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

Form Factors
At the same time that I went to Harvard Hans Halban accepted pressure from the French government to build up a laboratory in France. This was at the University of Paris (Sud) at Orsay, France, where he built the Laboratoire de l’Accelerateur Lineaire (LAL). He took with him from Oxford, George Bishop, Pierre Marin, Boris Milman and his wife, a Rumanian born couple, and of course his technician Victor Round. Partially as a result of my suggestion, Halban chose to build a 1 GeV linear accelerator like that at Stanford. The actual engineering was done by Compagnie Sans Fils (CSF). It seemed a good place to go for a sabbatical leave and also have hands on experience with electrons again. There I carried out my first experiment on electron scattering with Lehmann and Taylor. This was the first precise (2%) cross section measurement (60). I had already hired as a research fellow, Louis Hand from Stanford, to arrive in Harvard on my return. He was just finishing his PhD thesis with Pief Panofsky. He wrote to me that he had realized that one was looking at form factors the wrong way. One should consider the Hamiltonian as the product of two currents in the Breit frame as J_µ j_µ. If one did this the spins separated well In particular the interaction could be written Ge + F x q Gm. This resonated with me and I wrote back and pointed out that the Rosenbluth formula could be rewritten in a simpler form in terms of these electric and magnetic form factors rather than the Dirac and anomalous moment form factors that Rosenbluth, and hence Schiff had used. Hofstadter in the fine set of electron scattering experiments from 1952 to 1960, which won him the Nobel prize, had followed the advice of Rosenbluth and Schiff.
Lehman, Taylor and Wilson (50) became the first experiment to describe their results with these form factors. I then proceeded, with Hand and Miller, to reanalyze all data in terms of them. These were first presented in the second Lepton-Photon conference in Cambridge in fall 1961, in a brief letter in Physical Review (61). and later in a review paper, Hand, Miller and Wilson in 1963 (71). In this review paper all the earlier work is properly referenced. We showed that the ratio of the electric and magnetic form factors is almost independent of four momentum transfer (71) and coined the phrase, still in use today, the “dipole fit". Also the vector and scalar magnetic form factors, obtained from a combination of the neutron and proton form factors followed this same rule. This, as explained to me by Abraham (Bram) Pais, was an important impetus to the theoretical idea of the partial symmetry SU6. But it was, and to my mind still is, a puzzle. Why should the vector and magnetic form factors be so closely the same when the former involved a rho meson in the virtual photon line, and the other omega and phi mesons? We thought that there was some deep meaning to the relationship that we could not, and still do not, understand.
One problem we had was notation. Hofstadter had often used the expression electric form factor F_e for what we now call the Dirac form factor, and F_m for the anomalous moment form factor. So we could not use this notation. So we went up one in the alphabet and used G_e and G_m. This is now the universally used notation although most authors don’t understand the reason for using G rather than F and they do not know who made that change in notation. Ernst, Sachs and Wali had discussed these “true”electric and magnetic form factors but had failed to realize that these actually came more directly out of the data than the ones Hofstadter had used. They are therefore often called the Sachs form factors. I have often wondered if the fact that the work Hand started is ignored because of a bias described to me by my colleague Bob (Robert V.) Pound. Experimenters are not supposed to make suggestions on theory and theorists are not supposed to do experiments. In writing the review paper on nucleon form factors (71) I had in mind the sensitivity of Bob Hofstadter. As noted before, Pief had found difficulty in working with him because of what seemed to be a possessiveness about his field. Here was I reanalyzing Hofstadter’s data! I therefore wrote to him with drafts and so on. He was very courteous. I thought at the time that he was pleased that someone had taken his work so seriously. Later, at the lepton-proton conference in Stanford in 1987 or so, I expected to see Bob at the sessions. But he was not there. I called him up to see whether he was coming, and if not whether I could come to see him. He insisted on coming especially to talk with me about physics and how I was doing.
At the CEA we began our series of electron scattering experiments, extending these measurements to higher momentum transfers (70,94,126,139). When the accelerator commenced operation in 1962, I and my group carried out the first experiment and embarked on a program of electron scattering from hydrogen (protons) and deuterium (proton + neutron). At that time the only experiments had been those of the two Bobs. Bob Hofstadter’s group at Stanford and a few by Bob Wilson at Cornell. They disagreed at high momentum transfers. The potential describing nucleon-nucleon scattering had a hard core. Bob Wilson had a high cross section for electron proton scattering and that suggested to him that there was a “hard core” to the proton itself. The students John Dunning and Wendell Chen showed that Bob Wilson was wrong and the form factors continued to fall. We also were able to excite the first nucleon resonance at 1238 MeV, and another student Al Cone looked briefly for structure in the region beyond. I note that the amount of accelerator time SLAC was able to put on these studies vastly surpassed ours, and they had a higher energy. We therefore missed out on the discovery of scaling of the inelastic form factors. Would we have found it a few years later if SLAC had not existed? It is not certain but I suspect so. We were looking in the right general direction.
When we stated measurements with the external beam we were able to corrected an error in the normalization of the first, internal beam, experiments. We had already had informal reports that experimenters in DESY found smaller cross sections. They were right.. These external beam experiments confirmed that the form factors follow the “dipole fit” noted earlier. That works over 4 orders of magnitude of the cross sections. Only 30 years later did measurements at CEBAF, using polarized electrons and measuring the polarization of the recoil proton to separate the form factors, find that the ratio G_e/G_m ratio of electric to magnetic form factors falls below the value of unityat higher momentum transfers.
. When we discussed the form factors we realized that we should love the form factors for their own sake and not take the Fourier transform all the time and discus charge distributions as Hofstadter had done. In what frame of reference should one discus the charge distribution? I was sensitive to this because of my correction of Gammel and Thaler who tried to compare p nucleus and PP scattering each in its own center of mass frame, whereas the approximations work in the laboratory frame. Lou Hand pointed out to me that Gregory Breit had discussed this in the 1930s and everything was simpler in the “Breit frame”. But then what is frame independent? What is the Lorenz invariant? It is of course the square of the 4-momentum q2. q2 not only has a space-like component being the square of the momentum vector, but also a time-like component which is the square of the change of energy. Then one can ask what physics occurs when the sign of q2 is opposite? Instead of writing down the process as an electron and proton colliding with a change in momentum of each, one can pull one of them to the other side of the equation, changing a particle to an antiparticle, and have a proton and anti-proton colliding to form an electron-positron pair. Or, equivalently an electron colliding with a positron to produce a proton and antiproton. In contemplating this, Lou Hand and I realized that the future lay with electron-positron collisions - about which I will write in a later section. Meanwhile at the European Nuclear Physics laboratory, CERN, in Geneva, there were beams of anti-protons. One group there led by Professor Antonino Zichichi, was using them to study electron-positron pairs and looking at the same process as I was in a region of q2 with opposite sign. We need measurements with both signs of q² to fully understand the form factors. So naturally I engaged in correspondence with Professor Zichichi (Nino) who became a good friend. Our experiments were complimentary although we had friendly rivalry on their joint interpretation. But over the years we have shared a common frustration. We both wanted to see a major electron-positron colliding beam as soon as possible and, of course, wanted to play a part, and have fun, in its use. My attempts to get such a facility in Cambridge, MA will be described later. Nino was urging such a facility in Italy. It appeared at first that the laboratory at Frascati would lead the field, and Nino had a major group working there. But management and union problems upset Frascati on the verge of what could have been a great success. Nino has orally commented to me that he and I knew more about the reasons for such a facility than the people who eventually built and operated it. I do not think Nino realizes how much the Stanford people knew, although it is probable the he personally knew more about the underlying physics than any individual in Stanford. I believe that I also knew more about the underlying physics, and that the CEA scientists, particularly Ken Robinson and Gus Voss, certainly knew more about the accelerator physics .
Fermilab
In 1964 the High Energy (Rochester) conference was held in Dubna USSR. LBL Berkeley had proposed to spend $350 million on a 200 GeV proton accelerator to be built on a site near Sacramento, to be staffed and managed by LBL. East coast scientists had become used to the Brookhaven management structure whereby scientists from all over could, and did, propose experiments at the 30 GeV synchrotron, although it was the scientists at Columbia University in New York were most successful. I remember a half hour conversation with Ed McMillan as we walked beside the Volga. I tried to persuade him to modify the LBL proposal to have a country wide management procedure. I think I persuaded him but it was too late. The movement was underway to form Universities Research Association to run such a project. The location also was now open. I understand that it was President Pusey of Harvard who, at the first meeting of the Council of Presidents of URA, who was specific on this question. “I do not see why we should assume that the site is fixed.” Also the amount of funding that Glenn Seaborg thought that Congress would vote was smaller than the $350 million requested. As the budgeting for Fermilab got underway Glenn Seaborg, assured congress that this would be the big capital project of the AEC’s science program, and also that older machines would be shut down.. Only $250 million was voted, instead of the $350,000,000 Berkeley proposed, and this was to include the first experimental equipment which the LBL proposal had not. Bob Wilson was chosen to be director because it was felt that he was the one person with a track record of successfully using a smaller budget. I remember calling him up when I heard that he had been asked by URA to head the project. Jane Wilson answered and gave Bob the message that the high energy physics community needed him. Bob told me later that I was the first to urge him on and that he needed and heeded my encouragement. Federal funding was already dropping because the Vietnamese war had got expensive. The halcyon time of 20% annual increase in high energy physics funding was over.
The board of trustees was composed of about 15 people, each representing three Universities in his region. About half of the trustees were scientists from the major universities with established nuclear physics programs, and about half were administrators from those Universities which did not have such a history but wanted to enter this exciting field. I was asked to be on the board of trustees for three years, extended to six, and also be secretary for the region to get agreement on a successor board member. I was trustee from 1967 or 1968 through 1974 or 1975.
It seemed natural for me to pursue lepton scattering to the higher energies available at Fermilab. I therefore started the muon scattering experiments at FERMILAB (experimental proposal E98). This was my first experience of extensive working away from home. Alas, working away from home does not match my preferred way of working and interacting with students and colleagues. I would typically leave home at 6 am, catch the 7 am plane to Chicago. Maybe it was a Boeing 737. I would take the first plane in the morning to Chicago, then rent a car, costing $7.37 a day to go to Fermilab. Then rush back that or the next day at 8 pm. The airplanes still allowed smoking so I would come home feeling quite sick. But that in that first yeat of accelerator operation I counted 110 nights spent away from home - and of course more days. During the first term of this I was also teaching two half courses. Originally the experimental proposal was solely from Harvard, but we amalgamated with a similar proposal from the University of Chicago. That seemed ideal, because they were from a local university with only a 40 mile commute. We agreed that a young Assistant Professor (at Chicago) Luke Mo, who had worked on the SLAC inelastic scattering be spokesman. But that led to problems and I had to take over three years later. This was the last time I knew enough about an experiment, including other peoples’ apparatus and their computer programs, to ensure that it worked, and that failures, whether admitted or not were understood, and corrections made therefor.
Initially I had proposed to move a CEA magnet, the “Jolly Green Giant”, as an analyzing magnet for a spectrometer, but the Chicago scientists offered the old 400 MeV cyclotron magnet. This was a bigger magnet and demanded larger size spark chambers as detectors. An electronic engineer, Nunamaker, at Chicago built for Luke Mo some spark chambers that were to follow an analyzing magnet. These spark chambers had individual read out for each wire and were to be the “seed” for the data analysis. But these spark chambers were only 60% efficient at the highest voltage that could be sustained. Fortunately at Harvard, Tom Kirk and Lynn Verhey and an excellent technician whose name escapes me, made excellent large spark chambers which were, to my pleasant surprise, 95% to 99% efficient, except in the very center where the muon beam halo slowly made the chambers inefficient, presumably by the break up of the spark chamber gas slowly coating the wires with something. Because the Harvard chambers were efficient and the Chicago chambers were not, our analysis plans were rapidly modified to be based upon a “seed” from the Harvard chambers. This was implemented by Tom Quirk, an Australian at Oxford University. We also took advantage of a fortunate decision by Godfrey Stafford, then director of the Rutherford laboratory. The Rutherford laboratory had an IBM 360 computer, one of the fastest at the time, and Godfrey was offered a second one for a modest price - almost free. At Harvard I would have had to buy computer time from our computer lab. This meant quarterly visits to Oxford where I stayed across the road from the new Clarendon Laboratory at a B and B. I remember that I had no key of the Clarendon lab, but needed to get in one evening so I crawled through a basement window. This was considered infra.dig. (beneath my dignity) by the administrative lab director so he gave met a key the next day.
This experiment demonstrated that the "scaling" of inelastic form factors, for which Friedman, Kendall and Taylor correctly got the Nobel prize, only holds in one small region. (189, 198, 215, 217). In general it is a approximation and does not hold; I remember explaining these scaling violation results to Bob Wilson at lunch one day. He understood well radiative corrections in scattering and suggested at once the analogy with gluon radiation. This is described in more detail by the theoretical ideas of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) (189,198, 215, 217). But an upgrade of the beam to allow improved results was not immediately available.
Most of this time I was still on the Board of Trustees. I remember we were very keen on the openness of the laboratory, both internationally and racially. I remember the first couple of Russian (USSR) visitors. I took them to dinner in Chicago and asked the staff what was a good one. The visitors wanted a “typical” American restaurant. When we got to the restaurant just on the west of town I found it was a Greek restaurant where the owner and his two brothers did a Greek dance for the customers. I was about to apologize for the fact that it was not American when I stopped. A Greek, Italian, Chinese, Japanese or whatever restaurant is typical American! We went on to a Czech film about Dubcek. A good education for a Russian.
We had rented a small “Harvard” apartment in west Chicago, just north of the lab. I ate breakfast in the “diner” in west Chicago the next day and sat next to an elderly farmer. During conversation he said that: “we should nuke those Russians while we are still ahead”. I had heard such comments from visiting Americans in Oxford around 1950 but this was 20 years later. But I pointed out to him that we, the US Government, Fermilab, and the scientists had invited Soviet scientists to spend time at the laboratory in collaborative research. The Soviets were very pleased with the invitation to visit and this was the first time they allowed families to accompany their husbands. I pointed out that these wives went to the supermarket and saw how ordinary Americans lived and what freedom meant. “When they return, are they not the best ambassadors for the American way of life?” The farmer agreed. But he probably still wanted to nuke those Russians.
In 1983 Tom Kirk, by that time on the Fermilab staff, proposed an update of the muon scattering at higher energy. This had a trial run in 1987, and ran in 1991 and 1993. The beam was superior, but the group was much less tight and controlled. Tom Kirk was persuaded in 1987 to join the design study for the SSC. I could have taken the leadership but the group rightly insisted that I should take leave and work at FERMILAB. By that time I was 15 years older than before, also working at Cornell, and with extensive commitments on various risk analysis projects, including understanding Chernobyl. I declined. No one had the tight control necessary. No one freely discussed problems in their parts of the apparatus so that we could all discuss possible solutions. For example, I noticed when on shift that the drift chambers inside the magnet were only 60% efficient. So I called Henry Lubatti from Seattle who was the owner thereof, and he was informed that they already had the highest possible high voltage before breakdown. Nothing was done. Interestingly they had been bought from Nunamaker who had made the 60% efficient spark chambers for Luke Mo 15 years before! Some Cerenkov detectors were installed by Vernon Hughes and they never worked well enough to be used. But they put 1 radiation length of material before our 6 m chambers, now drift chambers not spark chambers, which were the main tracking chambers. The computer tracking became more complicated and inefficient. Yet Vernon refused to allow them to be removed.
We had hoped that the experiment would tell us about muon production of jets; also the production of vector mesons from heavy elements as a function of momentum transfer. But these inefficiencies severely limited what we were able to accomplish and these remain unstudied. We did get some of the form factors at high excitation (512, 592, 597).

My connection with Fermilab has not ceased but is maintained both by my son, Dr Peter James Wilson, and daughter-in-law, Dr Julie Whitmore who are active on the permanent scientific staff there. Alas in 2008 the US Federal budget is such that Fermilab may have to fire some 600 staff members as all future activities have been cut. Peter has had to do much of this in his managerial position. In some senses SLAC is worse off. The high energy colliding beam program has been stopped. But Pief wisely had used his credit and authority to move the laboratory into other areas. As noted earlier his support of a synchrotron radiation facility at SLAC led to a rejection of the CEA proposal. But for Stanford it paid off. As of 2008 a new synchrotron light source is being built.

Visits to the USSR
I first met Russian physicists, Blokhinsev, Dzhelepov, Nikitin and Okun, at the American Physical Society meeting at Stanford University, California in December 1957 where I presented some results of experiments that had been performed with the cyclotron at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. They afterwards visited us at Harvard where I shoiwed them what we weere doing at the cyclotron and provided them with many rolls of Scotch Tape which they hmad not seen. But this brief interaction was only the beginning. As noted earlier I had the privilege of attending the first ‘Rochester” confence in 1950, and the 1957 conference at CERN, Geneva, where many Russians attended, the 1958 conference in Kiev, USSR , which was the first major postwar scientific conference in the USSR, and the 1964 conference in Dubna, USSR. In 1965 I spent nearly a month on a USSR-USSR Academy exchange- in Akademigorok, (Novosibirsk); Moscow, Dubna and Yerevan. This led to individual meetings and lasting friendships.
When I went to the 1958 Kiev conference almost all foreign travel to the USSR went through Moscow. Direct flights to Minsk or Kiev were out of the question. I had stopped off in Paris on the way to see people in Orsay and discuss a possible sabbatical leave which I took in 1961. George Bishop and I then flew to Moscow on Aeroflot’s Tupolev 104 twin jet. We landed in Vnukovo airport SW of Moscow. On the plane was an elderly Russian born American; who was greeted by his sister who he had not met since 1913. Everyone was still when they greeted. We were greeted by Intourist and taken by bus to the Metropole Hotel in the center of Moscow. There we had supper and went to bed. Up early the next morning to catch a small 2 engine propeller plane to Kiev. My seat belts were broken. When I pointed this out by gestures to the stewardess, she laughed. No one on the plane bothered with this capitalist idea of seat belts!

My interest in the USSR was not purely academic. So in 1963 I applied for a special NSF grant to spend a month in the USSR in spring 1965 on an “inter academy” exchange although I was not, and am not, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. The scientific excuse was a meeting in Novosibirsk arranged by Andrei Mikhailovich Budker who originally had a Jewish name, Gertsch Itschkovitch Budker which name was known only to close friends of which I was proud to be one, about colliding beams. Burt Richter was also there and so was Ernest (Ernie) Courant from Brookhaven and Bernie Gittelman from Cornell. Neither were Professors so I was considered senior although I was younger than Ernie and Ernie was one of the foremost accelerator theorists in the world, having invented strong focusing , with Snyder and Livingston.. I was, however, older than Gerry O’Neill, a Professor at Princeton. So at dinner one night in Budker’s house I was put on the spot and had to be responsible for all of America’s evil deeds. It was the start of the Vietnam war. “What would you think of a country” asks Budker, “if during your civil war that country were to intervene on one side?”. Fortunately I had an answer. “ You must realize,” I said, “That I was born in England with working class ancestry. At the start of the war England helped the south, because they needed the cotton from the south to feed the mills of Lancashire. But the workers, understanding perhaps the plight of the Negroes, went on strike. This just shows that the workers often have better judgements than their governments”. Budk$er was pleased with my answer and then said something with which I wholeheartedly agreed and agree. “It is up to us scientists who understand these matters to explain them to the people in government.”. Ernie Courant congratulated me on my responses. I do my best. Someone at the meeting, noting that the Novosibirsk laboratory had strong direct support from Moscow, and secretary Kruschev in particular, asked Budker what it was like to have such support. “It is like having a very rich, but rather stupid, uncle”. Budker came to visit USA a year later. I went to pick him up at the airport. As we drove up Soldiers Field Road, I could not resist the jest: “On the left hand side you see the Harvard Business School, the West Point of capitalism and on the right hand side you see the Faculty of Arts and Sciences - the Kremlin on the Charles.” Budker congratulated Stan Livingston on a very fine accelerator, and personally commiserated with me with the problem of having to fight with my wife’s brother-in-law for the funds to build a colliding beam. He was the first person, other than Andrée, to recognize what a difficult problem that was for me.

On the way to this meeting we stayed a day in Moscow. There was a big holiday to celebrate Yuri Gagarin’s trip into space. In retrospect I do not understand the dates and history here. It was 1961, not 1965, that Gagarin went into space. Why was the holiday and parade delayed 4 years? Bert Richter and I tried to get into Red Square to get a good view of the parade but were stopped 50 feet short. But we joined the tail end telling the enthusiastic Russians that it was for the whole world to celebrate. Bernie Gittelman waved an American flag. It was in Novosibirsk that I first meet Sergei Kapitza, and Budker’s two right hand men Ben Siderov and Stan Rodionov.. The latter was to become Deputy head of the Soviet Institute for Space Research. I met him again at the Pugwash conference of 1989 in Cambridge, MA. I was at that later time concerned with reporting to the President on the risks of the Galileo space probe, and as noted later he had written a paper on comparing risks of nuclear reactors and Pu 238 source Radioactive Thermal Generators (RTGs) for powering such a probe. I was surprised by his correct point that nuclear reactors are, in fact, safer than RTGs with Pu 238. As noted elsewhere, Dick Cuddihy of the laboratory in Albuquerque argued this also. But both are safe enough so that other factors enter into any reasonable decision process.
Sergei Kapitza invited me to pass by Moscow and give a talk at his father’s seminar on a Wednesday evening. I remember Migdal also gave a talk at the same 3 hour seminar. He talked on the application of the Bardeen, Cooper, Schrieffer (BCS) theory to nuclear structure and pointed out the energy gap that can occur when two extra neutrons are added to a closed shell. Dzelepov came in from Dubna for the meeting and asked when I was going to Dubna. I had requested such a visit but had not heard. It turned out that the appropriate bureaucrat in the Soviet Academy was sick and no one else picked up on my program. So Dzelepov took me out to Dubna that night after a stop for refreshment at his apartment where I met his wife - a Professor of welding. The next night Dzelepov had a dinner party for me at the little hotel in Dubna. Bruno Pontecorvo was invited. I had not seen Ponte for 15 years. Ponte monopolized the conversation. He was obviously nostalgic for the USA . “Have you been to the Grand Canyon?” When I said that I had planned to go in early 1952 but got married instead, he said “You must go”. I asked about the story which had been circulating in the USA about his first summer vacation in the USSR. In the USSR everyone from an institute or factory, goes to the same resort for a vacation. In summer 1951, when I was in the Canadian Rockies, the Dubna scientists went to the Black sea. Ponte had bought skin diving equipment - a wet suit, a snorkel and spear in Italy in summer 1950 before turning up in Russia. He showed it off to his Russian friends in 1951. He went into the sea and disappeared. Dzelepov and other friends were frantic. His disappearance was reported to the police, and Ponte turned up 24 hours later in jail. It seems that he had swum around a headland and came out of the water. All dressed in black, brandishing a spear, coming from the direction of Turkey, he spoke Russian with a bad Italian accent and when asked about his job, his reply was implausible. He was a nuclear physicists working in Dubna! He was promptly arrested as a spy! Ponte confirmed this story in every detail. On my later report to the AEC on my trip (with a copy to CIA as usual) I noted that it gave me a little pleasure as a former British subject that at one time and place Pontecorvo was arrested as a spy. But of course I don’t know whether he was a spy at all, or if he was a spy, which “side” was he working for. At that time it was inappropriate to ask him, and he died before it was possible for me, or any of his Russian friends such as Boris Yerezolimsky, to ask him.
It was while in Moscow that I really learned the Soviet “Three Queue System.” I lost my tooth paste, so I had to buy some more. At the pharmacist store you line up to pick out the tooth paste. Then you line up at the counter to pay for it. Then you take the receipt back and line up again to collect the tooth paste
From Dubna I went to Armenia. I had promised Alikhanian that I would visit his laboratory where they were building a “copy” of the CEA. At the 1959 Kiev conference I had sent him some 45 reports on various parts of the CEA construction. I phoned the Soviet Academy to say that I would be driven by the Dubna car to the flight the Academy had booked for me. The bureaucrat who had organized my trip was happy. He had lost track of me. Bernie Gittelman and Burt Richter both visited Yerevan at this time also, and Gerry Fisher from CEA and his wife, Vera Kistiakovsky had arrived on a three month exchange with CEA. I remember being taken to an old monastery in Gegard to the east of Yerevan and then to the cathedral at Echmiadzin. It was the 50th anniversary of the 1916 genocide. We were taken to Lake Sevan - which then had more water in it than it does now. At Yerevan I became aware of three distinct groups. The Armenians, the Azeris, (both town people) and the Kurds who were mostly in the hills and came down on market day. I likened the existence of the Kurds to the existence of a distinct spin temperature and lattice temperature in a material, which can be different with little thermal contact between the spins and the lattice. As I write this I am reminded of Norman Ramsey’s joke at the international nuclear physics conference in Glasgow in 1954. There were a few Russians there. He asked for a toast to the atomic nucleus. The atomic nucleus should teach politicians that different systems can coexist. The nucleus displays independent particle aspects as well as collective aspects.
I was put up in the tall Hotel Ukraina on the 15th floor. As is my custom I walked down the emergency stairs. They were blocked with a locked gate at the 13th floor. I tried walking up from the 12th floor. Also blocked. I assumed then and still assume now, that the recording equipment was on the 13th floor. But I was feeling sick I was scheduled to go to Leningrad but when I got to Moscow I decided I must get home quickly. I explained that to the young scientist who picked me up. I wanted to cancel the visit to Leningrad and change my reservation. Moscow-Stockholm and home. The dispatcher of foreign flights was out. My friend, whose name I have forgotten, said “I have been up since 4 am doing an experiment. I must go home. Here is the telephone number of the dispatcher. He speaks French and German. An academy car will be downstairs at 6.30 to take you to the airport”. I telephoned half an hour later and it was arranged. The telephone number was duly reported to NSF (and CIA) and it turned out to be useful later. There was a small problem at the airport. My ticket, bought in USA with US government funds, was for an Aeroflot plane to Stockholm and Copenhagen which did not fly that day and I wanted to go on the SAS plane ,on the same route, on the earlier day. The Aeroflot agent refused to endorse the ticket to SAS. So I politely explained that I would have to explain the reason that I had to buy another ticket to the US government, and that to simplify the inevitable investigation, could I have her name? The ticket was endorsed at once! This was a clear example that to cope with a bureaucrat one must make it harder to say no than to say yes. It was a long trip. The SAS flight took me to Stockholm and Copenhagen. At Copenhagen I called Andrée. I then took another SAS flight to Bergen and New York, and up to Boston. Then I spent a day in bed for recovery. A few weeks later was my birthday and Andrée arranged a small birthday party in our house in Arlington. The two visitors from Armenia, Hamlet Badalyan and a Russian, had arrived by that time and they came to the birthday party.
My next major trip to USSR was for the Kiev conference in August 1970. Christopher had just graduated from high school and had done well in Russian. He had followed the Russian joke: “In the USA optimists are learning Russian and the pessimists are learning Chinese”. I also had some $500 in royalties from the translation of my book on nucleon-nucleon scattering. The USSR had not signed a copyright agreement with capitalist western publishers so I got nothing through my publisher Interscience. But they were willing to pay royalties to the hard working author. Those funds could not be taken out of the USSR so why not spend them enjoying ourselves? I planned for us to visit Central Asia: Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarkand. Bukhara where the British Indian army officer had been thrown into the vermin pit after his failed attempt to make an arrangement with the Emir of Bukhara to control the area in the “Great Game” of British/Russian rivalry in Central Asia. And Samarkand - on the “Golden Road” of Elroy Flecker. All three are, of course, on the Silk Road by which silk was brought from China to the west 800 years before.
To get a visa the USSR embassy usually wanted us to buy “Intourist” lodging and meal coupons for the full trip. But I wanted to pay for these with my royalty money from the book on nucleon-nucleon scattering. After a delay I paid Intorist for 2 days with a Christopher flew to Washington to collect our visas. They were valid for 2 days but we were told to extend them in the USSR. We tried to do this at every stop but were repeatedly told, it is OK, wait till the next stop! The American Physical Society had arranged a special fare for the American conference goers. Czech airlines, NY to Prague and Prague to Kiev, and Aeroflot Leningrad to NY 3 weeks later. In Kiev, I presented a rapporteur talk on test of quantum electrodynamics at small distances. This had been a topical subject 10 years before, but all the tests showed that QED holds, so the talk was perhaps dull. Indeed Dick Taylor made an impolite comment to that effect. Chris waited outside the hotel on a couple of days and some Ukrainian or Russian teenagers came up and they got together. I remember going to dinner in a taxi with Ben Siderov from Novososibirsk and Pief, and the taxi was stopped and the driver was fined, on the spot, for picking us up at the place on the road where it was forbidden. Pief commented that this was a much longer obstruction of (non existent) traffic as the fine was levied and paid than by the initial brief stop!
In Kiev I collected my 500 ruble royalties and tried to regularize our position. Lou Hand was also at the conference and had an assignment to get to Bukhara and buy a carpet. He joined us and I then included him in all arrangements. I had made a reservation on a non-stop flight from Kiev to Tashkent but had had no response from hotels and so on in Central Asia. The head of Intourist in Kiev, a very helpful lady, said that she could get us on any flight out of Kiev, but had no authority in Uzbekhistan. Attached to the conference was a friendly helpful KGB agent who also had no direct authority. So it was recommended that we go to Moscow, and stay at a hotel, around the corner from the main Intourist office. Then in the morning to go to the Intourist desk at the hotel and ask for help. If and when the agent replies in a particular manner; (And here she mimicked an agent unwilling to do anything) to break off at once and go the head office. She from Kiev would send full information and request. I booked a flight from Moscow to Tashkent with a stop at Chelyabinsk, and then a smaller light on to Samarkand, another to Bukhara, returning to Moscow from Samarkand. I had hoped to look out of the windows at the Soviet atomic bomb facility int eh Ural mountains. It transpired as she expected. Just as we were walking out of the hotel at 9 am to go to the Intourist head office, our friendly KGB agent walked in. He had come around to see if he could help us! It took 2 ½ hours but we got our tickets. But I was not to see the facilities at Chelyabisk for another 20 years. They found a more convenient non-stop flight Moscow to Tashkent, and the widows at the seats we were assigned had been deliberately blacked out.
We got to Tashkent at 4 am and went to the hotel. At 10 am I went to the Intourist office. “We can find space here, but cannot get you to Samarkand and Bukhara.” So following instructions from my friendly KGB agent I suggested that they look at the Telex machine where they would find a message from the head office. It was signed by “Budnev” the director of Intourist, and requested or instructed them to help us on the planned trip. This was the only message from HQ for 2 weeks! So all got arranged. At the suggestion of Bekzhod Yuldashev, a young Uzbek physicist I met in Kiev, we telephoned his sister, Fareeda Salimova in Tashkent, and she and her husband Damir Salimov, an Uzbek film maker, showed us around Tashkent in the afternoon ending up at a new but typical Uzbek style tea house near the hotel. We were impressed by the monument in the middle of the new part of town. An old man surrounded by 20 children. This man had received 20 children from further west who had been orphaned by WW II. One Professor from Rochester, NY was at the meeting and at the hotel. He was born in Poland, and his whole family were refugees in Tajistan near Stalinabad (now Dushanve). He was trying to get to visit. I do not believe he managed it..
In the morning we went to the market - which was almost over. We wanted fruit. There had been little in Kiev and later little in Moscow. We found an old man who still had a watermelon left - which we bought. He was curious about us. I was prepared for such curiosity and had prepared a set of US coins with different Presidents. I asked him to accept this little gift. When I showed him the Kennedy half dollar, he spontaneously said:”he was a good man”. Early the next morning we flew to Samarkand, arriving at a little hotel at about 9 am. Somewhat apologetically we were shown a room with two single beds and a sleeping couch. “We hope that is alright.” I commented that in 1938 a young British diplomat, as he, Fitzroy Maclean described in his book “Eastern Approaches” had had to sleep under a park bench and this was far superior. As we came downstairs we saw two elderly British ladies arguing with the front desk. “But we made this reservation 2 months ago”. This seemed a moment to keep silent. The problem became apparent later. A new special tourist hotel was being completed and was already 3 moths late. The Uzbeks had over booked.
In Samarkand we were taken to the Ulug Bek sextant. This was 150 meters diameter and used to make precise measurements of the location of the stars. This work earned Ulug Bek the distinction of being one of the six “greats” in early astronomy in the text book from which I l$earned. I think they were: Coppernicus, Ulug Bek, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galieo and Newton Although the sextant was copied in India, it was allowed to be buried by sand after Ulug Bek’s assassination and was unearthed by Russian archeologists in 1907 and we wera also shown the Bibi Khanum mosque built by Timurlane for a favorite wife. Partially destroyed by the earthquake of 1870, it had been restored after WW II by the USSR We were also shown the main square with its’ four madrassas including one built by Ulug Beg. We had no way of identifying the bench under which Fitzroy Maclean slept in 1938, or the bench used by the two “little men in black” who were his watchers. We took a young Uzbek physicist to dinner and told him of the latest high energy physics results. On walking back to the hotel we saw an amusement park with a Ferris wheel. On a whim, all 3 of us went on the Ferris wheel. It was magical seeing Samakand from above withe the floodlit Bibi Khanum mosque and other sights.
I had hoped to take Andree to see Samarkand sometime. In summer 1994 when we visited Kyrghystan we did spend a day in Tashkent. But it was all we wished to spend after a 10 day visit. I tried again in 2001 and were scheduled on a Uzbek airlines flight from NYC on September 15^th.to Tashkent for a physics conference, in Samarkand if I remember aright, but That flight did take off but no flights went down from Boston, and the family did not want us to go.
From Samarkand Chris, Lou and myself went on to Bukhara. We were given an “official” tour in the morning by an intourist guide, to the fort with its pit now free of vermin, and a couple of mosques. I asked about new apartment construction such as we had seen elsewhere in the Soviet Union. “Yes we have a new estate in the SW, but it is not on our tour. You might wish to walk over this afternoon.” So we did and saw a construction site with a sentry box on each corner. I took photographs of this, but that film disappeared from my locked suitcase It was a number lock which I had set at our telephone number 4823, and would no longer open that way. But it opened at 0000. I am sure that the reader’s explanation of this circumnstance is as good as mine. As we passed the main Mosque my mind went back to the history of the construction of the railroad in 1870 or so. The Russians, after their conquest of central Asia, cemented it by building a railroad from Novosobirsk in the north, past Almaty in Kazakhstan, Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara to the Caspian sea. The Russian railroad engineers commented that the water in front of the mosque was used for everything. There was much wildlife therein, and yet people drank from it. Soviet sanitary engineering was clearly superior, and this thought has influenced me greatly as noted later in my discussion of arsenic. However in 1970 we could see no one drinking the polluted water!..
Intourist hotel menus were almost all the same. For lunch there was the inevitable Chicken Kiev. Where were the shishkabobs for which Central Asia is famous? Chris and I saw them being cooked in the middle of the square and rushed back to tell Lou Hand and an Australian tourist family. We all ate shishkabobs in that little restaurant, eating them sitting on the raised platform that was the restaurant. The Australian family was interesting. A couple with a 7 year old daughter spending a year touring the world with two small suitcases ans a short wave radio. It was therefore here that we learned that 4 aircraft had been hijacked by the PLO and downed at an airfield in Jordan. It was the start of a major hijacking frenzy. Newspapers in the Soviet Union made no mention of it for several days presumably while the government decided what its’ position was. .
Then back to Moscow where the next day we visited the big 70 Gev accelerator at Serpukhov accompanied by the same friendly KGB agent that had helped us to get to Central Asia. Being my usual mischevous self I asked him what he thought of the hijackings. That put him on the spot. Was he going to say that he had not heard of them? After a pause of at least half a minute he admitted that he knew. He explained that there was a special party newspaper for the top 900 people in the party and he was one of the 900 . He asked us if we thought that Serpukhov was going to be the leading high energy laboratory in the world. I said that we certainly hoped that it would be for the next four years before Fermilab got going. I gave my usual spiel, which was easy because I believed it. A little competition between nations on these peaceful activities for the good of the world can be helpful. But collaboration on the successful projects is even more helpful. I note that that dry summer one could smell smoke in Moscow. There were forest fires not far away. But they were not mentioned in the newspapers either. When the Soviets were being secretive about Chernobyl as I describe later, I understood their automatic desire for secrecy. But it led to major problems.
We went on to Leningrad and I went on out to Garchina to see Lobachov’s experiment on the polarization of the gamma ray from Neutron proton capture. If I remember aright, Chris stayed in Leningrad, when I went out to the lab in Gatchina, at a former summer estate of a wealthy nobleman. Half way there I saw something I was half expecting. A couple of army tanks on the side of the road. I asked to go back. It was the location of the limit of te Nazi advance to Leningrad in 1941 and there was a memorial. I stayed 15 minutes to contemplate about this terrible event - the siege of Leningrad - about which I of course knew well from 1941-1944. The 900 days .I am not sure whether it was on this trip or another that I went out to the main cemetery. In 1941 every death was recorded. But in January and early February there were no entry. But then there must have been a brief thaw. The translation of what I read for February 15^th is::” on this day 15,000 people were buried here.” It boggles the mind.
From Gachina we drove to the Czar’s summer palace at Petrodvoretz. This was burnt and overrun by the Nazi armies in 1941 but the Soviet government had meticulously renovated it. Christopher came out by hydrofoil from Leningrad and we returned to Leningrad by hydrofoil. The next day we left by Aeroflot plane to New York. I cannot remember at this time but believe the plane left from Leningrad. But we may have had to return to Moscow. As we went through passport control to board the plane it was noticed that we had been in USSR for 3 weeks with visas valid for only 2 days. But our friendly KGB agent was right there and there was no problem. So ended an exciting trip that I will always remember. I believe that our straightforward acceptance and understanding of life in the Soviet Union was helpful in preventing the cold war fro becoming hot.
It was several years before I visited the USSR again. I had signed a statement of Scientists and Engineers for Orlov and Sharansky and belveied in my commitment not to visit the USR or to invite one of their people to our lab while Olrlov and Sharansky were in jail. A lthough there was a high energy physics conference in Georgia in 1976, I had decided not to go but to ask that Allen Sessoms, then an Assistant Professor go to represent Harvard High Energy Physics which he did ably.. Then in 1979 came a specific invitation which was hard to refuse.
In 1979 I was explicitly invited by Vladimir Lobachev to visit Garchina again to discuss parity violation experiments. Vladimir had looked at the polarization of the gamma ray from n-p capture in the research reactor at Gachina. The children had almost all left home (Peter had gone to college) and Andrée wanted to come with me so we resolved to violate the promise but to seek out refuseniks while there. We knew that refusniks were dismissed from their jobs 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 not to be questioned, and as noted later we succeeded but made no guarantee. Victor did not have all his papers and we agreed to meet in Moscow 2 days later. That night, on Thursday evening, at exactly 6 pm, I was to walk northwards outside Oktoberskaya metro station and Victor walked south. I followed him around the corner into a car driven by his brother David, a distinguished biologist and geneticist. After going round the block to be sure he was not followed, David handed me some papers. As Victor said some 10 years later, “You did not know whether I was KGB”. True. But one does what one has to do.
That Tuesday evening Vladimir Lobachov and his wife entertained us to dinner at the Astoria hotel - once known as known as St Petersburg’s best and still good. We had tried to keep our visits to refuseniks quiet. We telephoned from public phones in busy places, and met “on the fly”. But the KGB must have known. Lobachov asked us to keep very distinct our social visit from our official visit. As usual there was a Russian singer with an overly loud amplifier. Much was western music with Russian words. It was hard to talk. On a nearby table a lone man was sitting. It turned out that he was from Finland. He was obviously inebriated. He then fell sideways. A waiter came along and propped him up. He fell sideways again. So a couple of waiters carried him up to bed. It seems that Finland had very strict regulations about drinking, so that busloads of Finnish tourists would arrive in Leningrad for the weekend “on the bottle (or bottles).” This was one of these thirsty tourists. We took the 11.59 train, the Golden Arrow, to Moscow. We were then told the reason why the train had always left at 11.59 and not midnight. If the train had left at midnight or later the bureaucrats would have not been able to claim the previous day in their expense accounts.
The first day we were in Moscow we went out to Dubna - by train. It was now a faster train than the one I had taken in 1964 since the line was electrified. Andrée wanted to walk by the river - by herself - while I was giving my lecture. But her “minder” had orders to go with her. So our host at Dubna told her to get out of the car quickly as we came to a railroad grade crossing and he drove across just as the gates closed. Andrée disappeared fast and was able to have a solitary contemplative walk along the banks of the Volga. I had to give two talks back to back - one on the TMI accident and the other on muon scattering. The lecture room was packed. Just before the interval a man muffled in a heavy overcoat came and sat in the front row. It was Bruno Pontecorvo. “I have a fever of 103 degrees F”, he said, “but I had to come and say hallo to you” It was the last time I saw Ponte before he died. I never had the chance to ask him after it became possible for him to speak openly, and explain why he left England in 1950. None of my Russian friends knew either. In my talk about TMI I referred to Academician Alexandrov’s statement that “such an accident could only happen in America where they put profits ahead of safety”. I emphasized that this was a political statement and if the engineers and scientists believed it they would be doomed to have a serious accident within 10 years. Unfortunately I was right. The V.I. Lenin Atomic Energy Station at Chernobyl blew up in April 1986.
Then in Moscow we were invited to lunch by Pietr and Anna Kapitza in their house at the Institute for Physical Problems where I had given a seminar in 1965 - some 12 years before. Afterwards I was taken around the laboratory by Sergei and Andrée was given a ride around Moscow by Anna in Pietr’s bright blue Mercedes (which he had bought with his Nobel Prize money). And then Sergei invited us to dinner in his apartment where he had also invited the Siberian economist (of Armenian descent) Aganbeghian. Andrée commented to Tanya Kapitza that we had been “watched “ all the time and was there a possibility of going to the country and walking somewhere. “Yes” she said. ”I am going to our dacha tomorrow (Friday) and you can come with me”. So on the Friday, I believe, we were dropped on the edge of a woodland. “Our dacha is 5 km over there. I will see you at lunch”. We almost got lost but arrived for lunch. There was also Tanya’s father, Dr Damir, who had been head of the main Moscow hospitals and had been one of the 40 physicians at Stalin’s bedside as he died. He was also the physician who met, at their airport, America’s foremost heart surgeon who had arrived in an effort to treat Landau after he became a vegetable in his car crash on the road from Moscow to Dubna. Dr Damir was either originally Turkish or has Turkish ancestry. He had three daughters who inherited his dacha - the one in which were eating. We were to see it more often later. After lunch we were taken to Pietr’s dacha a mile away where we met Pietr and Anna again, and saw Pietr’s laboratory that he had built during his exile, and then we were taken back to Moscow. I write more about Pietr Kapitza, his work, his exile and his influence in the Soviet Union later in these memoires.
Early that evening we called on Valodya Kharitonov, who had left Yerevan and returned to Moscow. He had basically retired at age 62. His apartment was full of books, however. Valodya had been at the University of Moscow with Andrei Sakharov. I had been trying several times in the previous couple of days to reach Andrei Sakharov on his telephone. I knew his telephone number but not his address. But each time I called and spoke English the line went dead. But I figured that even such automatic machines must get a cup of tea or coffee sometime so I went on trying. So just before we left Valodya’s apartment at about 11 that night we got through and we met Andrei Sakharov for the first time as described later in a special section about Sakharov . One of the first things Andrei said was “I assume that everything said in this apartment is recorded.”. That makes it easy. You don’t have to wonder. I remember the historical story of the English Foreign Office official who, leaving for the weekend forgot to send the message to General Howe in New York to meet General Burgoyne coming down from Montreal. I assumed that no one would read the tapes till Monday and I resolved to leave Moscow by the next available airplane. Fortunately we were prepared. We were scheduled on an Aeroflot to Paris on the Tuesday, but it flew every day. As a result of my leaving early in my 1965 trip, I also had the telephone number of the dispatcher of foreign flights in Aeroflot so at 4 in the morning I phoned to change the reservation. At 7.30 I called our “minder” and asked if he could get an Academy car to go to the airport because we had to leave early. He protested that the Academy travel office was closed and it would be impossible to change the ticket. He was shaken when I told him it was already changed, and he actually shook all the way to the airport. At the airport the young passport control officer was on a dais looking down on us. He ruffled through my passport with its Chinese and Saudi visas, very puzzled. Then he ran his finger down a list on the dais in front of him. We were not (yet) on the list. Then he rang a bell. I froze and was speechless. The Captain came around and did the same thing - ruffling through the pages of the passport. Finally Andree found her voice. “ Is there a problem?” “No!” said the Captain. He shut the passports and we were allowed to proceed. “We are home free, “ said Andree. “Not until the wheels touch the ground in Paris (Orly) will we be free”. We passed on to the “duty free store” called in the USSR the “Beriozka shop”. There was a tea cosy of a lady looking just like the little lady who gave out the keys at our hotel - the Academy hotel. We bought her and have her still. .
We arrived in Paris and were nervously exhausted. The capitalist US airlines would not let us leave on the next plane because the required 14 days minimum stay had not passed. So we rented a car and went down and collapsed in Lardy with Victor and Barbara. There is an epilogue to this story. In about 1986, David Goldfarb met an American journalist, Nicholas Daniloff, outside the Metropole Hotel and gave him some papers. They were both arrested and Daniloff was taken to Lublianka jail. When I read about this in the New York Times, I immediately thought: “This could have been me.” David was asked to testify against Nicholas saying that Nicholas was a spy but David refused. David’s request to leave Russia for leukemia treatment in France, I believe, was refused. They were both released later, largely due to the efforts, I understand, of Armand Hammer. I was invited to a welcoming party for David, and Yuri Orlov, in New York but that coincided with a party, in October 1986, that several graduate students gave for me in Harvard to celebrate my 60th birthday. Since then Nicholas Daniloff got an academic position at Northeastern University and I have met him several times at lectures about Russia at Harvard University. Incidentally this is another of many examples of the inaccuracies in my memory. Until I checked I thought that Nicholas’ arrest was in 1983.
Our next trip was to the Kyrgyz republic and to Tashkent in the former USSR but not to Moscow in 1993. I was by this time on the borad of the Andrei Sakharov foundation. When Andrei was a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet he met an physicist/electrical engineer from Kyrgystan, Dr Askar Archayev, elected from Kyrgystan. At the break up of the Soviet Union Askar Arkhayev became President of the new Kyrghyz republic. The Sakharov Foundation invited him to the USA for a human rights conference in Washington, DC.. Askar accepted but said that he wanted to fulfil a dream of visiting Harvard and MIT. It fell to me to arrange this visit which I did, putting him up at the Hyatt regency hotel using my frequent flyer coupons.. We were invited back for a visit to his country as his guest.
So in August 2003 we took a specuial ticket on Turkish airlines via Istanbul. The Kyrghyz airlines were not running, so we flew to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan where we were met and driven south to Bishkek, the capital of the Kyrghyz republic. We stopped for lunch at a “fast food stand” run by a Uighur immigrant of whom more later. It was less elegant but better than Macdonalds. In Bishkek we stayed in one of 6 small villas in the Presidential compound. It was very elegant.a living room, bedroom, bathroom with a sunken bathtub. Kyrghystan ws a favorite vacation spot for the top communist brass of the USSR and we were told, that “Comrade Stalin stayed here.” I have been to places in England where Queen Elizabeth I was supposed to have stayed and places in the USA where George Washington stayed but never slept in such a historical bed until this occasion.
We visited the physics department and the Academy of Sciences and were then driven eastwards to a beautiful lake. Lake Issy-Kul is about 80 miles from east to west and maybe 5 to 10 miles north to south. It was a favorite vacation spot in the USSR period. We stayed at a vacation complex and again we stayed in a bed Joseph Stalin has slept in. Then we were taken to see the mountains to the north. Our guides expcted us to walk a quarter of a mile and then stop, but we, especially I, wanted to go to the top. I believe it was at 9,000 feet. To the south there was Lake Issy-kul and across were the Tien Shan mountains rising to 22,000 feet and separating Kyrghysia from C hina. These were the mountains where Igor Tamm (junior) had invited me to climb and where he made the first ascent some 20 years before. I could see a line of clouds half way up the mountains. It was and of course is, a magnificent sight.

Coming back we took a small detour to the ruins of a town. It had been a major stop on the “silk road” but had been sacked by Genghis Khan and never recovered. There was a plan and pictures showing how it must have appeared in its hey day. Again we stopped for lunch at a road side stand run by a Uighur refugee. We were then told that there were a hundred thousand Uighurs who had fled their native Sinkiang about 1970 when there had been a clamp down on minorities by the Chinese government. Amusingly, Professor Jeffery Sachs our neighbor in Newton Centre, was also visiting Askar Archayev independently and staying in another of the little guest houses in the Presidential compound. I never asked whether Joseph Stalin also slept in Sachs’ guest house!

While we were there there were Independence Day celebrations. That was on the anniversary of the day in August 2001 when the Soviet Union finally fell apart. We watched from the Presidential stand. That night President Askar Archayev invited us to dinner. I promised to do what I could to help scientists get funding in the new environment. But it was hard. They had no idea how to write a proposal, even though I painstakingly outlined it for them. They could not even write a one page CV. So nothing came of that effort.
We were scheduled to leave from Tashkent, and Archayev’s staff arranged a car to take us there. It was an official car, and we were waved through all the check points. I noted that after we were left at the hotel, the official driver negotiated with a passenger, presumably paying in cash, to go back to Bishkek. I had expcted to see my friend Bekzhod Yuldashev who was head of the nuclear physics laboratory in Ulug Beg, a small town north of Tashkent that had been started as a science complex. But that night he was out of the country on business, about which more later. So we were met by his niece Yulduz Salimova , whose parents Chris, Lou Hand and I had met some years before in 1968. This beautiful lady and her boy friend were both working in the world bank office. We had bought a fine colored wool rug the day we left Bishkek, but had nothing to tie it up for the plane trip hime. We could find no place to buy cord, so an electricity extension cord from the world bank office was pressed into service! Alas, after we got the carpet home we failed to get it cleaned. 6 months later it, and the carpet beneath it, were destroyed by a moth infection. The next day we were shown around Tashkent by Bekhzhod’s deputy Alexander Kist - a Czech born physicist. At one place downtown there had been a statue of Stalin. This had been removed and in its place was a statue of Timurlane. “It is not an improvement” we were told. “He was a bigger butcher than Stalin”.
As we left the next day and were about to board the plane, we did meet Bekhzhod. He had just flown in. We found out what he was doing. In 1991, after the fall of the USSR, research funding ceased. So Bekzhod started making radioactive isotopes for medicine using the Ulug Beg cyclotron, and had started a joint company with DuPont to sell them all over SE Asia. He was therefore able to keep the laboratory alive and was highly praised for so doing. But I suspect the company was his personal one yet he was using government equipment!. As I contemplate this, I suspect that actions such as his in the USA would have him in jail within days if not hours. But circumstances and culture in the remnants of the USSR were different. I was invited to go to Uzbekhjistan, to Samarkhand, for a physics conference in September 2001 and had booked a ticket for myself and Andree to leave on September 15^th. I was all set to talk about the CLEO experiments. But on September 11^th all air travel was stopped. The plane took off, but we were not on it.
We never got back to Uzbekhistan or Kyrgystan. But a year later we got a formal invitation to Yulduz’ wedding. I had just spent a few days in Kiev seeing Pantelevaich Umanetz, who had hosted me at Chernobyl and was then Minister of Nuclear Energy, and another visit to Minsk and St Petersburg, and one more long trip seemed too much. So we declined. I found out later that this was a proper Moslem celebration lasting a full week! But Yulduz’ husband was accepted as a student at Brandeis University so we invited them to a New Year party at our house. The last I heard they were working in Montreal. Bekzhod went on to become President of the Uzbek Acdemy of Science, but has now left Tashkent and is in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). I suspect he finds it politically more palatable. It was another 10 years before Andree and I went to a Moslem wedding of Peter Rogers’ Moroccan student Dr Hynd Hoya Bouhia. But that only lasted 3 days.