Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  The nearest Oppenheimer got to ‘the warmth of human companionship’ was with Bernheim and Boyd. For their second and third years, Oppenheimer and Bernheim occupied large adjoining rooms in a house in Mount Auburn Street, known in Harvard as the ‘Gold Coast’ because of its reputation as the place where only the wealthiest students lived. Oppenheimer brought to these rooms oil paintings, etchings and a tea urn in which he brewed only Russian tea. ‘He wasn’t a comfortable person to be around, in a way,’ Bernheim later commented, ‘because he always gave the impression that he was thinking very deeply about things. When we roomed together he would spend the evenings locked in his room, trying to do something with Planck’s constant or something like that.fn16 I had visions of him suddenly bursting forth as a great physicist and here I was just trying to get through Harvard.’ Boyd was a regular visitor to the house on Mount Auburn Street, and remembers that Oppenheimer seemed never to study, or in any case that ‘he was pretty careful not to let you catch him at it’.

  In fact, Oppenheimer did little else but study. He was determined to get through his degree in three years, rather than the customary four (as, indeed, were Bernheim and Boyd), which meant that he had to take six courses at a time, rather than the usual four, but he also audited a number of courses and, in addition, spent vast amounts of time in the library (he later said he ‘ransacked’ the library in something like the way the Goths ransacked Rome), reading an extraordinary number of books on a vast range of subjects. He seemed determined, if not to know everything, then at least to give the impression that he knew everything.

  ‘I am working very hard now,’ Oppenheimer wrote to Smith in November 1923, ‘so hard that I fear your epithet of grind.’ In a subsequent letter, he outlined to Smith the kinds of things that filled his day-to-day existence:

  Generously, you ask what I do . . . I labor, and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories, and junk; I go to the math lib and read and to the Phil lib and divide my time between Meinherr Russell and the contemplation of a most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza – charmingly ironic at that, don’t you think? I make stenches in three different labs, listen to Allard gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill the low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters and wish I were dead. Voila.

  It is this particular letter of which Jeremy Bernstein has remarked: ‘The whole tone makes one’s flesh creep.’ And yet it is one of Oppenheimer’s most honest and forthright letters. The tone is affected, to be sure, but the picture it draws of his time at Harvard, full of intense and varied intellectual activities, mixed with frustrated glances at apparently unattainable women and the constant battle to keep suicidal depression at bay, rings entirely true.

  Jeffries Wyman says about himself and his circle of friends at Harvard: ‘We were all too much in love with the problems of philosophy and science and the arts and general intellectual life to be thinking about girls.’ But Oppenheimer’s letters to Smith reveal that this was not entirely true. As well as the contemplation of the ‘lovely lady’ studying Spinoza described above, there was also, in a letter written in January 1924, mention of a ‘ravishing creature’ who served food to the people who attended a literary salon on Beacon Hill, and ‘whose charm is pretty largely responsible for my frequent ascents of the hill’. For the most part, though, Oppenheimer’s company at Harvard was restricted to men. None of his friends remembers him ever taking a girl out.

  It was not all hard work, however. Oppenheimer, Bernheim and Boyd would often have dinner at Locke-Ober’s, the famously elegant and famously expensive French restaurant in Boston, after which they would walk the six miles back to Cambridge, along the Charles River. Boyd also remembers an occasion on which, during a winter walk along the shore with Oppenheimer and Bernheim, one dared the others to go swimming, upon which they all stripped and plunged into the freezing water. And Bernheim recalls that sometimes they would take a train out of Cambridge, get off at a randomly chosen point and spend the night walking back. There were also weekend trips to Cape Ann. Here, Oppenheimer and Bernheim, sometimes joined by Boyd, would stay overnight at an inn they had discovered at Folly Cove, where the food was extremely good. In a letter to Smith, Oppenheimer claimed that he and Bernheim were thinking of buying, or possibly renting, a ‘ramshackle cottage way out on Cape Ann’, which ‘lies way above the water, amid huge cliffs of yellow granite, and looks across a miraculously blue ocean to the shore line of Maine’. But these plans never came to anything and Bernheim later remarked that, as far as he was concerned, those cliffs of yellow granite existed only in a ‘mythological landscape’ of Oppenheimer’s imagining.

  Still, these walks and weekend trips aside, Oppenheimer’s time was mostly spent in intense study. ‘Even in the last stages of senile aphasia,’ as he put it to Smith, ‘I will not say that education, in an academic sense, was only secondary when I was at college. I plow through about five or ten big scientific books a week.’ In the New Year of 1924, Smith learned that he had been appointed the new principal of the Ethical Culture high school. Congratulating him, Oppenheimer begged him not to overwork and was also prompted to reflect: ‘For me, and, I suspect, for you, it was never the opinion merely of the multitude that counted so much; it was the opinion and the conduct of the great.’

  At the end of the year, Oppenheimer discovered that he had been awarded an A in every course he took, except his second-semester maths course in probability, for which he got a B. His A in the notoriously difficult graduate course on thermodynamics, taught by Kemble, was especially noteworthy. For a second-year student of chemistry, who had never taken any undergraduate course in physics, to get an A on this course was completely unheard of. After spending part of the summer with his family in Europe, Oppenheimer returned to Harvard in October 1924 for his final year. Soon after the start of term, he wrote to Smith to tell him that his plans for the following year were not quite decided. One possibility was to follow Edsall and Wyman to Cambridge, England, for, as he told Smith, he had been offered a place at Christ’s College. Another was to stay at Harvard (‘I cannot decide to leave this Puritanical hole, even for all the vacuity of my life here’) and pursue research with Bridgman.

  In his final year, Oppenheimer took more courses than ever, and, as always, they were extremely diverse. With a discernible note of excitement, he told Smith: ‘I am taking a course with Whitehead of Russell & Whitehead, Cambridge, on the Metaphysical presuppositions of science.’ Whitehead, who had been Bertrand Russell’s tutor in mathematics at Cambridge, had become famous as Russell’s co-author of the monumental three-volume Principia Mathematica, published in 1910–13, which sought to show that the theorems of arithmetic could be derived from axioms of logic. In 1924, Whitehead, who since the First World War had concentrated on writing philosophy rather than mathematics, accepted an offer from Harvard to join their philosophy department. He was by then already sixty-three years old and was to stay in the United States for the rest of his life (he died in 1947, having retired from teaching ten years earlier).Whitehead’s course consisted of seminars rather than lectures and attracted very few students. In this first year it attracted just Oppenheimer and one other brave student. Many years later, writing to Bertrand Russell to congratulate him on his ninetieth birthday, Oppenheimer recalled:

  It is almost forty years ago that we worked through the Principia Mathematica with Whitehead at Harvard. He had largely forgotten, so that he was the perfect teacher, both master and student. I remember how often he would pause with a smile before a sequence of theorems and say to us: ‘That was a point Bertie always liked.’ For all the years of my life I have thought of this phrase whenever some high example of intelligence, some humanity, or some rare courage and nobility has come our way.

  In addition to Whitehead’s course, Oppenheimer took two courses each in chemistry, physics and mathematics and a history cours
e called ‘History of England from 1688 to the Present Time’. He also audited many courses, including a graduate seminar given by the distinguished mathematician George Birkhoff on Sturm-Liouville equations (a type of differential equation), a subject chosen, Oppenheimer later remembered, ‘because he’d been working on it and wanted to talk about it’. Birkhoff, Oppenheimer recalled, ‘was a remarkable fellow. He would begin: “Well, you know, walking across the yard this morning it occurred to me . . .”’ Birkhoff’s course was, Oppenheimer said, the only mathematics course at Harvard that he remembered with any happiness.

  Birkhoff, as well as being Harvard’s most eminent mathematician, was also one of its most controversial and eccentric professors, whose interests extended far beyond mathematics. In 1933, after spending a year travelling round the world studying the art, music and poetry of various cultures, he published a book called Aesthetic Measure, which put forward a mathematical theory of aesthetics, the centre of which was a formula for measuring aesthetic value. He was also passionate about promoting American mathematicians, and, in this capacity, famously aroused the ire of Einstein, who in the 1930s was once heard to denounce him as ‘one of the world’s greatest academic anti-Semites’, after Birkhoff had urged the appointment of American mathematicians in favour of European Jewish refugees, whose cause Einstein was supporting. In the 1920s, Birkhoff wrote a recommendation for Oppenheimer that included a sentence that one could regard as evidence either of his anti-Semitism or of his willingness to overcome it: ‘He is Jewish but I should consider him a very fine type of man.’

  Though it was theoretical physics that had excited Oppenheimer’s enthusiasm, it is interesting that it never occurred to him to pursue postgraduate research with Kemble, rather than with Bridgman, who was resolutely experimental in his approach to the subject. When he looked back on his time at Harvard, it was his relationship with Bridgman that Oppenheimer singled out as most important for his intellectual development. ‘I found Bridgman a wonderful teacher,’ he recalled, ‘because he never really was quite reconciled to things being the way they were and he always thought them out.’ Bridgman, he said, ‘was a man to whom one wanted to be an apprentice’.

  Why Oppenheimer decided against becoming Bridgman’s ‘apprentice’, and why he opted instead to pursue research at Cambridge, is not entirely clear. He must have made the decision by the New Year of 1925, since he then wrote to Smith telling him that Christ’s College had written to him asking for fees and for ‘a certificate from my “head-master” at school, which is you’. In April, he wrote to Francis Fergusson, telling him that he would be in England at the end of August or the beginning of September, which would give him time before the start of term to see Fergusson. He proposed that they should go to Wales together, where they could ‘ruminate conjointly on our sins’ and Fergusson could pass on to Oppenheimer the benefit of his experience of English society, in particular ‘how to treat the tutors & the dukes’.

  In the meantime, Oppenheimer completed his degree at Harvard. Despite describing his work to Smith as ‘frantic, bad and graded A’, in his final year he, for the first and only time in his undergraduate career, got two Bs: one for Whitehead’s course and the other for dynamics. Nevertheless, in June 1925 (though the record notes that it was ‘as of 1926’), Oppenheimer was awarded the AB summa cum laude (the equivalent of a first-class degree in the UK) in chemistry. Boyd and Bernheim also completed their degrees that summer and the three of them celebrated in Bernheim’s room with (this being the period of Prohibition) some laboratory alcohol. As Bernheim remembers it, he and Boyd ‘got plastered’, while Oppenheimer ‘took one drink and retired’.

  * * *

  fn6 Strikingly, in this exchange, while Benesch speaks of the Jewish ‘faith’, Lowell speaks of the Jewish ‘race’.

  fn7 It must be stressed that most of Oppenheimer’s correspondence from this period has not survived. There are no letters, for example, to or from his parents, though it is certain that he wrote frequently to them throughout his three years at Harvard.

  fn8 In 1931, Standish and its neighbour Gore Hall combined to form Winthrop House.

  fn9 ‘Qualitative analysis’ in chemistry contrasts with ‘quantitative analysis’; whereas the former is concerned with the identification of chemical compounds in a given sample, the latter is concerned with measuring the amount of each compound in the sample.

  fn10 After Oppenheimer moved to Cambridge, England, in 1925, his letters to Fergusson, then at Oxford, do mention Bernheim, referring to him as ‘Fred’.

  fn11 In connection with Fergusson’s disdain for the ritual of the annual Harvard–Yale football match and his (justifiably) confident expectation of a Rhodes Scholarship, it is interesting to compare him with Oppenheimer’s freshman friends: Bernheim, who was so keen to get tickets for the match that he applied twice, and Boyd, who applied for a Rhodes Scholarship, but was rejected.

  fn12 The first edition of Crowther’s Molecular Physics was published in 1914, but, given the nature of Oppenheimer’s list, it seems likely that he had in mind the third edition, published in 1923.

  fn13 It is not clear whether Oppenheimer was using the second or third edition of this work. It was, in any case, not the first – published in 1916 – since that had only two volumes. For publishing details of the second and third editions, see the Bibliography.

  fn14 Arnold Sommerfeld’s Atombau und Spektrallinien, which had originally been published in 1919 and by 1923 was available in English as Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines, was generally regarded as, in the words of one historian of science, ‘the textbook bible of the subject for physicists the world over’.

  fn15 A System of Physical Chemistry was published in a series called Textbooks of Physical Chemistry edited by Sir William Ramsay. Oppenheimer does not give either the title of the series or of Lewis’s three-volume work; he only gives the titles of the individual volumes, listing their author as ‘Ramsay; Lewis’.

  fn16 Referred to by the letter h, Planck’s constant is a fixed numerical value (6.5 x 10-27), which is the constant of proportionality between the energy of light and its frequency. It is central to quantum physics, and has been since its inception, being used by Planck and subsequent physicists to describe the very notion of a ‘quantum’ of energy. It is discussed at length in the third volume of Lewis’s A System of Physical Chemistry.

  5

  Cambridge

  ‘YOU WILL TELL me how to treat the tutors & the dukes & I shall tremble.’ Oppenheimer’s plea to Fergusson for help in preparing for Cambridge was partly in jest, but it also expressed a very real and deep anxiety. He was indeed trembling at the prospect of trying, and possibly failing, to achieve what Fergusson, with apparently very little effort, had already achieved: namely, acceptance into the highest level of English literary and intellectual society. Herbert Smith understood this all too well and tried to alert Fergusson to it in a letter written shortly before Oppenheimer’s arrival in England, in which he advised him that ‘your ability to show him [Oppenheimer] about should be exercised with great tact, rather than in royal profusion. And instead of flying at your throat – as I remember your being ready to do for George What’s-his-name . . . when you were similarly awed by him – I’m afraid he’d merely cease to think his own life worth living.’

  Oppenheimer’s original plan, outlined in the letter quoted in the previous chapter, was to sail to England at the end of August or the beginning of September 1925, leaving him a few weeks before the start of term, which he hoped to spend in Wales together with Fergusson, ‘sailing and recuperating from America’. In a subsequent letter, written in July, this plan had changed somewhat. Giving an exact date on which he expected to arrive in England – 16 September – Oppenheimer told Fergusson that he intended to see him in Cambridge soon after this date, and then, after a couple of weeks in Cambridge (‘to see about laboratory facilities and such matters’), he planned to go with Fergusson not sailing in Wales, but walking in Cornwall.


  In the meantime, Oppenheimer spent much of August in New Mexico, which he had not visited since his trip there in the summer of 1922, but which remained the place he most cherished and in which he felt most appreciated and accepted. This time he was accompanied by his parents and Frank, who was now thirteen. ‘The Parents are really quite pleased with the place,’ Oppenheimer wrote to Smith from Los Pinos, ‘and are starting to ride a little. Curiously enough they enjoy the frivolous courtesy of the place, and all is well.’ In fact, Julius and Ella spent most of the trip staying in luxury at the exclusive and expensive Bishop’s Lodge hotel, on the outskirts of Santa Fe, joining their son at the Pages’ ranch for just a few days. Most of Oppenheimer’s time was spent with Katherine Page and Paul Horgan, who was back in New Mexico after finishing his course at Rochester. Horgan remembers one ride in particular, in which he and Oppenheimer, crossing the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, got caught in a thunderstorm, ‘immense, huge, pounding rain’, to shelter from which they sat under their horses while they ate their lunch. ‘I was looking at Robert,’ Horgan recalls, ‘and all of a sudden I noticed his hair was standing straight up . . . responding to the static. Marvellous.’