One thing that relieved the repetition and alternation of work, intellectual discussions, evening gatherings, social family visits and dinner parties, was when a group of us would play poker about once a week. The group included Metropolis, Davis, Calkin, Flanders, Langer, Long, Konopinski, von Neumann (when he was in town), Kistiakowski sometimes, Teller, and others. We played for small stakes; the naïveté of the game and the frivolous discussions laced with earthy exclamations and rough language provided a bath of refreshing foolishness from the very serious and important business that was the raison d'être of Los Alamos.
In playing such a game, unless you are vitally interested in the game itself, and not merely in its relaxing qualities, you will not do well. Von Neumann, Teller, and I would think about completely unrelated subjects during the bidding or betting; consequently, more often than not we were the losers. Metropolis once described what a triumph it was to win ten dollars from John von Neumann, author of a famous treatise on game theory. He then bought his book for five dollars and pasted the other five inside the cover as a symbol of his victory. It may not be clear to non-scientists or non-mathematicians that one can do theoretical work in one's head and pursue it quite intensely while literally carrying on some other more prosaic activity.
The Trinity test, Hiroshima, V-J Day, and the story of Los Alamos exploded over the world almost simultaneously with the A-Bomb. Publicity over the secret wartime Project filled the newspapers and its administrative heads were thrown in the limelight. In one newspaper interview out of many published the day after Hiroshima, E. O. Lawrence "modestly admitted," according to the interviewer, "that he more than anyone else was responsible for the atomic bomb." Similar statements by and about others filled the media. Oppenheimer was reported to have described his feelings after the unearthly light of the initial flash of the Trinity experiment by quoting from the Hindu epic, the Bhagavad Gita: "It flashed to my mind that I had become the Prince of Darkness, the destroyer of Universes."
What is true is that as I was reading this item in a newspaper, something else flashed through my mind, a story of a "pension" in Berlin before the war. I told it immediately to Johnny, who was eating dinner in our house. The Berlin boarders were sitting around a table for dinner and dishes were passed for each person to help himself to his share. One man was taking most of the asparagus that was on the platter. Whereupon another man stood up shyly and said: "Excuse me, Mr. Goldberg, we also like asparagus!" And the expression "asparagus" became it code word in our private conversations for trying to obtain an unduly large share of credit for scientific work or any other accomplishment of a joint or group character. Johnny loved this story so much that in our humorous conversations we played on developing the theme. We would plan to write a twenty-volume treatise on "Asparagetics through the Ages.'' Johnny would do "Die Asparagetics im Altertum" and I the final volume "Rückblick und Ausblick" in the manner of heavy German scholarship. Later, Carson Mark put his own stamp on these jokes by composing a song, "Oh, How I Love Asparagus," to the tune of a current popular song.
But levities like these could hardly alleviate the general feeling of foreboding upon entering into the era of history that would be called the Atomic Age. The war was over, the world and the nation had to reorganize themselves. Life would never be the same.
Chapter 9. Southern California
The war was over and the world was emerging from the ashes. Many people left Los Alamos, either to return to their former universities like Hans Bethe, or to go to new academic positions like Weisskopf to MIT or Teller to Chicago. The government had not reached any decision yet about the fate of the wartime laboratory.
The University of Chicago took steps to start a great new center for nuclear physics, with Fermi, Teller and several others from the Manhattan District Project. Von Neumann, better than anyone else, it seems to me, argued that as a result of the role science had played in the winning of the war, the post-war academic world would not be recognizable in pre-1939 terms.
On the purely personal plane, I had no evidence that any member of my immediate family had survived (two cousins did reappear many years later, one in France, the other in Israel). Françoise had lost her mother in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. We were both American citizens now, the United States was our country, and the idea of returning to Europe never entered our heads. But the question of what job to return to from war work was very much on our minds.
I had some correspondence with Langer, who was then the chairman, about returning to Madison. He was very honest and open, and he told me with admirable frankness when I inquired about my chances for promotion and tenure: "No reason to beat around the bush, were you not a foreigner, it would be much easier and your career would develop faster." So it seemed that my chances in Wisconsin were not very good, and I looked elsewhere. Elsewhere came in the form of a letter from an old Madison friend, Donald Hyers, who had become a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Hyers was well established there, and he asked whether I would be interested in joining the faculty as an associate professor at a salary somewhat higher than the one in Madison. The university was small, not very strong academically, and certainly not a very prestigious place, but the professors there, he said, were engaged in vigorous attempts at improving the academic standing of the institution. He invited me for a visit, and I flew to Los Angeles in August of 1945.
This was the first time I saw that city, and it gave me a very strange impression. It was a different world from any I had known, climatically, architecturally, and otherwise. I mentioned this job possibility to Johnny, and although he was rather surprised at my interest in this rather modest opportunity, he did not react negatively. His tendency was to go along. I did not see much sense in marking time in Los Alamos after the war, so I accepted the USC offer.
In early September of 1945, I went to Los Angeles to look for housing and to prepare our move from Los Alamos. In the immediate postwar period, the housing situation in Los Angeles was critical. Since we did not own a car, we were restricted to searching for a house in the vicinity of the University. I used to say that any two points in Los Angeles were at least an hour's drive apart, a "discrete" topological space. I managed to sublet for one semester a typical small Los Angeles house on a modest street lined with spindly palm trees. To me it seemed adequate, but it appeared rather miserable to Françoise. Nevertheless, we settled there temporarily for lack of anything better. I noticed that in our various moves from one habitat to the next all our material possessions, clothes, books, furnishings had a way of diminishing in transit. I used to say that they dwindled to 1/e, in analogy to the energy losses of particles in transit through "one mean free path."
For the second semester of that academic year (1945–46), Hal and Hattie von Breton, good friends of the Hawkinses, invited us to stay in their summer cottage on Balboa Island across from Newport Beach. It was on the water, beautiful and comfortable — a wonderful change from the university neighborhood but a little too far for me to commute daily — so during the week I lived in a hotel near the campus and went home to the island on weekends. Françoise remained on Balboa with our baby daughter Claire, who had been born in Los Alamos the year before.