Another thing that Princeton’s administration and Wheeler and Spitzer readily agreed on was location. Matterhorn would be located at the University’s newly acquired 825-acre Forrestal Research Center[65] several miles from the main campus. This location gave comfort to those at the university who wanted an insulated layer between academia and secret projects, and it was no hardship to Matterhorn. (The University had purchased this property from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research when that institute consolidated its activities in New York City in the spring of 1951 preparatory to becoming Rockefeller University. Reportedly, as part of the sales agreement, Laurance Rockefeller (Princeton’32) insisted that the University’s new acquisition be named after James Forrestal (Princeton’15), the nation’s first Secretary of Defense.){22}
I had been working diligently at Los Alamos and expected to do the same in Princeton. John Wheeler had no objection to my taking a two-week break between jobs—literally between. I decided to ride a motorcycle from one place to the other, circuitously through Utah, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin. In mid-May 1951 I hitched a ride to Albuquerque and came back to Los Alamos on a BSA 125-cc motorcycle. It had one cylinder and a two-gallon gas tank (in which the gasoline needed to be mixed with oil), delivered 4 horsepower, and was understandably called the Bantam. It was available in one color, mist green, and was capable of speeds in excess of 50 miles per hour downhill.
Without waiting for the results of Greenhouse Item to come in, I parked my Carryall and most of my belongings with a friend, and took off. In Utah, I raced a freight train, barely pulling ahead. In Wyoming, I flagged down a motorist in a torrential downpour, asking him to carry my camera to the lodge near Old Faithful. Camera and I survived the soaking. In Madison, Wisconsin, on a perfect spring day, I joined a group of university students for a picnic on a grassy slope overlooking a lake. In Cleveland, Ohio, I stopped to visit a girlfriend named Libby. She was enchanted (I think) with my raccoon-like appearance. I had large white circles around my eyes where my goggles had blocked the sun. Her father, however, was alarmed when I told of my back pain that got worse every afternoon. He was an executive used to exercising authority. Nothing I said could deter him from crating the Bantam for shipment to Princeton and sending me on by train.
I arrived refreshed in Princeton, where the motorcycle served briefly as my principal means of transportation (augmented by a bicycle and, before long, by a British roadster—I just had to spend all that money I had made in Los Alamos). I can’t remember at all how my belongings got to Princeton. I suspect that John Toll brought them in his car.
Chapter 12
Academia Cowers
Among the people caught up in HUAC’s net was David Bohm, an assistant professor of physics at Princeton. (Another was J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brother Frank—also a physicist—who, after being forced out of a professorship at the University of Minnesota, became a cattle rancher and high-school teacher in Colorado, and later, to the benefit of millions, director of San Francisco’s Exploratorium.{1}, [66]) I discuss Bohm here because his case had some influence on Princeton’s faculty, pro and con, and thus some bearing on Princeton’s receptivity to Wheeler’s proposal. Also I had a personal link to Bohm. He was co-author of my first published paper and was, for a time, my roommate.
Not long after the end of World War II—probably in 1946—John Wheeler became aware that David Bohm, then twenty-eight, might be an especially promising young theoretical physicist.{3} Bohm was in Berkeley, where he had worked throughout the war, guided by—or at least inspired by—Robert Oppenheimer. Some of his wartime projects were related to the atomic-bomb effort, some were in pure physics. (He was barred, reportedly by General Groves himself, from actually moving to Los Alamos.{4}) Wheeler was especially intrigued by the fact that Bohm had shown an interest in the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. (Wheeler was, at the time, working on more practical problems related to atomic nuclei and elementary particles, but he retained throughout his life an itch to get deeper into whatever principles might underlie quantum mechanics.) After interviewing Bohm in Berkeley, Wheeler persuaded his Princeton colleagues to offer Bohm a job as an assistant professor—a so-called tenure-track position. Bohm accepted and arrived to take up his duties in Princeton in January or February 1947.{5}
As it turned out, Bohm’s research interests at Princeton centered on plasma physics—a field in which he did quite notable work. Despite the quality of the work, the new direction was a disappointment to Wheeler, who had been looking forward to intellectual discourse with Bohm. Wheeler later admitted that he did not resonate with Bohm’s style,{6} and he had no sympathy for Bohm’s left-wing politics or his refusal to cooperate with HUAC. So when Bohm was arrested and charged with contempt of Congress in 1950, Wheeler was not among his Princeton defenders.
In 1948–49, my first year at Princeton, I took a year-long course in quantum mechanics with Bohm—a superb course with about a dozen students that was fun as well as instructive. In keeping with Bohm’s preference for working late and sleeping late, the course was taught in the evening.
Toward the end of that academic year, in May 1949, Bohm was called to testify before HUAC.[67] He sensed that the committee wasn’t so much interested in him as in his Berkeley friends, whom the committee hoped to paint as dangerous Communists. Bohm invoked the fifth amendment and declined to testify. We graduate students had no respect for HUAC and a great deal of respect—even affection—for Bohm, so there was no question where our sympathies lay. Most of his faculty colleagues were probably supportive, too, although not all.
An entire year-an-a-half elapsed with no repercussions for Bohm, so campus life went on pretty much as before, although we were aware of other physicists who were being forced out of their jobs for their supposed Communist ties. It wasn’t until December 1950, by which time I was in Los Alamos, that Bohm was arrested and indicted for contempt of Congress.{8} Princeton University wasted no time reacting. President Dodds at once issued a statement: “Dr. David Joseph Bohm, assistant professor of physics, has been suspended from all teaching and other duties at Princeton University.”{9} Bohm was paid through June 1951, when his appointment ended, but was barred from campus, or at least from Palmer Lab, where the physics department was housed. Students who wanted to talk to him had to meet him off campus. Much later, in a 1986 interview, Bohm had this to say about that six-month period. “I made much more rapid progress during that time than at any time before.”{10}
66
Another was G. Rossi (Ross) Lomanitz, who was discharged from Fisk University after coming afoul of HUAC in 1949.{2} Like Bohm, he was part of the Berkeley group around Robert Oppenheimer in the early 1940s. He finally found a receptive professional home at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where he and I were colleagues in the late 1970s and early 1980s.