by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Their friendship transcended physics. Rabi shared Oppenheimer’s interest in philosophy, religion and art. “We felt a certain kinship,” Rabi said. It was that rare brand of friendship, forged in youth, that survives long separations. “You start off,” Rabi recalled, “just where you left off.” Robert particularly valued Rabi’s candor. “I was not, as it were, put off by his manner,” Rabi recalled. “I never flattered him, I was always honest with him.” He always found Oppenheimer “stimulating, very stimulating.” Over the years, and particularly at those times when most people felt intimidated by Oppenheimer, Rabi was perhaps the only man who could tell him in his straightforward fashion when he was being stupid. Near the end of his life, Rabi confessed, “Oppenheimer meant a great deal to me. I miss him.”
In Zurich, Rabi knew his friend was working very hard on the quite difficult task of calculating the opacity of the surfaces of stars to their internal radiation—but Robert concealed his efforts under a calculated “air of easy nonchalance.” Indeed, among friends, he avoided talking physics and became animated only when the topic turned to America. When the young Swiss physicist Felix Bloch stopped by Robert’s apartment in Zurich, he happened to admire the beautiful Navajo rug Robert had slung over his sofa. This led Robert into a long and excited discourse on the merits of America. “There was no mistaking the intensity of Oppenheimer’s affection for his country,” remarked Bloch. “His attachment was most apparent.” Robert could also talk at length about literature, “especially the Hindu classics and the more esoteric Western writers.” Pauli joked with Rabi that Oppenheimer “seemed to treat physics as an avocation and psychoanalysis as a vocation.”
To his friends, Robert seemed physically fragile and mentally robust. He smoked incessantly and nervously bit his fingernails. “The time with Pauli,” he recalled later, “seemed just very, very good indeed. But I did get quite sick and had to go away for a while. I was told not to do any physics.” After a six weeks’ rest, an apparently mild case of tuberculosis was in remission. Oppenheimer returned to Zurich and resumed his frantic pace.
By the time Robert left Zurich in June 1929 to return to America, he had established an international reputation for his work in theoretical physics. Between 1926 and 1929 he published sixteen papers, an astonishing output for any scientist. If he had been a little too young to participate in the initial flowering of quantum physics in 1925–26, under Wolfgang Pauli’s supervision he had clearly caught the second wave. He was the first physicist to master the nature of continuum wave functions. His most original contribution, in the opinion of the physicist Robert Serber, was his theory of field emission, an approach that permitted him to study the emission of electrons from metals, induced by a very strong field. In these early years he was also able to achieve breakthroughs in the calculation of the absorption coefficient of X rays and the elastic and inelastic scattering of electrons.
And what could any of this mean, in a practical sense, for humanity? However weirdly unintelligible—today as much as then—to the average citizen, quantum physics nevertheless explains our physical world. As the physicist Richard Feynman once observed, “[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is— absurd.” Quantum mechanics seems to study that which doesn’t exist—but nevertheless proves true. It works. In the decades to come, quantum physics would open the door to a host of practical inventions that now define the digital age, including the modern personal computer, nuclear power, genetic engineering, and laser technology (from which we get such consumer products as the CD player and the bar-code reader commonly used in supermarkets). If the youthful Oppenheimer loved quantum mechanics for the sheer beauty of its abstractions, it was nevertheless a theory that would soon spawn a revolution in how human beings relate to the world.
CHAPTER SIX
“Oppie”
I think that the world in which we shall live these next thirty years will be a pretty restless and tormented place; I do not think that there will be much of a compromise possible between being of it, and being not of it.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER August 10, 1931
ROBERT’S TIME IN ZURICH had been productive and stimulating, but as always, with the coming of summer, he craved the exhilaration and the invigorating calmness induced by Perro Caliente. There was a rhythm now to his life: intense intellectual work, at times to the point of near exhaustion, followed by a month or more of renewal on horseback in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico.
In the spring of 1929, Robert wrote to brother Frank, urging him to bring their parents out West in June. He suggested further that, once the sixteen-year-old Frank had gotten Julius and Ella settled into a comfortable lodge in Santa Fe, he should take a friend up to their ranch above Los Pinos and “open up the place, get horses, learn to cook, make the hacienda as nearly habitable as you can, and see the country.” He would join Frank in mid-July.
Frank needed no further prodding, and in June he arrived in Los Pinos with two friends from the Ethical Culture School, Ian Martin and Roger Lewis. Lewis was to become a regular visitor to Perro Caliente. Frank found a Sears, Roebuck catalogue and mail-ordered everything: beds, furniture, a stove, pots and pans, sheets and rugs. “It was a great spree,” Frank recalled. “The stuff arrived shortly before my brother did that first summer. Old Mr. Windsor hauled it up to Perro Caliente with a horse and wagon.” Robert arrived with two gallons of bootleg whiskey, a large quantity of peanut butter and a bag of Vienna sausages and chocolate. He arranged to borrow from Katherine Page a saddle horse named Crisis. Aptly named, Crisis was a large, half-castrated stallion that no one but Robert could ride.
For the next three weeks, he and the boys spent their days hiking and riding through the mountains. After a particularly grueling day on horseback, Robert wrote a friend wistfully, “My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.” At night, Robert sat by the light of a Coleman lantern, reading his physics books and preparing his lectures. On one trip, fully eight days long, they rode all the way to Colorado and back, a distance of more than 200 miles. When they weren’t surviving on plain peanut butter, Robert introduced them to nasi goreng, an exceedingly spicy Indo-Dutch dish that Else Uhlenbeck had taught him to cook in the Netherlands. These were Prohibition years, but Robert always had plenty of whiskey on hand. “We’d get sort of drunk,” Frank recalled, “when we were high up [in the mountains], and we’d all act kind of silly. . . . Everything my brother did would sort of be special. If he went off into the woods to take a leak, he’d come back with a flower. Not to disguise the fact that he’d made a leak, but just to make it an occasion, I guess.” If he picked wild strawberries, Robert would serve them with Cointreau.
The Oppenheimer brothers spent hours in the saddle together, talking. “I think we probably rode about a thousand miles a summer,” Frank Oppenheimer recalled. “We’d start off very early in the morning, and saddle up a horse, sometimes a packhorse, and start riding. Usually we’d have some new place that we wanted to go, often where there was no trail, and we really knew the mountains, the Upper Pecos, the surface of the whole mountain range. . . . There were wonderful flowers all the time. The place was very lush.”
During one memorable ride up the Valle Grande, they were attacked by deer flies, which sting like bees. “So we set the horses to a full wild run up the length of the Valle (two miles), overtaking each other over and over again to pass the welcome flask after slowing enough to take a swig.”
Robert showered his brother with gifts—a fine watch at the end of that summer, and two years later a secondhand Packard roadster—but he also invested time in tutoring Frank on love, music, art, physics—and his own philosophy of life: “The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a
sin.” Their times together at Perro Caliente were an intense part of Frank’s education. When, later that summer, Frank wrote his brother a letter describing his encounter with a burro, Robert replied, “Your tales of a burro were immensely entertaining—so entertaining in fact that I showed them to one or two friends.” Robert then went on to critique Frank’s prose: “What you said, for instance, about Truchas and Ojo Caliente [in New Mexico] at night was much more convincing and honest and in the end communicative of emotion than your bits of purple writing about miscellaneous sunsets of the past.”
In mid-August, Robert ambivalently packed his bag and drove to Berkeley, where he moved into a sparsely furnished room in the Faculty Club. Frank remained in New Mexico until early September, when Robert wrote him that he already missed the “gay times at Perro Caliente.” He was nevertheless busy preparing his lectures and getting to know his colleagues. “The undergraduate college here,” he wrote Frank, “seems not to be worth much, or I should suggest that you come here next year. For it is a beautiful place and the people are pleasant. I think that I am going to keep my room at the Faculty Club. . . . Tomorrow I have promised to cook Nasi Goreng on a camp fire. . . .” Soon, Robert’s new friends in Berkeley would be calling his exotic dish “nasty gory” and trying to avoid it whenever possible.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Berkeley, had hired Oppenheimer to introduce the new physics to graduate students. It did not occur to anyone, least of all to Robert, that he might teach undergraduates. In his first course, a graduate-level class on quantum mechanics, Robert jumped right in and tried to explain Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the Schrödinger equation, Dirac’s synthesis, field theory and Pauli’s latest thinking on quantum electrodynamics. “I had for non-relativistic quantum mechanics a pretty good feeling, a pretty good understanding of what it was about,” he later recalled. He started with wave-particle duality, the notion that quantum entities may behave as either particles or waves, depending on the circumstances of the experiment. “I would just make the paradox as bald and inescapable as possible.” Initially, his lectures were largely incomprehensible to most students. When told that he was moving too fast, he only reluctantly tried to slow the pace and soon complained to his department chairman, “I’m going so slowly that I’m not getting anywhere.”
Oppenheimer nevertheless always delivered a performance in the classroom—although during his first year or two of teaching, his presentations sounded more like a liturgy than a physics lecture. He tended to mumble in a soft, almost inaudible voice that got even lower when he was trying to emphasize a point. In the beginning, also, he stammered a good deal. Though he spoke without notes, he invariably laced his lectures with quotes from famous scientists and the occasional poet. “I was a very difficult lecturer,” Oppenheimer recalled. His friend Linus Pauling, then an assistant professor of theoretical chemistry at Caltech, gave him this unfortunate advice in 1928: “If you want to give a seminar or lecture, decide what it is you want to talk about and then find some agreeable subject of contemplation not remotely related to your lecture and then interrupt that from time to time to say a few words.” Years later, Oppenheimer commented, “So you can see how bad it must have been.”
He played with his words, inventing complicated puns. There were no broken phrases in Robert’s speech. He had the extraordinary ability to speak in complete, grammatically correct English sentences, without notes, pausing on occasion, as if between paragraphs, to stutter his oddly lilting hum that sounded like “nim-nim-nim.” The relentless patter of his voice was interrupted only by puffs on his cigarette. Every so often, he would twirl toward the blackboard and write out an equation. “We were always expecting him,” recalled one early graduate student, James Brady, “to write on the board with it [the cigarette] and smoke the chalk, but I don’t think he ever did.” As his students filed out of the classroom one day, Robert spotted a Caltech friend, Professor Richard Tolman, sitting in the back. When he asked Tolman what he thought of the lecture, he replied, “Well, Robert, that was beautiful, but I didn’t understand a damn word.”
Robert eventually transformed himself into a skilled and charismatic lecturer, but during his first years at Berkeley he seemed oblivious to the basic principles of communication. “Robert’s blackboard manners were inexcusable,” said Leo Nedelsky, one of his earliest graduate students. Once, when questioned about a particular equation on the blackboard, Oppenheimer replied, “No, not that one; the one underneath.” But when perplexed students pointed out that there was no equation underneath, Robert said, “Not below, underneath. I have written over it.”
Glenn Seaborg, later a chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, complained of Professor Oppenheimer’s “tendency to answer your question even before you had fully stated it.” Frequently he interrupted guest speakers with comments like, “Oh, come now! We all know that. Let’s get on with it.” He refused to suffer fools—or even ordinary physicists—and he never hesitated to impose his own exceedingly high standards on others. In these early years at Berkeley, some thought he “terrorized” his students with sarcasm. “He could . . . be very cruel in his remarks,” recalled one colleague. But as he matured as a teacher, he grew more tolerant of his students. “He was always very kind and considerate to anybody below him,” recalled Harold Cherniss. “But not at all to people who might be considered his intellectual equals. And this, of course, irritated people, made people very angry, and made him enemies.”
Wendell Furry, who studied at Berkeley from 1932 to 1934, complained that Oppenheimer expressed himself “somewhat obscurely and very quickly with flashes of insight which we couldn’t follow.” But even so, Furry recalled, “He praised all of our efforts even when we weren’t so hot.” One day in class, after a particularly difficult lecture, Oppenheimer quipped, “I can make it clearer; I can’t make it simpler.”
As difficult as he was, or perhaps because he was so difficult, most of his students took his courses more than once; indeed, one student, a young Russian woman recalled only as Miss Kacharova, took the course three times, and when she tried to enroll again, Oppenheimer refused to allow it. “She went on a hunger strike,” recalled Robert Serber, “and forced her way in that way.” For those who stuck it out, Oppenheimer found numerous ways to reward their hard work. “One learned from him through conversation and personal contact,” Leo Nedelsky said. “When you took a question to him, he would spend hours—until midnight perhaps—exploring every angle with you.” He invited a good number of his doctoral students to collaborate with him on papers, and he made sure they were listed as coauthors. “It is easy for a famous scientist to have lots of students doing the dirty work for him,” said one colleague. “But Opje helps people with their problems and then gives them the credit.” He encouraged his students to call him “Opje,” the Dutch nickname he had acquired in Leiden. Robert himself began signing his letters with “Opje.” Gradually, his Berkeley students anglicized “Opje” into “Oppie.”
Over time, Oppenheimer developed a uniquely open teaching style in which he encouraged all of his students to interact with each other. Instead of holding office hours and seeing each student individually, he required his eight to ten graduate students and half-dozen postdoctoral fellows to meet together in his office in Room 219, LeConte Hall. Each student had a small desk and chair where he or she sat and watched as Oppenheimer paced the room. Oppie himself had no desk, only a table in the middle of the room piled high with stacks of papers. A blackboard covered with formulae dominated one wall. Shortly before the appointed hour, these young men (and the occasional woman) would straggle in and wait for Oppie as they casually sat on the edge of a table or leaned against the wall. When he arrived, he zeroed in on each student’s particular research problem in turn and solicited comments from everyone. “Oppenheimer was interested in everything,” Serber recalled, “and one subject after another was introduced and coexisted with all the others. In an afternoon, we might discuss electrodynamics,
cosmic rays and nuclear physics.” By focusing on the unsolved problems in physics, Oppenheimer gave his students a restless sense of standing on the edge of the unknown.
Very soon it was clear that Oppie had become a “Pied Piper” of theoretical physics. Word spread around the country that if you wished to enter this field, Berkeley was the place to do it. “I didn’t start to make a school,” Oppenheimer later said, “I didn’t start to look for students. I started really as a propagator of the theory which I loved, about which I continued to learn more, and which was not well understood but which was very rich.” In 1934, three of the five students awarded National Research Council fellowships in physics that year chose to study under Oppenheimer. And yet, while they came for Oppenheimer, they came as well for an experimental physicist named Ernest Orlando Lawrence.
Lawrence was everything that Robert Oppenheimer was not. Reared in South Dakota and educated at the universities of South Dakota, Minnesota, Chicago and Yale, Lawrence was a young man supremely confident of his talents. Of Norwegian Lutheran stock, Lawrence had an untroubled all-American demeanor. As a college student, he had paid his tuition peddling aluminum pots and pans to his farmer neighbors. An extrovert, he would use his natural affinity for salesmanship to promote his academic career. Some of his friends thought him a bit of a social climber, but unlike Robert, he possessed not a shred of existential angst or introspection. By the early 1930s, Lawrence was the premier experimental physicist of his generation.
At the time Oppenheimer arrived at Berkeley in the autumn of 1929, Lawrence, twenty-eight years old, was lodging in a room at the Faculty Club. The two very boyish physicists quickly became best friends. They talked almost daily and socialized in the evenings. On weekends they occasionally went horseback-riding. Robert, of course, rode in a Western saddle, but Ernest insisted on distinguishing himself from his farm background by affecting jodhpurs and an English saddle. Robert admired his new friend for his “unbelievable vitality and love of life.” Here was a man, he saw, who could “work all day, run off for tennis, and work half the night.” But he could also see that Ernest’s interests were “primarily active [and] instrumental” while his own were “just the opposite.”
