The particular numbers in our thought experiment are not important. What is important is the enormity of radiation’s effects—its energy and its pressure—when it is hot enough. At ordinary temperature, radiation is like the pixie dust that was visible only to Tinker Bell and her band of fairies. At the temperatures characteristic of nuclear explosions, radiation is “stuff,” full of enormous energy and capable of pushing like a giant piston.
Chapter 7
Going West
I spent most of my boyhood in Kentucky, and, when I was eight and nine, lived for one year in Georgia. In 1942, at sixteen, armed with a “regional scholarship”[40] from Phillips Exeter Academy, I was off to New Hampshire for the final two years of high school. All of Exeter’s students at that time were boys, and almost all of them were from New York and New England. My role, as a southerner, was to leaven the mix. I suppose I did that to some extent. The educational benefit to me was enormous. Before I left Exeter, I knew that I wanted to be a physicist. Going on to Harvard and Princeton seemed more like following a natural course of events than choosing a path.
A slogan that goes back even to well before the 1940s is: Join the Navy and see the world.{1} I did join the Navy—just before turning eighteen and not long before my graduation from Exeter—and I did see at least some parts of the world: Mississippi, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan—although never a ship or a foreign port. The Navy first set about training me to become an Electronic Technician. Recruits who, through testing, showed a scientific or mathematical bent were selected for the program. At the time, radio receivers, transmitters, radar, and sonar were all in a state of rapid development, and all were in need of skilled technicians to keep them running (their vacuum tubes got sick easily). I enjoyed the training. But part way through it, I was offered the option of applying for something called the V-12 program, which meant going to college as preparation for becoming an officer. After managing to finesse an eye exam,[41] I was demoted from Electronic Technician 3rd Class to Apprentice Seaman and sent off to John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where, among other things, I took a wonderful course in differential equations in a class of three students. From there the Navy sent me to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where, fortuitously, a physics course in which I enrolled required students to be in the lab on the afternoon when Navy drill was scheduled. By this time the war was over, and I waited my turn for discharge. I went off to Harvard in the fall of 1946 being neither an Electronic Technician nor an Officer.
By 1950, when I chose to follow John Wheeler to Los Alamos, I had seen a good deal of the East, the South, and the Midwest, but had never been as far west as the Mississippi River nor to the lands beyond it. This was to be a new adventure.
My transport at the time was a bicycle and a 1931 Packard touring sedan, neither of which seemed right for the wild west. I had purchased the Packard two years earlier for $300 from a fellow graduating senior at Harvard. For that sum I acquired a car of near-limo proportions with a convertible top, a cigarette lighter that extended on a long spooled wire from the dashboard to the remote rear seat, a hood that stretched far out in front of the driver, and two spare tires, one mounted on each front fender. Having two was a good thing, since the tires had a habit of going flat or blowing out at frequent intervals. (On one drive from Boston to New York, I had two blowouts, and my passengers, two students from Wellesley College, got to New York too late to attend the wedding that was their destination. We remained friends.) I had no trouble finding a buyer for my bicycle. To dispose of the Packard, I turned to my mother in Garden City on Long Island (my parents had left Kentucky while I was at Exeter). She was a better business person than I, and she took on the task with enthusiasm. After some word of mouth and some local advertising, she found a buyer for the car. I don’t remember how much she got for it, but I do remember that it was more than I had paid for it.
Then came the task of finding a vehicle that was suited for the wild west and that fit my budget. I settled on a surplus Army vehicle, a Chevrolet Carryall. It needed only $400 to muster it out of the Army and into my possession. In modern parlance, it was a “crossover” vehicle, a truck-like body on an automobile frame. Its tail gate was supported by chains inside the vehicle, which, when the Carryall was closed up and driven round curves, clanked in a most satisfying rhythm as the chains swung to and fro. It also burned oil, lots of oil, emitting a blur of blue smoke through its exhaust pipe. I turned to a friend from prep-school days, David Nason, who had grown up in Cleveland, Ohio. He had earned a degree in chemistry while I was earning my physics degree, and now worked in a Texaco research lab in Beacon, New York. He was skilled with his hands, and jumped at the chance to overhaul the engine on my new car (or truck)—even though his knowledge of piston rings and crankshafts was, I am pretty sure, only theoretical. Nevertheless, we dived into the task in his garage in Beacon (by this time, I had Princeton’s qualifying exam behind me and was largely free of pressure). Dave did the work while I, like an operating-room nurse, handed him the tools he called for, provided rags for wiping things clean, and looked into the engine’s innards to make sure nothing extraneous was left behind. Miraculously, it all worked. The reassembled engine did not burn oil, and the vehicle served me well during my year in Los Alamos, including some treks over back-country roads.
Ever constrained by tight finances, I looked for some passengers who wanted to go west and could share expenses. A pair of British graduate students (not physicists) fit the bill perfectly. They wanted to use their summer to visit California, and were happy to see much of the country close up on the way. The front of the Carryall contained a so-called bench seat that could accommodate three people. I had removed the rear seats to make way for a mattress, and on at least one night we slept in the car. Actually, small-town hotels, with typical rates of $2.00 per night for a single room, were within our range. (We avoided motels, whose rooms were priced at $3.00 to $4.00.)
In due course, after making our way along Route 66 through Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle (with no blowouts and no flat tires), we reached Clines Corners, New Mexico, where I had to peel off to the northwest on Route 285 toward Santa Fe and where my passengers could catch a Greyhound Bus to carry them the rest of the way to California.
Some easterners, on first encountering this part of New Mexico, are caught off guard, even made uneasy, by the seeming desolation, the loneliness, the creek beds that contain no water, the palette of every color but green, the persistent sunshine. Where are the trees? they ask. Where are the people? Where are the vibrancy and sounds of the city? These were not my reactions. I fell in love instantly with the unbelievably blue sky punctuated by puffy, hospital-white clouds in the foreground and towering grey thunder clouds in the distance; with the undulating hills and flat-topped mesas; with the crisp, dry air; with the scrub growth and tumbleweeds and road runners. That love affair with New Mexico has lasted to the present day. Even now I go to back every once in a while just to “breathe New Mexico’s air.”
40
It was a quite remarkable scholarship that covered all expenses, including two round trips per year in a Pullman car.
41
I listened to the sailors ahead of me in line and inspected the chart with both eyes open. When it came my turn to recite the letters using one eye at a time, I was flawless.