Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  In that summer of 1923, Oppenheimer took a holiday job in a laboratory in New Jersey, in the hope, so he told Francis Fergusson in July, of finding an adventure ‘similarly satisfying’ to that he had experienced in New Mexico. Thus he had ‘searched the plant and the hotel for possible persons’ – that is, people who would interest him in something like the way Fergusson, Horgan and Page had interested him. But, he reported:

  Only one wretch have I found, and he penniless and dissipated; but he is six foot seven, has fine black moustachios, is a Bostonian via Oxford, is properly pessimistic and boasts cleverly about the right sort of thing, has read, and well, writes, and is a bit of a scientist. He works at a different plant and lives in a different city, but has come over for an evening a couple of times. But he has lost his job, and is going to South America. He is not a Jew.

  Once this non-Jewish, educated Bostonian left, there was nothing keeping Oppenheimer at the laboratory. ‘The job and people are bourgeois,’ he told Fergusson, ‘and lazy and dead; there is little work and nothing to puzzle at; and the establishment has among it less than one sixteenth of a sense of humour. So I am going home.’

  By the time he wrote to Fergusson again, in the middle of August, Oppenheimer was at Bay Shore, where, he was delighted to report, ‘Paul [Horgan] has been with me for the past three weeks. Of course I have been happy.’ The two of them, he wrote, had been ‘spending a most civilized and unexciting time down here, writing, reading enormously, travelling to town from time to time for books and exhibits and plays, and sallying every evening in tuxedoes, pathetically to ransack Bayshore or Islip for a vestige of adventure’. Horgan has recorded that he found the Oppenheimers’ house at Bay Shore comfortable, spacious and impressive: ‘It was my first taste as a resident of rather excessive luxury and grandeur and comfort on that scale. I enjoyed it enormously.’ He recalls that some days they would go on Trimethy, some days they would go riding and other days they would go to the theatre in New York.

  Horgan had by this time graduated from the Military Institute in New Mexico and, after the summer, was starting his course at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, in upstate New York. The Oppenheimers had planned to travel to Quebec for the last part of the summer and so agreed to give Paul a lift to Buffalo on the way – Buffalo being not far from Rochester. As Oppenheimer recounted the journey to Fergusson, it was the occasion for the tension between the Old West, as represented by Horgan, and the new money, as represented by his parents, to come to the fore once again:

  And toward the end there developed such an intricate panorama of complications that I was regaled with a daily scene. Toward the end, you see, mother and father grew a little jealous of Paul, and a little irritated at the ease with which he disregarded obstacles whose conquests formed the central jewels in the Oppenheimer crown. The matter was further embellished by two luscious complexes, oozing ich or: mother’s and father’s, which tried to apologize for being Jews; the Horgan’s, which whinnied and shied clumsily about richesse and poverty.

  Horgan himself was unaware of this ‘panorama of complications’ and remembers only that Oppenheimer’s parents were charming and welcoming. About his own ‘complex’ over money, and Mr and Mrs Oppenheimer’s complex about being Jewish, he remembers nothing.

  During the weeks that Oppenheimer spent at Bay Shore that summer he had for company not only Paul Horgan, but also Bernheim and Boyd, both of whom were invited, but probably not at the same time as each other. Boyd was impressed with the elegance of the house and with Oppenheimer’s sailing skills; Bernheim, on the other hand, had doubts about Oppenheimer’s seamanship and considered the holiday home ‘just an ordinary kind of house’.

  What everyone who spent time with Oppenheimer remembers about that summer was that he seemed always, whatever else he was doing, to be reading physics. Paul Horgan recalls:

  . . . we would go out on the boat – he was a very good sailor, good navigator – and anchor out in the shallow part of Great South Bay, off Bay Shore, and I would be up on the forward deck, working at a typewriter, writing desperately bad imitations of Chekhov and other short story writers, and Robert would be in the cockpit, sprawled over a book on thermodynamics and chuckling with great connoisseurship over it. It always impressed me very much.

  It seems likely that the book Horgan saw Oppenheimer reading while sailing was not ‘a book on thermodynamics’, but rather The Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism by James Jeans. Towards the end of his life Oppenheimer still had the book and mentioned in an interview how ‘salt-encrusted’ his copy of it was, remarking: ‘it’s clear that I studied that when I went sailing in the summer’. The importance the book had for him is alluded to in his letter to Fergusson of 16 August, written from Bay Shore. Responding to the news that Fergusson had written stories set in both Harvard and Pecos, Oppenheimer writes: ‘But really, maestro, I am terribly – yes, terribly, eager to see your things, and would even burn my new Jean’s Electromagnetics for a glimpse of the Pecos one.’

  First published in 1908, The Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism was, the author states in the preface, intended to cover the same ground as James Clerk Maxwell’s classic 1873 text, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, but in a ‘more elementary’ way: ‘The present book is written more especially for the student, and for the physicist of limited mathematical attainments.’ Jeans, in fact, had a gift for explaining difficult ideas simply, a gift that he was to put to influential and lucrative use later on in life in his best-selling books The Universe Around Us (1929) and The Mysterious Universe (1930), as well as in his 1942 book, Physics and Philosophy. He was thus the ideal author to guide Oppenheimer through the arcane world of twentieth-century theoretical physics, as Oppenheimer had, up until the summer of 1923, no formal training in physics whatsoever, and rather less training in mathematics than one would expect a physicist to have had at that point in his education.

  This had not prevented Oppenheimer, in his first year (as a chemistry student) from trying to master, in his spare time as it were, and without any formal guidance, some of the most difficult ideas of modern physics. During that year his scientific interests shifted from chemistry to physics as it gradually dawned on him that, as he later put it, ‘what I liked in chemistry was very close to physics’. After all, he reflected, ‘if you were reading physical chemistry and you began to run into thermodynamical and statistical ideas you’d want to find out about them’. In the same interview, he added: ‘I can’t emphasise strongly enough how much I read and more really just in exploration.’

  You see, it’s a very odd picture; I never had an elementary course in physics except for a very elementary school course and to this day I get panicky when I think about a smoke ring or elastic vibrations. There’s nothing there – just a little skin over a hole. In the same way my mathematical formation was, even for those days, very primitive, and this was more than evident in the way I went about some of the things I did later.

  His education in physics, he acknowledged, was best characterised as ‘a very quick, superficial, eager familiarisation with some parts of physics, with tremendous lacunae and often with a tremendous lack of practice and discipline’.

  Characteristically, these lacunae did not prevent Oppenheimer from beginning his career as a physicist by jumping straight into the deep end. In May 1923, towards the end of his first year at Harvard, he wrote to Edwin C. Kemble. Though still a junior member of the physics department, Kemble was notable for being the only theoretical physicist at Harvard and for being the only one abreast of developments in the then rapidly developing and unnervingly novel field of quantum theory. In his letter, Oppenheimer asked Kemble for permission to take his course on thermodynamics, Physics 6a, which ran during the autumn semester of the following year. This was, on the face of it, an extraordinary request. Physics 6a was a graduate course, normally taken only by those students who had completed their undergraduate studies and had excelled in advanced-level phys
ics courses. A requirement for taking Physics 6a was that students had successfully completed Physics C, a final-year undergraduate course. Oppenheimer was asking Kemble to waive this requirement.

  Besides having not completed Physics C, at this point in his education Oppenheimer had not taken any degree-level physics courses. Nor had he audited any. Realising that, under these circumstances, he would have to present a fairly exceptional case for being regarded as a graduate-level physics student, Oppenheimer provided Kemble with a list (a ‘partial list’, he insisted) of ‘several works on Thermodynamics and related subjects’ that he had read during his first few months at Harvard. The list goes far beyond what one would have expected from an undergraduate majoring in physics, let alone one majoring in chemistry, and demonstrates an impressive linguistic breadth, in that two of the books on the list were in French and another two in German.

  Included on the list were some impressively up-to-date textbooks, two of which – Thermodynamics by Gilbert Newton Lewis and Merle Randall (which was to go into several editions and become a widely used, usually graduate-level textbook) and James Crowther’s Molecular Physics – had only just been published that year.fn12 Another book on the list, the massive three-volume work A System of Physical Chemistry by William C. McC. Lewis, devoted its third volume, first published in 1920,fn13 to quantum physics.

  As well as being up to date, the list also revealed a much deeper interest in the history and philosophy of science than one would expect from an undergraduate science student. It included, for example, the work usually credited as the very foundation of thermodynamics, ‘On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances’ by Josiah Willard Gibbs, which was first published as a pair of articles in the journal, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences between 1874 and 1878. Oppenheimer also included a number of works by scientists known for their contributions to the philosophy of their subject, including Henri Poincaré and Wilhelm Ostwald. The aforementioned William C. McC. Lewis, though much less well known than either Poincaré or Ostwald, was also someone with a deep interest in philosophy. He had, on his appointment to the chair in physical chemistry at Liverpool University in 1914, devoted his inaugural lecture to a philosophical discussion of ‘Physical Chemistry and Scientific Thought’, in which he expressed many thoughts that chime with the brief remarks Oppenheimer made on the subject. Urging his listeners not to adhere to an overly rigid demarcation between philosophy and science, Lewis remarked that ‘any man who has followed a line of directed thought is necessarily a philosopher and science is really only a particular form of philosophy’.

  At its meeting of 6 June, Harvard’s physics department considered Oppenheimer’s letter to Kemble and, noting that ‘Mr Oppenheimer, according to his own statement, had read rather widely in Physics for one of his age’, voted to allow him to take Physics 6a without taking Physics C. Surprisingly, no one from the department seems to have done anything to ascertain whether Oppenheimer was telling the truth about having read these books, or to check whether, if he had read them, he had learned anything from them. According to Oppenheimer’s recollection: ‘Years later I was told that when the faculty met to consider this request, George Washington Pierce [a member of the physics department] . . . said, “Obviously if he says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a PhD for knowing their titles.”’

  It would be astonishing if there were not some exaggeration, at the very least, in Oppenheimer’s claims to have read all the books that he lists, and there are, indeed, a few indications that he was not entirely familiar with them all. For example, the bibliographic information he provides is scanty and occasionally inaccurate. For none of the books does he offer such standard citation details as the first names or the initials of the author, the name of the publisher, the date or place of publication. ‘On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances’ is listed as ‘On the Equilibria of Heterogeneous Systems’; the German word Spektrallinien in the title of one of the books he listsfn14 is given as ‘Spectral-linien’; and the details of the three-volume work by William C. McC. Lewis mentioned above are given in such a mangled way that a good deal of detective work is needed to identify the books being referred to.fn15 If one could get a PhD for knowing these titles, Oppenheimer would, it seems, only just have scraped through the viva.

  Nevertheless, when he returned to Harvard for his second year in the autumn of 1923, he did so as someone who, though lacking any kind of formal training in physics, was eager to begin graduate-level courses in the subject. His passion for physics, which became more intense as his undergraduate career progressed, eclipsed and eventually extinguished his earlier preoccupation with short-story writing, a process no doubt helped by the fact that Francis Fergusson was no longer at Harvard, having left for Oxford to pursue his studies in English literature. On the day Fergusson left, Oppenheimer sent him a telegram, delivered to his ship, the SS Albania, offering ‘one last wave of ululation applause’ and telling him that ‘it would delight me to hear from time to time of your achievements’. During the following months, he continued to write to Fergusson and also to Horgan in Rochester and to Smith in New York, but his letters grew less frequent and dwelt less and less on literature and more and more on physics – his earlier talk of the stories he had written or planned to write now replaced with talk about equations and theoretical ideas.

  Some of the courses he took in his second year provided him with genuine and lasting stimulation. As in his first year, he took a great variety of courses, including a year-long course in French literature, a philosophy course in the theory of knowledge, two mathematics courses and three in chemistry, but it was the graduate physics courses – especially Heat and Elementary Thermodynamics, taught by Edwin Kemble, and Advanced Thermodynamics, taught by the distinguished experimental physicist Percy Bridgman – that really made him come alive intellectually. Astonishingly, his lack of foundational training in physics proved no hindrance to him in mastering the very difficult material these courses contained, and Oppenheimer was not only able to hold his own with the graduate students taking them, many of whom were three or four years older, but quickly established himself as one of the very best students in the classes.

  It is customary to describe physics at Harvard at this time as being something of a backwater, with the important theoretical advances being made in Copenhagen and the German universities and the decisive experimental work being done at Cambridge, England. And it is true that neither Kemble nor Bridgman was the equal of such towering figures in physics as Rutherford at Cambridge, Bohr at Copenhagen or Born at Göttingen. However, neither were they entirely negligible figures. Kemble was at the forefront of the development of American theoretical physics and Bridgman was justifiably pleased to have brought him to Harvard, where he provided the foundation for one of the most rapidly growing centres of theoretical physics in the United States. Bridgman himself was an experimenter rather than a theorist, and had little knowledge or understanding of the quantum theory that was then being developed in Europe. He was nevertheless one of the leading American physicists of his generation, a position acknowledged in 1946, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on high pressures.

  Though Bridgman had fought hard to attract Kemble to Harvard, there is little sign that they became particularly good friends. In many ways they were opposites; Kemble, the theorist, was a devout Christian, while Bridgman, the experimentalist, was a strident atheist. Both of them became enormously impressed with Oppenheimer, though neither of them seemed to grow especially close to him. The only anecdote Bridgman told about Oppenheimer in later life was designed to illustrate his rather off-putting intellectual showiness. Once, he said, he invited Oppenheimer to his house for dinner. Seeing Oppenheimer admiring a picture of the Greek temple at Segesta, Sicily, Bridgman mentioned that it had been built around 400 BC. ‘I’m sorry to contradict you about the date,’ responded Oppenheimer, ‘but I judge from the capitals on the columns that
it was built about 50 years earlier.’

  Oppenheimer was at this time still just nineteen years old. As always, he seemed intellectually much older, and socially and personally much younger. This meant that, on an intellectual level, he was able to mix with people who, on a social and personal level, remained distant from him. One such person was Jeffries Wyman, whom Oppenheimer had probably met during his first year, but who became a friend during this second year, when they were both enrolled on the same graduate physics courses. A few years older than Oppenheimer, Wyman had majored in philosophy before switching to biology. In Oppenheimer’s first year at Harvard, Wyman had been in his final year of undergraduate study, planning to enter Harvard Graduate School the following year to take courses in chemistry as well as physics, prior to leaving for England, where he would pursue postgraduate research in biochemistry at Cambridge.

  Wyman was as secure and as confident a member of Harvard’s intellectual and social elites as it was possible to be. He came from an old, established Bostonian family, many of whom were extremely distinguished. His grandfather, also called Jeffries Wyman, was one of the most celebrated naturalists of his generation and had been professor of anatomy at Harvard in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the first curator of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and one of the founders of the National Academy of Sciences. Wyman’s best friend, both as an undergraduate at Harvard and throughout much of his life, was John Edsall, whom Oppenheimer had met through the Liberal Club, and who was from a similarly established background.

  Wyman had been encouraged to befriend Oppenheimer by Francis Fergusson (‘Francis was full of talk about Bob Oppenheimer,’ Wyman later remembered). In his last-minute telegram to Fergusson, Oppenheimer had been careful to add ‘Jeffries too sends greetings’, in order, perhaps, to let Fergusson know that he and Wyman had indeed become friends. In fact, Wyman’s attitude to Oppenheimer was a little circumspect. His initial impressions, he said later, were that Oppenheimer ‘was a little precious, and perhaps a little arrogant, but very interesting, full of ideas’. He noted, as Boyd had, that Oppenheimer was ‘completely blind to music. In fact he told me that music was positively painful to him.’ He also remembers that Oppenheimer ‘found social adjustment very difficult, and I think he was often very unhappy. I suppose he was lonely and he didn’t fit in well with the human environment.’ ‘We were good friends,’ Wyman added, ‘and he had some other friends, but there was something that he lacked, perhaps some more personal and deep emotional contact with people than we were having, because our contacts were largely, I should say wholly, on an intellectual basis. We were young people falling in love with ideas right and left and interested in people who gave us ideas, but there wasn’t the warmth of human companionship perhaps.’