Physics is Fun Memoires of Richard Wilson Version of September 25th 2009

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. 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 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 30^th 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 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 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 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 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 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 60^th 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 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 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 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 5^th 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.