Beating the Odds

The following sections are included:

• Dedication

• Foreword

• Preface

• Acknowledgements

• List of Figures

• Abbreviations in the Footnotes

• Contents

In the early 1930s Albert Einstein² often came to Oxford. He was the guest of the physicist Professor Frederick Lindemann,³ later Lord Cherwell, advisor to Winston Churchill, who was eager to encourage contact with German scientists. During one visit someone asked Einstein what most impressed him about Oxford, to which he replied ‘E.A. Milne’.⁴ The reason was not hard to find. At a time when the university marginalised science, my father stood out for his youthful vitality, brimming with ideas. He was thirty-two when he took up his chair in mathematics — despite having no degree. A magnet for students of the highest calibre, he energetically put new life into a moribund department, and established an international centre of astrophysics. That he scaled the heights of academia was no surprise to his cousins, who in childhood had jeered his bookish inclinations, but, given his humdrum background, his rise was remarkable and rapid. Until he was seventeen he never left Yorkshire…

Milne was one of some hundred freshmen who arrived at Trinity that autumn. For the first time he was outside the strict jurisdiction of his parents, and he savoured his independence. But his new freedom was sombre. Cambridge was utterly changed by harsh reminders of the war. Soldiers and Belgians blurred the usual demarcation between ‘town’ and ‘gown’, and a familiar sight alongside the Union Jack was the Belgian flag of red, yellow and black. After the barbaric atrocities of the Germans who ravaged Belgium and burnt priceless medieval treasures in the library of the University of Louvain, Cambridge offered refuge to its impoverished professors and students…

At the outset of World War I the British Army distrusted civilian scientists, sceptical of their making a useful contribution to victory, whereas in Germany science, scientists and technology commanded respect. English military personnel perceived science as the preserve of slightly eccentric, wealthy gentlemen tinkering away in private laboratories, so attempts to improve artillery by scientific means were dismissed as unwanted and unwarranted intrusions into military expertise. Given this complacency, it is not surprising that research for warfare evolved in an ad hoc manner, without the systematic allocation of scientific expertise that there would be in World War II. Projects sprang from individual initiative, and depended on personal networks of contacts for recruiting suitable teams. Having the ear of people in high places might be crucial to gain government support…

In 1918 Milne faced a new task. ‘I am to oscillate between here, Stokes Bay and Rochford,’ he wrote jauntily to his father, ‘carrying unto the ends of the earth the gospel of trumpets.’² The biblical allusion was a jesting nod to his father, for these trumpets were not the blowing kind; they were for listening. Huge, cumbersome ear trumpets could pick up the noise of a distant plane and they were the only means of locating aircraft when hidden by cloud or darkness. At night, once the position of an enemy plane was known, searchlights could illuminate it ready for gunners to take aim…

After being elected a Fellow of Trinity, Milne wrote euphorically, ‘Friday was certainly the greatest day of my life’.² During the anxious months of preparing his fellowship papers he had watched his expenses carefully. He had revived part of his Yorkshire scholarship money and Trinity had tided him over the summer with a Jeston Exhibition of £50 and a Yates Prize for ‘impoverished’ students. Now he exhilarated in the knowledge that his gamble had paid off and his future was secure. What he did not foresee was that the fellowship would propel him into the orbit of the most celebrated physicists and mathematicians of the day and accelerate his entry into professional bodies. Just two months later, in December 1919, he was elected to the London Mathematical Society…

The rhythm of Milne's life at Manchester was radically different from Cambridge, academically, socially and domestically. Away from the cosseting of college servants in Trinity's sequestered masculine courts, he had to fend for himself. He found lodgings at 7 Clyde Road in West Didsbury, an area popular with university staff, only a short tram ride from the university in Oxford Road. His landlady cooked his evening meal from such food as he had purchased and he ate lunch in the informal and friendly atmosphere of the university refectory, where seniority did not dictate where people sat. It was easy for a newcomer to settle in and as Rutherford put it, ‘At Cambridge one might sit next to a man for forty years without knowing whether he had a wife, mother or sister, whereas before he had been at Manchester a week he knew his colleagues and their wives and was calling their children by their Christian names.’²…

Milne had seldom encountered girls. He came from a family of brothers, attended a boys' school, and thereafter lived in the company of men at Cambridge and during the war. He had wistfully confided to his Trinity friend Tressilian Nicholas,² later the Senior Bursar of the college who astutely invested in Felixstowe Docks, that he wished to be as happily married as Nicholas was. Yet, as Nicholas pointed out, ‘those with supreme gifts for mathematics seldom used to meet members of the other sex. Neither Hardy, nor for that matter Isaac Newton, ever married.’…

Milne was right to be apprehensive about Oxford. Even before he arrived, his college, Wadham (Fig. 10), rebuffed him. While he and Margot were in Oxford looking for somewhere to live he called on the Warden of Wadham, John Stenning,² an Aramaic scholar, to ask him for a room in college where he could hold colloquia. Milne was keen to instigate them, as he had been impressed by their value at Manchester. Aware that mathematics professors at Cambridge had rooms in the Arts School, and that Oxford had no similar provision, nor a departmental centre for mathematics, he thought his request entirely reasonable. He was mistaken. The Warden admitted that Milne was entitled to a room, but, sweeping his request aside, said that as a married man he would not ‘want’ one, and deliberately changed the conversation…

Milne was Oxford's first mathematical physicist and because he fell outside the existing mould in a highly conservative environment he struggled to gain recognition for himself and his subject. In his hard-hitting inaugural lecture³ he made his case forcefully, aware that sitting in the front row listening to him were the Vice-Chancellor and other dignitaries, some of whom had questionable sympathy for science. He did not mince his words…

A month later my parents moved into a three-storey house not far from their flat, which they had outgrown with the birth of my sister in 1930. Typical of north Oxford's Edwardian Gothic architecture, 19 Northmoor Road was in a network of streets populated by dons with families. My father quipped to Svein Rosseland that they had resisted the temptation of calling their daughter Stella or Astra, and chose Eleanor. I arrived in 1933 and when the RAS dining club toasted my health, my father replied that he lived in an expanding Universe (Fig. 13). My brother Alan followed in 1938…

Six weeks after moving house, the Milnes' German friends, Kate and Erwin Freundlich,³ whom they had met in Leiden, came to stay. The husbands were of one mind on the importance of a broad approach to astrophysics and astronomy. As Milne put it, ‘The history of theoretical astronomy shows that specific theories of the constitution of celestial bodies have in general been less fruitful than investigations of fundamental problems associated with idealised models.’⁴…

As the face of Oxford science began to change, the air sweetened and Milne felt less excluded, less downtrodden. The clearest evidence that the university had stopped ignoring science was that it designated a ‘science area’, carved somewhat grudgingly out of the Parks. An influx of talented Jewish physicists, recruited by Lindemann, revitalised the Clarendon Laboratory and in 1933 they were the first in the world to produce liquid helium. Early in World War II their groundbreaking research on the fission of uranium transformed the theoretical manufacture of an atomic bomb into a practical possibility…

Life seemed tame after the frenzy of Hubble’s visit and Milne was out of sorts. His usual exuberance deserted him for a conference at St Andrews³ in late July to which he took Margot and Eleanor. He despaired that his ideas were not being judged on their merits⁴ and sensed that the audience was out of sympathy with them. Additionally he felt inhibited⁵ by the presence of the elderly esteemed Willem De Sitter, sporting his neat Vandyke beard, who with Einstein had produced a cosmological model that was widely accepted as an accurate representation of the Universe. Milne disagreed with De Sitter over the notion of a horizon beyond which light cannot reach us, but did not wish to clash with him publicly. Privately he likened De Sitter's mind to ‘the hide of a rhinoceros’⁶…

Two friends hoisted Milne out of his abyss of sad inertia. Chandra judged that a change of scene might revive his spirits and rekindle his love of mathematics. A perfect pretext was the up-coming gala inauguration of the new McDonald Observatory in Texas and he approached Otto Struve,² the director of both the fledgling observatory and of Yerkes Observatory, who agreed to invite Milne to the celebrations. That the new observatory had ever reached completion was largely due to Struve. He seized the initiative when the project foundered despite an enormous bequest from William Johnson McDonald, banker and amateur astronomer…

Three weeks later the Blitz began in earnest and for fifty-seven days and nights the Luftwaffe's bombers pounded London relentlessly. Civilians suffered the most. Danger was never far away and the Milnes had several close calls. Even at the best of times mathematics requires intense concentration and under these unnerving conditions Milne needed every scrap of willpower to apply his brain effectively, especially if he were short of sleep from the perilous raids or from fire-watching duty…

Shaken and perplexed, and probably demoralised, the Milnes had little choice but to take temporary refuge with Edith Milne. For Milne to continue with the Ordnance Board he had to be within commuting distance of its headquarters, now at 34 De Vere Gardens, Kensington, and he decided to take lodgings in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, near his brother Philip. Work at the Ordnance Board was much diminished because it was most unlikely that there would be enough time before the war ended to devise and manufacture any new artefacts resulting from research.² Some of Milne's civilian colleagues were back at their universities and he expected to be released soon. After his long absence from Oxford, he was champing to get back into harness. To expedite his release he enlisted the aid of Douglas Veale, the university registrar, whose early career in the higher echelons of the civil service equipped him to deal with officialdom. In the autumn the Ordnance Board released Milne from full-time employment and he reverted to his former arrangement of working part-time…

At the end of July 1945 Beatrice came home and Milne rejoiced that she was cheerful and affectionate. Her state of mind was fragile though, and to his distress she lapsed into melancholy silences. On 27 August she went to London to see her dentist and listen to a lunchtime concert at the National Gallery. Despite this veneer of normality, she was not in her right mind and the next day, while Milne was out of the house, she gassed herself. He had the horrifying experience of discovering her body on the kitchen floor. He wrote to Whitrow, ‘She never complained and she never explained.’² Her death was a ‘dismal mystery’³ and she remains an enigma. He found it scarcely credible that the same tragedy had twice befallen him. Although the circumstances differed, as did his wives' temperaments and personalities, he was the common link. Had he failed them in some way? Was his absorption in his work to their detriment? G.H. Hardy held that of all the arts and sciences, mathematics is the most austere and remote.⁴ A mathematician's peaks of high excitement are largely inaccessible to his wife, unless she, too, is a mathematician and can fathom their fascination. Yet professional life is but a single component among many that shape the stability and happiness of a marriage…

The following sections are included:

• Epilogue

• Index