what is frame
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independent? What is the Lorenz invariant? It is of course the square of the 4-momentum q2.
q2 not only has a space-like component being the square of the momentum vector, but also a
time-like component which is the square of the change of energy. Then one can ask what
physics occurs when the sign of q2 is opposite? Instead of writing down the process as an
electron and proton colliding with a change in momentum of each, one can pull one of them to
the other side of the equation, changing a particle to an antiparticle, and have a proton and
anti-proton colliding to form an electron-positron pair. Or, equivalently an electron colliding
with a positron to produce a proton and antiproton.
In contemplating this, Lou Hand and I
realized that the future lay with electron-positron collisions - about which I will write in a later
section. Meanwhile at the European Nuclear Physics laboratory, CERN, in Geneva, there were
beams of anti-protons. One group there led by Professor Antonino Zichichi, was using them to
study electron-positron pairs and looking at the same process as I was in a region of q2 with
opposite sign. We need measurements with both signs of q2 to fully understand the form
factors. So naturally I engaged in correspondence with Professor Zichichi (Nino) who became a
good friend. Our experiments were complimentary although we had friendly rivalry on their
joint interpretation.
But over the years we have shared a common frustration. We both
wanted to see a major electron-positron colliding beam as soon as possible and, of course,
wanted to play a part, and have fun, in its use. My attempts to get such a facility in Cambridge,
MA will be described later.
Nino was urging such a facility in Italy.
It appeared at first
that the laboratory at Frascati would lead the field, and Nino had a major group working there.
But management and union problems upset Frascati on the verge of what could have been a great
success.
Nino has orally commented to me that he and I knew more about the reasons for
such a facility than the people who eventually built and operated it. I do not think Nino
realizes how much the Stanford people knew, although it is probable the he personally knew
more about the underlying physics than any individual in Stanford. I believe that I also knew
more about the underlying physics, and that the CEA scientists, particularly Ken Robinson and
Gus Voss, certainly knew more about the accelerator physics .
Fermilab
In 1964 the High Energy (Rochester) conference was held in Dubna USSR. LBL
Berkeley had proposed to spend $350 million on a 200 GeV proton accelerator to be built on a
site near Sacramento, to be staffed and managed by LBL. East coast scientists had become used
to the Brookhaven management structure whereby scientists from all over could, and did,
propose experiments at the 30 GeV synchrotron, although it was the scientists at Columbia
University in New York were most successful. I remember a half hour conversation with Ed
McMillan as we walked beside the Volga. I tried to persuade him to modify the LBL proposal
to have a country wide management procedure. I think I persuaded him but it was too late.
The movement was underway to form Universities Research Association to run such a project.
The location also was now open. I understand that it was President Pusey of Harvard who, at
the first meeting of the Council of Presidents of URA, who was specific on this question.
“I
do not see why we should assume that the site is fixed.” Also the amount of funding that
Glenn Seaborg thought that Congress would vote was smaller than the $350 million requested.
As the budgeting for Fermilab got underway Glenn Seaborg, assured congress that this would
be the big capital project of the AEC’s science program, and also that older machines would be
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shut down.. Only $250 million was voted, instead of the $350,000,000 Berkeley proposed, and
this was to include the first experimental equipment which the LBL proposal had not. Bob
Wilson was chosen to be director because it was felt that he was the one person with a track
record of successfully using a smaller budget. I remember calling him up when I heard that he
had been asked by URA to head the project. Jane Wilson answered and gave Bob the message
that the high energy physics community needed him. Bob told me later that I was the first to
urge him on and that he needed and heeded my encouragement.
Federal funding was already
dropping because the Vietnamese war had got expensive. The halcyon time of 20% annual
increase in high energy physics funding was over.
The board of trustees was composed of about 15 people, each representing three
Universities in his region. About half of the trustees were scientists from the major universities
with established nuclear physics programs, and about half were administrators from those
Universities which did not have such a history but wanted to enter this exciting field. I was
asked to be on the board of trustees for three years, extended to six, and also be secretary for the
region to get agreement on a successor board member.
I was trustee from 1967 or 1968
through 1974 or 1975.
It seemed natural for me to pursue lepton scattering to the higher energies available at
Fermilab. I therefore started the muon scattering experiments at FERMILAB (experimental
proposal E98).
This was my first experience of extensive working away from home. Alas,
working away from home does not match my preferred way of working and interacting with
students and colleagues.
I would typically leave home at 6 am, catch the 7 am plane to
Chicago. Maybe it was a Boeing 737. I would take the first plane in the morning to Chicago,
then rent a car, costing $7.37 a day to go to Fermilab. Then rush back that or the next day at 8
pm. The airplanes still allowed smoking so I would come home feeling quite sick. But that
in that first yeat of accelerator operation I counted 110 nights spent away from home - and of
course more days.
During the first term of this I was also teaching two half courses.
Originally the experimental proposal was solely from Harvard, but we amalgamated with a
similar proposal from the University of Chicago.
That seemed ideal, because they were from
a local university with only a 40 mile commute.
We agreed that a young Assistant Professor
(at Chicago) Luke Mo, who had worked on the SLAC inelastic scattering be spokesman. But
that led to problems and I had to take over three years later.
This was the last time I knew
enough about an experiment, including other peoples’ apparatus and their computer programs, to
ensure that it worked, and that failures, whether admitted or not were understood, and corrections
made therefor.
Initially I had proposed to move a CEA magnet, the “Jolly Green Giant”, as an analyzing
magnet for a spectrometer, but the Chicago scientists offered the old 400 MeV cyclotron magnet.
This was a bigger magnet and demanded larger size spark chambers as detectors. An
electronic engineer, Nunamaker, at Chicago built for Luke Mo some spark chambers that were
to follow an analyzing magnet. These spark chambers had individual read out for each wire
and were to be the “seed” for the data analysis.
But these spark chambers were only 60%
efficient at the highest voltage that could be sustained.
Fortunately at Harvard, Tom Kirk and
Lynn Verhey and an excellent technician whose name escapes me, made excellent large spark
chambers which were, to my pleasant surprise, 95% to 99% efficient, except in the very center
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where the muon beam halo slowly made the chambers inefficient, presumably by the break up of
the spark chamber gas slowly coating the wires with something.
Because the Harvard
chambers were efficient and the Chicago chambers were not, our analysis plans were rapidly
modified to be based upon a “seed” from the Harvard chambers. This was implemented by
Tom Quirk, an Australian at Oxford University. We also took advantage of a fortunate decision
by Godfrey Stafford, then director of the Rutherford laboratory. The Rutherford laboratory had
an IBM 360 computer, one of the fastest at the time, and Godfrey was offered a second one for a
modest price - almost free. At Harvard I would have had to buy computer time from our
computer lab.
This meant quarterly visits to Oxford where I stayed across the road from the
new Clarendon Laboratory at a B and B.
I remember that I had no key of the Clarendon lab,
but needed to get in one evening so I crawled through a basement window. This was considered
infra.dig. (beneath my dignity) by the administrative lab director so he gave met a key the next
day.
This experiment demonstrated that the "scaling" of inelastic form factors, for which
Friedman, Kendall and Taylor correctly got the Nobel prize, only holds in one small region.
(189, 198, 215, 217).
In general it is a approximation and does not hold; I remember
explaining these scaling violation results to Bob Wilson at lunch one day. He understood well
radiative corrections in scattering and suggested at once the analogy with gluon radiation. This
is described in more detail by the theoretical ideas of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD)
(189,198, 215, 217).
But an upgrade of the beam to allow improved results was not
immediately available.
Most of this time I was still on the Board of Trustees.
I remember we were very keen
on the openness of the laboratory, both internationally and racially. I remember the first couple
of Russian (USSR) visitors. I took them to dinner in Chicago and asked the staff what was a
good one. The visitors wanted a “typical” American restaurant. When we got to the
restaurant just on the west of town I found it was a Greek restaurant where the owner and his two
brothers did a Greek dance for the customers. I was about to apologize for the fact that it was
not American when I stopped. A Greek, Italian, Chinese, Japanese or whatever restaurant is
typical American! We went on to a Czech film about Dubcek.
A good education for a
Russian.
We had rented a small “Harvard” apartment in west Chicago, just north of the lab. I ate
breakfast in the “diner” in west Chicago the next day and sat next to an elderly farmer. During
conversation he said that: “we should nuke those Russians while we are still ahead”.
I had
heard such comments from visiting Americans in Oxford around 1950 but this was 20 years
later. But I pointed out to him that we, the US Government, Fermilab, and the scientists had
invited Soviet scientists to spend time at the laboratory in collaborative research. The Soviets
were very pleased with the invitation to visit and this was the first time they allowed families to
accompany their husbands. I pointed out that these wives went to the supermarket and saw
how ordinary Americans lived and what freedom meant. “When they return, are they not the
best ambassadors for the American way of life?” The farmer agreed. But he probably still
wanted to nuke those Russians.
In 1983 Tom Kirk, by that time on the Fermilab staff, proposed an update of the muon
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scattering at higher energy. This had a trial run in 1987, and ran in 1991 and 1993.
The
beam was superior, but the group was much less tight and controlled.
Tom Kirk was
persuaded in 1987 to join the design study for the SSC. I could have taken the leadership but
the group rightly insisted that I should take leave and work at FERMILAB.
By that time I
was 15 years older than before, also working at Cornell, and with extensive commitments on
various risk analysis projects, including understanding Chernobyl. I declined. No one had
the tight control necessary. No one freely discussed problems in their parts of the apparatus so
that we could all discuss possible solutions. For example, I noticed when on shift that the drift
chambers inside the magnet were only 60% efficient. So I called Henry Lubatti from Seattle
who was the owner thereof, and he was informed that they already had the highest possible
high voltage before breakdown. Nothing was done. Interestingly they had been bought from
Nunamaker who had made the 60% efficient spark chambers for Luke Mo 15 years before!
Some Cerenkov detectors were installed by Vernon Hughes and they never worked well enough
to be used.
But they put 1 radiation length of material before our 6 m chambers, now drift
chambers not spark chambers, which were the main tracking chambers.
The computer
tracking became more complicated and inefficient. Yet Vernon refused to allow them to be
removed.
We had hoped that the experiment would tell us about muon production of jets; also
the production of vector mesons from heavy elements as a function of momentum transfer. But
these inefficiencies severely limited what we were able to accomplish and these remain
unstudied.
We did get some of the form factors at high excitation (512, 592, 597).
My connection with Fermilab has not ceased but is maintained both by my son, Dr Peter
James Wilson, and daughter-in-law, Dr Julie Whitmore who are active on the permanent
scientific staff there.
Alas in 2008 the US Federal budget is such that Fermilab may have to
fire some 600 staff members as all future activities have been cut.
Peter has had to do much
of this in his managerial position. In some senses SLAC is worse off. The high energy
colliding beam program has been stopped.
But Pief wisely had used his credit and authority
to move the laboratory into other areas. As noted earlier his support of a synchrotron radiation
facility at SLAC led to a rejection of the CEA proposal. But for Stanford it paid off. As of
2008 a new synchrotron light source is being built.
Visits to the USSR
I first met Russian physicists, Blokhinsev, Dzhelepov, Nikitin and Okun, at the
American Physical Society meeting at Stanford University, California in December 1957 where I
presented some results of experiments that had been performed with the cyclotron at the Atomic
Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. They afterwards visited us at Harvard where I
shoiwed them what we weere doing at the cyclotron and provided them with many rolls of
Scotch Tape which they hmad not seen. But this brief interaction was only the beginning.
As noted earlier I had the privilege of attending the first ‘Rochester” confence in 1950, and
the 1957 conference at CERN, Geneva, where many Russians attended, the 1958 conference in
Kiev, USSR , which was the first major postwar scientific conference in the USSR, and the 1964
conference in Dubna, USSR. In 1965 I spent nearly a month on a USSR-USSR Academy
exchange- in Akademigorok, (Novosibirsk); Moscow, Dubna and Yerevan. This led to individual
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meetings and lasting friendships.
When I went to the 1958 Kiev conference almost all foreign travel to the USSR went
through Moscow. Direct flights to Minsk or Kiev were out of the question. I had stopped off
in Paris on the way to see people in Orsay and discuss a possible sabbatical leave which I took in
1961. George Bishop and I then flew to Moscow on Aeroflot’s Tupolev 104 twin jet. We
landed in Vnukovo airport SW of Moscow. On the plane was an elderly Russian born
American; who was greeted by his sister who he had not met since 1913.
Everyone was still
when they greeted. We were greeted by Intourist and taken by bus to the Metropole Hotel in
the center of Moscow. There we had supper and went to bed. Up early the next morning to
catch a small 2 engine propeller plane to Kiev. My seat belts were broken. When I pointed
this out by gestures to the stewardess, she laughed. No one on the plane bothered with this
capitalist idea of seat belts!
My interest in the USSR was not purely academic. So in 1963 I applied for a special
NSF grant to spend a month in the USSR in spring 1965 on an “inter academy” exchange
although I was not, and am not, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. The
scientific excuse was a meeting in Novosibirsk arranged by Andrei Mikhailovich Budker who
originally had a Jewish name, Gertsch Itschkovitch Budker which name was known only to close
friends of which I was proud to be one, about colliding beams. Burt Richter was also there
and so was Ernest (Ernie) Courant from Brookhaven and Bernie Gittelman from Cornell.
Neither were Professors so I was considered senior although I was younger than Ernie and Ernie
was one of the foremost accelerator theorists in the world, having invented strong focusing , with
Snyder and Livingston.. I was, however, older than Gerry O’Neill, a Professor at Princeton. So
at dinner one night in Budker’s house I was put on the spot and had to be responsible for all of
America’s evil deeds.
It was the start of the Vietnam war.
“What would you think of a
country” asks Budker, “if during your civil war that country were to intervene on one side?”.
Fortunately I had an answer. “ You must realize,” I said, “That I was born in England with
working class ancestry.
At the start of the war England helped the south, because they
needed the cotton from the south to feed the mills of Lancashire. But the workers,
understanding perhaps the plight of the Negroes, went on strike. This just shows that the
workers often have better judgements than their governments”. Budk$er was pleased with my
answer and then said something with which I wholeheartedly agreed and agree. “It is up to us
scientists who understand these matters to explain them to the people in government.”. Ernie
Courant congratulated me on my responses. I do my best. Someone at the meeting, noting
that the Novosibirsk laboratory had strong direct support from Moscow, and secretary Kruschev
in particular, asked Budker what it was like to have such support. “It is like having a very rich,
but rather stupid, uncle”.
Budker came to visit USA a year later. I went to pick him up at
the airport. As we drove up Soldiers Field Road, I could not resist the jest: “On the left hand
side you see the Harvard Business School, the West Point of capitalism and on the right hand
side you see the Faculty of Arts and Sciences - the Kremlin on the Charles.”
Budker
congratulated Stan Livingston on a very fine accelerator, and personally commiserated with me
with the problem of having to fight with my wife’s brother-in-law for the funds to build a
colliding beam.
He was the first person, other than Andrée, to recognize what a difficult
problem that was for me.
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On the way to this meeting we stayed a day in Moscow. There was a big holiday to
celebrate Yuri Gagarin’s trip into space. In retrospect I do not understand the dates and history
here. It was 1961, not 1965, that Gagarin went into space.
Why was the holiday and parade
delayed 4 years? Bert Richter and I tried to get into Red Square to get a good view of the
parade but were stopped 50 feet short. But we joined the tail end telling the enthusiastic
Russians that it was for the whole world to celebrate. Bernie Gittelman waved an American
flag. It was in Novosibirsk that I first meet Sergei Kapitza, and Budker’s two right hand men
Ben Siderov and Stan Rodionov..
The latter was to become Deputy head of the Soviet
Institute for Space Research. I met him again at the Pugwash conference of 1989 in Cambridge,
MA. I was at that later time concerned with reporting to the President on the risks of the Galileo
space probe, and as noted later he had written a paper on comparing risks of nuclear reactors and
Pu 238 source Radioactive Thermal Generators (RTGs) for powering such a probe. I was
surprised by his correct point that nuclear reactors are, in fact, safer than RTGs with Pu 238.
As noted elsewhere, Dick Cuddihy of the laboratory in Albuquerque argued this also. But both
are safe enough so that other factors enter into any reasonable decision process.
Sergei Kapitza invited me to pass by Moscow and give a talk at his father’s seminar on a
Wednesday evening.
I remember Migdal also gave a talk at the same 3 hour seminar. He
talked on the application of the Bardeen, Cooper, Schrieffer (BCS) theory to nuclear structure
and pointed out the energy gap that can occur when two extra neutrons are added to a closed
shell.
Dzelepov came in from Dubna for the meeting and asked when I was going to Dubna.
I had requested such a visit but had not heard. It turned out that the appropriate bureaucrat in
the Soviet Academy was sick and no one else picked up on my program.
So Dzelepov took
me out to Dubna that night after a stop for refreshment at his apartment where I met his wife - a
Professor of welding. The next night Dzelepov had a dinner party for me at the little hotel in
Dubna. Bruno Pontecorvo was invited.
I had not seen Ponte for 15 years. Ponte
monopolized the conversation. He was obviously nostalgic for the USA . “Have you been to
the Grand Canyon?” When I said that I had planned to go in early 1952 but got married instead,
he said “You must go”.
I asked about the story which had been circulating in the USA about
his first summer vacation in the USSR.
In the USSR everyone from an institute or factory,
goes to the same resort for a vacation. In summer 1951, when I was in the Canadian Rockies,
the Dubna scientists went to the Black sea. Ponte had bought skin diving equipment - a wet
suit, a snorkel and spear in Italy in summer 1950 before turning up in Russia. He showed it off
to his Russian friends in 1951. He went into the sea and disappeared. Dzelepov and other
friends were frantic. His disappearance was reported to the police, and Ponte turned up 24
hours later in jail. It seems that he had swum around a headland and came out of the water. All
dressed in black, brandishing a spear, coming from the direction of Turkey, he spoke Russian
with a bad Italian accent and when asked about his job, his reply was implausible. He was a
nuclear physicists working in Dubna! He was promptly arrested as a spy! Ponte confirmed
this story in every detail. On my later report to the AEC on my trip (with a copy to CIA as
usual) I noted that it gave me a little pleasure as a former British subject that at one time and
place Pontecorvo was arrested as a spy. But of course I don’t know whether he was a spy at
all, or if he was a spy, which “side” was he working for. At that time it was inappropriate to
ask him, and he died before it was possible for me, or any of his Russian friends such as Boris
Yerezolimsky, to ask him.
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It was while in Moscow that I really learned the Soviet “Three Queue System.” I lost
my tooth paste, so I had to buy some more. At the pharmacist store you line up to pick out the
tooth paste. Then you line up at the counter to pay for it. Then you take the receipt back and
line up again to collect the tooth paste
From Dubna I went to Armenia. I had promised Alikhanian that I would visit his
laboratory where they were building a “copy” of the CEA.
At the 1959 Kiev conference I had
sent him some 45 reports on various parts of the CEA construction.
I phoned the Soviet
Academy to say that I would be driven by the Dubna car to the flight the Academy had booked
for me. The bureaucrat who had organized my trip was happy. He had lost track of me.
Bernie Gittelman and Burt Richter both visited Yerevan at this time also, and Gerry Fisher
from CEA and his wife, Vera Kistiakovsky had arrived on a three month exchange with CEA.
I remember being taken to an old monastery in Gegard to the east of Yerevan and then to the
cathedral at Echmiadzin.
It was the 50th anniversary of the 1916 genocide. We were taken
to Lake Sevan - which then had more water in it than it does now.
At Yerevan I became
aware of three distinct groups. The Armenians, the Azeris, (both town people) and the Kurds
who were mostly in the hills and came down on market day. I likened the existence of the
Kurds to the existence of a distinct spin temperature and lattice temperature in a material, which
can be different with little thermal contact between the spins and the lattice.
As I write this I
am reminded of Norman Ramsey’s joke at the international nuclear physics conference in
Glasgow in 1954. There were a few Russians there. He asked for a toast to the atomic
nucleus. The atomic nucleus should teach politicians that different systems can coexist. The
nucleus displays independent particle aspects as well as collective aspects.
I was put up in the tall Hotel Ukraina on the 15th floor. As is my custom I walked
down the emergency stairs. They were blocked with a locked gate at the 13th floor. I tried
walking up from the 12th floor. Also blocked. I assumed then and still assume now, that the
recording equipment was on the 13th floor. But I was feeling sick
I was scheduled to go to
Leningrad but when I got to Moscow I decided I must get home quickly. I explained that to the
young scientist who picked me up. I wanted to cancel the visit to Leningrad and change my
reservation. Moscow-Stockholm and home. The dispatcher of foreign flights was out. My
friend, whose name I have forgotten, said “I have been up since 4 am doing an experiment. I
must go home. Here is the telephone number of the dispatcher. He speaks French and German.
An academy car will be downstairs at 6.30 to take you to the airport”. I telephoned half an
hour later and it was arranged. The telephone number was duly reported to NSF (and CIA) and
it turned out to be useful later.
There was a small problem at the airport. My ticket, bought
in USA with US government funds, was for an Aeroflot plane to Stockholm and Copenhagen
which did not fly that day and I wanted to go on the SAS plane ,on the same route, on the earlier
day. The Aeroflot agent refused to endorse the ticket to SAS. So I politely explained that I
would have to explain the reason that I had to buy another ticket to the US government, and that
to simplify the inevitable investigation, could I have her name?
The ticket was endorsed at
once! This was a clear example that to cope with a bureaucrat one must make it harder to say
no than to say yes. It was a long trip. The SAS flight took me to Stockholm and Copenhagen.
At Copenhagen I called Andrée. I then took another SAS flight to Bergen and New York, and
up to Boston. Then I spent a day in bed for recovery. A few weeks later was my birthday and
Andrée arranged a small birthday party in our house in Arlington. The two visitors from
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Armenia, Hamlet Badalyan and a Russian, had arrived by that time and they came to the birthday
party.
My next major trip to USSR was for the Kiev conference in August 1970.
Christopher had just graduated from high school and had done well in Russian. He had
followed the Russian joke: “In the USA optimists are learning Russian and the pessimists are
learning Chinese”. I also had some $500 in royalties from the translation of my book on
nucleon-nucleon scattering. The USSR had not signed a copyright agreement with capitalist
western publishers so I got nothing through my publisher Interscience. But they were willing
to pay royalties to the hard working author. Those funds could not be taken out of the USSR
so why not spend them enjoying ourselves? I planned for us to visit Central Asia: Tashkent,
Bukhara and Samarkand.
Bukhara where the British Indian army officer had been thrown into
the vermin pit after his failed attempt to make an arrangement with the Emir of Bukhara to
control the area in the “Great Game” of British/Russian rivalry in Central Asia. And
Samarkand - on the “Golden Road” of Elroy Flecker. All three are, of course, on the Silk Road
by which silk was brought from China to the west 800 years before.
To get a visa the USSR embassy usually wanted us to buy “Intourist” lodging and meal
coupons for the full trip.
But I wanted to pay for these with my royalty money from the book
on nucleon-nucleon scattering. After a delay I paid Intorist for 2 days with a Christopher flew
to Washington to collect our visas. They were valid for 2 days but we were told to extend them
in the USSR. We tried to do this at every stop but were repeatedly told, it is OK, wait till the
next stop!
The American Physical Society had arranged a special fare for the American
conference goers. Czech airlines, NY to Prague and Prague to Kiev, and Aeroflot Leningrad to
NY 3 weeks later. In Kiev, I presented a rapporteur talk on test of quantum electrodynamics at
small distances.
This had been a topical subject 10 years before, but all the tests showed that
QED holds, so the talk was perhaps dull.
Indeed Dick Taylor made an impolite comment to
that effect. Chris waited outside the hotel on a couple of days and some Ukrainian or Russian
teenagers came up and they got together. I remember going to dinner in a taxi with Ben
Siderov from Novososibirsk and Pief, and the taxi was stopped and the driver was fined, on the
spot, for picking us up at the place on the road where it was forbidden.
Pief commented that
this was a much longer obstruction of (non existent) traffic as the fine was levied and paid than
by the initial brief stop!
In Kiev I collected my 500 ruble royalties and tried to regularize our position. Lou
Hand was also at the conference and had an assignment to get to Bukhara and buy a carpet. He
joined us and I then included him in all arrangements. I had made a reservation on a non-stop
flight from Kiev to Tashkent but had had no response from hotels and so on in Central Asia.
The head of Intourist in Kiev, a very helpful lady, said that she could get us on any flight out of
Kiev, but had no authority in Uzbekhistan. Attached to the conference was a friendly helpful
KGB agent who also had no direct authority. So it was recommended that we go to Moscow,
and stay at a hotel, around the corner from the main Intourist office. Then in the morning to
go to the Intourist desk at the hotel and ask for help. If and when the agent replies in a
particular manner; (And here she mimicked an agent unwilling to do anything) to break off at
once and go the head office. She from Kiev would send full information and request. I
booked a flight from Moscow to Tashkent with a stop at Chelyabinsk, and then a smaller light on
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to Samarkand, another to Bukhara, returning to Moscow from Samarkand.
I had hoped to
look out of the windows at the Soviet atomic bomb facility int eh Ural mountains. It transpired
as she expected. Just as we were walking out of the hotel at 9 am to go to the Intourist head
office, our friendly KGB agent walked in. He had come around to see if he could help us!
It took 2 ½ hours but we got our tickets.
But I was not to see the facilities at Chelyabisk for
another 20 years. They found a more convenient non-stop flight Moscow to Tashkent, and the
widows at the seats we were assigned had been deliberately blacked out.
We got to Tashkent at 4 am and went to the hotel. At 10 am I went to the Intourist
office. “We can find space here, but cannot get you to Samarkand and Bukhara.” So
following instructions from my friendly KGB agent I suggested that they look at the Telex
machine where they would find a message from the head office.
It was signed by “Budnev”
the director of Intourist, and requested or instructed them to help us on the planned trip. This
was the only message from HQ for 2 weeks!
So all got arranged.
At the suggestion of
Bekzhod Yuldashev, a young Uzbek physicist I met in Kiev, we telephoned his sister, Fareeda
Salimova in Tashkent, and she and her husband Damir Salimov, an Uzbek film maker, showed
us around Tashkent in the afternoon ending up at a new but typical Uzbek style tea house near
the hotel.
We were impressed by the monument in the middle of the new part of town. An
old man surrounded by 20 children. This man had received 20 children from further west who
had been orphaned by WW II.
One Professor from Rochester, NY was at the meeting and at
the hotel. He was born in Poland, and his whole family were refugees in Tajistan near
Stalinabad (now Dushanve).
He was trying to get to visit. I do not believe he managed it..
In the morning we went to the market - which was almost over. We wanted fruit.
There had been little in Kiev and later little in Moscow. We found an old man who still had a
watermelon left - which we bought. He was curious about us. I was prepared for such
curiosity and had prepared a set of US coins with different Presidents. I asked him to accept this
little gift. When I showed him the Kennedy half dollar, he spontaneously said:”he was a good
man”.
Early the next morning we flew to Samarkand, arriving at a little hotel at about 9 am.
Somewhat apologetically we were shown a room with two single beds and a sleeping couch.
“We hope that is alright.”
I commented that in 1938 a young British diplomat, as he, Fitzroy
Maclean described in his book “Eastern Approaches” had had to sleep under a park bench and
this was far superior. As we came downstairs we saw two elderly British ladies arguing with
the front desk. “But we made this reservation 2 months ago”.
This seemed a moment to
keep silent.
The problem became apparent later. A new special tourist hotel was being
completed and was already 3 moths late. The Uzbeks had over booked.
In Samarkand we were taken to the Ulug Bek sextant.
This was 150 meters diameter
and used to make precise measurements of the location of the stars. This work earned Ulug
Bek the distinction of being one of the six “greats” in early astronomy in the text book from
which I l$earned. I think they were: Coppernicus, Ulug Bek, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galieo
and Newton Although the sextant was copied in India, it was allowed to be buried by sand after
Ulug Bek’s assassination and was unearthed by Russian archeologists in 1907 and we wera also
shown the Bibi Khanum mosque built by Timurlane for a favorite wife. Partially destroyed by
the earthquake of 1870, it had been restored after WW II by the USSR
We were also shown
the main square with its’ four madrassas including one built by Ulug Beg. We had no way of
157
identifying the bench under which Fitzroy Maclean slept in 1938, or the bench used by the two
“little men in black” who were his watchers. We took a young Uzbek physicist to dinner and
told him of the latest high energy physics results. On walking back to the hotel we saw an
amusement park with a Ferris wheel. On a whim, all 3 of us went on the Ferris wheel. It was
magical seeing Samakand from above withe the floodlit Bibi Khanum mosque and other sights.
I had hoped to take Andree to see Samarkand sometime. In summer 1994 when we
visited Kyrghystan we did spend a day in Tashkent. But it was all we wished to spend after a
10 day visit. I tried again in 2001 and were scheduled on a Uzbek airlines flight from NYC on
September 15th.to Tashkent for a physics conference, in Samarkand if I remember aright, but
That flight did take off but no flights went down from Boston, and the family did not want us to
go.
From Samarkand Chris, Lou and myself went on to Bukhara. We were given an
“official” tour in the morning by an intourist guide, to the fort with its pit now free of vermin,
and a couple of mosques. I asked about new apartment construction such as we had seen
elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
“Yes we have a new estate in the SW, but it is not on our tour.
You might wish to walk over this afternoon.” So we did and saw a construction site with a
sentry box on each corner.
I took photographs of this, but that film disappeared from my
locked suitcase It was a number lock which I had set at our telephone number 4823, and would
no longer open that way. But it opened at 0000. I am sure that the reader’s explanation of
this circumnstance is as good as mine. As we passed the main Mosque my mind went back to
the history of the construction of the railroad in 1870 or so. The Russians, after their conquest
of central Asia, cemented it by building a railroad from Novosobirsk in the north, past Almaty in
Kazakhstan, Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara to the Caspian sea. The Russian railroad
engineers commented that the water in front of the mosque was used for everything. There was
much wildlife therein, and yet people drank from it. Soviet sanitary engineering was clearly
superior, and this thought has influenced me greatly as noted later in my discussion of arsenic.
However in 1970 we could see no one drinking the polluted water!..
Intourist hotel menus were almost all the same. For lunch there was the inevitable
Chicken Kiev. Where were the shishkabobs for which Central Asia is famous?
Chris and I
saw them being cooked in the middle of the square and rushed back to tell Lou Hand and an
Australian tourist family. We all ate shishkabobs in that little restaurant, eating them sitting on
the raised platform that was the restaurant.
The Australian family was interesting. A couple
with a 7 year old daughter spending a year touring the world with two small suitcases ans a short
wave radio. It was therefore here that we learned that 4 aircraft had been hijacked by the PLO
and downed at an airfield in Jordan. It was the start of a major hijacking frenzy. Newspapers
in the Soviet Union made no mention of it for several days presumably while the government
decided what its’ position was.
.
Then back to Moscow where the next day we visited the big 70 Gev accelerator at
Serpukhov accompanied by the same friendly KGB agent that had helped us to get to Central
Asia.
Being my usual mischevous self I asked him what he thought of the hijackings. That
put him on the spot. Was he going to say that he had not heard of them?
After a pause of at
least half a minute he admitted that he knew. He explained that there was a special party
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newspaper for the top 900 people in the party and he was one of the 900 . He asked us if we
thought that Serpukhov was going to be the leading high energy laboratory in the world. I said
that we certainly hoped that it would be for the next four years before Fermilab got going.
I
gave my usual spiel, which was easy because I believed it. A little competition between
nations on these peaceful activities for the good of the world can be helpful. But collaboration
on the successful projects is even more helpful.
I note that that dry summer one could smell
smoke in Moscow. There were forest fires not far away. But they were not mentioned in the
newspapers either.
When the Soviets were being secretive about Chernobyl as I describe
later, I understood their automatic desire for secrecy.
But it led to major problems.
We went on to Leningrad and I went on out to Garchina to see Lobachov’s experiment on
the polarization of the gamma ray from Neutron proton capture. If I remember aright, Chris
stayed in Leningrad, when I went out to the lab in Gatchina, at a former summer estate of a
wealthy nobleman. Half way there I saw something I was half expecting. A couple of army
tanks on the side of the road.
I asked to go back. It was the location of the limit of te Nazi
advance to Leningrad in 1941 and there was a memorial.
I stayed 15 minutes to contemplate
about this terrible event - the siege of Leningrad - about which I of course knew well from
1941-1944. The 900 days .I am not sure whether it was on this trip or another that I went out
to the main cemetery. In 1941 every death was recorded. But in January and early February
there were no entry. But then there must have been a brief thaw. The translation of what I
read for February 15th is::” on this day 15,000 people were buried here.” It boggles the mind.
From Gachina we drove to the Czar’s summer palace at Petrodvoretz. This was burnt
and overrun by the Nazi armies in 1941 but the Soviet government had meticulously renovated
it. Christopher came out by hydrofoil from Leningrad and we returned to Leningrad by
hydrofoil. The next day we left by Aeroflot plane to New York. I cannot remember at this time
but believe the plane left from Leningrad. But we may have had to return to Moscow. As we
went through passport control to board the plane it was noticed that we had been in USSR for 3
weeks with visas valid for only 2 days.
But our friendly KGB agent was right there and there
was no problem. So ended an exciting trip that I will always remember. I believe that our
straightforward acceptance and understanding of life in the Soviet Union was helpful in
preventing the cold war fro becoming hot.
It was several years before I visited the USSR again. I had signed a statement of
Scientists and Engineers for Orlov and Sharansky and belveied in my commitment not to visit
the USR or to invite one of their people to our lab while Olrlov and Sharansky were in jail. A
lthough there was a high energy physics conference in Georgia in 1976, I had decided not to
go but to ask that Allen Sessoms, then an Assistant Professor go to represent Harvard High
Energy Physics which he did ably.. Then in 1979 came a specific invitation which was hard to
refuse.
In 1979 I was explicitly invited by Vladimir Lobachev to visit Garchina again to discuss
parity violation experiments.
Vladimir had looked at the polarization of the gamma ray from
n-p capture in the research reactor at Gachina. The children had almost all left home (Peter had
gone to college) and Andrée wanted to come with me so we resolved to violate the promise but
to seek out refuseniks while there.
We knew that refusniks were dismissed from their jobs
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and denied access to journals, so we took a suitcase full of journals to give to them and resolved
generally to help them.
Our visas for the USSR only arrived by mail on the Saturday morning - and we left on the
Saturday evening with non changeable and non refundable airline excursion tickets.
Boston-Glasgow-Copenhagen and then Copenhagen-Leningrad. I noticed that the visa was
incorrectly written - for arrival on the Wednesday instead of the Sunday. I believe now that
small mistakes such as these were usual for the USSR embassy and were deliberate. It gave
authorities a legal reason for giving you trouble later if they wished to do so.
We arrived
about 5 pm at Leningrad. The passport people left us till last and were giving us a hard time.
The soldier called his boss - a Captain. I explained the error and then I pulled out all the stops
in my request. My rule with all bureaucrats of any country is to make it harder for them to say
no than to say yes. “I understand that we have created a problem that will take time to resolve.
But can you please tell Vladimir Nazarenko, Stalin prize winner, who is waiting for us, that we
have arrived and will be delayed. He can then also tell Pietr Kapitza, Hero of the Soviet Union
and Nobel Prize winner that we will not be in Moscow on time.” He went outside and the
conversation (according to Vladimir) went like this. “Who is this man Nazarenko?”. “I am
Nazarenko”. “Your friends Wilson from America are here”. “Good”. “But their visa says
they are coming on Wednesday”. “But I invited them for today”. “But the visa is only valid
for Wednesday.” “But I invited them for today. We could ask them to go home and come back
again Wednesday but that seems stupid.” “Yes it would be stupid”. So the captain let us in.
I found out later that a couple of weeks before a journalist had arrived three days before the date
on his visa. The police took him to his hotel room where he was confined for the intervening
three days.
We spent a week in and around Leningrad and Gachina. Myself mostly in Gachina and
Andrée was escorted by a guide. Andrée asked to go the botanic gardens. There she met a
man whose experience showed a resilience in face of adversity that led the residents of
Leningrad to be admired the world over. He had just written a thesis on tropical plants and
then in September 1941 all the greenhouses were destroyed and there was no heating in the
winter. This scientists kept one particular plant under his coat each winter (41-42, 42-43, one
43-44) till the siege was over. It survived.
It was, I believe on that visit that I was taken to
the famous cemetery in the north of Leningrad and was shown the book in which they inscribed
the names. There were no names in a certain period of cold weather. But I believe it was
February 15th 1942 that the entry simply read: “on this day 15,000 people were buried here”.
They had frozen to death in the preceding weeks and been picked up as the thaw came. Half
way along the road from Leningrad to Gatchina is a monument by the side of the road with a
tank. It was the limit of the German advance. I asked to stop and look and contemplate the
horrors about which I had thought so much when I was 15 years old at school when these things
were happening. Fortunately they were not happening to me.
In Gatchina one older scientist turned out to be an admirer of Andrée’s father. We had
the usual long lunch with vodka (a habit Gorbachev broke later). On the second or third day I
was taken to Petrodvoretz. This was a summer palace of the Tsar, destroyed by the Germans
and rebuilt by the Russians, including the gold leaf. Andrée joined us by hydrofoil from
Leningrad.
We came back to Leningrad by a hydrofoil boat. I never went on a hydrofoil in
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the USA but the next year we went from Kowloon to Guangchow on one.
I also kept our promise to ourselves and telephoned some refuseniks from a public phone.
We went out to see them at a new restaurant just opened on the edge of the harbor. Built by the
Finns it was to be ready for the Olympics the next year. There we met Victor Goldfarb and his
wife Elena and friends.
Victor was born about 1928. If I understand aright, his father was a
Bolshevik, but Jewish.
Victor had recently lost his job. He was head of a small plasma
research laboratory where a few other Jews worked. Following the 1973 agreement that
Russian Jews who wanted to do so were allowed to leave (ostensibly to go to Israel). Several
asked to go and Victor put no obstacle in their path. The authorities felt that Victor’s
laboratory was definitely “unpatriotic” and shut it down. Now Victor, at age 53 or so was out of
a job. And he was Jewish. After repairing central heating boilers for awhile he applied to
leave himself and was leaving 14 days later. He was not allowed to take out his scientific
papers, nor was his wife allowed to take her jewelry, and only 100 roubles.
I agreed to mix
his papers with mine and Andrée agreed to wear Elena’s jewelry. But, we warned the
Goldfarbs that if we were questioned by passport control we would say exactly what we were
doing and explain it. We would do our best not to be questioned, and as noted later we
succeeded but made no guarantee. Victor did not have all his papers and we agreed to meet in
Moscow 2 days later. That night, on Thursday evening, at exactly 6 pm, I was to walk
northwards outside Oktoberskaya metro station and Victor walked south. I followed him
around the corner into a car driven by his brother David, a distinguished biologist and geneticist.
After going round the block to be sure he was not followed, David handed me some papers. As
Victor said some 10 years later, “You did not know whether I was KGB”.
True. But one
does what one has to do.
That Tuesday evening Vladimir Lobachov and his wife entertained us to dinner at the
Astoria hotel - once known as known as St Petersburg’s best and still good.
We had tried to
keep our visits to refuseniks quiet. We telephoned from public phones in busy places, and met
“on the fly”. But the KGB must have known. Lobachov asked us to keep very distinct our
social visit from our official visit. As usual there was a Russian singer with an overly loud
amplifier. Much was western music with Russian words. It was hard to talk. On a nearby
table a lone man was sitting. It turned out that he was from Finland. He was obviously
inebriated. He then fell sideways. A waiter came along and propped him up. He fell
sideways again. So a couple of waiters carried him up to bed. It seems that Finland had very
strict regulations about drinking, so that busloads of Finnish tourists would arrive in Leningrad
for the weekend “on the bottle (or bottles).” This was one of these thirsty tourists.
We took
the 11.59 train, the Golden Arrow, to Moscow. We were then told the reason why the train had
always left at 11.59 and not midnight. If the train had left at midnight or later the bureaucrats
would have not been able to claim the previous day in their expense accounts.
The first day we were in Moscow we went out to Dubna - by train. It was now a faster
train than the one I had taken in 1964 since the line was electrified. Andrée wanted to walk by
the river - by herself - while I was giving my lecture. But her “minder” had orders to go with
her. So our host at Dubna told her to get out of the car quickly as we came to a railroad grade
crossing and he drove across just as the gates closed. Andrée disappeared fast and was able to
have a solitary contemplative walk along the banks of the Volga. I had to give two talks back
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to back - one on the TMI accident and the other on muon scattering. The lecture room was
packed.
Just before the interval a man muffled in a heavy overcoat came and sat in the front
row. It was Bruno Pontecorvo. “I have a fever of 103 degrees F”, he said, “but I had to
come and say hallo to you” It was the last time I saw Ponte before he died. I never had the
chance to ask him after it became possible for him to speak openly, and explain why he left
England in 1950. None of my Russian friends knew either.
In my talk about TMI I
referred to Academician Alexandrov’s statement that “such an accident could only happen in
America where they put profits ahead of safety”. I emphasized that this was a political
statement and if the engineers and scientists believed it they would be doomed to have a serious
accident within 10 years. Unfortunately I was right.
The V.I. Lenin Atomic Energy Station
at Chernobyl blew up in April 1986.
Then in Moscow we were invited to lunch by Pietr and Anna Kapitza in their house at the
Institute for Physical Problems where I had given a seminar in 1965 - some 12 years before.
Afterwards I was taken around the laboratory by Sergei and Andrée was given a ride around
Moscow by Anna in Pietr’s bright blue Mercedes (which he had bought with his Nobel Prize
money). And then Sergei invited us to dinner in his apartment where he had also invited the
Siberian economist (of Armenian descent) Aganbeghian.
Andrée commented to Tanya
Kapitza that we had been “watched “ all the time and was there a possibility of going to the
country and walking somewhere. “Yes” she said. ”I am going to our dacha tomorrow (Friday)
and you can come with me”. So on the Friday, I believe, we were dropped on the edge of a
woodland. “Our dacha is 5 km over there. I will see you at lunch”. We almost got lost but
arrived for lunch. There was also Tanya’s father, Dr Damir, who had been head of the main
Moscow hospitals and had been one of the 40 physicians at Stalin’s bedside as he died. He was
also the physician who met, at their airport, America’s foremost heart surgeon who had arrived
in an effort to treat Landau after he became a vegetable in his car crash on the road from
Moscow to Dubna. Dr Damir was either originally Turkish or has Turkish ancestry. He had
three daughters who inherited his dacha - the one in which were eating. We were to see it more
often later.
After lunch we were taken to Pietr’s dacha a mile away where we met Pietr and
Anna again, and saw Pietr’s laboratory that he had built during his exile, and then we were taken
back to Moscow.
I write more about Pietr Kapitza, his work, his exile and his influence in the
Soviet Union later in these memoires.
Early that evening we called on Valodya Kharitonov, who had left Yerevan and returned
to Moscow. He had basically retired at age 62.
His apartment was full of books, however.
Valodya had been at the University of Moscow with Andrei Sakharov. I had been trying several
times in the previous couple of days to reach Andrei Sakharov on his telephone. I knew his
telephone number but not his address. But each time I called and spoke English the line went
dead. But I figured that even such automatic machines must get a cup of tea or coffee
sometime so I went on trying. So just before we left Valodya’s apartment at about 11 that
night we got through and we met Andrei Sakharov for the first time as described later in a
special section about Sakharov . One of the first things Andrei said was “I assume that
everything said in this apartment is recorded.”. That makes it easy. You don’t have to
wonder. I remember the historical story of the English Foreign Office official who, leaving for
the weekend forgot to send the message to General Howe in New York to meet General
Burgoyne coming down from Montreal. I assumed that no one would read the tapes till Monday
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and I resolved to leave Moscow by the next available airplane. Fortunately we were prepared.
We were scheduled on an Aeroflot to Paris on the Tuesday, but it flew every day. As a result
of my leaving early in my 1965 trip, I also had the telephone number of the dispatcher of foreign
flights in Aeroflot so at 4 in the morning I phoned to change the reservation.
At 7.30 I called
our “minder” and asked if he could get an Academy car to go to the airport because we had to
leave early. He protested that the Academy travel office was closed and it would be impossible
to change the ticket. He was shaken when I told him it was already changed, and he actually
shook all the way to the airport. At the airport the young passport control officer was on a dais
looking down on us. He ruffled through my passport with its Chinese and Saudi visas, very
puzzled. Then he ran his finger down a list on the dais in front of him. We were not (yet) on
the list. Then he rang a bell. I froze and was speechless. The Captain came around and did
the same thing - ruffling through the pages of the passport. Finally Andree found her voice. “
Is there a problem?” “No!” said the Captain. He shut the passports and we were allowed to
proceed. “We are home free, “ said Andree. “Not until the wheels touch the ground in Paris
(Orly) will we be free”. We passed on to the “duty free store” called in the USSR the
“Beriozka shop”. There was a tea cosy of a lady looking just like the little lady who gave out
the keys at our hotel - the Academy hotel. We bought her and have her still.
.
We arrived in Paris and were nervously exhausted. The capitalist US airlines would not
let us leave on the next plane because the required 14 days minimum stay had not passed. So
we rented a car and went down and collapsed in Lardy with Victor and Barbara.
There is an
epilogue to this story. In about 1986, David Goldfarb met an American journalist, Nicholas
Daniloff, outside the Metropole Hotel and gave him some papers. They were both arrested and
Daniloff was taken to Lublianka jail.
When I read about this in the New York Times, I
immediately thought: “This could have been me.” David was asked to testify against Nicholas
saying that Nicholas was a spy but David refused. David’s request to leave Russia for
leukemia treatment in France, I believe, was refused. They were both released later, largely
due to the efforts, I understand, of Armand Hammer. I was invited to a welcoming party for
David, and Yuri Orlov, in New York but that coincided with a party, in October 1986, that
several graduate students gave for me in Harvard to celebrate my 60th birthday. Since then
Nicholas Daniloff got an academic position at Northeastern University and I have met him
several times at lectures about Russia at Harvard University. Incidentally this is another of
many examples of the inaccuracies in my memory. Until I checked I thought that Nicholas’
arrest was in 1983.
Our next trip was to the Kyrgyz republic and to Tashkent in the former USSR but not to
Moscow in 1993.
I was by this time on the borad of the Andrei Sakharov foundation.
When Andrei was a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet he met an physicist/electrical engineer
from Kyrgystan, Dr Askar Archayev, elected from Kyrgystan. At the break up of the Soviet
Union Askar Arkhayev became President of the new Kyrghyz republic.
The Sakharov
Foundation invited him to the USA for a human rights conference in Washington, DC.. Askar
accepted but said that he wanted to fulfil a dream of visiting Harvard and MIT. It fell to me to
arrange this visit which I did, putting him up at the Hyatt regency hotel using my frequent flyer
coupons..
We were invited back for a visit to his country as his guest.
So in August 2003 we took a specuial ticket on Turkish airlines via Istanbul.
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The
Kyrghyz airlines were not running, so we flew to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan where we were met
and driven south to Bishkek, the capital of the Kyrghyz republic.
We stopped for lunch at a
“fast food stand” run by a Uighur immigrant of whom more later.
It was less elegant but
better than Macdonalds.
In Bishkek we stayed in one of 6 small villas in the Presidential
compound. It was very elegant.a living room, bedroom, bathroom with a sunken bathtub.
Kyrghystan ws a favorite vacation spot for the top communist brass of the USSR and we were
told, that “Comrade Stalin stayed here.”
I have been to places in England where Queen
Elizabeth I was supposed to have stayed and places in the USA where George Washington
stayed but never slept in such a historical bed until this occasion.
We visited the physics department and the Academy of Sciences and were then driven
eastwards to a beautiful lake. Lake Issy-Kul is about 80 miles from east to west and maybe 5
to 10 miles north to south. It was a favorite vacation spot in the USSR period.
We stayed at
a vacation complex and again we stayed in a bed Joseph Stalin has slept in. Then we were
taken to see the mountains to the north. Our guides expcted us to walk a quarter of a mile and
then stop, but we, especially I, wanted to go to the top. I believe it was at 9,000 feet. To the
south there was Lake Issy-kul and across were the Tien Shan mountains rising to 22,000 feet and
separating Kyrghysia from C hina.
These were the mountains where Igor Tamm (junior) had
invited me to climb and where he made the first ascent some 20 years before.
I could see a
line of clouds half way up the mountains. It was and of course is, a magnificent sight.
Coming back we took a small detour to the ruins of a town. It had been a major stop on
the “silk road” but had been sacked by Genghis Khan and never recovered.
There was a plan
and pictures showing how it must have appeared in its hey day. Again we stopped for lunch at
a road side stand run by a Uighur refugee.
We were then told that there were a hundred
thousand Uighurs who had fled their native Sinkiang about 1970 when there had been a clamp
down on minorities by the Chinese government.
Amusingly, Professor Jeffery Sachs our
neighbor in Newton Centre, was also visiting Askar Archayev independently and staying in
another of the little guest houses in the Presidential compound. I never asked whether Joseph
Stalin also slept in Sachs’ guest house!
While we were there there were Independence Day celebrations.
That was on the
anniversary of the day in August 2001 when the Soviet Union finally fell apart. We watched
from the Presidential stand. That night President Askar Archayev invited us to dinner. I
promised to do what I could to help scientists get funding in the new environment. But it was
hard. They had no idea how to write a proposal, even though I painstakingly outlined it for
them. They could not even write a one page CV. So nothing came of that effort.
We were scheduled to leave from Tashkent, and Archayev’s staff arranged a car to take
us there. It was an official car, and we were waved through all the check points. I noted that
after we were left at the hotel, the official driver negotiated with a passenger, presumably paying
in cash, to go back to Bishkek.
I had expcted to see my friend Bekzhod Yuldashev who was
head of the nuclear physics laboratory in Ulug Beg, a small town north of Tashkent that had been
started as a science complex.
But that night he was out of the country on business, about
which more later. So we were met by his niece Yulduz Salimova , whose parents Chris, Lou
Hand and I had met some years before in 1968.
This beautiful lady and her boy friend were
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both working in the world bank office.
We had bought a fine colored wool rug the day we left
Bishkek, but had nothing to tie it up for the plane trip hime. We could find no place to buy
cord, so an electricity extension cord from the world bank office was pressed into service!
Alas, after we got the carpet home we failed to get it cleaned. 6 months later it, and the carpet
beneath it, were destroyed by a moth infection. The next day we were shown around Tashkent
by Bekhzhod’s deputy Alexander Kist - a Czech born physicist. At one place downtown there
had been a statue of Stalin.
This had been removed and in its place was a statue of Timurlane.
“It is not an improvement” we were told. “He was a bigger butcher than Stalin”.
As we left the next day and were about to board the plane, we did meet Bekhzhod. He
had just flown in. We found out what he was doing. In 1991, after the fall of the USSR,
research funding ceased. So Bekzhod started making radioactive isotopes for medicine using
the Ulug Beg cyclotron, and had started a joint company with DuPont to sell them all over SE
Asia. He was therefore able to keep the laboratory alive and was highly praised for so doing.
But I suspect the company was his personal one yet he was using government equipment!.
As
I contemplate this,
I suspect that actions such as his in the USA would have him in jail within
days if not hours. But circumstances and culture in the remnants of the USSR were different.
I was invited to go to Uzbekhjistan, to Samarkhand, for a physics conference in September 2001
and had booked a ticket for myself and Andree to leave on September 15th.
I was all set to
th
talk about the CLEO experiments. But on September 11 all air travel was stopped. The
plane took off, but we were not on it.
We never got back to Uzbekhistan or Kyrgystan. But a year later we got a formal
invitation to Yulduz’ wedding. I had just spent a few days in Kiev seeing Pantelevaich
Umanetz, who had hosted me at Chernobyl and was then Minister of Nuclear Energy, and
another visit to Minsk and St Petersburg, and one more long trip seemed too much. So we
declined. I found out later that this was a proper Moslem celebration lasting a full week!
But Yulduz’ husband was accepted as a student at Brandeis University so we invited them to a
New Year party at our house. The last I heard they were working in Montreal. Bekzhod
went on to become President of the Uzbek Acdemy of Science, but has now left Tashkent and is
in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). I suspect he finds it politically more
palatable.
It was another 10 years before Andree and I went to a Moslem wedding of Peter
Rogers’ Moroccan student Dr Hynd Hoya Bouhia. But that only lasted 3 days.
Colliding beams of electrons and positrons
The fact that operation of the Harvard cyclotron was cheaper than operation of other
accelerators was instrumental in my trying, in the 1960s, to keep all parts of a high energy
physics program, accelerator, apparatus, and data analysis, at Cambridge, MA, with Harvard as
a leading participant. It was one of the several reasons that I rejected offers from other places,
Stanford, Manchester UK and Cambridge UK that were made about this time. I failed in this
endeavor for a number of reasons, many of which are outlined in the previous section on the
CEA. But the failure to keep high energy physics firmly in the Universities has led, in my
view, to a decline in the field itself. Since this has been one of the most difficult and painful
parts of my life the failure must be described.
In summer 1956 funding for high energy physics seemed limitless and the launching of
Sputnik in 1957 ensured that it would continue - as it did for a time with an increase of 20% per
year. Funding was made available for two University size accelerators, the CEA and the
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Princeton-Penn accelerator at $5 million each plus $2 million contingency for each of the two
accelerators. Funding for SLAC seemed likely although that took another 7 years In the mid
west it was proposed to build colliding proton beams - the “Synchroclash”. Then G.K (Gerry)
O.Neill proposed a simpler arrangement. He proposed to store protons in a smaller ring and to
allow the stored protons to collide.
Norman Ramsey and I both saw that this could be fine
for electrons.
We discussed this among ourselves and with AEC people. We all agreed that
it seemed premature to plan a detailed experiment on electron-electron collisions using the
CEA because construction was just beginning, and we agreed that we would return to the idea
when CEA began working.
Norman wrote to Pief at Stanford suggesting that he try to make a
colliding electron-electron facility using the 1 GeV accelerator. I have Pief’s reply, in a letter,
which I abbreviate: “The idea is not very interesting because you can only do one experiment”,
namely. electron-electron scattering. But Gerry O’Neill persuaded him to go ahead anyway.
In my view it was the vision and enthusiasm of Bruno Touschek which made the
difference.
Indeed, anyone who takes the trouble to examine his carefully written notes, in a
couple of books owned by his widow Elspeth, will recognize the breadth of his vision and his
thoroughness.
Bruno was always also faithful in praising others. He pointed out that one
could make electron-positron collisions and proceeded to do so in a small ring ADA in Orsay
about 1962.
I was convinced. He pointed out to me that the idea came first from the
Norwegian physicist, Wideroe with whom Bruno had worked in Hamburg on a betatron in 1941.
Bruno also pointed out that it was Ken Robinson at CEA who showed that keeping electrons
stable against all three instabilities, vertical betatron oscillations, horizontal betatron oscillations
and horizontal synchrotron oscillations was possible. The sum of the squares of all three
oscillation times is constant and positive. Bruno Touschek called this “Robinson’s Theorem”
and stressed its’ importance.
Even now, neither Bruno’s nor Ken’s insights have been
adequately recognized. A combined cycle accelerator, with the gradient and the bending field
in the same magnet, could not work. The addition of quadrupoles was necessary. Indeed
the beam in the CEA, a combined cycle accelerator,
expanded in horizontal size when
accelerated to the highest energies. It was unstable against synchrotron oscillations..
I am not sure exactly when I was convinced that we should build an electron-positron
colliding ring at CEA. Probably in 1961 when I returned from my sabbatical leave and was
working on form factors in the space-like region. There was obviously more structure in the
time like region. I described this later in a brief conversation that I remembe with David
Ritson at Stanford, who had just spent a year’s leave in Rome. He and Fernando Amman had
made a very simple calculation of the change in “tune” of the betatron oscillations when electron
beams and positron beams collided at a small angle. The change is proportional to the current,
and we needed to avoid half integral resonances so we needed to keep  < 0.5. We made a
proposal to build electron-positron colliding beams at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator.
This was informally discussed with the Atomic Energy Commission for funding in 1961 and a
brief proposal was duly submitted in 1962 I believe. Bill Wallenmeyer, the high energy man at
AEC working in the Office of Science at the AEC told me that the funds for our proposal were
put in the budget the AEC had already forwarded to Congress for funding, and in the atmosphere
of the time would almost certainly have been funded if others did not intervene. But Pief and
Burt Richter at SLAC, which had been formally funded in 1962, were also interested in a large
colliding rings even though they had not got an accelerator going yet.
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At that time Pief had already got a reputation at the AEC, particularly with Paul
McDaniel, Assistant Secretary for Science Research, for being single minded and partisan
about physics. They even laughed about it in Washington, so I was warned and did what I
could to prevent a confrontation. That the AEC should laugh about this was reciprocated by
Pief who several times then and since compared Glenn Seaborg to a tall reed that bends, rather
than a tall firm post. I never knew what to say about Pief’s remark because I think that in
politics one should be willing to bend - except of course when someone threatens to use nuclear
weapons. I proposed that we should build colliding beams of 2-3 GeV, and then when SLAC
was finished, they could build one at a higher energy of 20 GeV or so. Thus we could be
sequential, be cooperative and avoid unnecessary competition. But that was not to be.
Again, Pief wrote me a letter, which I still have, saying that he did not think a ring of even 10
GeV was possible. This is interesting in view of later developments at SLAC and competition
with DESY and Cornell. In Frascati they were building a ring, ADONE, where beams of
electrons and positrons at 1.5 GeV each would collide. My MIT colleagues, accepting that a
confrontation was inevitable argued that we keep the higher energy of 3 GeV in each beam rather
than 2 GeV in each beam to be competitive and distinct from Frascati. I suspect that was a
mistake. If we had shifted our sights downward to 2 GeV, at least on paper, we might have
been accepted. We were to suffer for it.
The AEC set up a small committee, chaired by Jackson Lazlett of Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratory to make a recommendation. I discussed that with Pief. He insisted, and I agreed,
that we do not involve politicians in the process. At that time our local Senator (Edward
Kennedy) and representatives were proud of CEA and visited us. I was very careful not to
mention this ongoing decision. I heard later that someone at SLAC had discussed it with
politicians from California, and my colleagues in the CEA were appalled. But I doubt whether
that had any influence on the scientific committee.
It did, however affect morale in
Cambridge. The committee had their first meeting in Cambridge, and a second in SLAC. I
well remember with horror the meeting at SLAC, about May or June 1964 where John Rees and
I were defending our proposal. The words are seared into my memory.
They seemed to be
the opposite of the idealism that George Chapman had mentioned at the APS meeting some 6
years before. Burt Richter and Gerry O’Neill had not yet got their small electron - electron ring
going, and Burt said: “If I was on this committee I would vote against any ring at this time”. I
was flabbergasted and almost speechless. I was confident that the skilled CEA team, of Ken
Robinson, Gus Voss, Tom Collins, Euan Patterson and John Rees could make a storage ring
work, even if all the answers to problems were not immediately available.
I said just that.
Also I asked if Burt Richter’s statement meant that he was withdrawing the proposal. Alas, no.
The committee was certainly divided. Bob Wilson, who was on the committee told me later, in
1965, that he had expected fighting words from me. I failed at this, and John Rees was even
more at a loss, suggested to me that we give up the fight.
Burt Richter’s comments made it very difficult for the committee and the AEC to do
anything but delay the storage rings. The committee therefore recommended not to fund a
storage ring at that time, but they also decided to express a preference for building one at
SLAC. I was very concerned about the delay. I was convinced that electron-positron storage
rings were the clear future for experimental particle physics and one must be built somewhere.
The CEA staff agreed. They, in particular, were more willing than I to move to the location
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where the beam was to be built - as several did.
Tom Collins, probably John Rees, and I went
to see Jackson Lazlett at LBL and we met in the office of Andy Sessler in Berkeley who, we
found, was the most pessimistic person on the committee. We tried to persuade them that the
physics was exciting and that we wanted to see it happen as soon as possible, whether it was at
SLAC or at CEA. Andy kept repeating that he recognized that we wanted to build a storage ring
at CEA and thought we were trying to get him to reverse the committee’s view that the best place
was SLAC. We, particularly Tom Collins, kept reiterating that although we preferred a
ring in Cambridge, we wanted one somewhere soon, preferably in the USA. We pointed out
that a delay would put a request for construction funds in to the AEC while FERMILAB, the
country’s first priority, was being built.
As a result colliding beam projects had lost a window
of opportunity and there was a six year delay. I spent a little time looking for other sources of
money - a wealthy Texan perhaps. But I was no good at that. Rumors came back to us that
SLAC scientists were accusing us, particularly me, of trying to upset the decision to build a
ring at SLAC. Taking advantage of a family visit to us by Pief and Adèle in fall 1964, we
invited the CEA staff to a small party in the garden to explain individually their views which I
believed, and still believe, were close to mine. But the incorrect rumors persist to this day.
Indeed a Professor at SLAC quite recently justified his behavior to Andrée by saying: “You
know what he did.” Andrée knew no more than is written here, and I knew little more about
what I did. I strongly suspect that lies were being told about me. Andy Sessler more recently
has commented on the fact that at the time CEA had the best group of accelerator physicists in
the world. Alas, that was not enough.
It was probably in early summer 1964, while the AEC committee was still pondering the
issue, that Burt Richter, Matthew Sands and David Ritson came to try to persuade us to
abandon the idea of building a storage ring at Cambridge, but to join them at SLAC where the
injection was easier (but see a note later about Cornell). My argument, then and now, was
that we had more scientists interested in using such a facility in the Cambridge area than they
had at SLAC. The presence of the CEA had stimulated the formation of high energy groups at
the University of Massachusetts at Fall River, (where Richard Panofsky later became Dean), at
Tufts University, Brandeis University, Northeastern University, Brown University and even Yale
University. SLAC could not claim this diversity for many years. It would have helped keep
high energy physics in the Universities. This was a strong battle of mine for many years,
which I lost. For many years SLAC operated in the LBL Berkeley mode where visitors had
fewer rights than at Brookhaven. One of the three said outright, and the others did not
contradict: “If you don’t agree now, we will never let you work on the colliding rings”. I was
once again taken aback and said that our view was different. If the AEC gave us the funds we
would allow all interested scientists to join. But whether or not it was because of the clearly
stated threat, I unfortunately was never able to work at SLAC.
Since the colliding beam proposal was postponed sine die, we presented two possible
proposals the following year. One was a full proposal, including a detector, the other was for a
“stripped down” version for the rings only, costing half the amount. Gus Voss and Ken
Robinson were full of bright ideas.
Ken had on his blackboard the Luminosity formula L =
2Ie/ ß and I casually asked him one morning why we could not reduce ß.
The next
morning, Ken was all excited. He had realized that installing a special interaction region with
low ß was possible. We incorporated this into our new proposal. The ring we wanted would
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have cost $15-$18 million for a ring including the detection apparatus, and a stripped down
version for half that - the idea being that expensive detectors need not be built till the ring
worked.
That summer (1965), at the Lepton-Photon conference in Hamburg, Bob Wilson
gave an enthusiastic talk about storage rings. He did so again in the 1967 accelerator conference
held at the CEA.
But to no avail. The AEC did not bother to call the committee back.
Bob told me several times later that his vote on the Lazlett committee was one of the biggest
mistakes he made in his life
If he had voted otherwise, I understand from others on the
committee that there would have been a majority for the CEA proposal. The AEC would
probably have followed the committee recommendation and we would have built a storage ring
and the Psi () might have been discovered the some years earlier.
I made no secret about my enthusiasm for storage rings in my discussions in
Europe. Pierre Marin, who I had known and helped as a graduate student in Oxford, built a ring
of about 500 GeV at the linear accelerator at Orsay. There they did fine work on the rho and
omega resonances.
I also lobbied my friends, particularly the Director Dr Willi Jentschke,
at the Deutche Electron Synchrotonen (DESY). On the way to the 1964 Dubna meeting I made
a special visit to DESY and waxed enthusiastic about the possibilities. At the lepton-proton
conference at Hamburg in 1965, Bob Wilson made an enthusiastic appeal. But it was not till
1968 that DESY began to build an electron-positron storage ring (DORIS) at 3 GeV. The
budget was considerably larger than we had asked for but he was very slow, and DORI S was not
finished till 1974 after the SLAC (SPEAR) finally became operational. The CEA staff became
imaginative. Although both John Rees and Gerry Fischer left us (for SLAC) and Tom Collins
for Fermilab (where he became Deputy Director), Gus Voss and Ken Robinson were still full of
ideas. Why not collide the beams inside the CEA itself, or in a special "by-pass" straight
section? This they did. We then built the simple, non magnetic, “Bypass On Line Detector”
(BOLD) and Louis Osborne of MIT set out to built a superior detector, with magnets, to replace
BOLD when it was ready. Unfortunately Osborne’s detector was finished too late.
Already
in 1971 the Italians in ADONE had found an unexpectedly large, and exciting, cross section for
electron-positron annihilation (150, 152, 155, 158). We found an even larger one, just in time
for the “Rochester” conference in FERMILAB. We did not immediately realize it, but this was
the first measurement of the extra "charm" degree of freedom.
For reasons I never understood, the large cross section was not believed.
But even
before the data were publicly available, the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP),
chaired by Sidney Drell, Deputy Director of SLAC recommended the complete abandonment
of CEA. Abandonment began in 1973. We had time for one more run at a higher energy 5
GeV c.m. energy. According to my notes, our next run was to have been an energy scan.
Would we have seen the J/Psi? I think so. It would have been hard to miss.
Although the fact that we could not get a storage ring at CEA was a great personal
disappointment to me, I do not believe we could have done better that the SLAC group, with its
extra three persons from CEA. Indeed we might well have done worse. There was a set back
in the role of Universities in High Energy Physics. But the most serious problem in
abandonment of the CEA was the failure to keep it as a synchrotron radiation facility. As noted,
a machine of the same size was completed 20 years later for 100 times the cost at the Argonne
National Laboratory.
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Earlier in 1967, my younger colleagues, Assistant Professors Lou Hand and Eugene
(Gene) Engels persuaded me to join them in a small experiment at Brookhaven National
Laboratory. We produced muon pairs from a 12 GeV pion beam using spark chambers and
absorbers to detect the and measure the muons. We showed that there was a peak at the rho
resonance, showing the inverse of electron scattering, and a very small one at the phi resonance
(116). But then we missed a golden opportunity. Leon Lederman suggested we put a 30
GeV proton beam into the apparatus and look for higher energy muon pairs. We would have
done this if we could have let the apparatus stay in place. But the habit in those days was to
continually move apparatus around.
Another experiment was scheduled the next month in our
place. Should we propose to reassemble a year latter?
Since the mu pair cross section from
pions dropped so much from the rho resonance to the phi, we argued that we would be unlikely
to see anything and it was not worth submitting a proposal. We were wrong. Lou Hand and I
have calculated that If we had put the 30 GeV proton beam into our apparatus we would have
easily found the J resonance 4 years before it was found independently by Ting and collaborators
and the Psi by Richter and collaborators. So I missed participating in the discovery in two
separate ways. Such is life!
In 1968 the Rochester conference was held in Vienna. Pief presented the first exciting
results from SLAC. Everything had worked well Their reputation in the community was
justifiably high.
Then in early 1999 SLAC proposed to AEC that they be allowed to divert
promised “equipment” funds to build a simpler colliding beam (the Stanford Proton Electron
Accumulation Ring or SPEAR) than previously proposed. This obviated the “freeze” on
equipment funds till FERMILAB was finished. I was on leave in Frascati but I immediately
wrote to the AEC, in hand writing, stressing the importance and urging the AEC to support
SLAC.
Of course I sent Pief a copy of the letter and still have one. In my mind then and
now the “Bypass” was only a “stop gap”, not to inhibit the real proposal we had constantly urged
at some location preferably in the USA.
I do not believe that the by-pass did in fact inhibit
the real proposal athough some critics have argued that it did.
In spring 1969 I went on leave to Frascati, Italy to work with and help to commission the
electron-positron storage ring ADONE. I do not know the etymology off ADONE but Bruno
Touschek argued that ADONE had the sme realtionship to his small ring ADA that Minestrone
had to miestra. This ring was to produce center of mass energies of 3 GeV. Although I feel
sure that ADONE was largely Bruno Touschek’s conception, it was left to Professor Fernando
Amman to be in charge of construction and commissioning.
Fernando was working hard on
commissioning and spent many evenings trying to store the beams and make them collide. I
would go in and help as much as I could. My help was mostly by keeping the notebook.
Bruno did not turn up at Frascati and then only for an hour or two. So one day I called to see
whether I could discuss some problems with him. There were aspects of the design that I did
not understand. I hoped that he could help me understand them as my discussions with Ed
Purcell and Bob Pound had often clarified matters in my mind. But either Bruno would not, or
could not, concentrate on the problems, details of which I have now forgotten. When I arrived
at his house on Via Pola Bruno said, not unreasonably: “I must pick up my son from school.”
So we did. On the way back he said: “I always stop at this bar for a drink on the way home. “ So
we did. Then we got back and Elspeth had prepared a fine supper, with of course one, or
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maybe two, bottles of Chianti. We still had not got to my problems and it was time to leave.
Bruno and Elspeth said that it was too late to drive to Frascati that night so they suggested that I
stay the night on their sofa. I had driven on the Rome to Frascati road on a Saturday night
before and seen three serious crashes in one night, and as I had been drinking, even though only
one glass to Bruno’s two, I accepted. The following morning Bruno and Elspeth took me out
for lunch to a restaurant north of Rome with more Chianti. We never got to my problems. I
realized then that Bruno would not make any more contributions to electron positron scattering
till his addiction was cured. Alas, I was right and he drank himself to death 10 years later.
But a week later Fernando got ADONE working. I was working with him that night and
he was about to give up for the day when I noticed that there was twice as much bremsstrahlung
from the regions where the electron and positron were interacting than from the others.
“You’ve got it” I exclaimed to Fernando.
Once there was a signal Fernando skillfully
optimized it and Alone was ready for experiments. Four detectors were planned by various
Italian groups in four interaction locations to look for various secondary particles . At that time
everyone was still thinking of single particles. They had not realized the importance of a
detector with close to 4 coverage.
Nor had I. I had been helping a research fellow of Jerry
O’Neill who had proposed such a detector but that proposal was in abeyance. We set up a
scattering apparatus for luminosity measurement. But then the floor fell in under Fernando.
Workers at INFN were asking for higher pay and in June 1969 went on strike, a “sciopero
bianco”. They came to work, punched the time cards and did nothing all day. The laboratory
management did nothing. A couple of excellent young accelerator theorists left and never came
back. Enthusiasm had gone. A year later, in 1970-1971, the strike was over they operated and
came up with interesting results. By postulating symmetry of the interaction cross section, they
were able to predict the total hadronic cross section. They found a ratio to the electromagnetic
cross section of about 2. Bruno ran a summer school in Varenna that July 1969 which I
attended with the family. I got the NSF to fund two fellowships from CEA. No accelerator
physicist wanted to go so Alan Litke and Ron Madaras went to the conference. Alan Litke went
on around the world. To Novosibirsk to see Budker, to Vladivostok, Japan and then home. At
that time we were all thinking about single particle experiments: e+ + e- -> P + Pbar.
From
the form factor measurements in the space like region I had predicted that the cross section was
small and, as noted earlier, Nino Zichichi had confirmed this with the antiproton beam at
CERN. The smallness of the predicted cross section was one reason that the AEC committee
in 1965 had recommended postponement of colliding beam projects. But in Varenna both Burt
Richter and I (125) had realized that one could get production of pairs of excited nucleons with a
similar cross section to the elastic process, making a total cross section 200 times greater than
production of proton-antiprotons in the ground state. But neither of us had realized the
simplicity of the quark model predictions. That realization was due primarily, I believe to
Bjorken a little later. The ratio of hadronic to electromagnetic cross sections would be given, to
first approximation, by the sums of the squares of quark charges . (½)2 + (1/3)2 + (2/3)2 =
2/3. The three fold discrepancy with the experimental value of 2 is attributed to the idea that
there are three flavors of quarks
In spring 1972 the CEA colliding beam had its’ first results, with the ratio equal to nearly
3. We were asked to justify our very existence before HEPAP.
Sid Drell, chairman of the
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committee asked us directly what the answer was. I did not answer directly because we were
still analyzing the data, but I told him that the problem created by the Frascati data remained.
It was another 18 months before SPEAR operated and produced the same results.
We were
allowed one more run at 6 GeV c.m energy and had to shut down in 1993 for good.
My mind was already turning to the thought expressed most clearly by my father-in-law
Jesse DuMond . “If you can’t lick em, join ‘em.”. I looked for opportunities to do this.
I
was unwilling to abandon any of the scientists I had encouraged to come to work at CEA, but in
1972, I informally suggested immediately moving our working detector, BOLD, to SPEAR at
once to put in the spare interaction region. This was not accepted but in a formal call for
proposals to fill a second interaction region in 1973 we submitted again a detailed proposal to
SLAC. We were rejected. I was told that then that the only two “outside” members of the
committee, one being Sam Ting, had voted for us. Among other interesting subjects our
proposal had suggested looking at - gamma and gamma -gamma interactions using the virtual
gammas from the electrons.. Burton Richter suggested that we build detectors for adding that
capability to his main detector, and then we could publish together those results, but only those
results, using our additional apparatus. Although I duly brought this to the attention of the
group, this limited collaboration was unappealing and almost insulting. If the Harvard/MIT/CEA
proposals to SLAC had been accepted, we would have had an immediate team to work in one
of the interaction regions. But I could keep the team together no longer. Our team
disintegrated. There was no way I could hold it together. The CEA budget was gone, and
instead of raising the Harvard high energy budget because we would now have to travel, the
AEC cut it.
I was very despondent. In a fit of disgust I took all of my notebooks, reprints and most
of my letters on colliding beams and destroyed them.
I had to take sleeping pills. Andrée’s
reaction was worse. “If you submit another proposal to SLAC I will divorce you” . She meant
it, but a year later she relented and I submitted another detailed proposal on parity violation in
electron proton scattering looking for  - Z interference. One of Howard Georgi’s graduate
students, whose name was also Wilson, explained that the asymmetry would be of the order of
q2/Mz2 multiplied by sin2 w where w is the Weinberg angle. That proposal was also
rejected. Lou Hand, who I believe was on the SLAC program committee and supporting me,
commented later: “Don’t bother to submit a proposal to SLAC again. The better and more
interesting it is the more likely they are to reject it.” He had in mind the reputation NASA had
developed in its first years: calling for proposals, and then doing the work themselves, I was
emotionally unable to visit Pief and Adèle for another 5 years although I visited the Bay area.
Andrée did visit, because she loved and loves her sister (as do I and do all my family) but she got
extraordinarily angry with Pief one night because he completely failed to understand the
problems he had created for me. To calm herself she polished off a whole bottle of Adèle’s
sherry.
Several times Andrée said to me that I married the wrong lady - a statement with
which I strongly disagreed then and now. She had known of the possible problems with Pief’s
approach to physics many years before as a teenager from one of Pief’s fellow students (from
1941) Alex Green. Rightly or wrongly I did not want our children to be involved with all of this
although they knew something was going wrong. Our children had their own problems as
teenagers. It was the Vietnam war, and Christopher did not want to be called up. It was also a
time when two of Pief and Adèle’s children, Margaret (Margie) and Carol were in Boston for
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their music studies (Viola de Gamba and Cello respectively) and we had them round to our house
many times. I don’t know whether they know even now (2009) about my personal difficulties.
A year or so later, Joe Ballam, then Director of Research at SLAC took it on himself to
encourage me to submit another proposal. But not only could I not face it, but I could not think
of another really interesting thing to do at SLAC at the time.
Were my proposals really bad?
Was I as incompetent as the rejections implied? My mind started to think of other matters.
Maybe I could prove myself in another field.
As noted elsewhere I did prove myself in
another field and the honors others have given me come from these secondary and part time
activities.
But try as I could, I could not forget high energy physics and the electron positron
storage rings which were the cutting edge.
I went to a meeting in Frascati, Italy, in about
1975 to discuss with the Europeans a collaboration on the DESY ring, but after a tentative OK
my overtures to join were rejected.
It seemed that my name was poison. But the
opportunity to work with colliding beams again became possible when a 5 GeV accelerator
(CESR) was proposed, with a modest budget, at Cornell. Frank Pipkin already had been
working there on electron scattering and he and I made a joint group which worked at Cornell,
using the CLEO detector, for 25 years. Cornell had already taken the CEA’s linear
accelerator injector that I had ordered in 1964! It was nice to see it again.
In view of Burt
Richter’s 1964 claim that you must use a linac to inject into a storage ring I note that the
highest luminosity of any storage ring until the B factory was commissioned in 1995 was
continually achieved at Cornell.
The CLEO group was a very agreeable one.
Disagreements were always talked through. But it was still 350 miles away from Harvard.
Government Scientific Committees
Since 1960 I had often been asked to sit on scientific committees for various projects.
A special committee in 1963-4 for the next Brookhaven accelerator. One for proton-proton
storage rings at Fermilab in 1972.
For future electron and muon experiments in 1973.
I
always accepted and always said what I think, but this upset some people. In 1967 I was
appointed to the Board of the newly formed Universities Research Association, set up to manage
the new Fermi National Accelerator laboratory, and in 1967 was Chairman of the Scientific
Committee till Ed McMillan took over in 1969 when I went on leave. The last committee on
which I was explicitly asked to sit, in 1973, was advising the AEC on lepton beams. I felt that
with adequate funds very usable high energy electron and muon beams could be built at
Fermilab, with a lower intensity than SLAC but better duty cycle; but with probably less funds
than the 40 GeV upgrade for which they sought funds. It was reported to me that Burt Richter
who was also on that committee made some very nasty personal remarks about me to other
scientists at SLAC. I have never been asked to sit on a High Energy Physics committee again,
although I, like many others have been asked my opinion. Maybe foolishly I gave it - as
honestly as I could.
I have, however been asked to sit on committees for which I was less
qualified, such as the Health and Environmental Research Advisory Committee of the AEC and
the Energy Engineering Board of the National Academy of Sciences and to chair the nuclear
safety committee for the Republic of China (Taiwan).
In 1974 Francis Lowe was Chairman of a small HEPAP sub-committee to discuss future
accelerator plans. There were three proposals on the table. An electron-positron collider at
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about 12 GeV (PEP) for SLAC, The FERMILAB “energy double” using superconducting
magnets. A pair of 200+200 GeV proton rings (Isabelle) for BNL.
I recommended the
SLAC machine to Francis. But the US federal budget was tight and approval was delayed. In
the meantime a similar DESY proposal had been funded. There was an interesting condition;
the construction funds should be spent immediately to offset a recession in the German
construction industry. In view of this in 1975 I changed my recommendation from the
previous year. I thought the US should concentrate on matters in which we were unique.
Thus we should go ahead with either the energy doubler or Isabelle. I explicitly suggested that
SLAC raise their sights and aim for a 50+50 GeV electron-positron ring to produce Z and
possibly W intermediate vector bosons. But they were reluctant to switch. With the experience
of SPEAR behind them, both the AEC and SLAC felt that they would build the ring quickly and
beat DESY. After all, SLAC had beaten DESY to the 3 GeV ring even though DESY had a
head start. But this time DESY was even faster than SLAC and their higher energy ring was
finished 2 years ahead of SLAC. They took the cream of the experiments. SLAC had not
counted on the skill of Gus Voss. I knew Gus and had so counted.
Sadly, I counted this
then and now, as the crucial decision that gave the leadership in High Energy Physics to Europe,
which leadership Europe has maintained ever since.
As I see the sad history, mistake after mistake followed. The proposed proton-proton
collider, “Isabelle”, was funded and then canceled.
Although CERN had no previous
electron experience the 50+50 electron positron ring was built at CERN. SLAC tried to catch
up with a fine linear collider, but this came on line only a week or so before CERN with lower
intensity than CERN. They were just one week ahead of CERN on measuring the width of the
Z.
The width of the Z tells us the number of lepton types, known now to be limited to 3.
This one week lead was not enough to raise much interest, and it made therefore less of an
impact that the CEA “By Pass” which measured a high cross section a full 18 months before a
better experiment at SLAC confirmed it. But the SLAC linear collider did have polarized
electrons and positrons and after a few years running had an excellent measurement of sin w.
If one leaves out the fact that we learned a lot about how to make useful collisions in a linear
collider, the cost of this measurement was high. About $200 million. But not as bad as the
$900,000,000 that Argonne National Laboratory spent to replace the CEA that we had thrown
away.
Finally the high energy community failed to take the proposed Supercollider as
seriously as they had taken FERMILAB. Glenn Seaborg had insisted that while Fermilab was
under construction, there should be no conflicting construction projects. As noted above, ths
was the main reason that there was a delay in implementing electron-positron colliding beams
after the first window of opportunity was missed. He had also told Congress that some smaller
facilities would be shut down.
Maybe at that time I should have gone to one of the major
summer studies and got personally involved as I had been in Fermilab 20 years earlier. Among
other things, Pief had got personally involved with the SSC as chairman of a URA committee
and I did not want to risk another painful personal clash. I did point out the issue to a HEPAP
subcommittee in 1987, noting that to keep to the AEC budgetary suggestions that the BNL high
energy program would have to be shut down, and maybe that of SLAC or Fermilab also. In
1987 the AEC started on a course similar to that Seaborg had adopted in 1965. They declined
to add a new construction project to the budget till the SSC was fully funded and asked for cut
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backs or closures in the existing program.
But the high energy community was not listening..
The AEC had explicitly
suggested that the construction proposals for a B factory be delayed till SSC was well underway
and declined to put a B factory on the budget submitted to Congress. They asked the high
energy community what to cut But the community did not follow and kept following lesser
agendas.
I was unpopular because I recommended to HEPAP’s committee a specific
suggestion of what to cut. California congressmen, whether urged by SLAC or not, pushed the
construction proposal for a B factory anyway bypassing the DOE decision. In my view, this
was a major contributory cause to the demise of the SSC. Of course I can count 20 things that
went wrong with the SSC. Any one of them could have been overcome but congressional
confidence was lost. President Clinton and Congress, in cancelling the SSC were able to say
“We gave you a construction project that you asked for”.
The role of high energy physics in the Universities was maintained when Fermilab was
started. Although there were leading physicists at BNL and Berkeley, much of the important
work and the thinking was still done at Universities. As previously noted 40 University
Presidents personally met and formed the Universities Research Association.. President Pusey
took a personal interest. They started a competition for site selection, which, in my view, was a
good thing. Enthusiasm for high energy physics was high in State Legislatures. Bob Wilson
as Director was deeply committed to the major role of University scientists with Fermilab
scientists in support. But this slowly changed. As time went on, University Presidents sent
representatives instead of personally attending the meetings of the Council of Presidents. By
the time the SSC was proposed the Harvard high energy physics committee went in a body to see
President Bok. There was not the enthusiasm in the department as a whole as there was 20
years before. Although at our urging Derek Bok supported the SSC, many other scientists and
Universities were lukewarm or opposed. For example in 1987 Glenn Seaborg asked me to
introduce him to Michael Dukakis or at least his campaign staff. As noted elsewhere, he wanted
to make a strong case for nuclear power. Dukakis campaign manager asked about the SSC.
Glenn replied that although elementary particles was not his field (a modest remark considering
his contributions) he felt it was a fundamental subject and should be supported.
But that changed for the worse 4 years later, in 1991, when the project was in deep
trouble. I could not persuade either Glenn or Edward Teller to sign or cosign a letter of support
for the SSC. They were content to see it go down the drain. I was not happy with the
testimony given in the US Senate by the Director, Roy Schwitters, and by the distinguished high
energy physicists in support It seemed to display too much arrogance and hubris.
At that
time, in 1991 President Neil Rudenstine of Harvard was also uninterested. Part of the change is
the nature of the field. But I believe that a leading reason for the lack of University support
part is that the major work is no longer done at University laboratories.
Frank Pipkin and I
had always insisted that our graduate students not only understand data analysis but also made a
contribution to the design of the apparatus. I had contributed to the accelerator design both of
the cyclotron and the CEA and so on. But more and more students are not so motivated. In
the 1960s and 1970s I met students who had got PhD degrees from analysis of bubble chamber
pictures, but had never looked at the accelerator or the beam line.
Some of them had never
looked at the bubble chamber. It has steadily got worse.
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Time has made these unpleasant incidents of 1965-1975 more understandable to me if not
acceptable. Everyone has his priorities, and for Pief the first priority was SLAC and supporting
the scientists he had hired.
Of course I knew this at the time, but it was over ten years before I
come to terms with this simple fact, and became willing to talk with Pief and visit him again.
Andrée and I went to his retirement party in, I believe, 1989. In 2008 I was present at the
special symposium at Stanford where Pief’s extraordinary career was being celebrated. But in
view of the history above, I had a great problem when Pief asked me in 1991 why we had not
tried to make a synchrotron radiation facility out of CEA. Of course we had, but Pief’s desire
to have the synchrotron radiation facility at SLAC prevented it at the time, because NSF were
only willing to allocate $500k and SLAC wanted that limited sum.
Since he was instrumental
in getting our proposal for conversion to a dedicated synchrotron radiation facility turned down, I
was upset at his reopening the old wound. A year or so later he opened another old wound.
He was musing on how to keep high energy physics in the universities. I rudely and abruptly
said that it was too late. If he had been interested in keeping high energy physics in the
universities in 1964, matters would be very different. I commented that as the leader in the
field, he could rightly accept the credit for a lot of the correct decisions and also take the credit
for a lot of actual experiments that had been done in high energy physics but he should also
accept some blame for things which had gone wrong. Pief was silent.
Parity Violation experiments
I remember going to Professor EA. Milne’s lectures on Vector and Tensor Calculus in
summer 1945 when a student. He discussed parity and said that all known physical laws
conserve parity”. I remember Hans Halban in 1953 or so asking Vicky Weisskopf, visiting at
the time, whether it was worthwhile looking at the angular distribution of the beta rays from a
cold nucleus using the apparatus developed by Nicholas Kurti and collaborators.
The answer
was “No. Because parity is conserved”.
So when in 1946 Yang and Lee suggested that it is
NOT conserved in weak interactions I knew what to think. It is noteworthy that my friends
Ernie Ambler and Ralph Hudson, two of Nicholas Kurti’s graduate students at Oxford,
understood quickly and when Ms. Wu of Columbia suggested they search for it, they already
had the apparatus. In my view most American scientists credit Ms. Wu with that measurement
and fail to give Ambler and Hudson the credit that they deserve. But I did not force my way in
on others experiments at that time but waited for an opportunity to do some myself.
When the cyclotron upgrade was finished we included an experiment on time reversal in
the program. But then matters opened up in 1970.
I was interested, as were others, in the
“Intermediate Vector Boson”, now the W and the Z.
How could one see them?
I
calculated two methods. One is to use a muon beam from pion decay at Fermilab, a procedure
which suggested itself followed the parity violation experiment of Jerry Friedman and Valentine
Telegdi in 1956. The muons at Fermilab were automatically longitudinally polarized.
After
our initial experiments on muon scattering I proposed to use the longtitudinally polarized muon
beams .for studies of parity violation. But that proposal was rejected and the experiments were
done in CERN in the late 1980s.
While traveling back from a meeting in Washington with
Herman Feshbach he suggested to me another experiment. He proposed that I look for parity
violation in a reaction with which I was very familiar N + P -> d +  but with looking for the
polarization of the gamma ray. He thought that there might be an asymmetry as large as 2 x
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10-6. That would be easy to find. I scoured possible reactors. By this time I knew I would
have to travel to find an accelerator or reactor that I wanted. MIT. I discussed the possibility
with reactor physicists and engineers at Watertown Arsena, at NASA in Ohio and at
Brookhaven and finally at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Gaithersburg, MD.
We
started at NBS and succeeded in demonstrating parity violation on neutron capture in cadmium
but NBS. were not at the time amenable to the necessary liquid hydrogen target in the reactor.
At Norman Ramsey’s suggestion I visited the Institute Laüe Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble where
they had just installed a polarized neutron beam. I changed the idea of the experiment to look
for the asymmetry of the gamma ray in capture of polarized neutrons - not quite the inverse of
Feshbach’s and simpler theoretically as it turned out.
Using these neutrons from the ILL
reactors we found parity violation in deuterium, chlorine, and strontium but in neutron-proton
capture we only able to place an upper limit of 5 x 10-8 - 50 times smaller than suggested by
Feshbach, and smaller than had (erroneously) been found in USSR by Lobashov and
collaborators but in agreement with what is now expected from the modern theory. I still think it
is an interesting experiment and reaction. Professor Puppi of Italy had a triangle in 1955 of
three weak interactions. Leptons on leptons, leptons on hadrons and hadrons on hadrons. The
first two have been extensively studied, and in particular weak neutral currents have been found
in each. It would be nice to confirm that these apply quantitatively to nucleons on nucleons
also.
In 1970 one of the experiments I wanted to do was the study of parity violation in either
electron scattering or muon scattering. My attempts to do so at SLAC (electrons) and muons
(Fermilab) were described in an earlier section. But like many people, once one has an idea one
cannot let go. So in 1980 this interest metamorphosed into parity violation in electron
scattering from carbon at the small Bates linear electron accelerator in Middletown, MA.
More recently our techniques have been used at CEBAF at Jefferson National Laboratory
(JLAB), )in Newport News, VA. This addresses various aspects of the weak interaction and is
now addressing the contribution of strange quarks to the proton structure (716, 791, 886, 887,
905). One reason that I still remain emotionally committed to this experiment is of course my
failure to be able to participate in the first of these at SLAC in 1975.
ln all, I have worked and done experiments at a large number of accelerators and reactors
as shown in the following list:
Nuclear Reactors
British Experimental Pile (BEPO) (Harwell)
National Bureau of Standards (NBS) (now LIST)
MIT Nuclear Engineering Dept., Cambridge MA USA
HIBA Brookhaven National Laboratory
Institute Laüe Langevin (ILL), Grenoble , France
Power Reactor at Bugey, France (CEA)
(Proton) Cyclotrons
Rochester, NY(240 Mev)
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Harwell, (AERE) (160 Mev)
Harvard University, (160 Mev)
Electron Synchrotrons
Oxford (100 Mev)
Cambridge Electron Accelerator (CEA) (6 GeV)
Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF)
Proton Synchrotrons
Cosmotron, BNL (3Gev)
Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) (30 GeV)
Fermilab (350 GeV)
Linear Electron Accelerators
Mark II Stanford (45 Mev)
Bates (MIT) (500 MeV)
Colliding Beam facilities
CEA (e+/e- 3 GeV)
Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) (e+/e- 5 GeV)
CERN (18 GeV)(P Pbar)
To the owners and operators of these facilities I give my thanks.
have been unsuccessful and even bored!
Without them I would
Medical Experiments and Treatments
In 1970 when CEA was collapsing, I had three worries. The first I have just
described: how to maintain my high energy physics interest, particularly that in colliding
beams, the second was how to keep the CEA alive - at that time for synchrotron radiation
studies, and thirdly how to keep the exciting medical program at the cyclotron going. I
succeeded in the last, which was for me personally the third priority.
I referred earlier to the
Harvard cyclotron. After I had stopped experiments personally in 1961, I had watched the
work of others with approval, but had taken no specific action. But it was still under the
purview of the high energy and nuclear physics committee of which I was still chairman.
In
the years 1969 to 1971 I watched it carefully in my semi-administrative capacity. I described
this in my book “A Short History of the Harvard Cyclotrons” (870). Andy Koehler and Bill
Preston had encouraged the use of protons from the Harvard University Cyclotron for "radio
surgery" by Dr Ray Kjellberg of the neurosurgery department of MGH. On the closure of the
ONR/AEC contract for the cyclotron operation, there was an issue of who was to pay. I spent 2
hours with Dean Ebert of the Medical school trying to persuade his faculty to take it over, with
Harvard physics department faculty and staff in the background if something went wrong. No
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luck. So we were about to shut down the cyclotron when I was invited to meet Herman Suit
who was thinking of coming to MGH as head of their department of radiation medicine.
A
major attraction was the existence of the cyclotron. So I stuck my neck out, exceeded my
authority, and stated that Harvard would keep it going. It was one of the best things I ever
did.
Bill and I persuaded the physics department to keep it operational for medical
treatment, collecting use charges from the Massachusetts General Hospital. Andy Koehler
insisted on taking only half a salary for his full time work. But we all knew this could not, and
should not, last for long.
We were helped by John Lawrence M.D. (Ernest Lawrence’s brother) from Berkeley.
AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg had negotiated an exchange with the USSR and John Lawrence
took a 3 man team to Russia to study proton therapy. He chose Andy Koehler as his third man.
Then a return visit came.
By now Herman and Ray had got many others interested and
Andree and I arranged a party in our garden of about 30 people to meet the visiting Russian trio
of three people. The 30 were mostly physicians and surgeons from Massachusetts General
Hospital but included Paul Martin, the physics Department Chairman. Paul told me
afterwards that this convinced him that we had made the right decision. The AEC had assigned
an interpreter to the visiting 3 person (1 woman, 2 men) team but it was very soon clear that the
interpreter was out of his depth. So I got the excellent Russian teacher from the Newton High
School to come. He saved the day.
Although MGH paid for treatments and collected patient fees we tried to get some
general research funding. The obvious place was AEC which had a medical program as a part
of its’ charter. But AEC were spending $2 million a year at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
(LB:L) for medical funds from the AEC biology program. They said “NO! in no uncertain
terms. We found a little money from NSF from a new program, “Research Appropriate for
National Needs (RANN)”.
But Andy’s efficiency, which I knew so well, made the difference.
In 1975 for example, we had about 1/10 the budget of LBL and treated 10 times the number of
patients!
LBL inefficiency was their doom.
The accelerator was paid for by the high
energy physics program and when the cyclotron and Bevatron shut down, so did their medical
program.
The various details of the cyclotron program were important and some members of the
physics department distrusted Andy and myself and wanted to worry personally about every
detail. When the cyclotron operation was run by Bill Preston that presented no problem and
when he retired in 1975 Bill persuaded the Dean of FAS to form a management committee,
separated from the Physics Department.. I was appointed the first Chairman of that committee
reporting directly to the Dean of the faculty, and remained a member of the cyclotron operating
committee till closure in 2002. I believe that it was in 1978 that a most important incident
occurred. I had just, at 8 am central time, just gone on shift at our Fermilab muon experiment.
I got a call from Herman Suit. He was concerned about the treatments that Dr Ray Kjellberg
planned that day at the cyclotron. Ray was treating artero-venous malformations where an
artery comes close to a vein in the head and capillaries go from one to another and cause trouble.
Ray was treating in one “fraction” (all the dose at one time) instead of spreading the dose
(fractionating it) over several sessions. Herman felt that this might be OK with targets of 5 mm
diameter or less but Ray was treating lesions 2 cm diameter. This was a long standing
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disagreement. What should I do? I called the cyclotron and discussed with Andy Koehler
who asked me to cope. I asked a graduate student to take my shift on the experiment and spent
the next 2 hours on the phone. I called Dr Charles (Charlie) Sanders then head of MGH. “Two
of your physicians are quarreling on my turf.” I said. “I have asked Andy not to turn on the
cyclotron till I get instructions from someone higher than both of them - and that is you” Charlie
Sanders agreed that this was a good administrative position. He asked me my views on the
quarrel. I told him the scientific situation and the political situation. Eventually Herman
withdrew his opposition that day when Charles Sanders agreed to set up an MGH committee to
make recommendations on future treatments. It was that power to be independent of both
parties that enabled the cyclotron to be much more effective that UC Berkeley in patient
treatment. After this incident I made sure that the Harvard University insurance would cover
actions by the Harvard Cyclotron staff, and the Harvard lawyers (who knew the MGH lawyers)
made a formal (one sided in favor of Harvard) legal agreement. Harvard cyclotron staff would
have the right to stop any treatment they thought improper but MGH would take all legal
responsibility. I also checked that everyone at the cyclotron was covered by medical
malpractice insurance under the blanket Harvard contract. This led to many years of
comparative peace between Herman and Ray and very productive work in helping patients..
When the cyclotron finally shut down, and the treatments shifted to a new, specially built
cyclotron at MGH, it had treated as many patients (9,119) with heavy charged particles as all
other facilities in the world put together (229, 342, 388, 396). But that shut down was not the
end. The new MGH machine now treats at a rate three times as high as did the Harvard
cyclotron in its last, most productive, years. That and the increase in the number of places
doing the same treatments is a satisfying sign of our success. From 1973 to 2002 Herman Suit,
head of the Radiation Medicine Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, asked me to be
Chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Radiation Medicine Department at Massachusetts
General Hospital, which oversaw construction of a replacement for the Harvard cyclotron. I am
still (in 2008) a member of that committee.
The hospital is a very different environment than
the University. The undoubted success of proton therapy has led to a flood of patients. The
Radiation Medicine Department receives about $35 million, mostly in patient fees (mostly paid
by insurance) and $18 million in expenses, leaving a good surplus for capital and other hospital
departments.
But the physicians who make the decisions clearly have little or no concept of
the way a technical project can be stimulated and operated and I fear that the lead in these
matters that Harvard/MGH will disappear. In retrospect many people have said that the
medical work was one of my most important achievements. But then all I had to do was to
support Andreas (Andy) Koehler. The achievement of Andy, with my help, is more than the
success of the cyclotron at MGH. It is the success of the 20 or so other proton therapy
accelerators throughout the world.
Atlantic Legal Foundation
About 1980 I got to know Fred Seitz, a very distinguished physicist who had worked with
Wigner and coauthored with him the classic paper on how radiation damage could open up a new
fruitful field of scientific enquiry. Seitz had built up the physics department at the University of
Illinois, and served a period as President of the US Academy of Sciences. He, with Miro
Todorovich of NY University had started Scientists and Engineers for Secure Energy (SE2) to
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support nuclear energy. I was asked to join and did. As the list of public hearings shows, I
represented SE2 in Congressional hearings especially just after the Chernobyl accident.
SE2
wanted to support the opening of the Shoreham Nuclear Power plant which, particularly after
Chernobyl, was opposed by the Governor of New York State, and eventually shut down after a
few billion dollars had been spent, as described elsewhere.
Fred Seitz looked around and
persuaded a public interest law foundation, the Atlantic Legal Foundation to support us. We
tried by various means to allow the Shoreham nuclear power plant to operate and not let the
state shut it down. But we failed, as described later. In 1987 Fred asked me to join the
Science Advisory Board of the Atlantic Legal Foundation (ALF). The Atlantic Legal
Foundation is a public interest law foundation intervening in lawsuits in the what they perceive
to be the public interest. In many ways it is a “right wing” organization, and I became the
“token liberal”. But on scientific issues I believe that I have been able to help to ensure that
good science prevails and that “junk science” is excluded from the court room. In particular I
continue to argue that there is an extremely important distinction between being cautious, using
such rules as the ill defined “Precautionary Principle” and assigning blame and monetary
damages (871) . In addition to the publication, I have intermittently maintain a webpage
http://soundscience.info or http://physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/soundscience/ALF_science.html
originally as a webpage for ALF but now as my own.
Many scientists and many others want to keep away from legal bickerings. But that is
where a lot of the action is.
When I was chairman of the physics department I instructed the
secretary to keep records as if she was to testify in court about the matter. “But we don’t want
to go into court”. “Of course not” I agreed. “If you keep good records you will not have to.”
A similar rule applies in technology.
A good technologist must think carefully about all
aspects of the technology, including potential weak points, and have good explanations ready.
The explanations must be in technical detail for the expert and in simpler but accurate, language
for the non specialist. He should avoid at all costs the terrible mistake of talking down to the
critics.
My real work with ALF began with the landmark Daubert case before the US Supreme
Court which set forth some criteria (often erroneously called rules) for scientific evidence that is
admissible in a court room. Normally in a court room a witness can only testify to facts that he
has personally seen. An expert witness has more latitude to describe the background of the
case. But how much latitude? There are numerous cases of scientists who will testify for one
side or another who are less than precise - some would say less than honest - in their discussion.
Lawyers, judges and juries are often swayed by non-scientific and even factually incorrect
arguments. Immense sums of money can now be involved. For example when the cases
involving electromagnetic fields were before the courts the electric power industry was already
being forced, for self preservation, to spend a billion dollars a year rerouting power lines and
putting them underground. It was easy to project that they would soon be spending more than
the budget for the US basic research program. Even for continuing their work in an ivory
tower, scientists had to be involved. But few have been.
I have helped to draft over a dozen briefs of“amicus curiae”, (friend of the court) in cases
where so-called“expert” witnesses have misapplied science in the courtroom. In particular I
drafted briefs in a trilogy of cases before the US Supreme Court: Daubert, Joiner and Kumho
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tire, which altered the standard rules governing expert witnesses. The first one (Daubert) came
about when a drug manufacturer was sued for billions of dollars by about a hundred plaintiffs for
making an anti-nausea drug, bendectin, which helped pregnant women overcome morning
sickness. Some of these women had miscarriages, which is not uncommon. Although
numbers were not precise, about 10% of pregnancies were terminated in this way. An
American habit is to blame someone else for one’s misfortunes, particular if he or she has a deep
pocket and can be sued.
In spite of a claimed belief in religion, fewer and fewer people are
willing to admit that a misfortune is an “act of God” and look instead for some one with a deep
pocket to use. . Daubert sued.for damages and a hundred others followed suit.
In Daubert, the Appeals Court judge had availed himself of an expert who pointed out the
flimsy nature of the evidence that had been adduced.
The US Supreme Court, realizing the
fundamental nature of the decision that they had agreed to discuss, asked for briefs of “amicus
curiae” from many interested organizations. The President of Atlantic Legal Foundation felt
that this was a case where the scientists Fred Seitz had assembled could be of help.
A
hundred groups responded. I met with Martin Kaufman, senior counsel, and Loevinger, a
former Judge who had studied the role of scientific evidence in the courts, and we drafted a
brief in 2 to 3 hours. I had the job of lining up scientists who would agree. Within a week or
so I got Nicolaas Bloembergen, Erminio Costa, Dudley Herschbach, Jerome Karle, Arthur
Langer, Wassily Leontief, Richard S.Lindzen, William N. Lipscomb, Donald B. Louria, John B.
Little, A. Alan Moghissi, Brooke T. Mossman, Robert Nolan, Arno A. Penzias, Frederick Seitz,
A. Frederick Spilhaus, Dimitrios Trichopoulos to join me in the brief. This included six Nobel
Laureates.
A few other groups who submitted briefs completely misunderstood the issue.
They claimed that rejecting testimony as inappropriate for a legal case involving a dispute
between two parties would be like stifling Galileo. But ALF argued that was incorrect.
Galileo was not involved with a dispute between two parties. He was stifled for saying truths
that the Vatican authorities found uncomfortable. Linus Pauling refused to join with us for this
erroneous reason. Tightening the rules of evidence would not stop any future Galileo from
saying what he wanted outside the courtroom. The issue was, and is, whether the evidence is
sufficient to affect a decision between two parties. The Supreme Court, while not completely
agreeing with us, quoted our brief first of all. They were, in fact, wiser then we were. While
agreeing that peer review is important they argued that it is one of many factors and neither
necessary nor sufficient.
In Joiner, we again got a distinguished group of amici. We argued that animal data on
carcinogenicity with no human data and no evidence of high exposure was inappropriate to bring
before a jury. The Supreme court in this case emphasized that the evidence presented by the
expert must be “reliable” and that the courts could hire their own experts to aid them in
understanding. Kumho Tire was especially interesting. A Texas court of appeals had accepted
the argument of an expert witness that when an admittedly bald tire had blown out and he could
find no specific reason for the failure that it must have been due to bad manufacture.
I was
able to find the former tire expert of the Department of Transportation, who had written a book
on the subject, to join three former Presidents of the National Academy of Engineering in our
brief. I am glad to say that our brief succeeded.
Another, Covalt, before the California Supreme court, effectively stopped lawsuits about
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adverse health effects allegedly caused by electromagnetic fields. In our view the allegations
were wrong. This is discussed below in a special section. This brief submitted on behalf of
six Nobel Laureates were effective in stopping the nonsense.
In May 2008 the ALF
submitted an “amicus letter” requesting the California Supreme Court to review another crucial
case about the limits of blame for deaths caused by asbestos. Alas we were a little late getting
the letter in and that may be the reason that we have so far been ignored.
Asbestos is the name given to a group of naturally occurring minerals and was widely
used starting in the late 19th century as a fire retardant. Indeed the very name came from the
Greek "will not burn". It is now given by general unstated consent to a group of materials that
are regulated in commerce. Each chemical exits in two forms: fibrous (asbestiform) and non
fibrous. The fibrous form can produce toxic lung damage, asbestosis, lung cancer, and for
some asbestos types, mesothelioma. The fibrous form has two subgroups that are
distinguishable under electron microscopy. One causes amphiboles, the other, serpentine
asbestos does not cause amphiboles. Amphibole asbestos was widely used in the shipyards and
navies of the second world war.
Chrysotile, a form of serpentine asbestos, has more recently
been used in buildings although all types are now either banned or avoided as much as possible
in commerce.
In 1986 The US Environmental Protection Agency issued guidelines for risk assessment.
In their discussions they noted that there were not enough electron microscopes in the country to
distinguish the different asbestos types in all situations.
This was a factor in their explicit
assumption that all asbestiform types had the same potency for causing cancer regardless of
chemical type. These guidelines have been widely used to guide regulations, and in court
cases used for claiming damages and in other public documents. In the intervening 18 years
much information has surfaced that shows that the assumption of equality does not hold,
especially for mesothelioma. In 2003 the U.S. EPA. acknowledged that the potencies can be
different: “For mesothelioma the best estimate of the coefficient (potency) for chrysotile is only
0.0013 times that for amphibole and the possibility that pure chrysotile is non-potent for causing
mesothelioma cannot be ruled out by the epidemiology data.”
Many scientists, public policy analysts and the courts have been slow to grasp the
implications of this newer evidence. For example mesothelioma has a latency of 40+ years,
and anyone contracting mesothelioma may have been exposed 40 or more years before but wants
to blame someone now. Among men there is evidence that male mesothelioma incidence in
the USA has quadrupled since 1940, and that is usually attributed to asbestos exposure probably to amphibole asbestos exposure before 1970. Yet often a victim, searching for a deep
pocket and unable to sue the US navy, blames a manufacturer o.f chrysotile.
Assuming the
above (EPA) statement of the science is correct, chrysotile would not normally even be
considered a partial cause of mesothelioma. On the other hand, as I have pointed out in a paper
involving amphiboles (877), a person exposed to amphibole asbestos, at the iron mines on Lake
Superior, has a larger risk for mesothelioma than suggested by the 1986 calculation which was
based on an average of all asbestos types.
These and other briefs are listed on the Atlantic Legal Foundation’s website and in the a
page on my website to which there is direct access by the sound science website
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http://soundscience.info.
Real Environmental Issues
I have been accused of being an anti-environmentalist and in the 1970s got anonymous
telephone calls attacking my position on nuclear power, and calling me a tool of industry. I
had not even at that time accepted a free cup of coffee from any nuclear power company or
utility! How was I to defend myself? One way is to recognize real environmental issues
when they arise. In many cases I have done so and have acted thereon. I recognized in 1970
that burning of coal produced much more damage to the environment and public health than
nuclear power and pointed this out in a brief letter to Physics Today entitled “Kilowatt Deaths”
(145). I helped to enthuse colleagues at Harvard School of Public Health in their studies of this
and was a coauthor of one (225), and editor of another (634), of 2 books on the subject. In 1991
As noted earlier, I was asked by the Chairman and Director of the Arab Fund for Social and
Economic Development to convene a conference on the effects of the Kuwait oil fires, and this
developed, under the leadership of Dr John Evans, into a major effort studying the effect of the
Iraqi aggression on the public health of Kuwaitis, which is likely to develop into a major ongoing
study of health in Kuwait and possibilities for improvement. Interestingly this was a situation
where my initial estimate of the consequences (50,000 delayed deaths due to air pollution) of the
ongoing disaster were too pessimistic by a factor of one or two orders of magnitude. I
imagined that the plume of the oil fires would be close to the ground and that everyone would be
in the resulting fog. I had forgotten the rise of the plume due to the heat and the air pollution
was only high on a very few days. Moreover the air pollution was reduced during the Iraqi
occupation as there were fewer cars on the road.
Since 1990 I have been active in pointing out the dangers of arsenic in the
environment, and have traveled to Inner Mongolia and Bangladesh to study these and help the
local people. A few papers were written about this (613, 635, 806, 807, 873) but the people there
were hard to work with. Then about 1997 my colleague Peter Rogers brought the problems of
Bangladesh to my attention. After visiting at a conference in Dhaka in 1998, I saw over 150
victims of chronic arsenic poisoning. I came back and gave an emotional lecture at the school
of public health. “If you are interested in international public health you must be involved with
Bangladesh.” I was able to convince Charles (Charlie) Harvey, now at MIT, to address
hydrochemistry and hydro geology, and David Christiani MD to address epidemiologically what
arsenic actually does to people.,
I decided to address directly an intermediate step. How can
one get pure water to the people of Bangladesh now? (888,890). In particular I am President
of the Arsenic Foundation, which I set up in 2004 to be a conduit for tax free donations to help
the people of SE Asia (particularly Bangladesh), in their effort to obtain arsenic free water.
In
addition to spending our own money to help, and spending time on the issue, I started and
continue the arsenic website (http://arsenic.ws or
http://physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/arsenic_project_introduction.html in an attempt to inform
all who will about arsenic. As I tell colleagues it has “more than you ever wanted to know”
about arsenic and the problems it causes.
After the USA invaded Iraq in 2003, I began a small program to help the University of
Baghdad get back on its feet. I sponsored visits of Ministers and academics to Harvard. In
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2006 this program is truncated by the violence in Baghdad and is reduced to attempts to bringing
in graduate students who do not have, on paper, the qualifications to enter by the normal
competition. This has not been successful. Harvard, and departments in other Universities
have been reluctant to help in this, the major way that they can help. I was, and am, deeply
disappointed.
Nuclear Power and other Energy Issues
Since 1970 I became involved with various aspects of energy policy. It began, as
appropriate for a Professor at a University, when some students asked me to help them “stop the
dangerous nuclear power”. I made a bargain with them. We would study the issues together
in a special “reading course”. It did not take me long to realize that the problems of nuclear
power are not problems of nuclear physics per se, but complex problems of engineering systems
in a field where the energy density of the fuel is a million times higher than heretofore. This led
to a role in explaining nuclear power and nuclear safety to the public.
In a sense it began 20 years before when I was a graduate student using radioactive
sources and devising my own safety rules. My girl friend at the time, Margaret Leach, told me a
story that horrified me. Physicians would take radium sources that were then used for radiation
therapy, and leave them on a rolling table unshielded, in the corridor! My discussion with L.H.
Gray in Hammersmith hospital, when I went to see him about calibration of my radiothorium
source, had confirmed my consequent distrust of ordinary General Practitioners of the time
(which L.H. Gray tried his best to improve). I noted with approval an action of my Professor at
Oxford, Lord Cherwell.
In the House of Commons two bills passed in the same session. The first was to set a
limit of 150 milliRem. per year for a radiation dose to the public, and the second to demand a
compulsory X ray every year to detect tuberculosis which in postwar years was rampant. The
ordinary film used for X rays at the time led to a radiation dose of 1,000 milliRem. When the
bills reached the House of Lords, Cherwell in his usual low voice pointed out that they were
inconsistent. The second bill was withdrawn and alternates were found. But I still had to have
an X ray each time I entered the USA. I kept the X ray to give to Harvard University because,
according to a law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had to have an X ray every year since
I was a teacher.
When I spent a summer in Stanford in 1959, I was asked again to have an X
ray, to prove hat I did not have cancer before I started work at the “dangerous” nuclear facility.
I wore my film badge. It went black! (Dose to the chest of about one to two Rems). Pief,
the head of the lab, was informed and realized at once what his mischevous brother-in-law had
done. He persuaded the Stanford lawyers to abandon their nonsensical requirement.
I had
always argued, in jest, that the reason that physics departments in the USA after the war had
picnics, at which families and children came was to show the students that radiation had no
effect on fertility. Pief expressed the matter more succinctly. When asked at a cofee break
by a machine shop technician in Stanford whether radiation made one sterile, he replied, in my
presence, : “Don’t count on it!”.
Nuclear power was just beginning to come into its own. Over 50 new plants were being
built. In March 1971 I believe, Glen Seaborg, who was at that time President of the American
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Association for Advancement of Science made an appeal to the country’s scientists. “You
have been receiving funds for your research from the AEC for many years. Now it has trouble
explaining one of its primary missions, developing nuclear electric power, to the public. We
need your help.” As far as I know only two people responded. Myself, to help, and Henry
Kendall who hindered. My response to Glenn’s appeal was to write to him saying that I
needed data on half a dozen issues which were raised among the public by nuclear energy.
Effects of Radiation at low doses; accident probabilities; disposal of nuclear waste; diversion of
material for nuclear weapons. Two days later I got a phone call. Not from a secretary but from
Glenn himself. “Can I speak to Professor Wilson, please?” “The issues you raise are too
complex for me to explain over the phone but can you come down to Washington and spend a
few days with us?” Of course I did. In his office in Germantown, Glenn addressed the
questions one by one.
“Assistant Secretary xxx is the expert on this one,” and the Assistant
Secretaries were called in one by one to answer my questions. “Now you know their telephone
numbers, call them anytime”. I was hooked. My new career as a public explainer began then
and there.
My admiration for Glenn and his approach to life increased and he remained
helpful to me always and always listened to any comment that I had. I have, incidentally,
never found any other government servant who was so forthcoming. My first paper on the
political problems of this technical situation appeared in Nature (137).
Henry Kendall meanwhile was going public with some misinformation. He complained
that the AEC was being extremely secretive.
In this case about a reactor safety report WASH
740. That was a study performed by BNL scientists, I believe, about the potential for extreme
nuclear accidents. It had been performed as a result of an explicit request by the Joint
Committee of Atomic Energy and had been presented to the AEC. Henry claimed that the
report was being deliberately withheld. I called the appropriate assistant secretary and asked
for a copy to be on my desk the following morning. It was, of course, on my desk by 9 am and I
immediately telephoned Henry and informed him that he could borrow it whenever he wished.
He never wanted it. Alas, that was typical of Henry and of the anti-nuclear power movement
at the time. He preferred to make a public complaint rather than to understand and to influence
the industry in a direct way. I tried to be ready to respond within minutes to an incorrect
public complaint before it spread and festered.
Henry had started the Union of Concerned
Scientists and in its first years was to work to reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons. This
worthy goal was not achieved. I commented at the time that Henry managed to stop many
nuclear power reactors, but as far as I could tell he failed to stop a single bomb!
He was like
the drunk looking for his watch that he had dropped at night. A bystander tried to help and
after 10 minutes, he said “I cannot find it either. Are you sure you dropped it here?” “No,” was
the reply.” I dropped it further up the street but there is a street light here so that I can see what
I am doing.”
I went out in 1973 to Vermont to support the operating permit for the Vermont Yankee
nuclear power plant, with a “Limited Appearance” at the public hearing before the licensing
board. I got a lift with Norman Rasmussen, then a nuclear physicist who had a few years earlier
done a very fine piece of work, using a Ge(Li) detector, cataloging the energies of neutron
capture gamma rays. He was in the nuclear engineering department at MIT, and was better
placed than I to study reactors. A year later the AEC asked him to be Chairman of the Reactor
Safety Committee that produced WASH-1400, the Rasmussen report.
By that time I was
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comparing radiation doses and noted that the highest anticipated public dose from the power
plant was comparable to the increase in cosmic ray dose as one went from the power plant to the
top of the hill where the public hearing was being held. I proposed that we would all be safer if
we adjourned the hearing and reconvened at the power plant. The State of Massachusetts,
through its Attorney General, complained that the permitted site boundary dose of 10 mRem. per
hour was too high. I immediately wrote to the Attorney General, with a copy to Harvard
University, asking for relief from a Massachusetts law that required all teachers in the
Commonwealth’s schools and colleagues to have a yearly X ray to ensure that they did not have
TB. For me, the alternate of a skin test would not work because I am tuberculin positive. I
was confident that the X ray dose was high because it was 1 Rem as recently as 1960. But
Jacob Shapiro, Harvard’s radiation safety officer at the time, was ahead of me. He had already
insisted that the University Health Services use the best practices. They shield the patient from
radiation except at the exact location of the desired X ray image. They use sensitive film.
Maybe they use an image intensifier screen. He measured the dose for a chest X ray at Harvard
Medical services at 8 milliRems. This was 100 times smaller than I had measured at Stanford
and just below my complaint level!
Having been born and brought up in London, and having endured London fogs for many
years, I was aware that air pollution was not good. I was also aware that in Halifax and other
Yorkshire towns, those who could afford to do so lived on top of the hills and came down by
carriage or car. The poorer people lived near the “Dark Satanic Mills” of the hymn. The non
conformist preachers used the prayer : “From Hell, Hull and Halifax, Good Lord deliver us”.
My grandmother scrubbed her front door step twice a day. Whenever I took a bath a thin, and
sometimes not so thin, black line marked the level that the water had reached in the bathtub.
I
was therefore emotionally prepared to compare the risks and dangers of air pollution with those
of nuclear power. I was unwilling to make the same sort of vague statement that the nuclear
industry were fond of making, such as: “nuclear power has killed nobody” whereas they had not
yet made much electricity either.
I tried to be quantitative, using the best estimate I could
get for low levels of radiation and also for air pollution.
The paper “Kilowatt Deaths” (145)
comparing the number of anticipated deaths from electricity usage, that appeared in Physics
Today in 1972
Leonard Hamilton, MD, of BNL told me that this little paper stimulated his
more systematic studies at BNL. Others found these early papers stimulating. I was slowly
moving into an intellectual vacuum now filled by the field of Risk Analysis.
Nuclear power plants under construction were designed to produce 900 to 1200 Mwe twice as much as previous designs. The AEC had some criteria for the engineering design of
the “Emergency Core Coolant System” (ECCS) that would coolant water in e event of a severe
accident where the pressure in the reactor is lost and the water rapidly evaporates - technically a
blow down. lost. A question arose about how well it would work?
There were no direct data
and calculations were necessary.
In a letter to AEC, by that time chaired by James
Schlesinger Jr, and in testimony to Congress’ Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) I
suggested that they hold a public hearing and a issue a graded set of reports. For the expert,
there should be a detailed multi volume study with all the engineering data should be made for
the cognoscenti and a shorter report should be available for the public with careful detailed
references to the detailed report. Alas this has never really hppened, not in the nuclear
industry, and not in any other “dangerous” industry. The public hearing occurred and lasted 18
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months in all. Environmentalists, led by Henry Kendall’s Union of Concerned Scientists,
combined to oppose the criteria.
A young economist, Daniel Ford, fresh out of Harvard, was
their detailed organizer. Ford had just got a BA in economics from Harvard. He came round
to my office a couple of times to get a private lecture on some of the issues. I remember
calculating for him on the blackboard the maximum dose that people could get from Krypton 85.
I asked him to meet one morning with my small class on energy policy, and explain the reason
for the UCS intervention in the hearing.
He over reached himself. A short while later when
he was trying to get the AEC hearing board to accept him as a technical expert he said,
incorrectly, that he had given 2 invited lectures in my class on heat transfer and water flow.
But I was reading the hearing transcript and my letter pointing out the “error” was read into the
record with no opposition. I noted a couple more “exaggerations” of his in the hearing record
but forget now what they were.
Henry Kendall himself raised the ire of the AEC hearing board and hence the Chairman
of the AEC, Jim Schlesinger.
He proffered testimony to the board. When called he stated
he could not come immediately because of the experimental schedule at SLAC. And then he
asked for 2-3 days to pilot his private plane across the country.
The board chairman ordered
him to turn up or face contempt charges. Bill Wallenmeyer informed me that Jim
Schlesinger’s anger was hurting the high energy physics program. According to Bill’s comment
to me at the time, Jim Schlesinger cut $300,000 from the SLAC budget for this reason.
I
called Sid Drell, acting director of SLAC while Pief was on sabbatical leave, and suggested he
take action to isolate SLAC itself from Henry’s inaction. I do not know what action Sid took
but Henry Kendall turned up and gave his testimony. A few months later when my last SLAC
experimental proposal, looking for parity violation in electron proton inelastic scattering by
using longitudinally polarized electrons was rejected, one reason specifically stated in writing,
was that there was this $300,000 budget cut. The experimental program of Taylor, Kendall and
Freeman was not cut. This only intensified my frustration expressed earlier on my attempts to
work at SLAC.
In 1972, I was asked by a local environmental group, the “Sheepscot Valley Conservation
Society”, by a retired clergyman, Reverend Barth, to help them ensure that Central Maine
Power, majority owner of Maine Yankee nuclear power plant, met all criteria. I suggested a
public information meeting. Central Maine Power were reluctant. I called their outside
lawyer, John Ritsher Esq., of Ropes and Gray in Boston and he said: “Ask Mr Barth to call the
President of Central Maine Power (CMP) in 30 minutes.” Mr Barth made the call and the
meeting took place. In that afternoon we toured the plant and in the evening sat down in
Wiscasset. The meeting was almost a disaster. It was opened by the public relations director
of CMP. He had got a poor degree in the classics but was a nephew of the President of CMP.
He knew very little but talked platitudes for ½ hour and did not want to stop. An engineer from
Yankee Atomic was sitting next to me. Leaning over he whispered “Now you know what we
are up against”. Indeed, the industry public relations people were their worst enemies. But
Jack Randazza, then plant superintendent saved the day. He had been a Maine lobster man, and
had learned about nuclear power on Yankee Rowe and the Swiss PWR. After he had spoken he
was asked many questions which he answered straightforwardly and well.
Maine Yankee ran
well for 20 years but 25 years later the heat exchanger of the power plant needed replacement
This was the lowest ebb of the nuclear industry and rather than replace it, CMP shut the plant for
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ever.
This led to my first consulting job - consultant to the Attorney General’s office of the
State of Maine in the discussion of CMPs request for an operating license for Maine Yankee.
I charged $100 a day. I went beyond the formal review and discussed the low probability High
Consequence events, beyond what the AEC had called the Maximum Credible Accident, both
with the radiological group (3 people) in the capital (Augusta) and with the head Maine State
police. The Police were well prepared with evacuation plans including using boats to evacuate
from the bottom of the peninsula. They held a yearly exercise with the Strategic Air
Command. The State police would try and steal a nuclear weapon from the SAC base, and the
Air Force would try to stop them. I was told that the police won every year but am still unsure
what that means in terms of safety..
I suggested that Maine formally enter the ECCS hearing
on a limited basis. That hearing was covering crucial issues of interest to Maine and there
would be an operating license hearing before the ECCS hearing was over. We went to
Washington when one Oak Ridge scientist was testifying. It is obvious that if the power level
is reduced, there would less demand on ECCS systems. At what level would the witness’
concerns be moot? He would not say, but we got from him a procedure to discuss the issue and
the Maine Yankee people, using this procedure, accepted a license for 85% power until the AEC
had ruled on Washington ECCS hearings. . This was granted till the ECCS hearing was
finished and revised general criteria were issued. As far as I know, Maine Yankee was the only
power plant and Maine the only state to take this cautious, yet positive, approach. Other states
either accepted nuclear power without question or were in outright opposition.
On one of
these trips to Washington I called on Ralph Nader who had been talking against nuclear power.
I expolained to him what a number of us academic atomic scientists were trying to do to ensure
that the industry was responsible.
I never got him to support nuclear power, but his rhetoric
changed.
While this was going on, Hans Bethe gave a talk at Fermilab on a nuclear power future.
He praised the idea of a breeder reactor. Some 15 years before Hans had thought carefully
about the safety of liquid sodium reactors in the 1960s and “invented” the “Bethe-Tait“
accident whereby after a loss of sodium coolant the top of the reactor fuel assembly falls to the
bottom with a velocity great enough to make a considerable reactor excursion. Until the 1980s
this was the dominant safety worry. Fortunately this is avoided in modern designs, with metal
fuel, by a natural shut down before the likely accident initiators can evaporate the sodium. In
questions, I raised the obvious issues and suggested that Hans was not adequately cautious.
His response was characteristic. The next day he telephoned me. “I have been asked by the
AEC to form a small breeder reactor safety committee. Will you join it?”. The answer of
course was “Yes”. A couple of years later Andree and I were invited to his 70th birthday party
at Cornell. Four or five people, including the Deputy Secretary of ERDA, talked about the
status of the fields in which Hans had done so much.
I felt deeply honored and this was the
start of a deep personal friendship on these issues which lasted until his death.
I always consider Hans Bethe to be a true liberal. Many anti-nuclear people, including,
alas, some of his colleagues at Cornell, thought he was not a moderate liberal scientist when he
supported the development of nuclear electric power. Hans disagreed with the positions taken
on nuclear power by the Union of Concerned Scientists from 1973 on. It is an interesting
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paradox that in the 1960s it was liberals, usually Democrats, who supported nuclear power
development and Republicans who were reluctant. Now liberals, although mostly not liberal
scientists, have rejected nuclear power and by default the globe may be warming somewhat
faster! To many of us, the position of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1973, was
incorrect and counterproductive. By taking a very public position against nuclear power UCS
deflected attention from their important position of opposition to the arms race. Bethe
remained consistent. While arguing for a strong control of, and reduction in the number of
nuclear bombs, Bethe supported civilian uses of nuclear fission. His logical, and in my view
liberal, position was made clear in the statement of which he was the architect: “Scientists’
Statement on Energy Policy” in 1975. I was proud to be a part of that statement signed by 21
scientists who had diverse positions in society and proud to join Hans at the press conference in
the National Press club in Washington.
I was reminded of this quite recently, and
remembered that the Assistant Secretary for Reactor Safety Research in the old AEC, Dr Milton
Shaw, shook our hands as we came in and thanked us for doing such a service to the industry.
I wanted to at least appear balaned in my views, and noticing Ralph Nader in the audience, I
immediately went up and shook his hand. Hans felt that there were, and are, legitimate
concerns about nuclear power that had to be, and have to be, addressed, and was willing to
address them.
I believe that it was about this time that I made a special visit to Linus Pauling,
then at Stanford, to persuade him NOT to oppose nuclear power. His comment was
characteristic. “If Hans is spending time thinking about the safety, then I do not have to do so
myself”. I believe that Linus never again said anything publicly against nuclear power.
In 1983 Charles Till at Argonne National Laboratory came up with the idea of the
Integral Fast Reactor, which has the potential to reduce the proliferation worries of the Purex fuel
cycle, both Hans and I served on the advisory committee. Hans was characteristically
enthusiastic, and was meticulous about editing our draft reports to ensure the correct balance of
optimism and reality. He was constantly emphasizing the importance of preventing
proliferation.
Health prevented Hans from coming to some of the later meetings, and in 1995
the IFR program was abandoned, hopefully only temporarily, but I still discussed with him all
my thoughts on nuclear energy on my many visits to Cornell for colliding beam physics.
Some critics have argued that Hans had no input into problems such as nuclear waste.
That is not true. In one of my many discussions in late 1997, Hans mentioned that an Indian
tribe (the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes} wanted to store nuclear waste (temporarily) in their
back yard.
This would enable spent fuel to be stored with an even smaller risk than in the
reactor complex. By January 13th 1998 I had formed Scientists for Secure Waste Storage - with
6 Nobel Laureates, 2 Ambassadors, an astronaut and a former Presidential Science advisor to
support the tribe’s efforts in the long public hearing.
There was, and is, opposition. Hans
always wanted to know the progress. I had hoped to be able to tell him of even partial success.
But it was just a week after Hans’ death that the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board
recommended approval (although there are still many avenues open for opposition).
But he
also died before the successful “back door” attack on the tribe by the Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) which 2 years later had stopped the
project and maybe killed it for ever.
I do not believe that the republican establishment in Utah
is against the project because it is unsafe, but because it is a group of uppity Indians trying to do
business on their own. Maybe the Democratic administration we have in 2009 will eventually
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reverse the decisions of BLM and BIA.
Hans was a conciliator. In 1988 half a dozen liberal Nobel laureates were upset with the
Union of Concerned Scientists for using their names in a position paper against nuclear power,
and Emilio Segré was threatening legal action.. This came about because they had all been
asked to support the UCS position against the nuclear bomb arms race. Hans name was also
misused in the same position paper but Hans who calmed them down.
Henry Kendall was
unrepentant. He said it would be too expensive to send to their mailing list a correction. Yet
that would have cost no more than the initial erroneous usurping of their names.
I,
fortunately, was not personally involved.
I was asked to sign the position against the nuclear
arms race but explicitly in a letter to Henry Kendall (which was not answered) said that cold only
do so if UCS withdrew their opposition to nuclear power.
I was concerned that my name
might later be misused - as indeed it would have been. But I pointed out the errors in the UCS
position paper in a detailed article in Nuclear News (405), urging nuclear industry people to
address them directly.
In 1997 at an energy conference held by the Global Foundation, it was
my privilege to be Chairman at the final panel session on nuclear power. Hans and Edward
Teller, who disagreed on military uses of nuclear energy, expressed complete agreement with
each other on the need for nuclear power. I understand it was the first time their wives, who
were present at the meeting, had talked to each other for 20 years.
In getting to know Hans, I was privileged to know the power, strength and support of his
wife Rose (Ewald).
Rose’s father was a Professor of Physics at Frankfurt where she and Hans
first met. Although not cognizant of details of our technical discussions, she understood the
principles of the physics. Rose and her parents understood the evils of fascism even better than
Hans, and it was principally Rose who shared with us her deepest concerns about the trend of the
US government policies since 2001.
I had followed the terrible events of the 1930s from
across the English Channel and share her concerns.
Andree and I met Rose a couple of times
since Hans death, going out of our way to meet her in May 2008.
I had hoped to get together an energy group at Harvard, and MIT in a coherent enough
fashion that we could get big funding from the AEC.
The obvious MIT group was the nuclear
engineering department at MIT. I noted above that I was friendly with Norman Rasmussen and
I discussed nuclear safety with him from 1971 on.
Professor Rose was also in a personal
way, interested in expanding the horizons beyond nuclear power. I met Professor Manson
Benedict who was a regular advisor to the AEC and got from them the Fermi award.
But MIT
did not seem, at the time, to be expansive in the way that I envisaged so that we did not have to
hunt for every penny. Fred Abernathy of the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard had just
come back from a couple of years in Washington at the US National Science Foundation. So
he and I went down to Washington, in about 1976, with a preliminary proposal which we gave
to Ken Davies, then Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy. It got nowhere.
Other institutions did better. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory was a National Laboratory
and got a great deal of funding. MIT formed an “Energy Lab”, separate from the Nuclear
Engineering Department and at that time with no connection that I could discern. This Energy
Lab” was to be a conduit for federal funding. I hoped that if we at Harvard could not form a
lab with good funds from the government, maybe we could join with MIT. But this never
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worked out. I. joined with them in preparing a big proposal, but when DOE funding was 20%
less than requested it was the Harvard small 20% that was cut out.
Alas, I was merely
window dressing to help get funding - then to be discarded.
One of our “stars” was Dr
William (Bill) Shurcliff. He had been a writer for Professor Smythe on the famous Smythe
report of 1945 on the atomic bomb program. He was the radiation safety officer at the CEA.
Now as CEA collapsed he decided to write about solar energy and wrote a series of factual
reports on solar heated houses. All produced by himself with no budget. By about 1978 he
had the produced 50 or so versions of “Solar Heated Houses”. The AEC, now the DOE, had put
in by that time well over $100,000 to no useful result.
In contrast to Bill Shurcliff, of course,
LBL was awarded a big contract that they did not immediately know what to do with.
1974 was my “right wing summer”. I was asked to give some lectures on energy at the
“Edward Teller Center for Science, Technology and Political Thought” at the University of
Colorado in Boulder. Several distinguished scientists were there: Edward Teller, Eugene
Wigner, and Paul Dirac. I was particularly proud when Eugene Wigner commented about my
discussion of air pollution in a very complimentary way . “You really know your facts. It is
important to really know.”
I had met Eugene before, but in the three weeks of the school I
got to know him a lot better.
I realized later that Eugene was indeed very troubled by fuzzy thinking and even more by
pretension. Although I have my share of both of these, I am fortunate that his wrath was never
turned on me. I saw it in action for the first time some 17 years later, in 1994, at a summer
school/conference in Boulder, Colorado. A lecturer was explaining his speculations about
possible ways of using solar energy to produce hydrogen. Eugene was quiet until the end.
Then came the bombshell. “Dr X, will you please return to your second slide?” “Dr X please
look at the fourth chemical reaction on the list”. “Everyone” (meaning only Eugene) “knows
that this reaction does not go.”
But it was not until a 3 week summer school and conference on energy futures for the
world in Boulder, Colorado that I talked extensively with him. He was there with his friend
Edward Teller, his sister Manci and his brother-in-law Paul Dirac. Eugene’s interplay with
Teller was fascinating. Eugene gave several lectures about nuclear energy. He would make
some point about which it was just possible to argue. Edward Teller would say “I disagree”.
Eugene would stop and stand still, somewhat like a reproved naughty boy, but with a huge smile
on his face as Edward made his disagreement clear. It was usually a trivial point that Edward
made. It was often, perhaps always, for the sake of disagreeing, but they clearly both enjoyed
this little game, which I saw repeated on other occasions.
I am not sure how and when I became aware of Eugene’s huge contributions to
understanding and using nuclear fission. It was probably about 1947 - before I had ever met
him. There was a cold winter in England and coal trains could not get to the power plants.
Electricity was rationed. We all talked about the energy crisis and the future of nuclear energy.
My graduate work had just begun, with Carl Collie and with Dr Hans (von) Halban who, with
Joliot and Kowarski, had measured (in 1939) the number of neutrons in fission for the first time.
Somewhat later, in 1950, I used the thermal neutron flux from the British Experimental Pile
(BEPO) to try to measure neutron capture gamma rays. This was a graphite reactor, and
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physicists there talked about the “graphite disease” alternatively called the “Wigner effect”
and described by Wigner as early as 1943. It is the fact that, in a low temperature graphite
reactor, fast neutrons will knock a carbon atom off its lattice and that atom could not get back.
This would then store energy. As Seitz and Wigner stated in a semi-popular article in
Scientific American in 1956, “the amount of sword-of-Damocles energy stored in this way can
reach up to hundreds of calories per mole. Obviously a sudden release of it could lead to
unpleasant complications”. As a result of this calculation, Wigner stated (earlier) that “it would
be unscientific to claim a useful life (for the Hanford reactor) of more than 100 days.”
Fortunately the lattice is able to readily recover its original form by a controlled temperature rise
and annealing. This was regularly done and graphite reactors last much more than 100 days and
many have lasted many tens of years.
I have never seen a detailed description of what went
wrong in Windscale in 1958, but I assume the fire in the graphite reactor was caused by a failure
to anneal the reactor according to Wigner’s procedure, and the Wigner disease took over.
Radiation damage studies of all sorts are now common. Sometimes they provide information
on the lattice. Seitz and Wigner ended their brief article by saying “it is gratifying that a
phenomenon which originated as a pure nuisance promises to provide us useful information
about the solid state in general.” But also radiation damage studies are done to be sure that the
material in question can survive intensive radiation bombardment.
It was in 1950 also, that I learned of Eugene’s huge contribution to the design and
construction of the Hanford reactors - an engineering achievement of considerable magnitude,
which involved the scaling from Fermi’s zero energy reactor to a 250 Mwt water cooled reactor.
Such a large jump in size usually takes many years and many intermediate steps. The actual
time is on record and was about 100 days. But I remember Eugene’s description to me at the
Colorado meeting 30 years after the achievement: “I told General Groves: give me 100
scientists and engineers and I will have that reactor for you in 3 months. I was wrong. It took
4 months and when it was finished there were 10,000 people on site. The second reactor took 6
months and the third took 8 months” (presumably because Eugene was not watching the details
by that time).
This comment, from memory, of Eugene’s was in the context of the length of
time to build an electricity producing power reactor - in 1974 it was 4 years, and now often much
more. As Eugene himself wrote sometime later: “However this is not the full story: present
reactors are expected to perform definite functions for extended periods in addition to
performing a chain reaction.”
The initial design of the Hanford reactors was due to Eugene Wigner although DuPont
Corporation was in charge of construction. It was Wigner who persuaded everyone that a
graphite reactor cooled with helium gas (now a type favored by several designers) was less
appropriate than a reactor with water cooling channels.
The design is fully discussed in a
report of summer 1942 (top secret at the time) “On a Plant with Water Cooling” with authors
Weinberg, Young, Christy, Pless, Wigner and Williams. Although he was the first named
author, Alvin Weinberg always maintains that he did not design the Hanford reactor but “I sat
beside the man who did”. The detail in that paper is extraordinary and is shown in the many
tables. “Oxygen and Hydrogen Content of Circulating Water.” “Heat Exchanger Design”,
including numbers in “engineering units”, such as BTU/ft2 deg 0F, that physicists use at home
but hate to use in the laboratory and many more including a detailed materials list. I am told
that several of the engineering drawings, such as those in the report, were made by Eugene
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personally and that he would pore over suppliers’ catalogs and personally determine delivery
times.
Wigner was certainly well aware that there was a positive void coefficient in a water
cooled reactor - boiling of water in a channel would increase the reactivity - and the report has a
whole paragraph showing how the water reduced the reactivity constant from 1.10 to 1.07.
Inversely, a sudden removal of the water would increase it by 0.03 which is more than the
fraction of delayed neutrons which allow control of the reactor. But as laconically noted by
Alvin Weinberg later “no one dared to think of the consequences of a complete failure of the
cooling”. Later, of course, people did and all US reactors are designed with the requirement of
keeping the “void coefficient” low. But the Russians did not, even though the water in the
channels of the RBMK reactors was normally boiling under pressure. Not taking proper
account of the positive void coefficient was one of the several Russian mistakes that, taken
together, led to the Chernobyl accident. But Wigner’s natural uranium reactors at Hanford
(which as noted above he had only expected to last 100 days) were replaced after 20 years to
avoid this problem. In 1986 when the Chernobyl accident took place many scientists and
engineers, myself included, thought at once of the Wigner disease, and of the 1956 Windscale
accident where, according to statements at the time, there had been inadequate attention to the
problem. But the temperature of the graphite at Chernobyl was high enough to anneal the
graphite continuously and avoid that particular problem.
Wigner in his memoirs describes his relationship with DuPont. DuPont engineers were
more conservative than he would have been. But in Alvin Weinberg’s words, DuPont “saved
his bacon.” When the Hanford reactor first went to high power, it shut itself down after an hour
or so. Eugene and other physicists were not aware that one of the xenon fission products had a
high cross section for thermal neutrons. Fortunately DuPont had allowed more space in the
reactor vessel than Eugene’s design and when this was filled with fuel rods to compensate the
effect of “xenon poisoning”, the reactor worked well.
Other features of the week long school and conference in Colorado were particularly
interesting.
Data were presented by someone about the 50 odd power reactors then operating.
I was able to add my recent conversations with William Webster, President of the New England
Electric System, about the costs of electricity generated by nuclear fission. At that time the
(small) Yankee Rowe was producing electricity at a busbar cost of 0.9 cents per kilowatt hour,
and Connecticut Yankee at 0.55 cents per kWh (including some contribution to paying off the
mortgage). I clearly remember Eugene’s pleasure, and indeed surprise that nuclear electricity
had at last become cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels. He had always said very succinctly
“if nuclear power is not economic, it makes little difference whether it is only slightly
uneconomic; it will not be built if other sources of energy are cheaper”.
I am sure that he
would have been as chagrined as many of us at the recent great increase in cost, beyond inflation,
to 1.9 cents per kWh (in year 2000) plus a much larger sum for paying interest on the costs of
construction. Some of the increase is due to inflation, some to increased staff in response to
regulation, some to an increase in interest rates and some due to a general increase in
construction costs above normal inflation. But my estimates of these effects do not add up to
the actual cost increase. Eugene would be better than I have been at understanding and
explaining the difference.
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Eugene rejected the projections, which were common in the early 1970s, that US energy
use would continue to double every 10 years as it had in the recent past. He stated his view that
energy use would reach a plateau very soon. He put this in writing 2 years later after a nuclear
energy symposium in Louisiana. Eugene was right.
By 1974 energy use in the USA had
already reached that plateau at 10 kW per person. Energy intensity, in energy per unit of GNP
has since fallen in approximately the same amount as GNP has risen, thus reverting to a long
term trend rather than the 1950 - 1970 period. Eugene expressed in his view in a typical worldly
manner. “It is wrong” he said to Andrée and myself at a large breakfast “for a single individual
to consume too much of the world’s goods.” Another philosophical remark he often made was
“the promise of future science is to furnish a unifying goal to mankind rather than merely the
means to an easy life; to provide some of what the human soul needs in addition to bread
alone.”
I had some trepidation in going to th conference in Boulder. I was invited to give some
lectures on energy and the environment based upon my work - then just beginning - of
comparing risks of energy systems. I had feared that there might be some huge mistakes and
that I would be mercilessly criticized. Fortunately I was wrong. Eugene said afterwards “You
seem to know your numbers. It is very important to really know and not merely believe.” It
was there that we formulated a simple concept that when there is a lot of easily available stored
energy, such as easily burnable fuel, (or indeed carbon atoms knocked off the lattice by fast
neutrons) in one place and a lot of people in a nearby location there is potential for disaster.
Of course this concept was not new; the good citizens of London used such a principle in 1848
when they forbad the shipment of petroleum fuels up the Thames closer than 30 miles from
London Bridge (at Canvey Island) but Eugene thought it a useful guiding principle.
With
encouragement from Eugene and others I continued and expanded my work on risks and gave a
copy of my most recent book “Risk-Benefit Analysis “ to Eugene’s daughter Martha and to the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Many scientists think only about their work and their contributions. But Eugene put his
work into the context of other people’s work and was often generous in crediting the work of
others. This was clear in conversation, and as I read his memoirs in preparing this talk, I
realize it was true of his writings. In his memoirs, for example, he spontaneously praised
Seaborg and pointed out that he had completed the plutonium chemical separation plant ahead of
schedule - a schedule many leading chemists thought was not possible. In his memoirs about
the early days of nuclear fission research he referred to the French group under Hans von Halban
and Frederic Joliot - a reference that many Americans omit. For me this interest in other
peoples work was a great pleasure.
Eugene could, and did, write detailed papers as well as smaller papers. When I started
thinking about nuclear reactor safety in 1973, I was surprised to find a small paper with K.
Way, written in 1948, about the rate of decay of fission products. Eugene explained that there
is a proportionality between the disintegration constant and the fifth power of the disintegration
energy. As a result, the total radioactivity from the products of nuclear fission falls as the
inverse 1.2th power of time. The paper shows that this is experimentally confirmed.
This
“trivial” fact is easy to remember and therefore easy to use -and I use it frequently when I think
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about nuclear safety.
Although I read Eugene’s book with Al Weinberg “The physical theory of nuclear chain
reactors” when it came out in 1958, I only recently became aware of his many papers and his
37 patents on nuclear reactors. These were mostly written at the tail end of the second world
war, in 1945, and the years following (1946 and 1947). Roy Glauber recently told me that
these patents were partially a result of a fact that at the Chicago laboratory there was a patent
officer specifically to help the patent process. Eugene studied many possible reactor designs.
The materials testing reactor at Oak Ridge was one of his designs. After a lull of some 15
years, he reverted to a review of new ideas on nuclear reactors in 1969.
During the present
(1990-2008+) lull in activity in building of nuclear reactors, more and more scientists are asking,
as Wigner did in 1947, what are the useful combinations of fuel, moderator and coolant?
Those involved in the “Generation IV” program of new nuclear reactor types could well examine
carefully Wigner’s memoranda of spring 1945 and his 37 detailed patents.
I do not always agree with scientists who are far brighter than myself. So it was with
Eugene Wigner.
He had a deep distrust of Russians and it seemed that he was in favor of
fighting any war in which Russia was even remotely involved.
Thus, he and Edward Teller,
fully supported the Vietnamese war till the end. I did not; nor it turned out did his sister,
Manci or his brother-in-law Paul Dirac.
This led to an embarrassing discussion at breakfast at
the Colorado meeting. Manci started to talk to my wife Andrée, (née Desirée DuMond) and
myself. “How well do you know Eugene?” I explained that Eugene and I had discussed physics
for over 20 years. “You must talk to him” continued Manci. “You must persuade him that we
(the USA) have to get out of this wicked war”. Both Andrée and I chickened out and said,
somewhat weakly but truthfully, that we did not know him that well. At that time Eugene was
deeply troubled and believed that the Soviet Union had built many air raid shelters for the
important elements of their population. This would enable them to survive a nuclear war
whereas the United States could not. He spent much time advocating air raid shelters and even
spent a year on engineering designs - surely a waste of his talents!
Eugene was not alone in
this. The Nobel Prize winning chemist, and a former AEC commissioner, Bill Libby, also
made his own air raid shelter, but less thoroughly.
The mind boggles a little at the single
mindedness of this determined man - committing himself to tasks far below his skills in a cause
he believed in, because no one else would do so.
If I ever have to be in an air raid shelter
again I would rather it be in one designed by Eugene than one designed by Bill.
I found myself disagreeing again when Eugene organized an afternoon session at a small
conference organized by the Reverend Moon. He invited many distinguished people including
several of my colleagues and me. We disliked the “Moonies” and did not want to go to any
meeting sponsored by Reverend Moon. My colleagues who had not developed a personal
relationship with Eugene just ignored the invitation. But my friendship with Eugene was
enough that I could not ignore his gracious invitation and painstakingly explained to Eugene why
I would not go. As with all such discussions with Eugene I learned a lot: I had to explain in an
exchange of letters my reasons for not going. Eugene insisted that Rev. Moon was funding the
conference but not influencing him in any way. Of course we all receive funds from
organizations that we do not always like. Nonetheless I and others felt that the very existence
of the conference would be used to advertize what we believed to be an organization that was
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perverting many Americans.
I found out later that one of my “liberal” friends went to this
meeting. That was Dr Fadhel Jamali, who in 1945 some 40 years before, had signed the UN
charter on behalf of Iraq, and was thrown out of office, narrowly escaping death, in the
revolution of 1958. But our circumstances were different. Fadhel was over eighty, in poor
circumstances in Tunis and when someone would pay his fare to the US he could ignore a
domestic American problem.
I was honored by being asked to visit Budapest on the 100th anniversary of Eugene’s
birth and to talk at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. At that meeting we honored Eugene
Wigner as a scientist and remembered him as a friend. I believed then and now that we
honor him best not by agreeing with him all the time but taking his work, his ideas and his
principles and subjecting each and every one of them to the scrutiny he wanted and he would
give to the work of others.
He was a giant in all these respects.
At a public lecture I gave in an associated public conference in Denver during this three
week energy course I compared risks of energy. There I first met the Astronaut Bill Anders
who had just been named an AEC commissioner and was later to become Chairman of the NRC.
Also I met Dr Ross Adams VP of Air Products and Chemicals who liked my lecture and my
whole approach. “We have a problem with vinyl chloride” he said. “We think we are doing
the right thing but are having a hard time explaining it. Can yo help us?” I replied that I
would look at it, but warned him that if I thought he was right he had made a friend. If I
thought he was wrong he had made an enemy. He took the risk and this was the real start of my
lucrative consulting career which expanded far beyond what I had done for the State of Maine or
what I had done on the High Energy Physics Committees.
But to return to my attempts to get a strong group studying energy at Harvard and MIT,
I succeeded with a smaller effort. I founded, in 1975 believe,together with Professor Allan
Manne of the Economics Department, the Energy and Environment Policy Center which we
located in an old undergraduate laboratory, at the end of the second floor of Jefferson
Laboratory. We had an initial small grant from the Cabot foundation, and a couple of others.
I organized a weekly lunch time energy seminar for the Cambridge area, and my secretary
prepared a list of lectures in the area “the Cambridge Energy Calendar”. I had visited England
in summer 1972, I believe, and gave some lectures. A young man, Dr Andrew (Andy) Van
Horn, came up and asked if he could come and work with me as a research fellow. I found a
small amount of money, and we worked on accidents in energy systems and in particular wrote
about LNG safety. I wanted to work on energy efficiency and policies with Andy at Harvard
but he preferred to go to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory where he joined Arthur Rosenfeld for
awhile. But the thought of having a joint Harvard-MIT energy center, modeled perhaps on the
CEA, to rival LBL in the field remained on my mind.
After Andy left for brighter climes, I
got a call from Richard Eden of Cambridge, suggesting that a bright student of his, Edmund
Crouch, would like to join on energy work.
Edmund stayed at Harvard in the Energy end
Environmental Policy Center for 10 years or so and is in Cambridge MA still as the leading
bright scientist in Cambridge Environmental Inc.
We did a little more energy work
together,but most importantly Edmund had all the bright ideas on our work on chemical
carcinogens and risk analysis.
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In 1979 it was found that many of the coolant and other pipes in US nuclear power
plants were overly, and incorrectly, constrained by clamps and so on. New calculations showed
that this made them more, rather than less, liable to failure in an earthquake. NRC ordered
many plants, including Maine Yankee, to shutdown until they could prove that their plant was
alright. It was easy to show that the shut down made only a very small difference in reducing
overall risk, and may even have increased risk by the disturbance. The proper procedure
would, in my view, have been to keep the plant running while the calculations were being done.
As I was writing this to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the Three Mile Island (TMI)
accident occurred.
The TMI accident started at 4 am on March 28, 1979. I heard about it at 11 am on that
Wednesday morning. My former student Bob Budnitz, then Director of Research at NRC,
telephoned me and described what he knew. He was calling a dozen friends of known
competence in the hope that a reliable word be spread. I remember Bob describing the
sequence of events. At 4.45 the coolant pumps were cavitating (banging) because they were
pumping steam as well as water. Bob told me: “then at 5.45 they turned off the main coolant
pump”. I roared into the phone with extreme surprise “They did what?” and Bob replying that
he did not understand it either. Once the pump was off, even though it had been pumping a
mixture of water and steam, it would not restart for another 8 hours or so. Up until that time
the reactor could have been recovered. But that action of switching off the pumps doomed the
reactor.
The reactor operators had completely failed to understand what was happening between
4.15 and 5.30 in the morning
But Bob and I were conditioned to understand. In his PhD
thesis work Bob had a small liquid deuterium target. The cryogenic engineers had told him
repeatedly that it was full because their thermistors said so, Bob had to show them by electron
scattering that there was no deuterium therein. I had previously had another like experience at
Fermilab when the cryogenic engineers insisted, by looking at their solid state level detectors,
that the target was full of hydrogen but I could show by looking at our data that muons were
only scattering from the bottom of it.
So we were both conditioned to understand at once the
error made by the operators in thinking that the reactor vessel was full of water - when it was not.
The indicators they had was the water was up to the top of the pressurizer.
They had forgotten
that a kettle of water boiling on the stove will still have water dripping from the outside when
almost all had boiled away. The measured numbers of the pressure and temperature by 4.20
should have told them that the water was boiling. But that was not the worst mistake.
I called Leo Beranek, then head of Channel 5 TV and he suggested that I be on the 11 pm
news. I called Bob Budnitz at home at 10.45 and got the latest news from NRC and was also
able to get through by telephone to the TMI control room.
Dr Ted Webster, radiation
physicist at MGH, and I spent ½ hour without any commercial break describing what we knew
and explaining the limits of any possible radiation release level on nuclear safety.
I also was
on a couple of other TV shows. I wrote to the newspaper about the lessons to be learned (223).
The Governor of Massachusetts asked me to be Chairman of a small panel to recommend
what should be done at the state level. The real answer was that the Commonwealth should not
make any appreciable changes in what it was already doing. Massachusetts already had an
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emergency preparedness group sitting in a bunker in Framingham. This bunker was designed
during the cold war so that the group could still function in the event of a major nuclear attack.
I was agreeably surprised to find that the emergency plans for a nuclear power accident were
integrated with emergency plans for other hazards. They, correctly, considered a nuclear
accident to be one of 20 or so severe accidents for which they had to be prepared. They
integrated the plans mandated by the AEC with their own. This was far better than in most
states where there was no comprehensive emergency plan, and a nuclear emergency plan would
therefore never be exercised by smaller, more frequent, non-nuclear emergencies.
I assume
that everyone who reads this will agree that emergency plans should be practiced. Less obvious
is the that they should be integrated as far as possible for various accidents. For example both
evacuation for a nuclear power accident, which we hope will be infrequent or never, is similar to
evacuation when there is an overturned freight car with toxic chemicals. The less frequent
possibility can be exercised by the frequent possibility of other accidents if the plans are
integrated.
It might be thought that the Massachusetts Emergency Preparedness Department would
be first responders. But that does not seem to be the case in practice.
My recent
2003-2008) interactions with the Framingham Emergency Planning Group ave not been as
positive, but I note that it is the Framingham group who integrate and organize the medical and
other teams at the time of the yearly Boston Marathon so they have close coordination with first
responders and medical teams. While it is very unlikely that an actual terrorist scenario would
ever follow what was exercised, the exercises enable the various players to work with, and trust,
each other and learn each others weaknesses and automatically to compensate for them.
Our small committee reporting to the Governor of Massachusetts did take the opportunity
of making two recommendations which although still technically sensible are still politically
unpalatable. Noting that not a single US newspaper had been accurate in discussion of the
accident and its implications, whereas NRC press releases were accurate, precise and brief, we
suggested that when an major accident, of any type, occurred the Governor should ask the press
to print any government press release verbatim, on any page they wished, and only then make
whatever comment thereon they wished. In the Boston area for example there are probably
well over a thousand physicians and scientists who understand radiation and its units. The
press, instead of informing them kept them in the dark by feeding them garbage. When, in
front of TV cameras, I reported the recommendations, including this one, to the Governor, I
could see that ALL of the cameras turned off as I made this important recommendation. It
never reached the news! Scientists have still a long way to go to get reliable technical
information across.
I still think that my description of what had happened at Three Mile
Island, in an Appendix to the report, is superior to that of many others who are mesmerized by
pictures of a partially melted core.
One of the worst features of the press coverage was the failure of most reporters to
understand the units in which important parameters are measured. They would confuse the
radiation dose in Rems or Oersteds with Radiation dose rate in Rems/hr or Rems per year. It is
as if they could not tell whether they commuted 30 miles to work each day or commuted 30
miles per hour. One can easily tell those who have no technical understanding their misuse of
units in this way.
Scientists get confused between measures in the centimetre-gram-second
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(cgs) units and in the metre-kilogram–second (MKS) units.
I tell my students to become
comfortable with one set so that they can get a rapid understanding, but be able to translate
accurately, with perhaps some delay. into another. What for example, is Planck’s constant in
units of the Pole - Stone and Fortnight? An example we used to love as students is the unit of
Beauty. 1000 ships were sent to rescue Helen of Troy. So the Helen is obviously a unit of
Beauty. But it is not a practical unit. Most of us only know someone with a milliHelen who
might launch one ship. And we all know a few where the microHelen is more appropriate.
A couple of years later, in 1992, Bob Marshak, then President of the American Physical
Society asked me to be Chairman of a committee of the American Physical Society to study the
"radionuclide release from severe accidents at nuclear power plants" (341). We had a good
committee. As an executive assistant Professor Rose of MIT’s nuclear engineering department
suggested Dr Kamal Araj who had just got his PhD at MIT. Kamal was excellent in this role..
He is a Palestinian, born in Beit Jala but had acquired American citizenship.
Alas, after he left
Harvard he ran into a number of problems all related to his personal behavior. He was arrogant
and I remember that this was the first and only time the physics department chairman (me) got a
complaint from a travel agent for insulting the staff of the agency. In that I could not help.
Other people have had behavior problems, some described in these pages, but their physics was
good enough that the world would ignore the bad behaviour. My work on TMI did not go
unnoticed. I was asked by a small group in New York, Scientists Institute for Public Information
(SIPI), whether I would be willing to have my life interrupted by reporters asking about radiation
matters. I agreed and that led to a lot of work after the Chernobyl accident. For a month
after the Chernobyl accident I seemed to be continuously on the phone.
After TMI I was asked by DOE to join the Health and Environment Research Advisory
Committee (HERAC), which appointment lasted for 3 years, and also the Energy Board of the
National Academy of Sciences which sponsored and organized energy studies. I stayed on this
NAS board about 10 years until about 1991. I was agreeably surprized and extraordinarly
pleased when my work about nuclear power was explicitly honored by the American Nuclear
Society by a “Presidential Mention” at tyhe annual meeting in 2009.
Chernobyl
In 1986 after the nuclear power plant blew up at Chernobyl, I immediately (April 28th)
sent telexes to two Russian friends Sergei Kapitza, and Eugeny Velikhov, and also to Professor
Alexandrov, President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, describing my skills and volunteered
to go and help. Professor Alexandrov asked for my reactor safety report and I referred him to
Sergei to whom I had already sent a copy. My offer of help was not immediately accepted.
On my 60th birthday, April 29th 1986 I was on four different US TV programs explaining the
situation and had many phone calls from the press starting with a call from Australia at 8 am and
one from the NY Times correspondent in Moscow at 2 pm. The NY Times correspondent
could not get information from Moscow and was told that I knew more than anyone! This was
only the beginning. I was on the phone or giving talks continuously for a month. DOE had
learned a little from the TMI accident and set up a committee to filter information so that it was
not erroneously reported in the press. Alan Sessoms, at that time in the Department of State,
was on this committee, and it just took a phone call to get put on his list of reliable persons.
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On the first day I mentioned, both in my telexes to the USSR and on the McNeil-Lehrer show
on NBS the importance of looking for iodine and if present the need for restricting milk
consumption. This appeal to the USSR was not immediately accepted because of the Soviet
desire for secrecy. Adnan Shihab-Eldin called me from Kuwait and asked when the radioactive
cloud would reach Kuwait. I checked with scientists at Livermore National Laboratory who
had the best program for calculation of air dispersion available at the time. They said the
plume would reach Kuwait when the wind changed on May 2nd. Adnan was therefore ready for
it. He pumped volumes of air through filter paper and collected and measures the particulate
radioactive iodine. It remains, I believe, the only good overseas measurement in the quadrant of
the world SE of Chernobyl. These data were the fodder for the PhD thesis of Dr. Ameenah
Farhan, who became Chairman of the physics department of the University of Kuwait in 1993
and by 2006 was deputy dean of the University of Kuwait. She is a very good and reliable
physicist.
The newspapers were a little better at describing the Chernobyl accident than describing
the TMI accident.
But even the New York Times printed a number of incorrect stories. I
was sent, by my friend Dr Adnan Shihab-Eldin, then director of the Kuwait Institute for
Scientific Research (KISR) a precise story in 3 typewritten pages, of a visit to the power plant 2
days after the accident by a friend who was the Middle Eastern correspondent for Pravda who
was on leave in his home town of Kiev. It rang true to me. It still does. But the NY Times
would not print it because they “could not verify the source”, although I provided his name and
phone number.
They could not verify the source of most of the junk they printed.
A few years later the Japanese criticality accident occurred. Again, the New York Times
(NYT) got the facts wrong.. They quoted the correct digits for the maximum off site dose, but
were off by a factor of 1000. They quoted 2 Rems per hour not 2 mRems per hour (actual
number from memory - not to be quoted). They had by this change converted a nuisance into a
disaster. Fortunately I had specifically called Dr Kazuhisa Mori, head of the Japanese Atomic
Industrial Forum in Japan the night before. Dr Mori was very enthusiastic about nuclear power
although both his parents were killed at Hiroshima. Dr Mori knew the numbers and when the
National Public Radio news man telephoned me at 7.30 in the morning I was able to prevent him
repeating the NYT mistake. It was good that NPR knew to call an “expert”. But why did
NYT not do so? Was that part of “all the news fit to print”? Do the Harvard emergency
plans include endeavoring to be sure that the media publish the correct information? Of course I
am not talking censorship here. They can publish, in addition to correct information, any garbage
they wish. I think that it should be a priority for the press and other media but at the moment I
do not find it to be so.
The problem of accurate communication on radiation matters persists long after an
accident. Poor communication, sometimes even to the extent of propagation of junk science,
persists about asbestos hazards 60 years after the major exposures which occurred in the ships
and shipyards of WWII and just afterwards. It exists to a lesser extent on other matters also.
Recently in a small way I was able to help our local building manager when the attic of the
Lyman laboratory was being renovated and mercury was suspected. The more they cleaned,
the higher seemed the mercury levels. I called the manufacturer of the measuring equipment
and he admitted that at low concentrations the readings were adversely affected by solvents -
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such as had been used for cleaning.
The more they cleaned, the greater the false reading!
The Soviet response to the Chernobyl accident was in many ways more tragic than the
accident itself. While the evacuation of Pripyat, while a day late, was carried out well and soon
enough, the secrecy in the USSR prevented the authorities from carrying out what is the most
important action. They should have impounded all milk within a hundred miles or so and
stopped the drinking of fresh milk. As I look back at my records of letters, I found one to Bob
Budnitz in Berkeley in 1971. We both were beginning to think from first principles about
reactor safety and consequences of an accident. In that one page letter I outlined what had to be
done, a letter with which Bob agreed. Although volumes have been written on what to do, the
one page letter summarized the essential points. All the rest is detail. Leonid Ilyin, deputy
Minister of Health in the USSR knew this too. He had written a paper, translated into English
about 1983, explaining this, and describing in appreciative detail the British reaction to the
Windscale reactor accident in 1957. That, or another, paper also compared the residual risks to
risks of air pollution containing numbers that almost certainly came from my book!
But Dr.
Ilyin did not speak up and stop the drinking of milk. Other people who knew about the
radioactive iodine deposition were Dr. Izrael who was head of the Institute of hydrometeorology
in Leningrad and whose staff made the first rapid radioactivity survey on May 27 and 28th,
Evgeny Velikhov of the Kurchatov Institute and Gorbachev’s Science advisor, and Sergei
Kapitza.
They probably knew earlier, but on the morning of May 29th they had no excuse:
Each of them received phone calls from worried friends in the west saying effectively: “Impound
the Milk.” Any one of these individuals in the USSR could have broken the wall of silence and
saved a thousand children from thyroid cancer. I cannot and do not blame them for their
silence
I have never had to live in their society of secrecy where stepping out of line might
mean exile to Siberia or worse.
In the west we felt powerless.
My own personal views
were reinforced. An open society is crucial for ensuring safety.
The Soviets agreed to describe all that they knew about the accident at a special meeting
at IAEA in Vienna. The IAEA is an organization of about180 countries and if each sent two
delegates to the meeting the lecture room would be filled. The US was allotted 12 places. There
were more than 12 bureaucrats in Washington who wanted an expenses paid trip to Vienna,
with no chance for people like me. So I persuaded Adnan Shihab-Eldin to invite me as a
consultant to the Kuwait delegation.
I deliberately joked about this with Ambassador
Kennedy who thought, as I expected, that this was inappropriate and he wangled an additional
place on the US delegation. But when we got to the lecture room I was not given a seat in the
main lecture room but had to watch on TV from another room. At the lunch break I saw my
old college friend John Maddox, editor of Nature, and explained the situation “You are writing a
report on the meeting for Nature (370) ” he said “and here is your press pass”. With my new
pass, which let me in to the main lecture room, I asked Ambassador Kennedy for an interview.
He laughed and rectified the situation. I was then properly admitted to the American
delegation. Also that night, McNeil and Lehrer, by long distance telephone, asked me to join
Hans Blix (Director General of IAEA) on a direct link up to their TV program to discuss the
report.
I tried to parlay my knowledge and experience on Chernobyl, nuclear radiation and
Russians into a DOE grant to study the effects. Edmund Crouch and I wrote a detailed proposal.
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But DOE preferred then to work through an established laboratory. Moreover I was not a part
of the “Radiation Club” and insiders got the funds.
Evgeny Velikhov invited me, in February
1987, to attend the conference on a “Nuclear Free World” . At the ballet performance at the
Bolshoi to which the participants were invited, I asked when could I visit Chernobyl. I did so
later in the week and was one of the first foreigners to do so.. I wrote about this in “Chernobyl
after the Accident”.(389) Then in December 1987 I arranged, with the help of Sergei Kapitza
and his connections with Moscow TV, a visit by an independent US film producer. This film
“Back to Chernobyl” appeared on .National Public Radio in 1988.. I was one of the 300,000 or
so awarded a medal in 1987 as one of the "liquidators". I have written extensively since about
the accident (475, 485, 501, 532, 580, 581, 614, 624).
One of the features about the Soviet Union in those days was that it was a good source of
excellent jokes. They produced an abundance. “What is the difference between
Communism and Capitalism?” On receiving no reply the answer came. “With Capitalism
Man exploits Man. With Communism it is the other way around.” After Chernobyl the rule
became: “When there is an accident you first reward the guilty; you punish the innocent and
decorate the uninvolved”.
This last tends to be a universal rule. The Russian pilot who shot down a Korean
Airline plane off Kamchatka was decorated.
The Israeli pilot who bombed the Iraqi research
reactor was decorated. The UK Health and Safety person who made a mess of the response to
the poisoning of a Russian ex-diplomat by Polonium 210 was decorated.
But sometimes
authorities exploit mishaps for sensible ends.
When a German youth flew a small plane into
Russia and landed in Red Square, he had been tracked and not shot down. But he was not
forced to land. I was told by Anna Kapitza that Gorbachov took the opportunity to fire 40 hard
line Red Army or Air Force generals for their incompetence!
Safety Committees
In 1991-1992 I was asked to chair an advisory committee for the government of the
Republic of China, on the operation and safety of the nuclear power plants in Taiwan.
The
suggestion that I be the Chairman was prompted by Paul Lochak but actually came from Lee
Yuan-Tse, born in Taiwan, but who shared the Nobel prize for work with Dudley Hershbach
when he was at Harvard. He went back to Taiwan about 1990 as president of Academica
Sinica.
I had a more expansive view than the rest of the committee and I think Lee Yuan-Tse
expected that would be the case. Probably that was why he wanted me to be Chairman. I
wanted to be sure that our report addressed every issue that the anti-nuclear scientists in Taiwan
raised. I had a little problem in persuading our immediate employers, the staff of the Minister
of Economic Affairs that it was a good idea. The rest of the committee was lukewarm. But I
had already discussed this with Yuan Lee and we both felt that it was important. So we invited
the anti-nuclear people to talk to us. The most important anti nuclear activist refused, but we
addressed (mostly in an appendix) his publicly stated concerns anyway.
The committee was
composed of two Japanese nuclear engineers, a Belgian and a French nuclear expert, and a
mainland born Chinese in addition to myself. We went over all the safety indicators proposed
by the US Institute of Nuclear Power Operators, INPO.
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At the time Taiwan had three nuclear power plants with two reactors each. There are
two Westinghouse PWRs at Kentung in the SW corner of the island, 2 GE BWR reactors in
Kaoshiung in the north and 2 more Westinghouse reactors in the north. They were planning,
but as of 2008 still have not finished , two more.
I called around to find out what previous
reviews had said, and had a list of 400 or so questions that they had raised and asked what was
the resolution of each of the issues.
I was told that the station in Kentung in the SW was
troublesome. I was also anticipating that the Chinese reverence for age and authority might be
inimical to a safety culture. I remember the final press conference where we presented the
report (500EXTRA) . “It is important,” I said, “that there be a culture of safety among
everyone in the nuclear industry which exceeds that in society as a whole.” As an example, I
cited the safety in the conference room where we were meeting the press. There was no cover
on the light switch at the entrance and it was all too easy to get an electric shock. “Unless
everyone in the industry is automatically safer than this, the reactors will not be safe as they
could be.” I personally practice a cautious approach to hazards. When I stay in a hotel of 5
stories or more I always walk down the emergency stairs to be sure that I know where they are if
an emergency arises. My children used to laugh at me. After 9/11 they laugh no more.
Our committee agreed to my surprise, that the Taiwanese ran their power plants more
safely than the US does, according to the INPO criteria. We asked tough questions at Kentung
and found that the Superintendent of the station had changed since my information. I was
impressed by the way he managed his staff. He assembled the top 20 or so to answer our
questions. As we asked a tough question he picked a member of his staff. “Mr X is the expert
on that one.” we got a straight forward answer. He had also solved an interesting
hydro-mechanical turbulence issue which had resulted in earlier years in 5 to 10 unnecessary
turbine trips a year.
We were less impressed by the management of the Kaoshiung plant. We went inside
the containment of one of the BWRs.
We saw one of the security guards smoking a cigarette
while going his rounds. There is inevitably a lot of inflammable material around, and fire is an
initiating event that can lead to common mode failure, this is potentially very serious. We said
nothing till our final report.
Six months later the superintendent of the plant was replaced .
In discussions of nuclear power I made a special visit to see Andrei Sahkarov in 1979 to
ascertain his views. They are described elsewhere in a separate section on Russian Scientists.
Elena Bonner decided to honor the memory of Andrei after his death in 1990 by an International
Conference with the theme being the two major interests of Andrei in his last years: the rule of
law in Russia and Eastern Europe and the effects of Chernobyl on the future of nuclear power. I
was deeply honored by being asked to organize the second part. In 1990 we had a planning
meeting in Moscow, and in May 1991 held the conference. About that time an Argonne
laboratory physicist born in Minsk called to ask my help. His mentor in Minsk, Professor
Stanislaw Suskevic wanted help in training people in Belorussia. His problems were a little
like a provincial university in Farnce. All the best people went to Moscow. So after the
planning meeting I was asked by the physicist Dr Stanislaw Suskevich, who was by then VP of
the University of Belorussia in Minsk and VP of the Belarussian Supreme Soviet to meet him in
Minsk. I did so. Suskevich had political obligations in the Belorussian Supreme Soviet in
May 1991 and could not come to the International Sahkarov conference but sent a younger
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colleague, Dr Alexander Lutsko. Lutsko asked to be allowed to use the Sakharov name for
the Sakharov College of Radioecology in Minsk, Belarus, which has become the International
Sakharov Environmental University.
Elena Bonner readily granted that request.
In August
1991 the Soviet Union was crumbling and Suskevich became acting Chairman of the Supreme
Soviet of Belarus. In October I received a bizarre FAX from Minsk. It was the text, with
accompanying English translation, of a request to the Supreme Soviet by the Chairman
(Stanislaw Suskevich) to form a college of Radioecology. It was signed by such persons as the
head of the Orthodox church in Minsk, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Minsk, the head of a
new NGO “Children of Chernobyl” and had a space for the signature of “Richard Wilson,
Chairman of the International Advisory Committee.”
I thought for a few minutes, signed and
sent it back.
I remained Chairman for 10 years, until 2002 and remain an honorary member,
and was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2001.
While my expenses in Belarus have always been paid by the University, I have had to
pay for my fare from personal sources, and I have taken it as a duty to find international funding
for those activities that we thought important. I got a UNESCO grant for them in 1992 by
calling at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on my way to the first meeting of the International
Advisory Committee in January 1992. I wrote the first draft of the successful proposal which I
handed to Lutsko and was sent in by Lutsko almost unaltered.
I also got some funding from
Soros until the new President, Lukashenko, decided to tax all foreign gifts so Soros declined to
supprt us further.
.
That January was hectic in many ways and I missed an important family duty. In
December 1990, we had a call from Alison that Winnie was getting worse and had to go to the
retirement home that we had picked out the previous year. Geoffrey and I both remember the
frustration that we felt at the time
We had asked her physician, the post office manager, the
bank manager and others, to telephone Geoffrey or me at any hour of day or night if there was
need and NOT to call Alison. But he called Alison first! Geoffrey coped by phone with the
arrangements and winnie went without problem to the nursing home near Banbury. But then
went to England, as previously planned, in mid January to empty her apartment.
I could have
gone a few days earlier but could not do so at that time, because I had the prior arrangement to
go to Minsk, but Andrée spent 2 or 3 days helping Geoffrey pack up.
I flew to Paris, called on UNESCO, met with the head of FRAMATOME and Paul
Lochak and then on to Minsk. I had no visa for travel to Russia and decided to avoid Russia
itself, so flew to Warsaw and took the night train to Minsk which left at 1 am. It was probably
in Paris that I found that I could not find my “high energy physics” diary with all my telephone
numbers. It had fallen out of my pocket in the mens’ room of the Fermilab lodging house
“Aspen East” a day or two earlier. A call to FERMILAB got someone who found it, and at the
appropriate date there was the phone number of Stanislaw Suskevich. I waited 3 hours in
Warsaw at the railroad station with all waiting rooms closed, sitting on a cold floor.
I was
tired and feeling a little unwell as I borded the train at 1 am. As a train buff I had hoped to be
awake at 4 in the morning as the wheels were changed under the car at Brest Litovsk as we
passed from standard gauge track to the Russian broad guage but I was not feeling well so slept
through it. I had the ‘flu. I was allowed into Belarus without a visa because I knew the head
of state! (Stanislaw Suskevich).
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On arrival at Minsk at 11 am it was 30 degrees below zero. At that temperature it is
irrelevant whether one says Fahrenheit or Celsius!
But it was a fine day and it was OK in the
sun. But I had no rubles or kppeks and there was no place to change money! But a friendly
Russian gave me 3 kopeks for the telephone coin box
I called Suskevich and half an hour
later Alexander Lutsko picked me up. We stayed in a hotel on the main street which had been
the communist party hotel just across the from the University.
I remember walking across
to the University the next morning with Elena Bonner for our first meeting
She was
recognized by a passing Russian who asked her what she thought of the political situation.
But there was a shortage of food. The food distribution in the USSR had been organized by the
Communist part, who had bought at fixed prices from the peasants. Now that system had
broken down and in te towns food was more expensive. But I was taken to a Sauna where I
believe I got rid of my ‘flu. The photograph on my website was taken by Stanislaw Suskevich
himself when I handed him my camera.
He briefly described the meeting a month before
when he had invited Yeltsin of Russia and Kravchuk of Ukraine to meet and found the new
Union of Independent states
That night he had two soldiers guarding his modest 2 bedroom
apartment. What were you afraid of I asked. “Gorbachev.” was the prompt reply. This
story has always amused me when I think of the numerous secret service guards in the USA
On leaving Minsk I needed a reservation on the night train to Warsaw. But even the
head of state could not arrange it! So a young lecturer, whose name temporarily escapes me,
came with on a local to Brest Litovsk, 10 minutes after the fast Paris train.
He gave me
instructions. When you get there look lost and don say a work in Russian. Just say “Paris,
Paris!” That was easy. A lady came out from the booking office who spoke French. “When do
you want to go?” “As soon as possible” I replied. There is a train in half an hour”. So I
went rapidly through the passport control, and boarded the train in an ordinary compartment. It
was the Paris express that I had wanted to travel in which had arrived in Brest Litovsk an hour
before and had just had the wheels changed. There were 5 Belorussian ladies there - somewhat
stout, or as we rudely say “Potato fed”. At the first large town in Poland, they all got out,
passed their baggage, mainly sacks of food, through the window to each other. I offered my
“bungee cords” as a contribution to their endeavor. These peasants were taking food to sell in
Poland for hard currency. Indeed Russian peasants understood the free market system very fast.
Interestingly, Andrei Sakharov had argued that the USSR should break apart and come back
together in a voluntary, and more powerful and benevolent, union. Suskevich was trying to do
this. He got the leaders of the republics to agree to an accord that any visa for on country of
the former USSR would be valid for any other.
This has now changed and when I have to
travel both to Belarus and Russia I need 2 visas.
But I have violated this more than once. I
have entered Belarus, without a visa, on the train from Moscow, and come into Moscow from
Armenia without a visa.
Although this has confused the newly benevolent authorities I have
had no real problems.
I did not forget my meeting, in 1974, with Bill Anders at the meeting in Denver. Nor
did he. I later talked to him when he was Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
and he invited me to visit him in Norway when he was ambassador. At that meeting he
introduced me to the Norwegian nuclear people. I stayed in the Ambassador’s residence which
occupies a site in a city block. Apparently it was built by Alfred Nobel for his daughter as a
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wedding present.
Bill was out having dinner with the King when I arrived.
The reader
may recall that in 1948 I had gone with a group from the Oxford University Scout Club to a
Rover Scout meet in Sjak, in Norway.
The Crown Prince had come to visit each group’s
camp site, and had eaten supper with us. Now the Crown prince was King. I told Bill Anders
that in 1948 the Crown Prince had dinner with our small group which was the inverse of Bill
having dinner with the King! A couple of years later Bill and I talked, together with his
deputy Bertram Wolfe, when he was running GE Nuclear in San Jose.
Then Bill was asked
to run General Dynamics, which he took from being a large company losing money to a smaller,
profitable company. After a few years he retired to a house on Orcas Island in Puget Sound. I
asked him several times to support me in briefs of amicus curiae on nuclear matters with the
Atlantic Legal Foundation and also was very strong in his support of the Goshute Indians. He
told me that when I next visited Seattle he would pick me up at the airport and he would fly me
to his house. The opportunity came 10 years later in 2007 when the American Society for
Mechanical Engineers (ASME) awarded me the Dixy Lee Ray award. Bill was in Seattle, and
we drove out to hiis island. Bill and his wife Valerie introduced Andrée and me to several of
their friends. I was described as the major specific supporter of nuclear power. He also
praised me for my patience and persistence in this, and said that he did not have the patience.
Two of Bill and Valerie’s 5 children became fighter pilots. A third son would have also
become a fighter pilot but he has the same problem as I displayed in Worthy Down when I was
16. His stomach would not let him. Allo three of them joined Bill in a museum of WWII
aircraft in Bellingham, and on November 5th we flew across to the special opening day at
Bellingham. Bill has a four seater De Havilland Beaver monoplane, (often used by the
Canadian Forest Service for fire fighting). It was a fifteen minute ride and I am glad to say that
my stomach treated Bill better than the hapless pilot at Worthy Down some 60years before.
Risk Analysis
When in 1971 I decided to spend time discussing nuclear power, I decided that one
should not discuss one energy source in isolation but compare them across the board, both in
terms of health hazard, cost and environmental effects, taking the complete fuel chain into
account. How to influence the choices led me to write about pollution charges. (37, 141, 144,
146,148, 156, 160, 161, 167, 171, 174). But a brief letter “Kilowatt Deaths” (145) that
appeared in Physics Today in 1972 seems to have had the most influence. In a simple table I
produced my best estimate of the number of people who would die from using electricity
generated from a number of sources.
Leonard Hamilton, MD, of BNL told me that the
“kilowatt deaths” letter stimulated his more systematic studies at BNL. Others also found
these early papers stimulating.
I was slowly moving into an intellectual vacuum now filled by the field of Risk Analysis.
Since 1973 I have written extensively in the field of Risk Analysis (174, 227) and was a
founder member of the Society of Risk Analysis and was given their distinguished service
award. In this, I have been a pioneer in the use of comparing risks to aid in their understanding
and a co author with Crouch, of a seminal book in the field which went into a second edition
(227, 406). I have lectured on this subject in over 25 countries. (206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 218,
220, 240, 256, 272, 305, 306, 307, 309, 311, 317, 318, 327, 343, 345, 365, 378, 380, 384, 391,
395, 408, 533, 544, 563, 571, 627, 628, 635, 696, 746, 807, 847, 887)
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I have worked in particular on possible effects of low doses of anything on public health.
It started with the effect of low doses of radiation.
(457, 458, 470, 471, 695, 784, 787, 869)
and then on low doses of chemicals.
This is a very fundamental subject on which many
scientists are confused and therefore talk nonsense.
Sometimes we know that a substance or
action causes adverse effects on health when given at high doses. It might, for example,
cause adverse reactions in 30% of all people. But what happens if the substance is given at a
low dose, perhaps 100 times smaller? Is there no effect? Or does it cause adverse reactions in
30%/100 or 0.3% of all people? This last idea, called “low dose linearity” was first raised for
effects of ionizing radiation. But it may well apply, and I think it does, for may other
substances. I am, therefore, particularly concerned when anti-nuclear people considered
radiation to be uniquely dangerous.
They call themselves environmentalists.
I hate to give
them that honor. I believe, as the late Senator Tsongas publicly declared, that anyone who prefers
burning of coal to nuclear power cannot legitimately call him/herself an environmentalist.
I suspect that the intellectual concept and meaning of the phrase “low dose linearity” started with
radiation issues, because physicists were much involved, and to someone with a training in
physical sciences the idea of low dose linearity comes naturally. Physicists are also well used
to discussing “negative” results in terms of quantitative upper limits on a possible effect. The
issue is the extrapolation of risk from high doses in major events, such as the effects of the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, to the low doses normally encountered by humans. It is
crucial. This makes a study of all factors that might influence the dose-response all important.
I trace the concept to Professor Geoffrey Crowther in Reading University UK who in
1924 or so suggested that radiation cancers come from the ionization of a cell by radiation. All
the concepts of stochastic processes that a physicist learns then apply and low dose linearity.
But hundreds of cells get ionized each minute, yet on average less than one cancer appears in a
lifetime. So this needs a major modification. Nonetheless it influenced thinking. In 1927
the newly formed International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) adopted low
dose linearity, guided in part, so some stories go, by recent studies that showed that the effect of
radiation on fruit flies seemed to be linear. But the idea became more general many years later
and applies not only to radiation but also to chemicals and not only to cancer but other medical
end points. The crucial point is that radiation increases the incidence of cancers that otherwise
occur naturally but does not produce cancers that do not otherwise occur.
If the “radiation cancers” are indistinguishable from “natural cancers”, and no pathologist
can tell the difference unless he knows the exposure, then it seems reasonable to suppose that
radiation and natural background, whatever that is, act similarly at some stage in th development
of the cancer. Then Taylor’s theorem in mathematics applies and at low doses there must be
linearity.
Not only is this a contentious issue in radiation risk assessment but also in studies
of risks of chemicals at low doses. The Taylor’s theorem argument clearly also applies to
chemicals whether they are “initiators” or “promoters”, or alternatively whether they are “early
stage carcinogens” or “late stage carcinogens”. Theoretically Guess, Crump and Peto
emphasized this and their argument was used by the US EPA in its early days to justify a default
of low dose linearity - a fact which most people have forgotten. Martha Crawford (now Martha
Heitzman) and myself argue that the same argument applies to chemical end points other than
cancer (568). In particular it applies to lung cancers and other respiratory ailments caused by air
208
pollution or cigarette smoking. The argument makes no mention of the animal toxicologists
distinction between initiators and promoters, or early stage and late stage carcinogens.
Interestingly the European Union in its EXTERNe study accepted low dose linearity for air
pollutants, correctly in our view, but the US EPA does not.
I always insist to my students that an idea must be presented in three ways. In a formula.
In a graph. And in words. And the three must agree in as many details as possible. When
talking in 1979 to an audience of toxicologists and epidemiologist at a meeting of the Toxicology
Forum in New York City I used a graph to explain why low dose linearity is a probable scientific
reality . Professor Arthur Upton, then at NCI and shortly to return to NYU came up and said
that he at last understood the point.
Toxicologists, whether working for industry or for regulators, tended to assume a
non-linear response at low doses. In a review in 1987, (379), Lauren Zeise, Edmund Crouch
and myself found that the direct evidence for or against a linear, or near linear, dose response
relationship for chemical exposures in the workplace and environment, at the low doses of
present interest, is weak or non-existent. The “megamouse” study carried out at the National
Toxicology Laboratory in Arkansas seemed to show that the carcinogen (2-AAF) has a
threshold response for bladder tumors, although of course one cannot rule out a linear effect at
low doses much smaller than the direct extrapolation from high doses. But the bioassay results
are consistent with a linear response for liver tumors. This suggests that some carcinogens at
some sites might exhibit a linear dose-response and others might exhibit a non-linear dose
response relationship characteristic of acute toxicity. If the high dose carcinogenicity is
secondary to an acute toxic effect, the dose-response relationship will be that of the acute toxic
effect, which is often expected to be non-linear, rather than the linear relationship usually
assumed for carcinogens.
This might occur for asbestos where the Dr Mereweather, the Chief
Inspector of factories in the UK asked just this question in 1938, and of benzene where it may be
that cancer is always preceded by pancytopenia.
Perhaps it is true of arsenic also. Various
scientists are pursuing methods of explicitly incorporating the effects of high dose toxicity on
cell proliferation into general dose-response models for risk assessment although empirical
support is lacking. If chemicals likely to have nonlinear dose response relationships and those
for which all we have is the linear default with Taylor’s theorem, this characteristic could be
included in the risk assessment and different substances could be treated differently. If this could
be achieved, it would be most useful for carcinogen risk assessment. I believe that one of the
factors most likely to lead to strong nonlinearities in the dose-response relationship is toxicity to
the target organ.
Now that DNA analysis can be done routinely I have suggested
experiments along these lines. For example, persons exposed to fallout from Chernobyl, such
as people near Gomel, Belarus, are at a higher risk of leukemia than those not so exposed such
as residents of Minks.
Do they have identical or similar DNA structure? If different,
Taylor’s theorem would not seem the proper default. A farsighted Belorussian blood specialist,
Dr Eugene Ivanov, had frozen many samples of blood for further analysis When I suggested
such a study, and tried to get funding from the US DOE for the experiment, he was fired from his
job for discussing these matters with an American. He was later reinstated but I could not get
anyone to do the studies. I have suggested similar studies for lung cancer caused by arsenic
and cigarette smoking but no takers.
This argument that low dose linearity is the proper default for almost all pollutants has to
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be argued again and again and I have referred to it many times (600, 600a, 635, 638, 640, 644,
695, 717, 787, 869).
As of June 2008 I find at a meeting of the Society of Risk Analysis that
toxicologists are still struggling to separate linear and non linear mutagens and carcinogens. I
still insist that statements of threshold and non linearity at low doses must be accompanied by a
an explanation of why the naturally occurring adverse events take place.
An important issue is how to describe any technical situation. If it is not understood by
the decision makers and the people who elect them, it will be ignored.
A physicist will
naturally talk about the probability of an individual getting a cancer and is understood by most
other physicists. But often not by physicians and toxicologists. A professor at Harvard
Medical School said once “one should only regulate on the basis of those risks that are certain” meaning by certain those directly verified by epidemiology and not merely based on “theory”
however well based. But that is confusing terminology.
Toxicologists have persuaded
the US EPA that while low dose linearity may apply to carcinogens, other toxic effects cannot
be regulated on the basis of low dose linearity.
It is also closely related to the issue of what
one does when one has little information
It is crucially connected with the idea that a
substance is deemed dangerous only when a risk ratio exceeds 2 in some observed situation.
For common ailments that measured a risk of a few per cent and society wants to reduce risks to
far below this level.
A consistent approach seems necessary.
Consistency becomes of major practical importance in two major situations.
Some
anti nuclear activists would argue that radiation is uniquely dangerous at low doses and ban
nuclear power plants for this reason. I do not believe that nuclear power is uniquely dangerous.
Pro nuclear engineers counter that there really is a threshold for harm, and below this threshold
radiation is good for you. But I see no good data for this. I am often in the middle and try to
persuade the pro nuclear engineers to drop that argument. “Do you want to get into an esoteric
argument at a public meeting on this point, or do you want my support, and support of many
other physicists, that the environmental and public health hazards of nuclear power, are far
exceeded by the alternatives?”
Captains of the chemical industry like to argue both that there
is a threshold, at least for their particular chemical, or that no one has produced cancer with that
chemical either in man or in laboratory animals, and therefore that the risk is zero and society
should stop bothering them.
This led me naturally into major discussion of how one knows
what one does about chemical carcinogenesis. Sometimes I think that I am winning. Not
often. But in the last year, 2006/7 some people understand..
For the work on risk assessment I have been given several wards:
A medal as "Chernobyl Liquidator" in the USSR, 1987
Forum Award, American Physical Society for Forum on Science and Society 1990
"For his outstanding research and promotion of public understanding of a broad
spectrum of issues dealing with physics, the environment, and public health, including his work
on reactor safety, estimation of risks posed by environmental pollution and pioneering use of
comparative risk analysis."
Society for Risk Analysis, Distinguished Achievement Award 1993
Honorary Doctor; International Sakharov Environmental University (ISEU), Minsk 2001
2005 Erice (Ettore Majorana) Prize for Science and Peace, Erice 2006
"For his long-lasting involvement in "The Spirit of Erice" and its promotion to people
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of different culture and various civilizations with remarkable success, thus allowing the new
generation to envision the future with hope and confidence. Confidence and hope rooted in
Scientific Culture of which Professor Wilson has been an illustrious contributor"
2007 Dixy Lee Ray Award, American Society for Mechanical Engineers
"For significant contributions to the science and engineering of environmental
protection, particularly methodology of risk assessments, risk assessment of specific pollutants,
riska assessment of nuclear power including nuclear waste, and ethics in environmental science
and engineering.""
Presidential Citation, American Nuclear Society, (2008)
"For mentoring students for over 50 years in nuclear science, engineering and
technology and his tireless efforts promoting peaceful application of nuclear power in support of
“Getting the Word Out.” Through over 900 papers and publications, and myriad lectures, he has
provided invaluable insight and wisdom giving the nuclear community a profound legacy from
which to draw knowledge. Professor Wilson’s distinguished career is an inspiration."
It was, and is very gratifying to receive these awards.
In particular I liked Dixy Lee
Ray and her straightforwardness and honesty. Although I did not always agree with her, we
became good friends. I would have preferred to be rewarded for my experimental particle
physics . I was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences about 1958, much
younger than is now the usual situation. In about 1967 Denys Wilkinson proposed me for the
Royal Society since I am still a British subject as well as a US citizen. I was never elected. I
was not supposed to know, but I was informed that I was nominated at least once for
membership in the National Academy of Sciences in about 1969 and 1970.
About once a
year someone assumes, incorrectly, that I am member of NAS. That is embarrassing. Jack
Ruiana (professor of Electrical Engineering emeritus at MIT) does this and Andree comments
that it is because he thinks I ought to be e member. But I certainly made the right decisions in
1971 to become involved in environmental and public affairs when I was blocked in my
preferred pursuit of colliding electrons and positrons. Curiously, the National Academy of
Sciences was started by President Lincoln to give advice on national affairs. Most members of
the National Academy don’t involve themselves in national affairs as much as I do. If I had
been elected a member I might have had greater opportunities to help . When for example, I
criticized the membership of a number of critical NAS/NRC committees, I drafted a letter to the
President of the National Academy of Sciences.
I could not send it myself but Allan Bromley
kindly took it and forwarded it as his own.
Similarly I wrote a letter for the NY Times in
1980 supporting nuclear power, which Hans Bethe and Glenn Seaborg co-signed. But the NY
Times did not at that time accept more than two signatures, so although the author of the letter, I
removed my name.
Sabotage and Terrorism
My thoughts about terrorism arose in the 1990s. At that time we talked about sabotage.
A disgruntled employee of Consolidated Edison Company of New York had recently blown up a
substation to cause trouble. What could he do with nuclear power?
I discussed this with
Norman Rasmussen as early as 1973.
We agreed that a full risk analysis should include
sabotage as an accident initiator.
I have a copy of a report from Sandia corporation in 1976
doing just that. I was insistent, that power companies should not be allowed to forget this and
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hide it under the rug because we did not know the frequency of the first step in the accident chain
- the existence of a saboteur. In describing the AEC’s defense in depth philosophy and its
numerical analysis in Rasmussen’s Reactor Safety Study I pointed out as early as 1973 that there
is a chain of 4 events the probabilities of which must be multiplied to obtain the accident
probability.
The probability of the initiator. The failure of the Emergency Core Cooling
System (ECCS), and the probability of the wind blowing from the reactor toward a populated
city.
The overall probability becomes small. But a saboteur who is knowledgeable could
start an emergency; then set off two small bombs. One to disable the ECCS system and the
second to make a hole in the containment. All to be done when the wind is blowing toward the
city!. Moreover a terrorist, such as a Lebanese in one of the twenty or so small groups in that
fractionated country, or a PLO fighter could be a “sleeper”. He could enroll at MIT and take
Rasmussen’s reactor safety course. Then he could take a job with a nuclear power utility and
learn the weak points of his reactor and finally start on his nefarious pursuit. This was my
thought in 1975 at a time when it was already difficult to persuade people to take extreme events,
and sabotage or terrorism seriously. But I thought, incorrectly, that 20 terrorists acting in
concert, as they did on September 11th 2001 was unlikely. That changes the picture
completely.
But when I looked at alternatives I realized that natural gas posed greater opportunities
for an imaginative terrorist. I wrote the little paper, using the words from a TV advertisement
“Natural Gas is a Beautiful Thing?” (156), merely adding the question mark. The total energy
content of a 17 million gallon tank of LNG, two of which sit in Everett on Boston Harbor, was
equivalent to 20 Hiroshima bombs. Can one set them off? It is not easy but it is possible.
One of the possible initiators was a liquid-liquid superheat explosion similar to the explosion
when molten steel is poured onto a wet floor. A couple of the Argonne National Laboratory
scientists were discussing, both theoretically and experimentally, the criteria for that to happen
and it seemed to be possible. Ed. Purcell introduced me to Stirling Colgate of Los Alamos who
was also concerned. I was asked, in 1977, to be on a committee of the General Accounting
Office on Safety of Liquefied Petroleum Gases. After the final dinner meeting we played a
game. Who can find the worst way of sabotaging an LNG facility? There were a variety of
good, or perhaps I should say bad, ideas. The organizer then said he would collect the notes
and destroy them. This is because one does not want to give ideas to a terrorist, who, it was
assumed, was of lesser intelligence.
This raises the whole question of what one should keep
secret and what not. Borrowing a terminology from the military, I believe that in general short
term issues, tactics, should be secret, but long term issues, strategies, cannot be kept secret for
long and it is best to make them widely available so that counter measures may be prepared. I
like to refer to the case of the Canadian heroine Laura Secord, a farmer’s teen aged daughter,
who drove her cows across the invading US forces in 1812, and found out the order of battle for
the next day, thereby foiling the US advance. My own suggestion, details of which must remain
unstated, was to add a little liquid oxygen into the tank.
The way I then proposed, cannot now
be done.
Of course LNG accidents are only one type of severe accidents that can be created by a
saboteur. I had already thought about dam failures and the crude failure probability was
already listed in my letter “kilowatt deaths” But I had a more sinister thought. The Connecticut
River between New Hampshire and Vermont is almost owned by the utility companies who have
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installed hydroelectric dams along almost the whole length. Near Littleton is the Moore
reservoir and hydroelectric station with a 140 Mwe hydroelectric plant. Suppose that I was to
blow up this dam at a time of flood. The cascading waters would cause each dam downstream
to fail in turn all the way down to the sea at Old Saybrook. I discussed this with professor
Arthur Casagrande, Harvard’s soil science expert who had designed half the earth filled dams
in North America. He agreed that it was possible and went one better. What about a dam
failure in the upper Missouri, with the resultant cascading flood taking out dams all the way
down the Mississippi? He added that he had designed a dam near St Louis which was large
enough and sturdy enough to hold in the event of such a catastrophe upstream.
It was about
this time that I was at the energy and environment meeting in Boulder in 1974. In discussions
with Eugene Wigner, we, or more likely he alone, formulated the simple concept that when
there is a lot of easily available stored energy, such as water in a reservoir, easily burnable fuel,
(or indeed carbon atoms knocked off the lattice by fast neutrons) in one place and a lot of people
in a nearby location there is potential for disaster. We agreed that all energy systems should be
analyzed for such possible disasters, technically called the high consequence, low probability
accident.
But of course “stored energy” is a slightly vague concept. The rate at which a
chemical reaction can take place is crucial also. Should we worry that iron, in the presence of
air, will oxidize? We do not call it burning, but call it rusting, because it happens so slowly.
Nonetheless the concept is useful and instructive.
In the 1970s the concept of Event Tree Analysis was being developed for nuclear power,
although old line engineers were loath to accept it. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission
backed away from it, largely as result of public pressure from Henry Kendall and the Union of
Concerned Scientists. I tried then to get it accepted (239, 264).
I counted 5 ways in which
the use of Rasmussen’s even tree analysis by industry and NRC would have prevented the TMI
accident. Others saw this too and after Three Mile Island NRC officially embraced event tree
analysis, but it was not completely accepted till the mid nineties. . LNG and Chemical
industries accepted it about 1980. NASA was urged to accept event tree analysis after the
Challenger accident but only did so about 1990. I had talked about it in many meetings. The
9/11 disaster at the World Trade Center should have persuaded the building industry to accept it
but it seems that buildings will be rebuilt at the site without any such careful reanalysis. I have
brought this up several times but although I ha had superficial agreement, I have had no
success.
When 9/11 came around I was therefore well equipped to note that paying attention to the
high consequence low probability accident was the most important step to make society less
vulnerable to the consequences of terrorism.
I gave talks on this and other aspects. For the
Global Foundation in London in 2001 (811), and Florida in 2002; to the PSAMS conference in
Puerto Rico, and at the World Federation of Sciences seminar on Planetary emergencies in Erice
in 2002, and the Biological Terrorism meeting (BTR3) in Albuquerque in 2003 (863).
I sent
a copy to my former colleague, John D. Graham, who had started the Harvard Center for Risk
Analysis and was then administrator in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the
Office of management and Budget.. He sent it around to the heads of all relevant government
offices and it can still be located through their website. It is surprising to me how new this
concept seemed to almost everyone at these meetings.
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As noted earlier in these memoires I had, as an graduate student in Oxford wondered how
much havoc I could create with the silver cyanide plating solution in the cupboard by putting into
the water supply. I wondered about epidemics and Crouch and I discussed them a little in our
book on Risk-Benefit Analysis. I postulated that the same concept, that a serious attention to
extreme natural disasters might be important as a first step in coping with potential terrorist
acts. I was discouraged with this by the biological warfare people at an Erice meeting but when
I gave my general terrorism talk in Albuquerque in 2003, it resonated with General Annette
Sobel, a physician in the Air Force who was the organizer of the meeting and in charge of
Homeland Security in the area. She was instrumental in ensuring that some of the funds from
the US Department of Homeland Security go into preventing natural outbreaks of diseases. At
the 2004 and 2005 BTR meetings several people were saying the same thing. The natural
epidemic of SARS also helped to change peoples’ attitudes. The Dean of Harvard School of
Public Health, Dr Barry Bloom, said this also, so I became sure that my postulate is correct for
biological terrorism as well as for terrorism involving physical and engineering projects..
Although the postulate is widely accepted by experts, very little preventive action seems
to be based thereon. The Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism of the World Federation
of Sciences has picked this up and issued recommendations. In particular how to reduce the
average number of persons that a sufferer from a disease infects and how to reduce this number
below one by urging the populace to take simple precautions if the early stages of a pandemic
become apparent.. The World Health organization have known this for years, and my friend,
Dr Kazem Behbehani, uses it in his program to eliminate elephantitis, country by country. But
where is the elementary instruction on coping with epidemics in schools? Why are not the kits
available and advertized at the major drug store chains? Why is the Massachusetts Emergency
Planning group so laid back? Why does not every School of Public Health in the universities
world highlight this as an important issue?
Barry Bloom talked about this but as Dean of the
Harvard School of Public Health, he could have taken action. As I contemplate this I realize
that I and others still have interesting work to do. This is comforting to me on a personal level,
but when I worry about the future of my grandchildren and the human race generally I am not
encouraged.
Chemical Carcinogens and risks thereof
I have always been attentive to global environmental issues such as global air pollution
and acid rain (225,244). My interest in chemical carcinogens arose in Denver, Co in summer
1974. I had given a talk on comparing the risks (to health) of energy systems at a conference on
energy arranged by Edward Teller at the “Edward Teller Center for Science Technology and
Political Thought” at the University of Colorado. In addition to a “School” with twenty
participants, there was also a large public meeting in Denver of 300 people.
This was part of
what I call “my right wing summer”. The Vice President of Air Products and Chemicals, Ross
Adams, came up to me and commented that he liked my approach and they needed it in the
chemical industry. “We had a problem with cancers caused by vinyl chloride” he said. We
think we are doing the right thing but are having difficulties in explaining this to the public.
“Can you help us”. “I know nothing about vinyl chloride,” I said. “But I will look into it. If I
think you are right you will have made a friend. If I think you are wrong you will have made an
enemy. That is the risk you take.”. He took the risk and I became a consultant. I read an
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excellent EPA paper by Dr McGaughy. McGaughy had looked both at the human data and also
at some animal data where Maltoni in Bologna, Italy had kept Sprague-Dawley rats in and
atmosphere containing benzene and they also had developed angiosarcoma. The next year was
the year my father was dying of lung cancer, so when I went to see him in Oxford. I also called
on Sir Richard Doll - then Regius Professor of Medicine and a member of the SCR at my
college, Christ Church in Oxford, and then I went to visit the VP of the Imperial Chemical
Industries. in Welwyn Garden City.
The risk assessment was simple. I presented it at a meeting of the American Chemical
Society in San Francisco in 1975. Exposures in the workplace were very high.
No one had
taken care to seal leaks and when the public complained of the smell the factory managers just
shut the windows, reducing the exposures outside, but increasing them inside. Some exposures
were as high as 10% (which exceeded the anaesthetic level and the workers passed out) most
were over 1000 ppm. Workers began to get a rare liver disease - angiosarcoma. The
Risk-Ratio (RR), for angiosarcoma, the incidence among those exposed divided by the
incidence for those unexposed, was 400. That was huge! But there were not many people
exposed. I was given access to the vinyl chloride registry of some two hundred victims,
worldwide, over the previous 20 years. Industry, labour, and regulators all did the right thing.
The plants were sealed to avoid fugitive emissions and occupational exposures were reduced
1000 fold. Industry actually made money - they avoided the loss of 5% of the vinyl chloride.
The problem was solved although some environmental advocates and, alas, the head of OSHA
continued to raise the issue as late as 1980 and demand further unnecessary action. It was a
pity these environmental advocates could not move on. There were so many more problems to
address that needed their attention.
One problem became apparent to me. Epidemiologists tended to talk to themselves and
not to the public, not even to scientists in other disciplines. A typical, otherwise first rate,
paper on the effects of pollutant X might end with a statement that the Risk Ratio is 3.3 with no
discussion of what that might mean in public policy. What matters in establishing that a
pollutant is troublesome is the Risk Ratio. But to the individual what matters more is the Risk
itself, and what matters for society the risk summed over all people exposed.
The Risk
Ratio for vinyl chloride of 400 did not mean a widespread problem, because very few people
were exposed. But a much smaller risk ratio of 3.0, with a much more widespread exposure
might. In 1977 the FDA came out with a fine discussion on saccharin. No person has ever
been known to have any sickness from saccharine exposure, so that any calculation of a problem
had to be by use of animal data. Rats get bladder cancer when exposed to high doses. From
this bitter experience of rats FDA estimated that 500 persons a year might develop cancer in the
USA, more that the number of angiosarcomas world wide in 30 years! THIS was an issue that
deserved my attention. Alas, 30 years later I still have trouble explaining it to people.
When I went to see Richard Doll in 1976 to discuss vinyl chloride, he suggested to me
that there was a real need to compare animal data on carcinogens and human data to see to what
extent one could take animal data to predict the behavior in man and choose a “Safe” exposure
level. This we did. I had just hired as a research fellow for energy studies Dr Edmund A.C.
Crouch who had world with Richard Eden at the Cavendish Laboratory. He changed the field of
risks of chemical carcinogens and we wrote a couple of seminal papers. Edmund was, and is,
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imaginative and careful. He was always correcting me when I was careless in distinguishing
between the estimates and the estimator and such like niceties. I get tied up in knots about
whether to divide by N or N-1 when calculating the standard deviation. Edmund doesn’t.
Also he is first rate with computers - both software and hardware. Indeed a few years later the
head of the statistics Department at Harvard once said of him: “he is the best statistician I know:
he gets it right first time.
The first paper, published in 1979 with Edmund Crouch, was
about a comparison of carcinogenic potency in rats and mice and hence (hopefully) in men (211).
Edmund wrote several more papers about this on his own (Crouch, 1983a, 1983b).
These papers compare potency in several species -- principally comparing potency in rat
and mouse. It is shown that when animals are fed the same amount, daily, as a fraction of body
weight, the lifetime incidence of cancer is comparable.
There are variations with the particular
strain of rat or mouse, but these are usually small factors. Better and more data, which were
published in the second edition of our book on Risk-Benefit analysis (717) , confirm this
general conclusion.
There are limited data on humans, but where they are, they are in
general agreement with the same result with an important exception that we noted at the time arsenic. We attributed this, tentatively but erroneously, to the idea that this was an exception
particular to the particular mode of entry into the body, by inhalation. It was 10 years before
the tragedy of the world wide misunderstanding hit the world, but I was among the first to realize
to realize it and its implications. The tragedy that no one was looking carefully at the effects of
chronic doses of arsenic when they urged use of ground water rather than surface water is
discussed elsewhere and most attribute the tragedy in Bangladesh to blindness of the World
Bank, UNICEF or British Geological Survey. But in my view the problem lies deeper.
Toxicologists, the world over, had implicitly but incorrectly, assumed that rats and mice were
always good indicators of human responses, and were not alert to exceptions.
As I ponder this issue of animal-man comparisons I also think of asbestos. Here a factor
enters that is additional to the chemical properties. The shape and size of the fibers seems to
matter. This brings a physical parameter in addition to the obvious chemical one. Over 30
years scientists have floundered on this issue. Are animals a good test? Most scientists have
tended to rely on human data which unfortunately has been extensive because of high past
exposures.
An attempt by the US EPA in July 2008 to establish a more reasoned risk
assessment has foundered because the scientific committee established to examine the problem
has said , basically, we do not know enough to make many distinctions. But it does appear, to
my surprise, that chrysotile asbestos, a form of serpentine asbestos, which can be distinguished
by electron microscopy from amosite, crocidolite, and tremolite which form amphiboles, is a
little less potent in causing lung cancer than the amphiboles and a lot less potent in causing
mesothelioma (906).
What does this mean for the materials that are being made by our
enthusiastic nanotechnologists?
I do not believe that anyone has any really good idea of how
to address these new risks.
The role of bioassays in understanding risks of chemicals
Although animal bioassays have been used for half a century to discover which chemicals
cause cancer, their use in quantitative assessment of risk is only about 25 years old. The U.S.
Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have made the
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most extensive use of quantitative risk assessments and the assumptions they make dominate the
field. However the assumptions are rarely clearly stated.
The four most crucial assumptions
are:
(1) that a substance that is carcinogenic in animals is carcinogenic with a similar potency
(measured in appropriate units) in humans;
(2) that there is a linear (proportional) relation between dose and carcinogenic response
(probability of developing cancer); and
(3) the slope of the dose response relationship at low doses can be derived from data at high
doses
(4) it is reasonable to treat all carcinogens, regardless of proposed mechanism of action, in the
same way.
Studies on animals are used to detect potential human carcinogens before harm to people
is obvious. The usefulness of animal tests is usually justified by reference to the fact the all
compounds identified as human carcinogens through epidemiology have been demonstrated to
be animal carcinogens, although sometimes after much difficulty and in at least one case,
arsenic, with lower than the expected potency. (However, the converse of this argument, that
all animal carcinogens are or can be expected to be human carcinogens, has been challenged.
Some challenges can be addressed by a careful consideration of potency and exposure. This
point has been hard to get across. A paper by Ennever et al. in 1987 listed several animal
carcinogens which had not been demonstrated to cause cancer in humans in spite of careful and
responsible epidemiological studies. But Goodman and I (479, 482, 483) showed that the
carcinogenic potency in humans predicted on the basis of chemical bioassays and the "usual"
interspecies relationship is not large enough to expect tumors to appear in the small, moderately
exposed group of humans in these studies. I still have to explain to intelligent scientists who
ought to know better, that there is a difference between not finding an effect because it is below
the limit of detection, and it not being there.
Each of the major regulatory assumptions listed above has come to be challenged by the
scientific community. In many ways, the objections hinge on assumption 4, that one should start
with an assumption that all carcinogens are carcinogenic at some level, but they can differ by
factors of 10 million in their potency. Empirical studies have demonstrated that there are
instances when assumptions 1 and 2 are indeed reasonable as shown in our first paper (211), and
times when they are not). In particular assumption 1 is wrong for arsenic and in my view an
adherence to this assumption, without realizing that it is an assumption is a major reason for the
tragedy in Bangladesh and in SE Asia generally (900). I and my friends and colleagues have
been searching for ways in which differences between carcinogens can be demonstrated
empirically hoping to help bridge the gap between scientists and regulatory scientific policy.
Our colleague, the late Professor Fiering, suggested that one of his graduate students
Lauren Zeise work with us for a PhD thesis. This she did, using a small grant I got from DOE.
Lauren was poor in statistics but Edmund taught her. Indeed when Lauren got her first job in
the California regulatory system, she found, with wonder (so she told me), that she seemed to be
the only person in the department who understood statistics! She may still be.
As a student
Lauren noticed a paper by Parodi in Italy pointing out an unexpected correlation between acute
toxicity and carcinogenic potency. He PhD thesis at Harvard University in 1984, under my
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direction, then became: conforming and expanding this result using the CBDS data base for
carcinogenic potency and the RTECS data base for acute toxicity.. It was hard to get it
published. We tried several Journals. Typically we got two extreme (but both negative)
reviews. The first said this is obvious and not worth publishing, the second said these are two
different medical end points and there cannot be any connection! That told me that we were on
to something important, but Lauren was in despair. I cheered her up with the story, probably
oversimplified but told to me by Rosalyn Yalow herself of her early work on radioimmunoassay.
Rosalyn had tried to get it published in three separate journals, and was turned down. Finally
her collaborator persuaded the Editor of the third journal to publish the paper provided that one
controversial conclusion about the mechanism of insulin I believe, was eliminated. Rosalyn
told me that the offending sentence was finally published in her Nobel Prize speech. Lauren did
get her work published. (306,346,364,) but not in a Nobel Prize speech, an honor she has yet to
receive.
But perhaps the most controversial, the most misunderstood and potentially the most
important, was our proposed use of this for regulation of carcinogens.
The Society for Risk
Analysis with its journal “Risk Analysis”, had just started and Edmund and I broached the
subject in the first paper of the first issue (258). Professor Richard Zeckhauser, an economist at
the Kennedy School of Government, was a reviewer, and he discussed this with us at the Science
Center cafeteria.
Our idea was, and is, to accept this correlation as a statement of fact,
although not a statement of causation, but nonetheless to use it in estimates of risk for regulatory
purposes. This, we felt was being properly cautious, although as noted in the section on my
work with the Atlantic Legal Foundation and the brief we submitted in Joiner, this should not
mean that animal data should by themselves be used for assigning blame or awarding damages.
If one had data on Carcinogenisis in animals then there is a reasonable prediction of what the
carcinogenic potency in people will be with an uncertainty range attached.
Much of the
toxicological community had been doing this qualitatively for a century without clearly saying
so. The danger of the approach is to forget the assumptions and limitations. The terrible
example is arsenic. The world had basically assumed that if rats and mice don’t get cancer why
should people? That arsenic is an exception to our rule, leads me to ask the question, what other
exceptions are lurking around the corner that will cause another catastrophe like the SE Asia
arsenic catastrophe? I am still in 2007, having a tough time trying to get scientists to think
about the problem in this way.
We tried to extend this approach to situations where all we know is the acute toxicity,
maybe only in rats or mice . We suggested that this can give us the first estimate of
carcinogenic potency in people.
Of course, we never suggested, nor do we believe, that this
should replace more direct data when those data can be collected. But it can guide anyone
producing a new chemical whether or not to abandon it or to go on to the carcinogenic bioassay
and maybe a clinical trial. This led also to another suggestion for which at the time (25 years
ago) I was much criticized.
I noted that of the chemicals found to be carcinogenic in animals,
most clustered just at the limit of detection and none were found to be 100 times more
carcinogenic than the detection limit. Bruce Ames and collaborators showed half of all tested
chemicals had a measurable (statistically significant) carcinogenic potency and this did not, and
does not, depend on whether the chemicals are naturally present in the environment or were
man made. I postulated and still postulate that if we had perfect measurements one could
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generate a plot of number of chemicals vs. log potency which is normal, but half the chemicals
with a detected potency and the other half with a potency that is real but undetectable with
present procedures. This postulate led to several suggestions. The first is that we should not
ask; “is this chemical carcinogenic?” But assume it is carcinogenic and estimate the potency by
all means available. We should also never say that a certain chemical is a non-carcinogen but
say that it is a chemical with a potency less than X, where X is the best estimate from all the
data, direct or indirect. I thought and think, that this is a simple way of guiding us in what to
do next. But one distinguished toxicologist for example, said “It is the craziest idea I have
ever heard”. I recently heard, 20 years later, that some important toxicologists are thinking it to
be less crazy than they thought at first.
Maybe they will tell me directly and credit me with
the thought. But on this I am not optimistic.
Very few people have used the NTP CBDS database for addressing problems and
questions about carcinogenisis. This data base is of the tumors and other lesions in over 300,000
rodents exposed to a variety (over 400) of chemicals. There have been several recent
discussions suggesting that regulation based upon these animal bioassays cause unnecessary
panic in the American populace. I disagree and in a letter to the Washington Times in 2005
(880) and claim that the problem is the attempt to regulate minuscule risks. Alas, the industry
have never come to grips with this.
Alas, we got into a little conflict and misunderstanding with Bruce Ames and Lois Gold, .
They had undertaken an important and massive task of listing the basic all chemicals alleged to
cause cancer in animals. I call it the Gold book. Bruce picked up on Lauren’s correlation and
, in my view attached more meaning to it than I believe is justified and not, in my view, even
correct. He claimed that the carcinogenic effects are due to the toxic effects of dosing chemicals
at too high a dose. Unfortunately that claim does not work out in practice. More
importantly, he and Lois claimed that the interspecies comparison of carcinogenic potency is a
tautological consequence of the previously known correlation between acute toxic responses in
rats and mice.
We argued about this and wrote a couple of papers thereon (340,461). The
last was a careful statistical (Monte Carlo) study of the relationship between acute toxicity and
carcinogenic potency to address the extent to which they are real and the extent to which they
might be statistical artifacts (461).
The main pont is that there exist very few, if any,
chemicals with a high carcinogenic potency but low toxicity and this fact was known well before
anyone did any statistical analysis.
We also looked at other aspects of the data on carcinogenisis in rats and mice. Byrd et
al, 1988, 1990 studied the concordance between different organ sites for different species
(437,500) and demonstrated that rare tumors in one species are better predictors of tumors in
another species than are common tumors; this was the first definitive quantitative justification for
a procedure adopted by both IARC and FDA (437,500).. Contrary to our initial presumption,
liver tumors in B6C3F1 mice are as good a predictor of tumors in rats as other common
tumors. Moreover, benign liver tumors (adenomas) are as predictive as malignant tumors
(carcinomas) (500). With George Gray we showed that concordance studies across sites and
species improves when common regulatory criteria (as used by FDA for example) are
used. This is a quantitative justification for these procedures (620). Then wee used
Monte-Carlo modeling, to study false-positive detection rates in long-term rodent bioassays,
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(650) and showed that anticarcinogenic effects (called hormesis by Calabrese) is common in the
CBDS database (642,,650 and erratum)) One important issue is the tumor site concordance
between humans and laboratory animals. This was explored directly by my colleagues Gray and
Evans in 1992. With humans and mice there was no evidence of tumor site concordance. A
similar comparison of humans with rats results in a statistically significant level of discordance,
that is a response in one tissue in one species is actually statistically associated with the lack of
that response the other species. In this data set there is no statistically significant association (at
the p = 0.05 level) of tumor site between rats and mice for those human carcinogens tested in
both species, although evidence of discordance is present with 0.10 < p < 0.05. We began to
study these site specific correlations in detail with a view to comparing the predictions of an
Absolute Risk (AR) and a Relative Risk (RR) model.
Interestingly there is an anti-correlation between the incidence of liver tumors in control
(non dosed) rodents and lymphomas. This seems to be most pronounced for histiocytic
lymphoma and adenomas.
We produced the most detailed study to date of this (642, 650, 743,
744). We then began to examine in a little detail the effects of tumor
groupings (classifications) on the fraction of chemicals being studied that are assigned to be
carcinogens or anti-carcinogens, A preliminary report on this was presented as a poster at the
Society of Toxicology (SOT) meeting in March 1999 and was then published (745, 748) In
addition members of the group have been authors of a number of other papers on specifics of
chemicals, or asbestos (207, 209, 212, 218, 240, 258, 304, 309, 317, 327, 332, 343, 346, 347,
378, 391, 408, 414, 440, 451, 455, 499, 495, 499, 701.). Notwithstanding the arguments just
above, we discussed in an unpublished lecture at Professor Calabrese’s annual seminar on
hormesis that in the same animal species one can often have both anti-carcinogenic effects at
one tumor site and carcinogenic effects at another tumor site. When the cancer rates are added
the total cancer rate has a dip. This was obviously true in one of the early experiments on
dioxin by Kociba and others, but often ignored.
I tried, unsuccessfully, to get Edmund Crouch appointed in the School of Public Health
so in 1987 he left to a small, very good, company Cambridge Environmental. We let these ideas
sit undeveloped for some years.
Then a graduate student, Francesco (Frank) Pompei, came
on a very promising development. He had noticed that cancer incidence above age 70 flattened
and fell. I said: “nonsense. That cannot be.” The Armitage Doll multistage theory, about
which I had just lectured to the graduate class on Risk Analysis, predicts that incidence rises
indefinitely. I was right about the Armitage-Doll prediction but wrong about the data. This
led at once to another discovery we are finding it hard to get the “experts” to accept.
It has been the conventional wisdom for a longtime that if a person does not die of
something else (car accident, heart disease etc.) he/she will die of cancer. This view is being
challenged by the fact that the age-specific incidence of cancer does not seem to rise indefinitely
but flattens off about age 80 and even falls above that age. This was pointed out by Frank who
successfully defended his Harvard PhD thesis on this subject in April 2002. Papers followed
(805) Better data are presented in a comment on a paper by Campisi (868) . These were
expanded in a conference poster. Some implications were presented by Pompei, and Wilson
(872).
But the most comprehensive data on 20 carcinogens in males and females for 3
different observational periods. are in a recently published paper in the lead journal “Cancer
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Research” in 2008.
All but one show a similar fall of the incidence to zero at age 100.
Then we were told by critics that this fall off does not appear in animals. True, it mostly
does not. That is because the “regulatory” bioassay is to study rats and mice up to age 2 years
and then to kill them in a “terminal sacrifice” That corresponds to about age 80 in people.
For studies where animals last longer, there is a flattening and fall off.
Pompei, Polkanov and
Wilson showed that there is a flattening and fall off (805). There is one data set, the so called
“megamouse” study, or the ED01 data., where animals are followed to death at 800 days.
But
these are old data and our attempt to decode the data from the file that we were given led to a
gross error that unfortunately we published. The incidence does not fall off in cancer incidence
as fast as we first thought. We are now examining the data more carefully.
We note that the
animals dosed by high levels of 2,4,DAA show high incidence of cancer in the age period 2-3
years.
I tentatively postulate that this is because 2-4 DAA acts to reduce senescence, allowing
cancers to develop. If this postulate is true, there should be a concomitant life extension. So
far it seems that the life extension is small. We repeatedly urge chemical industry and the
National Toxicology Program to carry out their bioassays till the end of life so that this
phenomenon may be studied further.
The obvious question now is; “what is wrong with the conventional theories such as that
of Armitage and Doll? Or the clonal expansion theory of Moolgavkar and Knudsen?”
Our
critics have suggested that the data imply a variation in sensitivity among people. This
explanation would have to include the assumption that the number of completely non susceptible
persons varies with cancer site in such a way that the turn over happens at the same age for each
cancer. This means 99% completely non susceptible people for a rare cancer and 20% for a
common cancer. Some people had speculated that the problem was in the mathematical
approximations used. Ritter, Burmistrov, Pompei, and Wilson (876) examined the
mathematically exact formulation and showed that it does not alter the above conclusion.
Uses of Risk Analysis for Regulation
Some scientists involved in scientific policy argue that one should take no action, even
preventative, unless there is rigorous scientific proof of the efficacy of the action. I think this is
overly conservative. I believe that one must be cautious in new situations. This is often
discussed as the “Precautionary Principle) which is important but badly defined.
Often there
is more evidence that a substance or procedure is safe than a person knows or is willing to admit.
We have discussed this in a couple of papers (544, 571, 847). I differ with many persons
demanding action in that I think that it is important at all times to be fully aware of what is
scientifically proved and what is conjecture. If one regulates on the basis of a conjecture, or
fails to regulate, one must always be willing to change one’s mind as new information becomes
available. This “intermediate “ position has been hard to sustain.
Historically it seemed reasonable that cancer might appear in man in the same organ as it
appears in animals (rodents). In 1973 Tomatis noticed that there is a greater correlation between
animal carcinogenicity and human carcinogenicity if the sites were allowed to be different for the
two species, than if they were forced to be the same. This was further confirmed by Crouch and
Wilson (1979) and by Crouch (1983a,1983b) who studied the comparison of carcinogenic
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potency between rats and mice. In 1983 the Carcinogenic Assessment Group (CAG) of the
EPA, made this assumption explicit for regulatory purposes. No explicit biological rationale was
ever put forth to support this assumption. The Carcinogen Assessment Group (CAG) of EPA
now assumes that if a chemical produces a statistically significant excess of tumors in a group of
animals, usually rats or mice, at any one site, then it will be considered to pose a probable risk of
cancer to humans at some unspecified site. There are several problems with this interpretation.
Since carcinogenic potency and acute toxicity have been found to be correlated, and there is an
inter-species correlation of acute toxicities, there is a strong empirical connection between
toxicity and carcinogenicity as noted above. This could be explained simply if acute toxicity is
the cause of tumors with most chemicals, as urged by Bruce Ames and Lois Gold, although
other explanations are possible. There are problems with this simple explanation. In particular
if the Ames and Gold explanation applies to most chemicals it is hard to understand why there
appears to be little concordance across tumor sites.
EPA did not formally consider it to be relevant to the quantitative risk assessment
whether the site in which tumors are found in rats differs from the site in which they are found in
mice, and makes no implication that tumors will be found at the same site in humans. However,
such considerations appear in discussing the general toxicological profile of the substance, for
instance the appearance of tumors in the same site in both sexes or species tested is taken as
stronger evidence for potential human carcinogenicity. In this sense, all carcinogens are
considered the same. However, other uses of bioassay data by EPA, PBPK models for example,
have the concordance of sites as an implicit assumption. Although EPA developed a fairly well
defined method for risk assessment, the logical and scientific underpinning for this method
remains weak. The EPA theory is "unified" in the sense that the risk is calculated for most
chemicals in the same way, regardless of any mechanism for carcinogenisis that may have been
proposed. The EPA assumes a linear dose-response at low doses, but allows data to suggest
differences from linearity at high doses. Although often called a "linearized multistage" model, it
is more accurately called a "truncated polynomial" procedure, (379) since it is a mathematical
model whose relationship to the biological multistage model is not unique. This method
generates a "plausible upper bound" estimate of carcinogenic potency that has been widely
criticized in the scientific community. It has more recently been replaced by a default approach
that gives a similar low dose risk - to draw a straight line from the lowest response at a low dose
(LD10) to the origin.
Tumor sites are said to be concordant across species if the tumors appear at the same
anatomical site in different species when they are exposed to the same carcinogenic agent.
Although usually ignored in risk assessment, concordance plays a very large implicit role in the
process. In the hazard identification portion of risk assessment the underlying assumption of
perfect concordance plays a role in both epidemiology and the interpretation of the relevance of
animal bioassay results to humans. Tumor site concordance often guides the design of
epidemiology studies. The results of an animal bioassays may lead to case/control epidemiologic
studies examining the risk of cancer in humans in the same site in which it was found in animals.
If carcinogenic agents frequently affect humans and animals at the same site this strategy can
help to focus the efforts of epidemiologist. On the other hand, if tumor site concordance is not to
be expected, this approach may hinder attempts to identify human carcinogens by focusing the
attention of epidemiologist on single tumor sites. In addition to its influence on epidemiology, in
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hazard identification tumor site concordance is frequently invoked by those who wish to ignore
or downgrade the relevance to humans of tumors in rodent tissues with no human equivalent
(e.g. zymbal gland) or when concordance is lacking.
In dose-response evaluation tumor site concordance is important both as the basic
assumption of dose-response modeling and in the determination of "dose." The standard models
of dose response used in risk assessment, such as the "linearized multistage (LMS) model" (more
accurately called a truncated polynomial model) that used to be favored by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), actually calculate a site specific cancer potency from
animal data which theoretically is only applicable to the same site in humans. The use of this
model to estimate risk to humans at any site is out of necessity rather than theory. Tumor site
concordance is also an important but usually unacknowledged assumption in the use of
physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models in risk assessment. In order to improve
the cross-species and high dose to low dose evaluation of risk it is often advocated that PBPK
models be used to calculate the dose to the target organ rather than the dose administered to
animals or humans for purposes of dose-response evaluation. If, however, target organs are not
concordant across species, then target organ dose may be an inappropriate dose metric.
Examining the issue of tumor site concordance, and perhaps identifying cases when it is an
appropriate assumption, and when it is not, should increase our knowledge in these issues of
cross-species extrapolation. In addition, study of concordance should generate biologically based
hypotheses about factors known to influence tumor site concordance - such as similarities or
differences in pharmacokinetics, metabolism, or gene expression, in different species.
Most of the examination of cross-species extrapolation of carcinogenic response has
focused on the fact of carcinogenicity itself, rather than the site of response. In addition to the
purported 100% correlation between humans and animals it has been demonstrated that rats and
mice have a fairly high, about 75% concordance of carcinogenic response when challenged with
the same chemical
Others have shown, however, that cross species prediction is somewhat
better for mutagens that nonmutagens and for chemicals with high acute toxicity again indicating
that scientific research may be able to demonstrate qualitative and quantitative differences
between chemical carcinogens.
Twenty years ago, in the 1970s, it seemed natural to search for evidence of
carcinogenicity after chronic administration of a substance at the same site where the substance
had been shown to cause toxicity. Many historical examples exist. Benzene at high doses
produces pancytopenia (it kills blood cells), and it also produces leukemia. Exposure to asbestos
results in asbestosis (of the lung) and later was shown to cause lung cancer. Vinyl chloride is
toxic to both human and rat liver, and also causes angiosarcoma in both humans and rats.
Aflatoxin B1 is both toxic to the liver and is an established risk factor for liver cancer. In two of
these cases (benzene and asbestos) it is still an open question whether it is the substance that
causes the cancer directly or whether the cancer is caused by the toxicity.
In spite of the
regulatory assumption that all carcinogens are alike, scientists have endeavored to find
distinctions between different types of carcinogens. Following the seminal work of Meyerson
and Russell in 1977 that suggested that animal carcinogenicity is quantitatively related to
mutagenicity Parodi et al. in Italy began to study possible correlations between mutagenic and
carcinogenic potencies. Parodi et al. discovered, to most scientists' surprise, that carcinogenic
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potency is more strongly correlated with acute toxicity, than with mutagenicity. As noted above
this was confirmed and expanded by our group, using a larger database. Associated with this
correlation, and a possible cause of it, is the fact that many substances only produce statistically
significant tumor responses at the highest dose tested. This Maximum Tolerated Dose (MTD) is
related to the acute toxic effects of the substance. This led to concern that this correlation might
be merely a statistical artifact of the bioassay experimental design. But our extensive Monte
Carlo simulation of the bioassays (461, 479)) showed that while the correlation could in principle
be a statistical artifact of the bioassay itself, it would be so only if many substances cause tumors
in 100% of the animals in a bioassay. The actual values of the various parameters preclude such
an explanation. Only 2% or less of chemicals produce tumors in 100% of the animals in
long-term bioassays.
Possible biochemical reasons for the existence of this correlation (in which it could be
described as a biological artifact of the experimental design of the NTP bioassays) have recently
been discussed. In particular, substances at high doses, approaching the maximum tolerated dose,
kill cells. Ames et al. propose that this results in cell proliferation, and subsequent tumor
development by a mitotic effect. If this is the case, such substances would be expected to show a
very non-linear dose response relationship at these doses. However, at lower doses, a linear dose
response might still be appropriate, especially for initiators.
More recently several examples have emerged of situations in which carcinogenisis
indeed appears to be secondary to direct organ toxicity, and there is a clear biological
explanation. For example, sodium saccharin causes microcrystals to form in the bladder at high
doses, and it is probable that these crystals cause the bladder cancers that are observed,
presumably by an irritant effect . As calls to de-emphasize the results of animal bioassays have
intensified , so has the need to empirically investigate this relationship in as many ways as
possible.
Long-term rodent bioassays are conducted with the intention of identifying chemicals
with the potential to increase cancer rates. It has long been known, but often dismissed, that
statistically significant dose-related decreases for certain tumor sites and types are also found in
many long-term rodent bioassays. A well known example is the work of Kociba et al, in 1978 on
dioxin. Anti-carcinogenicity has recently come to be taken more seriously. My colleague Igor
Linkov, (542, 650) demonstrated that anti-carcinogenic effects in animal bioassays apparently
have a biological basis. In addition, Clark, in a human study in 1996 demonstrated convincing
anti-carcinogenicity for selenium administered at low doses to humans, whereas it is
carcinogenic at high doses,.. The fact that rodent bioassays also shows anti-carcinogenicity for
selenium indicates the potential generality of protective effects.
In spite of the findings of anti-carcinogenicity, it has been regulatory practice to consider
only tumor increases when classifying and regulating a substance as a carcinogen. Factors
contributing to the view that anti-carcinogenic effects are not important included the inability to
account for biases due to experimental conditions, inadequate attention to random responses, and
the presence of significant weight loss and other effects of exposing animals at the maximum
tolerated dose.
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We, Linkov et al, (542, 550) maintain that anti-carcinogenic tumor decreases are as
common in the bioassays as increases and are not a single isolated phenomenon. This contention
continues even after some corrigenda and addenda are made to the analysis. I have discussed in
an unpublished lecture that in the same animal one can often have both anti-carcinogenic at one
tumor site and carcinogenic effects at another tumor site. No one has discussed the implication
of this for regulation. The Carcinogenisis Bioassay Data System (CBDS) database of the
National Toxicology Program (NTP) is the primary tool for these studies. Not only are sites of
all tumors listed, but also toxic lesions are listed. The weights of the animals are listed at the end
of life and of the groups of animals at other times.
The results so far indicate that any attempt to a priori predict the target organ for human
carcinogenicity from experience of an individual chemical would be fraught with uncertainty.
When the goal of testing a chemical for carcinogenicity in animals is to identify potential human
carcinogens it appears that the rodent tests can qualitatively confirm whether a compound has
carcinogenic potential but rodent tests in general appear to have little ability to predict the target
tissue for human carcinogenicity.
The regulatory expression of these observation is confused but the scientific community
already has discussed an important implication, namely that all carcinogens are not the same.
Therefore, a unified regulatory method to identify carcinogens and estimate carcinogenic
potency may no longer be appropriate. In principle this is already recognized in the EPA
carcinogen policy; the three key assumptions discussed above are stated to be only default
assumptions to be replaced when better data or more generally accepted theories are available.
Then risk assessors can adopt a case-by-case approach that utilizes more biological information
such as a nonlinear dose response relationship rather than the default linear relationship. But
while it seems to be now accepted that there are examples of this, such as saccharin and the
case of dioxin is being seriously discussed, this has not been generally accepted for other
non-genotoxic compounds.
On the other hand we have been emphasizing the generality of linear dose-response
relations They apply whenever the mechanism of the medical ailment being discussed is
similar for the carcinogen and for whatever causes the background. In all of this I emphasize
proper attention to uncertainty (305, 327). In 2000-2008 this program has changed to a detailed
study of the multistage theory of cancer and how it must be modified to address cancer at old
age. Our latest work on a very careful study of cancer incidence at old age (882) came out the
prestigous journal “Cancer Research.” . My work on chemical carcinogens has been funded
personally as a by product of my consulting work for industries facing regulation or lawsuits.
Alas, while I have been able to obtain occasional funding for this work it has become sporadic
and I have had none at all since 1995.
Arsenic
As noted earlier, bioassays in mice and rats did not show that arsenic causes cancer.
Whether for this or other reasons, the world was not looking out for problems of chronic,
continuous, low level exposure.
Although Edmund Crouch and I had noted the skin cancers,
and lung cancers, I was surprised when in 1990 I was helping Dr Steven Lamm evaluate risks
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of mining tailings, and found in our review of the data on arsenic that C.J.Chen and
collaborators,. found high cancer rates NE of Tainan in Taiwan some 4 years before. The death
rate from internal cancers was 100 times that from skin cancers which had formed the basis of
the EPA risk assessment at the time. Although it was, and is, only an “ecological study”, and
therefore limited in its ability to inform us about dose response, a simple graph showed one of
the best linear dose-response curve I have ever seen.
The data should not be ignored, yet the
EPA and much of the world was ignoring them. We looked at the literature, which we had just
searched, and found that the direct interpretation, that the risk of arsenic repeated cancer was
indeed that high, was not contradicted by any other study. On the contrary there were hints of
the large risk in many places.
Even so might the problem be due to some aspect of the
Taiwan exposure?
Thus began an aspect of my work which has continued for 20 years.
A brief history of arsenic in water and food is being published (905), and I have for 10 years
maintained a website with more than most people ever want to know about the subject. I rent a
specific simple web address, http://arsenic.ws which at the moment leads to the page on my
website http://physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/arsenic/arsenic_project_introduction.html.
The work on trying to help the people in Bangladesh is extraordinarily rewarding for me
personally. It is all too easy for an American “do-gooder” to propose some action or another
that people in a developing country “must do” to gain prosperity.
In 1998 I thought somewhat
along these lines. At the suggestion of Peter Rogers, a professor of Environmental Engineering
at Harvard, I went to a conference in February 1998 run jointly by Dhaka Community Hospital
(DCH) and the School of Environmental Studies in Jadvapur University in Kolkata. We were
taken to a village, Chandripur, in the SE part of the country with 900 residents. There we were
shown several victims. I saw over 120 cases of arsenic poisoning - more than an American
dermatologist sees in a lifetime.
I was hooked. On my return I gave an emotional talk at
the School of Public Health and I gave a talk, which was well received, that if HASP were truly
interested in global public health, then they must be involved with Bangladesh. I had given a
talk at the 1998 conference outlining 3 actions that must take place simultaneously.
- studying the geochemistry of how the arsenic gets into the water with a hope of being
able to have arsenic free supplies in the future
- studying by epidemiology (comparing a cohort now exposed and later less exposed) what
arsenic actually does to people
- and I noted that neither the geochemist nor the epidemiologist could go back to a village a
second time (either pragmatically or honorably) unless they did something to provide pure water
for the villagers.
We had a false start in trying to get major funds from the World Bank, but then Professor
Charles Harvey who was just moving from Harvard to MIT got NSF funding for the first task,
and Professor David Christiani, HMS and HSPH found funds from NIH for the second. I got
funds, alas, still in much smaller amounts, from 3 wealthy Arab friends, from the OPEC fund,
from some friends and acquaintance, and some money of our own, to work on the third task.
To help in this I started the “Arsenic Foundation” which is a 501(c)3 foundation to enable tax
exempt donations to be made.
I have learned that one must listen to the villagers who are being affected, and also listen
to the local NGOs who work with them. The constraints and restrictions that each of these
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face are not easily discernible from abroad and vary from place to place and time to time. This
became even clearer to me when I heard a talk by an American NGO, at the Second International
Risk Analysis conference in Guadalajara, who was helping villagers in the desert regions on
NW India in Rajastan. He also emphasized the importance of talking to the villagers. While I
understood his list of constraints, each seemed very different from the ones I had heard in the
Bangladesh villages. In discussions with Dr Meera Hira-Smith of West Bengal and UC
Berkeley, California, the problems in the West Bengal villages are different again. While in
Bangladesh it seems that agreement within a village is possible, to have a single large, “Indira”
well servicing the whole village by pumping to a water tank with simple PVC pipe to a number
of distributed taps, the remaining Moslem-Hindu differences in West Bengal add additional
constraints that make this solution, which seems both technically sensible and politically possible
in Bangladesh less palatable for West Bengal.
However, the way of ensuring that the water remaains free of bacteria, even during the
rainy season, is still a problem (906).
Electromagnetic Fields
In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a large public concern about electromagnetic
fields from electric power lines. Associated with this public concern has been ignorance,
misunderstandings, lake of attention to public concern by industry, modification of data to fit a
preconceived notation, and some downright fakery.
It is interesting as a fine example of how
society can go crazy, and how careful scientists can be swept aside.
As noted at the start of these reminiscences, I became aware of dangers of electricity at
an early age. When I was 15 I was sent by my father to look at the X ray machine of our local
physician, Dr Kelly, which was giving electric shocks to her patients.
She had dutifully asked
the electrician to install 3 pin sockets in her surgery for the X ray machine, but when I checked, I
found that the ground socket was unconnected!
I was angry with the electrician for such
incompetence. As noted earlier I was a little perturbed in 1942 when bicycling back from
Winchester to Crowthorne in the rain by looking at the blue discharges around the insulators of
the 300 kV transmission lines. The undergraduate laboratory in the Clarendon Laboratory had
a vacuum system on the 4th floor doing some experiment. As usual for the time, it was all
glass, and the valves were sealed with vacuum grease which sometimes had to be warmed to
allow them to operate.
One morning a student came in early at 8.30 and started working. He
picked up a hair dryer to warm the valves. The metal case of the hair dryer was properly
connected to the ground pin of a three pin plug. BUT someone had noticed that the fuse kept on
blowing so he put a piece of paper as an insulator between one part of the case and the next.
The student holding the hair dryer found himself connected to the live 230 volt connection in one
hand while he was holding onto the grounded metal framework supporting the vacuum system
with the other hand.. The current went from left hand to right through his chest. His fists
automatically clenched and he could not let go. He screamed and a porter came up. By the
time he got there the student had kicked the glass system apart and finally managed to pull the
hair dryer out of the power socket. He was badly burned but otherwise he was OK. It was a
lesson I never forgot. A year later Geoffrey and I rewired the building which was rented by
the Oxford University Scout Club for our meetings, following in detail all the IEE requirements
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as well as some local ones of the Oxford building inspector. As a risk analyst I noted that 500
people in the US die every year from electrocution and some tens per year by lightning strikes.
But we can also cure, or at least prevent deaths from electrocution. In 1960 or so, defibrillators
became available to get a heart started after a heart attack or electric shock. Tom Collins at the
CEA noticed this, and we became the first group after the Philadelphia fire department to het
some and be trained in their use. They were never a need for treatment after a shock but twice
we had heart attacks at the cyclotron. Firstly our engineer, Mike Wanagel, fell off his stool and
his heart stopped. We brought him around, but alas he was never fit for work again. Then the
janitor fell with a heart attack. We had just started this on him, when Dr Ray Kjellberg, who
had been treating a patient with the proton beam came up. We explained, and he said “carry
on.” When blood came out of the janitor’s ears we proposed to stop and Ray agreed and signed
the death certificate.
Of course electricity can kill. But can electromagnetic fields kill without causing a
current to flow in the body?
That is a far more difficult question. One learns that there is
an electric field of about 300 volts per metre in much of the world, which reverses when a storm
is approaching and then the insulation of the air breaks down and lightning strikes. Just before
breakdown, the high reverse electric field is easily observable as one’s hair stands on end , but
with no other known adverse consequence.
No one has claimed that these magnetic fields
cause cancer.
But there is also a magnetic field; normally about 0.2 Gauss vertical component
and about 0.3 Gauss overall. This changes near iron out croppings. Of course since 1800
people have made magnets with fields of 20,000 Gauss or more, and scientists have been
exposed to them. In the period 1950 to 1965 I often put my head inside the magnetic field of a
cyclotron. One could see occasional flashes of light in the retina, known since about 1900 as
magnetophosphenes, and if I moved my head around I could taste the electric current induced
between the mercury amalgam fillings in my teeth.
Soon after he had discovered nuclear
magnetic resonance, Ed Purcell put his head inside the Harvard Cyclotron magnet to see whether
he could induce the spin transitions in his head - but nothing was observable. The number of
atoms moving, although observable nowadays in (Nuclear) Magnetic Resonance Imaging, were
too few to be felt. They seem and seemed to cause no adverse effects.
But about 1978 Wertheimer and Leeper made a big fuss with a claim that overhead
electric power lines were causing cancer. They observed a doubling of leukemia rates among
those in proximity to power lines in a particular area of Colorado. They attributed the increase
to the magnetic fields, about 10 milliGauss, caused by the power lines. This set off a flurry of
activity. Should I have taken notice at the time and started research on the subject? Ten
milliGauss seemed small. I suggested it to a young research fellow but he agreed with me that
there was almost certainly an alternative explanation and did not want to waste his time on a
useless project.. Another epidemiologist suggested that the power lines went along main roads,
and people living thereon had smaller incomes than those living elsewhere, and this was a
“confounding” effect (alternative explanation).
But this did not stop the flurry of activity.
The was, and is, no plausible explanation of how electromagnetic fields might cause
cancer. So Dr Ross Adey, a medial scientist at the University of Loma Linda set out to find
one. He believed he had it, when he exposed chicken embryos to a magnetic field. He found
that he efflux of calcium ions peaked at 60 Hz. Here was, he became convinced, was the
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explanation. He became an activist, and , alas, stopped thinking.
Other scientists, more
careful and with better equipment failed to reproduce his results.
Moreover, European
activists quoted his results not, apparently realizing that a peak at 60 Hz was irrelevant to the
European situation where the power line frequency is 50 Hz.!
Another scientist produced data
on experimental animals as a function of field on and off, but his data did not have the statistical
scatter that was appropriate, and could not have been taken in the way he described. This was
done with a government contract to the University of California. If it had been an industry
spending government funds, there would perhaps have been an outcry demanding that the
government money be returned, but few scientists wanted to challenge the University of
California.
There are a number of situations where good safety practice will lead to a comparatively
small magnetic field. For power lines, the load should be balanced among the phases and the
individual fields will then cancel.
Electric heating blankets should be wound with twisted pair
wires rather than a single wire. Houses with old fashioned knob and tube wiring will have
higher magnetic fields. Presumably it was these that led Grainger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon
to propose a policy of “No Regrets” and encourage people to do those mitigation steps which are
cheap. This is fine for personal behavior and even for a company which would spend money
for good public relations, but to make it a public policy demands a definition. Grainger was
insistent that the policy was not the same as “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” recommended
for radiation protection. ALARA nowadays has a reasonable definition based on an assumption
of low dose linearity for radiation induced cancers. Grainger’s policy had no such definition
and that inevitably caused trouble. Lawsuits began to arise. A weekly journal was being
published on how to prosecute cases of excessive (whatever that was) electromagnetic field
exposure.
I realized, somewhat late, that I had to get into the act.
In 1991 a draft document was prepared by Dr Robert Gaughy I believe, for the EPA
suggesting that Electromagnetic fields be considered a “Class C carcinogen”, probably
carcinogenic to humans. A review committee was being formed composed mainly of
epidemiologist and toxicologists. Robert Park, on behalf of the American Physical Society,
and Alan Bromley, President Bush’s Science advisor, pointed out that there should be on the
committee someone who understood electromagnetic fields. As I understand it, each was
asked to submit a dozen names, and I was on each list and the least objectionable to the EPA!
So I was called by the secretary of the Science Advisory Board. His critical question
was:“Have you ever taken a public position on electromagnetic fields?” I began my usual nit
picking. “Yes. Every Tuesday and Thursday from 9.30 to 11 am before 40 students.” “I did
not mean that.” “What did you mean?” “Have you publicly taken a position on whether
electromagnetic fields cause cancer?” With a more precise question I could take give a more
precise and simple answer. “No”. Interestingly, I found, when I attended my first committee
meeting, that I was one of the few who had not taken a public position - most of the committee
members had said that they thought that electromagnetic fields can cause cancer!
My involvement with that committee confirmed the importance of adjectives and
adverbs. The nouns had been decided in advance. But adverbs could alter the sense. I
cannot remember the exact words in the documents, but they were something like the following
with my corrections in italics: yes, electromagnetic fields could cause effects on a biological
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system at some field level. Not necessarily adverse. They might cause cancer. The might
cure cancer. And so on. I tried, but failed, to get the committee to recognize three simple
facts. The “proponents “ of the hypothesis that power line fields cause cancer used terms that
showed they had little understanding of electromagnetic fields. Elementary physics history
tells us that EMF stands for “Electro Motive Force”.
To use EMF for Electromagnetic Fields”
displays ignorance. Also, the energy in a magnet field varies as B2 not as B, and
measurements on chemical effects, such the measurements by Jeenicke and myself on
modification of scintillation light by magnetic fields show a low field behavior as B2 not as B
(168).
Yet the proponent epidemiologists were plotting their data versus B, as if B is a scalar
not a vector, without saying what B was. Since the AC fields from power lines alternate the
average value of B is strictly zero! Presumably they were using a meter produced for the
power industry which measures average B2 and plots it as if it were a measurement of B. But
the papers never state this. . Moreover none of them seem to have realized that B is a vector. If
an adverse effect increases linearly with B and the field is reversed, the effect would become
beneficial! More fundamentally, symmetry principles tell us that at low fields, any effect
cannot vary as B but can vary as B2. Worse still, there is an old fashioned principle about
pollutants: “more is worse, less is better.” The proponent epidemiologists struggle to find a
“dose response” relationship with a positive slope, but fail to look at the whole mass of data.
Drivers of electric trains are exposed to AC fields of 1 or more Gauss as the electricity is picked
up from the overhead wire and deposited in the ground with the train in between. Yet studies
of railroad engineers fail to find excess leukemia.
Although I was not able to get the committee to include any words such as these in the
report, I did manage to persuade them that the EPA, or the International Agency for Research on
Cancer (IARC), classification that is suitable for substances, is inappropriate for
electromagnetic fields , and a deeper understanding must prevail.
Alex Shlaykhter and I started collecting data on all studies, by that time about 110 of
them, which addressed the issue.
The next summer I hired a young Freshman student, Loh,
from Malaysia to collect and categorize them Within 6 weeks he and Alex had a fine
compilation. I started going to a summer conference of the Bioelectromagnetic Society, which
had split into two on this issue. I persuaded them to invite Loh. He gave a fine
straightforward description now published (619). Not one study had a Risk Ratio exceeding 2
and the average was below 1.5.
One man from the Air Force Research Center in Texas was
highly impressed. “I paid $150,000 for a conference of epidemiologists to discuss this issue,
and they never came up with anything. Now you have done it all!” He gave us a small
contract to continue this work which, inter alia, supported Daniel Kammen for 2 years. At that
meeting I pointed out that it was vital that not a single legal case where plaintiffs claimed
damages from electromagnetic fields should ever be decided for the plaintiff. If it was, the legal
onus of proof would switch from the plaintiff to the defendant. Professor Robert (Bob) Adair,
from the Yale University physics department said that here was a case before the California
Supreme Court (COVALT vs San Diego Power and Light) right now, and that amicus briefs
might be considered if they were submitted within 10 days.
It only took me a minute to
decide. “I will draft a brief of amicus curiae for the California court, and the counsel will be
the Atlantic Legal Foundation. I invite any and all of you to join me as amici”. For various
reasons of conflict, only one, Bob Adair, did so.
The next day I flew to Washington for a
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meeting of a committee on Plutonium Management of the American Nuclear Society, chaired
jointly hy Glenn Seaborg, and Bill Kennedy. Glenn agreed to join me. I drafted the brief on
AMTRAK on my way back to New York, handed it to Martin Kaufman, General Counsel of
ALF. Then I went back to Boston and telephoned my friends to sign on as amici. It took
little persuasion. Already there were lawsuits totaling in the billions of dollars. Power
companies were spending over a billion dollars to put power lines underground. It was likely to
consume the entire research budget of DOE.
I lined up 6 Nobel Laureates. 2 each in Physics,
Chemistry and Medicine
I was pleased with the brief. That and two similar briefs in lower
courts stopped the legal cases cold.
An amusing mistake was made by the plaintiff’s lawyer.
He complained to the newspapers that we were just a bunch of physicists who knew nothing
about public health.
The matter should be left to epidemiologist! But the only reason that I
had not persuaded an epidemiologist to join us was that all the epidemiologists I knew were on
vacation! But the complaint of the plaintiff’s lawyer gave us an opportunity. Using his
public statements as a reason, we successfully petitioned the court to allow the names of three
distinguished epidemiologist to join the brief.
But there was more detail to attend to. The National Institute for Environmental Health
Sciences had $30 million a year in research money and scientists, even level headed scientists
who did not believe in the effect, wanted to keep it. California politicians, as often politically
active in environmental affairs, wanted to continue. Neither report paid attention to my
concerns and in each case, I put in a very detailed and strong rebuttal to each of their points.
The National Center for Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRPM) had a committee to
study the matter, chaired by Dr Ross Adey, a medical scientists who had claimed a peak at 6o Hz
of calcium efflux from chicken embryos, a study which has failed to be replicated in more
careful subsequent work. Adey was a strong proponent of the idea that magnetic fields are
dangerous and must be reduced without further thought.
Strong representations was made to
NCRPM and the review committee quashed the report. A study committee of the National
Academy of Sciences was originally going to be a weak committee. But Dick Garwin got on
the committee and ensured that truth and reason would prevail.
Since about 2000 I have heard little more on the subject. I have stated my views in
public and on the web but taken no action. But silliness has a habit of re-raising its ugly head
and I am wary. There were many others working to bring scientific sense into the system, but I
feel that our action in submitting the brief of amicus curiae to the California Supreme Court was
crucial. Too few good scientists are willing to enter the legal arena, but so often that is where
the action is. I am proud that this is a field where I have spent some of my energies.
Looking back, I realize that epidemiologists were not wrong in expressing their original
thoughts. Epidemiologists correctly look for problems and speculate on possible reasons for
adverse effects on public health. It becomes natural to postulate a mechanism that they do not
understand and may well be outside their expertise. But the critical epidemiologists were
completely wrong in not searching for colleagues who had that expertise in electromagnetism to
enlighten them. They should have used their notation.
When flaws were discovered in their
speculative arguments, and the critical epidemiologists became obstinate they ceased to be
scientists. This raises the important issues of interdisciplinary research. The problem is
when to use data when rigorous scientific proof is lacking. Also how to express an uncertainty
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in such situations and of how to address that uncertainty in recommendations on public policy
and how to be appropriately cautious.
NIGEC
When I was a student at Oxford, wither the last year of undergraduate work or the first
year of graduate work, I went to the lectures on meteorology by Professor Dobson. I still
have my notes of his lectures. I became aware that the earth is a greenhouse, When I arranged
a special session on Energy policy at an American Physical Society meeting in Cambridge, MA
in January 1972 or 1973, I got someone to discuss the issue. I found later that Glenn Seaborg
had mentioned possible global warming at a Congressional hearing on nuclear energy a year or
two before. In 1977,1978, 1999, and 2000 my friend Nino Zichichi asked me to join
Professor Fernando Amman in running an ‘International School of Energetics” in Erice, Sicily,
and one of the issues we emphasized then was the absence of greenhouse gases when nuclear
energy is used.
About that time, my friend Leonard Hamilton, an epidemiologist at Brookhaven
National Laboratory, from whom I had a small subcontract for work on air pollution and risks
generally, suggested that we invite Kevin Mullen from the Policy Division of US Department of
Energy to spend a couple of years with us. DOE would pay half his salary and BNL would
increase our subcontract for the other half. This seemed fine. But DOE was slow at billing,
and when BNL wanted a full accounting by December 31st , Harvard had not yet received a
request for Kevin’s salary.
I tried to get Dr Edmund Crouch’s salary (which had been paid by
a grant from a foundation, put instead on the BNL contract, but although it was well within the
scope of the contract BNL objected.
I had no help from either the Kennedy School
Administration or Harvard’s Office of Research Contracts who should have found a way of
accruing the money.. So I lost that $30,000 or so. Then DOE came in with the request (late)
to pay Kevin’s half salary. I was stuck.
I put little bits of his salary on various other funds.
Kevin pushed me into running a short course for Risk Analysis. He did the organization and we
had over 60 people the first time: VPs of companies and Assistant Secretaries of government
agencies. The participants paid. I put 2 months of Kevin’s salary on that project and so on.
We ran the course for a couple of years from the Kennedy School which was an administrative
hassle, but then I decided to organize it as one of the short courses in the School of Public
Health. I stepped out of the organization in about 1992, but it remains, 40 years later, as a
very successful short course and makes money for the school of public health.
Kevin never forgot how I had to scrape to meet the Harvard commitment and compared it
with the ease with which money can go to National Laboratories, particular if there appears to be
a surplus in the DOE budget at the end of a year. So when a representative from Davis,
California, and representative Lindy Boggs (Chairman of the House Energy Committee) of
Louisiana, wanted a project, he suggested a National Risk Analysis Center with a branch at
Harvard. One idea was that DOE could give money to the new Center as easily as to a national
laboratory and then pass on to the universities in the region. This project later was moved out of
the policy section at DOE to the Science section under Dr Ari Patrinos, and became the National
Institute for Global Environment Change (NIGEC) with 4 - later 5 regional centers in UC Davis,
Tulane University (Louisiana), University of Indiana and one to be decided in the northeast for
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which Harvard competed.
After a lot of work in 1989 the National Institute of Global
Environmental Change (486) started and I became the Director of the Northeast Regional Center
from 1990-1994.
The change in the NIGEC mandate from policy to science came as NIGEC started in the
summer of 1989. This seems to have been decided in the Department of Energy when the
program was put under the Office of Science with Dr Ari Patrinos in charge. While the first 3
regional Centers at Tulane University, UC Davis, and University of Indiana were congressionally
mandated, Harvard has a policy of not accepting congressionally mandated (pork barrel) funds.
So the Northeast Center was open to competition. Fortunately we had an excellent group of
people in the Cambridge area, and Dr Steven Wofsy was, and is, particularly important. We
decided to have 4 prongs. One based on the Harvard Forest on how northeastern forests, which
are still recovering from the deforestation that went on till the end of the 19th century, soak up
carbon dioxide (for which Steve was looking for money) together with SUNY - Albany and the
University of New Hampshire, A policy section I headed with help from Professors Fiering and
Rogers at the Division of Applied Sciences, Harvard University, scientists from Carnegie Mellon
University, and MIT. A third on basic Science with Mike McElroy of Earth and Planetary
Sciences involvement from MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and I cannot
remember the 4th.
The fact that we were trying to integrate workers on climate change in the
northeast somewhat helped us win the Center. Also, there is no doubt that Steve’s work was the
most important. Unfortunately the choice of the first national director, located at UC Davis
was not a good one.
The first, and only, test of Kevin Mullen’s basic idea came when the Army Corps of
Engineers (ACE) wanted to give Myron Fiering and Peter Rogers $200,000 to study the potential
impact of global warming on the ACE work - dams and reservoirs and so on. It seems ideal that
it should be additional money passed through NIGEC. It could get to NIGEC overnight, and
be passed on to Harvard as appropriate.. But the National Director balked and said that the
project would have to go through a lengthy review - by which time the fiscal year would be over
and the money would be gone.
I had some difficulty in welding my group on policy into a
whole. We had at Harvard, myself, Professors Fiering and Rogers and a research fellow. I
added a Senior Research fellow from Carnegie Mellon, and a couple of Research Scientists
from Wood Hole Oceanographic Institutions, and someone from Yale. So when I went on
sabbatical leave in 1994 and the overall budget was cut to accommodate a 5th regional center at
the University of Wyoming, I abandoned the attempt to keep a coherent policy group; we
abolished the policy prong and Steve Wofsy, by that time a Professor, took over. NIGEC lasted
another 10 years.
The NIGEC experience got me well acquainted with a rival set of arguments. On one
side are the scientists who argue that global warming is happening and it will be dangerous. On
the other side, those who argue that the evidence is not rigorous and the probably is not urgent.
This is one more example of the fundamental dilemma of science in public policy. To what
extent should one demand rigorous scientific proof before acting?
But I never forgot the discussions of the best policy alternatives if one decides to take
preventive action. I note one alternative in particular. Scientists understand that carbon comes
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out of the ground in only a few places. Coal mines. Oil wells. Natural Gas fields, and even
travels through recognized ports of entry. Within a year all the carbon is burnt and becomes
carbon dioxide, but the time scale for carbon dioxide to change the climate is decades. This
suggests that addressing carbon as it enters the surface pool is a far simpler, and cheaper, method
of control than taxes or specific laws. Klaus Lackner enthused me about this again in 1998 and
we have written about it since (809, 899, 902). The amount of carbon can be limited by
demanding a permit to bring carbon out of the ground, and steadily reducing the number of
permits, by carbon taxes or a cap and trade system with a steadily reducing cap. Putting carbon
back into the ground in a permanent way (sequestration) can be addressed by issuing a certificate
of sequestration as being the negative of a permit. Both Klaus Lackner and I prefer permits
because they are more fair, but economists tend to prefer a cap and trade system because the
existing “polluters” do not immediately have to change their ways. Strange it seems to me that
in 2008, that there is not one law or proposed law on the statute books in the world that
recognizes this simplicity of the carbon cycle. The 2006 report of Sir Nicolas Stern to the UK
government does not discuss it. Nobel Peace prize winner Al Gore seems not to understand it
although his mentor, my colleague and friend Roger Revelle, agreed 30 years ago that it was a
good idea. It seems important to urge this continually - as I am doing.
Armenia and Azerbaijan; May 25-29, 1991
I made my first visit to Armenia in 1965 as a part of a one month “Academy” exchange
visit to the USSR.
There I gave lectures at the Physics Institute in a building which now
houses the US Embassy. I met a number of physicists. I had met Valentine (Valodya)
Kharitonov, a Russian, in the Kiev meeting in 1959 and sent him 40 reports on the building of
the Cambridge Electron Accelerator which they proposed to, and did, copy. I met Hamlet
Badalyan a native Armenian and Sam Kheifetz, who although from the area was Jewish. The
teen aged daughter of Sam Kheifetz, Leeka Kmheifetz, guided us on a couple of sightseeing
tours. Later, in the 1980s, I met Leeka at a meeting on effects of radiation in Colorado. She
had come to the USA in the 1970s with her parents, and became an epidemiologist. We went to
Lake Sevan, north of the capital Yerevan, where there was a monastery on an island in the
middle of the lake. We went to an old church at Gegard and to the cathedral, the center of the
Armenian religion at Echmiadzin. At Echmiadzin I became aware of the Armenian genocide
about which I had known next to nothing before.
Strangely, I was until then unaware of the
number of ethnic Armenians in Watertown, MA or around Fresno, CA whose ancestors had fled
the genocide. I read up on this afterwards and realized how much my education had been
missing. I became aware of the genocide of 1916, and earlier awful behavior of the Turks in
1897. I read Toynbee who was, I believe, the first person to call the Turkish behavior a
genocide - as indeed it was. I remember Hitler’s purported remark in 1934 when discussing his
planned extermination of the Jews. “Who remembers the Armenians?”
At the time of the Armenian earthquake, in 1988 I believe, Gorbachev had begun his
“perestroika”. There were demonstrations in Armenia asking that the area of Nogorny
Karabagh be reallocated to Armenia instead of Azerbaijan, because most of its citizens were
ethnic Armenians rather than ethnic Azeris. Five of the demonstrators were arrested.
Gorbachev cut short a visit to Washington, DC, to go to the earthquake zone and offer help from
the central government. He was met with cries: “free the Karabagh five.” That was politically
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too soon; and the central Communist Party had other issues and they did nothing. But
demonstrations continued. About 150 ethnic Armenians were massacred in Sumgait on the
Caspian sea just north of Baku. Centuries old ethnic squabbles, kept underground during the
rigid Stalin era, resurfaced. Fighting broke out particularly at the end of April 1991
In May 1991, at the first International Andrei Sakharov Memorial Congress "Peace,
Progress and Human Rights" an Armenian politician, whose name now escapes me, told the
session on “the Rule of Law in USSR and Eastern Europe” about the fighting on the
Armenian-Azeri border, particularly 5 weeks before. Elena Bonner had the idea of assembling
a small ‘expert’ team from the conference as ‘fact finders”. Russians were not to go except as
an interpreter. Alas we had no Muslim in the group. Adnan Shihab-Eldin would have liked to
come along, but he had an important meeting with the Emir of Kuwait and had to get home. We
stopped the conference an hour or so early to catch the flight to Yerevan.
At that time the Soviet Union was on the verge of breaking up. Aeroflot would only
allow one plane at a time to go from Moscow to Yerevan, and the next would not leave till the
first came back. They were afraid of being their airplanes being captured by the Armenians, as
the Uzbeks did effectively in August later that year. All the planes were full. We entered this
plane, put our bags in the hold, and walked up to the main deck. We arrived and about 8 of us
stood in the aisle. Eight Armenians gave up their seats and stood in the aisle instead. The
(woman) pilot came back and said something in Armenian which I assumed was “I will be
damned if I will fly this plane with all you people standing”. I was assured by an Armenian that
this indeed was effectively what she said. So all 8 sat down on the steps to the hold and we
went to Armenia.
As a foreigner in the USSR I was always careful. I took no position on the political
question of which administrative entity shall rule any individual person in the USSR and in
particular of ethnic Armenian or ethnic Turkish origin. But as I pointed out a few days later to
General Yazov, the Defense Minister of the USSR, the USSR was a member of the UN and
signed various treaties including several on human rights. Azerbaijan and Armenia were, and
unless explicitly rejected at the time of independence still are bound by these treaties, and are
subject to all international laws on human rights.
Since my scientific visit in 1966, the 50th
anniversary of the genocide, I became acquainted with the turbulent history of the Armenian
peoples and all the Caucasian peoples over the centuries.
It was just after that the 1986
Armenia earthquake that the massacre occurred at Sumgait north of Baku. Whole Armenian
families totaling a few hundred people were killed. It is noteworthy that in the late 19th
century oil was discovered near Baku and oil engineers, both Armenian and Russian, emigrated
there. Lev Landau, the famous physicist was born here, to a Russian father
After Sumgait
many Armenians and Russians had left Azerbaijan, some by semi forced ejection supervised by
the USSR army . I report on one exodus from Getaushen (Tchaikend), below.
By 1991 there were perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees from both sides.
Azeris in Armenia were deported. Armenians in Azerbaijan were being deported. We all
agreed that no aspect of the centuries old history with its millions of individual tragedies, is
justification for any violation of human rights by either the government of Armenia or the
government of Azerbaijan. These governments have the duty to protect the citizens within
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their territories no matter what their ethnic origin. But as the USSR was falling apart the USSR
was having trouble insisting upon it.
The leader of this "group of experts" was Baroness Cox (Lady Caroline but always at
her insistence just Caroline) of Queensbury, at that time Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords,
United Kingdom. She had been raised to the peerage by Margaret Thatcher because of her fine
nursing work in Africa where she was well known for objecting to the slavery that the Sudanese
arabs use to subjugate the peripheral populations. We had visas for Erevan and Baku, approval
from the USSR, but promises of protection only from the authorities of Armenia. We therefore
started our visit in Erevan, Armenia. Although the protection of Azerbaijan authorities was
lacking a third small group went to Baku and got no further. Our group went north and another
went south to the border of Navechian, an Azeri region half inside Armenia. I and five others
went north to a town north of Voskepar . We were shown a small radar station, destroyed a
month before, which had been used for guidance of aircraft crossing into Karabagh from
Armenia. We interviewed villagers in Voskepar and the regional head of the Armenian KGB.
In one case, some of the group talked to a senior Army officer.
Intense fighting had taken place between Voskepar and the neighboring Azeri village of
Nishki-Voskepara . Fighting had starte 18 months before, and more recently between April
27th to May 6th 1991. It is perhaps worthy of note that Armenia refused to sign the new Union
treaty of April 23rd.
There were Soviet internal troops on both sides of the border. On the
Armenian side under Captain Baginski and on the Azerbaijani side under Colonel Makarichin.
The villagers in Voskepar trusted and entertained Captain Baginski's troops.
On April 27th 1991 firing started from the Azerbaijan side on cars on the Armenian side
of the border. The drivers fled on foot. When it was dark, the deputy mayor of the town went to
the road junction, to cope with the cars. A Soviet armored car was there and called by radio for
instructions: "We are under fire; what shall we do?" "Do not fire". The chief of the regional
KGB, Lev Arisimovich, (surname not readable from my notes) gave us "hearsay" evidence that
Captain Baginsky was told that this troops would be fired on if they got involved. Three days
later the regiment of Soviet internal troops on the Armenian side withdrew. This date was given
to us in Voskepar but confirmed by a Soviet general in Erevan.It is perhaps important to note
that officers in the Red Army, the USSR army, were mostly Russians. Many Yera sbefore men
came from distant republics. When they were needed to keep order in Mongolia, for example,
the troops would come from elsewhere; Estonia for example. When order was needed in
Azerbaijan the troops might be from Siberia. But, I was told, this changed after the debacle in
Afghanistan as middle class Russian families objected to their sons dying in a distant place.
Gorbachev made this change in a concession to Yeltsin. So now the soviet troops in
Azerbaijan were Azeri.
A detachment (25 or 29 I am not sure which) of Armenian militia, under orders of the
Ministry of Internal Affairs of Armenia, were coming to Voskepar by a back road at 5 a.m. on
6th May when they were ambushed by two Soviet army helicopters. Eleven were killed and the
rest taken prisoner. The Armenians believe the prisoners have been handed over to the Azeri
OMON, a local militia group.
We saw about six damaged houses in Voskepar. In addition,
20 houses were burned out (by gasoline) and a church near the border with Azerbaijan. No
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villager dared to go there since.
The whole group, including myself, met refugees from the town of Getaushen
(Tchaikend) (3000 inhabitants) who had been deported from western Azerbaijan during the
previous month. Among the refugees we met families of ethnic-Armenians held prisoner in
Azerbaijan. We met Armenian physicians who had gone to Nagorny-Karabakh to treat the sick.
The physicians had been jailed and beaten. We photographed their bruises.
A group going to
Navechian was told by a (Russian) Soviet army officer who said, among other things, that there
were some orders that his men would not obey. When together, we compared notes and corrected
minor discrepancies.
There was a remarkable consistency between the stories of individual villagers, and of
others. I believe, that this consistency attests to the truth of their stories. During the deportations
there were numerous civil rights violations of several types:
- killings
- multiple killings
- beatings
- forced abductions and imprisonments
- rapes
- stealing of property and livestock or buying for an insulting price (a car for 2 roubles!)
- obtaining "voluntary" requests to leave Azerbaijan at gunpoint or by other threats
- tearing ears of girls by forcible removal of earrings.
We found no evidence, in spite of diligent enquiry, that anyone recently deported from the
village of Getaushen left it voluntarily.
Although most, if not all, of the beatings and killings
were carried out by the Azerbaijan OMON, the Soviet Army was clearly not passive. They
organized the initial surrounding of the village and then stood aside while the OMON terrorized
the villagers. The Soviet Army arranged the transport of the villagers who were left on the
Armenian side of the border with only the clothes they were wearing.
I got sunstroke and was sick just after that.
I was taken to a restaurant where we
rested. After resting over the lunchtime, I rejoined the party at the “eternal fire”
commemorating the 1916 genocide. We then met in the office of the President, Ter-Petrossian,
or Armenia. In the USSR they had a “hot” telephone where each president could talk to the
Presidents of all other republics. Caroline Cox tried to call the President of Azerbaijan to make
arrangements for a visit there. She got an assistant. He said so emphatically, in English, there
is a war on, that Caroline dropped the phone! Photographs taken by a Japanese businessman in
the party show that I was still far from well
We met again at the hotel that night.
I realized that we had made a mistake in
Voskepar. We had talked to the villagers in Voskepar but had not crossed the border. We had
to talk to the people on the other side! To complete our picture, it was necessary to hear the
views of the Azeri villagers in the neighboring village of Nishki-Voskepara in Azerbaijan and
their OMON. Caroline, who had not been there the previous day, agreed to lead the group to
go back the previous day. This time we flew direct to Voskepar, landing the helicopter on a
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sloping hillside. The Armenian villagers tried to persuade us not to go. "It is dangerous. We
cannot protect you." When we were adamant they said: “we will come with you.” “No,” we
said “It is more dangerous for you than for us.” The five of use left the villagers behind and set
off to walk the 1,5 km to the abandoned church and the OMON headquarters in the school of
Nishki-Voskepara just beyond. We had a white dishtowel on a stick as a sign of peace.
It seemed to take a year to walk that distance. One person stopped to pick up some spent
USSR cartridges. “No,” said Caroline. “ Let us pick up souvenirs on the way back.” Soon two
OMON militia could be seen outside the school on the hilltop, which we had been told, was the
Azeri firing point. They had submachine guns, then 5, then 20. Caroline commented “what
a crazy way of spending a fine afternoon.” My mind went back to the 7 seconds or so between
the time, in 1944, that I saw a U1 missile head on just before it exploded across the street with
its 1 -2 ton warhead. I commented that I thought it was safer to go on and pretend that we knew
what we were doing than to turn around and be shot in the back. With no incident, we, four
plus interpreter, passed the burnt out Armenian church, and climbed the hill to the waiting
OMON and Azeri villagers. The Japanese business man with us, loaded with cameras, took a
minute or so longer to reach the top of the hill.
We were taken further back to the village itself . Meeting us was Major Mablouda, a
major in the OMON. The parents of Major Mablouda, an ethnic Turk, were sent from Georgia
to Uzbekhistan in 1944 for which he blames Stalin and Mikoyan. Born in Ferghana in
Uzbekhistan, in 1950, he had to leave in 1989 with the Uzbek uprisings. He was a Moslem but
not an Uzbek. He arrived in Azerbaijan with no job but could use a gun. It is sad that there
should be so many tragedies in the one family. But they do not justify revenge.
We were
shown the damage to the school and several houses caused by Armenian shells. We asked, but
were given no dates of the damage and they seemed over a year old. On the whole, the older
damage seemed greater in the Azeri side, but there was more and more recent damage on the
Armenian side. The Major gave us a message for the Armenians.
"Tell them we will not give them an inch of our territory. When they were asking in a
civil manner we gave them 200,000 hectares. By force they will not get an inch. If they are bad
we will be bad. If they are good we will be good." He pointed out an Armenian farmer on the
other side of the valley tending to his field. “We could shoot him but if he minds his own
business we will not”. Other members of the group got similar statements in other locations.
The Azeris offered us food. I believe that we should have accepted, because breaking
bread is so important. Incidentally, I first realized the implications of “breaking bread” when 12
years old when I saw the film starring Robert Donat, of “The Count of Monte Cristo”. The
Count deliberately turns down eating anything at a party given by his former lady-love who had
married one of the men who betrayed him. But Caroline told Major Mablouda that we had a
helicopter waiting. We were driven back to the border in a bus which stopped 3 feet from the
border and started to walk back to Voskepar. An Armenian car soon came down (the first for
18 months) and picked us up. We were offered, and accepted, food in Voskepar and when we
went back to the helicopter. Caroline was given a fine bunch of flowers and we found that the
helicopter was well equipped with a couple of cases of the best Armenian brandy.
It was a
fine day and I took a photograph, which did not come out well, of Mount Ararat as we came in to
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land in Yerevan.
Later that night we set of back to Moscow, reaching it at 4.30 am or so. Elena had
arranged for us to meet Marshal Yazov, Defense Minister of the USSR in his office on the
Wednesday at 10.30 am followed by a meeting in the Supreme Soviet with the Chairman
thereof. Many of our group met with Marshal Yazov at the defense ministry. Caroline of
course opened the discussion. But Marshal Yazov was stalling. So I broke in. “Yesterday
we were in no man’s land between the Armenian militia and the Azeri militia and we have mud
on our boots to prove it.
It is not our business to decide whether the Armenians are right and
the 17 men taken prisoner by your helicopters were policemen as the Armenians claim or
terrorists as the Azeris claim. That is for you to decide by whatever legal procedures you have
for such matters. But each and every one is a human being.” We then asked that each and
every prisoner taken by the Soviet army be granted his civil rights regardless of his alleged
crimes. Their civil rights included, but were and are not limited to:
- the right to hear a specific charge,
- the right to be held in a prison remote from the conflict with jailers who are not parties to the
conflict,
- the right not to be beaten and to have medical care,
- the right to have legal representation including representation by international jurists,
- the right to communicate with their friends and families,
- the right to a prompt and fair trial.
Marshal Yazov said “Da” to each and every one. He agreed to look into this matter
personally. Marshal Yazov kept his promise. By mid-July 1991 all the Armenian militiamen
were released. They were asked to keep quiet, for awhile at least, about their incarceration. By
mid-August Marshal Yazov was himself in jail as a result of being part of the abortive coup
against Gorbachev..
Caroline went back to London and I stayed on for a physics conference in honor of
Andrei Sakharov a couple of days later.
Dr Boris Altshuler, son of Dr Lev Altshuler who
measured the properties of plutonium metal under pressure, so important for bomb design,
helped me draft a brief 15 minute report to describe our trip. I proposed a resolution with the
following words:
In view of the evident involvement last month, of the Soviet Army on one side of the conflict, in
violation of Soviet Law and of human rights, I suggest that this conference pass a resolution.
"Members of the 1st International Sakharov Conference on Physics, present at the afternoon
meeting in Moscow on May 31, 1991, having heard the report of one of our number, Professor
Richard Wilson of Harvard University, call upon Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Soviet
Union. We ask that he notice the obvious involvement of regular troops of the Soviet Army in
gross violations of civil rights during the last five weeks. We ask that he call a halt to all mass
deportations. We ask that he order that those persons forcibly deported from their ancestral
villages be allowed to return home. Finally, we ask that the OMON troops be asked to withdraw
from the border and preferably disband, and the Soviet troops be from other republics. Finally,
we suggest that he invite UN observers to preserve the peace, and to protect the civil rights of
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all citizens of the region."
This was voted by a majority of those present (about 150) with one against and seven
abstainers. Unfortunately Academician Keldysh, who was in the Chair, had not been briefed
about what was happening. Gorbachev got a copy of the resolution by the next day. When I
returned I sent a copy of my report to Allan Bromley, then Science advisor to President Bush,
and I believe that President Bush saw a copy on Wednesday in the next week..
As noted above, an officer (Russian) of the Soviet 4th army in Azerbaijan told a member
of our group in May 1991 that there were some orders that his army (being 80% Azeri troops)
would not obey. In our meeting with Marshal Yazov, he told us a lot of what appeared to be
irrelevant information; that he hoped to have all troops out of Germany and all nuclear and heavy
weapons out of eastern Europe by the end of August 1991. I was particularly interested in this,
but it seemed that no one else in our party recognized the significance of what he was saying, It
seems likely in retrospect that Marshal Yazov was preoccupied by the problem of removing the
tactical nuclear weapons from Azerbaijan. He was concerned that as the Soviet Union fell
apart nuclear weapons would fall into the hands of people who were less cautious in their use
than is vital for world peace. He could not favor Armenia till the weapons were safely on
Russian soil. I have been told, orally, from US sources that there were many in Azerbaijan in
May 1991 but they were all out by August 1991.
On Friday, May 31, 1991, five other members of the group met President Mutalibov of
Azerbaijan for four hours in Baku. However, they were denied permission to visit Stepanakert or
any other area of Azerbaijan with ethnic Armenians. However arrangements were made by the
Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union for them to visit at the end of July 1991.
Baroness Cox accordingly led a group there at that time. Unfortunately I was with in the south
of France and could not go at that time.
At the physics conference I made a suggestion with little hope that it would succeed. I
had hoped that President Ter-Petrossian of Armenia and President Mutalibov of Azerbaijan visit
these villages, and other points of conflict and side by side walk the same road, and reassure the
villagers by their presence that fighting on both sides will cease. They did not do so. But I
have been told that although 20,000 - 40,000 people lost their lives in the fighting around
Nagorny Karabagh, no shots were fired between Voskepar and Nishki Voskepara. If true we
accomplished something.
On my return I found that I was in demand by the Armenian community in the USA who
had heard of our activity very quickly. I had to give talks at the Armenian center in Watertown,
and again in Belmont. I still get a complimentary copy of the Armenian newspaper published in
Watertown. One incoming graduate student, of Armenian descent, specifically looked out for me
as he arrived that fall. I still receive weekly the Armenian newspaper. I find it interesting that
when the Republic of Georgia in summer 2008 started pushing against the Ossetians within their
midst, and Russia militarily supported the Ossetians, the Armenian community was one of the
few which supported Russia. There is a large Armenian group inside Georgia.
Moreover
neither they, nor I, forget that it was a Georgian, Josef Stalin, who wuled the USSR with a brtal
iron hand for many years.
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Armenia has few indigenous sources of energy. During the Soviet times, they got oil
from the oil fields in Azerbaijan near Baku which is a field in which John R Rockefeller had
invested some 100 years before. They also had hydropower which was much overused. The
level of the water in Lake Sevan dropped markedly. The Monastery on an island in Lake Sevan
that I had seen in 1965 had become part of the mainland in 1991.
Armenia needs nuclear
power for its independence. Two 550 Mwe light water power plants were built of the type
VVER 550. The new Armenian politicians objected to the nuclear power plant both as being
dangerous (Chernobyl had already occurred) and also a symbol of Russian domination. Elena
Bonner and Andrei Sakharov emphasized the safety problems and the two plants were shut
down. Elena soon realized that a change must be made. She asked me to prepare a proposal for
a nuclear power safety committee to report to the President, Mr Ter-Petrossian. I chose the
best safety experts I could. Bob Budnitz from Berkeley, Adolph Birkhofer from Munich, an
Englishman from the Atomic Energy laboratory in Risley, Lancashire, UK and an earthquake
expert from California. I added Artem Abagyan from Moscow - he had been born in Nogorny
Karabagh.
Nothing happened for 2 years till Armenia applied for a loan from the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). They set up a safety review committee in 1991
with most of the same membership - since they also knew the best people - and I went along for
the first meeting representing the Sakharov Foundation.
This time Andree came with me,
and we went on afterwards to see the Kapitzas in Nikolina Gora.
We sat down to dinner with
4 generations: Anna, Sergei, their daughter and granddaughter. The safety review of the
Armenian reactor found several very clear problems.
The reactor itself was well mounted on
hydraulic buffers and would withstand any reasonable earthquake. But the control panel might
fall down! Worse still emergency power was to be delivered by about 100 lead acid batteries in
glass containers. The failure of even one of the glass containers would leave the reactor
unprotected! A $500,000 gift from a wealthy Armenian American fixed that. But the source
of emergency coolant water was unreliable and we all recommended that an emergency coolant
water pond be quickly established.
All but the last recommendations were soon carried out
and in an interesting reversal, when the Russian Engineers came in from Moscow to restart unit
2, they were met with cheers - not the jeers of a few years before. The Armenians had accepted
the smaller of the two risks they faced. On the one hand a “dangerous” nuclear power plant, and
on the other hand a serious shortage of electricity. Americans have yet to fully accept that
nuclear power is adequately safe.
There are those who would deny the fact of the genocide. Unfortunately the facts meet
all the reasonable definitions. The fact that the Ottoman Empire was at war with Russia,
which in turn controlled much of Armenia in the Caucasus is no excuse. A country must face
up to the errors of the past in order to move forward. Turkey still refuses to do so.
Interestingly the 1916 genocide was perpetrated by the group running the Ottoman Empire called
the “Young Turks”, because these “youngsters” had turned out the previous government
some 10 years before. In England and USA many people called any group opposing the
elderly establishment “Young Turks”. When the spokesman for the CLEO group (Ed
Thorndike) decided to form a committee of young people to criticize the decisions being made
by us elders, he called it the “young Turks”. I objected at a group meeting with the words
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“Don’t you remember what they did?
It was therefore with horror that I read in 2007 that
Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation league, say that we did not really know whether a genocide
took place. We should ask Turkey to open the records and encourage historians to look at
them. A comparison of the exact words with the exact words of the President of Iran about the
Holocaust is frightening. The president of Iran is rightly blamed for holocaust denial. Why
is Foxman not equally blamed for genocide denial? Fortunately around the Boston area, where
there are many Armenians, he is.
Russians
In the years after I had helped Stanislaw Suskevich to found the Sakharov college of
Radioecology, now the Andrei Sakharov Environmental University in Minsk, I was often asked
by Russian and Belorussian students to describe my interactions with important Russian
scientists. I therefore separate out this section. When I was 11 or 12 years old the
mathematics master in my school asked the class what we wished to do when we were adults and
independent (over 21).
I immediately expressed a desire to join the British foreign service.
War intervened and my ability (and interest) in mathematics and physics led the joint recruiting
board to suggest I study radar - and this led after the war to my career in physics. But my
interest in foreign countries remained and I was fortunate that my field of experimental particle
physics led to many overseas journeys and friendships.
There was another reason for not
joining the civil service. My father had joined the Administrative Civil Service in 1999 at age
26. Since then it became a lot harder for a scientist to join. He could join the Scientific
service but in UK that did not at the time get him into positions where decisions got made. The
Scientific Civil Service was different, but even the upper echelons had little power over
decisions. It did not seem sensible to me. But I have traveled to distant countries many
times. My work on high energy physics first made this possible.
I first met Russian physicists, Blokhinstev, Dzhelepov, Nikitin and Okun, at the
American Physical Society meeting at Stanford University, California in December 1957 where
I presented some results of experiments that had been performed with the cyclotron at the
Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. A week or so later they visited the
Harvard cyclotron.
But this brief interaction was only the beginning. In December 1950
Robert Marshak had organized an international high energy conference in Rochester, New
York and thereby began the historic series of “Rochester” conferences. After a few years the
conferences were held in varying countries and conferences.
I had the privilege of attending
the first and when I was in Rochester in 1950. I was also the Harvard delegate to the 1957
conference at CERN, Geneva.
This coincided with the discussion and signing of the limited
test ban treaty. Hans Bethe and Igor Tamm were the US and USSR scientists discussing the
matter. We knew that Igor Tamm was a leading mountain climber so a group of us, Pief, Bob
Hofstadter, and Peter Hillman invited him to climb a small mountain with us. Tamm had no
visa for France and did not want to just drive through the Swiss-French border as so many did in
the Geneva area so we chose a small mountain just NW of Lausanne. Igor described to us his
recent visit to China. He declined to say why he went, although I now suspect it was to tell the
Chinese that the USSR was not going to share with them the “secret” of making an atomic bomb.
He also described his brief capture by the “Green” forces in the Ukraine when he was a message
carrier for the “Reds” He was taken before a French General who spared him because he spoke
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French! He also suggested that we keep our eyed open for one of his students, Andre
Sakharov, who, he maintained was brighter than he was.
The next year, I went to the USSR for the 1958 “Rochester” conference in Kiev, USSR,
which was the first major postwar scientific conference in the USSR.
That was very exciting.
To get to Kiev from London or Paris it would be logical to fly direct. But that was not then
allowed. At that time almost all foreign travel to the USSR went through Moscow. Direct
flights to Minsk or Kiev were out of the question. I had stopped off in Paris on the way to see
people in Orsay and discuss a possible sabbatical leave which I took in 1961. George Bishop
and I then flew to Moscow on Aeroflot’s newly acquired in jet - Tu104. We landed in Vnukovo
airport SW of Moscow. On the plane was an elderly Russian born American; who was greeted
by his sister who he had not met since 1913.
Everyone was still when they greeted. We
were greeted by Intourist and taken by bus to the Metropole Hotel in the center of Moscow.
There we had supper and went to bed. Up early the next morning to catch a small 2 engine
propeller plane to Kiev. My seat belts were broken. When I pointed this out by gestures , the
stewardess, she laughed. No one on the plane bothered with this capitalist idea of seat belts!
The conference was held in a large theatre building next to the Intourist hotel where we
stayed. There was a whole day trip down the Dnieper to a village where a Ukrainian dance
group danced for us. Our friends from 2 years before were there and I remember, in particular
being taken to a village up the hill from where the boat stopped by Dzelepov. Any
academician was entitled to a car anywhere he went in the USSR so we came down again by his
car
Sergei Kapitza
In April 1965 I spent nearly a month on a USA-USSR Academy exchange. I went to
Akademigorok, (Novosibirsk); Moscow, Dubna and Yerevan. This led to individual meetings
and lasting friendships. Sergei Petrovich Kapitza arrived late at the small conference, mainly on
colliding beams, in Akademigorok that I attended as a part of this trip. This tall man spoke
English with an English accent whereas all the other Russians I had met spoke with an American
accent. When I asked where he had learned the language he replied that he was born in
England. “Ah!” I said. “Your name must be Kapitza!”
Sergei invited me to talk at his
father’s Wednesday evening seminar in Moscow the next week. So began a friendship which has
lasted 43 years.
Much has been written about Sergei’s father, Pietr Kapitza. Indeed the general features
of his life history were already known to me. But Sergei was my own age. Born in
Cambridge, he was brought to Russia in 1934 with his mother Anna when they joined his father
whom Stalin would not permit to return to UK. As a son of Pietr he obviously had support in
whatever he wanted to do. During the second world war he spent some time exploring for oil.
In 1965 he was working in his father’s laboratory, the Institute of Physical Problems and built a
microtron - indeed he may have invented it. But very little physics research was done with this
microtron and by the time I met him he was starting a fine career as running a weekly TV
program in Moscow Radio, on Science. “True but incredible”, I believe it was called.
Apparently it was replayed also, and was seen by about 30 million viewers.
I saw several of
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the programs and was impressed although I did not understand the language, it was clear that the
quality was high - superior to NOVA which is sometimes not accurate.
Sergei visited the USA for the first time about 1975. He turned up without specific
invitation and indeed I would not have specifically invited him because of my agreement with
the group Scientists and Engineers for Orlov and Sharansky. But I helped him in a couple of
details such as renting a car! When in 1978, just after TMI, and I visited Moscow we called
on Pietr Kapitza. After lunch in their house, Anna took Andrée for a tour of Moscow in Pietr’s
pride and joy. That was a blue Mercedes bought with Pietr’s Nobel prize money. Sergei took
me for a tour of Pietr’s laboratory and invited us to dinner in their apartment on Leninsky
Prospekt to meet an Armenian/Siberian economist Dr Aganbegyan.
Andrée commented to
Sergei’s wife Tanya Kapitza (née Damir) that we had not been alone but were always watched.
Was there somewhere we could just walk? I am going to our dacha tomorrow, come out with
me. We went to the Dacha at Nikolina Gora, 40 miles west of Moscow on the Moscow river.
Then she drove us to a heath and dropped us. Our dacha is 3 miles over there. I will see you
for lunch.” This was Dacha Damir, given to his three daughters by Dr Damir, head of the
Bodkin? hospital in Moscow. We were introduced to 85 year old Dr Damir,
Another of
his daughters and a niece; a young architect who was recovering from an illness. “What do you
want to do when you recover?” We asked. “We are prosperous here in USSR and I feel I
should go and help an undeveloped country for awhile.”
This was not the first and not the
last, high minded comment that we heard that put us westerners to shame.
I cannot remember the year, but there was a conference in Washington on a “Nuclear
Winter” to discuss an idea of Karl Sagan that a nuclear war would put up so many particulates
that the sun would be obscured for a year or so and the earth would freeze. He and several
others were invited to discuss this by Tom Brokaw on Nightline. By that time Sergei was back
in Moscow after a 16 hour flight via Mexico City. He was in a booth where he could hear but
not see anyone. and I watched the program. Clearly Sergei gave the best performance
outshining luminaries such as Edward Teller. He emphasized the uncertainty of what might
happen and illustrated this by describing the firestorm that was created in Hamburg by the
British 1000 bomber raid in 1942. (Andrée and I later found out that her uncle coincidentally
called Serge Gaebel, while an unwilling guest, as a prisoner of war, of the German
government was forced to help clean up after this raid.) That firestorm, repeated again as we
know in Dresden a year later, surprised people. What will happen with an explosive power
1,000 times what was dropped at Hiroshima? We do not know. Brokaw realized that Sergei
had the clearest understanding and several times asked Sergei for clarification of the Science.
We did not meet again until I visited Moscow after the Chernobyl accident when in
February 1987 Evgeny Velikhov organized the Conference on a Nuclear Free World discussed
elsewhere in these reminiscences. I asked Sergei how his family were. “You will see them
tonight because you are coming to my 60th birthday party.” It was a crowded party of about 30
people in his apartment and I sat next to his brother Andrew. Soon thereafter Sergei visited
Boston for a Pugwash meeting and stayed in our house. Andrée and I reciprocated in 1996 by
staying in their Dacha as I have done several times since then.
Yuri Orlov
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I first met Yuri Orlov at the high energy physics conference in Dubna in 1964. During
that conference US warplanes bombed Haiphong (the Tonkin Gulf incident). The US
delegation were sure that President Johnson must have had good reason to do the bombing.
Yuri was sure that it was a “put up job”. He was right and I learned from this to trust his
judgment on such matters.
I met him again in both Novosibirsk and Yerevan in 1965.
Orlov was a young communist as a teenager but started criticizing the system early. As
a result of his criticisms in 1956, the head of the laboratory in which he worked, Dr Alikhanov
of the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow, was instructed to
dismiss him. Alikhanov persuaded his brother, Arlem Isaakovich Alikhanian to give him a
position at his new accelerator laboratory in Yerevan, Armenia. It was there that he performed
his accelerator calculations that were of particular interest to me.
Orlov moved back to Moscow in 1973 founded the Moscow branch of Amnesty
International and in May, 1976, he be came Chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group n
formed the with the expressed goal of assuring that the USSR keep its word under the Helskinki
accords. For his work in this regard, Yuri Orlov was arrested in February 1977. Following a
closed trial, in which he was denied the right to call witnesses and to examine evidence, he was
convicted of "anti-Soviet agitation" and sentenced to seven years in a strict regime labor camp
followed by five years of internal exile. My whole research group working at Fermilab working
on mu P scattering signed a telegram of protest to Mr Brezhnev. (My group had a Chinese, a
Canadian, a Frenchman and an Australian).
This behavior of the Soviet authorities towards
Orlov and others led me to join many American physicists in a personal boycott of the USSR,
(Scientists and Engineers for Orlov and Sharansky) and refused to encourage visits of Soviet
scientists until Orlov and Sharansky were released.
I discussed Orlov’s situation with Andrei Sahkarov in May 1979. Andrei suggested
that we get the biggest bureaucracy in the USA 99the Post Office) to fight with the biggest
bureaucracy in the USSR, the KGB.
I should send a registered letter to Orlov at his prison
camp. When the receipt came back with the wrong signature I was to complain to the US post
Office whose duty it was, under International Postal Regulations, to collect the money back
from the USSR. I tried to get all attendees at an International Accelerator Conference to do
likewise, but I do not believe that anyone else did. I got no response from the post office and
my representative in Congress, Father Drinan, declined to help.
Orlov served his jail sentence in Permsk and was then sent for five years exile to Siberia.
In 1986 he was brought back to Moscow and put on a plane for the USA. He turned up in
Cornell University who offered him a research appointment. As department Chairman I had
tried to get Harvard University to give him an appointment but failed - a forerunner of my later
failures to be generous to scholars from the University of Baghdad. I was in Ithaca when Orlov
arrived and he gave an informal seminar on the physics he had been thinking about in Siberia.
I turned up late, while Orlov was talking, but as soon as he had finished he came over and talked
to me. I was surprised that Orlov recognized me after all his experiences..
In 1996 I went to the 2nd International Sakharov conference on physics at the Lebedev
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Institute in Moscow. Orlov was there also but he spent 2 hours with Yeltsin, explaining to Boris
Yeltsin why it was, and probably still is, essential to give Chechnya considerable independence,
either within or without, the Russian Federation. Yeltsin took his advice but as we know that
fell apart a few years later when Putin was President. We were fortunate in October 2008
when we at Harvard arranged a conference to remember the 1968 “reminiscences on Progress,
Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” by Andrei Sakharov. Yuri was able to come
and made many fine comments.
Andrei Dmitrevich Sakharov
In 1979 my friend Vladimir Lobashov invited me to visit him and his research group
in Gatchina, Leningrad district. My wife and I decided to break this boycott and visited in April
1979. We justified this to ourselves by helping refuseniks by taking journals to them and
visiting dissidents in the evenings.
We then went on to Moscow.
It was then that we first
met Andrei Dmitreyvich Sakharov when we visited his apartment in May.
I thought I had met Sakharov on a previous visit to the USSR, probably when I
lectured at the Lebedev Institute in 1959. But Andrei told us that he was not then in Moscow,
but we both had attended the High Energy Physics conference in Kiev in 1970, where I had
been a rapporteur, so we probably met then.
In 1979 I wanted to discuss with Andrei three
subjects, nuclear energy, Yuri Orlov, and my physics interests, because he had expressed his
opinion on all of them. Communicating with him was an adventure of its' own. I did not have his
telephone number before I went to Moscow, but it was given to me by another physicist friend in
Moscow, Valodya (Vladimir) Kharitonov - a classmate of Andrei's. Valodya was one of the
sixty friends who, with Andrei and Yelena Bonner, waited outside the courthouse where Yuri
Orlov was sentenced, in secret, to 7 years hard labor. I telephoned Andrei's apartment many
times, but each time I started to speak English the line went dead - till 11 pm Friday night, when
the automatic telephone cut out must have gone for a cup of tea or coffee and I was able to talk
to Andrei and get his address. My wife Andrée was with me and we went round at once and
stayed for several hours. He and Elena Bonner received us with courtesy, friendliness and
straightforwardness.
Andrei immediately told us that he had assumed for 10 years that his apartment was
bugged, and that we should be careful what we said. I had always acted as if anything I said in
the USSR was recorded, except one-on-one conversations in the middle of open country, and my
wife had realized this also. Yet Andrei would not tell me Yuri Orlov's address "It is too
dangerous." I still do not understand why that item was more dangerous than anything else. He
urged me to write and cable to Orlov and to get Orlov's friends and colleagues in the west to do
likewise. "Yuri won’t get the letters and be able to read them;" Andrei said "but the authorities
will, and they may be influenced" . Back in the USA I found Yuri's address and I sent a
registered letter to him at his prison camp in Permsk. A couple of months later I spoke at an
accelerator conference in Brookhaven and suggested that they all do so too, but to the best of my
knowledge no one else did. Yuri told me later that he did not receive them, but I feel that our
effort was nonetheless worth while.
At that first meeting, Andrei took the opportunity to write one of his many open letters to
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the west. He dictated it in Russian to his wife, Elena Bonner, who typed it out immediately.
After it was translated in the USA I made a special trip to Washington DC with it. I was
impressed then, by the care with which such a letter, although written quickly, was actually
crafted. He drew western attention to some 30 people who were in jail for various activities.
But he took care to emphasize the universality of the civil rights issues, by mixing Jews and
Pentecostals in the same sentence, so that no one could ever call it Jewish, or Pentecostal,
propaganda. He always took that care in conversation also. Andrée and I were also
privileged to take a letter to their family, Elena's daughter, Tatiana (Tanya) , their son-in-law
Efrem Yankelevich and their grandchildren. We realized that they live near us in Massachusetts.
Tatiana in particular, has made an enormous effort over the years to make sure that the western
world did not forget her mother and stepfather, while at the same time adjusting to a life in a new
and strange country, and bringing up a fine family. The separation from their family was hard
for Elena and Andrei who feared that they might never meet again. Fortunately they did.
We
left 49B Tschaikolova Street at 3 in the morning. Even the Moscow subway had stopped
running. Andrei insisted on coming down to the street to be sure that we were able to catch
one of the few taxis that were on the street at this hour. We were not to see him again for 8
years.
I had first heard about Andrei Sakharov from Igor Tamm who later shared, with Frank
and Cherenkov, the Nobel prize for his explanation of Cherenkov radiation. Andrei joined
Tamm's research group and in particular joined him after the second world war in a seminal
paper inventing the TOKOMAK device for nuclear fusion work. Tamm became his thesis
advisor, and with Tamm he worked for several fruitful years in Moscow, before he went to the
"Installation", the secret military establishment, near Gorky, to design and make the hydrogen
bomb. I had met Igor Tamm and climbed a small mountain with him in 1958 while we were both
attending meetings in Geneva. Igor Tamm also, was a man of exceptional good will. He
mentioned to me the outstanding intellect of his junior colleague, Sakharov. When I visited the
USSR a year later, and lectured at the Lebedev Institute, Igor Tamm was there, but, alas,
Andrei was still away from Moscow at his military research work.
I understand that it was at the military research "installation" that Andrei met the
physicist Yakov Zeldovich with whom he became very friendly. Andrei's real interests were
always fundamental physics, and he worked on these extensively with Zeldovich. His papers in
the late 1960s were on gravitation, CP violation and the origin of the universe. I notice that
unlike other authors whose papers were published in the journals at that time, he listed no
address; we all guessed from this that he was still living near the "installation". But it was not
until I read the abridged version of Andrei's famous article "On peaceful coexistence" in the New
York Times in July 1968 that I had actually read anything of Andrei's. That article was
outstanding, and I still think that it is one of his best. I believe that western scientists failed him
at that moment. His article got almost no response from us for over 6 months. Our National
Academy of Sciences should have responded immediately with a parallel article pointing out that
from our side too, there was no alternative to coexistence. It might have opened up
communication some 18 years earlier than finally occurred. Of immediate importance was that
Soviet tanks entered Prague on August 21st. Their reception was very different from the
receptions Soviet soldiers and tanks got in 1945. But the USA was too tied up with our own
stupidities in Vietnam to think and act reasonably. Moreover I had (and still have) no authority
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or influence in the US National Academy of Sciences.
It was about the time of that article, and the subsequent putting down of Dubcek in
Prague, that Andrei returned to Moscow. He attended seminars at the Lebedev Institute but his
personal contacts with other scientists diminished. I am told that about 1975 Zeldovich stopped
seeing him. I understand also that relations with his sons by his first marriage became strained.
Andrei never talked about them to me, although other scientists did; by the time I knew him,
his stepchildren, and grandchildren, were his great pride and joy. I believe that only 2 scientists
ever visited him in Gorki. When I met him in 1987, Andrei referred with great sadness to this
ostracism by his fellow scientists, especially that by Zeldovich, but it did not alter his
determination to do what he thought was right. Andrei had a forgiving and understanding nature.
I was told (by Sergei and Tanya Kapitza) that Andrei gave a most generous and moving tribute
to Zeldovich at Zeldovich's funeral 3 ½ years before, with no hint of reproach.
One of the most difficult things to do is make strong criticisms of a national policy,
without opposing the principle. Andrei did this all the time. He never wavered in his support
of nuclear fission as a source of energy, particularly to help the less developed parts of the world.
In 1978, largely at the urging of Franticek Janouch, he wrote an article, Nuclear Power and the
Freedom of the West”, (or similar title) for the US journal, the "Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists" to encourage the western nations to continue with this program. This was at a time
when many American scientists were confused. In 1979, after Three Mile Island, I wanted to
know if he had changed his view. But a single accident did not change his view, because he
never expected an ideal technology. "One cannot and must not, stop progress" he told me. A
realist always, he knew that man must learn from experience. But he criticized the Soviet
nuclear power program, partially because he saw too little learning from experience. At this
meeting in 1979, I stated to him my belief that, if there were no changes in the overall Soviet
approach to safety, that within 10 years there would be a Soviet accident, and without a vessel to
contain the released radioactivity there could be serious loss of life. Andrei understood my
concerns at once; he agreed with me that a containment was highly desirable, although he said
then, and repeated several times since, that he preferred reactors to be underground - a preference
he shared with Edward Teller, but not shared by any other scientist I know. Of course he knew
well the Soviet military (plutonium production) in Krasnoyarsk where the reactors are
underground. At the Forum for a Nuclear Free World in Moscow in February 1987, some West
German "Greens" had mixed nuclear power and nuclear weapons, opposing both equally. Andrei
spoke up and urged them to spend their energies instead on how to make nuclear reactors safer,
"because the world will need nuclear power, and the developed nations owe it to the
undeveloped ones not to use up the scarce resources that they will need.".
While Andrei was in exile in Gorki, I sent him some scientific papers - for example a
proposal of mine to study neutron oscillations, a possibility that he had suggested 15 years
before. We also sent him a Christmas Card every year when he was in exile - and we often
received one in return. I never expected either the papers or the cards to be delivered; but they
must have been; because afterwards Andrei remembered what I had written. In 1987, after his
return from exile, and after Chernobyl, I visited again a few times, carrying letters and gifts
from his family in the USA. He was by then very active once more, and constantly in demand. I
remember the evening when he had a Czech visitor, telling him the first news about Czech
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dissidents that he had heard for 20 years. A phone call came from the USA. "The phone
never stops ringing" Andrei said in frustration. "It never rang when we were in Gorki" Yelena
Bonner commented. "It rang once - just one year ago." Andrei continued.
That was the time
Gorbachev called asking him to return to Moscow.
Andrei was not content with only understanding the technical parts of the problems at
hand. He wanted to know the broader implications. As early as 1960 he was calculating the
radiation doses from bomb fallout; and tried to influence Kruschev not to test the large10
megaton bomb because of the large number of cancers predicted world wide on the assumption
of proportionality of effect with dose. I discussed details of the effects of Chernobyl with him
28 years later, just before I made my first visit to the damaged reactor, and we discussed the
latest numbers on fallout world wide, and the expected effect on public health. Andrei was a
nonsmoker, and fully well aware of the fact that cigarettes cause lung cancer, many other
cancers, and heart disease. In our discussions I was delighted that, like myself, he constantly
compared risks one to another to gain perspective; and in these comparisons he had assumed that
smoking 200 cigarettes was equivalent to being exposed to an integrated radiation dose of 1
Rem. He asked me what I thought was the best figure; I think he understated the effects of
radiation. I tend to use 800 cigarettes per Rem. At that time he used 200.
We also discussed the causes of the Chernobyl accident and how such accidents can be
prevented in future, both by careful design and by careful operation. He was most anxious that I
not believe everything that I was told officially. For example, in the August 1986 report to the
International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna it was implied that everyone within 20 - 30 km
were evacuated on Sunday afternoon 27th April. Yet, Andrei told me, three or four young ladies
arrived in their apartment building in Gorki a week after the accident, having remained 5 km
from the power station for 3 days. He also informed me that Valery Legasov told the Soviet
Academy of Sciences in October 1986 "I did not lie at Vienna, but I did not tell the whole truth".
Of course I had already figured that out for myself! But I had visited the USSR several times,
and had never expected the whole truth. I have learned to read between the lines, and listen to
what is not said. I remembered his caution and warning, when the fact that large amounts of
radioactivity had been deposited NE of Gomel in Belorussia was belatedly reported at the
meeting of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR in March 1989.
Although he was open, Andrei was discreet. The subject of the accident at Kyshtym
came up; he clearly knew more than he was willing to say. Eager though I was to satisfy my
curiosity (and that of my western colleagues) and find out more, it would have been rude to press
the issue. In spite of the way that the state had treated him, he was loyal, and would not discuss
matters which were still secret. For example, he came out publicly against ant ballistic missile
defense at the Moscow meeting in February 1987 but was careful not to mention that he had
written a memorandum, still secret, to the politbureau about this in 1967. It only became
public knowledge after his death. Now that some details of the explosion at Kyshtym are public
knowledge, I would like to have his opinion on several aspects, but, alas, it is no longer
possible.
Andrei's concern for civil rights did not stop at the boundaries of the USSR. On one of
my treasured visits he asked me whether it was true that much of the famine relief in the Sudan
249
had stopped at the Army officers or whether it had reached the proper destinations. When I
replied that it was more true than it should be and less true than it used to be, he compared the
situation to that in the Ukraine in 1930 when the Red Army took the food and the peasants were
starved. I had read about this crime of Stalin's when I was a boy in England in the thirties; I had
forgotten. But Andrei never forgot such matters.
I last saw Andrei when he, Elena, and their daughter Tatiana (Tanya) came to tea in our
house in the USA in August 1989, just before going back to Moscow after his second visit to the
USA. He did not want a big party of many people; just a family visit to see my wife's garden
and to chat. He was interested in people, not ceremony; in ideas, not fame. He was never
pompous, but on this occasion he was very relaxed. He climbed onto a wall in our garden, and
raised his arm posing like the statue of liberty! Tanya, lay down on the ground at the top of the
hill and rolled down like a young teenager. By then he was a happy man - much happier than
when I first saw him 12 years ago. He had seen the leader of his country appreciate what he had
been urging, and the people recognized him by electing him to the Supreme Soviet. I do not
believe that he had ever expected to be vindicated in his lifetime. Such joy happens to few
people, but Andrei was one of those who deserved it. Even in death small matters show how
much relations with the Soviet Union have become "normal". I found, to my pleasure, that the
FTD florist can now deliver flowers in Moscow in mid winter.
Andrei was an outstanding physicist, a brave civil rights leader, a warm hearted man and
a fine friend. He had the highest honors his society could give him, but he risked their rejection
and took another course because he thought the society was wrong. It is impossible not to
admire such a man. We will all miss him, but we in the west especially offer our condolences
to Elena Bonner and their family, and thank them for having worked so hard over the last 10
years to bring Andrei's messages to us. Elena had the idea of having a conference on the
intellectual interests of Andrei during his last years. There were two interests with two major
parallel sessions: the rule of law in Eastern Europe and USSR, and the effect of Chernobyl
Elena trusted no one in USSR to organize the second, and she asked me to do so. We a
preliminary meeting in May 1990, for the conference in May 1991, starting on what would have
been his 70th birthday.
There were two major plenary sessions, which I opened (475). Then
one working session on the causes of the accident, which I asked Adolph Birkhofer of Munich,
Germany to chair, one on the effects, which Elena asked me to chair myself, and one on the
future, which Franticek Janouch chaired.
It was a very successful meeting which attracted a
lot of attention.
At the first session on the rule of law a member of the Armenian parliament
described the fighting that was breaking out between Armenia and Azerbaijan. As a result of
this Elena organized a small fact finding mission which I described earlier.
In April 2007 I gave the Harvard Physics Department colloquium about Andrei’s
seminal work in physics. A few years before, Harvard had accepted the archives of Andrei’s
work, with his step daughter Tanya to be curator, and organize lectures on human rights in his
honor. This lecture was joint with the Sakharov archives. Later on May 17th 2007 I gave the
talk again, at the 15th anniversary celebration of the International Sakharov Environmental
University in Minsk It was well received by the older people but the students seemed less
interested. All their active life has been since Sakharov died and already his work seemed
remote. But for me it was a great privilege to know him. In October 2008 I helped to
250
organize a small conference in Harvard to remember the publication in the New York Times 40
years ago of Andrei’s “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom.”
This is available on a webpage http://sakharovconference.org. This conference was focused on
Russia but Andrei’s thoughts of 1968 also apply to other international situations.
Pietr and Anna Kapitza
I first heard about Pietr in summer 1950 when I was leaving UK for my visit in the USA.
He was then President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and they had invited many western
scientists to a conference in Moscow. I read a little about his history, and learned a lot more
later. His father was commander of the Kronstadt fortress in the bay outside Leningrad. In
1919 Pietr’s young wife and 2 children died in the influenza epidemic. His mentor, the scientist
Joffe, suggested a change in scene and suggested a visit to Lord Rutherford’s laboratory in
Cambridge, UK. While there he made many friends, including with Paul Dirac, (from whom
much of this information came, verified by Pietr’s son Sergei).
Pietr invented an effective
helium liquefier which was the basis for his Nobel Prize in physics. The Royal Society of
London gave funds for the Royal Society Mond Laboratory of which he became director.
In 1925 or so he married his wife Anna, daughter of the Soviet Ambassador to France - a
mathematician - and they bought a house on the Maddingly Road in Cambridge and had two
children, Sergei Petrovich and Andrei. In 1934 he visited Russia for a vacation. But he was
not allowed to return. He made a telephone call to his wife - who was at a dinner party with
the applied mathematician Goldstein who later came to Harvard. “There is a war coming.
Russia will need all the scientists it can get. I have been told that I have to stay. I would like
you to come and bring the children.” Anna did, and the Royal Society sent his equipment for
making high magnetic fields. He was given a laboratory, the Laboratory for Physical Problems,
in an old estate with a house on the grounds. There was a wall all around the estate and a sentry
box at each corner. Although a prisoner in many ways he got the New York Times every day
(3 days late) and could get the best seats at any theatre performance - but accompanied by
appropriate guards.
As I understand it, by 1950 Pietr was President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. A
number of scientists from England and Europe were invited to a conference. None of those
involved in the Atomic Bomb project were allowed to go. Also a few others, including
Professor E.A. Milne, who told me all about it one time when I was friendly with his daughter
Eleanor, were stopped as they left UK. This was presumably a clumsy effort to confuse the
Russians but as we now know, the Russians had their reliable sources. Then in1951 or so Pietr
was dismissed from his post. I don’t know the exact reasons but it seems he was unwilling to
work on the hydrogen bomb although he had worked on the first Russian atomic bomb. He was
officially accused of “Hooliganism”. He went into exile in his dacha at Nikolina Gora. There
he build a laboratory (now a museum) doing simple experiments on ball lightening and on
microwaves.
But even in exile, Stalin would listen to Kapitza. After Stalin died there was a struggle for
power that we did not hear about in the west. In one letter Pietr warned Stalin about Beria. At
first Beria took power. But soon there was a revolution against him. This happened on a
251
Saturday morning and tanks entered Moscow down Leningradski Prospekt to take over.
About 11.15 a man in a suit came to Kapitza’s dacha and asked to see his laboratory.
Courteously, Pietr showed off his laboratory to this man who did not seem to understand. At
11.45 the phone rang. It was for the visitor. After a short conversation the visitor thanked
Pietr and took his leave. It transpired that he was an Air Force general sent to protect Kapitza.
At 11.45 the revolution was successful. A detailed report of this was given by Dirac at a
meeting in Erice in 1983, entitled “My 60 year friendship with Kapitza”. Kapitza returned
from exile and was again head of the Institute for Physical Problems.
When Andrée and I visited Pietr and Anna in May 1978, Andrée asked what Anna liked
most about England. Picking bluebells in the woods in the spring time was Anna’s prompt
reply. One college of Cambridge University bought the house, Kapitza house, on Maddingly
Road, Cambridge, which Anna and Pietr owned in 1928. They made it into a set of apartments
for visitors. One of the first visitors was her son Sergei Kapitza. I called Anna on the
morning of her 90th birthday, in 1995 I believe. I was only able to locate her daughter-in–law
Tanya. I was told: “She is off in Cambridge with Sergei”. I just had time to act. I called the
FTD florist and asked for a big bunch of bluebells to be delivered to the Kapitza house. They
arrived 5 minutes after Anna had come from Heathrow airport! Anna of course was thrilled.
Not often does diplomacy have such success.
Pietr Kapitza, being older, had different views that Andrei Sakharov on how to cope with
the system Pietr had worked with the system all his life, and been at the edges of it for some of
the time. In 1970? when Andrei Sakharov made his public intervention on behalf of the
biologist Zhores Medvedev who was in a “mental home”, Pietr while agreeing with Andrei
that Zhores was unjustly accused, would have behaved differently. He worked within the
system. Anna, used her political influence through her husband in what I call a Victorian
manner. In this she was very different from Elena Bonner. For this reason I was careful in the
1980s to keep my visits separate. But in 1987, when I was at the conference on a nuclear free
world,
I called on Anna who by that time was a widow. She said that she hoped I would see
Sakharov before I left. I replied that I was going immediately to see Sakharov when I left.
“Good,” she replied. “He taught us that sometimes one must just stand up and say NO!” At
that meeting with Anna I mentioned that I had been to Pakistan briefly and saw the refugee
camps. She was not surprised; it confirmed her view.
She wanted the Soviet army out of
Afghanistan. I mentioned my conversation with the rug dealer from Mazur-I-Sharif, and his
concern that the Communist government was trying to educate women. “It does not matter.
That is their decision. We can’t force it on them.”
I last saw Anna on her 95th birthday in her Moscow apartment with her children and
grandchildren. I understand that she slipped on a rug in the apartment a few weeks later and
died in hospital.
Fadhel and Sarah Jamali
I first heard, or rather read, of Fadhel Jamali in April 1945. He was in San Francisco,
to discuss and sign the UN charter. I suspect that it was because of Fadhel that many of the
protections for small countries were added to the charter.
252
At the weekend the participants all went to Camp Curry at Yosemite valley to continue
their work. There was a cafeteria which, in accordance with the usual US style closed early.
Let us say at 6 pm. At 6.30 pm Fadhel showed up with his small staff. The cafeteria was
closed. So he went to the director of Camp Curry. He introduced himself. “What can I do
for you?” “In my country when a visitor arrives on the doorstep I would kill either a sheep or a
camel. All I am asking you to do is to open the cafeteria”. This they did and the French
arrived at 7.30 and could eat too and the Dutch at 8 pm. It was in the world newspapers within
a day.
I remembered this again on January 6th 1952 - the day after Andree and I were married
and we began our brief honeymoon at Camp Curry in Yosemite Valley.
But then I forgot
about Fadhel till I met his son Usameh at the “Economics of Energy” seminar that I offered with
AJ Meyer in 1975 and met Usameh again in Kuwait when I first visited. Then, on a visit to
Tunis in 1983 I called on Fadhel.
.
On July 14th 1958 there was a revolution in Iraq. Most of the members of the
Government including King Faisal were killed. (I first heard that had their throats cut). Fadhel
was not at first to be found. But his friends in the UN, assuming that he was dead, organized a
memorial service for him. He was the only friend of mine who ever survived his memorial
service. Amusingly, Fadhel commented that Andrei Gromyko, Ambassador of the USSR to
USA, did not turn up. Did he know something?
I had met his son Usameh (and since 9/11 I say the good Usameh) in Kuwait, when I was
invited in 1978 to visit Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research. Usameh told me that his father
and mother were living near Tunis (actually in Bizerte). In 1983 I was invited to the 25th
anniversary of the University of Tunis, which was started by the French just before they left.
There were a dozen foreign guests. There were six Frenchmen, 5 Arabs and myself. Andrée
and I both went and we were treated very well. We decided to call on Sarah and Fadhel.
Not knowing where they lived we got in a taxi and the driver knew all about them and found out
for us.
In 1988 I decided to reinstitute the seminar series A.J. Meyer and I had taught from 1973
to 1978 and he had continued till his death. I called it “The Middle East Development
Seminar” and I invited my friends in the middle east to some and tell us their dreams and how
we at Harvard could help them. In 1989 it was my privilege to invite Fadhel Jamali to spend a
week at Harvard University to lecture and discuss whatever he chose.
Fadhel gave me a typescript of these memoirs which I passed to Widener Library. It
was hoped that the typescript would be edited and published to inform the Western World that
there was a time when Iraq had tasted and struggled for freedom not only for themselves but also
for other Arabs, and by extension for all peoples. Alas, funding for the editing and publication
was not forthcoming at that time. In 2006 I decided to arrange for the scanning and placing
on the World Wide Web this very important document.
At the moment it is in Hypertext
Markup Language (html) for convenience in accessing a particular section. I was assisted in
this by four young visiting Iraqi scientists who do this in memory of a great Iraqi and a great
human being. I note that Fadhel's American wife (Sarah) was a great lady herself. Her
humanitarian work on behalf of children firstly in Iraq, and later in Tunis, won the admiration of
253
all who knew her. What other American has been pictured on the front page of a non-American
(Tunisian) magazine at age 90, and called the woman of the year? She fully supported Fadhel
in his work, and remained in Baghdad when he was in jail during 1958-1961 at great risk to
herself.
For 17 years both Andrée and I had the privilege of calling Fadhel and Sarah our
friends. It is for their memory, which I cherish, that I undertook the task of scanning and
organizing his memoirs.
Conclusion.
All lives come to an end, and memoires must come to an end a little sooner. There is
always a purpose to one’s writing.
In this case, a combination of nostalgia, vanity and a hope
to be of interest to my children and grandchildren. As I get old I have less ability in almost
everything. Less ability to perform constructive scientific work, less physical strength and lung
function to hike and climb in the mountains. But I take pleasure in remembering the happy
moments and successes of the past. Even if these memoires go into the waste basket, my time
will not have been wasted.
254
PUBLICATION LIST
This list is loaded onto the world wide web at
http://phys4.harvard.edu/%7Ewilson/publications/published_papers.html
from which site many may be downloaded.
1."Photodisintegration of the deuteron," R. Wilson, C.H. Collie and H. Halban, Nature (letter)
162, 185 (1948).
1a. "Random selectors for ESP experiments," Richard Wilson, Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research 48, 213 (1947).
2." Cross section for the disintegration of the deuteron by 2.76 MeV gamma-rays," R. Wilson,
C.H. Collie and H. Halban, Nature (letter) 163, 245 (1949).
3. "The decay constant of radio-sodium, 24Na," R. Wilson and G.R. Bishop, Proc. Phys. Soc.
Lond. 62A, 457 (1949).
4. "A lower limit for the finding energy of the deuteron," G.R. Bishop, C.H. Collie, H. Halban
and R. Wilson, Phys. Rev. (letter) 76, 638 (1949).
5. "A simple pressure and vacuum tap," H. Halban and R. Wilson, J.Sci. Instr. 26, 1948 (1949).
6. "Measurement of some weak gamma-ray intensities," G.R. Bishop, R. Wilson and H. Halban,
Phys. Rev. (letter) 77, 416 (1950).
7. "Cross-over transitions in Ir194, Ag110, Cs 134," Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. (letter) 79, 1004
(1950).
8 "Neutron capture -rays from Cd, Cl and C," Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. (letter) 80, 211 (1950).
9. "The cross section for photodisintegration of the deuteron at low energies," G.R. Bishop, C.H.
Collie, H. Halban, A. Hedgran, K. Siegbahn, S. DuToit and R. Wilson, Phys. Rev. 80, 211
(1950).
10. "Noise in ionization chamber pulse amplifiers," R. Wilson, Phil. Mag. 41, 66 (1950).
11. "Photoelectric dissociation of the deuteron," C.H. Collie, H. Halban and R. Wilson, Proc.
Phys. Soc. Lond. 63A, 994 (1950).
12. "High pressure ionization chambers used in Oxford ,"L. Beghian, C.H. Collie, H. Halban and
R. Wilson, Helv. Phys. Acta 23 ,82 (1950).
255
13. "Internal pair creation in magnesium-24," W. Mims, H. Halban and R. Wilson, Nature (letter)
166, 1027 (1950).
14. "High pressure ionization chamber counters and their use," R. WILSON, L. Beghian, C.H.
Collie, H. Halban and G.R. Bishop, Rev. Sci. Instr. 21, 699 (1950).
14a. "Discussion on `An electronic random selector,'" R. Wilson, Brit.I.R.E. 3A (1950).
15. "The angular distribution of the neutrons produced in the photo-disintegration of the deuteron
by the 2.51 MeV gamma-rays of Ga72," G.R. Bishop, H. Halban, P.F.D. Shaw and Richard
Wilson, Phys. Rev. 81, 219 (1951).
16. "A search for charge-exchange scattering of p+ mesons," Richard Wilson and John P. Perry,
Phys. Rev. (letter) 84, 163 (1951).
17. "Cross section for the reaction of pi+ + d to p + p and the spin of the pi +meson," D.L.
Clark, A. Roberts and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. (letter) 83,549 (1951).
18. "Disintegration of the deuteron by pi+ mesons," Donald L. Clark, Arthur Roberts and
Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 85, 523 (1952).
19. "Proton Bremsstrahlung at 140 MeV," Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev.85 , 563 (1952).
20. "The fundamental limit of sensitivity of photometers," Richard Wilson, Rev. Sci. Instr. 23,
217 (1952).
21. "Single channel pulse amplitude analyzer for measurement of coincident pulses," R. Wilson,
J.Sci. Instr. 29, 70 (1952).
22. "A formula for thick target bremsstrahlung," R. Wilson, Proc. Phys. Soc. Lond. 66A, 638
(1953).
23. "Analysis of photonuclear reactions," Richard Wilson, Proc. Phys. Soc. Lond. 66A, 645
(1953).
24. "Constancy of photomultiplier gain," R. Wilson, J. Sci. Instr.30 , 472 (1953).
25. "Electrodisintegration of Cu63, Zn64, Ag 109, and Ta181," Karl L. Brown and Richard
Wilson, Phys. Rev. 93, 443 (1954).
26. "Neutron-proton scattering at small angles," J.J. Thresher, R.G.P.Voss and R. Wilson, Proc.
Roy. Soc. 229A, 492 (1955).
27. "Special methods for gamma ray spectroscopy," G.R. Bishop and R. Wilson, contribution to
a book on beta and gamma ray spectroscopy, Kai Siegbahn (ed.), North Holland Publishing
256
Company, 1955.
28. "Internal pair formation," Richard Wilson, contribution to a book on beta and gamma ray
spectroscopy, Kai Siegbahn (ed.), North Holland Publishing Company, 1955.
29. "Fatigue of photomultipliers under pulsed operation," R. WILSON, J. Sci. Instr. 32, 152
(1955).
30. "Large scintillators as threshold detectors for high energy processes," J.J. Thresher, C.P. van
Zyl, R.G.P. Voss and R. Wilson, Rev.Sci. Instr. 26, 1186 (1955).
31 "Polarization in nucleon scattering at various energies," Richard Wilson, Phil. Mag. 46, 769
(1955).
32 "The scattering of high energy neutrons by a Coulomb field," R.G.P.Voss and R. Wilson,
Phil. Mag. 50, 175 (1956).
33. "Neutron and proton distributions in heavy nuclei," R.G.P.Voss and R. Wilson, Phys. Rev.
99, 1056 (1955).
34. "Neutron inelastic cross sections between 55 and 140 MeV," R.G.P. Voss and R. Wilson,
Proc. Roy. Soc. 236A, 41 (1956).
35 "The analysis of high energy neutron cross sections," R.G.P.Voss and R. Wilson, Proc. Roy.
Soc. 236A, 52 (1956).
36. "The elastic scattering of 136 MeV neutrons by nuclei," C.P. van Zyl, R.G.P. Voss and R.
Wilson, Phil. Mag. 47, 1003 (1956).
37. "The nuclear radius and potential from neutron diffraction scattering," R. Wilson, Phil. Mag.
47, 1013 (1956).
38. "The absorption of high-energy photons in matter," J. Moffatt, J.J. Thresher, G.C. Weeks and
R. Wilson, Proc. Roy. Soc., 244A, 245 (1958).
39. "Fine structure in the nuclear photo effect," Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 104, 1424 (1956).
40. "Proton-proton scattering at energies from 46 to 147 MeV," J.N. Palmieri, A.M. Cormack,
N.F. Ramsey and Richard Wilson, Annals of Physics, 5, 299 (1958).
41. Search for resonance structure of neutron cross sections at 100 MeV," S.G. Carpenter and
Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 114, 510(1959).
42. "p-n asymmetries at 143 MeV," S.G. Carpenter and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 113, 650
(1959).
257
43. "Nuclear parameters in the scattering of nucleons by carbon," Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev.
114, 260 (1959).
44. "Elastic scattering and polarization of protons by helium at 147 and 66 MeV," A.M.
Cormack, J.N. Palmieri, N.F. Ramsey and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 115, 59 (1959).
45. "p-p triple scattering at 143 MeV," C.F. Hwang, T.R. Ophel, E.H. Thorndike, Richard
Wilson and N.F. Ramsey, Phys. Rev. Letts. 2, 514 (1959).
46. "Some features of regenerative deflection and their application to the Harvard
synchrocyclotron," G. Calame, P.F. Cooper, Jr., S. Engelsberg, G.L. Gerstein, A.M. Koehler, A.
Kuckes, J.W. Meadows, K. Strauch and R. Wilson, Nucl. Instr. 1, 169 (1957).
47. "Experimental status of the nucleon-nucleon interaction," R. WILSON, report to the London
conference on nuclear forces and the few nucleon problem. Published in Nuclear Forces and the
Few Nucleon Problem, Pergamon Press, 1960; Vol. I, pp. 47-64.
48. "The nuclear photo effect," G.R. Bishop and R. Wilson, in Handbook of Physics XLI,
Springer Verlag, 1958.
49. "Depolarization and time reversal in p-p scattering at 142 MeV," C.F. Hwang, T.R. Ophel,
E.H. Thorndike and Richard Wilson, Phys.Rev.119 , 352 (1960).
50. "Nuclear radii from neutron scattering," Richard Wilson, Nucl. Phys. 6, 318 (1960).
51. "Small-angle proton scattering at 3 BeV," W.M. Preston, Richard Wilson and J.C. Street,
Phys. Rev. 118, 579 (1960).
52. "Cross section and asymmetry in the deuteron pickup reaction C 12(p,d)C11 at 145 MeV,"
P.F. Cooper, Jr. and Richard Wilson, Nucl. Phys. 15, 373 (1960).
53. "Measurement of the rotation parameter R in proton-proton scattering at 140 MeV," E.H.
Thorndike, J. LeFrancois and Richard Wilson,Phys. Rev. 120, 1819 (1960).
54. "Elastic scattering of 146 MeV polarized protons by deuterons, H. Postma and Richard
Wilson, Phys. Rev. 121, 1229 (1961).
55. "Asymmetry in 143 MeV pn scattering," A.F. Kuckes and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 121,
1226 (1961).
56. "Ionization counters," Chapter 6 of Techniques of High Energy Physics, D.M. Ritson (ed.),
Interscience Publishers, Inc., New York, 1961, pp.271-299. &127;
57. "On the deuteron as a free nucleon target at 145 MeV," A.F.Kuckes, P.F. Cooper, Jr., and
Richard Wilson, Annals of Physics 15, 193 (1961).
258
58. "Elastic (p,a ) and (p,d) scattering at 147 and 66 MeV," A.M. Cormack, J.N. Palmieri, H.
Postma, N.F. Ramsey and Richard Wilson, in Nuclear Forces and the Few Nucleon Problem,
Pergamon Press, 1960, pp. 259-268.
59. "Diffusion elastique des nucleons par des noyaux legers (D, He, C) comparison avec le
diffusion nucleon-nucleon," Richard Wilson, J. Physique 22, 610 (1961).
60. "Electron-proton scattering at low momentum transfers," P.Lehmann, R. Taylor and Richard
Wilson, Phys. Rev. 126, 1183 (1962).
61. "Alternate nucleon form factors," L.N. Hand, D.G. Miller and R. Wilson, Phys. Rev. Letts. 8,
504 (1962).
62. "n-p tripper scattering parameters R and A," R.A. Hoffman, J.Lefrancois, E.H. Thorndike
and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 125, 973(1962).
63. "Slightly inelastic proton-deuteron scattering," D.G. Stairs, Richard Wilson and P.F. Cooper,
Jr., Phys. Rev. 129, 1672 (1963).
64. "Electron-proton elastic scattering at 1 and 4 BeV," J.R.Dunning, Jr., K.W. Chen, N.F.
Ramsey, J.R. Rees, W. Shlaer, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. Letts. 10, 500
(1963).
65. "Electron-proton scattering at 1 and 4 BeV," A.A. Cone, K.W.Chen, J. Dunning, N.F.
Ramsey, J. Rees, W. Shlaer, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, presented at the Stanford
Conference on Nucleon Structure, 1963.
66. omitted
67. "Measurement of the triple scattering parameter R' in proton-proton scattering at 137 ½
MeV," Stanley Hee and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 132, 2236 (1963).
68. Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering: Experimental Aspects, Richard Wilson, John Wiley and Sons,
New York , 1963.
69. "Proton-deuteron elastic triple scattering at 140 MeV," R.A.Hoffman, J. Lefrancois, E.H.
Thorndike and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 131,1671 (1963).
70. "Electron-proton scattering at high momentum transfers," K.W.Chen, A.A. Cone, J.R.
Dunning, Jr., S.F.G. Frank, N.F. Ramsey, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. Letts. 11,
561 (1963).
71. "Electric and magnetic form factors of the nucleon," L.N.Hand, D.G. Miller and Richard
Wilson, Rev. Mod. Phys. 35, 335 (1963).
72. "Quasi free proton-neutron and proton-proton scattering at 140 MeV," J. Lefrancois, R.A.
259
Hoffman, E.H. Thorndike and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 131, 1660 (1963). &127;
73. "Electron-proton scattering at large momentum transfer," K.W.Chen, A.A. Cone, J.R.
Dunning, N.F. Ramsey, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, in Nucleon Structure, Hofstadter and
Schiff (eds.), Stanford University Press,1964, pp. 55-60.
74. "Electromagnetic structure of the neutron and proton," J.R.Dunning, Jr., K.W. Chen, A.A.
Cone, G. Hartwig, N.F. Ramsey, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. Letts. 13, 631
(1964).
75. "Electroproduction of protons at 1 and 4 BeV, K.W. Chen, J.R.Dunning, Jr., J.K. Rees, W.
Shlaer, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 135B, 1030 (1964).
76. "Problemes a petit nombre de nucleons," Richard Wilson, in Comptes Rendus du Congress
International de Physique Nucleaire, P. Gugenburger (ed.), Paris, 1964, pp. 87-97.
77. "A liquid-hydrogen target for internal-beam electron scattering," L. Hand, J. Rees, W. Shlaer,
J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, in Nucleon Structure, Hofstadter and Schiff (eds.), Stanford
University Press,1964, pp. 364-366.
78. "Internal pair formation," in Alpha -, Beta- and Gamma - Spectroscopy, Kai Siegban (ed.),
North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1965, pp.1557-1568.
79. "Baryon spectroscopy by inelastic electron-proton scattering,"A.A. Cone, K.W. Chen, J.R.
Dunning, Jr., C. Hartwig, N.F. Ramsey, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. Letts. 14,
326 (1965).
80. "The energy and momentum dependence of NP charge exchange scattering," Richard
Wilson, Annals of Physics 32, 193 (1965).
81. "Review of nucleon form factors," in Springer Tracts in Modern Physics, Springer-Verlag,
Berlin, 1965, Vol. 39, pp. 43-54.
82. "Nucleon form factors and their interpretation," L.H. Chan, K.W. Chen, J.R. Dunning, Jr.,
N.F. Ramsey, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 141, 1298 (1966).
83. "Measurement of proton Electromagnetic form factors at high momentum transfers," K.W.
Chen, J.R. Dunning, Jr., A.A. Cone, N.F. Ramsey, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev.
141, 1267 (1966).
84. "Quasi-elastic electron-deuteron scattering and neutron form factors," J.R. Dunning, Jr.,
K.W. Chen, A.A. Cone, G. Hartwig, N.F.Ramsey, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev.
141, 1286 (1966).
85. "Unsuccessful search for an excited electron," R. Budnitz, J.R. Dunning, Jr., M. Goitein, N.F.
Ramsey, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 141, 1313 (1966).
260
86. "1963 Summer Study Report," L. Hand and R. Wilson, SLAC-25(1963).
87. "Shielding for experiments near an electron machine," R. Wilson, CEA-A-30 .
88 "A revision of shielding calculations," Richard Wilson, CEA-73(1959), revised May 1963.
89. "Observation of muon pairs produced by high-energy negative mesons," A. Wehmann, E.
Engels, Jr., L.N. Hand, C.M. Hoffman, P.G.Innocenti, Richard Wilson, W.A. Blanpied, D.J.
Drickey and D.G. Stairs, Phys.Rev. Letts. 17, 1113 (1966).
90. "Muon-pair decay modes of the vector mesons," A. Wehmann, E.Engels, Jr., C.M. Hoffman,
P.G. Innocenti, Richard Wilson, W.A. Blanpied, D.J.Drickey, L.N. Hand and D.G. Stairs, Phys.
Rev. 18, 929 (1967).
91 "Inelastic scattering of electrons by protons," A.A. Cone, K.W.Chen, J.R. Dunning, Jr., G.
Hartwig, NF. Ramsey, J.K. Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 156, 1490 (1967). Erratum:
163, 1854 (1967).
92. "A comparison of experiments on photo production, electroproduction and muoproduction,"
Richard Wilson and M. Wong, 200 BeV Accelerator: Experimental Use III (1967).
93. "Measurements of elastic electron-proton scattering at high momentum transfer by a
coincidence technique," M. Goitein, R.J. Budnitz, L. Carroll, J. Chen, J.R. Dunning, Jr., K.
Hanson, D. Imrie, C. Mistretta, J.K.Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. Letts. 18, 1016
(1967).
94. "Comparison of elastic electron-proton scattering cross section with some theoretical
predictions," M. Goitein, J.R. Dunning, Jr. and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. Letts. 18, 1018
(1967).
95. "Some features of electromagnetic interactions," lectures given at Scottish Universities
Summer School, T.W. Priest and L.L.J. Vick (eds.), Oliver and Boyd, 1966.
96. "Proton form factors at time-like momentum transfers," Richard Wilson, CEA-TM-134
(1964).
97. "Particle extraction I: Tuck regenerative deflectors for the CEA," P.F. Cooper, Jr. and
Richard Wilson, CEA-53 (1958)
98. "Experimental checks of quantum electrodynamics," Comments on Nuclear and Particle
Physics 1, 20 (1967).
99. "The size of the nucleon and meson dominance," Comments on Nuclear and Particle Physics
1, 104 (1967).
261
100. "Quasielastic electron-deuteron scattering at forward angles," R.Budnitz, J. Appel, L.
Carroll, J. Chen, J.R. Dunning, Jr., M. Goitein, K.Hanson, D. Imrie, C. Mistretta, J.K. Walker
and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. Letts. 19 , 809 (1967).
101. "The excited states of the proton," Comments on Nuclear and Particle Physics 1, 128
(1967).
102. "The N-N interaction, 1967--An overview and conference summary," A.E.S. Green, M.H.
MacGregor and Richard Wilson, Rev. Mod. Phys.39 , 498(1967).
103. "Measurements of the neutron-proton and neutron-carbon total cross sections at
electron-volt energies," T.L. Houk and Richard Wilson, Rev.Mod. Phys. 39, 546 (1967).
Erratum: 40, 672 (1968).
104. "Spectrometers and their specifications," in Proceedings of the 1967 International
Symposium on Electron and Photon Interactions at High Energies (TID-4500), SLAC, p. 556.
105. "Neutron form factors from quasi-elastic electron deuteron scattering," R.J. Budnitz, J.
Appel, L. Carroll, J. Chen, J.R. Dunning, Jr., M. Goitein, K. Hanson, D. Imrie, C. Mistretta, J.K.
Walker and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 173, 1357 (1968).
106. "Differential cross sections for neutral-pion electroproduction near the first pion-nucleon
resonance," C. Mistretta, D. Imrie, J.R. Appel, R. Budnitz, L. Carroll, J. Chen, J. Dunning, Jr.,
M. Goitein, K. Hanson, A. Litke and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. Letts. 2, 1070 (1968).
107. "Phenomenological analysis of the neutral pion electroproduction and NN* form factor," D.
Imrie, C. Mistretta and Richard Wilson, Phys.Rev. Letts. 20, 1074 (1968).
108. "Momentum measurement at 100 Mev/c of particles in a high-energy beam with large
angular divergence and spatial extent," C. Zajde, E.Engels, C. Hoffman, P.G. Innocenti, A.
Liberman, Richard Wilson, W.A. Blanpied, D.G.Stairs and D. Drickey, Nucl. Instr. and Meth.
65, 93 (1968).
109. "Some rare decays in interactions of pi and K mesons with carbon and iron," A.A.
Wehmann, E.Engels, Jr., C.M. Hoffman, P.G. Innocenti, Richard Wilson, W.A. Blanpied,
D.J.Drickey, L.N. Hand and D.G. Stairs, Phys. Rev. Letts. 20, 748 (1968).
110. "Pion exchange in n-p scattering and photo production,"Richard Wilson, Comments on
Nuclear and Particle Physics II, 41 (1968).
111. "High energy nucleon scattering," Richard Wilson, Comments on Nuclear and Particle
Physics I, 160 (1967).
112. "Coincidence measurements of single-pion electroproduction near the N*(1236) resonance,"
C. Mistretta, J.R. Appel, R.J. Budnitz, L.Carroll, J. Chen, J.R. Dunning, Jr., M. Goitein, K.
Hanson, D.C. Imrie and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 184, 1487 (1969).
262
113. "Angular distributions of pi+ electroproduction and the pion form factor," C. Mistretta, D.
Imrie, J.A.Appel, R. Budnitz, L. Carroll, M. Goitein, K. Hanson and Richard Wilson, Phys.Rev.
Letts. 20, 1523 (1968).
114. "Test of time-reversal invariance in electroproduction interactions using a polarized proton
target," J.R. Chen, J. Sanderson, J.R. Appel, G.Gladding, M. Goitein, K. Hanson, D.C. Imrie, T.
Kirk, R.Madaras, R.V. Pound, L. Price, Richard Wilson and C. Zajde, Phys. Rev. Letts. 21,1279
(1968).
115. "Search for the electroproduction of the N* (1470) resonance from deuterium," J.L. Alberi,
J.R. Appel, R.J. Budnitz, J. Chen, J.R. Dunning, Jr., M. Goitein, K. Hanson, D.C. Imrie, C.A.
Mistretta and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. 176, 1631 (1968).
116. "Muon pair production by 12-GeV/c negative pi and K mesons on carbon and iron,"A.A.
Wehmann, E. Engels, Jr.,C.M. Hoffman, P.G. Innocenti, Richard Wilson, W.A.Blanpied, D.J.
Drickey,L.N. Hand and D.G. Stairs, Phys. Rev. 178, 2095(1969).
117. "Experimental test of quantum electrodynamics by muon bremsstrahlung," A.D. Liberman,
C.M. Hoffman, E. Engels, Jr., D.C. Imrie, P.G. Innocenti, Richard Wilson, C. Zajde, W.A.
Blanpied, D.G. Stairs and D.J.Drickey, Phys. Rev. Letts. 22, 633 (1969).
118. "High-energy muon inelastic scattering," C.M. Hoffman, A.D. Liberman, E. Engels, Jr.,
D.C. Imrie, P.G. Innocenti, Richard Wilson, C. Zajde, W.A. Blanpied, D.G. Stairs and D.
Drickey, Phys. Rev. Letts. 22, 659(1969).
119. "Form factor and vector mesons," Richard Wilson, in Meson Spectroscopy, C. Baltay and
A.H. Rosenfeld (eds.), W.A. Benjamin, Inc., New York, 1968,p. 47.
120. "Form factors of elementary particles," Richard Wilson, Physics Today 22 47 (1969).
121. "An achievement of magnitude," R. Wilson, book review in Science 164. 674 (1969).
122. "Electromagnetic experiments at NAL (and other smaller reports)," NAL Summer Study
(1968).
123. "The rho-gamma coupling and the optical model," Richard Wilson, Nuovo Cimento Letters
1, 952 (1969).
124. "Form factors," Richard Wilson, in Yearbook of Science and Technology, McGraw-Hill,
1969.
125. "Predictions for colliding-beam experiments at 3 GeV and some plans at CEA," in
Proceedings of the International School of Physics "Enrico Fermi" : Physics with Intersecting
storage Rings, B. Touschek(ed.), Academic Press, London, 1971, pp. 453-511.
263
126. "Elastic electron-proton scattering cross sections measured by a coincidence technique," M.
Goitein, R.J. Budnitz, L. Carroll, J.R. Chen, J.R. Dunning, Jr., K. Hanson, D.C. Imrie, C.
Mistretta and Richard Wilson, Phys. Rev. D1, 2449 (1970).
127. "Search for violation of time reversal invariance in inelastic e-p scattering," J.R. Appel, J.R.
Chen, J. Sanderson, G. Gladding, M. Goitein, K. Hanson, D.C. Imrie, T. Kirk, R. Madaras, R.V.
Pound, L. Price, Richard Wilson and C. Zajde, Phys. Rev. D1. 1285 (1970).
128. Review of Proceedings of the IV International Symposium on Electron and Photon
Interactions at High Energies, D.W. Braben (ed.), Daresbury Nuclear Physics Laboratory, 1969,
in Nature.
129. "What is the radius of a nucleus?" Comments on Nuclear and Particle Physics IV, 116
(1970).
130. "Highlights of high energy physics," Nature 227, 1018 (1970).
131. "Electromagnetic effects of the nucleon-nucleon interaction,"Comments on Nuclear and
Particle Physics II, 103 (1968).
132. "Low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering, charge symmetry and charge independence,"
Comments on Nuclear and Particle Physics VII, 141 (1968).
133. "Lepton-hadron interactions and quantum electrodynamics,"Richard Wilson, rapporteur's
talk at the XV International Conference on High Energy Physics, Kiev, USSR, August 1970.
134. "Cross section of slow neutrons on parahydrogen," T.L. Houk, D. Shambroom and Richard
Wilson, Phys. Rev. Letts. 26, 1581 (1971).
135. "Elastic scattering and resonant electroproduction," Richard Wilson, in Proceedings of 1971
international symposium on electron and Photon Interactions at High Energies, N.B. Mistry
(ed.), Laboratory of Nuclear Studies, Cornell University, 1972, pp. 97-114.
136. "Muon inelastic scattering--past, present, future," Richard Wilson, talk given at Conference
on Muon Physics, Colorado State University ,September 1971.
137. "Politics of nuclear power in the United States," Richard Wilson, Nature, 233, 453 (1971).
138. "Ten Years of Accelerator Physics," T.B.W. Kirk and Richard Wilson, The Institute of
Physics, Bristol, England, Vol. 35, No. 5, 1973.
139. "Backward-angle electron-proton elastic scattering and proton-Electromagnetic form
factors," L.W. Price, J.R. Dunning, Jr., M.Goitein, K. Hanson, T. Kirk, and Richard Wilson,
Phys. Rev. D4, 45(1971).
140. "The neutron-proton interaction below 30 MeV," in Proceedings of the European-American
264
Nuclear Data Committee on Neutron Standards and flux Normalization, Argonne National
Laboratory, 1970.
141. "Nuclear Energy," Richard Wilson, in The New book of Knowledge, Grolier, New
York,196, pp.352-371.
142. "Storage rings, vector mesons and photo production," Richard Wilson, Comments on
Nuclear and Particle Physics I, 200 (1967).
143. "Vector meson couplings, electron scattering and QED," Richard Wilson, Comments on
Nuclear and Particle Physics II, 169 (1968).
144. "Power Policy--Plan or Panic?" Richard Wilson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, p. 29,
May (1972).
145. "Kilowatt Deaths," Richard Wilson, Letter to Physics Today, 25 , 73 (1972).
146. "The AEC and the Loss of Coolant Accident," Richard Wilson, Nature, Vol 241, p.
317-320, February (1973).
147. Energy, Ecology and the Environment, Richard Wilson and William Jones, Academic
Press, June 1974.
148. "Tax the Integrated Pollution Exposure," Richard Wilson, Science, Vol. 178, pp. 182-183,
October (1972).
149. "Parity Violation in Neutron-Capture Gamma Rays," J.L. Alberi, I.G. Schroder and Richard
Wilson, Physics Rev. Letters., Vol. 29, No. 8, Aug. 1972.
150. "Initial Results on e+e- interactions at Ecm = 4 GeV at the CEA," R. Averill, et al. Paper
presented at the XVI International conference on High Energy Physics, Chicago, Illinois, Sept.
6-13, 1972.
151. "Electron-positron elastic scattering at a centre-of-mass energy of 4 GeV," R. Madaras, et
al., Phys. Rev. Letts., Vol. 30, No. 11, pp.507-10 (1973).
152. "Hadron production by electron-positron annihilation at 4 GeV center-of-mass energy," A.
Litke, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts., Vol. 30, No.23, pp. 1189-1192 (1973).
153. "Experimental test of quantum electrodynamics for the reaction e+ + e- to gamma +
gamma at 4 GeV center-of-mass energy," G.Hanson, et al., Il Nuovo Cimento, Vol.7,No. 13,
pp. 587-591 (1973).
154. "Neutron proton scattering at a few MeV," E.Lomon and R. WILSON, Phys. C9, 1329
(1974).
265
155. "Electron-positron collisions at high energies," A. Litke and Richard Wilson, Scientific
American, Vol. 229, No. 4, pp. 104-113, October(1973).
156. "Natural Gas is a Beautiful Thing?," Richard Wilson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol.
XXIX, No. 7, pp. 35-40, Sept. (1973).
157. "Electron Positron Elastic Scattering at 5 GeV Center of Mass Energy," H. Newman, et al.
Paper presented at the Int. Conf. on Electron and Photon Interactions at High Energies, Bonn,
Germany. Later published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 32, 483 (1974).
158. "Hadron Production by Electron-Positron Annihilation at 5 GeV Center of Mass Energy," J.
Leong, et al. Paper presented at the Int.Conf.on Electron and Photon Interactions at High
Energies, Bonn, Germany, August (1973).
159. "Large-Angle Quasi-elastic Electron-Deuteron Scattering," K.M. Hanson, et al., Phys. Rev.
Letts., 8, 753 (1973)
160. "Energy for a Hundred Thousand Years?", review by R. Wilson of book entitled Nuclear
Energy: its Physics and Social Challenge, Auth. D.R.Inglis, Physics Today, Vol. 26, No. 11, pp.
47-49 (1973).
161. "Nuclear Fusion: Our Best Energy Bet for the Future," from Harvard Magazine, Vol. 76,
pp. 32-38, Nov. (1973) and reprinted in Skeptic, special issue, number 2.)
162. "Wire Spark Chambers with Magnetostrictive Readout," R.Madaras, A. Litke, R. Wilson, et
al., Nuclear Instruments and Methods, Vol.155, p. 7730 (1973).
163. "Electron-Positron Elastic Scattering at 5 GeV Center of Mass Energy," H. Newman, et al.,
Phys. Rev. Letts., 32, 483 (1974).
164. "Hadron Production by Electron-Positron Annihilation at 5 GeV Center of Mass Energy,
Phys. Rev. Letts., 32, 432 (1974).
165. "Search for Heavy Lepton Production," J.Feller, et al., London Conference, July (1974).
166. "Experimental Test of Quantum Electrodynamics for the Reaction e +e- to gg at 5 GeV
Center of Mass Energy," M.E. Law, et al., Lettere al Nuovo Cimento 11, 5 (1974).
167. "How to save energy: frustrations remain," review by R. Wilson of book entitled Potential
Fuel effectiveness in Industry, E.P.Gyftopoulos, et al., Technology Review, Vol. 77, No. 3, pp.
66-67, January(1975).
168. "Sensitivity of Organic Liquid Scintillators to Magnetic Fields," E. Jeenicke and Richard
Wilson, Nuc. Inst. and Meth. 126, 459 (1975).
169. "Experiments in Electron-Positron Collisions at 4 and 5 GeV,"Lecture at Summer School
266
on Subnuclear Physics, Erice, Academic Press (1974).
170. "Experimental Attempts to Study Parity Violation in the Two Nucleon System," appearing
in Interaction Studies in Nuclei, by H.Joachim and B. Ziegler, North-Holland Publishing Co.,
The Netherlands, 1975.
171. "Sulphur Pollution and Emission Charges," Lecture at Summer School on Aspects of
Energy Conversion, Oxford, Pergamon Press (1975).
172. "The Nuclear Power Controversy in the U.S.A.,"Lecture at Summer School on Aspects of
Energy Conversion, Oxford , Pergamon Press (1975).
173. "Charging for Radioactive Emissions," Science, 190, Oct. 31, 1975.
174. "Examples in Risk Benefit Analysis," New Scientist (1975); also in Chemtech, Journal of
the American Chemical Society 5 604-607(1975).
175. "Scattering of Muons at 150 GeV," in New Phenomenon in Subnuclear Physics, ed.
Antonino Zichichi, NY:Plenum Press, 2 Vols., pp. 589-608 (1977).
176. "Cross Section of Slow Neutrons on Parahydrogen," J.Callerame, et al., Phys. Rev. C12,
1423, Nov. 1975.
177. "Cross Section of Slow Neutrons on Orthodeuterium," J.Callerame, et al., Phys. Rev. C12,
1428, Nov. 1975.
178. "Inclusive Hadron Production in Inelastic Muon-Proton Scattering at 150 GeV/c,"
Anderson, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts., Dec. 1, 1975 .
179. "Some Perspectives on the Energy Question," (A slightly abridged and edited version of
testimony given before the Committee on Energy and Diminishing Materials, California
Assembly, October 28, 1975). Nuclear News, 19 , Feb. 1976.
180. "Yellin's Review of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Safety Reactor Study:
Comment," Bell Journal of Economics, 7, 701, (1976).
181. "Will the Past Be Prologue?, The Past Health Effects of Fossil Fuel and Nuclear Electricity
Generation," Public Utilities Fortnightly, 99 , 43 (1977).
182. Book review of Non-nuclear Futures--The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, by Amory
Lovins and John H. Price in Technology and Culture, 1977.
183. "Nuclear Liability and the Price Anderson Act," The Forum, American Bar Association, 12,
612 (1977).
184. "World Energy Needs and Supplies," with A.J. Van Horn, Merit Students Encyclopedia,
267
1977 version, MacMillan Publishing Co., New York.
185. "Search for Parity Violation in Neutron-Proton Capture," with J.F. Cavaignac and B.
Vignon, Phys. Lett. 67B, 148 (1977).
186. "Properties of Inclusive Hadron Spectra in Muon-Nucleon Scattering at 150 GeV/c,"
Anderson, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts. 36, 1422 (1977).
187. "Diffractive Production of p Mesons by 147 GeV Muons," Francis, et al., Phys. Rev.
Letts., 38,633 (1977).
188. "Do We Really Need Nuclear Energy? Yes, If We Know What's Good for Us," Boston
Sunday Globe, June 5, 1977.
189. "Measurement of the Proton Structure Function from Muon Scattering," Phys. Rev. Letts.,
38, 1450 (1977).
190. "Partial Body Calcium Determination in Bone by Proton Activation Analysis," with R.F.
Eilbert, A.M. Koehler, J.M. Sisterson and S.J.Adelstein, Phys. Med. Biol., 22, 817 (1977).
191. "How to Have Nuclear Power Without Weapons," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
33, 39 (1977).
192. "Radiation and Man," book review of Biological and Environmental Effects of Low-Level
Radiation, IAEA, Vols. 1 and 2; and Transuranium Nuclides in the Environment, IAEA, in
American Scientist, 65,623(1977).
193. "Physics of Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor," Rev. Mod. Phys. 49, 4 (1977).
194. "Evidence of Parity Violation in Neutron Capture by 117 Sn," H. Benkoula, J.F. Cavaignac,
J.L. Charvet, D.H. Koang, B. Vignon, R. Wilson. Phys. Lett. 71B, 287-289 (1977).
195. "Nuclear Parity Violation in Neutron Capture," in Proceedings of the Ben Lee Memorial
Conference, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois, October 21, 1977.
196. "Study of Parity Violation by Neutron Capture Gamma Rays,"with J.F. Cavaignac, P.
Liaud, R. Steinberg, B. Vignon, and E. Jeenicke, Proceedings of the Second International
Conference on the Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction, University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
Canada, June 27-30, 1977.
197. "The Potential Risks of Liquefied Natural Gas," with A.J. Van Horn, Energy, 2, 375 (1977).
198. "From the Compton Effect to Quarks and Asymptotic Freedom,"Amer. J. of Phys., 45, 1139
(1977).
199. "Reducing the Hidden Subsidies to Urban Automobilists," with David Gordon Wilson,
268
Environmental Action Bulletin, 8, 23 ( November 12, 1977).
200. "The Status of Risk-Benefit Analysis," with A.J. Van Horn, BNL Report No. 22282,
December 1976.
201. "Factors Influencing the Public Perception of Risks to Health and Safety: A Brief
Summary," with A.J. Van Horn, BNL Report No. 24000, August 1977.
202. "Liquified Natural Gas: Safety Issues, Public Concerns and Decision Making," with A.J.
Van Horn, BNL Report No. 22284, November 1976.
203. "Mitigation of the Effects of Sulphur Pollution," with Benjamin Chang, BNL Report No.
22283, July 5, 1976.
204. "ep Possibility for Isabelle," Proceedings of the 1977 ISABELLE Summer Workshop, BNL
50720, UC-28, p. 399.
205. "What Good Is the Muon Storage Option?," Proceedings of the 1977 ISABELLE Summer
Workshop, BNL 20720, UC-28, p. 421.
206. "Risks Caused by Low Levels of Pollution," Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 51, 37,
Jan.-Feb. 1978.
207. "Risk Benefit Analysis for Vinyl Chloride," invited paper at American Chemical Society
Meeting, September 1976.
208. "Testimony for OSHA Hearing on the Identification, Classification, and Regulation of
Toxic Substances Posing a Potential Occupational Carcinogenic Risk," April 1978.
209. "Quantitative Estimates of Carcinogenic Risk," section of a book on Chemical
Carcinogenisis, ed. R. Olson, 1980.
210. "Estimates of Risks," Journal of Business Administration, Vancouver, 11, 37 1980.
211. "Interspecies Comparison of Carcinogenic Potency," with E. A.C. Crouch, J. Tox. and
Environ. Health, 5:1095-1118, 1979.
212. "The Daily Risks of Life," Technology Review, February 1979,pp. 41-46.
213. "Searches for Parity Violation," H. Benkoula, et al., Proceedings of the 3rd International
Symposium on Neutron Capture Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy and Related Topics, pp. 371-383,
Ed. R.E. Chrien and W.R. Kane, 1979.
214. "Lawyers, Scientist, and Dissent," Nuclear News, January,1973.
215. "A Measurement of the Nucleon Structure Functions," B.A.Gordon, et al., Physical Review
269
D20, 2645 (1979).
216. "Hadron Production in Muon-Proton and Muon-Deuteron Collisions," W.A. Loomis, et al.,
Phys. Rev. D19, 2543 (1979).
217. "Muon Scattering at 219 GeV and the Proton Structure Function, B.A. Gordon, et al., Phys.
Rev. Letts. 41, 615 (1978).
218. "A Rational Approach to Reducing Cancer Risks," Cancer News, 32 , 17 (1978).
219. "Nuclear Wastes in Perspective," Christian Science Monitor, p. 23, Jan. 25, 1979.
220. "The Concept of Risk," CFA Cosmetic Journal, 10, 22(1978).
221. "Reducing the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons by Advancing Nuclear Power," talk to the
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, published by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations,
April 1978.
222. "Energy Scenarios for the U.S.,"Proceedings of the 3rd International School on Energetics,
Vol. 6 of the Ettore Majorana International Science Series, p. 227, Plenum Press, N.Y., 1980.
223. "Lessons of Three Mile Island," Boston Herald American, 4/4/79.
224. "Production of Photons Associated with the c by 217-Gev/c protons," T.B.W. Kirk, et al.,
Phys. Rev. Lett., 42, 619 (1979).
225. Health Effects of Fossil Fuel Burning: Assessment and Mitigation , with S.D. Colome, J.D.
Spengler and D.G. Wilson, Ballinger Publishing Company: Cambridge, MA (1981).
226. "Measurement of Parity Violation in nd Capture," with M.Avenier, J.F. Cavaignac, D.H.
Koang, B. Vignon and Richard Hart, Proceedings of the "Neutrino '79" Bergen, Norway
Conference, June 18-22, 1979.
227. Risk/Benefit Analysis, with E.A.C. Crouch, Ballinger Publishing Company: Cambridge,
MA (1982).
228. "The Environmental and Public Health Consequences of Replacement Electricity Supply,"
Energy, 4:81-86, 1979.
229. "Rx: The Cyclotron," Harvard Magazine, pp. 58-62, Nov.-Dec.1979.230. "Soviet Scientists
on Nuclear Power," The Bulletin of the atomic Scientists, pp. 44-46, Feb. 1980.
231. "Problems in Estimation and Presentation of Risks," with Edmund Crouch and Robert
Kline, Presented to the Colloque Sur Les Risques Sanitaires Des Differentes Energies, Paris,
France, January 1980.
270
232. "Observation of Three Upsilon States," with D. Andrews, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts., 44, 1108
(1980).
233. "Transverse Momentum and Angular Distributions of Hadrons in Muon-Proton Scattering
and Test of Quantum Chromodynamics," with C. Tao, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts., 44, 1726 (1980).
234. "Observation of a Fourth Upsilon State in e+e- Annihilations," with D. Andrews, et al.,
Phys. Rev. Letts., 45, 219 (1980).
235. "When the Oil Runs Out," with R.V. Kline , Washington Post Op-Ed Page, August 22,
1980.
236. "On `oil power'," letter to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, p. 65, June 1980.
237. "Muoproduction of Neutral Strange Hadrons at 225 GeV," with R.G. Hicks, et al., Phys.
Rev. Letts., 45, 765 (1980).
238. Review of Frozen Fire by Lee Niedringhaus Davis in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
36, 39 (1980).
239. "Nuclear Accident Scenarios and Implications for Emergency Planning," Guest Editorial,
Health Physics, Vol. 40, pp. 287-290 (1981).
240. "Risk/Benefit Analysis for Toxic Chemicals," Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, 4,
370 (1980).
241. "Nuclear Power Plants," Opinion section, The Newton Graphic, Thursday, October 30,
1980.
242. "Evidence for New-Flavor Production at the Upsilon(4S)," with C. Bebek, et al., Phys. Rev.
Letts., 46, 84(1981).
243. "Decay of b-Flavored Hadrons to Single-Muon and Dimuon Final States,"with K.
Chadwick, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts., 46, 88 (1981).
244. "Health Effects of Fossil Fuel Burning," The Env. Prof., 2 d, 224 (1980).
245. "Using treaties, not air strikes to halt nuclear spread,"Christian Science Monitor, June 24,
1981 .
246. "A Measurement of the Branching Ratio of Upsilon (2S) -> pi+ pi- Upsilon (1S)," with D.
Andrews, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts. 46,1181 (1981).
247. "Observation of Shadowing in the Virtual Photon Total Hadronic Cross Section on Nuclei,"
with M.S. Goodman, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts., 47 , 293 (1981).
271
248. "Thoughts on a Muslim Bomb," Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 18, 1981.
249. "The Risks of Pesticides: Their Assessment and Comparison with Benefits," Proceedings of
Symposia IX International Congress of Plant Protection, Ed. Thor Komedahl, Entomological
Society of America: Washington, D.C. ,August 5-11, 1979, 1:275-279 (1981).
250. "Egypt sets sights on nuclear power for its energy needs," Christian Science Monitor, Feb.
8, 1982.
251. "How to reduce the price of electricity," Christian Science Monitor, May 18, 1981.
252. "Production ratios for hadrons produced in muon-proton inelastic scattering at 219 Gev,"
with J. Proudfoot, et al., Phys. Rev. D24,2012 (1981).
253. "Radiotherapy with 160 Mev Protons," with B. Gottschalk and Andreas Koehler presented
at the Conference on Ionizing Radiations, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia , March 1982.
254. "Environmental Problems of Nuclear Power and the Applications to Arab Countries,"
presented at the 2nd Arab Energy Conference, Doha, Qatar , March 1982.
255. "Coherent production of mesons in muon carbon scattering at 150 and 100 Gev," with D.
Shambroom, et al., Phys. Rev. D24, 775(1981).
256. "The Daily Risks of Life," Proceedings of the Public Awareness Symposium, Knoxville,
TN ,June 1980, pp. 5-21.
257. "Charged and Neutral Kaon Production at the Upsilon(4S),"with A. Brody, et al., CLNS
81/483 and CLEO 81-03, March 1981.
258. "Regulation of Carcinogens," with Edmund Crouch, Risk Analysis , 1, 47 (1981).
259. "India Mastering Advanced Technology," Christian Science Monitor, Wed., March 10,
1982.
260. Contributions to the 1981 International Symposium on Lepton and Photon Physics at High
Energies, CLEO Collaboration, 1981. Sept. 1981. Papers included the following titles:
Evidence Against Exotic Decays of B Mesons
Observation of Upsilon(3S) -> pi+pi- Upsilon(1S)
Inclusive Properties of B Meson Decay
Cross Sections for e+e- Annihilation into Hadrons in the Upsilon Region
Leptons from B Decay
Kaon Production from the Resonances
Kaon-Lepton Events in B Meson Decay
Baryon Production in the Region
A Determination of alphas from the Leptonic Decay of the Upsilon(1S)
A Measurement of the Leptonic Branching Ratio of the Upsilon(2S)
272
Angular Distribution in the 3-Gluon Decay of the Upsilon(1S)
261. "The Role of Health Risk Assessment in Decision Making,"Proceedings of the Third
Annual ORAL Life Sciences Symposium, The Franklin Institute Press, 1980. pp. 73-83.
262. "Mobilization of the Private Sector in Effective Development of Fusion Energy," Report to
the National Science Foundation Workshop on Commercialization of Alternative Energy
Technologies, Sept. 29-30, 1980.
263. "Nuclear Power, The Promises and Problems," part of the series entitled, ENERGY
SOURCES, The Promises and Problems, UNH/CHID Sources Series, University of New
Hampshire, Ed. Louis Klutz, Durham, NH , 1980.
264. "Explaining NPT," Nuclear Europe, Journal of ENS, 2, November 1981.
265. "Nuclear Technology in Developing Countries, Problems and Prospects--a Conference
Report," with Hugh Bodin, Nuclear Europe ,Journal of ENS, 5 , May 1982.
266. Energy for the year 2000, Ed. R. Wilson and F. Amman, Proceedings of the Third
International School on Energetics, Erice, Italy. Published by Plenum Press, 1980.
267. Energy demand and efficient use, Ed. F. Amman and R. Wilson, Proceedings of the Fourth
International School on Energetics, Erice, Italy . Published by Plenum Press, 1981.
268. "The Arab World -- in the Market for West's Know-How," Christian Science Monitor,
Wed., June 9, 1982 .
269. "Experimental Considerations for a Sensitive Neutron-Antineutron Oscillation Search,"
Presented to International Conference on Neutron and Baryon Stability (ICOBAN), January
1982, Bombay, India, published in the proceedings of the conference (1983).
270. "Nuclear Sales to China ?",Christian Science Monitor, Monday, July 19, 1982.
271. "De-Facto Non-Proliferation Principles," presented to the International Seminar on Nuclear
War, Erice, Italy, August 1982.
272. "The Use of Models in Public Health Risk Analysis," with J. Evans and H. Ozkaynak, J. of
Energy and Environment, 1, 1 (1982).
273. "Indoor Air Pollution," Icarus International, L.G. Cook Associates, Summit, NJ ,September
1982.
274. "Swedish reactor promises greater safety of nuclear powerplants," Christian Science
Monitor, Thursday, Sept. 30, 1982.
275. "The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," Progress in Scientific Culture, Autumn 1982, Vol.
273
7, No. 3, Ed. A. Zichichi.
276. "Inclusive Charged D* Production in e+e-Annihilations at W = 10.4 GeV," Bebek, et al.,
Phys. Rev. Lett., 49,610 (1982).
277. "Chemical and Nuclear Waste Disposal: Problems and Solutions," with J. Murray and J.J.
Harrington, Cato Journal, 2, 2 (Fall 1982).
278. "India and Pakistan :the nuclear confrontation," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
October 1982, p. 60-61.
279. "Measurement of the Branching Ratio of Upsilon(3S) -> p+p -Upsilon(1S)," with J. Green,
et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 49 , 617 (1982).
280. "Exorcizing myths about nuclear power," The Washington Times, November 15, 1982.
281. "Safety Regulations in the USA ,"D. Okrent and Richard Wilson, Chapter 4.3 of High Risk
Safety Technology ,Ed. A.E. Green, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 1982.
282. "Get It Firsthand", letter to the Editor, Boston Herald, Friday, Jan. 7, 1983. 283. "Acid Rain
Decisions," Icarus International, L.G. Cook Associates, Summit, NJ, December 1982.
284. "Khomeneini's Islamic Fundamentalism Unites Iraq,"Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 10,
1983 (letter from Iraq ).
285. "Semileptonic decays of B mesons," with K. Chadwick, et al., Phys. Rev. D27, 475 (1983).
286. "Iraq grapples with sandy solar collectors," Christian Science Monitor, 1983 (letter from
Baghdad).
287. "Possibilities of Experiments to Measure Neutron-Antineutron Mixing," FIRST
WORKSHOP ON GRAND UNIFICATION, University of New Hampshire, April 10-12, 1980,
Math Sci. Press, pp. 306-308, 1980.
288. "Muon Scattering at Fermilab," Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on High
Energy Physics, Tokyo ,Japan, August 23-30, 1978 .
289. "Decay of B Mesons into Charged and Neutral Kaons," A. Brody, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett.,
48, 16, (1982).
290. "Diffractive production of vector mesons in muon-proton scattering at 150 and 100 GeV,"
Physical Review D26, 1 (1982).
291. "Charged Particle Multiplicites in B-Meson Decay," M.S. Alam, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 49,
6, (1982).
274
292. "Measurement of the Leptonic Branching Ratios of the Upsilon(1S), Upsilon(2S), and
Upsilon(3S)," D. Andrews, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 50 ,11 (1983).
293. "Observation of Exclusive Decay Modes of b-Flavored Mesons," S. Behrends, et al., Phys.
Rev. Lett., 50, 11 (1983).
294. "Measurement of the Branching Fraction of the Decay Upsilon(1S) -> e+e-," R. Giles, et al.,
Phys. Rev. Lett., 50 , 12 (1983).
295. "A visit to the bombed nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha , Iraq," Nature, 302, March 31, 1983 .
296. "Search for axion production in Upsilon decay," M.S. Alam, et al., Phys. Rev. D27, 7
(1983).
297. "The Health and Environmental Effects of Burning Gas and Oil," with Leslie G. Cook,
Icarus International, June 1983.
298. "Observation of Baryons in B Meson Decay," M.S. Alam, et al.,The CLEO Collaboration,
CLNS 83/570, CLEO 83-06, June 1983.
299. "The CLEO Detector," D. Andrews, et al., Nuclear Instruments and Methods., Vol. 211,
No. 1, June 1, 1983 .
300. "D0 Spectrum from B-Meson Decay," J. Green, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 51, 5, (1983); also
The CLEO Collaboration, CLNS83/566, CLEO 83-04, June 1983.
301. "Evidence for the f Meson at 1970 MeV," A. Chen, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 51, 8 (1983);
also the CLEO collaboration, CLNS83/569, CLEO 83-05, June 1983.
302. "Further Evidence for Charged Intermediate Vector Bosons at the SPS Collider," G.
Arnison, et al., UA1 Collaboration, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland ,CERN-EP/83-111, August 11,
1983 .
303. "A Search for Axions at a Power Reactor," J.F. Cavaignac, et al., Physics Letters 121B, 3
(1983).
304. "Interisk Comparisons," with E.A.C. Crouch, Symposium on Assessing Health Risks from
Chemicals, American Chemical Society (1982).
305. "The Risks of Drinking Water," with E.A.C. Crouch and L.Zeise, Water Resources
Research, 19, 1359 (1983).
306. "Use of acute toxicity to estimate carcinogenic risk," with L. Zeise, et al., Risk Analysis, 4,
187 (1984).
307. "Attempts to establish a risk by analogy," M. Fiering and Richard Wilson, Risk Analysis, 3,
275
207 (1983).
308. "Search for massive e ->n g and µ? ->n g final states at the CERN super-proton synchrotron
collider", G. Arnison, et al., CERN-EP/83-162, submitted to Phys. Letts., (1983).
309. "Statistical Distributions of Health Risks," M. Fiering, et al., Civ. Eng. Syst. 1, 129 (1984).
310. "Production of charmed mesons in e+e-annihilations at 10.5 GeV", P. Avery, et. al., Phys.
Rev. Lett. 51,1139 (1983).
311. "The role of synergism in Carcinogenisis," with E. Crouch, et al., internal report, Harvard
University, Energy and Environmental Policy Center (1983).
312. "Ruling out exotic models of b quark decay", A. Chen, et. al., Phys. Letts., 122B, 317
(1983).
313. "Hyperon Production in e+e- Interactions in the Upsilon Region", with M.S. Alam, et. al.,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 53,24 (1984).
314. " A Search for the Chi(2.2) in the region", with S. Behrends, et. al., Phys. Letts., 137B, 277
(1984).
315. "Total cross section for electron positron annihilation into hadron final states in the upsilon
energy region", with R. Giles, et. al.,Phys. Rev., D29, 1285 (1984).
316. "Real and Imagined Constraints on Energy Use," Energy Opportunities, Edmonton, Canada
,March 20-24 (1984).
317. "The Uses and Misuses of Risk Assessment," with E. Crouch, Governance, p. 10 (Spring
1984).
318. "Commentary: Risks and Their Acceptability," Science, Technology and Human Values, 9,
(2), 11 (1984).
319. Book Review: "Loose Talk About Nuclear Power," The Atlantic, 245 , (2) 104 (1984).
320. "Observation of Radiative Decays of the Upsilon (2S) Region," with S. Behrens, et al.,
Phys. Rev. Lett., 52,(10)799 (1984).
321. "New Electricity Power Plants--Cheaper than they seem,"Icarus International, L.G.
Associates, NJ, October 1984.
322. "Study of the Neutron-Proton Weak Interaction at the ILL Reactor", M. Avenier, et al., J. de
Physique, C3, 45 Suppl. 3, 99(1984).
323. "Measurement of the Upsilon Mass", with W.W. Mackay, et. al., Phys. Rev. D29, 11, 2483
276
(1984).
324. "Upper Limit on Flavor-Changing Neutral-Current Decays of the b Quark", P. Avery, et
.al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 53, 14, 1309 (1984).
325. "Leptonic Communications of the branching ratio of Upsilon(2S)" with S. Behrens, et. al.,
Rapid Communications, Phys. Rev. D9, Vol. 30, 1996 (1984).
326. "Parity Violation in nd Capture," with M. Avenier, et .al., Phys. Letts, 137B, 125 (1984).
327. "Uncertainty in Risk Assessment," with E.A.C. Crouch and L.Zeise, Banbury Report 19,
133 (1985).
328. "Compensation effects in hadron calorimeters," with J. Brau, et al., IEEE Transactions on
Nuclear Science, NS-32, 1 (1985).
329. "Observation of new structure in the e+e-cross section above the Upsilon(4S)", with
Besson, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 54(5), 381 (1985).
330. "High-statistics study of Upsilon(2S)" with Besson, et al., Physical Review D30, 7, (1984)
331. "Limit on the b Upsilon u Coupling from Semileptonic B Decay," A.Chen, et al., Physical
Review Letters, 52, 13 (1984).
332. "Prioritization of Chemical Carcinogenisis Testing: the use of production data", with Erol
Hakanoglu, Myron B. Fiering, E.A.C. Crouch, Lauren Zeise. Civ. Eng. Syst. Vol. 2, p. 84
(1985).
333. "Inclusive hadron production in upsilon decays in non resonant electron-positron
annihilation at 10.49 GeV," S. Behrends, et al., Physical Review D31, 9, 1985.
334. "Observation of the decay B0 -> D*+mu- ," A. Chen, et al., Physical Review D31, 9 (1985).
335. "In Arab lands, a revolution in education : Oil money, independence, have spurred rise of
educated classes." The Christian Science Monitor, April 8, 1985.
336. "Two-body decays of B mesons," R. Giles, et al., Physical Review D30, 11, (1984).
337. "Safer than we thought", Speak out. IEEE Spectrum, October1985.
338. "A Measurement of W for 150 MEV Protons in Nitrogen and Argon", with P.L. Petti and L.
Verhey. Paper at Seattle Meeting Am. Soc. Physics. Medicine (1985).
339. "Decay D0 -> f K 0", (1986), with C. Bebek, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts. 56,1893.
340. "Tautology or not Tautology?", with E. Crouch and L. Zeise, J. Toxic. and Environ. Health.
277
20:1 (1987).
341. "Report to The American Physical Society of the Study Group on radionuclide release from
severe accidents at nuclear power plants", Reviews of Modern Physics, 57, 3, pt. II, July 1985.
342. "Potential for low LET charged particle radiation therapy in cancer", with Michael Goitein,
Herman D. Suit, Evangelos Gragoudas, Andreas Koehler, Rad. Research, Vol. 104, pp.
F297-F309 (1985).
343. "Risks Posed by Various Component of Hair Dyes", Arch. Dermatol. Res. 278, 165:170
(1985).
344. "Parity Non-conservation in the radiative capture of polarized neutrons by 35Cl", with M.
Avenier, G. Bagieu, H. Benkoula, J.F. Cavaignac, A. Idrissi, G.H. Koang, B. Vignon, Nuclear
Physics A436(1985) 83-92.
345. "Can Risk-Benefit Analysis Be Used in Resolving the Acid Rain Problem?" Acid Rain:
Economic Assessment, Ed. P. Mandelbaum, Environmental Science Research, Vol. 33. Plenum
Press. 1985.
346. "Reply to comments: On the relationship of toxicity and carcinogenicity, with L. Zeise and
E.A.C. Crouch, Risk Analysis, 5,1985.
347. "Misuses of Risk Analysis in the Federal Government, talk at theWorkshop on the Use of
Risk Analysis in the Federal Government, Amer. Soc. ofMech. Eng., Washington, DC (April
1985).
348. Book Review of Nuclear America: Military and Civilian nuclear Power in the
U.S.1940-1980; Radiant Science, Dark Politics: a Memoir of the Nuclear Age:and Controlling
the Atom: The Beginning of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1962,in Nature, Dec. 1985,p. 106.
349. "Risk Assessment for Chemicals, An Overview," in Proceedingsof aSymposium Sponsored
by the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Washington, DC, Sept. 23-24 (1985), pp. 1-13.
350. "Decay B -> C "with P. Hass, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 55, 1248. (1985).
351. "New determination of the Michel parameter in tau decay,"with S. Behrends, et al., Phys.
Rev. D32 (rapid communications) 2468 (1985).
352. "Bose-Einstein correlations in e+e-annihilations in the Upsilon region," with P. Avery, et
al., Phys. Rev. D32,2294 (1985).
353. "L c Production from e+e- Annihilation in the Upsilon Region," with T. Bowcock, et al.,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 55(9), 923 (1985).
354. "Inclusive Decay of B Mesons into Charged D*, Phys.Rev. Lett., 54 (17), 1894 (1985).
278
355. "Search for monoenergetic photons from Upsilon(1S)- > g + X, with Besson, et al., Phys.
Rev. D33(1) (Rapid Communications), 300 (1986).
356. "Inclusive f Production in B-Meson Decay," with D. Bortoletto, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 54 ,
800 (1986).
357. "Parity Violation in Capture of Polarized Neutrons," with Avenier, et al., in “The
investigation of fundamental interactions with cold neutrons”: Proceedings of a workshop, Ed.
G.L. Greene, NBS Special Publication 711, Feb. 1986.
358. "Measurement of the Direct Photon Spectrum from the Upsilon (1S), with S.E. Csorna, et
al., Phys. Rev. Letts., 56, 1222 (1986). 359. " Chernobyl Data Might Upset Dire Predictions,"
Newsday, May 22, 1986.
360. "How Dangerous was Chernobyl accident?" The Boston Globe, May 24, 1986.
361. "Middle East Nuclear Plants," Letter to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, pp. 47-48, May
1986.
362. "b Physics," for the CLEO collaboration, talk at the 7th Vanderbilt High Energy Physics
Conference, May 15, 1986.
363. "Problems in Interspecies Comparisons," with E. Crouch, in Mechanisms of DNA Damage
and Repair, Implications for Carcinogenisis and Risk Assessment, Ed. M. Simic, L. Grossman,
and A. Upton, New York: Plenum Press, 1986, p. 543.
364. "A Possible Relationship Between Toxicity and Carcinogenicity," with L. Zeise and E.A.C.
Crouch, Journal of the Amer. Coll. of Toxic., 5 , 137 (l986).
365. "Dealing with Risk: Summary and Analysis," in Dealing with Risk : The Courts, the
Agencies and Congress, Presentations delivered at the American Bar Association's Fourteenth
Annual Conference on the Environment, May 17-18, 1986.
366. "Liquid Argon as an Electron/Photon Detector in the Energy Range of 50 MEV to 2 GEV,"
with M.S. Goodman, et al., IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, 1, 524(1981).
367. "Measurement of the Photon Asymmetry in Capture of Polarized neutrons by Deuterons,"
with M. Avenier, et al., Nucl. Phys. A459,335 (1986).
368. "Chernobyl: Assessing the Accident," Issues in Science and Technology, Vol. III, No. 1, p.
21(1986).
369. "A Brief Note," Issues in Science and Technology, Winter, l986.
370. "What really went wrong?" Nature, Vol. 323, p. 29, Sept. 4, 1986.
279
37l. "A measurement of w for 150 MeV protons in nitrogen and argon," with P. Petti and L.
Verhey, Phys. Med. Biol., 31(10):1129-1138 (1986).
372. "Upper limits for the production of light short-lived neutral particles in radiative decay,"
with T. Bowcock, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts. 56, 2676 (1986).
373. "Observation of the Decay B - FX," with P. Hass, et al.,Phys. Rev. Letts., 56, 2781 (1986).
374. "Exclusive radiative Upsilon(1S) decays," with A. Bean, et al., Phys. Rev. D Rapid
Communications 34, 905 (1986).
375. "Limits on B0B0 Mixing and ( t B0)/(t B +) " with A. Bean, et al., Phys. Rev Lett. 58,183
(1987).
376. "Study of p +p- transitions from the Upsilon (3S)," Phys. Rev. Letts., 58 , 307(1987).
377. "Inclusive B decays into charm," Phys. Rev. D35, 19 (1987).
378. "Risk Assessment and Comparisons: An Introduction," with E.A.C. Crouch, Science, 236,
267, 17 April 1987.
379. "The Dose Response Relationships for Carcinogens: A Review,"with L. Zeise and E.A.C.
Crouch, Environmental Health Perspectives, 73,259 (1987).
380. "The Carcinogenic Risk of Some Organic Vapors Indoors: A Theoretical Survey," with M.
Tancrede, L. Zeise and E.A.C. Crouch, Atmospheric Environment 21, 2187 (1987).
381. "On the Relationship Between Carcinogenicity and Acute Toxicity," with B. Metzger and
E.A.C. Crouch, Risk Analysis, 9, No.2,169(1989).
382. "Coping with Atomic Disaster," book review of Chernobyland Nuclear Power in the
USSRby David R. Marples, The New York Times Book Review, Feb. 1, 1987 .
383. "A Nuclear Physics Program and Experimental Needs," Nucl.Inst. and Methods, A240,
34-40 (l986).
384. "Cancer Risk Management: A review of 132 federal regulatory decisions," C.C Travis, S.A.
Richter, E.A.C. Crouch, R. Wilson and E.D.Klema, Environmental Science and Technology 21,
415-420 (1987).
385. "Search for magnetically charged particles produced in e+ e- annihilations at square root ( s)
= 10.6 GeV," with T. Gentile, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 35, 1081 (1987).
386. "The Central Electromagnetic Calorimeter of UA1," with C. Cochet, et al., Nuc. Instr. and
Meth., A243, 45 (1986).
280
387. "Limits on Exotic Exclusive B Decays," with P. Avery, et al., Phys. Letts. 183B, 429
(1987).
388. Omitted
389. "A Visit to Chernobyl ," Science, 236, 1636 (1987).
390. "Nuclear Safety After Chernobyl ,"Env. Sci. and Tech. 21, 1051 (1987).
391. "Risk and Regulation," Chem Tech, Aug. 1987, p. 478 (reprint of 384).
392. "When there's an accident, who should be blamed," Chicago Tribune, Aug. 7, 1987).
393. "Still Waiting for the Nuclear Age," Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27 (1987).
394. "Study of the Decay B - > YC", Phys. Rev. D34, 3279 (1988).
395. "Risk Assessment and Comparisons: An Introduction," withE.A.C. Crouch, in Carcinogen
Risk Assessment, Plenum Press 1988 (reprint of 378).
396. "Proton Beam Treatment Facility for Tumors of the Eye," A.M.Koehler, E. Gragoudas, B.
Gottschalk, J. Munzenrider, J. Sisterson, M. Wagner, R. Wilson, presented at the Second
International Meeting on Diagnosis and Treatment of Intraocular Tumors, Nyon, Switzerland
(Nov. 1987).
397. "Time to pull plug on power politics," The Boston Herald, Guest Column January 17, 1988.
398. "Improved upper limit on flavor-changing neutral-current decays of the b quark," with A.
Bean, et al., Phys. Rev. D35, 3533 (1987).
399. "Evidence for Charmed Baryons in -Meson Decay," with M.S. Alam, et al., Phys. Rev.
Letts. 59, 22 (1987).
400. "Measurement of the tau lifetime," with C. Bebek, et al., Phys. Rev. D39, 690 (1987).
401. "G (b - µ?lv)/ G (b - clv) from the end point of the lepton momentum spectrum in
semileptonic decay," with S. Behrends, et al.,Phys. Rev. Letts. 59 , 407 (1987).
402. "Exclusive decays and masses of the mesons," with C. Bebek, et al. Phys. Rev. D36, 1289
(1987).
403. "Production of hand w Mesons in tau Decay and Search for Second-Class Currents," with
P. Baringer, et al., Phys. Rev. Letts. 59, 1993(1987).
404. "In Chernobyl Recovery, a Lesson We Must Learn," Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1988 ,
281
Part II, p. 7.
405. "Nuclear Power and Energy Policy," Nuclear News, 31,58 (1988).
406. "Risk Assessment and Comparisons,: An Introduction," with E.A.C. Crouch in "Hazard
Prevention", p. 14, March/April 1988(reprint of 378).
407. "Upper Limits on Charm-Changing Neutral-Current Interactions," with P. Haas, et al., Phys.
Rev. Letts. 60, 1614(1988).
408. "Measuring and Comparing Risks to Establish a de Minimis Risk Level," Regulatory
Toxicology and Pharmacology 8, 267-282(1988).
409. "Study of the Decay B(r) -> yC ," with M.S. Alam, et al., Phys. Rev. D34, 3279 (1986).
410. "Search for the Charmless Decays B -> (P Pbar pi) and (P Pbar 2pi) " C. Bebek, et al.,
Phy. Rev. Lett. 62:8 (1989).
411. "Studies of parity violation using polarized slow neutron beams,"with J. Alberi, et al.,
Canadian Journal of Physics, 66:542(1988).
412. The APS Council and the DEW study, Physics Today (letter) (1987).
413. "Global Energy Use: A Quantitative Analysis," R. Wilson.Symposium on global warming;
Center for Environmental Information, Rochester, NY; in Global Climate Change Linkages,
Elsevier Science Publishing Co., (1989)pp. 121-163.
414. "Measurement Uncertainty in Epidemiological Studies of Two Cohorts Exhibiting
Benzene-Induced Leukemia," E.T. Barfield, H. Gruenwald, S.Lamm, A. Walters, R. Wilson, and
D. Byrd, in Risk Analysis, edited by C.Zervos. Plenum Press, NY 1991, pp. 731-739.
415. "The Bates Polarized Electron Source," with Gordon Cates, et al.,Nucl. Inst. Method. A278,
293 (1989).
416. "Sources of Compensation in Hadronic Calorimeters," with M.S.Goodman, T.A. Gabriel, A.
Di Ciaccio, Nucl. Inst. Methods. A278, 441 (1989).
417. "Measurement of the Muonic Branching Fractions of the Upsilon (1S) and Upsilon (3S).
"W.-Y. Chen et al., Physical Review, D39, 3528 (1989).
418. "A Search for Exclusive Penquin Decays of B Mesons." P. Avery et al., Physics Letters,
223B, 470 (1989).
419. "Observation of the Charmed Strange Baryon (Xi0c )" P. Avery et al., Physical Review
Letters, 62, 863 (1989).
282
420. "Upsilon c++ and "Upsilonc0 Production from e+e- Annihilation in the Energy Region." T.
Bowcock et al., Physical Review Letters, 62, 1240 (1989).
421. "B0B0 Mixing at the Upsilon (4S)." M. Artuso et al., Physical Review Letters, 62, 2233
(1989).
422. "Search for b -> u Transitions in Exclusive Hadronic B-Meson Decays." D. Bortoletto et
al,. Physical Review Letters, 62, 2436 (1989).
423. "First Observation of Inclusive y Production in Upsilon Decays." R. Gulton et al., Physics
Letters, 224B, 445 (1989).
424. "Search for the Production of Fractionally Charged Particles in e+e - Annihilations at sq.
root (s) = 10.5 GeV." T. Bowcock et al.,Physical Review D40, 263 (1989).
425. "Search for a Neutral Higgs Boson in B Meson Decay." M.S.Alam et al., Physical Review
D40, 712 (1989).
426. "Study of the Decay Bbar0 -> D* l- nu", D. Bortoletto et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 63, 1667,
1989.
427. "Measurement of the Isospin Mass Splitting Xi+ c- Xi0c ", M.S.Alam et al., Physics
Letters 226, 401 (1989).
428. "Radiative Upsilon (1S) Decays." R. Fulton et al., Phys. Rev.D41, 1401 (1990).
429. "Measurement of Ds Decay Modes." W.-Y. Chen et al., Phys. Lett. B226, 192(1989).
430. "Report on Reports: Air Pollution, the Automobile, and Public Health. "Ann Y. Watson, et
al., Reviewed by Richard Wilson, Environment May 1989,Vol 31, No. 4.
431. "Regulating Nuclear Power." Issues in Science and Technology Summer 1989 Richard
Wilson.
432. "Measurement of the muonic branching fractions of the Upsilon (1S) and the Upsilon (3S)."
Physical Review D39, 3528, 1989.
433. Omitted
434. "A spectrometer for muon scattering at the tevatron" M.R.Adams et al., Nucl. Inst. Meth.,
A291, 533 (1990).
435. "Neglected information in the rodent bioassay", with G.Goodman, submitted to Nature.
NOT PUBLISHED.
436. "Some claims of unusually large effects of radiation", A.Shihab-Eldin and R. Wilson. July
283
16, 1989 .
437. "Do Mouse liver tumors predict rat tumors? A study of concordance between tumors
induced in different sites in rats and mice." D.M.Byrd, E.A.C. Crouch, Richard Wilson, Mouse
Liver Carcinogenisis: Mechanisms and Species Comparisons, p. 19-41, Alan R. Liss, Inc., 1990.
438. Omitted
439. "Managing genotoxins in the environment." Richard Wilson, Proceedings of Management
of Risk from Genotoxic substances in the Environment, Stockholm, Sweden ,Oct 4, 157 (1988).
440. "Consistencies and Inconsistencies underlying the quantitative assessment of leukemia risk
from benzene exposure" S.H.Lamm, A.S Walters, Richard Wilson, D.M.Byrd and Hans
Grunwald, Environmental Health Perspectives,82, 289, 1989.
441. "Exclusive Semileptonic Decays of B Mesons into D Mesons" Sadoff, A.J. et al., Aug.
1989, to be published (conference proceedings).
442. "Search for the Process Upsilon (r) D*+X" P. Avery, et al., Aug. 1989, to be published
(conference proceedings).
443. "The Decay D0 - K0Kbar0". J.Alexander, et al., Aug. 1989, CLNS 89/940, to be published
(conference proceedings).
444. "Search for Neutrinoless decays of the tau lepton" T. Bowcock, et al., Phys. Rev. D41, 805,
1990.
445. "P-Wave charmed mesons in the e+e-annihilation" P. Avery, et al., Phys. Rev. D41, 774,
1990.
446. "Exclusive and inclusive decays of B mesons into Dsmesons" D. Bortoletto, et al., Phys.
Rev. Lett., 64, 18, 1990.
447. "Measurement of parity violation in the elastic scattering of polarized electrons from 12C"
P.A. Souder et al., Phys. Rev.Lett. 65, 694 (1990).
448. "Observation of B-Meson semileptonic decays to noncharmed finalstates" R. Fulton et al.,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 64, 16 (1990).
449. "Duck and Cover" Richard Wilson, letters, The Nation, March 19, 1990.
450. "Living in a Greenhouse: Nuclear Power After Chernobyl",R. Wilson, Presented at JAIF
Meeting, 4/12/1990, Kyoto, Japan.
451. "Simulating a Carcinogenisis Bioassay", D. Byrd, EAC Crouch, G. Goodman, R.
McDonald, S. Wey and R. Wilson, Report to the Electric Power Research Institute, Sept. 11,
284
1989.
452. "First Review of the Mature Field of Nucleon-Nucleon Interactions", R. Wilson, Current
Contents 21, 20 (1990).
453. "On Behalf of the CLEO Collaboration", R. Wilson, Hadron, Editions Frontieres, France
,pp. 599-616 (1989).
454. "Comparing Risks - A Hazardous Undertaking", Forum Award Lecture, R. Wilson, Physics
and Society 19, 3 (1990).
455. "Asbestos, the hazard, the risk and public policy", R. D'Agostino, Jr., and R. Wilson, in
Phantom Risk - Scientific Inference and the Law, edited by K.R. Foster, D.E. Bernstein and P.W.
Huber, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1993).
456. "The Gulf Crisis and Research", A.A. Shihab-Eldin, R. Wilson, Nature 347, 420 (1990).
457. "Leukemias in Plymouth County, Massachusetts",R. Wilson, letter to the editor. Health
Physics 61, 279 (1991).
458. "Radiation Doses and Cancer", A. Shylakhter, R. Wilson, Nature 350, 25 (1991).
459. "A Noisy Spring Without Pests: Balancing Conflicting Claims of Society", R. Wilson,
(keynote address). In: Pesticides in the Next Decade: The Challenges Ahead, Proceedings of the
Third National Research Conference on Pesticides. Virginia Water Resources Research Center,
Blacksburg, VA. Edited by D.L. Weigman, (1991).
460. "Predicting the Carcinogenicity of Chemicals in Humans from Rodent Bioassay Data", G.
Goodman, R. Wilson. Environ. Health Perspect. 94:195-218 (1991).
461. "Monte Carlo Simulation of Rodent Carcinogenicity Bioassays", A. Shlyakhter, G.
Goodman, R. Wilson, Risk Analysis, 12, 73-82 (1992).
462. "Comments on Precision Measurements of Nucleon Structure Functions", R. Wilson.
Proceedings of the Workshop on Hadron Structure Functions and Parton Distributions. World
Scientific pp. 165-168 (1990).
463. "Energy Flow and Transverse Momentum of Hadron Jets Produced in Deep Inelastic Muon
Scattering". H.J. Lubatti, representing E665 Group. Singapore Meeting on High Energy Physics,
August, 1990.
464. "The use of Models in Planning for Emergencies", R. Wilson. Third Topical Meeting on
Emergency Preparedness and Response, Chicago ,April, 1991.
465. "Slowing the Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Personal Quest", R. WILSON. circulated
manuscript, April, 1991.
285
466. "The Future of Nuclear Power in the USA", R. Wilson. Proceedings of the Atomic Energy
Council Meeting, Republic of China , Taipei, March, 1991. pp. I.1-1 - I.1-34.
467. "Study of p +p - transitions from the Upsilon (3S) and a Search for the hb", I.C. Brock, et al.
Phys. Rev. D. 43,1448 (1991).
468. "Measurement of the L c Decay-Asymmetry Parameter", P. Avery, et al. Phys. Rev. Lett.
65, 2842 (1990).
469. "Exclusive and inclusive semileptonic decays of B mesons to D mesons", R. Fulton, et al.
Phys. Rev. D. 43, 651 (1991).
470. "Is There a Large Risk of Radiation? A Critical Review of Pessimistic Claims", A.
Shihab-Eldin, A. Shlyakhter, R. Wilson, Environmental International, 18, 117-151 (1992).
471. "Is There a Large Risk of Radiation? A Critical Review of Pessimistic Claims", A.
Shihab-Eldin, A. Shlyakhter, R. Wilson. Argonne National Laboratory Report, (ANL-92/23)
July, 1992. (89 pages)
472. "Nuclear Proliferation and the Case of Iraq", R. Wilson. J. Palestine Studies. 20, 5, 1991.
473. "Study of D0 decays into final states with a pi0 or h ", K. Kinoshita et al., Phys. Rev.D43,
2836, 1991. (CLEO Collaboration)
474. "Study of K* production in tau decay", M.Goldberg, et al. Phys. Lett. 251, 223 (1990).
(CLEO Collaboration)
475. "The Effects of the Chernobyl Accident. What We Know, What We Want to Know and
How to Find Out". Presented at the 1st International Sakharov Conference on Peace, Progress
and Human Rights, Moscow, May 22, 1991.
476. "Physics of the b Quark", R. Wilson. In: Sakharov Memorial Lectures in Physics, (eds. L.V.
Keldysh, V.Ya. Fainberg), Nova Science Pub, NY(1992), pp. 923-943.
477. "The Present. Effects of the Catastrophe", R. Wilson, Recommendations and Proposals of
Experts on the Theme: Global Implications of Chernobyl Disaster and the Future of Nuclear
Power. Presented at the 1stInternational Sakharov Conference on Peace, Progress and Human
Rights, Moscow, May 21-25, 1991.
478. "Memories of A.D. Sakharov", R. Wilson. In: Andrei Sakharov, Facets of a Life, Editions
Frontieres and P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute(1991),pp. 653-659.
479. Quantitative Prediction of Human Cancer Risk from Rodent Carcinogenic Potencies: A
Closer Look at the Epidemiological Evidence for some Chemicals Not Definitively Carcinogenic
in Humans. G. Goodman, R. Wilson, Regul. Toxicol. Pharmacol. 14, 118-146 (1991).
286
480. "The Legacy of Chernobyl", Z. Medvedev and "The Truth About Chernobyl", G.
Medvedev, reviewed by R. Wilson. Physics Today 44,105 (1991).
481. "Putting Chernobyl in Perspective, The Legacy of Chernobyl, Z.Medvedev and The Truth
About Chernobyl", G. Medvedev, reviewed by R. WILSON. 21st Century, 4, 64 (1991).
482. "The Relationship Between Carcinogenic Potency and Maximum Tolerated Dose is Similar
for Mutagens and Non-Mutagens", G. Goodman, A.Shlyakhter, R. Wilson. In: Chemically
Induced Cell Proliferation: Implications for Risk Assessment, (eds. B.E. Butterworth, T.J. Slaga,
W. Farland, M.McClain), Wiley-Liss, NY (1991), pp. 501-516.
483. "Comparison of the Dependence of the TD50 on Maximum Tolerated Dose for Mutagens
and Non-mutagens", G. Goodman and R. Wilson, Risk Analysis, 12,525-533 (1992).
484. "Study of Continuum D*+ Spin Alignment", Y.Kubota, et al., Phys. Rev. D 44, 593 (1991).
485. "Chernobyl and Glasnost: The Effects of Secrecy on Health and Safety", A. Shlyakhter and
R. Wilson, Environment 34, 25-30 (1992).
486. "Climate Change as a Risk Problem", A. Shlyakhter and R. Wilson, in Thinking Man's
Guide to the Greenhouse Problem", W. Clark and H. Lee, editors. NOT PUBLISHED
487. "Iraq's Uranium Separation: The Huge Surprise", R. Wilson. New Outlook, Sept./Oct., 1991
p. 36.
488. "Study of the Decays D0 -> KKbar and pp", J. Alexander, et al., Phys. Rev.Lett. 65, 1184
(1990).
489. "Determination of the branching ratio D+s -> phi p+ via Observation of D+s - > phi l +
nu" J. Alexander, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 65, 1531 (1990).
490. "The Men Who Survived Chernobyl's Cleanup", A. Shlyakhter, and R. Wilson. New York
Times (letter), October 28, 1991.
491. Nuclear Choices by R. Wolfson. Reviewed by Richard Wilson. American Journal of
Physics, 60 764-766 (1992).
492. "Unusual Decay Modes of D0 and D+Mesons", R. Ammar, et al., Phys. Rev. D. 44, 3383
(1991).
493. "Measurement of the Ratio B(D0 -> K*- e+n e) / B(D0-> K-e+ ne)", G. Crawford, et al.,
Phys. Rev. D. 44, 3394 (1991).
494. "Polarization Induced Transport Asymmetries of Light Pulses: The Pita Effect", G.D. Cates,
et al., (to be submitted to Optics Communications, (1992)).
287
495. "Risk Assessment and Risk Management: Their Separation Should Not Mean Divorce", R.
Wilson and W. Clark, in Risk Analysis, edited by C.Zervos, Plenum Press, New York (1991).
pp. 187-196.
496. "The Future of Nuclear Power", R. Wilson. Env. Sci. Technol., 26,1116-1120 (1992).
497. "Inclusive and Exclusive Decays of B Mesons to Final States Including Charm and
Charmonium Mesons", D. Bortoletto, et al., Phys. Rev.D. 45 21,(1992).
498. "Measurement of Baryon Production in B-Meson Decay", G.Crawford, et al., Phys. Rev. D.
45 752 (1992).
499. "Measurement Uncertainty in Epidemiological Studies of Two Cohorts Exhibiting
Benzene-Induced Leukemia", E.T. Barfield, H. Gruenwald, S.H.Lamm, A. Walters, R. Wilson,
D.M. Byrd, in Risk Analysis, edited by C. Zervos, Plenum Press, New York (1991). pp. 731-739.
500. "Organ Specificity of Rodent Tumor Induction: A Test of Statistical and Graphical Methods
by Examination of Tumor Induction from Ingestion of Selected Substances", D.M. Byrd III,
E.A.C. Crouch, R. Wilson, in Risk Analysis, edited by C. Zervos, Plenum Press, New York
(1991). pp.741-759.
500 EXTRA Report to the Government of Taiwan by the "International Expert Consulting
Team" on nuclear power plants in Taiwan. March 1992 (full report . text only
Chinese).
501. "Chernobyl: The Inevitable Results of Secrecy", A.Shlyakhter, R. Wilson. Public
Understand. Sci. 1 251-259 (1992).
502. "Volatilization of Volatile Organic Compounds from Showers. I. Analytical Method and
Quantitative Assessment", M. Tancrede, Y. Yanagisawa and R. Wilson. Atmospheric Env. 26A
1103, (1992).
503. "Physics and Psychics", Richard Wilson, Physics Today (letter), May 1987, p. 144.
504. "Tayseer Aruri - Birzeit University", Richard Wilson, Physics Today (letter), May 1989, p.
118.
505. "First Measurement of Jet Production Rates in Deep-Inelastic Lepton-Proton Scattering",
M.R. Adams, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 691026-1029, (1992).
506. "Two-body Ds+ decays to eta p+,eta' p +,eta rho+,eta' rho+,and phi rho +" M. Daoudi, et
al., Phys. Rev. D. 45 3965,(1992).
507. "Electronic Branching Ratio of the tau lepton", R. Ammar, etal.,Phys. Rev. D 45 3976,
(1992).
288
508. "Inclusive Production of the Charmed Baryon L+c from e+e- annihilations at square root
(s) = 10.55 GeV", P. Avery, et al., Phys.Rev. D 43 3599 (1991).
509. "Inclusive c (2P) Production in Upsilon (3) Decay", R. Morrison, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 67
1696 (1991).
510. "Measurement of the Inclusive B* Cross Section Above the Upsilon (4S)", D.S. Akerib, et
al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 67 1692 (1991).
511. "Observation of the decay X0c-Omega-K+", S. Henderson, et al., Phys. Lett. B
283161-164 (1992).
512. "Saturation of Shadowing at Very Low Bjorken x", M.R.Adams, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 68
3266-3269 (1992).
513. "The CLEO II Detector", Y. Kubota, et al., Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics
Research A320 66-113 (1992).
514. "Shadowing in the Muon-Xenon Inelastic Scattering Cross Section at 490 GeV", M.R.
Adams, et al., Phys. Lett. B 287 375-380 (1992).
515. "Ds+ Decays to hp+ and Upsilon p +" J. Alexander, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 68 1275-1278
(1992).
516. "50 Years of Atomic Energy - Nuclear Experts Predict What the Future Holds", R. Wilson,
Atomic Energy Clearing House 38 3-4 (1992).
517. "Distribution of Charged Hadrons Observed in Deep-Inelastic Muon- Scattering at 490
GeV", M.R. Adams, et al., Phys. Lett. B 272, 163 (1991).
518. "A measurement of the t lepton lifetime", M. Battle, et al, Physics Letters B 291 488-495
(1992).
519. "Exclusive c (2P) production in Upsilon (3S) decay", G. Crawford, et al, Physics Letters
B294 139-144 (1992).
520. "Lepton asymmetry measurements in and implications for the V-A and the form factors ",
S. Sanghera, et al, Phys. Rev. D. 47 791-798 (1993).
521. "Measurement of the D*(2010) Branching Fractions", F. Butler, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 69
2041-2045 (1992).
522. "Isospin Mass Splittings from Precision Measurements of D* - D Mass Differences", D.
Bortoletto, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 69 2046-2049 (1992).
523. "Measurement of t Decays Involving h Mesons", M. Artuso, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 69
289
3278-3281 (1992).
524. "Shape studies of quark jets versus gluon jets at square root ( s) = 10 GeV", M.S. Alam, et
al., Phys. Rev. D 46 4822-4827 (1992).
525. "Measurement of the t lepton electronic branching fraction", D.S. Akerib, et al., Phys.
Rev.Lett. 69 3610-3614 (1992).
526. "Estimating Uncertainty and Combining Data Sets in Observational Studies: Lessons From
Trends in Physical Constants", A. Shlyakhter and R. WILSON, submitted to Epidemiology.
527. "Search for t -- >g mu- ; A Test of Lepton Number Conservation", A. Bean et al., Phys.
Rev. Lett. 70138-142 (1993).
528. "Concept of Data Acquisition System for Gamma-Ray Spectrometer", A.N. Bazhenov, V.V.
Ivanov, E.A. Kolomensky, V.M. Lobashev, V.A. Nazarenko, A.N. Pirozhkov, V.N. Sedov,
Yu.V. Sobolev, V.A. Solovei, E.A.Tihomirov, K.G. Yurchenko, R. Wilson. Report on 5th
International School-Seminar Computing Automation in Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics,
16-23 October 1992, Sochi, Russia.
529. "t Decays with One Charged Particle Plus Multiple pi 0 mesons",M. Procario, et al., Phys.
Rev. Lett. 70 1207-1211 (1993).
530. "An Investigation of Bose-Einstein Correlations in Muon-Nucleon Interactions at 490
GeV", M.R. Adams, et al., Phys. Lett. B 308 418-424(1993).
531. "Nuclear Fallout", R. Wilson and A. Shlyakhter, The Nation, May 31 1993, p. 722.
532. "The Health Effects of Chernobyl", (an interview with Richard Wilson). 21st Century, pp.
14-20, Summer (1993).
533. "The Science and Policy of Risk", D. Kammen and R. Wilson, Science 260 1863 (1993).
534. "Measurement of the t -lepton mass", R. Balest, et al., Physical Review D, 47 R3671
(1993).
535. "Production and decay of the Ds1 (2536)+,J.P. Alexander, et al., Physics Letters B, 303 377
(1993).
536. "Search for Exclusive b(r) -> u Semileptonic Decays of B Mesons", A. Bean, et al., Physical
Review Letters, 70 2681 (1993).
537. "Evidence for Penguin-diagram decays: First observation of B-> K*(892)g ", R.Ammar, et
al., Physical Review Letters, 71:674 (1993).
538. "Limit on the tau Neutrino Mass", D. Cinabro, et al., Physical Review Letters, 70
290
3700(1993).
539. "Non-Gaussian uncertainty distributions: Historical trends and forecasts of the United States
Energy Sector, 1983-2010", D.M. Kammen, A.I. Shlyakhter, C.L. Broido and R. Wilson. In:
Proceedings ISUMA '93 Second International Symposium on Uncertainty Modeling and
Analysis, IEEE Computer Society Press (1993), pp. 112-119.
540. "Estimating uncertainty in physical measurements, observational and environmental studies:
Lessons from trends in nuclear data", A.I.Shlyakhter, I. Shlyakhter, C.L. Broido and R. Wilson.
In: Proceed. ISUMA '93 Second International Symposium on Uncertainty Modeling and
Analysis, IEEE Computer Society Press (1993), pp. 310-317.
541. "Production of charged hadrons by positive muons on deuterium and xenon at 490 GeV",
M.R. Adams, et al., Z. Physik C 61 179 (1994).
542. "Quantifying the credibility of energy projections from trends in past data: the U.S. Energy
Sector", A.I. Shlyakhter, D.M. Kammen, C.L.Broido and R. Wilson, Energy Policy, February
1994, p. 119-130.
543. "Production of neutral strange particles in muon-nucleon scattering at 490 GeV", M.R.
Adams, et al., Z. Physik C 61 539 (1994).
544. "What is the risk of the impossible?", D.M. Kammen, A.I.Shlyakhter, R. Wilson, Center of
Domestic and Comparative Policy Studies - Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs - Woking Paper 93-6, Nov.1993.
545. "Two Measurements of B0Bbar0 Mixing",J. Bartelt, et al., Physical Review Letters, 71
1680 (1993).
546. "Measurement of the D -> pp Branching Fractions, M. Selen, et al., Physical Review
Letters, 71 1973 (1993).
547. "The Art and Science of Comparing Risks" (Keynote Speech) in Proceedings of Fukui
Workshop on Health Risks: Perspectives and Research, edited by T. Sugahara, K. Torizuka, S.
Kobayashi, Y. Ishii, Health Research Foundation, 1993, pp. 95-122.
548. "Study of D0 Decays into Kbar0 and Kbar *0", M. Procario, et al., Physical Review D, 48,
4007 (1993).
549. "Public Perceptions of Nuclear Power: Some Observations from Experience", R. Wilson,
Physics and Society, 23 7 (1994).
550. "Careless Claims About Radiation Studies", R. Wilson, The Washington Post (letter to
editor, 24 January 1994).
551. "Measurement of the Absolute Branching Fraction for D0 - > K- p + ", D.S. Akerib, et al.,
291
Physical Review Letters, 71 3070 (1993).
552. "Measurement of Exclusive Lc Decays with a Upsilon+ in the Final State", Y. Kubota,
Physical Review Letters, 71 3255 (1993).
553. "Measurement of the Decay t- - > pi - pi+ pi-2 pi0 nu t ", D. Bortoletto, et al., Physical
Review Letters, 71 1791 (1993).
554. "Study of the Decays L +c -> Xi0K+; Sigma +K+K-;and X-K+K-",P. Avery, et al.,
Phys.Rev. Lett. 71 2391 (1993).
555. "Search for Exclusive b -> u Transitions in Hadronic Decays of B Mesons Involving Ds+
and Ds*+Mesons", J.P. Alexander, et al., Phys. Lett. B 319 365-372 (1993).
556. "Observation of B0 Decay to Two Charmless Mesons", M. Battle, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 71
3922-3926 (1993).
557. "Measurement of Charmless Semileptonic Decays of B Mesons", J. Bartelt, et al., Phys.
Rev. Lett. 71: 4111-4115 (1993).
558. "Analysis of Hadronic Transitions in Upsilon (3S) Decays", F.Butler, et al., Phys. Rev. D
49 40-57 (1994).
559. "Study of the Decay L +c- L l+ nu l ", T.Bergfeld, et al., Phys. Lett. B, 323 219-226 (1994).
560. "Observation of D0 - K+ p-", D. Cinabro, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 72 1406-1410 (1994).
561. "Asbestos in New York City Public School Buildings - Public Policy: Is there a Scientific
Basis?", R. Wilson, A.M. Langer, R.P. Nolan, J.B.L.Gee, M. Ross, Reg. Toxicol. Pharmacol. 20
161-169 (1994).
562. "Magnetic Fields and Cancer in Children Residing Near Swedish High-Voltage Power
Lines", (Comment on the Paper by M. Feychting and A. Ahlbom), R. Wilson and A. Shlyakhter,
Am. J. Epidemiol. 141378-379 (1995).
563. " Integrated Risk Analysis of Global Climate Change ", A. Shlyakhter, L. valverde,
R.Wilson, Chemoshere 30:1585-1618 (1995)
564. "The Potential for Nuclear Power", R. Wilson, in Global Energy Strategies: Living with
Restricted Greenhouse Gas Emissions, edited by J.C. White, Plenum Press, NY (1994). pp.
27-45.
565. "Measurement of Nuclear Transparencies from Exclusive r0 Meson Production in
Muon-Nucleus Scattering at 470 GeV", M.R. Adams, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett.74:1525-1529
(1995).
292
566. "Q2 Dependence of the Average Squared Transverse Energy of Jets in Deep-Inelastic
Muon-Nucleon Scattering with Comparison to QCD Predictions", M.R. Adams et al., Phys. Rev.
Lett. 72, 466-469 (1994).
567. "Perturbative QCD Effects Observed in 490 GeV Deep-Inelastic Muon Scattering", M.R.
Adams, et al., Phys. Rev. D. 48, 5057-5066 (1993).
568. "Low-Dose Linearity: The Rule or the Exception?", M.Crawford, R. WILSON. Human and
Ecological Risk Assessment, 2, 305-330 (1996).
569. "Der Stoff tragt eine Tarnkappe": Nuklear experten Seitz und Wilson uber Plutonium fund
in Sudbaden. R. Seitz and R. Wilson interview in Der Spiegel 30/1994. pp. 60-62.
570. "Nuclear Power Safety in Central and Eastern Europe", R. Wilson,. Nuclear Safety, 36:
33-46 (1995).
571. "What is the Risk of the Impossible", D.M. Kammen, A.I.Shlyakhter, and R. Wilson.
Technology: Journal of the Franklin Institute, 331A,97-116 (1994).
572. "A Measurement of a ratio of branching ratios Ds+ -> phi l+ nu and Ds+ -> phi l+ p", F.
Butler, et al., (CLEO Collaboration) Phys. Lett. B 324, 255-262 (1994).
573. "Exclusive Hadronic B Decays to Charm and Charmonium Final States", M.S. Alam, et al.,
Phys. Rev. D 50,43-68 (1994).
574. "Measurement of the Branching Fraction t -> h ?0 nu tau ",M. Artuso, et al., Phys. Rev.
Lett. 72, 3762-3766 (1994).
575. "Luminosity Measurement with the CLEO II Detector", G.Crawford, et al., Nuclear
Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 345,429-439 (1994).
576. "Production and Decay of D1 (2420)0 and D*2 (2460) 0" , P. Avery, et al., Phys. Lett. B
331, 236-244 (1994).Erratum Phys. Lett. B. 342, 453 (1995).
577. "Two-Photon Production of Charged Pion and Kaon Pairs" , J. Dominick, et al.,Phys. Rev.
D 50, 3027-3037 (1994).
578. "Measurement of Two-Photon Production of the cc2", J. Dominick, et al.,Phys. Rev. D 50,
4265-4271 (1994).
579. "Precision Measurement of the Ds*+ - D s+ Mass Difference", D.M. Brown, et al., Phys.
Rev. D 50 1884-1891 (1994).
580. "How Deadly is Chernobyl?", R. Wilson. Harper's. November 1994
581. "Chernobyl", R. Wilson. (Forum), National Geographic, December 1994, p. 186.
293
582. "Some Selected Recent Results from Muon-Scattering (E665) at Fermilab" and
"Electron-Proton Collisions (CLEO) at Cornell", R. WILSON, in Hadrons-94, Proceedings of
the Workshop on Soft Physics (Strong Interaction at Large Distances, Uzhgorod, Ukraine, Sept.
7-11 1994, edited by G. Bugrij, L. Jenkovszky and E. Martynov, Kiev; pp. 212-234.
583. "Measurement of Cabibbo-Suppressed Decays of the t Lepton", M. Battle, et al.,
Phys.Rev. Lett. 73 1079-1083 (1994).
584. "Observation of the Inclusive B Decays to the Charmed Baryons Sc++ and Sc0 ",
M.Procario, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 73 1472-1476 (1994).
585. "Search for Neutrinoless Decays of the t Lepton", J. Bartelt, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 73
1890-1894 (1994).
586. "Measurement of the Cross Section for gamma + gamma -> PPbar", M.Artuso, et al., Phys.
Rev. D. 50 5484-5490 (1994).
587. "Measurement of the Branching Fraction for Upsilon (4S) - > t +t- ", D.Cinabro, et al.,
(CLEO Collaboration). Physics Letters B 340 129-134 (1994).
588. "Observation of D1(2420)+ and D* 2(2460)+", T. Bergfeld et al., (CLEO
Collaboration).Physics Letters B 340 194-204 (1994).
589. "Study of the Five-Charged-Pion Decay of the t Lepton", D. Gibault, et al., (CLEO
Collaboration). Phys. Rev. Lett. 73 934-938 (1994).
590. "Semileptonic Branching Fractions of Charged and Neutral B Mesons", M. Athanas, et al.,
(CLEO Collaboration). Phys. Rev. Lett. 733503-3507 (1994).
591. "Measurement of the Bbar -> D*l nu branching Fractions and Vcb", B. Barish, et al.,
(CLEO Collaboration). Phys. Rev. D 51 1014-1033 (1995).
592. "Measurement of the ratio sigma n/sigma p ininelastic muon-nucleon scattering at very low
x and q2", M.R. Adams, et al. Phys., Lett. B 309 477 (1993).
593. "Scaled energy (z) distributions of charged hadrons observed in deep-inelastic muon
scattering at 490 GeV from xenon and deuterium targets", M.R. Adams, et al., Phys. Rev. D 50
1836-1873 (1994).
594. "Large density and correlation integrals in deep-inelastic muon-nucleon scattering at 490
GeV", M.R. Adams, et al., Phys. Lett. B 335535 (1994).
595. "Nuclear shadowing, diffractive scattering and low momentum protons in m Xe interactions
at 490 GeV", M.R. Adams, et al., Z. Phys. C 65 225 (1995).
294
596. "Nuclear decay following deep inelastic scattering of 470 GeV muons", M.R. Adams, et al.,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 74 5198-5201 (1995).
597. "Extraction of the ratio F2n/F2p in muon-deuteron and muon-proton scattering at small x
and q2 ", M.R. Adams, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 75 1466-1470 (1995).
598. "Upsilon (1S) -> g plus non interacting particles", R. Balest, et al., Phys. Rev. D 51
2053-2060 (1995).
599. "Crash Course", Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids, edited by T.Gehrels, Univ. of
Arizona Press, book review by Richard Wilson, Nature,375288-289(1995).
600. "Potential Environmental Impacts of Nuclear Power", R. WILSON. In: Environmental
Contaminants, Ecosystems, and Human Health, ed. by SK Majumdar, EW Miller and FJ
Brenner; Pennsylvania Acad of Sci, 1995. pp.139-153.
600a. "Environmental Impacts of Electricity Production". Presented at "An International
Symposium on The Global Energy Demand in Transition: The New Role of Electricity". Held
November 10-12,1994, Washington, DC. Published in Global Energy Demand in Transition:
The New Role of Electricity. B.N. Kursunoglu, ed., Plenum Press, NY.
601. "Modeling Indoor Air Exposure form Short-Term Point Source Releases", P.J. Drivas, P.A.
Valberg, B.L. Murphy and R. Wilson. submitted Indoor Air (January, 1995).
602. "The Future of Nuclear Power: The Role of the IFR", R. WILSON. Presented in the session,
`Utilization of Plutonium in Commercial Reactors' Reprinted from PWR-Vol. 28, Proceedings of
the International Joint Power Generation Conference, ASME, Minneapolis, MN on October 9,
1995. Editors: I. Fruchtman, B. Moore, D. Karg, S. Reid, S. Hartman, R. Henry, M. Curley and
B. Sykes, Book No. G00092-1995. pp. 7-10 (1995)
603. "Electromagnetic Fields and the Law", R. Wilson and M.S.Kaufman, in Science and the
Law, National Legal Center for Public Interest, Washington, DC
604. "First Measurement of the Rate for the Inclusive Radiative Penguin Decay b -> sg ", M.S.
Alam, etal.,Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 2885-2889 (1995).
605. "First Observation of the Decay Sigmac+ -> Sigma 0 e + nu and an Estimate of the
Sigmac+-> Sigma c0 Lifetime Ratio", J.P. Alexander, et al.,Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 3113- 3117
(1995).
606. "New Decay Modes of the Lc+ Charmed Baryon", R. Ammar, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 74,
3534-3537 (1995).
607. "Observation of Excited Charmed Baryon States Decaying into L+c p+ p-l ", K.W.
Edwards, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 3331-3335 (1995).
295
608. "Form Factor Ratio Measurement in L+c -> e+ nu ", G.Crawford, et al., (CLEO
Collaboration) Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 624-628 (1995).
609. "Measurement of the decay asymmetry parameters in L+c -> L p+ and L + c ->
Sigma+p0", M. Bishai, et al., (CLEO Collaboration) Phys. Lett. B 350256-262 (1995).
610. "Search for B - l nul", M. Artuso, et al., (CLEO Collaboration) Phys. Rev. Lett. 75 785-789
(1995).
611. "Measurement of the Ratio of Branching Fractions Br ( D 0 -> p- e +nu)/ Br ( D0 -> Ke+nu) ",F. Butler, etal., (CLEO Collaboration) Phys. Rev. D 52, 2656-2660 (1995).
612. "Inclusive decays of B mesons to Charmonium", R. Balest, etal., (CLEO Collaboration)
Phys. Rev. D 52, 2661-2672 (1995).
613. "Chronic arsenicism and skin cancer in Inner Mongolia -Consequences of arsenic in well
water", Z. Luo, Y. Zhang, L. Ma, G. Zhang, X. He, R. Wilson, D. Byrd, J. Griffiths, S. Lai, L.
He, K. Grumski, S.H. Lamm, SEGH Meeting Presentation, San Diego, CA June, 1995.
614. "What the educated public wants to know from Chernobyl", R.Lapp, A. Shlyakhter, R.
Wilson. Radiological Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident. Proceedings of the First
International Conference of the European Commission, Belarus, Russian Federation and
Ukraine, edited by A. Karaoglou, G.Desmet, G.N. Kelly and H.G. Menzel, IEEE Computer
Society Press (1996), pp. 829-832.
615. "Measurement of as from t decays", T. Coan, et al., (CLEO Collaboration) Phys. Lett. B
356, 580-588 (1995).
616. "Options for Reducing CO2 (I) Improving Energy Efficiency; (ii)Alternative Fuels", D.
Fang, D. Lew, P. Li, D.M. Kammen, R. Wilson. In Reconciling Economic Growth and
Environmental Protection in China, M. McElroy, editor, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA.
617. "Constraints Limiting the Expansion of Nuclear Energy", A. Shlyakhter, K. Stadie, R.
Wilson. U.S. Global Strategy Council, pp. 1-41 (1995).
618. "Search for CP violation in D0 decay", J. Bartelt, et al., (CLEO Collaboration) Phys. Rev. D
52 4860-4867 (1995).
619. "Electromagnetic Fields and the Risk of Leukemia and Brain Cancer: A Review of
Epidemiological Literature" , Y.S. Loh, A.I. Shlyakhter, R. Wilson, Journal of the Franklin
Institute 334A: 3-21 (1997).
620. " An Empirical Examination of Factors Influencing Prediction of Carcinogenic Hazard
Across Species ", G.M. Gray, P. Li, I. Shlyakhter, R. Wilson, Regulatory Toxicology and
Pharmacology, 22 283-291 (1995).
296
621. "Measurement of the "Ds*+ -> eta l+ nu and Ds *+ -> eta' l+ nu branching ratios",
G.Brandenburg, et al., (CLEO Collaboration) Phys. Rev. Lett. 75 3804-3808 (1995).
622. "Measurements of the decays t- - >h-h +h- n t and h-h+h-?0 nu tau Phys.Rev.. Lett. 75
3809-3813 (1995).
623. "Observation of the isospin-violating decay "Ds*+ -> Ds +p0,"J. Gronberg, et al.,(CLEO
Collaboration) Phys. Rev. Lett.75 3232-3236 (1995).
624. "More on Chernobyl: Ten Years Later",. Environment, 38(5) 3, 1996.
625. "A Risk Assessment for Exposure to Glass Wool" , R. Wilson, A.M. Langer, R.P. Nolan,
Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology 30, 96-109 (1999).
626. "Monte Carlo Modeling of Epidemiologic Studies" , A. Shlyakhter, L. Mirny, A.Vlasov,
and R. Wilson, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment 2(4):920-928 (1996).
627. "Uncertainty and Variability in Risk Assessment", R. Wilson and A. Shlyakhter, in
Fundamentals of Risk Analysis and Risk Management, Dr. Molak, editor. CRC Press, Inc., pp.
33-44 (1997).
628. "Risk Assessment of EMF on Health", R. Wilson. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and
Biology. July/August 1996, pp. 77-86.
629. "Management of Plutonium and the Future of Nuclear Power", R. Wilson. Presented at the
2nd International Sakharov Conference, May 20, 1996.
630. "Monte Carlo Simulation of Uncertainties in Epidemiological Studies: An Example of
False-Positive Findings Due to Misclassification", A. Shlyakhter and R. Wilson. In: Proceed.
ISUMA- NAFIPS '95 Third International Symposium on Uncertainty Modeling and Analysis,
and Annual Conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society. IEEE
Computing Society press, 1995, pp. 685-89.
631. "Health Effects of Russian Nuclear Accidents: What We Can Learn", R. Wilson and A.I.
Shlyakhter. Trans. Am. Nucl. Soc. 71: 41-42(1995).
632. "Prospects for Neutron - Antineutron Transition Searches", Yu.A. Kamyshkov, et al.
Nuclear Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.) 48: 460-462 (1996).
633. "Study of B -> Upsilon Rho", M. Bishai, et al ( CLEO Collaboration ). Phys. Lett. B
369:186-192 (1996).
634. " Particles in our Air: Concentrations and Health Effects ", ed: J.D. Spengler and R.
WILSON, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1996)
297
635. "Carcinogenic Risks of Inorganic Arsenic in Perspective", D.M. Byrd, M.L. Roegner, J.C.
Griffiths, S.H. Lamm, K.S. Grumski, R. Wilson and S. Lai; Int. Arch. Occup. Environ. Health
68, 484-494 (1996).
636. "Some Transboundary Environmental Issues of Public Concern", R. Wilson, Proceedings of
a Symposium on Electricity, Health and the Environment: Comparative Assessment in Support
of Decision Making, Vienna, Austria 16-19 October 1995; IAEA-SM-338/37, pp. 387-401,
(1996).
637. "Measurement of the branching fraction for Ds - -> f p - ", M. Artuso, et al. ( CLEO
Collaboration) , Phys. Letters B 378:364-372(1996).
638. "The need for new risk default assumptions", R. Wilson. BELLE Newsletter 5:18-20
(1996).
639. "Measurement of the t lepton lifetime", R. Balest, et al., ( CLEO Collaboration ), Phys. Lett.
B388 402-408 (1996).
640. "Low Dose Linearity: An Introduction", R. Wilson. Physics and Society 26:4-5 (1997).
641. "The Nuclear Fuel Cycle and other Features of Nuclear Power - Reaching a Public
Consensus", R. Wilson. In: Technology for the Global Economic and Environmental Survival
and Prosperity, B.N. Kursunoglu, ed., Plenum press, New York.
642. "Weight and Survival Depression in Rodent Bioassays with and without Tumor Decreases"
, I. Linkov, I. Shlyakhter, P.Li, R. Wilson and G.M. Gray, Toxicological Sciences 43: 10-18
(1998). ERRATUM
643. "Plutonium Burning for Disposal of Pure Plutonium" , R. Wilson. In: Encyclopedia of
Environmental Analysis and Remediation. R.A. Meyers, editor, John Wiley & Sons, pp.
3713-3729 (1998).
644. "Low Dose Linearity: The Rule or the Exception" , BELLE Newsletter 6(1):March 1997.
645. "Health Effects of Exposure to Low Levels of Particulate Matter", J.D. Spengler and R.
Wilson, letter to the Editor (Alan Moghissi,) , Environmental International 23, 587-591 (1997).
646. "Low Noise Electronics for the CLEO III Silicon detector", H. Kagan, et al., Nucl. Instr.
And Meth. In Phys. Res. (Section A), 383, 189-192 (1996).
647. " Risk Assessment for Asbestos and Management of Low Levels of Exposure to Chrysotile
", R. Wilson and B. Price, Canadian Mineralogist, Special publication 5 "The Health Effects of
Chrysotile Asbestos" Eds. Nolan, Langer, Ross, Wicks and Martin, pp265-275 (2001).
648. Pollution in the Ural Mountains - Environmental, Health and Policy Aspects, edited by I.
Linkov and R. Wilson, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (Published incooperation with
298
NATO Scientific Affairs Division). Environment - Vol. 40(1998).
649. "Closing the Fuel Cycle - Reaching a Public Consensus", B.Altshuler, F. Janouch, R.
Wilson. In: Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Reactor Strategies: Adjusting to New Realities. International
Symposium held in Vienna, 3-6 June 1997. IAEA-TECDOC-990, pp. 279-290 (1997).
650. "Anticarcinogenic Responses in Rodent Cancer Bioassays are not Explained by a Random
Effect", I. Linkov, R. Wilson and G.M. Gray, Toxicological Sciences 43: 1-9 (1998).
651. "Two-Body B Meson Decays to h and h N: Observation of B -> hNK",B.H. Behrens, et al.
(CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 80:3710-3714(1998).
652. "Observation of Exclusive Two-Body B Decays to Kaons and Pions" , R. Godang, etal
(CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 80:3456-3460 (1998).
653. "Radioactive Contamination of the Techa River: Environmental Records and Multimedia
Modeling", D. Burmistrov, M. Vorobiova, M.Degteva, I. Linkov, R. Wilson, in Conference
Proceedings of Nuclear Data for Science and Technology (vol. 59), G. Reffo, A. Ventura and C.
Grandi, editors, SIF, Bologna, pp. 1376-1380 (1997).
654. "Investigation of Semileptonic B Meson Decays to p-Wave Charm Mesons" , A.
Anastassov et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 80 , 4127-4131 (1998).
655. "Observation of Two Excited Charmed Baryons Decaying into L+c p "", G. Brandenburg
etal., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 2304 (1997).
656. "Analyses of D+-K0SK+ and D +-K0S p+ , "M. Bishai et al.,(CLEO Collaboration), Phys.
Rev. Lett. 78, 3261 (1997).
657. "A Measurement of the Michel Parameters in Leptonic Decays of the Tau", R. Ammar, et
al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 78 ,4686 (1997).
658. "Search for the Decays B0 - D(*)+D(*)- , ",D.M. Asner, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys.
Rev. Lett. 79 ,799 (1997).
659. "Search for Neutrinoless t Decays Involving p0 or h Mesons" , G. Bonvicini, et al.,
(CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 79 , 1221 (1997).
660. "Observation of the Decay D+s -> wp +", R. Balest, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys.
Rev. Lett. 79 , 1436 (1997).
661. "Measurement of the B bar -> D l nu P artial Width and Form Factor Parameters",M.
Athanas et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 2208(1997).
662. "First Observation of tau -> 3p h nu tau and t -> / 1pnt decays", T. Bergfeld, et al.,
(CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 79,2406 (1997).
299
663. "Observation of Exclusive B Decays to Final States Containing a Charmed Baryon", X. Fu,
et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys.Rev. Lett. 79, 3125 (1997).
664. "First Observation of Inclusive B Decays to the Charmed Strange Baryons X0 c and X +
c",B. Barish, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 79 , 3599(1997).
665. "Study of the Decay tau- -> 2p- p+3pi0 nu t", S. Anderson, et al., (CLEO Collaboration),
Phys. Rev. Lett. 79,3814 (1997).
666. "Limit on the Two-Photon Production of the Glueball Candidate /J (2220) at the Cornell
Electron Storage Ring", R. Godang, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev.Lett. 79, 3829
(1997).
667. "Measurement of the Decay Amplitudes and Branching Fractions of B -> J/ yK* and B ->
J/ y K Decays", C.P. Jessop, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 4533 (1997).
668. "Study of the B 0 Semileptonic Decay Spectrum at the Upsilon (4S) (Resonance" , M.
Artuso, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Physics Letters B 399 , 321 (1997). ,
669. "Studies of the Cabbibo-Suppressed Decays D+ -> p 0 e+nu e and D +-> he+ nu e ,"J.
Bartelt, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Physics Letters B 405, 373(1997).
670. "Study of Flavor-Tagged Baryon Production in B Decay", R.Ammar, et al., (CLEO
Collaboration), Physical Review D 55, 13 (1997).
671. "Search for f Mesons in tau Lepton Decay", P. Avery, et al., (CLEO Collaboration),
Physical Review D 55, R1119 (1997).
672. "Experimental Tests of Lepton Universality in tau Decay", A. Anastassov, et al., (CLEO
Collaboration), Physical Review D 55, 2559 (1997).
673. "Search for Neutrinoless tau Decays: tau -> eg and tau -> mu g", K.W.Edwards, etal.,
(CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review D 55, R3919(1997).
674. "Measurement of the Direct Photon Spectrum in Upsilon (1S) Decays" , B. Nemati, etal.,
(CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review D 55, 5273 (1997).
675. Tau neutrino Helicity from h- Energy Correlations" , T.E. Coan, et al., (CLEO
Collaboration), Physical Review D 55, 7291 (1997).
676. "Search for B -> mu n g and B -> e n g " T.E. Browder, et al., (CLEO Collaboration),
Physical Review D 56 , 11 (1997).
677. "Study of Gluon versus Quark Fragmentation in Upsilon -> g g g and q q g events at
square root (s) = 10 GeV", M.S. Alam, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review D 56, 17
300
(1997).
678. "LLbar Production in Two-Photon Interactions", S. Anderson, et al., (CLEO Collaboration),
Physical Review D 56, R2485 (1997).
679. "The Inclusive Decays B - DX and B - D*X", L.Gibbons, et al., (CLEO Collaboration),
Physical Review D 56, 3783(1997).
680. "Search for the Decay tau- -> 4 pi- 3pi+ pi0 nut ", K.W. Edwards, et al., (CLEO
Collaboration), Physical Review D 56 , R5297 (1997).
681. "Determination of the Michel Parameters and the t Neutrino Helicity in t Decay" , J.P.
Alexander, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. D 56, 5320 (1997).
682. "A New Upper Limit on the Decay h -> e+e-",T.E. Browder, et al., (CLEO Collaboration),
Physical Review D 56, 5359(1997).
683. "Flavor-Specific Inclusive B Decays to Charm" , T.E. Coan, et al., (CLEO Collaboration),
Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 1150 (1998).
684. "Search for Inclusive b -> s l+l- ", S. Glenn, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett.
80, 2289 (1998).
685. "New Measurement of B -> D*p Branching Fractions", G. Brandenburg, etal., (CLEO
Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 2762 (1998).
686. "Measurement of the branching ratio D0 -> K- ?+ using Partial Reconstruction of
Bbar -> D *+ X l - nu", M. Artuso, etal., (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 3193
(1998).
687. "Observation of the Radiative Decay D*+ -> D+ g ", J. Bartelt, et al., (CLEO
Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 80,3919 (1998).
688. "Measurements of the Meson-Photon Transition Form Factors of Light Pseudoscalar
Mesons at Large Momemtum Transfer" , J. Gronberg, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Physical
Review D 57 : 33 (1998).
689. "Measurement of the Total Cross Section for e+e- -> hadrons at square root (s) = 10.52
GeV", R. Ammar, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review D 57 , 1350 (1998).
690. "Search for the Decay B -> D+ s l (2356) X", M. Bishai, et al., (CLEOCollaboration),
Physical Review D 57, 3847 (1998).
691. "Measurement of the Branching Fractions of " L+c- P Kbar n ( p)", M.S. Alam, etal.,
(CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review D 57, 4467 (1998).
301
692. "Search for the Color-Suppressed B Hadronic Decay Processes at the Upsilon (4S) ", B.
Nemati, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review D 57 ,5363 (1998).
693. "New Limits for Neutrinoless Tau Decays" , D.W. Bliss, et al., (CLEO Collaboration),
Physical Review D 57 , 5903 (1998).
694. "Observation of B+- omega K+ and Search for Related B Decay Modes", T.Bergfeld, et al.,
(CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review Letters 81 , 272(1998).
695. "Effects of Ionizing Radiation at Low Doses on People" , R. Wilson, AAPT Resource
Letter, Am. J. Phys. 67(5), 372-377 (1999).
696. "Putting Balance Into Safety Regulation" , R. Wilson, In: Preparing the Ground for Renewal
of Nuclear Power , B.N. Kursunoglu, S.L. Mintz and A.Perlmutter, eds. Plenum Publishing, New
York, (in press).
697. "Observation of High Momentum Upsilon Production in B Decay" , T. Browder, etal.,
(CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review Letters 81 , 1786-1790(1998).
698. "Continuum Charged D* spin Alignment at square root (s)= 10.5 GeV", G. Brandenburg, et
al., (CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review D 58:052003 (1998)
699. "First Observation of the Cabibbo Suppressed Decay B+ -> D0K+ ", M. Athanas, et al.,
(CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review Letters 80 ,5493-5497 (1998).
700. "The Hadronic Transitions Upsilon (2S) -> Upsilon (1S)", J. Alexander, et al., (CLEO
Collaboration) Physical Review D 58:052004 (1998).
701. "A Risk Assessment for Exposure to Grunerite Asbestos (Amosite) in an Iron Ore Mine ",
R.P. Nolan, A.M. Langer, and R. Wilson, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 96(7):3412-3419 (1999).
702. "Should States Stockpile Potassium Iodide for Distribution in case of Nuclear Accident?",
R. Wilson, Physicians Weekly, 16(2): 1999.
703. "Public Acceptance of Nuclear Energy: Regulatory Issues and a Critique of Accelerator
Driven Reactors", R. Wilson, Energy, Environment and Economy Program (E3), 1998.
704. "Further Search for the Two-Photon Production of the Glueball Candidate fj (2220)", M.S.
Alam, et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review Letters 81,3328 (1998).
705. "First Search for CP Violation in Tau Lepton Decay" , S. Anderson, et al., (CLEO
Collaboration), Physical Review Letters 81 , 3823 (1998).
706. "A Limit on the Mass of the Tau neutrino ", R. Ammar et al., (CLEO
Collaboration),Physics Letters B 431, 209 (1998).
302
707. "Study of the Semileptonic Decays of B Mesons to Charmed Baryons" , G.Bonvicini et al.,
(CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review D 57, 6604(1998).
708. "Improved Measurement of the Pseudoscalar Decay Constant fd", M.Chadha, et al.,(CLEO
Collaboration), Physical Review D 58 032002(1998).
709. "Measurement of the Branching Ratios for the Decays of Ds+ -> h p +,h' p+ ,h rho +, and
h' rho + ."C.P. Jessop, etal., (CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review D 58052002 (1998).
710. "Radiative Decay Modes of the D0Meson", D. Asner, et al., (CLEO Collaboration),
Physical Review D 58, 092001 (1998).
711. "First Observation of the Decay t- -> K*-h nt" M.Bishai et al., (CLEO Collaboration),
Physical Review Letters, 82,281(1999).
712. "First Observation of "Upsilon(1S) -> gp- p + and g p 0 p 0 ", A. Anastossov et al., (CLEO
Collaboration), Physical Review Letters, 82, 286 (1999).
713. "Observation of Two Narrow States Decaying into X+cg and X0c g ", C.P.Jessop, et al.,
(CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review Letters, 82, 492(1999).
714. "Measurement of the Mass Splittings Between the b bar cbj(1P) States", K.W. Edwards,
et al., (CLEO Collaboration), Physical Review D, 59, 032003 (1999).
715. "Upsilon Dipion Transitions at Energies Near the Upsilon(4S)" , S. Glenn, et al.,(CLEO
Collaboration), Physical Review D 59, 052003 (1999).
716. "Measurement of the Neutral Weak Form Factors of the Proton", K.A. Aniol, et
al.,(HAPPEX Collaboration), Physical Review Letters 82 , 1096-1100 (1999).
717. Risk-Benefit Analysis 2nd Edition E.A.C. Crouch and R. Wilson (Harvard University
Press, 2001)
718. Comments on "Assessment of Health Effects from Exposure to Power Line Frequency
Electric and Magnetic Fields". NIEHS working group report (1998) , Richard Wilson, September
24th 1998
719. "Trends in Mesothelioma Incidence and Asbestos Exposure Evaluation" , B. Price and R.
Wilson, Canadian Mineralogist, Special publication 5 "The Health Effects of Chrysotile
Asbestos" Eds. Nolan, Langer, Ross,Wicks and Martin, pp53-61 (2001).
720. "Comparative risk assessments of energy options: The meaning of results", R. WILSON, M.
Holland, A. Rabl and M. Dreicer", IAEA Bulletin, 41 (1),14-18(1999).
721. "Contaminated Forests: Risk in Perspective" (after dinner talk), R. Wilson, in Contaminated
Forests, I. Linkov and W.R. Schell, editors, Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands,
303
1999, 405-408.
722. "Regulating Environmental Hazards" , R. Wilson, Regulation, 23, 31-44(2000).
723. "Criteria for Non-Proliferation in the Nuclear Power Industry" , R. Wilson, Presented at
Global '99 International Conference on Future Nuclear Systems. Nuclear Technology - Bridging
the Millennia, Aug 29 - Sept.3 1999, Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
724. "The Limits to Self -Determination and Independence" , R. Wilson, in the International
conference on "Procedures for Implementation of People's Right to Self-determination" Moscow,
June 29 - July 1,
725. "Search for Baryon and Lepton Number Violating Decays of the tau Lepton" R. Godang et
al." Phys.Rev.D59:091303,1999 - Postscript (2.1 MB) - SPIRES Search- hep-ex/9902005
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