Related Pergamon Titles of Interest GOTSMAN Frontiers of Physics (Proceedings of the Landau Memorial Conference, Tel Aviv, Israel, 6-10 June 1988) KHALATNIKOV Landau: The Physicist and the Man LUTHER Advances in Theoretical Physics (Proceedings of the Landau Birthday Symposium, Copenhagen, 13-17 June 1988) PITAEVSKI Collected Papers of Ε. M. Lifshitz TER HAAR Collected Papers of P. L. Kapitza Volume 4 PROFESSOR BONDI SCIENCE, CHURCHILL AND ME The Autobiography of Hermann Bondi, Master of Churchill College Cambridge PERGAMON PRESS Member of Maxwell Macmillan Pergamon Publishing Corporation OXFORD · NEW YORK · BEIJING · FRANKFURT SÄO PAULO · SYDNEY · TOKYO · TORONTO U.K. Pergamon Press pic, Headington Hill Hall, Oxford, OX3 0BW, England U.S.A. Pergamon Press Inc., Maxwell House, Fairview Park, Elmsford, New York 10523, U.S.A. PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC Pergamon Press, Room 4037, Qianmen Hotel, Beijing, OF CHINA People's Republic of China FEDERAL REPUBLIC Pergamon Press GmbH, Hammerweg 6, OF GERMANY D-6242 Kronberg, Federal Republic of Germany Pergamon Editora Ltda, Rua Eça de Queiros, 346, BRAZIL CEP 04011, Paraiso, Säo Paulo, Brazil Pergamon Press (Australia) Pty Ltd, PO Box 544, AUSTRALIA Potts Point, NSW 2011, Australia Pergamon Press, 5th Floor, Matsuoka Central Building, JAPAN 1-7-1 Nishishinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160, Japan Pergamon Press Canada Ltd, Suite No 271, CANADA 253 College Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 1R5 Copyright © 1990 Hermann Bondi All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publishers. First edition 1990 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bondi, Hermann, Sir. Science, Churchill, and me: the autobiography of Hermann Bondi, master of Churchill College, Cambridge, p. cm. 1. Bondi, Hermann, Sir. 2. Scientists—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Mathematicians—Great Britain—Biography. I. Churchill College. II. Title. Q143.B56A3 1990 509.2—dc20 90-6997 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bondi, Sir, Hermann 1919- Science, Churchill and me: the autobiography of Hermann Bondi, Master of Churchill College Cambridge. 1. Scientists. Biographies I. Title 509.24 ISBN 0-08-037235-X Printed in Great Britain by BPCC Wheatons Ltd, Exeter Foreword In the 1930s a number of Austrian and German men and women left their country in the face of personal danger and racial discrimination. Some very obvious names come to mind; Lord Weindenfeld, Sir Claus Moser and many others, In the years that followed their intellect, skills and talents enhances and enriched the life of this country. The name of Hermann Bondi stands high on that roll of honour. Most of those who read this fascinating account of his life will never have had to face those problems. It is difficult for us to imagine the circumstances in which a boy had to leave his country and finds himself in an alien land continuing his education in a foreign tongue. Not many of us would have managed to get to Trinity College, Cambridge and fewer still become a Fellow a few years later or indeed made the resounding success of our lives as Hermann Bondi has done - to the great benefit of his fellow citizens. I first met Hermann Bondi over thirty years ago whilst I was living in Canberra. He had then as now a formidable reputation as a mathematician and astronomer, lb someone with no scientific education he threatened to be a daunting guest: far from it. He proved to be one of the most engaging, humorous and brilliant people that I have ever had the privilege of meeting. He has the gift of explaining the most complicated proposition in terms which a layman can understand, without condescending to those much less intel- ligent than himself. The next time that our paths crossed I was looking for a successor as Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Defence and Sir Solly, now Lord Zuckerman, suggested his name to me to have exactly the qualities required in a job which demands a brilliant scientist but at the same time a man who can explain to politicians and servicemen the most difficult and increasingly baffling problem. Not, I think, without some hesitation Hermann Bondi accepted. He was an instant and outstanding success. Those who worked with him understood and enjoyed him and above all respected his judgement. And so it was in all his many appointments before and since. Churchill College has been fortunate to have him as its Master. I am sure that the Great man after whom it was named would have looked with approval on his tenure of office and been gratified that so distinguished a man should be its Master. The Rt. Hon. Lord Carrington, K.G. vii Preface THE ONLY excuse for writing an autobiography is that one thinks one wants to convey something of interest to others. In my case it is amazement that I should have had so varied and fascinating a career, that I enjoyed meeting so many marvellous people in very different walks of life, and that so absorbing and enjoyable a collection of jobs should have come my way. Sometimes it seems to me that I have been walking through life with a wide open mouth, and roast ducks have come flying in with monotonous regularity. I have never had a particularly high opinion of my intelligence and have told my children, only half in jest, that it was much more important to be lucky than intelligent. They are quite ready to believe that I am lucky! The reader will readily appreciate the cardinal importance to my life and indeed existence of the Second World War, Winston Churchill's leadership and its victorious outcome. Therefore, my pleasure in writing this in Chur- chill College is well founded. ix CHAPTER 1 Vienna ONE OWES a very great deal to one's home and school background, to one's friends, to one's parents, and to other relatives. I therefore need to give a reasonably full account of where I came from. My paternal grandfather came from Mainz in Germany. He was in business but not very success- fully, and found it a good idea to move in 1884 to Vienna, to try to make a living again in business there. He was Orthodox as most Jews were at the time and had an enormous family of sixteen children, all children of my paternal grandmother whom I never knew. Two of those sixteen I believe, died very young, and there were two pairs of twins amongst them, and my father and his twin sister, born in June 1878, were the thirteenth and fourteenth in the family. I did indeed have an enormous number of first cousins on my father's side, and of all that generation I was the youngest bar one. I am pretty sure I never met more than a fraction of my cousins, since many lived in other places and, of course, were much older and died quite a while ago. Virtually by tradition, the first son became a Rabbi, the second one (who from all accounts was an extremely vigorous and energetic man) effectively took over the business, made it do rather well, but died fairly young early in this century. My grandfather, I should say, who was born in 1831, lived to his mid-nineties and although there was over 88 years between us I can still remember him quite well. The other family with which I am so closely connected bears the name of Hirsch. They were well-to-do in the metal business and lived in Halber- stadt, in what is now East Germany There are many marital connections between these families. My father's mother, my mother s father and my mother's mother were all of the Hirsch family, as was a favourite aunt of mine, married to an older brother of my father's. The first link seems to have arisen from my paternal grandfather in his energetic young days, having struck a very successful arms deal with Garibaldi, travelling as was necessary in those days by coach over the St. Gotthard pass. This I was told led to the Hirsch family accepting him as a son-in-law. My own father had the temperament and outlook of a scientist but, of course, there was not much in the way of career possibilities for scientists in those days, even less so for a Jew, and he decided to become a doctor. But all his life he had a hankering for the scientific side of medicine in 1 2 Science, Churchill and Me which he had done significant research work as a young man at Heidel- berg; in his older days he tackled the difficult problem of the origin of the different noises made by healthy and diseased hearts. His scientific inclinations had a very strong influence on me. On every occasion where there was something of interest to see he stressed how remarkably interesting were the questions that arose about the origin of this or the nature of that. This attitude of curiosity has certainly rubbed off on me. A somewhat older brother of his, Joseph, also became a medical doctor and this was the branch of the family with whom we had the closest relationship. Joseph's wife Rosa was another Hirsch, an aunt of my mother's, who had introduced my mother and father to each other when my mother was on a visit to her aunt in Vienna. Thus these two families have always been most closely connected. Though my mother's family were very well-to-do, there was a great deal of tragedy in their lives. My mother was the second of two children, her brother some years older than she. Having been terribly ill with meningitis as a child, he never fully recovered his mental equilibrium. Her own mother died in childbirth, perhaps not too rare an occurrence in those days (1892). Her father then married his first wife's sister and out of that union there sprang my Uncle Seppi, a great favourite of mine, six years younger than my mother. My grandfather's second wife too died very young, of tuberculosis, and he himself did not survive her very long. Indeed, of all my four grandparents, only my paternal grandfather lived into my own lifetime. My mother, very intelligent but with only limited education as was not uncommon for girls in a small German city in those days, again always had a very questioning outlook. She invariably took the greatest interest in medical, educational and political questions, and had a real intellectual partnership with my father, in spite of the deficiencies of her education. She knew to perfection how to control her naturally protective instincts vis-à-vis her children, and encouraged our independence from early on. She was, however, inclined to pessimism. She used to say on our walking holidays in often rainy areas that the weather was the only issue on which she was an optimist. However, her pessimism was in no way aggressive until her last years. Indeed she was a splendid companion for us. My parents married in Vienna in May 1914, just before the First World War, which led to a long separation between my parents and a great worry for my mother, since my father as a junior doctor was in very exposed positions in the early stages of the war. Later he was ordered to run a hospital for prisoners of war (mainly Russian) amongst whom typhus was raging. This was in a remote part of Austria and with great courage he brought his wife and little daughter, my sister, to live there, being quite convinced that if their water supply came from above the camp and the hospital, there was no danger to them. My sister, born in early spring 1915, was Vienna 3 understandably not followed by another child until I was born on 1 November 1919, completing the family. There was an interesting contrast in the attitude to religion between my parents. Neither of them were believers, but where my father liked to follow the forms because of their value as tradition and as social cement (many decades later I was interested to learn from Sir John Colville that Winston Churchill had felt much the same), my mother was from very early on a strong rebel against the family orthodoxy and made it clear how much she disliked the narrowness, the self-satisfaction, the blind- ness of religion. What horrified her was, for example, the rule in Jewish Orthodox practice that if a child of yours leaves the faith, you should mourn for it as though it had died. Of course this dislike of orthodoxy had to be somewhat hidden because so many of the rest of the family were firm believers. Of the three brothers and one sister of my father who lived in Vienna, one was exceedingly orthodox with a family of four children, one fairly so with three. The other medical man, Joseph, shared my father's views and attitudes, whereas the sister, my aunt Lea, had very much the attitude of my mother. To keep relations with the rest of the family going one had of course to engage in a certain amount of pretence. Thus we were mildly kosher in our eating at home, but in no way when we were away on holiday. This enabled us to invite other members of the family to come to us for meals, though they might be occasionally a little mistrustful of the strictness of our cooking arrangements. My aunt Lea was a considerable personality, passionately interested in art. An art dealer of great distinction she was instrumental in popularizing Kokos- chka and introduced Picasso's work to Vienna. She too had a rather peculiar life. I mentioned earlier on the second son of the family who ran the business, and then died rather young. He left four little daughters with their young mother (also a Hirsch) who was widowed so early in life. In the normal manner of the day the youngest available sister, Lea, was asked to help with the education of the four girls, supporting their mother in this. Naturally those links between the four and her remained in- tensely strong. Although this took some of her time and energy, yet she carved out for herself a position and standing that was all her own, and her own wide circle of friends, very much of artistic inclination and ability. Amongst them was a gifted sculptor, quite a bit older than herself, with whom she started a long-lasting relationship. He was of Jewish origin but Catholic and married, so for a long time there was no question of marriage. Eventually his wife, who was, I believe, a little older than he, died. Then at last she could marry the love of her life, a few years before emigration. Her husband sadly did not live for very long, succumbing to a kidney disease during the war years. She herself lived well into old age and died only in 1971. All through these years meeting her was a stimulating, interesting and instructive experience every time. 4 Science, Churchill and Me In my days as a little boy I was a worry to my mother because I had no great interest in food, and was, I gather, painfully thin for quite a few years. I also had repeated trouble with my ears and though this led to no lasting damage it kept me out of school for quite a while when I was about 6. Though private schooling was not nearly as common in Austria as in England, it was not at all unusual amongst our circles. My mother however was firmly opposed to it and both my sister and I went to ordinary state or at least state-supported schools all the way through. I don't remember much about my years in primary school but I do recall that I was already very firm about who my friends were going to be and that this was not going to be dictated to me by parents, where I was soon able to show a distinct dislike for the son of a friend of my mother. Certainly my school life was interrupted with very frequent colds, flu, sore throats and the like. Taking tonsils out was very common in those days but my father, as a physician generally not keen on surgery, did not wish this to be done in my case until I was a little older. I think it is fair to say, whether through the operation or through the passage of time, after this was done (about the time I was 12) I became much tougher and more energetic. This may have had a connection with my relations with the other boys in my school. Whereas in my early years even at secondary school, I only had a very small circle of friends, this changed very sharply when I was 13 or 14 and suddenly I was on the best of terms with everybody and very much liked throughout the class. I myself very much enjoyed company. My sister was quite an influence on me in many different ways. In spite of the difference in age we both greatly enjoyed the Greek myths, and a good deal else in literature. It is very difficult to point in memory to definite events, but I must have been good at mathematics already when I was 8 or 9. My sister, for whom this was not the strongest side in spite of her generally scientific inclination, asked me to help her with her school work in mathematics when she was perhaps in the second or third year of her secondary school. I think I could be quite effective even then. I thoroughly enjoyed looking at her textbooks but the real turning point came when on a visit to uncle Joseph, I noticed a book (perhaps when I was 12), which was a simple introduction to calculus. In spite of being generally very encouraging, neither my uncle nor my parents thought that I would be able to follow this book, but in fact I swallowed it hook, line and sinker, and found nothing in it of any great difficulty. It is true of course that, as a youngster would, I became much more expert at manipulation than at the difficult logic of analysis. But I certainly did not find anything difficult in the book. At my own secondary school in mathematics I was far ahead of what we did in class. I remember class examinations when there were usually two sets of questions to be given to alternate boys to avoid cheating. In an exam lasting perhaps two hours,