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

Cmbridge and Arlington
Our arrival at Harvard University was accompanied by a very warm welcome from everyone in the physics department . I had already met a few of them, some on my brief visit in 1952, and others at various meetings and conferences, and knew about the professional life of most of the others. Professor Nicholas (Nico) Bloembergen had been living in a little “semidetached” house, built just after WWII, on Alpine Street in Cambridge. It was arranged that we move in a week after he moved out to a new house in Lexington. Sid Drell and his family put us up for a couple of days while we bought some furniture. These were a table and chairs and a studio couch from Sears and Roebuck We still own the studio couch!. Then we started looking for a house. We found one in Arlington on 37 Brantwood Road. A large 4 BR plus 2 attic rooms on a 15,000 sq foot lot-and-a-half overlooking Spy Pond and Boston further east. The price was reasonable - $15,500. For some reason, sickness I believe, I was not able to go and pay the deposit so Norman Ramsey kindly did so for me. Norman was living across route 2 in Belmont and we would sometimes meet on the bus to or from Harvard. We bought with the house some furniture, some of which we still have.
In 1955 the physics department held a weekly lunch in the faculty club. at which all business was discussed. Lunch was at 1.15 and informal discussions took place. Then the formal business started at 2, but much had been decided informally during the lunch! I remember the first lunch. Van (John Hasbrouck Van Vleck) sat beside me. “I am going to see if you are truly worthy of becoming a Harvard professor” he said. “I will give you a quiz with two questions. This morning I had clam juice for breakfast. What train was I traveling on?.” I got that right by simple reasoning. There was no night train down from Maine, and Van was unlikely to eat on the night train from New York. So I deduced, correctly, that he had traveled on the New England States express from Chicago. I made use of this information a couple of years later when I caught that train and was served, after asking, a complimentary glass of clam juice for breakfast. The second question stumped me. “What is the twin importance of the town of Mattoon, Illinois?” I should have known one of the two facets of the twon which made it important Mattoon is where the New York Central main line to St Louis crosses the Illinois Central main line. The second is that is where my new colleague Ed Purcell went to high school. Van was a delightful man, full of trivia in addition to his undoubted intellect for which he got the Nobel prize. He was one of Harvard’s truly great men. Later in these memoires I describe his, and our, love of mountains.
That October we got a car. Ted Dunham had taken the car that I had used in 1951 in Rochester and stored it in his brother’s place in South Tamworth, New Hampshire. We bought it for $100. So in early October we took the train up to Mt Whittier station (changing at Durham NH, and Ted’s brother in law took us to his house where the car would not start! It was pushed to the gas station where it was fixed. It was now too late to get home that night so we stayed overnight in his house South Tamworth and drove home.

The next summer (1956) we rented a house, Kendall house, on Sutton’s Island, just south of Mount Desert Island. This house had been given to Harvard by an alumnus who thought of the idea of entertaining faculty even after he was dead. It was a relaxed 2 weeks. We had a bedroom downstairs and Chris (3 ½ years old) and Michael (1 year old) shared a room upstairs with a narrow staircase down. We were woken one morning by Chris calling to Michael “I wouldn’t do that if I were you”. Michael was at the top of the stairs peering down and about to fall. Another more benign incident. We found a magnificent bed of mussels just outside the cottage. We picked four dozen or so, and Andrée prepared something different for Michael. But Michael’s eyes lit up and he insisted on eating his share of mussels! Alas, the car, the 1941 Ford “woody wagon” began to use more oil than gasoline on the way back so we bought another second hand car. But that car only lasted a few weeks as someone ran into it and damaged it more than it was worth repairing.

By summer 1956 Andrée was pregnant again with Nicholas; she was in the 8th month of pregnancy while were at Sutton’s Island. Although we were by that time living in Arlington, Nicholas was not born in Arlington but in the Wyman building of Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, He showed up on September 9th.. I saw them in a nice ward on the 4th floor overlooking Fresh Pond Brook Parkway and a view south to the Charles River. I was to come back to the Wyman building back 51 years later after the hospital had been reorganized and the Wyman building is now for outpatient surgery for a hernia. Then I was the center of attention as Dr Russell Nauta, opened me up, put my innards back where they belonged, and sewed me up again. It was a simple hernia operation. But that same week a cartoon appeared in the New Yorker magazine. A physician is talking to his patient at a consultation in his office. “Yes, it is a routine operation” the physician says. “If it is routine to have someone cut you open with sharp instruments and fiddle around with your insides.” It all depends on which side of the desk you are sitting.
Andrée had become a great fan of the British system for childbirth of the time and requested that she not be given an anesthetic. Our physician, Dr Moran, said that he had never delivered a baby by natural childbirth, but “the customer is always right.” But when Andrée was well into labor at the Mount Auburn Hospital she said; “it hurts”, which of course it did, and she was immediately put under. She therefore never actually saw the childbirth. For many years she felt peculiar about it, sometimes wondering if Nicholas was really hers! She was awake at the birth of all the next three children. I was not allowed to be present at Nicholas’ birth but was summoned soon after. We asked Cara Alexander, who had helped at the time of Michael’s birth to come and help look after the three children. She stayed for about 6 weeks. This enabled me to spend a week in UK immediately after Nicholas was born as discussed below..
In July 1956 I received a letter from Bill Burcham of the University of Birmingham inviting me to apply for a Professorial position in the University of Birmingham, UK. I applied and received a letter immediately thereafter asking me to come and visit, implying that the job was mine if I wanted it. I talked to Curry Street who was then Chairman of the Department. Curry said that it was a fine offer that I should take seriously but urged me to delay because both the Dean and the President of Harvard were on vacation. I did delay, and went to visit Birmingham in late September after Nicholas was born. Everyone was very welcoming in Birmingham and I even looked at some houses. I missed the first lecture of the term and turned up on Wednesday morning after a night flight from London. After my 10 am lecture, I found Curry Street sitting in my office. “We had our first department meeting on Monday” he said. “And we voted unanimously to offer you tenure. Yesterday, Norman Ramsey, Ed Purcell and I went to see the Dean and he and the President agree.” That was a clear sign that if I stayed at Harvard I would get the support I needed for whatever project I became interested in. After cogitating for 2 weeks I turned down Birmingham.

In 1957 after a vacation with Geoffrey and Pat on Lake Erie, we spent a long weekend at an old farm house just west of Camden, Maine which was offered to us free. Our biggest memory of this was the mice who ate the apples we were given to us from the orchard. These sloppy rodents spread the half eaten apples on the floor next to the refrigerator. At first Andrée thought that Chris had been eating the apples and scolded him for being messy and not finishing his food. As so often happens he was innocent of this terrible crime.

Life in Arlington proceeded. We were very busy. Andrée was busy with the three children and I was very busy at work. That did not stop Andrée becoming pregnant again. Elaine was born at the end of February 1958. This time Dr Moran listened a bit more to Andrée and Elaine was born in the hospital in Arlington by natural childbirth without any notable complications. We needed help again and Andrée wrote to Heather Lund in Binsey for advice. Heather was teaching a course in child care and suggested one of her students, Betty Hewlett. Betty came over, by boat to NY with a train up to Boston where I met her at South Station. She stayed with us for 6 months I believe and then took a similar job with another family. She is now Betty Gardescue, and she still lives in the Boston area in Weston.
We had several visits over the years from Andrée’s father and stepmother Jesse and Louise. Also my father Percy and step mother came over from England occasionally. Typically we would go out to the local countryside: Percy, having read Thoreau’s Walden was particularly interested in Walden pond. Concord was also a simple destination. But for the summer Boston was then too hot for me so we went north for vacations. In 1958 I saw a little pamphlet, “Maine houses and cottages” so we rented a farm house for a month at Pemaquid Harbor. We went there after I had made a 10 day visit to Geneva for the “Rochester Conference”. We spent 3 weeks there and Andy Koehler took the 4th week. Geoffrey and Pat and their children spent part of a week with us. Across the road was a small pier where a small boat with outboard motor could take us across the bay to the beach at Pemaquid Beach. Nicholas, in particular, liked helping with the outboard motor. But Andrée had not seen her sister since 1952; and the children had not met their cousins at all. So in summer 1959 we missed our vacation in Maine or New Hampshire and spent a summer in Stanford, renting Sid Drell’s house for 2 months. We went west immediately after I came back from the High Energy Physics conference in Kiev. This is described later under “Trips West”

But our creative enthusiasm was undiminished. In September 1959 Annette, now André as noted later in these memoires, was born. There were real complications. Andrée went into labor and I took her to hospital but after a couple of hours the labor pains stopped. Dr Moran suggested that he induce childbirth but wanted approval from both us. Of course we accepted his advice. The physical problem which necessitated this was that Annette was born with one leg twisted and stuck over a shoulder. This was straightened but we often wonder whether that may have been a contributory cause of her later health problems. About that time I had a stomach ulcer which slowed me down a little, and necessitated a bland diet. So we decided to go away for 2 weeks. Betty Hewlett came back in September to help for a couple of months but preferred not to stay longer. It was then that Angela Holder, now Angela Aaronson, came over, at Heather’s suggestion from England and stayed 6 months. She, like Betty before her had to be picked up at South Station. The next day Andrée and I set off for a 10 day vacation in Puerto Rico leaving the children in the care of these excellent young ladies. We had a good time, staying in a cheap room at $5 a night, and the last 2 days renting a car at $5 a day and going east to Luquillo beach. We stayed again for $5 in a very run down hotel on the beach in Luquiillo with half a dozen rooms which had padlocks for the doors in the rooms. It was owned by a Philadelphia lawyer who was obviously waiting for it to be bought up by real estate developers - which it has been. On the way back to the airport we saw a large pineapple at a roadside stand which we bought for $1. But then we had to cut it. We bought a machete from the next stand for $1 to cut the pineapple. We took this in our hand baggage on the airlines back to Boston. No one objected.

We went back to Maine in Summer 1960. This time we were at an inland lake, Norcross Pond. We were there a full month. That summer Jesse and Louise DuMond took a bus trip around the Gaspé peninsula in Canada and joined us for several happy days. We met them at the Canadian border where they had taken a bus down from Quebec, and a few days later drove them to Bangor for the bus to Boston and Hartford Connecticut where they stayed with Louise’s niece Jackie Zipf. In those days we visited Boothbay Harbor and took a boat out to Squirrel Island and around the harbor. I remember looking carefully at the bow wave of the boat and comparing the angle with calculation. Cerenkov radiation was just beginning to be used for particle identification and, of course, the calculation was similar. The pictures taken at the time of the family did not, of course include Peter who was not born for another 8 months. But I showed them many years later to my colleague Professor Melissa Franklin who works on CDF in Fermilab. “Do you recognize anyone in the picture?” “Yes,” was the reply. “That’s Peter”. Indeed Peter in his thirties looked very much like me in my thirties. In May or June that year I had an offer of a Professorship at Stanford. Bob Hofstadter personally proposed me for the position. It was tempting, and the thought of working close to Pief was attractive. It also seemed attractive to stay at Harvard where the CEA was soon to come on line. Vicki Weisskopf thought that I should go to Stanford. ‘It is better to be number 2 or number 3 in a first class lab” he said, “than number one in a second class one.”. I pondered it all summer and turned it down. One is never quite sure what is the ultimate item in making a decision, but I think that if I had not married Pief’s sister in law I would have gone. There were already signs of jockeying for position in Stanford, and Pief would have been in an impossible position. I had hoped to be able to join in an experiment from a distance. When troubles between Harvard and MIT arose later, I specifically wrote to Pief about 1964 that I withdrew some plans for joint work at SLAC because I did not want to export our local (CEA) problems of Harvard-MIT disagreements to Pief.
Palaiseau
In 1961 I took a sabbatical leave in France. I had a Guggenheim fellowship and we also had full salary for the half year. So we took the long planned visit to Hans Halban’s laboratory at Orsay. We flew to Shannon and on to Paris, Orly airport. There we were met by George Bishop and Andrée’s Uncle Serge. We then went to our apartment in a high rise apartment complex in Palaiseau. It was a little cramped but OK. Unfortunately we overlooked the sewage plant and the smell often prevented us using the balcony. We set out at once to get some help for Andrée with the 5 3/4 children. We advertised. The first person was OK but left very suddenly. The second was a young German girl, Halma. She was very energetic but she only was available for two weeks. Finally we found a girl from northeastern France - Raymonde, who had a mass of hair dyed red. She arrived two weeks before Peter was born and stayed with us the whole time. The hospital where Peter was born was Hospice d’Archange in Orsay. In view of the short labour Andrée had for four of the other 5 childbirths, I practiced getting there on time. The route involved crossing the commuter line, the Ligne de Sceaux, on a grade crossing. That would not seem difficult, but a train ran every 10 minutes in each direction! We got to the hospital in time, so that I did not have to learn a new profession. Peter was born with no trouble, but the doctor did not make it. The nurse-midwives did a fine job. I was outside in the corridor but the nurses did not want me in the delivery room.
We bought a brand new Peugeot “Limousine Familiale” for traveling for $1,400. It could take 3 people in the front and 2 in the back and two jump seats in the middle into which one could squeeze three children. Before it was available Hans lent me a “Deux Chevaux”. A very small car. We crammed everyone in it on a spring outing to Fontainbleu. We went walking on an open hillside area just north of Fontainbleu and almost lost Christopher, then 9 years old. We were walking up a hillside to a path at the top. I don’t know why Chris was last, but when we got to the path at the top we could not find Chris. I ran around the top and heard Chris coming up the hill a couple of hundred yards away - he was crying because he had lost us.
In May that year the French army in Algeria revolted and tried to unseat the De Gaulle Government, who was trying to make peace with the Algerians. Everyone was concerned that the French Air Force would support the army. So every airfield was blocked by farm carts and people so that no air force plane could land. We were a mile off the end of the runway of Orly airport and at dusk every plane had to land before the runway was shut down and blocked. Andrée felt very silly afterwards. While cooking supper she heard, on the radio, this man talking incessantly in rapid French. She turned the radio off. It was De Gaulle with is famous speech to Frenchmen “Aidez moi!”
In the summer we decided to go to the Riviera to see Meme and Jean. We rented through an English outfit “Rent a Villa” a villa in Roquebrune, and paid for it. But then we found it did not exist and they offered us another villa in another place and another time that made no sense. So Meme then found a villa for us in Menton. A better villa in many ways, but not such a good view and further from the beach. We left Palaiseau at the end of July. Raymonde took Annette and Peter by plane at once to Nice where they stayed with Meme and Jean and the rest set off to Austria for 2 weeks. We stopped for lunch in Nancy, and there we had “tripes a la mode de Caen”. Unlike the Parisian restaurants, who always seemed to regard children as a nuisance, the restaurant was nice to the children and the children all enjoyed the tripe. It was, I believe, the first time they had eaten it. Then we went on through Strasbourg and stayed in a small German hotel in Freiberg. It turned out we were all in one room! This was not what I had expected but it was OK for one night. The we drove through the black forest to Lech in Austria where we stayed in the best hotel there. We took the cable car up to Rufikopf on the east of the little town, and walked down - to the surprise of the hotel staff and other patrons who had not expected that three year old Elaine would be able to do so. Another day we were not so successful. We took the cable car to Oberlech to the northwewt of Lech walked with a plan to reach another mountain, the Kreigerhorn I believe, but I had over estimated the energy of the children as I often did. We never reached the top and we took the cable car down again. Another day we drove to the main railroad line between Switzerland and Austria and took the train through the 6 mile long Arlberg tunnel, built in 1884, and on down to Innsbruck and back to Lech. Then we went on down the Engardine to Italy, with a stop at a small hotel near St. Moritz, and the long drive then through Milan and Genoa to Menton.
The family spent nearly 2 weeks at Menton, including myself taking the train to the physics meeting at Aix en Provence for 2 days. It was at Menton that I first met Andrée’s Uncle Robert (Gaebel) who lived in a little house just outside with his wife, Simone. Andrée’s two uncles, Serge and Robert had run a small photography store in Paris before 1939 and both gone into the French army when called up in September 1939. Serge was captured in 1940, but Robert threw away his uniform and walked back to Paris and reopened the store. I presume that many of his customers were occupying German troops. Was Robert, therefore, a collaborator? After the war, the two brothers got together for six months when they quarreled. They did not talk again for 40 years when our daughter Annette persuaded Robert to take a train (from Ceret in the Pyrenees) to Paris to meet his brother. Such divisions existed in France for 30 years after the war between those who suffered heavily in the German occupation and those who, for whatever reason, did not.

.

We put the Peugeot on the train at Nice, said goodbye to Raymonde, Meme and Jean and then flew to London and on to Boston. In London we met Ann, another young lady found by Heather Lund, - who came back with us to help Andrée with the children. Again it was a night flight on a turboprop “Britannia”. But bad weather made it overfly Boston and we went on to New York. Flying back to Boston on Northeast airlines we circled for nearly an hour when suddenly the pilot said “I see a gap” and we rapidly went down and landed at high speed. As we descended Andrée looked back and saw the flight attendants were white as a sheet We landed OK but later that day a plane overran the end of the runway and ended up in the mud of the harbor.

Chocorua and other Vacations
In summer 1962 we wondered a lot where to spend a vacation. We liked Maine. It was cool, and we wanted a sea or a lake that was warm enough for the children to bathe in. We had seen Squirrel Island in Boothbay Harbor, when we had taken a trip to the sea (with Jesse and Louise ) in 1960 when we stayed at Norcross pond in Maine. We looked for a rental on the island. Andrée and I were interviewed by phone to see whether we were “OK”. Harvard professor Konrad Bloch had been similarly questioned by some group and was being denied a rental until Professor Bloch got a Nobel prize. Then he became acceptable. But that was Felix Bloch’s Nobel prize! When Konrad got his Nobel prize a few years later, he commented wryly that at last he felt he belonged! As a result I knew that being OK meant “Not Jewish”. Andrée understood before I did and we politely said that were we no longer interested. in a rental. We did not want to be a party to anti-Semitic behaviour. We did not like the rentals that were by anti-Semites so we splurged and went to an old hotel on the island. I remember there we had a storm and we saw the best aurora borealis that I have ever seen on land. It was great lounging in a porch chair looking north over the water. Alas, the hotel burnt down later that year and the island summer residents did not want another hotel there. A number of the hotel guests were Jewish and that may have upset the racist owners of the summer houses.
In summer 1963 we went out to California again to work on a summer study for the SLAC accelerator and that time we stayed in Pief’s house when Pief and his family were elsewhere. But in summer 1964 we looked again for a house on the mainland near a lake with warm water. We found one in Chocorua, N.H. It belongs to the descendants of the Balch family. Dr Balch had married a descendent of Bowditch, the 18^th century sailor and navigator from Salem, MA. Again we were interviewed by Dr Balch and his sister Mrs Lucy Putnam at their little house in Cambridge. However, we were never asked anything about religion or ethnic background and we felt there was no anti-semitism involved although I am not absolutely sure. We spent a month in Chocorua in each of 1964, 1965, and 1967.
It was a really wonderful time and all the children looked forward to it, and look back with nostalgia. The trees had been cleared so from the house there was a view of the lake and Mount Chocorua in the distance. We could go down and by the lake there was a small shed (boathouse) for small canoe that we could use. In between there were two small houses, one used by Dr Balch and Lucy Putnam and the other used by Cornelia Wheeler, another sister, and her husband. One convenient asset was that the bus from Boston to Berlin, N.H passed Lake Chocorua so that I could stay at work and go up on Friday night for a weekend and go back to work on early Monday morning.
Over the years we climbed mount Chocorua by almost every route. On the first time we went up by the Liberty Trail, 3.9 miles, with a guide estimate of 3 hours and 15 minutes. Nicholas, 8 years old, grumbled the most and it took us 4 hours or so. On the top we saw a thunderstorm brewing, and not wanting to be in the open as lightning struck we hurried down getting back into the woods by the time the storm broke. We almost ran down in the rain, which took less than 1 ½ hours, jumped into the car and went straight to the village store for an ice cream. That may have been the last time I was accused by my children of walking too fast. Certainly within a couple of years the complaint became “Daddy: why are you so slow?”. In 2008 we can walk about 1 mph on a fairly level mountain trail. In 2006 at the end of a trip in Maine Andrée and I spent a couple of days staying at the Tamworth Inn. We went round to look at the Balch house. A couple of grandchildren of the Balch’s and their families were there. Trees had grown up and blocked the view of the lake. The wood stove, on which many pancakes had been cooked, was there but unused.
In 1968, just after returning from the family trip west to Aspen and Wyoming as described below, Andrée and I went to the high energy physics conference in Vienna, Austria. The Austrians made us very welcome. There were receptions in the Hofbrau and in the Shoenbrum Palace - and at each one there was an orchestra where Andrée and I could waltz. We visited a village and were plied with the “vin nouveau”. We were take by train to Melk, 50 miles west, and saw a castle, then down the Danube to another village and a train back. The conference organizers arranged a block of tickets to see the Spanish Riding School horses. As Bob Wilson commented as we returned to the hotel, they are the “high energy horses.” The conference was memorable for many reasons; the ambiance was one and another was the presentation of the exciting new physics results from SLAC which I admit made me a little jealous.
In 1969 I took a sabbatical again in the spring. This time I wanted to go to Frascati to help them get their electron positron storage ring going and learn from Bruno Touschek, as described later. But Chris and Michael were now in high school and it seemed unwise to disturb them So I went by myself in January and came back for the family in June.I stayed at a little hotel in Frascati within walking distance from the lab. I learned enough Italian to be able to talk to the hotel people, and even translate from English into Italian some letters from prospective customers. I came back in late February for a meeting of the Fermilab trustees, and being a fine day took Nicholas out of school for the day and we went up to Gunstock for a day of downhill skiing. I reckoned I skied downhill 16 miles that day. It was my last down hill skiing. I had both a Guggenheim fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship, and they also paid for some lecturing trips. To Athens, in Greece, and to Pavia before Andrée and the children joined me. In June, I came home and the day the children got out of school, we all set off for England.
We rented a 10 passenger van in London and drove to a small place “Little Abbey” in Great Missenden. Geoffrey was also taking a year’s leave getting a good start on a PhD thesis at the University of Leicester and we decided on a family reunion. Several of the Kingston cousins also turned up. After this, and a brief tour of the Cotswolds, we went to Italy. I picked up my newly purchased VW microbus in Milan airport, where I had left it 10 days before, and drove to a summer school on Lake Como. Alas, Andrée picked up an infection in our hotel in London, and became really sick at Lake Como. We are fairly sure that the source of the infection was that hotel, because the ceiling of the bathroom fell onto two of our children in the bathtub. Andrée was taken to a hospital and soon recovered with the excellent care by the nurses who were nuns. From Lake Como we drove south to Frascati and Grotta Ferrata where we I had rented a villa and planned to spend the next 2 ½ months. A memorable overnight stop was at Florence. We stayed at a little hotel “Hotel Medici” and ate dinner late in the square. We thought the children would be tired and fractious, but the evening was magical and several remember it still.
I had luckily been able to find a very nice little villa half way between Frascati and Grotta Ferrata. This had a nice garden and was adjacent to the grounds of one of the major villas in the town. The local restaurant in Grotta Ferrata was very good and made excellent pasta. One lunchtime they took away the plate of Annette, who was a slow eater and when she objected they brought her a brand new dish. We bought food in the supermarket on the main square in Frascati and there we also bought wine. But the supermarket had no refrigerator so we bought milk at the bar!. After a week or so Christopher and Michael joined us having come from London by train, with a stop of course at Nice to see their grandmother. I had told Chris to call us from the station in Rome when they had arrived, and were about to take the local to Frascati. But he did not understand the telephone system. He called about three times and I tried to say put 500 lire in, but we were cut off each time. But bearing in mind my own system some 25 yeras before, I assumed he was catching the next local and I met him at the station. On another day Pater and Annette were chasing each other around the garden and crashed into each other. Annette’s teeth made a gouge in Peter’s head. Although we had to go to the doctor to get stitches in Peter’s head, Annette had the most pain. One day we invited Etim Etim, who had been Bruno Touschek’s graduate student understanding radiative corrections, and his family out from Rome and we all ate at the restaurant in Grotta Ferrata. .Etim and his wife told us about Nigeria. Some 20 years later, they separated and Etim went back to Nigeria and became science advisor to the President. The last time I heard from him was when he telephoned and asked would I support him if he decided to be a candidate for President in the next election. Of course I did but I never heard from him again, nor did Georgio Salvini. But both Georgio and I were called by a newspaper reporter who asked whether it could be true that Etim had embezzled some 20 million dollars in a Brazilian deal. I heard no more and am still not sure whether Etim had changed, or whether he was being set up for a disastrous fall.
We visited the Vatican on a hot day. There was a long waiting line of 1 ½ hours, so when we finally got to the Sistine chapel everyone was tired and we were soon pushed on and could not stay in the chapel more than 10 minutes. Andrée and I were to visit the Sistine chapel under far better circumstances in 2006. One memorable visit was to the Pope’s summer palace in Castel Gondolfo. Not far from Frascati. In the undergraduate laboratory at Oxford I had a young Jesuit, Patrick “Patsy” Trainor as a practical partner one year (1945-1946). Patsy later got a PhD in Astronomy, and the pope decided to revive the telescopes in the garden of the summer place which had been installed by a previous pope a hundred years before. Patsy became one of the pope’s astronomers. A set of offices was built on the top of the palace and there Rev. Trainor, who I was careful to call Patrick in front of my children, had the best office I have ever seen. He had a huge picture window overlooking Lake Albano with Mt. Albano behind. The arrival of the pope at his summer palace was anticipated the next day and the garden was therefore impeccable. We were shown an area where some 5,000 Jews had camped in the roughest days of the second world war. The wall was still blackened by the camp fires. The Jews were not protected by an army but by the moral authority of the pope. When I hear of complaints of how the pope collaborated with the fascists I think about this little important fact that he did support the helpless to this extent..
We took Patrick to dinner and the children, particularly Elaine, were enchanted by him. Patsy has since died. So have two other Jesuit friends from college days: Samuel (Sammy) Ross and James (Nibs) Fitzsimons who died in Africa. Alas, the lab staff went on strike, a “sciopero bianco”, where they came into the laboratory but no work was being done. This lasted a full year and the lab director did basically nothing. Interestingly, Nino Zichichi told me later that his technicians, employed from his University of Bologna did loyally come in and work. But with no functioning accelerator, their work was useless. So a couple of weeks later we set off northwards to make a couple of sightseeing trips and spend the rest of the sabbatical at CERN in Geneva.
Firstly we headed for Trieste where I had been invited to give a lecture or two at Abdus Salam’s International Center for Theoretical Physics. We had a brief stop at Venice where were as disappointed as we had been before. We stayed in a little hotel in the main square in Trieste and I went back to the institute a few miles to the west. The first day was a fantastic theatrical event We came out of the hotel and walked across the square to eat breakfast on the wharf. The whole town was watching as a furious Italian lady was gesticulating and shouting up at another lady with her head out of the window. It came to my mind the old English saying that if you tie an Italian’s hands behind his back he is speechless. But we of course had to have food. The dinner that night on the wharf was memorable: a whole fish for the family. The next day we ate at a small restaurant nearer the Institute. During the meal Chris went out to fetch something from the car and locked the keys inside. We called the Italian Automobile club, fully expecting them to be able to open the car in a few seconds as Richard Feynman might have done He opened it, but it took half an hour. My prejudice that Italians are all good petty thieves was demolished.
Then we drove fast, in one day, across northern Italy to Aosta where we stayed at a little inn. We spent a couple of days exploring the southern Alps. The first we went north to Champlorencal and then walked up a valley to the east. The next day we drove to Breuil-Cervinia in a a valley to the east where we took a cable car up to the pass at Plan Maison where we could see the southern side of the Matterhorn. We rejected going up the chair cars to further peaks and after walking on the snowfield for half an hour, we walked merrily down. Then we drove over the St Bernard Pass and on to Geneva where we stayed in Hotel Terminus at a special rate of $5 a night each including breakfast. We were 3 weeks in all in Geneva. Leaving there we drove to Lardy (near Paris) where we all stayed with Victor and Barbara Round. Then we flew home, sending the car to be loaded onto the boat from which I picked it up in Newark. Elaine left us in Geneva. She went to Denmark to stay for a few days with her school friend Kaethe whose parents were spending some time there. She joined us later in London as we changed planes.