Physicist Cécile DeWitt-Morette ponders prodigiously.
“I worry,” says the University of Texas professor emerita who still keeps an office at UT and covers classes for other professors. “I worry a lot. I keep worrying until I figure out the underlying problem that is responsible for the problem. Then I see what I can do to fix it.”
Jan DeWitt, one of DeWitt-Morette’s four daughters with the late physicist Bryce DeWitt, lives with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
So in the 1990s, her mother, a scientist and decorated Legion of Honor officer, designed the Planned Living Assistance Network of Central Texas, which each year helps more than 100 area families coping with mental illness.
Next week, DeWitt-Morette welcomes to town two old friends from the days when she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
The subject of the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” John Nash is a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and pioneer of game theory. His wife and former student, Alicia Nash, has cared for the schizophrenic scholar for decades, even when they were divorced. (They remarried.)
“She’s been a wonderful caregiver,” DeWitt-Morette says. “Not overbearing, but there as needed.”
The Assistance Network here has named a caregivers’ fund for Alicia Nash. Sept. 14, the couple will attend a symposium on mental health care at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center. Sept. 16, they will appear at a screening of “A Beautiful Mind” and at a private fundraising dinner.
So how do DeWitt-Morette’s worries turn into comprehensive fixes?
“I don’t see it as worrying,” says Liz Shelby, a network board member who also assists DeWitt-Morette. “It’s problem solving. She enjoys solving problems.”
‘I tell you why I worry so much,” DeWitt-Morette says. “When I was 7 years old, my mother said, ‘You are a big girl; now you have a conscience.’ I took it seriously. I had to figure it out. I was given a little black notebook for the pros and cons of each problem.”
Born to an industrialist father and a mother with a mathematics degree in a posh area of the Sixième Arrondissement district of Paris, DeWitt-Morette witnessed a mixture of privilege, achievement and social responsibility at an early age.
At the end of World War I, her father was handed the reins of the Société Métalurgique de Normandie, a huge mining and manufacturing operation. He did so on the condition that half the profits from the company would go to worker services — housing, education, health care — which were managed by DeWitt-Morette’s mother.
The outfit thrived, even during the Depression, in part because of worker loyalty. At the company’s 100th anniversary celebration two months ago, DeWitt-Morette ran into friends from first grade, some 85 years earlier.
“Until then, I thought everything was infinite,” she says. “Ever since, I’ve been looking for whatever I lost at that time. What I lost was infinity.”
Despite her advantages, she attended public schools, which DeWitt-Morette says in those days were often better than the private ones. When she finished high school, she had hoped to go to medical school but ended up studying math, chemistry and physics.
After undergraduate school, she really wanted to explore Paris on her own. The Germans who occupied northern France during the 1940s, however, required her to obtain a pass to visit Paris.
“They asked what I was going to do there,” she recalls. “I couldn’t say: ‘To have adventures.’ I had heard the words ‘quantum mechanics.’ I didn’t know what it was. But I told them I was going to study it.”
To keep her pass, she signed up for graduate work in physics at the Sorbonne. On June 6, 1944 — D Day — she took her final master’s degree exam. The same day, she lost most of her family, including her mother, when six Allied bombs fell on their house in Caen.
“When mother died, I became an adult overnight,” she says. “I thought: ‘I am now in charge of my family.’ ”
That year, she was offered a job in the laboratory of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who was Marie Curie’s son-in-law. DeWitt-Morette answered his letters and prepared his lecture notes.
Eventually, she joined a group of physicists working in Dublin, then another group in Copenhagen, Denmark, working with Nobel Prize winner Neils Bohr, who laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics.
In 1948, she received a telegram from Robert Oppenheimer — the theoretical physicist often called the “father of the atomic bomb” — asking that she join him at the Institute for Advance Study (not connected, it should be said, with Princeton University).
“I traveled first class on the boat because my stepfather wanted me to meet only proper people,” she remembers. “I had to figure out where Princeton was. So I asked another passenger.”
At the Institute, she did not work directly with Albert Einstein, but she frequently ran into him walking to and from the Institute.
“He and I had two things in common,” she says. “We were the only ones without a car. And we were keeping reasonably rational hours.”
(Other brushes with intellectual fame: Dr. Albert Schweitzer was once her physician, and developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was one of her daughters’ baby sitters.)
Although settled happily in America, she worried about the quality of her area of physics in France.
“Theoretical physics in France was in a very, very bad state for several reasons,” she says. “I decided something had to be done about it.”
So she created from scratch and led a rigorous physics summer school for 20 or 30 participants each year at Les Houches in the French Alps. Twenty-six of its students, who collaborated on publications, have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.
“It was not user-friendly,” she says. “Two lectures in the morning. Afternoon was for discussion. Nobody was allowed to arrive one day late or leave one day early. Lecture notes had to be complete on that day. No Xerox.”
In New Jersey, she met Bryce DeWitt. They married and moved to North Carolina, then to Texas in 1972. In 1973, they journeyed to Mauritania during a total solar eclipse to test the relation between Einstein’s general theory of relativity and gravity.
“I never had a program,” she says. “If something looked like fun, I’d look into it. No program.”
When her daughter was diagnosed with OCD, DeWitt-Morette responded as a mother, but also as a scientist.
“I pulled together people in physics and neuroscience,” she says. “I wanted to understand more about Jan’s illness. How can it be cured? Whenever I got frustrated with daily life living with the illness, I’d go talk with scientists, which was easier.”
She found people like Bob Englert, later director of the Assistance Network, who had the same worries. She and Englert attended a gathering in Dallas about how to help the mentally ill by helping their families. It changed her goals.
“I had already designed in my head a full residential outfit, which would include activities that would be income-producing,” she says. “The idea was beginning to gain support. That’s when I sensed that a smaller scale could be done right away and was what people wanted.”
DeWitt-Morette wants to applly some of the lessons she’s learned through this effort to geriatric care, complementing the work of existing groups such as Family ElderCare and Care Communities.
Before joining the board, Shelby quietly and effectively applied for many of the grants that have kept the nonprofit going. Recently, however, the group has gone more public. This week’s events are something of a coming out for the group. Perhaps just as telling, Jan DeWitt will talk this weekend about the hurdles of balancing work and benefits when ill.
You see, once DeWitt-Morette solves a problem in her head, action almost always follows.
“I don’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” the compact, restless woman says with a glint in her eye. “Because ‘no’ is simply a delayed ‘yes.’”
Alicia and John Nash: A Beautiful Partnership
Symposium on Sept. 14 at AT&T Center: $35-$55.
Screening on Sept. 16 of “A Beautiful Mind” at Alamo Drafthouse on West Anderson Lane: $20.
Information: www.planctx.org/NashEvent
Extra photos:
The second image was taken in academic year 1948-49 at the Institute in front of Fuld Hall. It features DeWitt-Morette with fellow visiting scholars (from left): Cheng Shu Wang Chang, Sheila Power, Mrs. Yukawa, DeWitt-Morette, and Hideki Yukawa. Credit: “Photographer unknown. From the Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA.
The third is of Alicia and John Nash. It was taken by John O’Boyle/The Star-Ledge
Correction: A previous version of this post misreported the number of DeWitt-Morette children. Names of the fund and the symposium were incomplete and the sequence of some events were incorrect.