In September 1920, we returned to Madison and lived there for nearly twelve years. I went back to the university as an assistant professor, was made an associate professor in 1925, and a professor and chairman of the department in 1928. The previous chairman had been Edward Burr Van Vleck, a distinguished mathematician, a discriminating collector of Japanese art, and a gentle scholar of the old school. He asked to be relieved, over his last year of teaching, of the administrative duties of the chairmanship — duties which he carried out with characteristically conscientious, meticulous care, but duties which he clearly did not relish. When the chairmanship was offered to me I went to Professor Van Vleck, for whom I had a great respect, admiration, and affection, and asked him if I could count on his help, for I was only thirty-four, whereas the other full professors were all considerably older and more experienced.
At that point I learned a lesson I have never forgotten. Van Vleck gently but firmly told me that when a person retired from a position he should do so completely, leaving his successor entirely free. Following this policy, he would never volunteer any suggestion, nor would he ever express any criticism. Indeed he made it clear that he would prefer that I not ask his advice even on some explicit point, for he thought that he should take his hand completely off and
leave the problems to me. The courtesy, friendliness, and confidence with which he handled this situation were a great inspiration to me. Ever since, whenever I left an assignment of any sort, I remembered that lesson. I have never had any interest in influencing the choice of the person to follow me, nor in extending the policies I have favored. I have great confidence in younger people, and in the future. I believe, as someone has said, that "nothing succeeds like a successor," especially if you give him a chance. This episode also made me realize the importance of retiring from any activity at a moment when one's departure is the occasion for regret, not relief.
If there is a better life than that of an enthusiastic teacher in a good school, I don't know what it is! The income was so very modest that a raise in salary of $500 was an exciting satisfaction. One's friends were on similar salaries; one could live decently, could pay his bills, and could even make a monthly deposit in the babies' educational savings account. The family could have a resident student
helping with meals and washing dishes for room and board. There was little keeping up with the Joneses, for Dr. Jones was also an assistant professor.
I was so fond of teaching that I got up each morning with zestful enthusiasm for the day's tasks. My teaching was initially to engineers—one or at most two classes of elementary analysis and of calculus, and one junior or senior course. After a few years I also taught a graduate course in the physics department, so that my engineering courses were reduced to one for underclassmen and one for juniors or seniors. About every other summer I had the privilege—we thought of it as such—of teaching in the six-week or even in the nine-week summer session. The former paid, at the start, $250; and this was by no means a negligible addition to income. Also one got a chance to offer short new courses in topics of current interest.
The life was rich and rewarding in so many ways. About half of my lunches were at home, to be followed by a completely quiet afternoon in my study. About half were with stimulating colleagues at the University Club. There was good talk at table, where one's companions might be philosophers, or historians, or physicians, specialists in medieval literature, or whatever. There was a gay and spirited game of billiards after lunch, before going back to the office.
This, moreover, was back in those good old days when professors had summer vacations—nearly three months every other summer, and half that, other times. One could renew his spirit, and when the first smoky tang of autumn came into the air, there was an almost compulsive yearning to get back on the campus and see the throngs of excited (and exciting) new youngsters, to regather with colleagues, to be back in the classroom meeting the challenge of a new group of eager minds. The registration in that new advanced subject—would it be only three or four—which would worry the dean? Or would it be six or eight—which would be splendid. Or would it be twelve or fifteen—which would be phenomenal! The intoxication of a September day on the campus is a reward that can hardly be understood by those who are condemned to earning their living in more prosaic ways.
We had church friends, neighborhood friends, and family friends, and we also had the automatically assured group of faculty friends—men and women of wide experience, varied interests, great competence. There were faculty wives' groups, and occasions—such as the Madison Literary Club—which husbands and wives both attended. But the men had a special privilege—their dining clubs. These met once a month or oftener, and in the tradition of the great English clubs of the seventeenth century, had a splendid meal followed by a long evening of serious discussion. I belonged to three such clubs. The one with the youngest membership was a group of what the medical fraternity would call the "young Turks," being of less conventional, not to say radical, temperament. My keenest memory of this group is of a long and noisy evening in my own home, during which Philip Fox La Follette (later the Governor of Wisconsin) and I hotly debated the practical effectiveness and moral justification of capital punishment, I being in favor and he opposed. A second dining club was a research group, and at each meeting the host had the responsibility of giving a generally intelligible account of his own scholarly activities. The third, to which I was not elected until I had been back in Madison for several years, was a distinguished organization that had been in existence for a long time. It was called Town & Gown, and as its name implies, it included, among its normal quota of twelve, equal representation from the university and from the City of Madison. Town & Gown has met regularly since 1878. Its roster includes several of the university's most eminent presidents, including Charles Richard Van Hise and Edward Asahel Birge; scholars such as Frederick J. Turner, Moses Stephen Slaughter, Joseph Jastrow, and John R. Commons; judges, justices of the supreme court, and governors.
My father died in the autumn of 1921—he was killed in a hunting accident. Afterwards we were even closer than previously to my stepmother, Cicely. We spent the entire day together, each Sunday after church. Late in the afternoon we would start reading aloud. I especially recall the pleasure with which we meandered through Anthony Trollope's Barchester Chronicles. My very modest inheritance furnished the down payment on a new house, which an architect friend of ours designed.
Our son, Warren Weaver, Jr., was born in 1923. Always devoted to working with my hands, as each Christmas approached I laid plans for making some major present for our small son. One year it was a large chest of blocks, all carefully made from clear sugar pine. One year it was a case with a huge collection of lead soldiers, mounted and unmounted. Evenings after he was tucked in, I cast them in molds, trimmed and painted them, and made the case, in the basement. Our daughter Helen was not born until near the end of our Madison period, in 1931. Our family life during all this period was as happy as I can conceive of family life being.
I took off one semester and did research related to electrical and magnetic methods of ore location for the firm of Mason, Slichter, and Hay. Max, Louis Slichter, and Don Hay had been associated in brilliantly successful work on submarine detection problems during World War I, and after the war they had important, and at that time novel, ideas for new techniques of geophysical prospecting. One summer, in 1928, I taught electrodynamics at the University of Chicago.
I had a number of especially gifted American students who went on to distinguished careers—Lee A. Du Bridge as President of California Institute of Technology (now adviser to President Nixon), Leland J. Haworth as Director
of the National Science Foundation, and John Bardeen, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956, to name only three. One engineering undergraduate, since become famous, I chanced not to have in any of my classes. He departed from the university somewhat precipitously, leaving in the mathematics department a record of "Incomplete" in calculus. On May 22, 1927, I got his card out of the department file, and in view of the event of the preceding day, wrote "Incomplete removed" on the record of Charles A. Lindbergh.
The primary incentive in coming back to Madison was to work with Max Mason, and our collaboration promptly commenced. We were well suited to work together, for we complemented each other in several ways. Max really didn't like to work, and I did; in particular he despised writing whereas I enjoyed it. He did not relish a disciplined schedule, and it was congenial to me to set up and maintain one. He had, of course, at least 90 per cent of the brains of the combination and probably 99 per cent of the imagination; but no matter how severe his criticism of a passage, I was always willing to go back at it for another try. We worked together almost every day for a couple of hours, and I would customarily put in at least that many hours by myself. At that time there was no exposition of electromagnetic field theory that made full use of the nimble power of vector calculus, or that attempted to carry out the transition from the unitary laws for isolated electric charge to the continuous laws for the large-scale field occupying all of space.
We made very rough going of certain aspects of this latter
point, for it was of course the case that there was no solid- state theory available at that time.
As our book neared completion I became more and more discouraged about it; for it grew increasingly clear that Max was never going to be really satisfied with it. In 1925, moreover, Max was chosen to be president of the University of Chicago, so that I was working mostly alone, writing to him often and sending him drafts, but getting little response. Finally he realized that this was unreasonable and authorized me to submit the manuscript. The Electromagnetic Field was published in 1929. It got good reviews, and for some twenty years thereafter, a fair proportion of graduate students in physics learned Maxwell's field equations, and all the associated theory, from our book. I was specially pleased that the volume was chosen by the American Institute of Graphic Arts as one of the Fifty Books of the Year of 1929, this referring not at all to its contents but to its typography, binding, and general design. I am still occasionally introduced to a physicist who blinks and says, "Weaver, of Mason and Weaver?"
The twenties were very heady times in physics. Both relativity and quantum theory were being vigorously pursued. The physics department at Madison had a series of stimulating visitors. The first of these, and one of the great masters of the older school, was H. A. Lorentz, who was present for a special colloquium in 1922. Arnold J. W. Sommerfeld (1868-1951), the world-famous physicist from Göttingen, was there for an extended visit in 1923, following which we had visits from a succession of such leaders
There seem to be no available departmental or other university records of these visitors, and the dates stated may be slightly in error.
as the German theoretical physicists and specialists in wave mechanics Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), Werner Heisenberg, Gregor Wentzel, and the British physicist Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, and the British mathematician and astrophysicist Sir Ralph Howard Fowler. Particularly from Schrödinger, Dirac, and Heisenberg we had a chance to hear about quantum theory and wave mechanics from the geniuses who were just then creating these fields.
The steadily increasing record of success of the theories did not particularly impress him. Indeed it must be conceded that capacity to deal with more and more experiential fact is not, of itself, a hallmark of a beautiful theory. One volume and inscribe on the first page, "This entire volume
If it had not been for Max's attitude, I think I would doubtless have plunged overboard into these subjects. But he was sarcastically indifferent. I think he must have admired the formal analytical skill of these outstanding men, but he was convinced that all this was futilely and falsely oriented. His objections bore no relation to the claim of Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in his famous debate with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962)—that there must be an underlying deterministic and discoverable reality in nature and that the basic laws of nature were not subject to chance. I am sure that Max had no intellectual or artistic objection to an inherently probabilistic theory; what he could not tolerate were the inconsistencies between these newer theories and the older classical field theories, the internal inconsistencies in quantum theory, and what he viewed to be the artificially introduced and essentially unpleasant "messiness" of the newer theories.
could, to be absurd, print all the known facts in a huge constitutes the theory." This would obviously be wholly
unsatisfactory, and makes clear that a good theory, in addition to dealing with a wide range of facts, should exhibit a sort of poetic concentration and simplicity, the wide scope opening up from a small central unified core. A really good theory, in short, has to have what mathematicians usually call "elegance." As Henri Poincaré showed long ago, moreover, if there is one theory which successfully deals with a body of experience, then there are indefinitely many theories which accomplish the same task. So again, mere "success" is not enough to lead to the choice of a theory.
much more satisfying, something whose complications are but the external aspects of an inner simplicity-something, in short, more elegant.
Under heavy influence from Max, and being at the same time too busy with the combination of family, teaching, and electrodynamics to take the necessary time to become really versed in quantum theory, I adopted his attitude; and I must say that I have never changed it. I still think that quantum mechanics, despite its magnificent and detailed triumphs, is a disposable portion of science which we will some day discard in toto, to replace it by something which will be even more competent and which will be
My dislike of quantum theory in the twenties, when it was in process of vigorous elaboration, was due in major part to the fact that it was not compatible with classical electromagnetic theory—the latter field being one that I was both very familiar with and very fond of.
As the years have gone by I have developed a more seriously based antagonism to quantum theory. Toward the end of this book I will indicate the basis for this more serious objection.