John Wheeler’s house was a short walk from the lab buildings. He, John Toll, and I often went there for lunch, and Janette Wheeler made us feel welcome. Wheeler always managed to embarrass me by giving Janette a big warm kiss after lunch as we started back to work—his way of letting her know, I think, that physics wasn’t his only passion. Wheeler wanted to turn one large extra room in the house into a study where he and John Toll and I could work on our non-lab projects evenings and the occasional Sunday. All that this required was that three desks be requisitioned from the Zia Company. Easier imagined than accomplished. The Zia Company at the time was the sole landlord and handled all maintenance and the provision of furniture for short-term rentals. Most residents loved the Zia Company. Clogged drain? No problem. Call the Zia Company. Leaking roof? No problem. Call the Zia Company.
So John Wheeler called the Zia Company and asked for three desks. Sorry, said the Zia person, desks are not on the approved furniture list. He cajoled. He pleaded. He turned on his charm. All to no effect. Days went by. Wheeler talked to the top official of the Zia Company and to administrators at the lab. Somehow, somewhere, a lock clicked open and three desks were delivered. Wheeler was, among other things, dogged. So, for the balance of the year, he and John Toll and I had our getaway office. I got a little physics done there (I didn’t really get going on my dissertation research until 1952). Toll got more done, because he was already well into his dissertation. Wheeler no doubt accomplished even more, because he was Wheeler, as dogged in his pursuit of physics as in his pursuit of desks. Going back to World War II, he always tried to keep his “Princeton physics” alive, no matter what the pressures of his government service.{10}
It was during these early months at Los Alamos, especially the summer of 1950, when I got well acquainted with the people who made T Division (T for Theoretical) tick: the regulars such as Carson Mark, Edward Teller, Stan Ulam, Freddie de Hoffmann, and some others who were engaged mainly in fission work, such as Conrad Longmire and Ted Taylor; the consultants and temporary staff who appeared for from a few days to a whole summer; and, of course, my own mentor, John Wheeler. T Division was divided into groups, T-1, T-2, etc. Stan Ulam’s group was T-8 and consisted only of himself and the mathematician Cornelius Everett.{11} Most of the H-bomb crew, including Teller, de Hoffmann, Wheeler and his “boys,” as well as the distinguished outside consultants, and the brilliant young Dick Garwin (two years my junior) were classified as belonging to T-DO, or T-Division Office, meaning that we were linked directly to Carson Mark. There were few barriers to communication anyway, and even less with this arrangement. There is no place else I could have been, not even back at Princeton, where I could have encountered—not just encountered, but worked closely with—so many brilliant people in such a short span of time.
The “big-three” consultants during that year at Los Alamos were Hans Bethe from Cornell University, Enrico Fermi from the University of Chicago, and John (or Johnny) von Neumann from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Each of them had made path-breaking advances in science (or, in von Neumann’s case, mathematics, although he also contributed to hydrodynamics research and was a leader in computer science before it was called computer science). Bethe, later a Nobelist, was from Germany. Fermi, already a Nobelist, was from Italy. Von Neumann was from Hungary and would almost surely have been a Nobelist if those prizes covered his fields of accomplishment.
Bethe, oddly, was, to us junior scientists, the least useful of the three, even though he was, by various accounts,{12} including his own,{13} a major contributor to the H-bomb development. On his visits, he would listen carefully as we described what we had been doing. As a general rule, he gave us no feedback. He was also reluctant to give a general-interest talk in the Reines Raum. In our youthful arrogance, we asked ourselves if we were wasting our time talking to him, since nothing seemed to come of it. Presumably he gave his feedback to Carson Mark or to Teller or Wheeler or Bradbury. He surely comprehended in detail everything that was going on.
By contrast, Fermi behaved as an equal colleague with us “youngsters” and always had useful things to say. If we invited him to give a general-interest talk, he was likely to accept and might offer two or three subjects and let us choose. We also enjoyed Fermi’s company outside the lab. He loved hiking in the nearby Jemez Mountains and wouldn’t admit for a moment that he couldn’t hike as fast or climb as briskly as those of us who were half his age. Fermi was a person of habit, who reportedly arose at the same time every day, listened to the same news source every day (not Martin Agronsky, I suspect), and stopped work at the same time every day. If he was subject to high and low moods, it wasn’t evident. To me he seemed always upbeat. And Fermi was competitive in every pursuit, be it an uphill climb or a physics problem or a board game. I remember an evening when he and Edward Teller were fiercely playing Parcheesi, each of them acting as if nothing in the world was more important than winning that game. (I was in the game, too, and can’t now remember who won.)
Von Neumann was also a delight to be with. His brain-power stuck out in every direction (and his middle had expanded a bit, too). Like Fermi, he soaked up whatever work we described and made useful suggestions about it, also agreeing, more often than not, to give a general-interest talk in the Reines Raum. Von Neumann was an indoor person, preferring an overstuffed chair, some good friends, and an appropriate beverage in his hand to a hike in the mountains. He and Stan Ulam were long-time friends whose acquaintance went back to 1934 when they corresponded about mathematics while Ulam was still in Poland.{14} It was at von Neumann’s invitation that Ulam came to America.{15} As it turned out, they had a lot in common. Both made important contributions to pure, abstract mathematics, yet were equally intrigued by quite practical problems. They shared a droll sense of humor and were regular correspondents.{16} In writing to von Neumann, Ulam was not above making unkind comments about Teller.{17}
Fermi and von Neumann were not destined for long lives. Both died at age 53, Fermi in 1954, von Neumann in 1957. Bethe lived—and worked—to age 98. Just a few years before his death in 2005, I heard him deliver an impressive lecture on the theory of supernovas, the subject of his research interest at the time.