A Beautiful Mind (75 page)

They were on their way back from Uppsala where Nash had given a talk — his first in three decades.
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Nash hadn’t been asked to give the customary hour-long Nobel lecture in Stockholm. The lecture at the University of Uppsala was arranged by Christer Kiselman.
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Nash’s chosen topic was a problem that had interested him before his illness and that he had taken up again since his remission: developing a mathematically correct theory of a non-expanding universe that is consistent with known physical observations. The conventional view, of course, is that the universe is expanding, and attempting to overturn the consensus is exactly the kind of contrarian intellectual bet that Nash has always enjoyed.

Nash’s talk on “the possibility that the universe isn’t expanding” began with tensor calculus and general relativity — stuff so difficult that Einstein used to say he understood it only in moments of exceptional mental clarity. Though he later confessed to nervousness, he spoke without notes, clearly and convincingly, according to Weibull, who has a doctorate in physics
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Physicists and mathematicians in the audience said afterward that Nash’s ideas were interesting, made sense, and were expressed with the appropriate degree of skepticism.

It is a quiet life, despite the fairytale of Stockholm and the lofty status of Laureate. The Nashes still live in the Insulbrick house with the hydrangeas out front, next to the alley and across from the Princeton train station. There is a new boiler, a new roof, a few new items of furniture, but that’s about it. (Nash was also able to pay down his half of the mortgage.) The few friends they see regularly, among them Jim Manganaro, Felix and Eva Browder, and of course Armand and Gaby Borel, are pretty much the people they have been seeing for some years. Their daily routines have changed less than one might think, dominated as they are by the twin needs of earning a living and caring for Johnny. Alicia takes the train to
Newark every day. Nash, who no longer drives, rides the “Dinky” into town, eats lunch at the Institute, and spends the afternoons in the library or, on rare occasions, in his new office. Very often, when Johnny is not in the hospital or on the road, he takes Johnny with him.

It is a life resumed, but time did not stand still while Nash was dreaming. Like Rip Van Winkle, Odysseus, and countless fictional space travelers, he wakes to find that the world he left behind has moved on in his absence. The brilliant young men that were are retiring or dying. The children are middle-aged. The slender beauty, his wife, is now a mature woman in her sixties. And there is his own seventieth birthday fast approaching.

There are days when he feels that he has escaped the ravages of time, when he believes he can pick up where he left off, when he feels “like a person who wants to do the research he might have done in his 30s and 40s at the delayed time of his 60s and 70s!” In his Nobel autobiography, he writes:

Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research efforts to add to his or her previous achievements. However, I am still making the effort, and it is conceivable that with the gap period of 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation, my situation may be atypical. Thus I have hopes of being able to achieve something of value through my current studies or with any new ideas that come in the future.
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But many days he is not able to work. As Nash once told Harold Kuhn, “The Phantom was not in until very late, after 6:00
P.M
. because even a Phantom can have ordinary human problems and need to go to a doctor.”
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And there are other days when he discovers an error in his calculations or learns that a promising idea has already been mined by someone else, or when he hears of new experimental data that seem to make certain speculations of his seem less interesting.

On such days, he is full of regrets. The Nobel cannot restore what has been lost. For Nash, the primary pleasure in life had always come from creative work rather than from emotional closeness to other people. Thus, recognition for his past achievements, while a balm, has also cast a harsh light on the vexing issue of what he is capable of doing now. As Nash put it in 1995, getting a Nobel after a long period of mental illness was not impressive; what would be impressive is “persons who AFTER a time of mental illness achieve a high level of mental functioning (and not just a high level of social respectability.)”
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Nash gave the starkest assessment of his own situation in front of an audience of psychiatrists to whom he had been introduced as “a symbol of hope.” In answer to a question at the end of his 1996 Madrid lecture, he said, “To recover rationality after being irrational, to recover a normal life, is a great thing!” But then he paused, stepped back, and said in a far stronger, more assertive voice: “But maybe it is not
such a great thing. Suppose you have an artist. He’s rational. But suppose he cannot paint. He can function normally. Is it really a cure? Is it really a salvation? … I feel I am not a good example of a person who recovered unless I can do some good work,” adding in a wistful, barely audible whisper, “although I am rather old.”
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These thoughts were much in Nash’s mind when he turned down an offer of thirty thousand dollars from the Princeton University Press in 1995 to publish his collected works. “Psychologically I have a problem since I have been, unfortunately, a long time without any publications,” he said to Harold Kuhn. He was saying, in short, that he doesn’t want to close the door on future work by acknowledging that his lifetime oeuvre is complete.

As Nash says, “I did not want to publish a collected works simply because I wanted to think of myself as, and assume the posture of, a mathematician, still actively engaged in research and not just resting on his laurels (as they say). And of course I knew that if a collected works was not published at this time, then it could be published later when, hopefully, I would have nice new things to add to it.”
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In these feelings, however, he is not so different from his brilliant contemporaries. They, too, are having to face, or have already faced, the prospect that they are likely never to match their past achievements. Some have remained more active than others. But aging is a fact of life, and an especially stringent one for a mathematician. It is, for most of them, a young man’s game.

It takes extraordinary courage to return to research after a hiatus of nearly thirty years. But this is exactly what Nash did. As he told the Madrid audience, “I am again engaged in scientific study. I am avoiding routine problems and instead I am dabbling.’ ”

Nash had been thinking about a mathematical theory of the universe since before his meeting with Einstein. Since the lecture in Uppsala, he has suffered various setbacks. In August 1995, he said, “I got results that indicated I had made a fundamental error a long time ago and that I must reformulate … [the] theory.” Apparently “there was stuff being lost in a singular integration and when I considered distributed matter instead of a point particle, I found the lost stuff which had been erroneously ignored” — adding, with characteristic objectivity, that “this is good since I have avoided publishing a version based on errors.”

He went on to describe the specific error:

There was a discrepancy in the field … which spoiled things. Recalculation revealed … there had been errors in the calculation. Now I must finish up the calculation for a distributed mass of gravitating matter, at least to the first order level of approximation. This level itself could bring an interesting (distinctive result).
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•  •  •

This evaluation of the difficulties encountered in his research gives a good idea that the problems Nash is working on are ambitious, that he has lost none of his taste for making high-risk bets (whether on ideas or stocks!), and that his thinking is still sharp. And even if his chances of achieving a new breakthrough are statistically small, as he says, the pleasures of thinking about problems are once again his.

The truth, however, is that the research has not been the main thing in his present life. The important theme has been reconnecting to family, friends, and community. This has become the urgent undertaking. The old fear that he depended on others and that they depended on him has faded. The wish to reconcile, to care for those who need him, is uppermost. He and his sister Martha, estranged for nearly twenty-five years, now talk on the telephone once a week. Johnny, of course, is the main thing, the constant.

It was Nash who had told the women to call the police.
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Johnny had been living at home. He had been all right for a while, but then he began to wear a paper crown. One afternoon, he wanted some money. Because he believed he was a sovereign, he thought that he should be able to get money from Sovereign Bank. But the ATM in front of the bank would not spit out any cash. In fact, it would not return his bank card. Agitated and unhappy, Johnny called his mother, who has an account at Sovereign, and demanded she meet him at the ATM and get his card out of the machine. Alicia told John, who insisted on going with her. The couple tried, vainly, to extract Johnny’s card. They also tried, unsuccessfully, to soothe Johnny. At that point, their son became enraged, picked up a big stick, and started to poke first his mother, then his father. Some bystanders across the street stopped when they saw the young man threatening the two elderly people. Nash shouted for one of them to call the police. A squad car pulled up. The police took Johnny, whom they knew well, back to Trenton State.

Johnny was in the hospital when his parents got the news from Stockholm informing them of Nash’s Nobel. Nash and Alicia called him first. He thought that they were pulling his leg, that it was a joke, and hung up on them. Later he saw his father’s face on CNN.
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The subject of Johnny’s future is extremely painful. Nash had spoken matter-offactly about it. Alicia, looking miserable, said nothing and instead sank deep into her seat and closed her eyes. She finally interjected, “He just wants to get on with his life.”
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The hopeful path that Johnny seemed to be on in his early twenties had long ago petered out. Whether because of the stress of teaching, the social isolation, or
because the remission had simply run its course, the year at Marshall University was a disaster. He had come home and has not worked since. “Of course I’ve been a bad example,” Nash admits.
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Johnny wanted to get a job, Nash said, but he seemed to think he would be able to get one in a college mathematics department. He had been writing letters introducing himself as the son of a Nobel Laureate and asking for a position. Now Nash was telling the Kuhns that Johnny would not take his medicine when he was not in the hospital. Alicia adds, “He goes to the hospital, he gets better, but when he gets home he doesn’t like to take his medication.” Then he would get sick again, hearing voices and having delusions. He would be hospitalized again and get better. Then it would start all over again. Watching over Johnny is now Nash’s main task in life. Except when Johnny is “on the road” wandering around the country on Greyhound buses, Nash is his caretaker. Nash takes it for granted that his son is his responsibility. As Nash said on one occasion, “My time of delusional thinking is, presumably, in the past, but my son’s time of it is right now.”
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They get up in the morning together after Alicia has gone to work. They eat breakfast together. Nash takes him to the library, to the institute, to Fine Hall. On Monday evenings they all attend family therapy together. Nash has tried to get his son interested in the computer and plays computer chess with him. He has said: “Ultimately computers could be a good sort of occupational therapy (as perhaps I was benefited in an OT [occupational therapy] fashion by [Hale] Trotter’s help in letting me get familiar with computer use.)
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Johnny is thirty-eight years old. He is tall and handsome like his father, and he and his father share an interest in mathematics and chess. But Johnny’s illness has dragged on for more than half his life, a quarter of a century. He has been treated with the newest generation of drugs, including Clozaril, Risperadol, and, most recently, Zyprexa. These drugs, which have enabled him, for the most part, to stay out of the hospital, have not given him a life. Time hardly passes for him. He no longer competes in chess tournaments — once his greatest joy. He no longer reads, saying that he has not been able to for a long time. He is often angry and occasionally violent.
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Life with Johnny is a tremendous strain on Nash and Alicia. Nash calls it being “perturbed,” “tyrannized,” and he is often preoccupied with the “drift and danger of degradation.”
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It is a constant disruption even when, as is often the case, Johnny is roaming around the country on Greyhound buses. For instance, Alicia and John go to the Olive Garden to celebrate Nash’s birthday, and Johnny calls to say that he has lost his ATM card and has no money. The evening is spent wiring him funds. “We’re at our wits’ end,” Alicia said recently. “You work so hard … and then he’s out of it. The Nobel hasn’t helped Johnny at all.”
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Johnny draws Nash and Alicia together and tears them apart. There are deep conflicts. They blame each other for Johnny’s misbehavior — when he destroys things in the house, attacks them, acts inappropriately in public. Nash feels that Alicia expects him to be the bad cop, a role he’s not happy with, while she is the soft one. But they rely on each other. They agree every day on what one or the
other should do. They also agree when it is time to hospitalize him. Nash is more judgmental and apt to hold Johnny responsible for his illness. He’s sometimes quite cruel, telling Harold Kuhn and others at times that people like Johnny ought to be jailed or that he has chosen to be as he is: “I don’t think of my son … as entirely a sufferer. In part, he is simply
choosing to
escape from ‘the world.’ ”
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