by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Setting aside his qualms, Fergusson eventually agreed to visit Cambridge early that spring. “He put me in a room next door, and I remember thinking that I’d better make sure that he didn’t turn up in the night, so I put a chair up against the door. But nothing happened.” By then, Robert seemed to be on the mend. When Fergusson briefly raised the matter, “he said that he needn’t worry, that he was over that.” Indeed, Robert had been seeing yet another psychoanalyst—his third within four months—in Cambridge. By this time, Robert had read a good deal about psychoanalysis and according to his friend John Edsall, he “took it very seriously.” He also thought that his new analyst—a Dr. M—was a “wiser and more sensible man” than either of the doctors he had consulted in London and Paris.
Robert apparently continued to see this analyst throughout the spring of 1926. But over time their relationship broke down. One day in June, Robert dropped by John Edsall’s lodgings and told him that “[Dr.] M has decided that there’s no use in going on with the analysis any further.”
Herbert Smith later ran into one of his psychiatrist friends in New York who knew of the case, and claimed that Robert “gave the psychiatrist in Cambridge an outrageous song and dance. . . . The trouble is, you’ve got to have a psychiatrist who is abler than the person who’s being analyzed. They don’t have anybody.”
IN MID-MARCH 1926, Robert left Cambridge on a short vacation. Three friends, Jeffries Wyman, Frederick Bernheim and John Edsall, had talked him into accompanying them to Corsica. For ten days they bicycled the length of the island, sleeping in small village inns or camping out in the open. The island’s craggy mountains and lightly forested high mesas may well have reminded Robert of New Mexico’s rugged beauty. “The scenery was magnificent,” recalled Bernheim, “verbal communication with the natives disastrous, and the local fleas abundantly fed each night.” Robert’s dark moods occasionally overcame him and he sometimes spoke of feeling depressed. He had been reading a great deal of French and Russian literature in recent months, and as they hiked through the mountains, he enjoyed arguing with Edsall over the relative merits of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. One evening after being drenched by a sudden thunderstorm, the young men sought shelter in a nearby inn. As they hung their wet clothes by a fire and huddled in blankets, Edsall insisted, “Tolstoy is the writer I most enjoy.” “No, no, Dostoyevsky is superior,” Oppenheimer said. “He gets to the soul and torment of man.”
Later, when the conversation turned to their respective futures, Robert remarked: “The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.” If Robert seemed burdened by such intensely existential thoughts, his companions nevertheless got a strong impression that he was unburdening himself as they hiked around the island. Clearly relishing the dramatic scenery, the good French food and wines, he wrote his brother Frank: “It’s a great place, with every virtue from wine to glaciers, and from langouste to brigantines.”
In Corsica, Wyman believed, Robert was “passing through a great emotional crisis.” And then something strange happened. “One day,” Wyman recalled decades later, “when we’d almost finished our time in Corsica, we were staying in some little inn, the three of us—Edsall, Oppenheimer and I—and we were having dinner together.” The waiter approached Oppenheimer and told him when the next boat departed for France. Surprised, Edsall and Wyman asked Oppenheimer why he was rushing back earlier than planned. “I can’t bear to speak of it,” Robert replied, “but I’ve got to go.” Later in the evening, after they had drunk a little more wine, he relented and said, “Well, perhaps I can tell you why I have to go. I’ve done a terrible thing. I’ve put a poisoned apple on Blackett’s desk and I’ve got to go back and see what happened.” Edsall and Wyman were stunned. “I never knew,” Wyman recalled, “whether it was real or imaginary.” Robert didn’t elaborate, but he did mention that he had been diagnosed with dementia praecox. Unaware that the “poisoned apple” incident had actually occurred the previous autumn, Wyman and Edsall assumed that Robert, in a fit of “jealousy,” had done something to Blackett that spring, just before their trip to Corsica. Clearly, something had happened, but, as Edsall put it later, “he [Robert] spoke of it with a sense of reality that Jeffries and I both felt that this must be some kind of hallucination on his part.”
Over the decades, the truth of the poisoned-apple story has been mud-died by conflicting accounts. In his 1979 interview with Martin Sherwin, however, Fergusson made it quite plain that the incident occurred in the late autumn of 1925, and not in the spring of 1926: “All this happened during his [Robert’s] first term at Cambridge. And just before I met him in London, when he was going to the psychiatrist.” When Sherwin asked if he really believed the poisoned-apple story, Fergusson replied, “Yes, I do. I do. His father then had to engineer the authorities of Cambridge about Robert’s attempted murder.” Talking with Alice Kimball Smith in 1976, Fergusson referred to “the time when he [Robert] tried to poison one of his people. . . . He told me about it at the time, or shortly thereafter, in Paris. I always assumed that it was probably true. But I don’t know. He was doing all sorts of crazy things then.” Fergusson certainly appeared to Smith to be a reliable source. As she noted after interviewing him, “He doesn’t pretend to remember anything he doesn’t.”
OPPENHEIMER’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE was finally coming to an end. Sometime during his short stay in Corsica, something happened to him in the nature of an awakening. Whatever it was, Oppenheimer made sure that it remained a carefully cultivated mystery. Perhaps it was a fleeting love affair—but more likely not. Years later, he would respond to a query from the author Nuel Pharr Davis: “The psychiatrist was a prelude to what began for me in Corsica. You ask whether I will tell you the full story or whether you must dig it out. But it is known to few and they won’t tell. You can’t dig it out. What you need to know is that it was not a mere love affair, not a love affair at all, but love.” The encounter held some kind of mystical, transcendental meaning for Oppenheimer: “Geography was henceforth the only separation I recognized, but for me it was not a real separation.” It was, he told Davis, “a great thing in my life, a great and lasting part of it, more to me now, even more as I look back when my life is nearly over.”
So what actually happened in Corsica? Probably nothing. Oppenheimer deliberately answered Davis’ query about Corsica with an enigma sure to frustrate his biographers. He coyly called it “love” and not a “mere” love affair. Obviously, the distinction was important to him. In the company of his friends, he had no opportunity for a real affair. But he did read a book that appears to have resulted in an epiphany.
The book was Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, a mystical and existential text that spoke to Oppenheimer’s troubled soul. Reading it in the evening by flashlight during his walking tour of Corsica, he later claimed to his Berkeley friend Haakon Chevalier, was one of the great experiences of his life. It snapped him out of his depression. Proust’s work is a classic novel of introspection, and it left a deep and lasting impression on Oppenheimer. More than a decade after he first read Proust, Oppenheimer startled Chevalier by quoting from memory a passage in Volume One that discusses cruelty:
Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a state, to which it was so restful to emigrate, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone, that indifference to the sufferings one causes, an indifference which, whatever other names one may give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.
As a young man in Corsica, Robert no doubt memorized these words precisely because he saw in himself an indifference to the sufferings he caused others. It was a painful insight. One can only speculate about a man’s inner life, but perhaps seeing an expression of his own dark and guilt-laden thoughts in print somehow lightened Robert’s psychological burden. It had to be comforting to know that he was not alone, that this was part
of the human condition. He no longer need despise himself; he could love. And perhaps it was also reassuring, particularly for an intellectual, that Robert could tell himself that it was a book—and not a psychiatrist—which had helped to wrench him from the black hole of his depression.
OPPENHEIMER RETURNED TO CAMBRIDGE with a lighter, more forgiving attitude about life. “I felt much kinder and more tolerant,” he recalled. “I could now relate to others. . . .” By June 1926, he decided to end his sessions with the Cambridge psychiatrist. It also lifted his spirits that spring to leave the “miserable hole” he had till then occupied in Cambridge and move into “less miserable” quarters along the river Cam, halfway to Grantchester, a quaint village one mile south of Cambridge.
As he despised laboratory work, and clearly was inept as an experimental physicist, he now wisely turned to the abstractions of theoretical physics. Even in the midst of his long winter depression, he had managed to read enough to realize that the entire field was in a state of ferment. One day in a Cavendish seminar, Robert watched as James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron, opened a copy of Physical Review to a new paper by Robert A. Millikan and quipped, “Another cackle. Will there ever be an egg?”
Sometime in early 1926, after reading a paper by the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg, he realized that there was emerging a wholly new way of thinking about how electrons behaved. About the same time, an Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, published a radical new theory about the structure of the atom. Schrödinger proposed that electrons behaved more precisely as a wave curving around the nucleus of the atom. Like Heisenberg, he crafted a mathematical portrait of his fluid atom and called it quantum mechanics. After reading both papers, Oppenheimer suspected that there had to be a connection between Schrödinger’s wave mechanics and Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. They were, in fact, two versions of the same theory. Here was an egg, and not merely another cackle.
Quantum mechanics now became the hot topic at the Kapitza Club, an informal physics discussion group named for its founder, Peter Kapitza, a young Russian physicist. “In a rudimentary way,” recalled Oppenheimer, “I began to get pretty interested.” That spring he also met another young physicist, Paul Dirac, who would earn his doctorate that May from Cambridge. By then, Dirac had already done some groundbreaking work on quantum mechanics. Robert remarked with considerable understatement that Dirac’s work “was not easily understood [and he was] not concerned to be understood. I thought he was absolutely grand.” On the other hand, his first impression of Dirac may not have been so favorable. Robert told Jeffries Wyman that “he didn’t think he [Dirac] amounted to anything.” Dirac was himself an extremely eccentric young man, and notoriously single-minded in his devotion to science. One day some years later, when Oppenheimer offered his friend several books, Dirac politely declined the gift, remarking that “reading books interfered with thought.”
It was about this same time that Oppenheimer met the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, whose lectures he had attended at Harvard. Here was a role model finely attuned to Robert’s sensibilities. Nineteen years older than Oppenheimer, Bohr was born—like Oppenheimer—into an upper-class family surrounded by books, music and learning. Bohr’s father was a professor of physiology, and his mother came from a Jewish banking family. Bohr obtained his doctorate in physics at the University of Copenhagen in 1911. Two years later, he achieved the key theoretical breakthrough in early quantum mechanics by postulating “quantum jumps” in the orbital momentum of an electron around the nucleus of an atom. In 1922, he won the Nobel Prize for this theoretical model of atomic structure.
Tall and athletic, a warm and gentle soul with a wry sense of humor, Bohr was universally admired. He always spoke in a self-effacing near-whisper. “Not often in life,” Albert Einstein wrote to Bohr in the spring of 1920, “has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did.” Einstein was charmed by Bohr’s manner of “uttering his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who [believed himself to be] in the possession of definite truth.” Oppenheimer came to speak of Bohr as “his God.”
“At that point I forgot about beryllium and films and decided to try to learn the trade of being a theoretical physicist. By that time I was fully aware that it was an unusual time, that great things were afoot.” That spring, with his mental health on the mend, Oppenheimer worked steadily on what would become his first major paper in theoretical physics, a study of the “collision” or “continuous spectrum” problem. It was hard work. One day he walked into Ernest Rutherford’s office and saw Bohr sitting in a chair. Rutherford rose from behind his desk and introduced his student to Bohr. The renowned Danish physicist then asked politely, “How is it going?” Robert replied bluntly, “I’m in difficulties.” Bohr asked, “Are the difficulties mathematical or physical?” When Robert replied, “I don’t know,” Bohr said, “That’s bad.”
Bohr vividly remembered the encounter—Oppenheimer had looked uncommonly youthful, and after he left the room, Rutherford had turned to Bohr and remarked that he had high expectations for the young man.
Years later, Robert reflected that Bohr’s question—“Are the problems mathematical or physical?”—was a very good one. “I thought it put a rather useful glare on the extent to which I became embroiled in formal questions without stepping back to see what they really had to do with the physics of the problem.” Later he realized that some physicists rely almost exclusively on mathematical language to describe the reality of nature; any verbal description is “only a concession to intelligibility; it’s only pedagogical. I think this is largely true of [Paul] Dirac; I think that his invention is never initially verbal but initially algebraic.” By contrast, he realized that a physicist like Bohr “regarded mathematics as Dirac regards words, namely, as a way to make himself intelligible to other people. . . . So there’s a very wide spectrum. [At Cambridge] I was simply learning and hadn’t learned very much.” By temperament and talent, Robert was very much a verbal physicist in the style of Bohr.
Late that spring, Cambridge organized a weeklong visit to the University of Leiden for American physics students. Oppenheimer went on the trip and met a number of German physicists. “It was wonderful,” he recalled, “and I realized then that some of the troubles of the winter had been exacerbated by the English customs.” Upon his return to Cambridge, he met another German physicist, Max Born, director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen. Born was intrigued by Oppenheimer, partly because the twenty-two-year-old American was grappling with some of the same theoretical problems raised in the recent papers by Heisenberg and Schrödinger. “Oppenheimer seemed to me,” Born said, “right from the beginning a very gifted man.” By the end of that spring, Oppenheimer had accepted an invitation from Born to study at Göttingen.
CAMBRIDGE HAD BEEN A disastrous year for Robert. He had narrowly escaped expulsion over the “poison apple” incident. For the first time in his life, he had found himself incapable of excelling intellectually. And his closest friends had witnessed more than one episode of emotional instability. But he had overcome a winter of depression, and was now ready to explore an entirely new field of intellectual endeavor. “When I got to Cambridge,” Robert said, “I was faced with the problem of looking at a question to which no one knew the answer—but I wasn’t willing to face it. When I left Cambridge, I didn’t know how to face it very well, but I understood that this was my job; this was the change that occurred that year.”
Robert later recalled that he still had “very great misgivings about myself on all fronts, but I clearly was going to do theoretical physics if I could. . . . I felt completely relieved of the responsibility to go back into a laboratory. I hadn’t been good; I hadn’t done anybody any good, and I hadn’t had any fun whatever; and here was something I felt just driven to try.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“I Find the Work Hard, Thank God, & Almost Pleasant”
You would l
ike Göttingen, I think. . . . The science is much better than at Cambridge, & on the whole, probably the best to be found. . . . I find the work hard, thank God, & almost pleasant.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER TO FRANCIS FERGUSSON, November 14, 1926
LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1926, Robert—in far better spirits and considerably more mature than a year earlier—traveled by train through Lower Saxony to Göttingen, a small medieval town that boasted a city hall and several churches dating back to the fourteenth century. At the corner of Barfüsser Strasse and Jüden Strasse (Barefoot Street and Street of the Jews), he could dine on wienerschnitzel at the four-hundred-year-old Junkers’ Hall, sitting beneath a steel engraving of Otto von Bismarck and surrounded by three stories of stained glass. Quaint half-timbered houses were scattered about the town’s narrow, winding streets. Nestled on the banks of the Leine Canal, Göttingen had as its chief attraction Georgia Augusta University, founded in the 1730s by a German prince. By tradition, graduates of the university were expected to wade into a fountain that stood before the ancient city hall and kiss the Goose Girl, a bronze maiden that served as the fountain’s centerpiece.
If Cambridge could claim to be Europe’s great center for experimental physics, Göttingen was undoubtedly the center of theoretical physics. German physicists at the time thought so little of their American counterparts that copies of Physical Review, the monthly research journal of the American Physical Society, routinely sat unread for more than a year before the university librarian got around to putting them on the shelf.
