[ Music ]
>> Thanks for coming.
My name is Arif.
I'm from the PML, and I do
neutron physics at the NCNR.
And it's a real pleasure
to welcome Murray Peshkin
to give something I think would
be a very interesting talk;
I think most of you will enjoy.
Just to introduce a
little bit thoughts,
something about Murray.
I couldn't as good as
Bill does, but I'll try.
Murray got his PhD from
Cornell in 1951, and then he was
in Northwestern University
for about 8 years up to '59,
and then he joined
Argonne National Lab,
and he retired in 1991.
And his main interest,
research interest, was in,
the fundamentals of
Quantum Mechanics,
particularly magnetic monopoles
and also Aharonov-Bohm effect.
And Murray is one
of the co-authors,
I think there are only
two authors with Tonomura,
who wrote the only book on
the Aharonov-Bohm effect.
You see, if you don't know that,
that's something interesting.
He's the fellow of the
American Physical Society,
fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement
of Science, and he has been
research associate at Stanford,
a Weizmann fellow in Israel,
and he was visiting scientist
at Kyoto University and also
visiting scientist a number
of times at Weizmann
Institute in Israel.
But before he did all this,
he did something even more
remarkable, in from 1944,
I believe, to 1946, he
went to Los Alamos to work
in the Manhattan Project,
when he was only 19 years old,
he was undergrad at Cornell,
and he was, as Murray tells us,
that he was the personal
computer for Richard Feynman.
And I met Murray first
time, he doesn't remember,
in mid-80s when I was
a student and I studied
at Argonne a few times.
But a number of years ago
here we started a project
to measure neutron magnetic
dipole moment, hopefully leading
to electric dipole moment.
It's very important
experiment, and Murray is one
of the primary initiator of that
experiment, and it's still going
on at the NCNR, and after all
these years, Murray is as sharp
as before and equally
productive.
So before I invite
him up here to talk,
I also mention something else,
and I appreciate that very,
very much, it was his
87th birthday yesterday,
and he made it here.
So let's give him a
big applause on that.
[ Applause ]
So before I start for the
talk, we have the usual,
the two exit signs in the back
[inaudible], that two exit
in the back, so anything
happens, please run.
Walk, but don't run.
And so Murray would
you come up, and--
[ Pause ]
I'd also like to mention if
you see some blank slides,
there is a reason for it, and
Murray will explain why is that.
[Laughs] Thank you.
So Murray there's, this
would make it forward,
this is backwards.
>> Very good, thank you.
>> And there's a
laser pointer on the--
the red one is the
laser pointer.
>> Oh, look at that.
>> Okay?
>> Oh great.
I always learn things
when I come here to NIST,
and what I learned today
was, if you're ever plagued
by self-doubt, get
Arif to introduce you.
[ Laughter ]
[ Pause ]
Well, this is a memoir.
I was one of the youngest,
and least significant people
at Los Alamos during
World War II.
You can read good
overviews of that project,
and it's very interesting,
written by historians
like Addison [Hunteson?]
or written by older people
who knew what the
project was all
about at the time
that I was there.
Mine is a worm's-eye
view, and I will try
to use my own experience and
the experiences of a few others
to tell you about the world
in which a young scientist,
many young scientists
found ourselves in war time
at Los Alamos and also in the
immediate aftermath of the war.
As you will see, my perspective
is a very personal one.
So in the spring of 1944,
I was a second-year
undergraduate physics student
at Cornell University.
We were being taught
mathematics and physics
by retired professors who had
been recalled to replace those
who were away doing war work.
The country was mobilized for
war, it was a popular war.
Most young men were either
in the military services
or doing other war-related work.
Women were, for the first time
in history in America at least,
working in serious
industrial jobs.
Rosie the Riveter was the
iconic woman of the day.
Graduate students in
physics were mostly,
had mostly left their
universities and were working
on various war-related projects.
Undergraduates were mostly being
allowed to finish a year before,
after their 18th birthday,
and then-- and then, intended,
expected to be drafted
into the Army or the Navy.
We were-- The morale of
the country was very high.
It seems paradoxical,
but, you know,
war time can be a very
happy time for most people
if they don't happen
to be at risk
or they don't have
loved ones at risk.
The Great Depression was over.
There was a use for everybody.
Everybody had a job to do
and they knew how to do it.
We were confident that
we would win the war.
As a typical example of the
morale-- of public morale,
gasoline was rationed,
so hitchhiking became one
of the preferred modes
of transportation,
and most people were
very generous
about picking up hitchhikers.
At Cornell, I was one of a
group of about 10 undergraduates
who were studying
physics and mathematics.
We were taking oh, 5 or 6
courses at a time, twice as many
as would normally be allowed,
most of them mathematics
and physics, year-round of
course, hoping to learn as much
as we could and to
make ourselves useful
for something better than
being a foot soldier.
At that time, the military
services were always wooing us:
"You join up now and we're
paying for your education
for the next year,
and then we'll put you
in some specialized
training, mostly electronics,
and then you will be
assigned some duty,
which would not be
being a foot soldier."
And most of my class opted--
classmates opted for
one or another of those.
But then there was
the mystery program.
One of my professors in the
spring of 1944 said, well,
there was this project, it was
located in the United States.
It was a great scientific as
well as a patriotic opportunity.
If we wanted to join it, what we
had to do was to join the Army,
and then somehow to tell
him that we wanted it,
and then to join the Army
and then somehow we would
wind up on the project.
He didn't know what it was,
he did know that we
wouldn't see our parent--
our families again
until the war was over.
And that was all he knew.
There wasn't a single word
in writing about anything.
In retrospect when
I look back on it,
it's seems an intimidating
situation.
At the time, it didn't
seem intimidating at all.
This was war, you know?
We were all in this together.
He told me that that was the
thing to do, so I did it.
So I joined the Army,
and pretty soon I--
in days almost, I was in basic
training, and about 2 weeks
after that or maybe 3, I was
suddenly told to pack my bags,
and I was assembled
with about 10 others,
and we were shipped
off to Los Alamos.
This was accompanied
by high drama.
We had sealed orders.
We were starting from a-- from a
training camp in Louisiana to go
to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
We went there via Oak Ridge,
Tennessee; Cincinnati, Chicago,
Saint Louis, and
finally to Los Alamos,
each time opening our
orders and finding
out what is the next step.
But we already could see
that whatever we were doing
had very high priority
because it was very-- we had
frequent changes of trains,
it was very hard to get
on a train at that time,
even if you are in the army.
We were always at the top of
the-- at the head of the list.
Finally, somebody gave us a
railroad car and we only had
to get a train to
pull it for us.
[Laughter] Well, some of
you know Los Alamos today.
You may enjoy seeing
a few photos
of how it looked
when I was there.
Here was the example
of priorities.
Here was the Harvard cyclotron.
Bob Wilson had brought
it with him.
They needed a vandergraph.
The best-- and they
needed two, in fact.
The best vandergraph for their
purpose was at the University
of Wisconsin in Madison.
That's where it was living now.
There was also a
Cockcroft-Walton accelerator.
The Theory Division lived in
this building that you see--
that you're looking at.
All of these were located
in the technical area.
Now, if you know Los Alamos now,
you will not see
the technical area,
but you can orientate
yourself by this pond,
which is still in
the same place.
Fuller Lodge is up
here somewhere.
This frontage along the main
road, it must be a quarter
of a mile, I think, or a
little less or have been,
it's not there anymore.
This is the rim of what
was called Omega Canyon,
it's a very steep canyon.
Here, for instance, is the
central shop, an enormous shop
with tremendous capabilities.
The Army-- the Army had
built all that over a period
of approximately
two months in 1944.
By the time I got there
it was, it was old.
It was routine, it was running.
The vigor with which all
that was done was
absolutely astonishing.
You know, they had not only
created an industrial city
of several thousand people
on top of this but they had
to build it from the ground up
that needed a fire department,
that needed a power station,
it needed a hospital,
it needed schools for
the worker's children.
All that had been
done in a period
of not just the two months,
but less than a year.
Well, in addition
to these buildings,
most of the technical work
was done in the Tech Area,
but there were outlying
buildings in the various--
mostly in various
canyons, for other things.
What am I-- here we go.
I mean, it's clear
what this was for.
We were hearing explosions
all the time
because the implosion problem
required a vast research program
in-- in explosion hydrodynamics.
Well, they-- people had the,
as I said, the people had
to live somewhere too, and they
had to have various aminities.
I think this Redwood
Water Tower was left
over from the boy's school
that had been there before
and so was the tailor shop.
And so, indeed,
was Oppenheimer's house,
the director's house.
But almost everything
else was new.
Residences have to be find--
found for all these people.
Single people and some
few married couples lived
in dormitories like this one.
There was also a women's--
well, there were
several men's dormitories
and a woman's dormitory.
Families, typically
childless people,
lived in these little
apartments.
Lots of people lived
in these shacks;
there must have been a
couple of hundred of them.
There were other kinds
of units like that too.
This is where I lived,
bad picture.
It was typical Army barracks.
You see the smoke stacks
where the coal-burning stoves,
which heated it--
were exhausted, and these
stoves caused us adventures now
and again.
Across the road from us
was the women's, the WACs,
the women's Army
barracks, that was,
I believe, centrally heated.
I never saw the inside,
the-- [Laughter] Listen,
I was the youngest guy there,
and there were very few
women and lots of men.
[Laughter] The most
conspicuous thing
about the women's barracks was
that they had what we
didn't have, window shades.
The company in the
barracks was marvelous.
The soldiers included
machinists, technicians,
and quite a few students
like me.
They were an interesting
bunch, in general,
and some of the students
later become very
distinguished scientists.
Alas, it was also
David Greenglass,
the notorious spy whose false
testimony sent his sister Ethel
Rosenberg to the electric chair.
Fortunately for me,
I avoided Greenglass
because he was a
really obnoxious person.
But that wasn't enough
to save me completely.
I-- later, when I was a graduate
student during the McCarthyism,
I had a summer job at Brookhaven
doing something quite innocent,
quantum electrodynamics.
But the job was withdrawn
because they couldn't
get me cleared,
I think because of an
indirect connection I had
with David Greenglass.
Well, we soldiers lived in
the barracks and we worked--
we worked under the direction
of civilians, so our experience
of the Army was actually
minimal.
The office in-- the officers
in charge of us knew nothing
of where we worked or what we
did or what all those explosions
that they kept hearing
all day were.
Needless to say, being young
and snotty, we did our best
to torment them, because they
had a very limited ability
to punish us.
[Laughter] If they wanted to
restrict us to the barracks,
they heard from Oppenheimer's
office that we were needed.
General Groves was in overall
charge of the entire project.
We soldiers thought that he was
a sort of comic opera character,
something out of Gilbert and
Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance;
you know, "I am the very model
of a modern major general."
[Laughter] We were quite
wrong; Groves was a genius
who made the project work.
Now let me turn to
the project itself.
It was a very exciting
place to work.
Most of the country's nuclear
physicists were there, and--
plus others, many
other kinds scientists.
Oppenheimer, whom all addressed
as "Oppie," led the project,
and he was a kind
of a cult figure.
His administrative, scientific,
technical leadership
were amazing,
and he had a very
charismatic personality,
and also, we were proud of him.
He was an articulate
spokesman for us.
At his insistence, information
was not compartmentalized very
much, with the result that we
were able to have colloquia
and seminars and find out
what people were doing
and thinking and, of
course, to learn things.
Here's a roster of the Theory
Division where I worked.
So Hans Bethe was in charge.
Vicki Weisskopf was his deputy.
John von Neumann was the only
person who came and went.
He was a consultant.
He had enormous influence
because he was so smart.
And you will see if you
just look through here,
I cannot see it very well,
let me come over here.
Well, of course, Dick
Feynman was the golden boy
of the Theory Division.
But there were, there
was George Placzek,
there was Rudolf
Peierls, where is he?
There was Marshak.
Bellman was a very distinguished
mathematician in his time.
The list just goes on and on.
Four of those people--
Bethe, Feynman, Glauber,
and Fred Reines-- won the
Nobel Prize after that.
Peter Lax won the Abel medal,
which is mathematically
pretty much equivalent
with the Nobel Prize.
There was also Klaus Fuchs, the
notorious spy, to our regret.
I never knew Klaus Fuchs; he
was rather a reclusive person.
That was a lucky thing for me.
There was Dieter Kurath, one
of my fellow soldiers who--
who later introduced electronic
computing to nuclear physics.
Dieter was a wonderfully
talented guy.
Hold your breath.
He could diagonalize
a five by five matrix.
That was an achievement
at that time.
He did it by recognizing
symmetries and, of course,
using a desk calculator.
There was one group, a
rather large-ish group,
that was working
with IBM machines,
and I will tell you a little
more about that later.
They were very central
to the project.
Then there was this
computation group
to which I was initially
assigned.
These were people who were doing
numerical calculations, all day
and all night but
sometimes all night.
They were-- a few of them,
soldiers of both genders,
only a couple of us
were actually students.
Many of them were the wives
of people on the project.
The project had an
incredible birth rate
because wives didn't
have anything to do,
and these were young
families in general,
but some of the wives were
doing these calculations.
Mici Teller, for
instance, was one of them.
And then there were other
people, mostly women,
who had been school
teachers or--
and some others too who were
just looking for some way
to help with the war and
somehow, one way or another,
found their way to Los Alamos.
So these people-- computations
in those days were done
on these desk calculators.
So, I used this for
about 18 months.
These things were marvelous,
and we really appreciated them
because they could divide.
Anybody could add,
subtract, and multiply,
but division was
the latest wrinkle.
And the calculations that we
did, because they were elaborate
and involved so many
subtractions, had to be carried
to 10 figures, which
this could do, just.
And the carriage on top, this
thing, moved over as you moved
from one digit to another.
I see you nodding,
[inaudible], you know these.
They were a wonder.
If you took off the panel, which
of course, I immediately did,
you saw a solid mass of wheels
and gears, wheels and rods.
It was absolutely astonishing.
Well, we were cal-- what
were we calculating?
Mostly, we were taking
spheres and doing neutron--
imaginary spheres and doing
neutron diffusion calculations
under a wide variety of model--
model designs to see what
would happen if this, if that.
The data that went into them
were nuclear cross sections,
which were ill-known, and
the number of neutrons per--
that came out of a fission,
which was ill-known.
So, we adjusted those
parameters.
Other people were
doing experiments,
and then we compared
the experiments
with these calculations
or somebody--
somebody smarter than we did
and we tried other calculations.
It was a-- it was
a noble attempt.
In retrospect, it was nonsense.
The cross sections
were not right.
There were things that we didn't
know about, like resonances.
In retrospect, I think what we
were actually doing was making a
tremendous multiparameter
interpolation formula
for the experimental data.
Be that as it may,
that's what we did.
Now, all of that was
only the Theory Division.
There were other theorists, too.
They were Edward Teller, who
was working on the super,
which was a failed
design for hydrogen bomb.
Stan Ulam, the great
mathematician,
was working with him.
Emil Konopinski.
But in addition to
that, they were all--
we were only a tiny bit of it.
There were the experimental
groups.
They were led by people such as
Fermi, Bob Wilson, Kistiakowsky,
Luis Alvarez, Ed-- well,
Norman Ramsey, Ken Griesen.
They were most of the
luminaries of physics.
Whoever wasn't at the
RAD Lab or at Berkeley,
with only a few exceptions,
was with us.
Now these guys were doing
dangerous experiments some
of them, involving neutrons.
And at that time,
nobody knew what kind
of neutron dose would have a
significant biological effect.
But they didn't care,
this was war.
There were other young
men dying in trenches.
So they just plunged
ahead with little care.
One of the experiments that
they did was The Dragon.
This is a picture of it.
It was called The Dragon by
Feynman, characteristically,
because it was tickling
the code--
tickling the tail of a dragon.
These things are blocks of
uranium-235 hydride assembled
to the point where it
was nearly critical.
Then there was this tube
in the middle, here,
in which they dropped
another block.
Now it would be over critical;
it the first time anybody
had done an experiment
that was over prompt critical.
There wasn't that
delay of a second or so
for the delayed neutrons.
And the idea was that it would
go over critical instantaneously
and then you made measurements
to see whether the whole
idea was right, you know?
At that time, they continually
needed to check out things
that you say in retrospect,
native and obvious,
but they weren't.
And when they did
that experiment,
they did it in a particular
lab in Omega Canyon,
where I showed you that was
just below the Tech Area.
It had a fence of
its own and guards
with machine guns
inside the main fence
because they were very
worried about Plutonium,
the very little bit
of it that was there,
and also the fissile
uranium-235.
And they-- when they did the
experiment the first time,
they actually had the doors
of the lab opened and cars
with the engines running in
case anything went wrong.
It's not at all clear that it
would've done them any good.
[Laughter] The guards-- these
guards were military policemen.
They were different from
the soldiers that I knew.
They were kept away from us.
They were tough guys.
They had been told that
if the siren went off,
they should flee.
They should just run away.
Imagine telling that
to military policemen.
They must have been absolutely
terrified most of the time.
[Laughter] Well, one evening--
one afternoon, I guess,
the siren went off.
Nothing was happening
here, not The Dragon.
What happened was
that on the mesa
above where the Tech Area
was, in the machine shop,
some quenching oil had flashed,
and a fire engine came
and it had a siren.
And the guards heard the
siren and they ran away.
[Laughter] And one of
them ran down the canyon
where you couldn't
follow him by car,
and they had to head them off.
Well, then I had another
enormously lucky break.
Feynman chose me to be
his personal calculator.
I was the-- in some
ways, the logical person.
Doing those calculations with
that calculator I showed you,
could be accelerated by
using some intelligence
about the numbers.
And also, by tech-- by--
it was something of an art.
You didn't want to copy
numbers out only to plug them
in again later, so you would
have to find ways to keep them
in the calculator, which had
no memor, but just to do things
in the right sequence.
And I was good at that, and
maybe that's why he chose me.
Dieter Kurath would
have been better,
but Dieter was indispensable for
diagonilizing those matrixes,
so I got work for Feynman.
Now all I could do
for Dick Feynman was
numerical calculations.
If he had had a 50-dollar
programable calculator
that you can buy
now for nothing,
he wouldn't have needed me.
But luckily for me,
he didn't have that.
I was still doing
calculations and using
that Marchant calculator
all day.
But now it was different because
Dick Feynman was a lovely guy.
He kept me interested
by telling me things,
telling me what he
was thinking about--
just physics or sometimes
projects.
Also, Feynman was the golden
boy of the Theory Division.
He was only 27 years old
and had just gotten his PhD,
and was virtually unpublished.
But somebody described
him as the best-known,
least-published physicist
in America.
And people came to
get his advice.
All the time.
Bethe came to get his
advice, all the time.
One time-- and so-- and
he was very nice about it.
He encouraged me to
stop working and listen,
not to speak of course.
One time, Bethe and
Feynman came--
Bethe and von Neumann
came in together.
Suppose the implosion
didn't work.
They had another design.
It was a monster.
What would be the critical mass?
We couldn't calculate
the critical mass
of a sphere correctly.
Feynman looked at it,
and he said, "Why me?"
Translation: "if you two can't
estimate the critical mass,
how do you expect me to?"
And one of them said,
"Nobody can calculate that,
so we want you to guess."
[Laughter] And that was a
very serious remark, actually.
It was a measure of their
respect for his intuition.
Feynman's insight and
intuition were just amazing.
He was different from--
you know, in a long life
and a lucky one, I've known a
great many great physicists,
some of them are pretty well.
Feynman was different
from everybody else.
His way of thinking
was simply different.
If you asked him to prove
some mathematical proposition,
he gave two-- or if he needed to
prove it-- he gave two examples.
But that wouldn't
work for most people,
but Feynman could
pick those examples
so that they probed all
the possible weak points.
Now, I mentioned the
IBM computer group.
They were working on the
hydrodynamics of the implosion.
That was a central
problem of the laboratory.
It was an enormous problem.
It occupied many of the best
scientists in the laboratory
for a substantial
part of their time.
There was nothing
trivial about it.
It was-- doing the
numerical parts
of it was beyond human
computers like me,
and the others like him.
So there was a group of
about 18 people working,
using IBM machines.
Oh there is Dick Feynman.
I forgot to show him to you.
I don't know when that
picture was taken,
but it was obviously
around that age.
Here is such an IBM machine.
What it could do is add
or subtract, say, multiply
and divide, I assume;
certainly nothing else.
The ones we had were--
this is a later,
the one of which I have a
picture is a later model.
The ones we had looked
pretty much like that,
just a little less--
a little less smooth.
And the idea was that you fed in
a couple of, if you wanted to,
if you had an array of numbers
A and another array of numbers B
and you had to add them, you
fed in 2 stacks of cards,
one with the numbers A,
one with the numbers B,
and it spat out stack
C with the sums.
You could make it know
that it should add
and not do something else.
Here you see, this
was actually kind
of like a telephone switchboard.
You plugged the wires
into various places
to tell it what to do.
Well, then if you wanted to
multiply those numbers C by 2,
of course, you fed them
into another machine.
And that was how you did
hydrodynamic calculations.
Well, it wasn't going well.
It was going very
badly, in fact,
partly because they weren't,
well, just was a hard problem,
and partly because these
machines were always breaking
down, and then you had to
call the IBM technicians,
and there was a delay
before they came.
I mean, they were
supposed to run 24/7
and the people worked 24/7,
but there were these delays.
Well, the situation was really
bad, so Bethe asked Feynman
to take over, to
advise them, he said.
Well, you know what?
In about 3 weeks, Dick
had turned it around
and they were really productive.
The problem with the technicians
coming to fix it was solved
by figuring out how to
fix it himself, of course.
So, being with Feynman was fun.
Most of the stories you've heard
about his escapades are true.
[Laughter] In the main
story that people know
but I can tell you
more about it,
he figured out how
to pick locks.
We all had-- we all had file
cabinets with a lock on them.
They were cheap Remington
locks of that area,
and we were supposed to put
away any sensitive papers,
which was any paper
with a number
on it, in the file at night.
Well, Feynman quickly
figured out how
to pick those locks,
and he showed me how.
And I can tell you,
it was not difficult.
It was just a matter of
using some intelligence
and deciding how to do it.
You did not need sensitive
fingers or anything like that.
And then, so, I mean that
was easy way to play pranks
on the other guys in our group.
But like, for instance,
opening his lock
and changing the
combination and closing it.
[Laughter] But one night,
we were working late,
and we were both tired,
and so we went around,
at his initiative of course, and
opened the locks of many people
in the Theory Division--
opened the safes of many people
in the Theory Division-- and
put in notes or moved files
around to show that
we had been there.
But of course, not-- we
didn't change the locks;
that would have been really bad.
Well, in the morning, I don't
know if people came to work
at 9, it wasn't 2 minutes
after 9 that everybody knew
who had done that, and the
security officer came along
and had a chat with
Dick Feynman.
But Feynman happily had the
good sense not to mention me
because I was in the Army.
[Laughter] I'll tell
you one more funny story
about that, before I move on.
There was-- in Oppenheimer's
office was a real safe
that weighed, you know, hundreds
of pounds and had a real lock.
And at some time, they
wanted to open it,
and nobody remembered
the combination.
So they called the
locksmith who,
of course, couldn't do anything.
The only thing he could suggest
was drilling out the lock,
and that would not
have been easy either.
So Oppenheimer asked
Feynman to look at it,
and Feynman opened it
in about 15 seconds.
[Laughter] I don't know whether
he confessed how he did it
but he did tell me.
He couldn't resist
telling somebody.
They all came from the factory
with combination 50-25-50,
so he tried that, and it opened.
[Laughter] They not only
forgot the combination,
they forgot that they
have never reset it.
Well, it's tangential
to my story,
but let me tell you a little
more about Dick Feynman,
because people are
interested in him.
When I went to graduate school
at Cornell after the war,
he was one of my teachers.
I was actually Hans
Bethe's student, but--
but I spent most of my
time with Dick Feynman.
Feynman had only very
few students either
at Cornell or CalTech.
He just couldn't
focus on problems
that weren't top
priority for him.
His lectures were
absolutely a joy to hear.
I had taken a course earlier
in classical electrodynamics,
taught by Bethe, and
it was a good course.
But when Feynman taught it,
I sat in on the lectures again
because-- and that was true--
in general, people just loved
to come and listen to him
because his lectures
were so wonderful.
He had his own way of
looking at routine things,
and it was always better.
It was always more intuitive,
maybe not as rigorous.
In fact, we students complained
that something he did
wasn't rigorous, he said,
"You know what rigamortis means?
It means died of
too much rigor."
[Laughter] There was
a problem with that,
and it's one I personally
think I suffered with all
of my professional
life, and I think many
of the others did, too.
You could learn physics
wonderfully from Dick Feynman,
but you could not
learn how to do physics
from Dick Feynman anymore than
you could learn how to dance
by watching a ballerina.
You just couldn't do that.
But, of course, we tried.
We always tried to approach
problems the way Dick Feynman
would, and we might
have been better off
if we had approached them
the way other people would.
Dick Feynman was not a saint.
During his Cornell years, he
was notoriously a womanizer
and had a very bad reputation
among the women on campus,
and there are many-- and there--
and some of the stories
about his having been
gratuitously cruel
to people are true.
I can only say that
he was invariably kind
and generous to me.
Well, the war ended in May 9th.
The war in Europe
ended in May 1945.
I had arrived at Los
Alamos in September 1944,
so it was a rather short time.
Then we learned that
Germany had given
up on making a fission bomb in
1943 and we needn't have been
so panicky, but nothing
changed at Los Alamos.
One man, Joseph Roth
[last name inaudible],
left because he did not want
to make such a horrible weapon,
but I had never heard at
that time of any discussion
of whether or not we should be
making such a horrible weapon.
And I did not then, either.
I'm sure that the older
and wiser people must
have had reservations
and must have thought
to each other about it,
but it did not trickle
down to me.
Nor to the people I
ordinarily spoke with.
Well, horrible weapons
leads me to Edward Teller.
I knew Teller because Los Alamos
was a very democratic place,
and I sometimes had
lunch with him by chance
of whom you sat down with.
I never spoke with
him about politics.
Others did, and those
who did said
at that time he was
not fighting this war.
He considered that
this war was won.
He was fighting the
future war with Russia,
with the Soviet Union,
and that was why he wanted
to develop the super.
And he was fixated on developing
the super, and although
on the man of his statue was,
of course, always involved
in decisions about the
fission bomb project,
but it was not the
thing he worked on.
He worked on the super.
The-- you may-- I don't
know if you have--
if some of you have seen
the opera, Doctor Atomic.
It depicts Oppenheimer as having
had no reservations and Teller
as having been worried
about that.
That was actually the
opposite of the truth.
Well, in any case,
we continued a pace
with the fission bomb project.
The war in the Pacific
had now turned around,
but we were still faced with
prospect of invading Japan
with a anticipated
million casualties.
By the time of the successful
Trinity Test in July 15th, 1945,
troops were on ships
steaming toward Japan
for the invasion fleet that
I have been thanked by people
who are in that--
on those ships.
Some 70 Los Alamos
scientists wrote a letter
to President Truman urging him
to give the Japanese
a chance to surrender.
But General Groves stopped it.
We bombed Hiroshima
on August 6th,
the Soviet Union join the war on
August 8th, we bombed Nagasaki
on August 9th, and August
14 Japan Surrendered.
At Los Alamos we were absolutely
exhilarated, as you can imagine.
We had ended-- we had
won the war and prevented
that costly invasion, until
Oppenheimer pointed out that
from now on, we would
all live in fear.
Well, just after the war
ended, there was a proceed-need
to dig blast gauges out
of the crater at Trinity.
These were gauges that
measured the maximum pressure
and so you could tell what
the blast wave had been.
They were buried in the-- in
the ground, very close to the--
to the tower which
held the bomb,
and now they had to be dug out.
So I volunteered, along with
four of the other theory people,
to go and dig them out,
partly because we thought
the experimenters had already
received enough radiation
and we should do it,
and partly actually because,
you know, it sounded like fun.
So we took an Army car, and
we drove to the Trinity site,
and there we changed to a local
vehicle at their base station,
and we drove to the place
where the crater was.
The crater was, I don't know, 10
feet deep at the most, I think.
Well, who can say where a
gradually ending crater ends,
but it was on the order of a
hundred meters in diameter.
And we had radiation gauges of a
sort, and we were going to leave
if we accumulated
more than 5 rem,
and with those gauges were
probably good to a factor five,
and so we went in and we had a
map and we located those gauges
and we dug them out,
and that was that.
Well, then we went
back to our-- then we--
then we were pretty well
covered with radioactive sand
at the time, so we
took off our clothes
and brushed ourselves
off as best as we could
and then we drove back
to this base station.
In retrospect, I think we should
have felt like a comedy team:
five naked men driving
across the dessert--
[Laughter] -- in a car.
Actually, I wasn't completely
naked; I was wearing shoes
because I was driving the car.
[Laughter] Well,
that was great fun.
But here's the serious question:
why were we doing
such a stupid thing?
The war was over.
There wasn't-- what
was our hurry?
The retrospect is, that not to
have done it would have been
against the culture of
that time and place.
It never occurred
to us not to do it.
Somebody said they would like
to know the pressure, good,
we dug out the gauges.
That attitude, which
pervaded for some time
after the war ended,
resulted in some serious--
had some serious
consequences, and I'll tell you
about one that-- I choose one
because I was peripherally
involved
with it, in just a moment.
But first, there
is another matter.
When the war ended,
Oppenheimer's lustre
started to tarnish.
He was the greatest
popular hero in the country
after General Eisenhower,
and he was called
to visit President Truman and
separately to visit Eisenhower,
and he was sort after
by powerful senators.
Two bills for controlling the
development of nuclear energy
and of nuclear physics,
the science,
were before the Congress.
One was called the
May-Johnson Bill,
and it would have given the
military complete control
of the both.
The other was called
the McMahon Bill,
and it would have established
the civilian organization,
the Atomic Energy Commission.
Everybody I knew favored
the civilian alternative,
and people were writing
letters to their congressmen.
Oppenheimer favored
the military.
Well, he went off
somewhere to talk about it,
and when he came back,
he favored the military
alternative.
And he wouldn't say why.
All he could-- all he would say
was, "If you knew what I know,
you would agree with me."
Well, people just
weren't buying that.
So, after the war, people
started to leave, of course,
and Feynman's group
evaporated except for me.
I was still in the Army,
so I couldn't leave.
So I joined Philip Morrison's,
which was building a
fast neutron reactor
called Clementine.
It was a mercury-cooled
reactor with an assembly
of plutonium rods
sitting in the mercury.
Here is a picture of
its core-- oh, oh this.
This had to do with Feynman.
When we complained about units,
that was what he wrote
on the blackboard.
So, here is the core
of Clementine.
You can see the size of that
canister, it had those holes
for aligning the plutonium
rods, you can see one
of the man's fing--
the person's fingers.
And the mercury flowed
throughout it.
That's not my hand, and
that may even be a fake rod,
but it could have been my hand,
and it could have been
a real plutonium rod.
That was the way one handled
plutonium rods, you picked it
up with your hands and did
whatever you did with it.
It was actually perfectly safe.
The plutonium was clad with a--
plated actually with a thin
layer of some white metal.
I never found out what it was,
but I would guess stainless
steel and, you know,
the alpha particles
couldn't get out,
and there weren't
that many neutrons.
Anyway, that was the way
we worked in those days,
and that's why we were able to
do things so fast and so well.
I think you don't
need that lecture.
Well, another part-- oh, well,
Phil Morrison was the
leader of that group.
Here he is.
Phil is one of the
heroes of my life.
I will tell you a
little more about him.
He was a remarkable man.
He appeared to have
swallowed the dictionary--
to have swallowed the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
There seemed nothing in which
he was not well informed.
He was a theoretical physicist,
but he was leading an
experimental group,
and he was one of those who went
to Tinian to assemble the bomb.
And then after the war, he was
one of the very first actually
to go into Japan and
assess the damage and talk
with knowledgeable people there.
And what he saw so horrified him
that he became a tremendous
advocate for arms control
for the rest of his life,
often at some political
peril to himself.
Well, part of our group was
doing a critical assembly.
They were led by Louis Slotin
of whom I don't have a picture.
The idea was that you had a
hemisphere of, I think it was--
surely it was plutonium,
we didn't have enough
U-235 at that time.
It was sitting on a table with
some little frame to hold it.
And you had another hemisphere
above it and you lower it
and you measure the neutrons
coming out as a function
of the distance between
the two hemispheres.
And the idea was
that by using that,
you could get more data points
for these silly calculations
that we were doing.
Well, it was understood
by everybody
that you never did that: you
didn't lower the upper part
of the reactive material and
you raised the lower part
because then if you dropped
it, it would fall away.
But they were doing it the way
they did it, they had shims
in place and they lowered it,
you know, a millimeter at a time
with the aid of a
screwdriver and the shims.
Something slipped
for some reason;
the thing went over critical.
There was a flash of,
invisible flash of neutrons.
Some people thought afterward
that they might have seen a
blue glow from the ionization.
Louis threw the upper
hemisphere away but, of course,
it was all too--
it was too late.
The reaction had turned itself
off due to thermal expansion
of the spheres actually.
Everybody rushed out the door.
The guard, the armed
guard at the door,
because it was plutonium,
was the last one out,
although he was standing
next to the door.
And they all went off to the
hospital, some of them stopping
at home first to tell there
wives what had happened.
It turned out that nobody was
injured really except Louis
because they were further
from the plutonium.
Louis died 10 days later.
Well, we were left to ask,
"Why were they doing
that experiment?"
The war was over.
They didn't have to do
such dangerous things.
The same answer as
I gave you before.
My connection with the lab--
with it was that Phil Morrison
was characteristically the first
one in there a few days later
after the radioactivity
had died down.
And a week or so later,
I and another man went
in to try clean things up a bit.
They needed us to clean them
up because the janitors refused
to go in there, having observed
that all the bugs were dead.
And Phil tried to explain to
them that the bugs were dead
because the doors were closed
and it was terribly hot in there
for a couple of weeks, but they
were inconsolable, so I did it.
There was no danger of secondary
radiation at that point.
That was not an act of
bravery or even of folly.
Well, after the war
came the McCarthyism,
and many of the people at Los
Alamos were caught up in it,
quite naturally, because
they were intellectuals.
The Great Dpression had
taught them before the war,
during the depression, that
capitalism doesn't work,
and they varied from
people who were interested
in Marxist economic theory
in a rather academic way,
to ones who really thought
that the Soviet Union
was leading the way
for the future, better world.
Stalin had not been recognized
by them or by anybody really
or by most people as
the monster that he was,
partly because of
government propaganda.
And so, even I had some
problem with the McCarthyism.
I was cleaner than clean.
I was a nerdy kid who had never
been interested in politics,
who never belonged
to any organizations
that were subverted
by communists,
except if you count
the U.S. Army
where we had David Greenglass.
I was just as innocent
as anybody could be,
but I had friends,
and that was enough.
Oppenheimer and many
of his former students
and associates had-- well,
had been closely associated,
if not with the communist
party, if not, members thereof.
Oppenheimer, himself, paid dues
for some months that were more
than most people's salaries.
And the witch hunters
were out for--
were shooting for Oppenheimer.
And the way they were
going to get at him was
through his former students.
They had been associated
with him in the same way
and they used the
classical methods
that witch hunters have used
in the past in the inquisitions
so forth, to get after him.
Well, one of the people who
was quite vulnerable was
Phil Morrison.
And he was questioned by one of
those Congressional committees,
and Phil was in an
awkward situation.
He was furious at Oppenheimer,
as were the rest of us,
because Oppenheimer,
well, how should I put it?
Oppenheimer was then
still a great hero
to the entire population.
He had the opportunity
to say "Look,
this whole business
is ridiculous.
Even I was involved in
those things in my youth.
It doesn't mean a thing
those people are not
necessarily disloyal."
But he didn't.
Instead, he threw
people to the wolves,
left and right trying
to save himself.
There was a man named Chevalier
whom Oppenheimer accused,
falsely as he later said,
he called it the "cock
and bull story" as he later.
Oppenheimer told Groves that
Chevalier had asked Oppenheimer
to commit espionage
for the Soviet Union.
Well, that just wrecked
Chevalier's life,
as you can imagine.
They didn't have any ability
to arrest him on that basis,
but it ruined his career.
Oppenheimer's brother,
Frank, who was a professor
at Minnesota was fired,
and so he did some ranching
for a while, and after a while,
invented the Exploratorium
in San Francisco, so we may
have benefited from that.
But in general, these
people were trying not
to testify against Oppenheimer.
Some of them fled the country.
Bernard Peters, a very
capable cosmic ray physicist,
fled the country and had spent
the rest of his life in India.
David Bohm who many people
thought deserved the Nobel Prize
for having invented the
plasma, and spent most
of his life in Brazil.
They all left either because
they were likely to be arrested
or be caught and then
they could get out of it
by testifying against
Oppenheimer.
Phil Morrison didn't flee.
He was questioned
in secret session.
He said, and I believe him,
that he refused to testify
on some untested constitutional
grounds, and he got away
with it, he didn't get arrested.
I think he was lucky that
it was a secret session.
If he had defied
them in public, he--
they would have had
to follow him up.
So, how was I involved
with this?
Well, first of all, I was
a friend of Phil Morrison.
There was-- the FBI was
following him around,
and they had seen me drive
him to this place or that.
And so, what happens
as a result of it?
Well, I was very lucky.
I was teaching at Northwestern
University after the war.
And so, I didn't have required
a clearance for anything.
But then, an FBI came--
agent came to visit me.
Did I know a certain
former graduate student,
fellow graduate student
of mine at Cornell?
Sure I do.
Someone I didn't like,
as a matter of fact,
but unjustly as it turned out.
But yeah, I knew him.
Had I given him a ride
in my car from a meeting
of the Physical Society
in New York to Ithaca
where Cornell is located?
Yes, I had.
Who else was in the car?
Now, what you do with
that slippery slope,
I said I didn't remember.
He was no dope.
He said, "Oh, you know, think
about it for a few days,
it'll come back to you.
I'll come back; I'll return."
He returned in a few days and he
said "Have you though about it?"
And I said, "I will
not discuss this man."
He said, "Okay, that's
your privilege."
Nothing came of it.
Well, 5 or 6 years later, I
left Northwestern and went
to Argonne, which
was an open lab,
and you didn't have
to be cleared.
But after I've been
there for some time,
it turned out that
it was discovered
that if you had been
cleared in the past,
as I had at Los Alamos,
then you had to be recleared
in order to work at Argonne.
So they tried to reclear me, and
I got a call, which said "Look,
on the basis of the
field investigation,
we cannot clear you.
Come down and we'll talk."
But I was again very lucky.
That was by then 1959 or a '60.
The McCarthyism was
basically over.
The FBI who-- guy who called
me was a humane individual
and he said "Look, my goal is
to find reasons why
I should clear you."
So we talked for
a day and a half.
And since we talked about
everything under the sun,
I couldn't be sure exactly
why it was that I was
under so much suspicion,
but I feel quite certain,
it must have been my refusal
to answer questions about--
He asked me about that.
And I again said I really
didn't know who it was,
and he again didn't believe
me but he was nice about it.
The intensity of their tracking
people was very impressive.
One of the many things
he asked me was--
about was...it turned out
that the uncle of the wife
of my former college
roommate was a writer
for the Communist
Daily Worker newspaper,
and he wanted information
about that.
And I said "Look, that
roommate now works
for the RAND Corporation
which is--
and obviously, has
very high clearance.
Why are you asking
me about this?"
And he said "Look, I ask the
questions, you answer them."
[Laughter] I thought
that was reasonable.
I also had a friend who
got in very serious trouble
because he had a mathematician,
because he had an
apartment in Albuquerque.
He had been in the Army
with me at Los Alamos.
He had been in the
Army, he had--
his wife was in the Army at
a nearby base, and they met
at this apartment in
Albuquerque weekends.
His wife was away.
Greenglass, whom this guy hated,
wanted to sublet it from him.
He let him do it because
Greenglass's wife was pregnant
and this and that.
Well, that was the apartment
in which the famous [inaudible]
box papers were passed through,
messenger for the Rosenbergs,
and he was in trouble
and I wrote a letter
defending him.
And this guy knew it.
Well, I think I've said enough.
Thank you.
[Applause]
