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are quite right to make jokes.'
    She said 'Perhaps we can scoop up some of this light and with it make bullets to use against General von Luttwitz!'
    My father would say 'Yes, my dear, one day we might even be able to do something like that.'
    This was the time - the winter of 1919-20 - when there were barricades again going up in the streets: when there was apparently the threat of a revolt by right-wing extremists against the moderate socialist government.
    I would say, as I so often said - 'But what is it really that is happening?'
    My father said 'What was that thing you said the other day?'
    I said 'That / said?'
    He said 'That just by seeing that we can't get out from our own vision, we might be out.'
    I said 'I said that?'
    My father used to walk up and down in his study at this time as if he were very excited. I remember an evening when we, he and I, could hear my mother, as usual, banging plates and cutlery about in the dining-room: my father turned to me and said 'We might even go out to your mother and say that we are ready for supper!' He

    did this, and my mother looked amazed. I thought - Well, that was brilliant!
    During that winter my father struggled to put into words what might make sense at least to himself about what was happening in physics. I think he planned to write some short book or pamphlet on the General Theory, though there were no traces of such a manuscript in what later was found of his papers. There were however some notes in a notebook. What he was trying to do, it seemed, was to say that there were two problems - one was to try to understand Einstein's mathematics, and the other was to try to understand what mathematics in general was doing. These, he said, were problems on different levels. The second problem had, as it were, to look down on the first: what was required was a type of language that could talk both about mathematics, and about what mathematics is.
    There was a sentence in his notebooks - 'Reality is not a metaphor we construct from mathematics: mathematics is one of our metaphors for reality.' Also - 'If we try to put knowledge on this level into words, are we not back in the trap of language?'
    During this winter (I was now perhaps ten) my father and I continued with our reading from story books and science magazines; these often seemed curiously relevant to what we tried to talk about. There was one story that I remember in particular which was to do with some people who were on a trip to outer space; they were, yes, in an airship. They were led by a man called Captain Steadfast; their second-in-command was a boy called Max. There was even a supposedly mad scientist whose head seemed to be set loosely on his shoulders. Captain Steadfast was on a mission to an outer galaxy where there was an evil demon about to dominate the universe; this was to be done by means of noise; the earth was being bombarded with inaudible but unbearable frequencies of noise; this was sending people mad; they were jumping about, bashing one another, starting wars; they could not tell what was plaguing them. Captain Steadfast and his crew had to find and destroy the evil demon before people on earth destroyed themselves. Also on the demon's star there was a beautiful girl imprisoned who might, if freed, lead Captain Steadfast to the source of the terrible noise. My father would look up every now and then and say 'This really is a very good story!' I identified, of course, with the boy called Max. The climax came (I remember it well!) when Captain Steadfast's airship was approaching the demon's star; the airship came up

    against a solid barrier of noise; the evil demon had put out sound waves so that they were like a wall; the airship banged against this wall but could not get through; the airship was breaking up! Captain Steadfast was being defeated. Then someone aboard had the idea (was it the mad Professor? was it Max?) that what had to be done was to create a vacuum in front of the airship -