course

a theorist

a theorist tends to accumulate in the course of his life's work. Just between us, Dan, I fear that figure of "impressive dignity" you mentioned stands revealed to himself as the stereotype "absentminded professor." How else can I explain leaving so valuable a formulation shrouded in mental cobwebs year upon year?

You may recall the Russian "mystery" was a preoccupation of mine for some time. I once suspected it was the visible symptoms of neo-Lysenkoism, forcing our Soviet colleagues willy-nilly along a crackpot track. Such papers as were being published by the Russians pointed clearly to some undisclosed event that had stimulated the departure from mainstream physics. I devoted much time to the study of these papers, reasoning that, if the hidden event were in the realm of theoretical physics rather than of political origin, then its nature might be definable from clues in the published works that followed it.

The answer came to me in late March—that half-forgotten formulation. In brief, it deals with a predictable asymmetry in nuclear structure that can be utilized as a weak point in nuclear binding force. Thus, the binding force can be largely bypassed, rather than overpowered, for the production of fusion and fission processes.

I communicated my findings to the appropriate government officials and the rest, as they say, is history.

Of course the thought occurred to me that, since my formulation was not new, perhaps the Soviets had picked it up from one of my early published works. This could have explained why the Russians were allowed to publish papers containing clues to the secret—that is, they assumed they had no secret since the key formulation was of Western origin. This would raise the secondary question of why they never quoted or referred to the key formulation, but they often "write around" Western contributions as a means of avoiding recognition of these contributions.

The government people working with me have been as interested as I in finding the original of my formulation. All my papers, published and unpublished, and my notebooks as well, have been searched without success. On the chance that the formulation was not mine at all, a similar search has been made of all the physical journals as far back as 1945. Even the theses of my students have been gone over, to make sure