In May 1951, the very month in which Project Matterhorn was being established in Princeton, Bohm went to trial and was acquitted. Despite efforts on his behalf by some of his faculty colleagues, he was not reappointed at Princeton. Finding no other jobs in the United States, Bohm went to Brazil, and later to Birkbeck College in London, where he remained until his death at the age of seventy-four. Wheeler’s initial hope was, in the end, realized. Bohm devoted a great deal of his professional activity in his later years to exploring the fundamentals of quantum theory.
The kinds of problems faced by Bohm, Frank Oppenheimer, and Ross Lomanitz were not the only fallout from the “Red scare” of the late 1940s. Security clearance was instituted as a requirement for employment in numerous Federal agencies as well as in university projects to which the money flowed from these agencies. Some scientists, as well as technicians and support staff, were denied clearance—and, in many cases, thereby denied employment—on the basis of unsubstantiated charges. For agencies faced with thousands of cases, it was no doubt often easier to deny clearance than to explore charges with care. To help address this problem, the Princeton astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer—later to head Project Matterhorn S—and a few of his colleagues formed the Scientists Committee on Loyalty Problems (SCLP) in the fall of 1948,[68] around the time that I was beginning my graduate study at Princeton. This became a committee of the Federation of American Scientists[69] and soon acquired several score notable scientists around the country as sponsors and consultants.{12} Over the three years of its existence, the committee tried to help individuals with clearance problems and also tried to influence procedures of the Federal agencies. Somehow I became a member of the committee and found my name emblazoned on the committee’s letterhead. I have no recollection of how this happened. I suspect that I was a sympathetic student willing to help keep records and oversee correspondence. When my own Q clearance was granted in about one month in 1950, I realized that I must have a record perceived as very clean—despite my having participated in the summer of 1949 in an international gathering of students in Germany at which there was a good deal of left-leaning talk, and despite my friendship with David Bohm.
Bohm was, in fact, a member of SCLP during its first year of existence. Shortly after his HUAC appearance, in late May 1949, he offered to resign from SCLP.{13} The senior members of the committee were torn. They wanted to support his stand, but they also felt that his membership on the committee would weaken the committee’s clout, such as it was, with government agencies. At a meeting of June 4, they (or perhaps we—I can’t now remember if I was present at this meeting) resolved the matter by resigning en masse, and so dissolving the committee.{14} But they (we) did so with the understanding that SCLP would quickly be reconstituted, with new members, not including Bohm and not including certain members who were based far from Princeton and had not been active in the committee’s deliberations and actions. So the dissolution and reconstitution took place at once. The committee then continued its activities on behalf of fair security clearance procedures for two more years. It went out of business in July 1951.{15} (In June 1950, a year after the mass resignation, Sam Goudsmit,[70] a physicist at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, submitted his resignation from the committee. I have not been able to determine why. Perhaps he felt that, being at some distance from Princeton, he wasn’t able to contribute much. In any case his resignation was not accepted.{16})
Some time after his testimony but before his indictment, I happened to be chatting with Bohm after we had both listened to a talk by a Princeton mathematician on antinomies (paradoxes). Bohm smiled and said, “Congress should appoint a committee charged to investigate all those committees that do not investigate themselves.”
Around the same time (1949–1950), I mentioned to Bohm that I was interested in leaving the Graduate College and moving into quarters in the town of Princeton. He told me that he had a large room containing two beds in a house on Nassau Street and that I was welcome to join him there, which would save us both some money. So for several months I was David Bohm’s roommate. As it happened, there was very little beneficial “data transfer” from his brain to mine. When he came in and went to bed around 3:00 a.m., I was long since asleep, and when I left around 8:00 a.m., he was still sleeping soundly.
But we did have some very fruitful scientific interaction. In the spring of 1950 I was asked to make a presentation to the physics department’s “Journal Club.” This was an evening gathering every week or so at which faculty and graduate students presented summaries of recently published articles by non-Princeton physicists. Typically there would be three twenty-minute presentations in a session. I was to report on a just-published paper by several experimental physicists at Oak Ridge. They had measured the strength of interaction of very low energy neutrons, or slow neutrons, as they were called, with numerous atomic nuclei. Not knowing anything else to do, I looked for some pattern in the published data by recalling a technique I had learned in Bohm’s quantum-mechanics course. I treated the nuclei as transparent spheres—like little glass orbs, so to speak, rather than like hard billiard balls—and found that the data were indeed consistent with that model, which included appropriate growth in the size of nuclei as one marched up the periodic table. The assembled faculty showed more interest than I would have expected. After the session, Bohm came up to me and said, “Ken, what you have done may be quite significant. I can work with you to prepare a paper for publication.” (At the time, physicists were imagining nuclei to behave more like opaque, not transparent, spheres. For reasons other than my small piece of work, that was about to change as the “nuclear shell model” came to be accepted.)
I was more than happy to accept Bohm’s offer. Within days—or at most a couple of weeks—we had prepared and submitted a short paper with the title “Nuclear Size Resonances.” It was published as a “Letter” in Physical Review on August 15, 1950, by which time I was hard at work in Los Alamos.{17}
When I returned to Princeton the next May or June, I did not see Bohm. His non-reappointment was by then old news, and he may have left town by then. Within the physics department, collegiality won out over hard feelings. If there was residual tension between those who supported Bohm and those who didn’t, it wasn’t evident to this observer. Wheeler never spoke to me of Bohm’s politics or his run-in with HUAC. He just told me that Bohm had not performed up to the department’s expectations. So, like many another non-tenured assistant professor before and since, he was not promoted or reappointed.[71]
Chapter 13
New Mexico, New York, and New Jersey
Simplicity marked Matterhorn’s beginnings. For office space we were assigned a metal shack that had held experimental animals for the Rockefeller Institute, and the aroma lingered. For the first week that we were there, John Wheeler, John Toll, and I slept on cots in a cavernous boiler room of the former Institute. Wheeler was waiting for tenants to vacate his Battle Road house. Toll and I were looking for places to live in town. Fortunately, the boiler room’s amenities included a bathroom and shower facilities.
70
Goudsmit is best known to the public for his leadership of the Alsos mission, which, in late 1944, followed troops into France and Germany and discovered that German scientists had made little progress toward an atomic bomb. He is best known to physicists as the co-discoverer of electron spin and the long-time editor of journals of the American Physical Society.
71
A year earlier, in 1950, Princeton had decided not to retain Robert Hofstadter as a physics faculty member. He moved to Stanford University and in 1961 won the Nobel Prize for his work there on the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Failing to win tenure at Princeton is the best thing that ever happened to Hofstadter.