Читать книгу The Starship and the Canoe - Kenneth Brower - Страница 13

Then the war caught up with Freeman. At the end of his second year at Cambridge, he was interviewed by C. P. Snow, whose wartime job was finding appropriate military uses for technical people. Freeman became, at the age of nineteen, a mathematician with the Royal Air Force Bomber Command.

This was irony, though an irony fairly common at the time. Freeman had been a “fierce pacifist” for most of his youth. He had grown up in the grim years after the First World War. “The older generation,” he has written of that time, “were determined that we should be constantly reminded of their tragedy. And, indeed, our whole lives were overshadowed by it. Every year, on November 11, there was the official day of mourning. But much heavier on our souls weighed the daily reminders that the best and brightest of a whole generation had fallen.

“We of the class of 1941 were no fools. We saw clearly in 1937 that another bloodbath was approaching. We knew how to figure the odds. We saw no reason to expect that the next round would be less bloody than the one before. We expected that the fighting would start in 1939 or 1940, and we observed that our chances of coming through it alive were about the same as if we had belonged to the class of 1915 or 1916. We calculated the odds to be about ten to one that we would be dead in five years.”

To Freeman and his small circle of fellow pacifists, the world was insane. Hitler was just a symptom. The German people were not enemies, but fellow victims; it was the times that were sick. The old men in power in Britain had no answers to any of the nation’s problems. Chamberlain was a hypocrite. Hitler was no hypocrite, but he was insane. Churchill was a warmonger “planning the campaigns in which we were to die.” The only world leader that Freeman’s friends admired was Gandhi. They subscribed to Peace News. They boycotted OTC, the British equivalent of ROTC. “We raged against the hypocrisy and stupidity of our elders in the same way the young rebels are raging today, and for very similar reasons.”

But the holocaust that Freeman’s circle expected did not materialize. The war came, but proved not so bloody as they had calculated. Churchill won their grudging admiration. The nonviolent, Hitler-accommodating Pétain-Laval government ended their Gandhism. “Pacifism was destroyed as a moral force as soon as Laval touched it,” Freeman has written. He was no longer a fierce pacifist when he reported for duty with the RAF.

“I arrived at the headquarters of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command in July 1943, just in time for the big raids against Hamburg. On July 27, we killed forty thousand people and lost only seventeen bombers. For the first time in history, we had created a fire storm.”

Fire storms were devastatingly effective accidents. No one understood, or understands today, what makes them. They seem to depend on a climatic instability with which the bombs interact. The storms travel very fast, generate enormous heat, and burn up the oxygen in large areas of a city. They kill people even inside bomb shelters.

“In every big raid, we tried to raise a fire storm, but we succeeded just twice—once in Hamburg and once, two years later, in Dresden.” American forces had a similar success in bombing Japan, twice triggering fire storms, Freeman notes. A fire storm in Tokyo killed as many people as the Hiroshima bomb—a hundred thousand. It was more devastating than the atomic bomb that fell on Nagasaki.

Freeman did not work directly on the mathematics of the fire storm. He became the Bomber Command expert on collisions. British bombers flew at night, and occasionally in the darkness they ran into one another. The bomber crews resented dying by accident; they felt slightly better about dying by enemy fire. The problem was that loosely bunched formations, though they suffered fewer collisions, lost more planes to enemy fighters. Freeman’s chore was to find the grim median.

“The ratio of lethal to nonlethal collisions over England proved to be about three to one. In this ratio, I had already allowed for the fact that some nonlethal collisions over England would have been lethal if they had occurred over Germany. So in the end I told the Command that our best guess at the number of lethal collisions over Germany was to multiply the number of nonlethal collisions by three. That was all the mathematics I had to do. In practical terms my information meant that we were losing only about one bomber to collisions in a thousand sorties. I told the Command that this was not nearly enough. I told them to increase the density of the bomber force five-fold, so that the collision losses would come up one-half percent. I told them that they would save much more than onehalf percent in losses to fighters. The Command followed my advice and the crews reluctantly obeyed.”

Freeman came to know more about the bombing campaign than most operational officers. He knew more even than most cabinet ministers. His knowledge appalled him.

“The defenses made it impossible for us to bomb accurately. We stopped trying to hit precise military objectives. Burning down cities was all we could do, so we did that. Even in killing the civilian population, we were inefficient. The Germans had killed one person for every ton of bombs that they dropped on England. To kill a German, we dropped three tons. I felt my responsibility deeply, being in possession of all this information that was so carefully concealed from the British public. Many times, I decided I owed it to the public to run out into the streets and tell them what stupidities were being committed in their name. But I never had the moral courage to do it. I sat in my office until the end, carefully calculating how to murder another hundred thousand people most economically.

“After the war ended, I read reports of the trials of men who had been high up in the Eichmann organization. They had sat in their offices writing memoranda and calculating how to murder people efficiently, just like me. The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals and I went free. . . .

“In August, 1945, I was all set to fly to Okinawa. We had defeated the Germans, but Mr. Churchill had still not had enough. He persuaded President Truman to let him join in the bombing of Japan with a fleet of three hundred bombers, which he called Tiger Force. We were to be based in Okinawa, and since the Japanese had almost no air defenses, we were to bomb, like the Americans, in daylight. I found this new slaughter of defenseless Japanese even more sickening than the slaughter of welldefended Germans. Still I did not quit. By that time, I had been at war so long that I could hardly remember peace. No living poet had words to describe that emptiness of the soul which allowed me to go on killing without hatred and without remorse. But Shakespeare understood it, and he gave Macbeth the words:

I am in blood

Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

“I was sitting at home eating a quiet breakfast with my mother when the morning paper arrived with the news of Hiroshima. I understood at once what it meant. ‘Thank God for that,’ I said. I knew that Tiger Force would not fly, and I would never have to kill anybody again.”

Asked recently if his experience of the war figured in his drive for the stars, Freeman nodded. “Our strongest feelings are subconscious. I grew up in a time of despair—the late thirties. It was far worse than it is now. It was worse than we realized. I think we were incredibly lucky. I suppose that’s where it really comes from.” Twenty-five years after the war, he wrote, “In my personal view of the human situation, the exploration of space appears as the most hopeful feature of a dark landscape.”

At the war’s end, Freeman considered his prospects. Physics, he decided, would be the most vital science of the next twenty-five years. Physics needed him, too; it was in “more of a mess than mathematics or astronomy.” He went to Cambridge, saw G. I. Taylor, and asked that great physicist for advice. Taylor immediately suggested that Freeman go to Cornell and work with Hans Bethe.

“It wasn’t all that obvious at the time,” says Freeman. “But it was the right decision. It was the perfect place. I had to get away from England, from my father. I needed a fresh start.” In 1947 he came to the United States on a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship. He arrived in Ithaca in the rain.

“When I knocked on Bethe’s door, and he opened it, and I looked down, the first thing I saw was a pair of very muddy boots. I found that very reassuring. It would not have happened at Cambridge. The students called him Hans. He ate with them in the cafeteria. Those were things no one would have thought to do at Cambridge.”

Freeman learned his physics from Bethe and from Richard Feynman, who was also at Cornell. “From Bethe and Feynman,” he writes, “I learned that mathematical elegance is not enough, a hard lesson for a pupil of Hardy to learn. To do good work in physics, one must also have an instinct for reality, an intuitive sense of the intrinsic importance of things. Bethe and Feynman had this instinct to a superlative degree. Some of it, though not enough, rubbed off on me. On the other side stood the great mathematician Herman Weyl, who once said to me, ‘When I am forced to make the choice between truth and beauty, I always choose beauty.’”

It is said of Hans Bethe that he is less a great physicist than a great teacher of physicists. I once asked Dyson if this was true.

“Both are true. Bethe had a mind very much like my own. He is less a deep thinker than a problem-solver. He figured out the equations for what goes on in the sun. The sun is an interesting piece of machinery to Bethe.” Of Freeman, Dr. Bethe says, “He was probably the most gifted graduate student I ever had. He was so good, he discouraged other graduate students from becoming theoretical physicists. Here was a man who could do everything with his left hand, and spend the rest of the day reading The New York Times. He’s a superb mathematician. The rest of us physicists usually know only enough math to get by. When he was very young, still a graduate student, he solved a problem nobody else was able to solve.”

The solution came to Freeman on a Greyhound bus.

The problem was one central to quantum electrodynamics, and the young physicist first spent a year at Cornell studying it, learning what approaches had failed. At the end of that year he closed his books, disconnected his cerebrum, got on a Greyhound, headed west. His fondness for bus travel dates from that trip. Greyhounds had no toilets then, so every two or three hours the bus had to stop. Freeman stretched his legs and walked around. He really saw the country. He made no calculations, letting his mind go fallow. In Berkeley he got off and visited friends, then got on another Greyhound and headed east again.

America passed once more outside his window. The bus rattled down the highway, and the pieces of the electrodynamic puzzle jiggled in Freeman’s head. It was a hard puzzle. Quantum electrodynamics is the theory that unifies Einstein’s special relativity and quantum mechanics. It reconciles, in a few neat principles, a former chaos of laws on solid-state and plasma physics, on the creation and annihilation of particles, on maser and laser technology, and on optical and microwave spectroscopy. The bus droned past mesas and cacti and one-gas-pump towns, while formulae chased one another across Freeman’s consciousness.

“We were driving home when it all fell into place,” he says. “I saw how to do it. I got out in Chicago and spent a week writing the thing up.”

Did any of the bus passengers notice? Shouldn’t some kind of metaphysical crackling be audible as a body of physical law becomes seamless? Did a sleepy soldier or an irritable mother or a bored child see anything different in the stare of the slender young man by the window? Probably not. Of course, those people were not just anonymous bus-riders either, and may have been busy with calculations, or composing symphonies, of their own.

Freeman’s discovery was one of those intuitive leaps so strenuous that physicists and mathematicians seldom make them after their midthirties. He has never made so daring a leap again.

“It must have been quite a sensation,” I once suggested.

“Well,” said Freeman. “Of course it’s the greatest thing in the world.” From Cornell, Freeman moved to Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Studies. Strolling in Princeton one day, the shy young physicist struck up a conversation with a four-year-old named Katrina, who was riding her tricycle. He was then, as he is now, most comfortable in the company of children. Freeman and Katrina went on meeting like that, outside her house, until one day she invited him in for tea. Inside he met her mother, Verena Haefeli-Huber, the Swiss mathematician who would become his wife.

“He was the budding young genius among the people at the institute,” Verena remembers. “He was not shy so much as awkward. He enjoyed the social thing—to be among people—but there was a slight distance in him, a rigidity. He was quite attractive.”

Three weeks later Freeman proposed. Verena thought this was a little hurried, but “Freeman was very determined. He isn’t swayed by moods or insecurities. He was very rational.” They were married. Katrina got the stepfather that she had wanted. She found Freeman very satisfactory. He spent a lot of time with her, taking her skating and on long walks. His looks were so youthful that people mistook him for her older brother, and that tickled her. His manner was strange sometimes—he would stop in the middle of sentences to make his calculations—but that was different and she liked it.

In 1951, the year Freeman became, at twenty-eight, a full professor at Cornell, Verena gave birth to Esther Dyson. In 1953, after Freeman was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, his second child, George Bernard Dyson, was born.