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Quantum Profiles
Quantum Profiles
Second Edition

J E R E M Y B E R N ST E I N

1
 3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

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© Oxford University Press 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bernstein, Jeremy, 1929– author.
Title: Quantum profiles / Jeremy Bernstein.
Description: Second edition. | New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019035270 (print) | LCCN 2019035271 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190056865 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190056889 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190056872 (updf)
Subjects: LCSH: Quantum theory. | Physicists—Interviews. |
Physicists—Biography.
Classification: LCC QC174. 12 .B464 2020 (print) | LCC QC174. 12 (ebook) |
DDC 530. 12092/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035270
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035271

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
 Contents

Foreword vii
1. John Stewart Bell 1
2. John Wheeler 75
3. Albert Einstein 115
4. Wendell Furry 131
5. Philipp Frank 139
6. J. Robert Oppenheimer 150
7. Victor Weisskopf 160
8. Tom Lehrer 163
9. Max Jammer 169
10. Robert Serber 190

Notes 195
Index 199
 Foreword

Three of the profiles in this second edition appeared in modified form in the
1991 edition of this book. The John Wheeler profile was done at the request of
the Princeton Alumni Weekly and appeared in a much shorter version in that
publication on October 9, 1985. A profile of Besso appeared in a modified
version in the New Yorker on February 27, 1989. I wrote the profile of John
Stewart Bell with the New Yorker in mind, but it was not published there, and
I took this opportunity to rewrite it. Most of the rest of this book has never
been published.
Quantum Profiles
 1
John Stewart Bell

John Stewart Bell and the author.

I would like to thank Tullio Basaglia of CERN for supplying the photo.

In 1902, the Olympia Academy was founded in Bern, Switzerland. It had

three members: Maurice Solovine, Conrad Habicht, and Albert Einstein.
Solovine, a young student, had answered a newspaper advertisement of-
fering private tutoring in physics by Einstein for three Swiss francs an hour,
while Habicht, who was studying mathematics with the idea of becoming a
secondary-​school teacher, already knew Einstein. The three young men had
regular evening “Academy” meetings over the next three years, at which they
studied philosophy and discussed physics. Solovine recalled having eaten
2 Quantum Profiles

caviar in his parents’ home in Romania, and on one of Einstein’s birthdays, he

and Habicht treated Einstein to some expensive caviar, which he had never
tasted. As luck would have it, that was the evening Einstein was scheduled to
talk to the “Academy” about Galileo Galilei’s principle of inertia. He became
so absorbed that he ate all the caviar without realizing what he was eating.
In 1905, the group broke up when Habicht and Solovine left Bern.
However, they began corresponding almost at once, and in one of his ear-
liest letters to Habicht, written in the spring of 1905, Einstein described his
program of research for the year in the sort of cheerful tone one might use to
describe a little light reading. It was, however, this research program that laid
the foundations of twentieth-​century physics. He wrote:

I promise you four papers . . . the first . . . deals with radiation and energy
characteristics of light and is very revolutionary. . . . The second work is a
determination of the true size of the atom from the diffusion and viscosity
of dilute solutions of neutral substances. The third proves that assuming
the molecular theory of heat, bodies whose dimensions are of the order of
1/​1000 mm, and are suspended in fluids, should experience measurable
disordered motion, which is produced by thermal motion. It is the motion
of small inert particles that has been observed by physiologists, and called
by them “Brown’s molecular motion.” The fourth paper exists in first draft
and is an electrodynamics of moving bodies employing a modification of
the doctrine of space and time; the purely kinematical part of this work will
certainly interest you.

What is striking about this list—​apart from the fact that it was compiled by
a then totally unknown twenty-​six-​year-​old physicist—​is that the first paper
announces, it turns out, the invention of the quantum, while the last paper
announces the invention of the theory of relativity, and of the two, it is only
the former that is in the young Einstein’s view “revolutionary.”
The theory of the light quantum, which Einstein initiated in 1905 and
which is with us still, is certainly the most revolutionary development in
the history of physics and arguably in the history of science. The creators
of the theory, men such as Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin
Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Dirac, were often struck by the ap-
parent “absurdity”—​the utterly noncommonsensical aspects—​of the world
depicted by quantum theory. Long after he had done his seminal work,
Heisenberg recalled that
 John Stewart Bell 3

an intensive study of all questions concerning the interpretation of

quantum theory in Copenhagen finally led to a complete and, as many
physicists believe, satisfactory clarification of the situation. But it was not a
solution which one could easily accept. I remember discussions with Bohr
which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in
despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the
neighboring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can
nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?

Unlike some of the other great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth

century—​in art, music, literature—​until recently, at least, this one was not
widely known, let alone understood, by the general public. Many physicists
realized this, and a few of them tried to do something about it. For example,
in 1953, J. Robert Oppenheimer delivered a very successful series of Reith
Lectures over the BBC about subatomic physics. In one of them, he char-
acterized the epoch of the discovery of quantum theory as follows: “It was
a time of earnest correspondence and hurried conferences, of debate, criti-
cism, and brilliant mathematical improvisation.” And then he added, with
a touch of the baroque eloquence of which he was a master, “For those who
participated, it was a time of creation; there was terror as well as exaltation
in their new insight. It will probably not be recorded very completely as his-
tory. As history, its recreation would call for an art as high as the story of
Oedipus or the story of Cromwell, yet in a realm of action so remote from
our common experience that it is unlikely to be known to any poet or any
historian.”
Oppenheimer died in 1967, and while there has not yet arisen “an art
as high as the story of Oedipus,” in the last few years, quantum theory has,
much to the surprise of most physicists, entered into the popular culture.
Fiction writers now cite, rightly or wrongly, the Heisenberg uncertainty prin-
ciple as a basis for theories of literature. A New York Times book review said
approvingly of a novelist that “she knows enough about Heisenberg to realize
that the act of observation alters the object observed; or in literary terms,
telling the story alters the story being told.” Tom Stoppard’s play Hapgood
turns on the uncertainty principle; the printed text is preceded by a quote on
the quantum theory of Richard Feynman. Even otherwise sober and non-​
science-​oriented magazines such as the Economist have felt an obligation
to alert their readers that something odd has happened in physics. In a fea-
ture article in its January 7, 1989, issue titled “The Queerness of Quanta,” the
4 Quantum Profiles

Economist notes that “many of this century’s most familiar technologies come
with an odd intellectual price on their heads. The equations of quantum me-
chanics explain the behaviour of sub-​atomic particles in nuclear reactors and
of electrons in computers and television tubes, the movement of laser light in
fibre-​optic cables and much else. Yet quantum mechanics itself appears ab-
surd.” Among the “absurdities,” the following are offered: “There are no such
things as ‘things.’ Objects are ghostly, with no definite properties (such as
position or mass) until they are measured. The properties exist in a twilight
state of ‘super-​position’ until then.”
“All particles are waves, and waves are particles, appearing as one sort or
another depending on what sort of measurement is being performed.”
Then, “A particle moving between two points travels all possible paths be-
tween them simultaneously.”
And finally, “Particles that are millions of miles apart can affect each other
instantaneously.”
While most physicists would find these capsule descriptions of the
quantum theory caricatural, there is enough truth in them to explain why
people who seem to have an aversion to more conventional science are
drawn to quantum theory. Quantum theory has become the basis of the
New Age outlook, with its emphasis on Eastern religions and holistic med-
icine. This surely would have astonished Oppenheimer, who, incidentally,
studied Sanskrit so that he could read the Upanishads in the original. Books
such as Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters—​quantum theory with a
dash of Eastern mysticism—​abound, and no ashram, at least no Western
one, can afford to be without its resident expert. In a health-​food store in
Greenwich Village, I came across an announcement in the I Am News of the
Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York, which, under the heading “Quantum
Dynamics,” read, “Spiritual Purification Program: Includes meditation, fire
ceremony, rebirthing, sweat lodge and Quantum Dynamics initiation for
those who haven’t had it; includes breathing techniques and mantra to dis-
solve upsets. This weekend we will work with Quantum Dynamics to dis-
solve past life karma all the way back to original cause.”
Pace Robert Oppenheimer
Although it is always somewhat dangerous to look for the cause of a com-
plex sociological phenomenon in a single event, nonetheless, I believe that
a case can be made for the proposition that the present widespread interest
in quantum theory can be traced to a single paper with the nontransparent
title “On the Einstein-​Podolsky-​Rosen Paradox,” which was written in 1964
 John Stewart Bell 5

by the then-​thirty-​four-​year-​old Irish physicist John Stewart Bell. It was

published in the obscure journal Physics, which expired after a few issues.
Bell’s paper was, as it happens, published in its first issue. Bell, who began
work in 1960 at CERN, the gigantic elementary-​particle physics laboratory
near Geneva, used to claim that his paper involved only the use of “high
school mathematics”; however, its six pages are dense with an extremely ab-
stract set of arguments, which even professionals in the field must work hard
to understand. In fact, for several years after its publication, few, if any, pro-
fessional physicists bothered to try.
This changed dramatically in 1969, when it was realized that “Bell’s the-
orem” (or “Bell’s inequality,” as it is often called) could actually be tested in
the laboratory. What was at stake in such a test was nothing less than the
meaning and validity of quantum theory. If Bell’s inequality was satisfied, it
would mean that all of Einstein’s intuitions about the essential incompleteness
of quantum theory had been right all along. If the inequality was violated, it
would mean—​at least, many physicists believe—​that Bohr and Heisenberg
had been right all along and that no return to classical physics was possible.
By the early 1970s, such experiments were actually being carried out. They
still are. With a few exceptions—​glitches, one thinks—​all these experiments
show that Einstein was wrong. It was these experimental results that caused a
new generation of physicists to confront just how peculiar and counterintu-
itive quantum mechanics really is. It is this realization that is being reflected
in the growing popular interest in the theory.
I knew John Bell for more than thirty years. When his tenure had just begun
at CERN, in 1960, I had begun a series of visits to the laboratory. During that
time, I talked to Bell about many things but very little either about his life or
about his work in quantum mechanics. I also got to know his wife, Mary, who
was also a physicist at CERN. The Bells, while charming company when one
got to know them, tended to be very private people, keeping pretty much to
themselves. “Mary and I are rather unsociable,” Bell once remarked to me in
his lilting Irish brogue. (“Mathematics” is pronounced something like “mah-​
thah-​mahtics,” and “now” comes out sounding something like “nae.” Mary
Bell is Scottish and has a fine burr. “Girl” sounds something like “gurrrle.”)
Bell had a dry wit, and one had to pay attention when he spoke to see that he
was not teasing. The Bells had no children but gave the impression of taking
great and constant pleasure in each other’s company.
I am quite sure that Bell would have been most willing to discuss his ideas
about quantum theory if I had asked, but somehow I never did. I had, in fact,
6 Quantum Profiles

never tried to read Bell’s 1964 article. But with all the mounting interest in the
subject, I decided that I had been missing out on something and that I would
educate myself. This process was aided no end when Bell sent me a copy of his
book—​his collected papers on quantum theory, published in 1987 under the
title Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. It contains twenty-​
two essays, including his 1964 paper. Some of the essays are addressed to
the educated layperson, including a celebrated one written in 1981 and with
the unlikely title “Bertlmann’s Socks and the Nature of Reality.” (Reinhold
Bertlmann is a real person.) I quote the opening paragraph because it is illus-
trative of Bell’s style:

The philosopher in the street, who has not suffered a course in quantum
mechanics, is quite unimpressed by Einstein-​Podolsky-​Rosen correlations.
He can point out many examples of similar correlations in everyday life. The
case of Bertlmann’s socks is often cited. Dr. Bertlmann likes to wear socks
of different colours. Which sock he will have on a given foot on a given
day is quite unpredictable. But when you see that the first sock is pink you
can be already sure that the second sock will not be pink. Observation of
the first, and experience of Bertlmann gives immediate information about
the second. There is no accounting for tastes, but apart from that there is
no mystery here. And is not the [Einstein-​Podolsky-​Rosen] business just
the same?

That it is not—​a fact that brings us deep into the mysteries of quantum
theory—​is the subject of the rest of this chapter and most of the other
chapters in this book.
Bell always talked over his ideas with Mary, and at the end of the preface,
he wrote: “In the individual papers I have thanked many colleagues for their
help. But here I renew very especially my warm thanks to Mary Bell. When
I look through these papers again I see her everywhere.”
Having studied the collection and an equally rewarding one titled
Quantum Theory and Measurement, edited by physicists John Wheeler and
Wojciech Zurek, I felt that I finally understood enough about the subject to
at least carry on a sensible dialogue with Bell. I thought I would also use the
opportunity to find out something about his and Mary’s lives. The odd twists
of fate that determine the lives of young scientists have always fascinated
me, and I could not imagine what circumstances had brought the Bells from
Ireland and Scotland to Geneva.
 John Stewart Bell 7

Bell had a very busy schedule, but we finally agreed upon a week in
January. For a skier, this is an especially happy time to visit CERN, which
is less than a half hour from the ski runs in the Jura. I did not think there
would be much chance to persuade the Bells to go skiing on their lunch
hours, since I knew that both of them had given up downhill skiing in
favor of cross-​country some years earlier. They owned a modest apart-
ment in Champéry, a ski resort not far from Geneva, where they could
cross-​country ski in peace. But I thought I would spend alternate lunch
hours downhill skiing in the Jura and eating in one of the CERN cafeterias
with the Bells. As the plane landed in Geneva, I saw that the Jura was
brown—​hardly a trace of snow. It later turned out that there was no skiing
at all.
An informal tradition had developed at the laboratory, according to which
“aristocrats” like theoreticians ate lunch late. one o’clock or so, while the more
“plebeian” members of staff ate earlier. The Bells traditionally had lunch
promptly at 11:45 and ate with the same small group consisting of, among
others, a Dutch computer expert and a Norwegian in charge of laboratory
safety. Both Bells were vegetarians, Mary since childhood and John since the
age of sixteen. Since there was, at least in the past, no particular provision
for vegetarian diets in the CERN cafeterias, Mary Bell would usually arrive
at lunch with a satchel of fresh vegetables, which she and John would share.
There is also the very pleasant tradition at CERN of after-​lunch espresso
in the large lounge next to the main cafeteria or outside on the patio, from
which one has a view of Mont Blanc, if the weather is nice. Gossip after lunch
is another tradition at CERN.
CERN is located on the French border, a few miles from Geneva. When
I first went there, it was entirely in Switzerland. As the giant elementary-​
particle accelerators that are the main business of CERN got larger and larger,
the terrain of the laboratory spilled over into France. The tunnels that con-
tain the evacuated pipes in which the beams of elementary particles run cross
the border in several places. At the time of my visit in 1989, it had reached a
kind of apotheosis in an accelerator called the LEP (Large Electron-​Positron
Collider), whose construction was begun in 1981. By the time it was turned
on in the summer of 1989, it had cost about a billion Swiss francs (nearly
three-​quarters of a billion US dollars), which was provided by the thirteen
European member states that ran CERN at the time (that number is now
twenty-​three). The LEP tunnel had a radius of twenty-​seven kilometers. The
tunnel contained electrons and their antiparticles, positrons, streaming in
8 Quantum Profiles

opposite directions. From time to time, the beams collide, and the results
were then the highest-​energy electron and positron collisions ever observed.
Because of all this activity, the character of the laboratory had changed
dramatically from what I remember of my first visit nearly thirty years earlier.
This was not so long after World War II, and the European community had
not yet rebuilt its scientific establishment; indeed, CERN was conceived to
accelerate that process. Those days are long past. The Large Hadron Collider
superseded the electron-​positron collider. It was turned on in 2008 and
among other things was responsible for the discovery of the Higgs boson.
While there was an enormous amount of construction at CERN by the
time of my visit in 1989, the theoreticians still occupied part of the same
compact-​looking four-​story building that they were in when I first went
there. I had no trouble finding Bell’s office, the same one I had been stopping
in, on and off, for several decades. Like the rest of the laboratory, the theo-
retical division—​TH, as it is called—​had undergone an almost exponential
expansion. When I had first been there, the entire division, including visitors
like myself, consisted of something like thirty people. In 1989, there were
about a hundred and forty.
The signs on Bell’s door read “J. Bell” and “M. Bell.” I knocked and was
invited in by Bell. He looked about the same as he had the last time, a couple of
years earlier. He had long, neatly combed red hair and a pointed beard, which
made him a somewhat Shavian figure. On one wall of the office was a pho-
tograph of Bell with something that looked like a halo behind his head, and
his expression in the photograph was mischievous. Theoretical physicists’
offices run the gamut from chaotic clutter to obsessive neatness; the Bells’
were somewhere in between. Bell invited me to sit down after warning me
that the “visitor’s chair” tilted backward at unexpected angles. When I had
mastered it and had a chance to look around, the first thing that struck me
was the absence of Mary.
“Mary,” said Bell, with a note of some disbelief in his voice, “has retired.”
This, it turned out, had occurred not long before my visit. “She will not look
at any mathematics now. I hope she comes back,” he went on almost plain-
tively. “I need her. We are doing several problems together.”
In recent years, the Bells had been studying new quantum-​mechanical
effects that would become relevant for the generation of particle
accelerators that succeeded the LEP. John had begun his career as a pro-
fessional physicist by designing accelerators, and Mary had spent her en-
tire career in accelerator design. A few years earlier, John Bell, like the rest
 John Stewart Bell 9

of the members of the CERN theory division, had been asked to list his
physics specialty. Among the more “conventional” entries in the division,
such as “superstrings,” “weak interactions,” “cosmology,” and the like, Bell’s
read “quantum engineering.”
Bell thought we would be more comfortable in our discussions if we found
a larger office. It turned out that the one next to his was temporarily free.
Mary, he told me, would be glad to talk to me over the phone if I had some-
thing I wanted to ask her. We settled into the new office, and I asked if he
would mind telling me a bit about his early life and how he got into physics.
“I was born on July 28, 1928, in Belfast,” he began. “My parents were poor
but honest. Both of them came from the large families of eight or nine that
were traditional of the working-​class people of Ireland at that time. Both
sides of the family have been in Northern Ireland for many generations. But
we are from the Protestant tribe—​the British side—​so the real Irish people
regard us as colonists.”
I was curious, as I always am, about whether there had been any scien-
tific or academic tradition in his family. He thought a moment and replied,
“As far as I know, until the present generation, there was none. The kind of
professions I had heard about in the family were carpenters, blacksmiths,
laborers, farmworkers, and horse dealers. My father’s first profession was
horse dealer. He stopped going to school at the age of eight—​his parents paid
fines from time to time for that. He learned how to buy and sell horses in-
stead. The nearest I heard of anyone in my family being educated was my
mother’s half brother. He was a village blacksmith, but he taught himself
something about electricity at a time when not many people knew about
electricity. I was the only one of my siblings who reached high school. I have
an older sister and two younger brothers, and they left school at about the
age of fourteen. The normal thing would have been for me to get a job when
I reached fourteen.”
Encouraged by his mother, Bell applied for financial help to go to sec-
ondary school. At the time, there was no universal system of free secondary
education in Britain. That would come a bit later with the Labor govern-
ment. “I sat many examinations,” Bell recalled, “for the more prestigious sec-
ondary schools, hoping for scholarships, but I didn’t win any.” Some money
did appear—​Bell was not sure from where—​so that he was able to attend the
Belfast Technical High School, the least expensive. Bell remembered it with
great affection. He did courses in bricklaying, carpentry, and bookkeeping,
along with the more conventional curriculum.
10 Quantum Profiles

Unlike many prominent theoretical physicists I have asked, Bell does not
have any early memories of scientific or mathematical precocity. He did,
however, recall that at the age of fourteen, he began a brief phase of reading
Greek philosophers. “I was a bookish sort of child, much in the local public
libraries. I was hostile to the idea of sports,” he said, laughing. “I regret it now.
I’ve grown up to be a seven-​stone weakling. I was, you know, brought up in
the Church of Ireland. I was even confirmed by a bishop. But in my adoles-
cent years, I began to wonder if it was really true what they told you. Does
God exist? Questions like that. So, like many children, I started looking for
answers. One place to look, I thought, was philosophy. I was reading thick
books on Greek philosophy. But very soon I became disillusioned with phi-
losophy. I found that the business of the ‘good’ philosophers seemed mainly
to refute the ‘bad’ philosophers. There didn’t seem to be much else. The next-​
best thing seemed to be physics. Although physics does not address itself to
the ‘biggest’ questions, still it does try to find out what the world is like. And
it progresses. One generation builds on the work of another instead of simply
overturning it. In my secondary school, I was already beginning to get some
idea that nature respects laws, like Newton’s laws of motion. I remember a
big disappointment when we started our course in Newtonian mechanics.
It was in a room with models of steam engines all around. The teacher said,
‘Next time, we are going to play with the machines.’ I thought he meant the
steam engines. But it turned out that he meant things like levers. It was a great
disappointment.”
Because of the cost, the only university Bell could have considered going
to after graduating from high school was Queen’s University in Belfast. But
Bell had graduated from high school at sixteen, and the university would not
admit anyone before the age of seventeen. So Bell looked for work. “I ap-
plied to be office boy in a small factory,” he recalled, “some starting job at the
BBC—​things like that. But I didn’t get any of the jobs I applied for. One told
me that I was overqualified; another didn’t tell me anything. It may be that
I was resisting presenting myself as if I really wanted a job. I really wanted
to continue on to the university, and the job I finally did get was in the uni-
versity.” It turned out that a laboratory assistant was needed in the physics
department, and Bell got that job. “It was a tremendous thing for me,” he
said, “because there I met, already, my future professors. They were very kind
to me. They gave me books to read, and in fact, I did the first year of my col-
lege physics when I was cleaning out the lab and setting out the wires for the
students.”
 John Stewart Bell 11

Among the professors who were especially helpful to him that year, Bell
remembered Karl Emeleus and Peter Paul Ewald. Emeleus gave him two
books to read: the classic freshman physics text Mechanics, Molecular Physics,
Heat and Sound by Millikan, Roller, and Watson and an odd Victorian text on
electricity and magnetism titled Elements of Electricity by the British physi-
cist J. J. Thomson. It was Thomson who in 1897 had identified the first sub-
atomic particle, the electron. He measured its charge and mass, and for this
work he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906. His work seemed to show that
the electron was a particle, a motelike billiard ball. Thomson was still alive
when his son, G. P. Thomson, shared the 1937 Nobel Prize with C. Davisson
for their independent experimental discoveries in the late 1920s that the elec-
tron can also act like a wave, one of the mysteries of the quantum theory. In
any event, Bell found the senior Thomson’s book exceedingly difficult. While
its donor, Professor Emeleus, was a rather formal character, Ewald, a very
distinguished crystallographer who, in Bell’s words, “had been washed up on
the shores of Ireland after the Nazis forced him to emigrate from Germany,”
was just the opposite. “He’d discuss anything,” Bell noted. “He even declared
that one of his assistants was mad.”
By the time Bell graduated from Queen’s University in 1949, he had de-
cided to make a career in theoretical physics. Ewald suggested that he con-
tinue his studies in graduate school with Rudolf—​later Sir Rudolf—​Peierls
in Birmingham. Peierls was a physicist with an extraordinary breadth of
interests. There is almost no branch of modern theoretical physics in which
he had not made some very significant contribution. He was also a great
teacher. While he was in Birmingham, several generations of young theoret-
ical physicists came there to study with him. Some, like Freeman Dyson, even
lived in the Peierlses’ house. Bell would have liked nothing better than to have
gone off to Peierls, except, as he put it, “By that time I had a very bad con-
science about having lived off my parents for so long [Bell had lived at home
while he was in college], and I thought I should get a job. So I did get a job,
at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. There I went, and
I found myself soon sent off to a substation at Malvern in Worcestershire.”
Bell was now twenty-​one. While he returned to Ireland regularly to see his
family (and in June 1988, in a single week, he was awarded honorary degrees
from Queen’s University in Belfast, his alma mater, and from Trinity College
in Dublin), he never did return to live in Ireland.
In the meantime, by an equally serendipitous route, Mary Bell had also
arrived in Malvern. Mary Ross was born in Glasgow into what Bell called
12 Quantum Profiles

a “slightly more bookish family than my own.” Her father began as a clerk
in a shipyard and finally became a commercial manager specializing in the
commerce of wood. Her mother was an elementary-​school teacher. Unlike
John, Mary Bell recalled being especially fond of arithmetic problems as a
child. Fortunately, as it turned out, the school she went to—​a comprehen-
sive school with grades from elementary school through high school—​was
coeducational, which meant it offered a physics course. “With girls alone,”
she told me, “there very likely would not have been physics—​other sciences
but not physics.” She did very well in school and, as her husband was fond of
reminding her, won many prizes for “general excellence.” In 1941, she won a
bursary competition, which enabled her to go to the University of Glasgow,
where she majored in mathematics and physics. “It was during the war,” she
reminded me, “and we all had to take courses in radio, circuits, and the like.
At the end of my third year, I was drafted to work in the radar lab at Malvern,
where, I must say, I didn’t do a lot.” After the war ended, she finished her de-
gree in Glasgow and was, like John, hired by the Atomic Energy Research
Establishment and soon sent to Malvern, where she joined the same acceler-
ator design group that had hired John.
As it happened, the Bells’ arrival in the accelerator group at Malvern
more or less coincided with a revolutionary breakthrough in the design of
accelerators, known as the principle of strong focusing, which was invented
in the United States by Ernest Courant, M. Stanley Livingston, and Hartland
Snyder and independently by a Greek physicist-​inventor named Nicholas
Christofilos. A beam of charged particles that is being guided around the in-
terior of an accelerator by electric and magnetic fields tends to try to “get
away.” Unless it is focused by these fields, the beam squirts off uncontrol-
lably in all directions. For a while, it appeared that this problem would be
insurmountable for the new generation of machines being designed for the
1950s. But, as has happened so often in the accelerator business, there was
an unexpected discovery that salvaged the situation. In this case, Courant,
Livingston, and Snyder realized that if one used suitably varying electric and
magnetic fields, rather than steady ones, as had previously been used to con-
fine the beam, stability could be achieved. John Bell told me that prior to this
discovery, a few designs had been generated in computer simulations that
seemed to exhibit stability, but no one understood why.
Bell very quickly became an expert on the mathematics of strong focusing.
He is best known among theoretical physicists for his abstruse work on the
theory of elementary particles and quantum mechanics, so he was very
 John Stewart Bell 13

pleased to have in his curriculum vitae such “engineering” items as “Stability

of Perturbed Orbits in the Synchrotron,” written in 1954. (Synchrotron is the
generic term for the kind of accelerator that uses strong focusing.) As young
as he was, Bell became a consultant to the British delegation that was begin-
ning the design studies that would lead, in 1959, to the construction of the
first accelerator at CERN—​the so-​called Proton Synchrotron. It was a land-
mark in postwar European science, as it was the first major scientific project
carried out after the war by the European community as a whole. Bell began
consulting for the project in 1952. That, as it happened, was also the year he
got an unexpected job bonus—​“a bolt from the blue,” as he put it. It turned
out that the Atomic Energy Research Establishment had the very enlight-
ened policy of selecting some of their young people and sending them back
to the universities for a year’s study. “It was proposed to me,” Bell recalled,
still with a tone of surprise. “It didn’t come from me, that I might go back to
university for a year. And so I said, ‘Fine,’ and off I went to Birmingham, and
there I became a quantum field theorist.” In the meantime, the Bells had both
moved from Malvern to Harwell and had gotten married.
John went off to Birmingham, and Mary remained at Harwell. “Our mar-
riage was a thing of weekends for a while,” he noted. In the British system at
the time, there was in each department a single “professor” who functioned
essentially as the chairman of the department. Peierls was the professor of
theoretical physics at Birmingham, and he assigned the young people who
came to work with him both problems to work on and junior members of
the faculty to work with. Bell, having already worked as a professional phys-
icist for three years, was somewhat older than the rest of the students. After
noting that he did not intend to treat him as a “beginner,” Peierls suggested a
general area for Bell to look into and assigned him an adviser, a young British
theorist named Paul Matthews. It was not clear whether the work was meant
to lead to a degree or even if a second year was possible. “I just didn’t open up
that question,” Bell told me. “I thought a year was fine. I thought I was very
lucky to get it. I just accepted that.”
Within a few months, Bell discovered a very deep theorem in quantum
field theory known as the TCP theorem. In this acronym, T stands for time
reversal, C for charge conjugation, and P for parity. These are quantum-​
mechanical symmetries. The theorem states that the combined operation of
these symmetries is a valid one even in theories where the individual sym-
metries may break down. It implies, among other things, that particles and
antiparticles, such as electrons and positrons, have the same mass.
14 Quantum Profiles

“Unfortunately for me,” Bell explained, “when I was writing that up, there
appeared not just a preprint but a reprint from Gerhard Lüders, who had
made the same discovery. So I was a year behind him. [Lüders’s work was
later generalized by Wolfgang Pauli and is often referred to as the Lüders-​
Pauli theorem.] And I cannot exclude that there was some garbled rumor of
Lüders’s work that had reached Birmingham and that Peierls had asked me
to look into that. Anyway, I thought I could make a paper out of my stuff and
also part of a thesis.”
When his year was up, Bell returned to Harwell to a new group that
had been formed to do fundamental research in areas such as elementary-​
particle physics. Bell was able to do a second problem, which completed his
thesis. “From time to time,” he explained to me, “I had a remark to make to
my old accelerator group. Mary was still there. I hadn’t given much thought
to my future. When I went to Harwell at the age of twenty-​one, I already had
a tenure position. I didn’t have to worry about anything. I just went along.
So long as I was happy, I didn’t think of going anywhere. But towards the
end of the fifties I began feeling uncomfortable because there was a growing
soul-​searching at Harwell. What was that establishment supposed to be
doing? They were not supposed to be doing nuclear weapons, though I be-
lieve now that there was some weapons work going on. Harwell had been
set up to develop peaceful uses of atomic energy, but by that time, the nu-
clear power stations had already been built, and other, more applied-​research
establishments had grown up to do that kind of work. Harwell had sort of lost
its sense of direction. Although I was in a very particular corner of Harwell,
doing relatively fundamental work, this malaise was felt everywhere. It also
began to look as if the fundamental research would be one of the things that
would disappear in a reorientation of the establishment. So I started to think
about going somewhere else.” The “somewhere else” was CERN.
CERN—​ which stands for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche
Nucleaire—​had its formal beginnings in 1954. It was in 1989 a consortium of
thirteen member states: Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, Denmark, France,
Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and
West Germany. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union is a member,
although both Americans and Soviets work in the laboratory. No classified
work of any kind is done at CERN. In 1953, a referendum was held by the
canton of Geneva, and voters ratified the decision of the Swiss government
to give the nascent laboratory its site near the border. From the beginning,
it was decided that CERN would have only a very small permanent staff of
 John Stewart Bell 15

physicists compared with the visitors. For example, in the theory division,
which consisted in 1989, the time of my visit, of about a hundred and forty
people, less than 10 percent were staff members. Typically, a staff member is
offered a three-​year contract with the understanding that as a rule, a second
three-​year contract will be offered. Sometime during those six years, a deci-
sion is made about whether the staff member will be offered one of the few
jobs with unlimited tenure.
There did not seem to be any university in Britain that could accommo-
date both Mary Bell’s interests in accelerator design and John Bell’s growing
commitment to research in elementary-​particle physics. CERN seemed
ideal, except that they would be giving up the security of John’s tenured job
for three-​year contracts. “I am amazed,” he commented, “at how easily we left
a tenured situation at Harwell and went to an untenured one. I remember
that Mary’s parents were a bit worried, but neither of us was worried. When
we first got here in 1960, they already had the tradition that new people were
more or less ignored and that you had to find your way to other people. Of
course, when I first showed up in the theory division, they shook my hand
and said, ‘Welcome,’ but after that, they left me alone. Nobody was coming
into my office or anything. I got quite lonely for the first months. It’s my un-
derstanding that newcomers here can still feel like this for the first months.
From time to time, we think that we must do something about it, and we have
tried various schemes. But the trouble is that the staff members who are here
are already so saturated that it is not easy to cold-​bloodedly say I must go
and spend time with this person because he or she is new. In any case, Mary
and I settled into Geneva very easily. We got to know people we work with in
CERN, and we didn’t try to get to know many other people. So the fact that
we were surrounded by Swiss rather than English and that they spoke French
wasn’t very important to us. And of course, we were very happy with the new
landscape around here. While we liked being in Berkshire, where Harwell
is—​there are a lot of beautiful things in Berkshire—​the novelty of the high
mountains here pleased us very much.” Except for a very occasional sabbat-
ical leave, the Bells had not left Geneva since 1960.
I once asked Bell whether during the years he was studying quantum
theory it ever occurred to him that the theory might simply be wrong. He
thought a moment and answered, “I hesitated to think it might be wrong, but
I knew that it was rotten.” Bell pronounced the word rotten with a good deal
of relish and then added, “That is to say, one has to find some decent way of
expressing whatever truth there is in it.”
16 Quantum Profiles

The attitude that even if there is not something actually wrong with the
theory, there is something deeply unsettling—​rotten—​about it was common
to most of the creators of quantum theory. Bohr was reported to have
remarked, “Well, I think that if a man says it is completely clear to him these
days, then he has not really understood the subject.” He later added, “If you
do not get schwindlig [dizzy] sometimes when you think about these things
then you have not really understood it.”
My teacher Philipp Frank used to tell about the time he visited Einstein
in Prague in 1911. Einstein had an office at the university that overlooked
a park. People were milling around in the park, some engaged in vehement
gesture-​filled discussions. When Professor Frank asked Einstein what was
going on, Einstein replied that it was the grounds of a lunatic asylum, adding,
“Those are the madmen who do not occupy themselves with the quantum
theory.”
Max Planck, whom one may consider either the father or the grandfather
of quantum theory, depending on one’s analysis of the history, was hardly a
“lunatic.” He was a conservative German, in the best sense of the term, from
an ancient family of scholars, public servants, and lawyers. His father was a
professor of law at Kiel, where Planck was born in 1858. Planck died in 1947,
having lived with dignity in Germany during the Nazi regime. His son Erwin
was executed by the Nazis after he took part in the July 1944 plot against
Hitler.
What appealed to Planck about physics was the possibility of finding abso-
lute laws that would retain their meaning, as he once wrote, “for all times and
all cultures.” One such law appeared to be the one governing what is known
as black-​body or cavity radiation. A so-​called black body can be made with a
hollow, thin-​walled cylinder of some metal such as tungsten. The walls of the
cylinder are heated by, for example, passing an electric current through them.
Radiation is then produced from the heated walls, and it collects within the
hollow cylinder. If a small hole is drilled in the cylinder, enough of this ra-
diation gets out that one can measure its characteristics. (Incidentally, if the
cylinder is kept at room temperature, the hole looks perfectly black from the
outside, since any radiation falling into it is trapped inside the cylinder—​
hence the name black body.) In particular, black-​body radiation has a very
characteristic distribution of wavelengths—​colors. It turns out that this dis-
tribution depends only on the temperature to which the cylinder is heated
and not on the material of which the cylinder is made. Cavities made of, say,
tantalum or molybdenum will exhibit the same black-​body spectrum as
 John Stewart Bell 17

cavities made of tungsten, provided only that all the cavities are heated to the
same temperature. This was demonstrated theoretically in 1860 by Planck’s
teacher at the University of Berlin, Gustav Kirchoff, using the newly dis-
covered science of thermodynamics. He showed that if different materials
had different black-​body spectra, one could construct a kind of perpetual-​
motion machine by connecting the cavities together.
Kirchoff ’s result gave the black-​body spectrum the sort of absolute char-
acter that appealed to Planck. Moreover, in 1896, another German physicist,
Wilhelm Wien, produced a simple formula that seemed to agree with both
the thermodynamics and the empirical data. Planck set out to derive Wien’s
formula from something like first principles. Indeed, by 1899, he thought he
had found such a derivation. However, by October 1900, Planck realized that
his derivation was wrong. Furthermore, the Wien formula was beginning to
break down experimentally when confronted with new data that embraced
a wider range of wavelengths. Planck then made a sort of inspired guess re-
garding what the correct formula was, and no sooner had he announced it
than it was confirmed. He later wrote:

The very next morning I received a visit from my colleague Rubens. He

came to tell me that after the conclusion of the meeting [at which Planck
had presented his formula], he had that very night checked my formula
against the results of his measurements and found satisfactory concord-
ance at every point. . . . Later measurements, too, confirmed my radiation
formula again and again—the finer the methods of measurement used, the
more accurate the formula was found to be.

And so it has remained.

Planck tried to derive his formula. As he put it, “On the very day when
I first formulated this law, I began to devote myself to the task of investing it
with a real physical meaning.”
To understand what is at stake, we can imagine the walls of the black-​body
cavity as being made up of atoms that are set into oscillatory vibrations when
heated. These oscillators emit and absorb radiation, and when they emit as
much radiation as they absorb, an equilibrium situation is produced that is
precisely that of a black body. In classical physics, there are no restrictions
on how much energy an oscillator can emit or absorb in a single transaction;
there are no minimal units. What Planck discovered was that he could derive
his formula if he allowed the emission and absorption of radiation to take
18 Quantum Profiles

place only in discrete units—​lumps of energy. (The use of the term quanta
for these energy units was introduced by Einstein in 1905.) In Einstein’s
homey image, it was like selling beer from a keg in pint bottles. As historians
of science such as Thomas Kuhn have noted, the derivations Planck gave in
his papers of 1900 and 1901 are sufficiently obscure that one cannot be sure
whether Planck understood that he had made a radical new assumption or
whether he thought he was still doing classical physics.
Fortunately, Planck made an unjustified step in his derivation. If he
had done it conventionally, it would have led not to the Planck formula
(or to the Wien formula) but to the expression derived by Lord Rayleigh
in 1905 that classical physics inexorably predicts. This expression, called
the Rayleigh-​Jeans law because it was slightly amended by the British as-
trophysicist James Jeans, agrees with the Planck law for long wavelengths
but then leads to disaster. It predicts that the total energy in the cavity is
infinite, a nonsensical proposition that became known as the ultraviolet
catastrophe. In short, by 1905 it was clear, if only to Einstein, that classical
physics had broken down.
A hint of Einstein’s state of mind at this realization is contained in his letter
to Habicht that I quoted earlier. Of his 1905 papers, including the one on the
theory of relativity, which modified our notions of space and time, it is only
the paper on the black-​body spectrum that Einstein described as “revolu-
tionary.” We will shortly see why.
As in so many other aspects of physics, the quantitative attempts to study
the nature of light begin with Isaac Newton. Newton spent at least as much
time thinking about light as he did about gravitation; the same can be said
about Einstein, although both men are best known for their theories of grav-
itation. Newton believed that light was a particlelike projectile emitted by a
radiating object. In the English edition of his book Optiks, published in 1717,
he described rays of light as being composed of “very small Bodies emitted
from shining Substances.” However, to explain some of his observations, he
supplemented this simple particle picture with the notion that these particles
could incite wavelike disturbances in an all-​pervasive medium that became
known as the ether. These disturbances he called “Fits of easy Reflexion
and easy Transmission.” On the other hand, his less well-​known but al-
most equally great contemporary the Dutch physicist Christian Huygens,
maintained that light was nothing but a wave disturbance in the ether. He
worked out the mathematics of such wave propagation in a very sophisti-
cated way that is still used.
Another random document with
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 “He’s gone, precious,” was Mrs. Horton’s greeting when he pushed
back the curtain that hung between the two rooms. “Come and get
into bed with me a minute. Daddy was off at five o’clock this
morning. Breakfast? Yes, I made him nice hot coffee and toast. And
now I smell Harriet’s bacon. You and I had better hurry.”
While they were eating breakfast, a small nose was flattened
against the dining-room screen door.
“Is Sunny Boy there?” asked a voice. “Can he come out and play?
My cousin from Fenner is visiting us an’ we want to build a fort.”
“It’s Ellen,” said Sunny Boy. “Could I be ’scused, Mother? I ate all
my oatmeal an’ everything.”
“Where are you going to be?” asked Mrs. Horton, smiling at Ellen.
“When we come down on the beach a little later we want to be able
to find you. And Sunny Boy mustn’t go in the water unless an older
person is around.”
“No’m,” agreed Ellen obediently. “We can’t go in either, not till to-
morrow. Not even wading. We’ll play down at the edge of the old
pier. My mother is coming, too, by and by and she doesn’t like to
hunt for us, so we promised to stay right there.”
“All right then,” said Mrs. Horton. “Run along, Son. I’m sorry you
haven’t a shovel, but a clam shell answers very well. The first time I
go into town I’ll get you a pail and shovel.”
Sunny Boy found Ellen and Ralph and the cousin from Fenner
awaiting him on the sidewalk. The cousin was another boy, a freckle-
faced youngster with merry blue eyes and red hair.
“I’m going to help build it,” Ellen said, as the four walked down
toward the beach. “Always an’ always I just have to carry things and
sit on things to keep ’em from blowing away, and this time I want to
build.”
“All right, you may,” promised her brother. “First we have to find
Sunny a clam shell to dig with.”
The others were carrying pails and shovels, and Ellen had also a
set of sand dishes with which she could, as she explained to Sunny
Boy, make wonderful cakes and pies.
“Wet sand is the best,” she informed him, “but we’ll have to get
along with dry till your mother comes down. Then you and Stephen
can go wading and get us some water.”
Stephen was the cousin’s name.
As they climbed over the sand dunes and came out on the shining
sandy beach, a big black and white spotted dog came running up to
them.
“Hello, Queen!” said Ellen, putting her arms around the dog’s
neck. “Have you had any breakfast, dear?”
 CHAPTER IX
THE FORT BUILDERS

“I S that your dog?” Sunny Boy asked Ellen curiously.

“She isn’t anybody’s dog,” declared Ellen seriously. “At least,
not really. Queen did belong to Dr. Maynard over in the town, but she
learned to ride on the trolley cars, and now she won’t stay at home.
Every summer she’s down on the beach all day, playing.”
“But dogs get hungry,” protested Sunny. “An’ where can she
sleep?”
“She sleeps most anywhere,” said Ellen, who was spending her
third summer in Nestle Cove and really knew Queen very well
indeed. “Sometimes she sleeps on our front porch. And my mother
always feeds her if she acts hungry. All the people in the cottages
know Queen.”
“Here’s a shell for you, Sunny,” announced Ralph, who had been
running up the beach looking for one. “Let’s start the fort right here in
this corner. You mark how it goes, Stephen.”
Stephen knew all about forts. He had a big brother who was an
officer in the regular army, and he lived in forts, just as more ordinary
people live in houses.
“First you have a wall,” said Stephen. “You can begin on that,
Ellen. Oh, ’way off! There, that’s about right. And Sunny Boy and
Ralph and me will make a great big fort, big enough to get into.”
To measure the height of their fort, they used one of the old pilings
left from the pier that had burned and had never been rebuilt, and
then they began to heap up the sand. If Stephen had only known it,
what they were building looked far more like an Eskimo’s hut than it
did a fort, but that didn’t matter as long as the builders were satisfied.
 “Now what do you think of that?” Stephen stood off to admire their
work. “I wish Aunt Hallie would hurry up and come and see it.”
“Isn’t the wall nice?” asked Ellen, who had been working every
minute to finish her part of the task. “It’s just as smooth! Feel,
Stephen.”
“Yes, that’s great,” approved Stephen. “Want to see how it looks
inside, Sunny? Stoop down, and don’t hit your head anywhere, or
you’ll knock it down.”
Sunny Boy crawled carefully through the doorway of the fort. It
was hollowed out inside to make a little room. He was half way in
and half way out when he heard Ellen exclaim: “Look what Queen
has in her mouth! Do you suppose she got it out of the water?”
Sunny Boy crawled carefully through the doorway of the
fort
Page 119
 Sunny was curious to know what Queen had, and he attempted to
back out hastily to see. He forgot that the doorway wasn’t very high,
and when he stood up, bump! went his yellow head, and down about
him tumbled the sand fort.
“Now you’ve done it!” scolded Stephen, as Sunny Boy’s feet
waved wildly in the air. “Hurry up and dig, Ralph, he’ll choke!”
Ralph and Ellen dug frantically with clam shells and spades, but
they had dug a deeper hole than they knew, and Sunny Boy was
really buried under a heavy load of sand.
“Take the pail,” ordered Stephen, who was older than Ralph or
Ellen, and able to realize that Sunny Boy might be in danger. “Ellen,
you go and get—” Stephen shaded his eyes with his hand and
looked up the beach. “You go and get the life-saver’s rake,” he told
her.
Every morning, when the life-savers cleaned up the beach, they
used long-handled wooden rakes. Usually they put these away in
lockers under the pier, but Stephen’s quick eyes had seen a rake left
out to-day and thrust carelessly under the piling. The two life-savers
were far out beyond the breakers now, in a rowboat, watching the
bathers.
“I got it!” Ellen came racing back with the rake. “Let me rake Sunny
out, Stephen.”
“You’re too little. Let go,” said Stephen. He began to claw at the
sand fort vigorously.
“Here come Mother and Mrs. Horton,” announced Ellen, just as
Stephen and Ralph together succeeded in uncovering Sunny Boy.
Sunny Boy sat up, rather frightened and extremely uncomfortable.
There was sand in his yellow hair, sand in his eyes, and sand in his
mouth.
“Ugh!” he spluttered. “Ugh! I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t even
breathe!”
“Why, Sunny Boy, what happened to you?” asked his mother
wonderingly. “This is Ellen and Ralph’s mother, dear.”
 Mrs. Gray smiled down at Sunny. She was very tall and had gray
hair. Sunny Boy held out his hand to her.
“You got rather the worst of it, didn’t you?” she said to him. “I think
you must have pulled the sand house down upon you. But a swim
will fix you up. Your mother tells me you are going in to-day.”
“Aunt Bessie is waiting for you at the house,” Mrs. Horton told
Sunny Boy. “She and Aunt Betty are going in bathing this morning.
They’ll look after you. I mean to sit here and sew with Mrs. Gray and
watch you.”
Sunny Boy turned to trot off to the bungalow, but came back.
“What did Queen have?” he asked curiously.
“An orange,” answered Ellen promptly. “I guess she stole it from
some one’s lunch box.”
Aunt Bessie was sitting on the porch knitting, a raincoat thrown
over her bathing suit.
“I’m going in swimming with you, Aunt Bessie. Sha’n’t we have
fun? Where’s my bathing suit?” cried the excited Sunny Boy.
“Your mother left your suit in the house to the left,” she informed
her nephew. “Want any help, dear?”
“I can undress all right,” Sunny Boy reminded her reproachfully. “I
don’t take time ’cept when I’m getting dressed.”
Aunt Betty, it seemed, could “swim like a fish” as Aunt Bessie
admiringly admitted.
“Let her hold you, Sunny Boy,” she urged her little nephew. “You’ll
learn to swim right away if you’re not afraid.”
Sunny Boy wasn’t afraid, not the least bit. Aunt Betty said she
would teach him how to float first, and she carried him out to where
the water was smoother and put him on his back just as though she
were putting him down on his own soft bed.
“Just keep your head up a bit,” she told him. “Never mind if the
water does come over your chin—there. I won’t let go, I’m holding
you firmly, dear. Now isn’t that fun?”
Sunny Boy agreed that it was. He tried floating several times, and
then Aunt Betty carried him back to the beach and he sat down
comfortably and let the waves roll over him.
“You’re having a beautiful time,” said Mother’s voice behind him.
She had come up and he had not heard her footsteps in the soft
sand. “I want you to go in and get dressed now, dear. Why, you’re
getting sunburned already.”
Sunny Boy did not want to go in. He wanted to stay and play
longer in the water. He scuffled his bare feet impatiently, and a little
frown grew on his forehead.
“Why, Sunny Boy!” Mother’s voice was distinctly surprised. “Here
Daddy left you to look after me, and you make a fuss the very first
thing I ask you to do. What do you suppose he would say to that?”
“I’m going,” announced Sunny Boy, scrambling to his feet. “I’m
going this minute, Mother. Can I have a cracker?”
“‘May I have a cracker?’” corrected Mrs. Horton. “Well, just one.
We’re going to have an early lunch.”
“All right. Then I’ll tell Harriet just one cracker.”
Sunny Boy ran over the hot sand, up to the bathhouse, and
rubbed so hard with the rough towels that he was as dry and clean
as could be in the shortest possible time. He put on his sailor suit
and went to his room to brush his hair.
“Mother says I may have one cracker, please,” he reported to
Harriet, whom he found setting the table in the dining-room.
“’Tis a pink nose, you have,” Harriet told him frankly. “Never mind,
you’ll be brown as a berry before your father comes down Saturday.
Here’s your cracker now.”
Sunny Boy ran down again to the beach and had time to help
Ellen and Ralph build a schoolhouse in the sand before Mrs. Horton
and the two aunts—for Aunt Betty had not stayed in the water many
minutes after Sunny Boy came out—gathered up their magazines
and sewing and started back to the bungalow for lunch.
“Sunny Boy,” said Mother at the table—and, by the way, Sunny
Boy sat in Daddy’s place when he wasn’t there and tried his best to
behave as the man of the house should—“if you take a nap this
afternoon, you may sit up to-night for a couple of hours and go with
us down on the beach.”
Now, Sunny Boy was not fond of taking naps, and since his fifth
birthday he had been gradually skipping them, since Mother thought
that if a laddie went to bed early every night and was not cross
during the day he might manage nicely without sleeping in the
afternoon. A cross boy needed a nap—that was what Mother always
said.
“Well, Mother,” answered Sunny slowly, “I don’t feel sleepy—I don’t
suppose I could go ’less I took a nap?”
“No, indeed,” answered Mother. “No nap means you go to bed at a
quarter of seven as usual.”
“All right,” agreed Sunny Boy, with a long breath. “I’ll go and take a
nap.”
He went into his room very much like a soldier going to war. We’re
sorry to say he kicked off his shoes—one of them went flying across
the pretty room and landed on a chair and the other went under the
bed. Then, dressed as he was, Sunny flung himself on the bed.
“Can’t go to sleep right in the day-time,” he grumbled to himself.
“I’ll bet Ralph doesn’t take naps.”
But Sunny Boy didn’t know that plenty of salt air and an ocean
bath and much running about on a sandy beach can make a small
boy sleepy even against his will; in the middle of a big yawn, Sunny
went to sleep.
When he woke, he heard his mother moving about in the next
room. He felt hot and uncomfortable, the way one feels, you know,
when the eyes first open after a nap. When you’re a baby you cry,
but when you are older, if you don’t watch out, you’re cross. Sunny
Boy felt cross.
“Hello!” his mother lifted the door curtain and smiled at him. “I
heard you turn over, dear. Supper will be ready in a few minutes.”
Sunny Boy sat up in bed.
“Supper!” he echoed. “Why, Mother, is it night?”
“It’s nearly six,” Mrs. Horton told him. “You’ve had a fine long nap.
Now I’ll help you wash, dear, and when you get into a fresh suit you’ll
begin to feel happier. And then I’ll tell you what fun we are going to
have to-night.”
 CHAPTER X
THE MARSHMALLOW ROAST

“T ELL me now,” urged Sunny Boy, sitting down on the floor to put
on clean white socks. “Is Daddy coming?”
“I wish he were,” said Mrs. Horton quickly. “No, precious, we’ll
have to wait till Saturday for that. This is Aunt Bessie’s plan, and
we’ll let her explain it. There! slip on the tan sailor suit and I’ll tie your
tie, and then we shall be ready.”
Sunny Boy, looking as shining and neat as a brand new pin,
rushed ahead of Mother to find Aunt Bessie. She was in the porch
swing, and just as he reached her, Harriet rang the gong for supper.
“Hurry up, Auntie,” implored Sunny. “Mother says we are going to
have fun to-night. What is it? May I go? Is Harriet going?”
Aunt Bessie smiled.
“Of course you are going,” she assured him. “Didn’t you take a nap
so you could go to this party? We’re going to build a fire down on the
beach and toast marshmallows. What do you think of that?”
Sunny thought it sounded delightful.
“But Harriet’s toaster is broken,” he said doubtfully. “She can’t use
it, can she, Mother? Did you buy a new one, Auntie?”
“You wait till you see how we’ll do it,” answered Aunt Bessie gaily.
“We’ll find a way. Harriet is going to the movies in town to-night, and
we’ll toast our own marshmallows over our own fire. My goodness,
Olive, I never thought of the fire! Can we find enough dry wood?”
Mrs. Horton was sure there would be enough wood on the beach.
“Maybe Queen will come,” suggested Sunny Boy, who had grown
very fond of the wise, friendly dog. “I should think she’d be lonesome
at night.”
 “We’ll ask her to the marshmallow roast,” said Aunt Bessie kindly.
Soon after supper they all went down to the beach, Aunt Bessie
carrying a box of marshmallows, and Sunny the safety matches.
Mrs. Horton and Miss Martinson brought a rug to spread on the
sand.
“Let’s go up a way,” suggested Aunt Bessie, as they reached the
sand. “There’s a fine smooth stretch around that bend, and we can
sit and watch the water till it is darker.”
They found a place where the sand was dry but not too powdery,
and Mrs. Horton spread out the rug. For a little while no one spoke,
and Sunny Boy, his elbow in Mother’s lap, was content to count the
waves coming in and running back again as they did forever and
forever.
“Now look,” whispered Mother presently.
Away out to sea, apparently, a silver disc was rising. They could
see it grow larger and larger.
“It’s the moon,” said Sunny Boy.
“And now we’ll build our fire,” announced Aunt Bessie, rising. “I’ve
had my eye on that driftwood over there for the last half hour. Sunny
Boy and I will get it.”
Sunny Boy and Aunt Bessie carried over the wood, which proved
to be light, dry pieces and was once, Aunt Bessie said, probably
orange crates on some fruit steamer.
“Now we fold the paper under so,” said Auntie, when the wood
was ready. “You may light it, Sunny Boy. Stand back, dear. There!
isn’t that a splendid blaze? Oh, no, we don’t toast the marshmallows
yet! We have to wait for the fire to burn down to red-hot coals. You
watch.”
Sunny Boy watched.
“I think,” he said politely, “the fire’s going out.”
Aunt Bessie looked and laughed.
 “I think it is, too,” she admitted. “Maybe we didn’t use enough
paper.”
“Let me try,” said Mrs. Horton.
She folded more paper, arranged the wood, and touched a match
to the pile. The flames shot up, and in a moment or so they heard
the crackling that told them the wood had caught and would burn.
“Mother can do it,” said Sunny Boy proudly. “Where’s the pan,
Aunt Bessie?”
“Oh, lambie, we don’t want a pan,” protested Aunt Bessie. “See
these nice, clean sticks I’ve saved? Well, we put a marshmallow on
the end, so—and hold it out to the blaze, so—and then when it
begins to brown we eat it—so!” and Aunt Bessie held out a delicious,
creamy brown marshmallow to the interested Sunny Boy.
“Now let me try,” said Sunny Boy. “And the first one shall be for
Aunt Bessie, ’cause it’s her party.”
Sunny Boy put his marshmallow carefully on the pointed end of
the stick, then held it out over the fire. But poor Sunny Boy held the
candy too near the glowing coals, and it was burnt to a crisp.
“Oh!”
“Never mind, Sunny Boy,” said Mother. “The next one will be all
right. We don’t often get anything just right the first time.”
And the next one was plump and brown, and Aunt Bessie said it
tasted delicious.
“Where do you suppose Queen is?” asked Sunny Boy, toasting a
particularly fat marshmallow for his mother. “Maybe the fire scares
her.”
“No, I’ll tell you,” said Miss Martinson, pulling Sunny Boy back a
little from the fire. “I think Queen must have gone home with some of
the children to spend the night. She’s getting old, you know, and I
dare say the sand feels damp to her after the sun goes down.”
Whatever the reason, no Queen was seen by Sunny Boy that
night. He saved two candies for the dog in case she did come, but at
last he had to eat them himself.
They toasted marshmallows till all declared that not another one
could they eat, and then they covered the fire with sand. Not for
worlds would Sunny Boy have said a word about being sleepy, but
he had yawned several times when he thought no one saw him, and
he was secretly glad when Mother announced that they must go
home.
“I like staying up,” he declared, trotting along beside her through
the soft sand, while Aunt Bessie and Miss Martinson walked ahead.
“If I took a nap every day could I always stay up?”
“Oh, that wouldn’t be a good plan at all,” replied Mother seriously.
“All the naps you might take wouldn’t make up for the sleep you lost.
You’ll have years of nights to play and work in when you grow up,
precious. Nights were made for little boys to sleep in so they’ll grow
up big and strong.”
After they reached the bungalow, Mrs. Horton went in with Sunny
and helped him get ready for bed. After she had gone again, he lay
for a little while listening to the roar of the waves as they broke on
the beach and watching the shadows the moonlight made in the
room before he went to sleep.
“I have to go into town to do a bit of marketing,” Harriet informed
him the next day when after breakfast he wandered out into her
kitchen and proceeded to poke his yellow head into the pantry.
“Sunny Boy, you know your mother doesn’t like to have you help
yourself to food. What are you doing in there?”
“Just lookin’,” answered Sunny amiably.
“Well, stop it,” said Harriet, pouring cream into her coffee. Harriet
was eating her breakfast. “As I said, I’m going to town, and if you
want to go with me in the jitney—”
Sunny Boy bounced out of the pantry.
“Take me with you,” he begged.
“You go and ask your mother if she is willing,” replied Harriet. “I’m
going right away without stopping to wash the dishes. And we have
to hurry back because I want to wash windows this morning. Hurry,
now.”
Sunny Boy hurried. Mother was willing, he reported in a few
minutes, and he and Harriet started a quarter of an hour later. They
caught a jitney without trouble, and ten minutes’ ride brought them to
the town. Harriet brushed by all the interesting shops, and even the
merry-go-round, and took Sunny to the butcher’s shop. He didn’t
care about a butcher shop—he saw plenty of those at home.
“Let’s go on the merry-go-round,” he suggested, when Harriet had
her package in the large bag she carried and was on the way to the
grocer’s store. “And I haven’t had a soda for ever and ever so long,
Harriet.”
“Well, Sunny Boy, I haven’t a minute,” explained Harriet kindly.
“There’s all the work waiting for me at the house. But I suppose if
you don’t get a ride on that contraption—If I take you for just one will
you promise not to tease for another?”
Sunny Boy promised, and they had an all-too-short, thrilling,
whirling ride, Sunny mounted on a camel and Harriet dizzily perched
on a giraffe. Then they stopped in the grocer’s and bought some
lettuce and had to hurry for a jitney, because they only ran every
twenty minutes, and if you missed one it meant a long wait.
“What big clouds,” said Sunny Boy, kneeling on the seat to look
out of the jitney window.
“They look like thunder clouds,” commented Harriet. “I shouldn’t be
surprised if we had a storm this afternoon. Our street is next, Sunny.
You pay the man and tell him to stop.”
Ellen and Ralph and Stephen, lined up in a little row, waited for
Sunny at his top doorstep. They wanted him to come down and go in
wading, they said.
“Your mother said it would be all right, ’cause my mother is on the
beach. She has her knitting,” said Ellen. “Let’s hurry ’fore it gets any
hotter.”
 CHAPTER XI
SUNNY BOY TO THE RESCUE

T HE sun was very hot on the beach, so hot that Mrs. Gray
declared that she was fairly baked under her umbrella and that
she did not see how the children stood the direct rays.
“Queen is hot, too,” said Sunny Boy pityingly.
The dog lay and panted, her red tongue hanging out, too warm
and uncomfortable to do more than feebly wag her tail when one of
the children patted her.
The ocean was crowded with bathers, trying to get cool, and Aunt
Bessie, Miss Martinson, and Sunny’s mother came up to them
presently, their bathing suits dripping.
“It feels so much like a thunderstorm, that we’re going up to the
house and dress,” said Mrs. Horton. “No one but a Hottentot or a
youngster could stand the sun to-day. The clouds look threatening off
there. Does Nestle Cove have very severe storms?”
“Pretty heavy sometimes,” admitted Mrs. Gray, knitting steadily. “I
remember last year we had one that crippled the electric light
service. I’ll send Sunny Boy up in an hour or so, shall I? Or may we
keep him to lunch? The children would love to have him.”
“I’m nervous in a storm,” confessed Mrs. Horton. “I think I’d feel
better if he were with me. Don’t let him stay out much past noon.”
So when the town whistle blew the long shrill blast that meant
twelve o’clock, Mrs. Gray gathered up her knitting and signaled to
the four children down at the water’s edge.
“You’re just as tanned!” said Stephen to Sunny Boy, as they began
to put on their shoes and stockings.
 Indeed, Sunny Boy’s face and hands and legs were a soft, even
brown now, and his nose was brown with little gold freckles
powdered generously over it.
“Whee! see the clouds,” shouted Ralph, pointing inland. “Don’t
they look like castles and mountains, Mother?”
“Or snow pudding,” said Ellen.
“My, what a big snow pudding!” and Sunny Boy giggled at the
thought.
“Don’t dawdle, children,” warned Mrs. Gray. “I heard thunder a few
minutes ago. We left all the windows up, you know. Ready, Sunny
Boy? Then we’ll start.”
Harriet had luncheon ready when Sunny Boy reached home, and
while they were eating a violent peal of thunder rumbled overhead.
Before the dessert was served the sun had gone out and thick black
clouds were hurrying through the sky. All the blue had gone out of
the sea, and it was a sullen gray with white-caps showing far out.
“It’s a regular gale,” announced Harriet breathlessly. She had been
out to get her dish-towels that had been flapping in the wind. “I never
saw a sky change so quickly. Shall I put the windows down, Mrs.
Horton?”
“Yes,” answered Sunny’s mother. “It is beginning to rain. Come,
folks, let’s go into the living-room and watch.”
The living-room had a big window that gave a glimpse of the
ocean, though the bungalow faced the street. There was a fine deep
window seat heaped high with cushions, and Sunny Boy took one of
these and put it in a chair behind his mother’s back, as he had seen
his Daddy do.
“Thank you, dearest,” she said. “Sit on the arm of my chair and
we’ll both be comfortable. Bessie, tell Harriet to come in. Never mind
the dishes, they can wait.”
So Harriet came in, and she and Miss Martinson sat on the
window seat, though Aunt Bessie and Sunny Boy and Mother
preferred to be a little further back.
 Zip! a great jagged streak of lightning split the black sky.
“I guess that struck a wave!” gasped Sunny Boy, as a tremendous
clap of thunder followed.
“More like a house,” returned Harriet. “I’m glad the telephone is in
the other room.”
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Horton was beginning, when there was a sharp
crackling noise in the dining-room, a flash, and a smell as of rubber
burning.
“What was it?” asked Mrs. Horton.
“Fuse burned out,” explained Aunt Bessie, who had run to see.
“That’s a common occurrence in the country and out-of-the-way
places like this. Listen to that!”
A great blaze of lightning showed them the street—“light as day,”
Sunny said—and then a sheet of water blown by the wind rattled
against the house and windows.
“Will it wreck ships?” asked Sunny Boy.
“We’ll hope not, precious,” returned Mother, hugging him. “Often
when there is a storm on shore it is calm a few miles out at sea. But
there will be a high tide and rough water for a couple of days, I’m
afraid. You’ll see driftwood on the beach to-morrow.”
“I wonder what Queen does when it rains,” speculated Sunny, his
thoughts turning to the friendly dog who roamed the sand and never
seemed to have a home.
“I think Queen goes under a pier and stays till the storm is over,”
said Miss Martinson. “And I think the worst of this storm is passed
now. What is it, Harriet?”
“I can’t make out what it is,” said Harriet, her voice puzzled. “I
guess it is alive, but it doesn’t move—”
Sunny Boy slipped down from the arm of his mother’s chair and
ran over to the window. He flattened his nose against the rain-
spattered glass and peered out. Then, without a word to any one, he
ran from the room.
 “Sunny! Sunny Boy! where are you going?” called Mrs. Horton.
“That crazy child’s gone right out into the rain,” cried Harriet,
running to the front door. The others followed her.
Sunny Boy was out in the middle of the street, bending over a little
object that lay in the road. As his mother reached the door he picked
it up and came running back, his eyes shining, the water dripping
from his yellow hair.
“It’s alive, Mother!” he shouted. “Do you s’pose the lightning struck
it?”
“Sunny Boy!” said Mrs. Horton drawing him in and closing the
door, while a peal of thunder rattled the windows again, “what made
you run out in the storm like that?”
“Why, it’s a dog,” explained Sunny Boy, wide-eyed. “A little dog,
Mother, and it was right in the middle of the street. An automobile
might run right over it and never see it.”
“Bring it out into the kitchen, the poor thing,” said Harriet. “I noticed
it ten minutes ago, but I couldn’t make out whether ’twas a bundle of
rags or something alive. Here, I’ll turn on the light. Let’s see what
kind of dog you’ve got.”
Sunny Boy put the dog into the apron Harriet held out. Two big
brown eyes looked out from a tangled mass of silky hair that should
have been white, but was now spotted and streaked with red mud,
and a curly tail wagged gently.
“Why, it’s a little beauty!” exclaimed Aunt Bessie. “Poor thing, it’s
so cold it’s about exhausted. Some one’s pet I suppose, and these
house dogs can’t stand exposure. What shall we feed it?”
“Warm milk, wouldn’t you, Harriet?” asked Mrs. Horton. “And then,
if it drinks it, we’ll put it in a box with a bit of clean flannel over it and
let it sleep. I don’t believe it is much more than a puppy.”
Soon the little dog had gratefully lapped up the warm milk Harriet
brought it, and had been put in a comfortable box and warmly
covered. The storm was quite over, and the sun was shining out
again.
 “Can we keep him?” asked Sunny Boy, changing his shoes which
had got wet in his trip to rescue the dog. “May I have him to play
with, Mother?”
“Why, dear, it is in all likelihood some one’s pet,” explained Mrs.
Horton. “If you lost your pet dog, think how you would feel till you
found it. We must make inquiry among the cottages to find if any one
has lost a dog, and we’ll pin a notice up on the post-office bulletin,
too. I don’t want you to get too attached to the dog, for I am sure its
owner will soon claim it. But, of course, till that happens, you may
play with it as much as you like.”
Sunny Boy went down to the beach before supper and found that
the storm had carried away part of the fishing pier. The waves were
higher than usual and the wet sand made walking difficult. He met
Ralph and told him about the dog.
“He can play with Queen,” Ralph suggested. “What are you going
to call him?”
Sunny Boy had not thought of naming the dog, because he
thought of course it was already named by the person who had lost
it. But Ralph did not agree, and said:
“The dog can’t talk and tell you who he is. He needs a name as
much as ever, and I think, Sunny, that you should give him a name to
go by till his own is learned.”
“All right then, call him Curly,” suggested Sunny Boy. “He has long,
curly hair. Mother says she is going to wash him, and then he’ll be
pure white. Maybe she will let him sleep with me.”
But Mrs. Horton, questioned on the subject that night, did not
approve of dogs sleeping on nice, white beds.
“If you want him to, Curly may sleep on a rug in your room,” she
told Sunny Boy. “But not on the bed. If you allow him to jump up, he’ll
have to go and sleep in his box in the kitchen.”
Curly proved to be a very popular addition to the family. Although
Mrs. Horton asked nearly every one she met, and wrote out a
description of Curly and pinned it on the lost-and-found bulletin in the