Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [141]
As the war began, Dyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he heard intimate lectures by England’s greatest mathematicians, Hardy, Littlewood, and Besicovitch. In physics Dirac reigned. Dyson’s war could hardly have been more different from Feynman’s. The British war organization wasted his talents prodigiously, assigning him to the Royal Air Force bomber command in a Buckinghamshire forest, where he researched statistical studies that were doomed, when they countered the official wisdom, to be ignored. The futility of this work impressed him. He and others in the operational research section learned—contrary to the essential bomber command dogma—that the safety of bomber crews did not increase with experience; that escape hatches were too narrow for airmen to use in emergencies; that gun turrets slowed the aircraft and bloated the crew sizes without increasing the chances of surviving enemy fighters; and that the entire British strategic bombing campaign was a failure. Mathematics repeatedly belied anecdotal experience, particularly when the anecdotal experience was colored by a lore whose purpose was to keep young men flying.
Dyson saw the scattershot bomb patterns in postmission photographs, saw the Germans’ ability to keep factories operating amid the rubble of civilian neighborhoods, worked through the firestorms of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945, and felt himself descending into a moral hell. At Los Alamos a military bureaucracy worked more successfully than ever before or since with independent-minded scientists. The military bureaucracy of Dyson’s experience embodied a routine of petty and not-so-petty dishonesty, and the scientists of the bomber command were unable to challenge it.
These were black days for the combination of science and machinery called technology. England, which had invented so much, had always been prone to misgivings. Machines disrupted traditional ways of living. In the workplace they seemed dehumanizing. At the turn of the century, amid the black soot clouds of the English industrial city, it was harder to romanticize the brutal new working conditions of the factory than the brutal old working conditions of the peasant farm. America, too, had its Luddites, but in the age of radio, telephone, and automobile few saw a malign influence in the progress that technology brought. For Americans the loathing of technology that would become a theme of late-twentieth-century life began with fears born amid the triumph of 1945. Among the books that had most influenced Dyson was a children’s tale called The Magic City, written in 1910 by Edith Nesbit. Among its lessons was a bittersweet one about technology. Her hero—a boy named Philip—learns that in the magic city, when one asks for a machine, he must keep using it forever. Given a choice between a horse and a bicycle, Philip wisely chooses the horse, at a time when few in England or America were failing to trade their horses for bicycles, motorcars, or tractors. Dyson remembered The Magic City when he learned about the atomic bomb—remembered that new technology, once acquired, is always with us. But nothing is simple, and Dyson also took to heart a remark of D. H. Lawrence’s about the welcome minimal purity of books, chairs, bottles, and an iron bedstead, all made by machines: “My wish for something to serve my purpose is perfectly fulfilled… . Wherefore I do honour to the machine and to its inventor.” The news of Hiroshima came partly as a relief to Dyson. It released him from his own war. Yet he knew that the strategic bombing campaign had killed four times as many civilians as the atomic bombs. Years later, when Dyson had a young son, he woke the boy in the middle of the night because he—Freeman—had awakened from an unbearable nightmare. A plane had crashed to the ground in flames. People were nearby, and some ran into the fire to rescue the victims. Dyson, in his dream, could not move.
He sometimes struck people as shy or diffident, but his teachers in England had learned that he had enormous self-possession.