Letter from Judith Shoolery

From: Judith Shoolery
Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2003 22:13:57 -0700
To: pkiraly@sunserv.kfki.hu
Subject: The Meson Song

Dear Dr. Kiraly,

My name is Judy Shoolery, and Margit Gregory forwarded your note about the Meson Song to me. I was Edward's collaborator on the Memoirs, and the English version lists me as the joint author (Edward Teller with Judith Shoolery).

I was happy to hear from you, because I remember how pleased Edward was when he returned from one of his first trips to Hungary with a copy of the song. As I recall, we had not yet reached Chapter 21, "Among Friends From Home (February 1946-June 1949)," or if we had it was in an early draft. He suggested that we might use the copy you gave him as the ending/summary of his brief time in academic physics after World War II. So we did.

The poem and its introduction at the end of the chapter were as follows in the English version:

At the end of the Colorado conference, as is traditional, we had a banquet, and for the occasion I wrote and recited a poem, which owed a great deal to the Gilbert and Sullivan evenings I had enjoyed at the Critchfields during the war.(footnote 47) I called it The Meson Song, and it summed up my feelings at that time.

Footnote 47: I had completely forgotten the words to the poem, except for the first two lines, but on a visit to Hungary in 1990, a Hungarian physicist had a copy of it, which he shared with me.

There are mesons pi, and there are mesons mu.
The former ones serve us as nuclear glue.
There are mesons tau -- or so we suspect --
And many more mesons which we can't yet detect.
Can't you see them at all?
Well, hardly at all,
For their lifetimes are short
And their ranges are small.
The mass may be small, and the mass may be large.
We may find a positive or negative charge.
And some mesons will never show on a plate,
For their charge is zero, though their mass is quite great.
What, no charge at all?
No, no charge at all.
Or if Blackett is right,
It's exceedingly small.
Some beautiful pictures are thrown on the screen
Though the tracks of the mesons can hardly be seen.
Our desire for knowledge is most deeply stirred
When statements from Serber can never be heard.
What, not heard at all?
No, not heard at all.
Very dimly seen
And not heard at all.
There are mesons lambda at the end of our list
Which are hard to detect and are easily missed.
In cosmic ray showers they live and they die,
But you can't get a picture -- they are camera-shy.
Well, do they exist?
Or don't they exist?
They are on our list,
But are easily missed.
From mesons all manner of forces you get;
The infinite part you may simply forget,
The divergence is large, the divergence is small:
In meson field quanta there is no sense at all.
What no sense at all?
No. No sense at all.
Or if there's some sense,
It's exceedingly small.

I don't recall that Edward made any changes in the copy that you gave us, so I hope that the manuscript version I've attached here is the one that you gave to him. I found it both wonderfully funny and an exquisite rhyme.

I am now working on closing up his office and preparing his papers for the Hoover Archives at Stanford University. I have taken the liberty of printing your webpage and its attachments and will include them in the archived material relating to the Memoirs. I am very happy that the forgery has been shown to be just that.

Thank you for writing.

With best regards, Judy Shoolery