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

Russians
In the years after I had helped Stanislaw Suskevich to found the Sakharov college of Radioecology, now the Andrei Sakharov Environmental University in Minsk, I was often asked by Russian and Belorussian students to describe my interactions with important Russian scientists. I therefore separate out this section. When I was 11 or 12 years old the mathematics master in my school asked the class what we wished to do when we were adults and independent (over 21). I immediately expressed a desire to join the British foreign service. War intervened and my ability (and interest) in mathematics and physics led the joint recruiting board to suggest I study radar - and this led after the war to my career in physics. But my interest in foreign countries remained and I was fortunate that my field of experimental particle physics led to many overseas journeys and friendships. There was another reason for not joining the civil service. My father had joined the Administrative Civil Service in 1999 at age 26. Since then it became a lot harder for a scientist to join. He could join the Scientific service but in UK that did not at the time get him into positions where decisions got made. The Scientific Civil Service was different, but even the upper echelons had little power over decisions. It did not seem sensible to me. But I have traveled to distant countries many times. My work on high energy physics first made this possible.
I first met Russian physicists, Blokhinstev, Dzhelepov, Nikitin and Okun, at the American Physical Society meeting at Stanford University, California in December 1957 where I presented some results of experiments that had been performed with the cyclotron at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. A week or so later they visited the Harvard cyclotron. But this brief interaction was only the beginning. In December 1950 Robert Marshak had organized an international high energy conference in Rochester, New York and thereby began the historic series of “Rochester” conferences. After a few years the conferences were held in varying countries and conferences. I had the privilege of attending the first and when I was in Rochester in 1950. I was also the Harvard delegate to the 1957 conference at CERN, Geneva. This coincided with the discussion and signing of the limited test ban treaty. Hans Bethe and Igor Tamm were the US and USSR scientists discussing the matter. We knew that Igor Tamm was a leading mountain climber so a group of us, Pief, Bob Hofstadter, and Peter Hillman invited him to climb a small mountain with us. Tamm had no visa for France and did not want to just drive through the Swiss-French border as so many did in the Geneva area so we chose a small mountain just NW of Lausanne. Igor described to us his recent visit to China. He declined to say why he went, although I now suspect it was to tell the Chinese that the USSR was not going to share with them the “secret” of making an atomic bomb. He also described his brief capture by the “Green” forces in the Ukraine when he was a message carrier for the “Reds” He was taken before a French General who spared him because he spoke French! He also suggested that we keep our eyed open for one of his students, Andre Sakharov, who, he maintained was brighter than he was.
The next year, I went to the USSR for the 1958 “Rochester” conference in Kiev, USSR, which was the first major postwar scientific conference in the USSR. That was very exciting. To get to Kiev from London or Paris it would be logical to fly direct. But that was not then allowed. At that time almost all foreign travel to the USSR went through Moscow. Direct flights to Minsk or Kiev were out of the question. I had stopped off in Paris on the way to see people in Orsay and discuss a possible sabbatical leave which I took in 1961. George Bishop and I then flew to Moscow on Aeroflot’s newly acquired in jet - Tu104. We landed in Vnukovo airport SW of Moscow. On the plane was an elderly Russian born American; who was greeted by his sister who he had not met since 1913. Everyone was still when they greeted. We were greeted by Intourist and taken by bus to the Metropole Hotel in the center of Moscow. There we had supper and went to bed. Up early the next morning to catch a small 2 engine propeller plane to Kiev. My seat belts were broken. When I pointed this out by gestures , the stewardess, she laughed. No one on the plane bothered with this capitalist idea of seat belts!
The conference was held in a large theatre building next to the Intourist hotel where we stayed. There was a whole day trip down the Dnieper to a village where a Ukrainian dance group danced for us. Our friends from 2 years before were there and I remember, in particular being taken to a village up the hill from where the boat stopped by Dzelepov. Any academician was entitled to a car anywhere he went in the USSR so we came down again by his car
Sergei Kapitza
In April 1965 I spent nearly a month on a USA-USSR Academy exchange. I went to Akademigorok, (Novosibirsk); Moscow, Dubna and Yerevan. This led to individual meetings and lasting friendships. Sergei Petrovich Kapitza arrived late at the small conference, mainly on colliding beams, in Akademigorok that I attended as a part of this trip. This tall man spoke English with an English accent whereas all the other Russians I had met spoke with an American accent. When I asked where he had learned the language he replied that he was born in England. “Ah!” I said. “Your name must be Kapitza!” Sergei invited me to talk at his father’s Wednesday evening seminar in Moscow the next week. So began a friendship which has lasted 43 years.
Much has been written about Sergei’s father, Pietr Kapitza. Indeed the general features of his life history were already known to me. But Sergei was my own age. Born in Cambridge, he was brought to Russia in 1934 with his mother Anna when they joined his father whom Stalin would not permit to return to UK. As a son of Pietr he obviously had support in whatever he wanted to do. During the second world war he spent some time exploring for oil. In 1965 he was working in his father’s laboratory, the Institute of Physical Problems and built a microtron - indeed he may have invented it. But very little physics research was done with this microtron and by the time I met him he was starting a fine career as running a weekly TV program in Moscow Radio, on Science. “True but incredible”, I believe it was called. Apparently it was replayed also, and was seen by about 30 million viewers. I saw several of the programs and was impressed although I did not understand the language, it was clear that the quality was high - superior to NOVA which is sometimes not accurate.
Sergei visited the USA for the first time about 1975. He turned up without specific invitation and indeed I would not have specifically invited him because of my agreement with the group Scientists and Engineers for Orlov and Sharansky. But I helped him in a couple of details such as renting a car! When in 1978, just after TMI, and I visited Moscow we called on Pietr Kapitza. After lunch in their house, Anna took Andrée for a tour of Moscow in Pietr’s pride and joy. That was a blue Mercedes bought with Pietr’s Nobel prize money. Sergei took me for a tour of Pietr’s laboratory and invited us to dinner in their apartment on Leninsky Prospekt to meet an Armenian/Siberian economist Dr Aganbegyan. Andrée commented to Sergei’s wife Tanya Kapitza (née Damir) that we had not been alone but were always watched. Was there somewhere we could just walk? I am going to our dacha tomorrow, come out with me. We went to the Dacha at Nikolina Gora, 40 miles west of Moscow on the Moscow river. Then she drove us to a heath and dropped us. Our dacha is 3 miles over there. I will see you for lunch.” This was Dacha Damir, given to his three daughters by Dr Damir, head of the Bodkin? hospital in Moscow. We were introduced to 85 year old Dr Damir, Another of his daughters and a niece; a young architect who was recovering from an illness. “What do you want to do when you recover?” We asked. “We are prosperous here in USSR and I feel I should go and help an undeveloped country for awhile.” This was not the first and not the last, high minded comment that we heard that put us westerners to shame.
I cannot remember the year, but there was a conference in Washington on a “Nuclear Winter” to discuss an idea of Karl Sagan that a nuclear war would put up so many particulates that the sun would be obscured for a year or so and the earth would freeze. He and several others were invited to discuss this by Tom Brokaw on Nightline. By that time Sergei was back in Moscow after a 16 hour flight via Mexico City. He was in a booth where he could hear but not see anyone. and I watched the program. Clearly Sergei gave the best performance outshining luminaries such as Edward Teller. He emphasized the uncertainty of what might happen and illustrated this by describing the firestorm that was created in Hamburg by the British 1000 bomber raid in 1942. (Andrée and I later found out that her uncle coincidentally called Serge Gaebel, while an unwilling guest, as a prisoner of war, of the German government was forced to help clean up after this raid.) That firestorm, repeated again as we know in Dresden a year later, surprised people. What will happen with an explosive power 1,000 times what was dropped at Hiroshima? We do not know. Brokaw realized that Sergei had the clearest understanding and several times asked Sergei for clarification of the Science.
We did not meet again until I visited Moscow after the Chernobyl accident when in February 1987 Evgeny Velikhov organized the Conference on a Nuclear Free World discussed elsewhere in these reminiscences. I asked Sergei how his family were. “You will see them tonight because you are coming to my 60th birthday party.” It was a crowded party of about 30 people in his apartment and I sat next to his brother Andrew. Soon thereafter Sergei visited Boston for a Pugwash meeting and stayed in our house. Andrée and I reciprocated in 1996 by staying in their Dacha as I have done several times since then.
Yuri Orlov
I first met Yuri Orlov at the high energy physics conference in Dubna in 1964. During that conference US warplanes bombed Haiphong (the Tonkin Gulf incident). The US delegation were sure that President Johnson must have had good reason to do the bombing. Yuri was sure that it was a “put up job”. He was right and I learned from this to trust his judgment on such matters. I met him again in both Novosibirsk and Yerevan in 1965.
Orlov was a young communist as a teenager but started criticizing the system early. As a result of his criticisms in 1956, the head of the laboratory in which he worked, Dr Alikhanov of the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow, was instructed to dismiss him. Alikhanov persuaded his brother, Arlem Isaakovich Alikhanian to give him a position at his new accelerator laboratory in Yerevan, Armenia. It was there that he performed his accelerator calculations that were of particular interest to me.
Orlov moved back to Moscow in 1973 founded the Moscow branch of Amnesty International and in May, 1976, he be came Chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group n formed the with the expressed goal of assuring that the USSR keep its word under the Helskinki accords. For his work in this regard, Yuri Orlov was arrested in February 1977. Following a closed trial, in which he was denied the right to call witnesses and to examine evidence, he was convicted of "anti Soviet agitation" and sentenced to seven years in a strict regime labor camp followed by five years of internal exile. My whole research group working at Fermilab working on mu P scattering signed a telegram of protest to Mr Brezhnev. (My group had a Chinese, a Canadian, a Frenchman and an Australian). This behavior of the Soviet authorities towards Orlov and others led me to join many American physicists in a personal boycott of the USSR, (Scientists and Engineers for Orlov and Sharansky) and refused to encourage visits of Soviet scientists until Orlov and Sharansky were released.
I discussed Orlov’s situation with Andrei Sahkarov in May 1979. Andrei suggested that we get the biggest bureaucracy in the USA 99the Post Office) to fight with the biggest bureaucracy in the USSR, the KGB. I should send a registered letter to Orlov at his prison camp. When the receipt came back with the wrong signature I was to complain to the US post Office whose duty it was, under International Postal Regulations, to collect the money back from the USSR. I tried to get all attendees at an International Accelerator Conference to do likewise, but I do not believe that anyone else did. I got no response from the post office and my representative in Congress, Father Drinan, declined to help.
Orlov served his jail sentence in Permsk and was then sent for five years exile to Siberia. In 1986 he was brought back to Moscow and put on a plane for the USA. He turned up in Cornell University who offered him a research appointment. As department Chairman I had tried to get Harvard University to give him an appointment but failed - a forerunner of my later failures to be generous to scholars from the University of Baghdad. I was in Ithaca when Orlov arrived and he gave an informal seminar on the physics he had been thinking about in Siberia. I turned up late, while Orlov was talking, but as soon as he had finished he came over and talked to me. I was surprised that Orlov recognized me after all his experiences..
In 1996 I went to the 2nd International Sakharov conference on physics at the Lebedev Institute in Moscow. Orlov was there also but he spent 2 hours with Yeltsin, explaining to Boris Yeltsin why it was, and probably still is, essential to give Chechnya considerable independence, either within or without, the Russian Federation. Yeltsin took his advice but as we know that fell apart a few years later when Putin was President. We were fortunate in October 2008 when we at Harvard arranged a conference to remember the 1968 “reminiscences on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” by Andrei Sakharov. Yuri was able to come and made many fine comments.
Andrei Dmitrevich Sakharov
In 1979 my friend Vladimir Lobashov invited me to visit him and his research group in Gatchina, Leningrad district. My wife and I decided to break this boycott and visited in April 1979. We justified this to ourselves by helping refuseniks by taking journals to them and visiting dissidents in the evenings. We then went on to Moscow. It was then that we first met Andrei Dmitreyvich Sakharov when we visited his apartment in May.
I thought I had met Sakharov on a previous visit to the USSR, probably when I lectured at the Lebedev Institute in 1959. But Andrei told us that he was not then in Moscow, but we both had attended the High Energy Physics conference in Kiev in 1970, where I had been a rapporteur, so we probably met then. In 1979 I wanted to discuss with Andrei three subjects, nuclear energy, Yuri Orlov, and my physics interests, because he had expressed his opinion on all of them. Communicating with him was an adventure of its' own. I did not have his telephone number before I went to Moscow, but it was given to me by another physicist friend in Moscow, Valodya (Vladimir) Kharitonov - a classmate of Andrei's. Valodya was one of the sixty friends who, with Andrei and Yelena Bonner, waited outside the courthouse where Yuri Orlov was sentenced, in secret, to 7 years hard labor. I telephoned Andrei's apartment many times, but each time I started to speak English the line went dead - till 11 pm Friday night, when the automatic telephone cut out must have gone for a cup of tea or coffee and I was able to talk to Andrei and get his address. My wife Andrée was with me and we went round at once and stayed for several hours. He and Elena Bonner received us with courtesy, friendliness and straightforwardness.
Andrei immediately told us that he had assumed for 10 years that his apartment was bugged, and that we should be careful what we said. I had always acted as if anything I said in the USSR was recorded, except one-on-one conversations in the middle of open country, and my wife had realized this also. Yet Andrei would not tell me Yuri Orlov's address "It is too dangerous." I still do not understand why that item was more dangerous than anything else. He urged me to write and cable to Orlov and to get Orlov's friends and colleagues in the west to do likewise. "Yuri won’t get the letters and be able to read them;" Andrei said "but the authorities will, and they may be influenced" . Back in the USA I found Yuri's address and I sent a registered letter to him at his prison camp in Permsk. A couple of months later I spoke at an accelerator conference in Brookhaven and suggested that they all do so too, but to the best of my knowledge no one else did. Yuri told me later that he did not receive them, but I feel that our effort was nonetheless worth while.
At that first meeting, Andrei took the opportunity to write one of his many open letters to the west. He dictated it in Russian to his wife, Elena Bonner, who typed it out immediately. After it was translated in the USA I made a special trip to Washington DC with it. I was impressed then, by the care with which such a letter, although written quickly, was actually crafted. He drew western attention to some 30 people who were in jail for various activities. But he took care to emphasize the universality of the civil rights issues, by mixing Jews and Pentecostals in the same sentence, so that no one could ever call it Jewish, or Pentecostal, propaganda. He always took that care in conversation also. Andrée and I were also privileged to take a letter to their family, Elena's daughter, Tatiana (Tanya) , their son-in-law Efrem Yankelevich and their grandchildren. We realized that they live near us in Massachusetts. Tatiana in particular, has made an enormous effort over the years to make sure that the western world did not forget her mother and stepfather, while at the same time adjusting to a life in a new and strange country, and bringing up a fine family. The separation from their family was hard for Elena and Andrei who feared that they might never meet again. Fortunately they did. We left 49B Tschaikolova Street at 3 in the morning. Even the Moscow subway had stopped running. Andrei insisted on coming down to the street to be sure that we were able to catch one of the few taxis that were on the street at this hour. We were not to see him again for 8 years.
I had first heard about Andrei Sakharov from Igor Tamm who later shared, with Frank and Cherenkov, the Nobel prize for his explanation of Cherenkov radiation. Andrei joined Tamm's research group and in particular joined him after the second world war in a seminal paper inventing the TOKOMAK device for nuclear fusion work. Tamm became his thesis advisor, and with Tamm he worked for several fruitful years in Moscow, before he went to the "Installation", the secret military establishment, near Gorky, to design and make the hydrogen bomb. I had met Igor Tamm and climbed a small mountain with him in 1958 while we were both attending meetings in Geneva. Igor Tamm also, was a man of exceptional good will. He mentioned to me the outstanding intellect of his junior colleague, Sakharov. When I visited the USSR a year later, and lectured at the Lebedev Institute, Igor Tamm was there, but, alas, Andrei was still away from Moscow at his military research work.
I understand that it was at the military research "installation" that Andrei met the physicist Yakov Zeldovich with whom he became very friendly. Andrei's real interests were always fundamental physics, and he worked on these extensively with Zeldovich. His papers in the late 1960s were on gravitation, CP violation and the origin of the universe. I notice that unlike other authors whose papers were published in the journals at that time, he listed no address; we all guessed from this that he was still living near the "installation". But it was not until I read the abridged version of Andrei's famous article "On peaceful coexistence" in the New York Times in July 1968 that I had actually read anything of Andrei's. That article was outstanding, and I still think that it is one of his best. I believe that western scientists failed him at that moment. His article got almost no response from us for over 6 months. Our National Academy of Sciences should have responded immediately with a parallel article pointing out that from our side too, there was no alternative to coexistence. It might have opened up communication some 18 years earlier than finally occurred. Of immediate importance was that Soviet tanks entered Prague on August 21^st. Their reception was very different from the receptions Soviet soldiers and tanks got in 1945. But the USA was too tied up with our own stupidities in Vietnam to think and act reasonably. Moreover I had (and still have) no authority or influence in the US National Academy of Sciences.
It was about the time of that article, and the subsequent putting down of Dubcek in Prague, that Andrei returned to Moscow. He attended seminars at the Lebedev Institute but his personal contacts with other scientists diminished. I am told that about 1975 Zeldovich stopped seeing him. I understand also that relations with his sons by his first marriage became strained. Andrei never talked about them to me, although other scientists did; by the time I knew him, his stepchildren, and grandchildren, were his great pride and joy. I believe that only 2 scientists ever visited him in Gorki. When I met him in 1987, Andrei referred with great sadness to this ostracism by his fellow scientists, especially that by Zeldovich, but it did not alter his determination to do what he thought was right. Andrei had a forgiving and understanding nature. I was told (by Sergei and Tanya Kapitza) that Andrei gave a most generous and moving tribute to Zeldovich at Zeldovich's funeral 3 ½ years before, with no hint of reproach.
One of the most difficult things to do is make strong criticisms of a national policy, without opposing the principle. Andrei did this all the time. He never wavered in his support of nuclear fission as a source of energy, particularly to help the less developed parts of the world. In 1978, largely at the urging of Franticek Janouch, he wrote an article, Nuclear Power and the Freedom of the West”, (or similar title) for the US journal, the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" to encourage the western nations to continue with this program. This was at a time when many American scientists were confused. In 1979, after Three Mile Island, I wanted to know if he had changed his view. But a single accident did not change his view, because he never expected an ideal technology. "One cannot and must not, stop progress" he told me. A realist always, he knew that man must learn from experience. But he criticized the Soviet nuclear power program, partially because he saw too little learning from experience. At this meeting in 1979, I stated to him my belief that, if there were no changes in the overall Soviet approach to safety, that within 10 years there would be a Soviet accident, and without a vessel to contain the released radioactivity there could be serious loss of life. Andrei understood my concerns at once; he agreed with me that a containment was highly desirable, although he said then, and repeated several times since, that he preferred reactors to be underground - a preference he shared with Edward Teller, but not shared by any other scientist I know. Of course he knew well the Soviet military (plutonium production) in Krasnoyarsk where the reactors are underground. At the Forum for a Nuclear Free World in Moscow in February 1987, some West German "Greens" had mixed nuclear power and nuclear weapons, opposing both equally. Andrei spoke up and urged them to spend their energies instead on how to make nuclear reactors safer, "because the world will need nuclear power, and the developed nations owe it to the undeveloped ones not to use up the scarce resources that they will need.".
While Andrei was in exile in Gorki, I sent him some scientific papers - for example a proposal of mine to study neutron oscillations, a possibility that he had suggested 15 years before. We also sent him a Christmas Card every year when he was in exile - and we often received one in return. I never expected either the papers or the cards to be delivered; but they must have been; because afterwards Andrei remembered what I had written. In 1987, after his return from exile, and after Chernobyl, I visited again a few times, carrying letters and gifts from his family in the USA. He was by then very active once more, and constantly in demand. I remember the evening when he had a Czech visitor, telling him the first news about Czech dissidents that he had heard for 20 years. A phone call came from the USA. "The phone never stops ringing" Andrei said in frustration. "It never rang when we were in Gorki" Yelena Bonner commented. "It rang once - just one year ago." Andrei continued. That was the time Gorbachev called asking him to return to Moscow.
Andrei was not content with only understanding the technical parts of the problems at hand. He wanted to know the broader implications. As early as 1960 he was calculating the radiation doses from bomb fallout; and tried to influence Kruschev not to test the large10 megaton bomb because of the large number of cancers predicted world wide on the assumption of proportionality of effect with dose. I discussed details of the effects of Chernobyl with him 28 years later, just before I made my first visit to the damaged reactor, and we discussed the latest numbers on fallout world wide, and the expected effect on public health. Andrei was a nonsmoker, and fully well aware of the fact that cigarettes cause lung cancer, many other cancers, and heart disease. In our discussions I was delighted that, like myself, he constantly compared risks one to another to gain perspective; and in these comparisons he had assumed that smoking 200 cigarettes was equivalent to being exposed to an integrated radiation dose of 1 Rem. He asked me what I thought was the best figure; I think he understated the effects of radiation. I tend to use 800 cigarettes per Rem. At that time he used 200.
We also discussed the causes of the Chernobyl accident and how such accidents can be prevented in future, both by careful design and by careful operation. He was most anxious that I not believe everything that I was told officially. For example, in the August 1986 report to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna it was implied that everyone within 20 - 30 km were evacuated on Sunday afternoon 27th April. Yet, Andrei told me, three or four young ladies arrived in their apartment building in Gorki a week after the accident, having remained 5 km from the power station for 3 days. He also informed me that Valery Legasov told the Soviet Academy of Sciences in October 1986 "I did not lie at Vienna, but I did not tell the whole truth". Of course I had already figured that out for myself! But I had visited the USSR several times, and had never expected the whole truth. I have learned to read between the lines, and listen to what is not said. I remembered his caution and warning, when the fact that large amounts of radioactivity had been deposited NE of Gomel in Belorussia was belatedly reported at the meeting of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR in March 1989.
Although he was open, Andrei was discreet. The subject of the accident at Kyshtym came up; he clearly knew more than he was willing to say. Eager though I was to satisfy my curiosity (and that of my western colleagues) and find out more, it would have been rude to press the issue. In spite of the way that the state had treated him, he was loyal, and would not discuss matters which were still secret. For example, he came out publicly against ant ballistic missile defense at the Moscow meeting in February 1987 but was careful not to mention that he had written a memorandum, still secret, to the politbureau about this in 1967. It only became public knowledge after his death. Now that some details of the explosion at Kyshtym are public knowledge, I would like to have his opinion on several aspects, but, alas, it is no longer possible.
Andrei's concern for civil rights did not stop at the boundaries of the USSR. On one of my treasured visits he asked me whether it was true that much of the famine relief in the Sudan had stopped at the Army officers or whether it had reached the proper destinations. When I replied that it was more true than it should be and less true than it used to be, he compared the situation to that in the Ukraine in 1930 when the Red Army took the food and the peasants were starved. I had read about this crime of Stalin's when I was a boy in England in the thirties; I had forgotten. But Andrei never forgot such matters.
I last saw Andrei when he, Elena, and their daughter Tatiana (Tanya) came to tea in our house in the USA in August 1989, just before going back to Moscow after his second visit to the USA. He did not want a big party of many people; just a family visit to see my wife's garden and to chat. He was interested in people, not ceremony; in ideas, not fame. He was never pompous, but on this occasion he was very relaxed. He climbed onto a wall in our garden, and raised his arm posing like the statue of liberty! Tanya, lay down on the ground at the top of the hill and rolled down like a young teenager. By then he was a happy man - much happier than when I first saw him 12 years ago. He had seen the leader of his country appreciate what he had been urging, and the people recognized him by electing him to the Supreme Soviet. I do not believe that he had ever expected to be vindicated in his lifetime. Such joy happens to few people, but Andrei was one of those who deserved it. Even in death small matters show how much relations with the Soviet Union have become "normal". I found, to my pleasure, that the FTD florist can now deliver flowers in Moscow in mid winter.
Andrei was an outstanding physicist, a brave civil rights leader, a warm hearted man and a fine friend. He had the highest honors his society could give him, but he risked their rejection and took another course because he thought the society was wrong. It is impossible not to admire such a man. We will all miss him, but we in the west especially offer our condolences to Elena Bonner and their family, and thank them for having worked so hard over the last 10 years to bring Andrei's messages to us. Elena had the idea of having a conference on the intellectual interests of Andrei during his last years. There were two interests with two major parallel sessions: the rule of law in Eastern Europe and USSR, and the effect of Chernobyl Elena trusted no one in USSR to organize the second, and she asked me to do so. We a preliminary meeting in May 1990, for the conference in May 1991, starting on what would have been his 70th birthday. There were two major plenary sessions, which I opened (475). Then one working session on the causes of the accident, which I asked Adolph Birkhofer of Munich, Germany to chair, one on the effects, which Elena asked me to chair myself, and one on the future, which Franticek Janouch chaired. It was a very successful meeting which attracted a lot of attention. At the first session on the rule of law a member of the Armenian parliament described the fighting that was breaking out between Armenia and Azerbaijan. As a result of this Elena organized a small fact finding mission which I described earlier.
In April 2007 I gave the Harvard Physics Department colloquium about Andrei’s seminal work in physics. A few years before, Harvard had accepted the archives of Andrei’s work, with his step daughter Tanya to be curator, and organize lectures on human rights in his honor. This lecture was joint with the Sakharov archives. Later on May 17th 2007 I gave the talk again, at the 15th anniversary celebration of the International Sakharov Environmental University in Minsk It was well received by the older people but the students seemed less interested. All their active life has been since Sakharov died and already his work seemed remote. But for me it was a great privilege to know him. In October 2008 I helped to organize a small conference in Harvard to remember the publication in the New York Times 40 years ago of Andrei’s “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom.” This is available on a webpage This conference was focused on Russia but Andrei’s thoughts of 1968 also apply to other international situations.