June 1956 - Linus Pauling Day-by-Day

15 June, 1956

Dear Mamma and Daddy,

Thank you for your letter and card. I am sorry you are not going to Finland. It probably would have been great fun. I can order some stainless steel from NK and have it shipped directly to the United States and take it in when we go. I have applied for a visa for Julia and am applying today for Horns Office approval. I asked the Professor yesterday if I could stay a little longer and he was jolly in favour of it. He felt excellent.

Would you please declare the Porsche? It was ordered on the 31 May, 1955 and delivered in Stuttgart on the 11 August, 1955. It was ordered through the dealers in England Messrs. A.F.N. Limited, and was ordered from England. It is being shipped from Antwerp by the firm NATURAL (Belgique) S.A. whose agents in Los Angeles are John L. Westland and Son, Inc. 426, S. Spring Street, Los Angeles 13, Michigan 8847. The car cost $2880, is adriablau with red leather, has a 1500 cc engine no. P-35 572, body no. 54 099, has been damaged and driven 12,000 miles. I have the bill of sale, delivery note listed to Mr. Pauling and signed by me. It was paid in personal cheques by Linus. You say on the way in that you do not know the value of it but want the evaluer in Los Angeles to evaluate it. Crellin should then go see the evaluer before it arrives. I shall write him.

Why are you leaving sooner, and when are you going? Dame Kathleen Lonsdale rang me up the other day and wishes me to extend her greetings. She wanted to see Mamma and to see if Mamma was coming to some meeting in Birmingham the third week in July.

I have been thinking a good deal about what I wish to do. It seems to me there are two courses, either I get a Ph.D. or I do not, and so now I must either do some research I wish to do and get a degree, or get the best job I can with the greatest possibilities. I am quite excited about working on the protein project, arranging the computing and arranging the methods of gathering data. However, the job is essentially a dead end; it does not lead to a Ph.D. nor is it a well paying job leading to future advancement. I am just stuck, and when the job is over, unless it is excellently successful and we have solved the crystal structure and I have done my part well and done a good large part, I shall be in exactly the same condition I am now, only three years or one year older. If the attempt were successful within say three years and I had done the computing and had a good hand in the gathering of the data and the model building, I would be in a good position. However, I expect a good deal of opposition to my ideas on how one gathers data, and the whole attempt may fail. Then I would be worse off than I am now. I might as well proceed now to a cosy industrial job, say with Beckman. I could work in Palo Alto with Bill Shockley, a clever young man in need of a crystallographer. Besides, selenium is close to the family heart.

It may well be necessary to make corrections for the absorption of X-rays in the crystal and the container, and this could be done by automatic computation at the same time as the Lorentz and polarization and all the other work was done. It would be pretty slow, but we have a long time and only want to do it once or twice. The alternative is to arrange the experimental method so that these corrections are fairly constant over all of space, probably quite a job. I am not much interested in growing crystals and searching hundreds of bottles, but given the four isomorphous crystals I am quite interested in getting the data and processing it. The only trouble is that it is a dead end, unless we are very successful. I think mounting techniques can be improved, probably by gluing the crystal to a fibre and sealing up the whole shebang. Spherical capillaries are probably impossible to get, but the absorption correction through a cylindrical capillary would be pretty easy to calculate on the machine. It would involve using more than one crystal in obtaining complete data though, however one probably needs more than one crystal anyway.

Eddie Hughes and his wife have been around a little. I was glad to meet Ruth. I saw Dorothy for a while. Quite remarkable how Oxford is cut off from the rest of the world. We shall go to her for the weekend next month. Thomas is away.

The degree course at Caltech is pretty hard. Julia is fine.

Much love,

XXXOOO Peter