Jack had worked with me at Irvine for several years, late in the 1980’s. He had come to me straight from M.I.T., where he had captured most of the available honors, and like most refugees from that institution he had something pallid and cramped about his soul, the stigmata of too much eastern living, too many harsh winters and airless summers. It was a pleasure to watch him open like a sturdy flower in our sunlight. He was in his very early twenties when I met him: tall but hollow-chested, with thick unkempt curling hair, cheeks perpetually stubbled, sunken eyes, thin restless lips. He had all the stereotyped traits and tics and habits of the young genius. I had read his papers in particle physics, and they were brilliant. You must realize that in physics one works by following sudden lancing insights — inspirations, perhaps — and so it is not necessary to be old and wise before one can be brilliant. Newton reshaped the universe while only a lad. Einstein, Schrцdinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, and the rest of that crew of pioneers did their finest work before they were thirty. One may, like Bohr, get shrewder and deeper with age, but Bohr was still young when he peered within the atom’s heart. So when I say that Jack Bryant’s work was brilliant, I do not mean merely that he was an exceptionally promising young man. I mean that he was brilliant on an absolute scale and that he had achieved greatness while still an undergraduate.
During the first two years he was with me, I thought he was genuinely destined to remake physics. He had that strange power, that gift of the shattering intuition that pierces all doubt; and, too, he had the mathematical ability and persistence to follow up his intuition and wrest firm truth from the unknown. His work was only marginally connected with mine. My time-reversal project had become more experimental than theoretical by this time, since I had moved through the stages of early hypotheses and now was spending most of my time at the giant particle accelerator, trying to build up the forces that I hoped would send fragments of atoms flying pastwards. Jack, on the contrary, was still the pure theoretician. His concern was the binding force of the atom. There was nothing new about that, of course. But Jack had doubled back to reexamine some overlooked implications of Yukawa’s 1935 work on mesons, and in the course of reviewing the old literature, had generally reshuffled everything that supposedly was known about the glue that holds the atom together. It seemed to me that Jack was on his way to one of the revolutionary discoveries of mankind: an understanding of the fundamental energy relationships out of which the universe is constructed. Which is, of course, what we all ultimately seek.
Since I was Jack’s sponsor, I kept an eye on his studies, looking over the successive drafts of his doctoral thesis while devoting most of my energies to my own work. Only gradually did the larger implications of Jack’s research dawn on me. I had been looking at it within the self-enclosed sphere of pure physics, but I now saw that the final outcome of Jack’s work had to be highly practical. He was heading toward a means of tapping the binding force of the atom and liberating that energy not through a sudden explosion but in a controlled flow.
Jack himself did not seem to see it. Applications of physical theory were of no interest to him. Working within his airless environment of equations, he paid no more heed to such possibilities than he did to the fluctuations of the stock market. Yet I saw it. Rutherford’s work at the beginning of the twentieth century had been pure theory too, yet it led unerringly to the sunburst over Hiroshima. Lesser men could search within the core of Jack’s thesis and find there the means for total liberation of atomic energy. Neither fission nor fusion would be necessary. Any atom could be opened and drained. A cup of soil would run a million-kilowatt generator. A few drops of water would send a ship to the moon. This was the atomic energy of fantasy. It was all there, implicit in Jack’s work.
But Jack’s work was incomplete.
In his third year at Irvine he came to me, looking haggard and depleted, and said he was halting work on his thesis. He was at a point, he told me, where he needed to pause and consider. Meanwhile he asked for permission to engage in certain experimental work, simply as a change of air. Naturally, I agreed.
I said nothing whatever to him about the potential practical applications of his work. That was not my place. I confess a sense of relief mingled with the disappointment when he interrupted his research. I had been reflecting on the economic upheaval that would come to society in another ten or fifteen years, when every home might run on its own inexhaustible power source, when transportation and communication would cease to depend on the traditional energy inputs, when the entire network of labor relationships on which our society is based would utterly collapse. Strictly as an amateur sociologist, I was disturbed by the conclusions I drew. If I had been an executive of any of the major corporations, I would have had Jack Bryant assassinated at once. As it was, I merely worried. It was not very distinguished of me, I admit. The true man of science forges ahead heedless of the economic consequences. He seeks truth even if the truth should bring society tumbling down. Those are tenets of virtue.
I kept my own counsel. If Jack had wished at any time to return to his work, I would not have attempted to prevent it. I would not even have asked him to consider the long-range possibilities. He did not realize that any moral dilemma existed, and I was not going to be the one to tell him about it.
By my silence, of course, I was making myself an accomplice in the destruction of the human economy. I might have pointed out to Jack that his work, extended to the extreme, would give each human being an unlimited access to an infinite energy source, demolishing the foundation of every human society and creating an instant decentralization of mankind. Through my interference I might have caused Jack to hesitate. But I said nothing. Give me no medals of honor, though; my anguish remained in suspension so long as Jack remained idle. He was making no further progress on his research, so I had no need to fret over the chances of its successful outcome. Once he got back to it, the moral problem would face me again: whether to support the free play of scientific inquiry, or to intervene for the sake of maintaining the economic status quo.
It was a villainous choice. But I was spared making it.
During his third year with me Jack pottered around the campus doing trivial things. He spent most of his time at the accelerator, as though he had just discovered the experimental side of physics and did not tire of toying with it. Our accelerator was new and awesome, a proton-loop model with a neutron injector. It operated in the trillion-electron-volt range then; of course, the current alpha-spiral machines far exceed that, but in its day it was a colossus. The twin pylons of the high-voltage lines carrying current from the fusion plant at the edge of the Pacific seemed like titanic messengers of power, and the great dome of the accelerator building itself gleamed in mighty self-satisfaction. Jack haunted the building. He sat by the screens while undergraduates performed elementary experiments in neutrino detection and in antiparticle annihilation. Occasionally he tinkered with the control panels just to see how they worked and to find out how it felt to be master of those surging forces. But what he was doing was meaningless. It was busywork. He was deliberately marking time.
Was it really because he needed a rest?
Or had he seen the implications of his own work at last — and been frightened?
I never asked him. In such cases I wait for a troubled younger man to come to me with his troubles. And I could not take the risk of infecting Jack’s mind with my own doubts if those doubts had not already occurred to him.