And here I have a footnote to add to Stan's description of the events that led to its building. Stan was acquainted with the fusion proposals, for during the war he had been nominally in Teller's group. Gradually he developed a hunch that the Super Teller envisaged was not very practical, and when in 1949 Truman ordered the development of that superpowerful weapon, he set out to verify his hunch while the electronic machines were being built. First, he worked just with Everett, then, with an added bevy of young women who had been hastily recruited to grind manually on electric calculators the operations now routinely performed by computers. I became one of them, even though I understood nothing of the mathematics involved. We bore the glamorous name of "data analysts." This job allowed me inside T-Division, at the time the inner sanctum of the lab, where, as a friend later put, I could "get the smell of the hive."
I was well placed to watch how personally Teller took the fact that Stan and Everett were the first to blow the whistle with their crude calculations. Every day Stan would come into the office, look at our computations, and come back with new "guestimates," while Teller objected loudly and cajoled every one around into disbelieving the results. What should have been the common examination of difficult problems became an unpleasant confrontation. More agreeable was the midmorning coffee hour where the great and not so great — including this "data analyst" — gathered to discuss scientific questions that came to their minds, the "state of the universe," or where to hike on Sunday, one of Fermi's favorite topics.
The technical and political debates were raging when Stan, mulling over the problems, suddenly came upon a totally new and intriguing approach. Engraved on my memory is the day when I found him at noon staring intensely out of a window in our living room with a very strange expression on his face. Peering unseeing into the garden, he said: "I found a way to make it work." "What work?" I asked. "The Super" he replied. ''It is a totally different scheme, and it will change the course of history."
I, who had rejoiced that the "Super" had not seemed feasible, was appalled by this news, and anxiously asked what he intended to do. He replied that he "would have to tell Edward." Fearing the Teller might pounce on him again, I ventured that maybe he ought to test his idea on Mark or Bradbury first. He did, but went to Teller the next day just the same.
Teller saw rapidly where the new avenue could lead and they hastened to write their well-known joint report. It is in two parts, Stan told me, because Teller was adding — in Stan's words—"a parallel scheme" of his own which altered Stan's original suggestion. My impression is that from then on Teller pushed Stan aside and refused to deal with him any longer. He never met or talked with Stan meaningfully ever again.
Stan was, I felt, more wounded than he knew by this unfriendly rejection, although I never heard him express ill feelings towards Teller. (He rather pitied him instead.) Secure in his own mind that his input had been useful, he withdrew. At that moment in the fall of 1951 when the lab's collective mind was on carrying out the monumental task of building and testing the weapon (as well as on the struggle against Teller's attacks), we escaped to Harvard for a few months of well-deserved change. From then on Stan steadfastly continued to avoid being drawn into the political turmoil, except for a brief testimony in Congress in favor of the Test Ban Treaty.
After the Harvard visit we returned once more to Los Alamos where the management, in its wisdom, provided Stan with more freedom than did the academic world. Stan then gradually disengaged himself from weapons to play with the then new, miraculous tool of electornic computing that had been built at the lab, the MANIAC. Johnny's brainchild, it was the first completely electronic machine with a built-in general operations program. This Model-T of contemporary computers enabled Stan to apply his skills in pure mathematics to other fields of science and experiment, years ahead of the times, with patterns of growth, complexity, nonlinearity, chaos. His research was for the most part written up in obscure Los Alamos reports. Few people were aware of what he was doing outside of their own specialty. Remarkably he did not seem to care. And partly because of the MANIAC's easy accessibility, for the rest of his life Stan remained connected with the lab. No wonder Seinhaus nicknamed us "Los Ulamos" when he came to visit us in the sixties.
Our life, however, was not all work and no play. We traveled on extended leaves to academic communities east and west, and to France for yearly vacations. We lived simply but comfortably on "bathtub row" (so-called because during the war it had contained the only bathtubs on the post), raising Claire, our child. Stan would show the neighborhood children the craters on the moon with his telescope, or point at Sputnik tracing its orbit through the sky, or play a game of chess with a visiting chess master. We belonged to a group that took visitors to the banks of the Rio Grande for candlelit dinners at Edith Warner's famed adobe house, which had no electricty or running water. The meals were served by her long-braided Indian companion, Tilano. The contrast of their timeless Indian life with the twentieth-century reality on the Hill offered a great moment of relaxation.
Our house was a continual open house. The parties we gave for the von Neumanns, Gamows, Fermis, Fisk, Rabi, and many others were lively. I had a knack for mixing and matching people, kept a good table, and Stan was always a great catalyst. With frequent trips to congresses and meetings in Russia, Britain, Israel, or Switzerland, our life was that of today's scientific jet-set.
When I voiced reservations about still living at the heart of thermonuclear work, Stan would reassure me that barring accidents, the H-bomb rendered war impossible. He also agreed, however, that there were too many bombs already, and he "did not believe that Russia would invade Western Europe, one of the supposed reasons for super-rearmament." (In the light of today's happenings, he was right as usual.)
This was a time when the question of science and morality was taking on new importance. When asked about the ethics of science, Stan was firm on the necessity of pursuing science for inquiry's sake, regardless of the consequences. What would Archimedes and Newton have done, he argued, if they had worried about the consequences of their thoughts? Without calculus no modern science could have developed. Admittedly things had changed since the days when Poincaré could say that morality and science were not in conflict, for both aimed at the betterment of mankind. The release of nuclear energy and the possibility of gene manipulation had enormously complicated the problem. But he was quick to point out the useful aspects of nuclear energy and the marvels of biological engineering, if used wisely, and to put the responsibility back in the public's court for deciding how to use them. He also insisted that it was the scientists' duty to inform the public of their discoveries.
With the Cold War waning and the Bradbury era ending, the purpose of Los Alamos was becoming dimmer, and the lab was settling into routine. It was also entering periods top-heavy with bureaucratic administrators. Stan, detached from its inner workings, found himself charting a lonelier course, and was outgrowing "government science," as he called it. He therefore embarked on a renewed involvement with the teaching profession.
He had always been noted for his lecturing style. In the Harvard days the students had named him one of the most stimulating math professors. I watched him once on the lecture circuit give one of his typical Ulamian talks where, hopping from topic to topic, he exposed a group of math majors to a glimpse of the world of science they could not fathom from their more prosaic encounters: a few rods about set theory; anecdotes of his youth when he developed an interest in math; sketches of Los Alamos, of von Neumann; remarks about the bomb at the root of much present-day technology; passing thoughts about Gödel and the importance of his undecidability proofs. He walked about, made a great display of glancing at his watch, always finding the mot juste in an informal stream of consciousness, never saying anything trite, and sowing seeds every so lightly in his listeners' minds.