by Ray Monk
In ‘Physics and Man’s Understanding’ Oppenheimer posed an interesting question: why did the great scientific achievements of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton have such an impact on our culture at large, while those of Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg had a comparatively small impact? His answer was as follows:
[The] new discoveries which liberated physics have all rested on the correction of some common view which was, in fact, demonstrably in error; they have all rested on a view which could not be reconciled with the experience of physics. The shock of discovering this error, and the glory of being free of it, have meant much to the practitioners. Five centuries ago the errors that physics and astronomy and mathematics were beginning to reveal were errors common to the thought, the doctrine, the very form and hope of European culture. When they were revealed, the thought of Europe was altered. The errors relativity and quantum theory have corrected were physicists’ errors, shared a little, of course, by our colleagues in related subjects.
Oppenheimer offers as a ‘vivid example’ of this Lee and Yang’s discovery of the non-conservation of parity. ‘The error which this corrected was limited to a very small part of mankind.’ It is an interesting thesis, but it is rather underdeveloped in this paper, and, unfortunately, Oppenheimer never returned to it.
At the end of 1965, Oppenheimer gave a talk on Einstein at a UNESCO meeting in Paris that was evidently an attempt to place Einstein and his work into the historical and philosophical scheme he had outlined in the papers discussed above. That is, though he acknowledged that Einstein was a great and original thinker, he wanted to show that, in accordance with the views expressed in ‘To Live with Ourselves’, Einstein’s discoveries ‘meant something’ only in the context of a great tradition. So Oppenheimer briefly went through Einstein’s great contributions to physics, showing how they related to the traditions of: first, thermodynamics; second, Maxwell’s field equations; and third, the philosophical tradition associated with the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In the last twenty-five years of Einstein’s life, however, said Oppenheimer, ‘his tradition in a certain sense failed him’:
He did not like the elements of indeterminacy. He did not like the abandonment of continuity or of causality. These were things that he had grown up with, saved by him, and enormously enlarged; and to see them lost, even though he had put the dagger in the hand of their assassin by his own work, was very hard on him.
The talk was controversial, largely because it was misunderstood and partly because Oppenheimer chose to make the above perfectly reasonable point by talking of dispelling the ‘clouds of myth’ that surrounded Einstein. He meant the myth that saw Einstein as an individual genius operating in isolation from the tradition of physics. He made life difficult for himself, however, by appearing to be snobbish. Einstein, he said, ‘was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness. I think that in England people would have said that he did not have much “background,” and in America that he lacked “education.”’ This was a compliment, though it did not look like one, especially as Oppenheimer seemed so determined, in other small areas, to bring Einstein down to size, pointing out, for example, that ‘he was not that good a violinist’, and also that his famous letter to Roosevelt ‘had very little effect’.
After giving this UNESCO talk, Oppenheimer left for St John, where he and Kitty celebrated Christmas and New Year in the usual style. In January 1966, they returned to the States and Oppenheimer attended the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, where he gave a historical lecture on ‘Thirty Years of Mesons’. After running through the story of the meson, from Yukawa’s first prediction to Lee and Yang’s discovery of non-conservation of parity, Oppenheimer concluded:
It seems to me that we are in for a far greater novelty than the discovery of ‘more fundamental’ particles. It is not one of the privileges, as it is assuredly not one of the virtues, of senility to make predictions. I make only one. I think that we are unlikely to live again through such a ten-year joke as mistaking the mu mesons for Yukawa’s particles. I do not think that could have happened if it had not been for World War II. That too, I hope, is not so likely to recur.
Oppenheimer at this time was still not sixty-two years old, but he looked much older. ‘You see the old man,’ one physicist is said to have remarked at a party given during the conference, ‘he’s dying.’ But he added: ‘I wouldn’t cross him!’
At the beginning of February 1966, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with throat cancer and started to receive radiation treatment. He spent much of March in hospital. At the end of the month, Dyson wrote to his parents that he was only now ‘finding out how lonely the Oppenheimers really are in spite of their huge numbers of “friends.” . . . These are the last two weeks of Robert’s radiation treatment, and in this time he must know whether it is life or death.’
I have been over three times to talk with Robert and Kitty. Kitty believes, perhaps rightly, that I can help Robert to keep alive by keeping alive his interest in physics. She feels desperately that he needs to be convinced that he is still needed in the community of physicists. On the other hand, I find that Robert is just so physically tired from the radiation that my instinct is to hold his hand in silence rather than burden him with particles and equations.
The radiation treatment finished in April, and by June he was able to travel. He went to Mount Kisco to attend one last meeting of the group that he had helped to set up. On 21 June, the New York Times carried the headline ‘Dr Oppenheimer Plans History of Physics After His Retirement’, under which, however, was a short piece not about Oppenheimer’s proposed book, but about his illness and his forthcoming retirement. It quoted Oppenheimer as saying that he would be giving his ‘hideously complete’ archive to the Library of Congress, ‘if anyone cares to look at it’. At the end of June, Oppenheimer ceased being director of the institute, and he and Kitty moved out of Olden Manor and into a much smaller house that had been the Yangs’ home.
After a last trip to St John, the Oppenheimers returned to their new home in the autumn of 1966. In November, Oppenheimer gave his final public lecture, entitled ‘A Time in Need’. If the talk seemed a little lacklustre and somewhat platitudinous, this was hardly surprising; it was obvious by this time that he did not have long to live. He had, he said privately, ‘no confidence at all of enjoying good health in the future’.
The Oppenheimers spent Christmas in Princeton that year for the first time in a decade. By this time the cancer was spreading and Oppenheimer was declining rapidly. In January 1967, he attended one last meeting of the Tuesday lunch group, at which he gave Treiman an earnest piece of advice: ‘Sam, don’t smoke.’ The following month, on 15 February, he attended his last faculty meeting. ‘Poor Oppenheimer is coming close to his end,’ wrote Dyson to his parents.
He insisted on coming to this faculty meeting but he can hardly speak any more. We were all very polite and told him how glad we were that he came; but really it is a torture for everybody to watch him sit there speechless and suffering. His doctors have now given him up and we can only hope for a quick end.
The effort of attending the meeting exhausted Oppenheimer, and, when he got back home, he went to bed. He stayed there for most of the following three days, getting up only to receive visitors. One of these was the journalist Louis Fischer, whose life of Lenin Oppenheimer had admired. ‘He looked extremely thin,’ Fischer wrote to a friend, ‘his hair was sparse and white, and his lips were dry and cracked.’ Conversation was difficult because Oppenheimer ‘mumbled so badly that I suppose I understood about one word out of five’. ‘I have a strong impression,’ Fischer added, ‘that he knew his mind was failing and that he probably wanted to die.’ The next day, Francis Fergusson came, but stayed only a very short while because Oppenheimer was so frail. ‘I walked him into his bedroom,’ Fergusson said in an interview years later, ‘and there I left him.’ The following evening, at 10.40 p.m. on Saturday, 18 February 1967, Oppenheimer died in his sleep.
A week later, 25 February, a memorial service was held in Alexander Hall on the Princeton campus. On a bitterly cold afternoon, 600 mourners gathered to hear brief eulogies from Hans Bethe, Henry DeWolf Smyth and George Kennan. Bethe gave a summary of Oppenheimer’s contributions to science and politics, after which Smyth, who had been the only AEC member to have voted in favour of reinstating Oppenheimer’s security clearance, spoke about the shame he felt on America’s behalf because of the security hearing: ‘It was a horrible period in American history, and we paid horribly for it.’ The same point was made more emphatically and more eloquently by Kennan, who remarked: ‘The truth is that the US Government never had a servant more devoted at heart than this one.’ He also recalled how, shortly after the 1954 hearing, he had asked Oppenheimer why he had not left the United States. ‘Damn it,’ Oppenheimer replied, ‘I happen to love this country.’ Soon after the service, Kitty took Oppenheimer’s ashes to St John and scattered them in the sea.
Kitty herself survived for just five more years, most of which she spent living with Charlotte and Robert Serber. Serber, alone among Oppenheimer’s friends, was devoted to Kitty. In the summer of 1972, Kitty bought an elegant fifty-two-foot ketch, which she called Moonraker and in which she and Serber planned to travel round the world. After setting sail from Fort Lauderdale in Forida, their plan was to cruise for a while in the Caribbean, before going through the Panama Canal on their way to Japan via the Galapagos Islands and Tahiti. When they reached Cristóbal, at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal, however, Kitty became very ill and was admitted to hospital in Panama City, where she died of an embolism on 27 October. Five years later, Toni Oppenheimer, who had, throughout her life, been subject to bouts of depression, committed suicide at her home on St John. Her second marriage had recently ended in divorce. Her brother Peter lived first in Perro Caliente and then in Santa Fe, where he worked as a contractor and carpenter. He is still alive, but recoils from anything connected with his famous father.
Oppenheimer loved Kitty, Toni and Peter, but he was never able to be the reliably affectionate husband or father they needed him to be. The problems he had as a child forming close bonds with other people had remained with him throughout his life. He had wanted those close bonds very much, but had not known how to create them. Similarly, and relatedly, he did not know how to open up to other people. In the last few years of his life, as we have seen, he had tried hard to overcome this trait, to reveal his inner self and become an ‘open book’. But the book remained closed. What he called his ‘hideously complete’ collection of private papers is impressively massive, but in those 296 boxes of letters, drafts and manuscripts there is remarkably little that gives away anything of an intimate nature. There is an abundance of material that testifies to his many-faceted brilliance – the ‘bright shining splinters’ that Rabi described him as being made of – but little that shows Oppenheimer sharing ordinary emotions with his fellow human beings.
This aspect of his personality was touched on by George Kennan in his contribution to the memorial service. Oppenheimer, Kennan said, was ‘a man who had a deep yearning for friendship, for companionship, for the warmth and richness of human communication’:
The arrogance which to many appeared to be a part of his personality masked in reality an overpowering desire to bestow and receive affection. Neither circumstances nor at times the asperities of his own temperament permitted the gratification of this need in a measure remotely approaching its intensity.
Of the three people who spoke at the service, Kennan knew Oppenheimer the best by a long way. Indeed, many of Oppenheimer’s friends felt that the memorial service had been hurriedly arranged and had not served its purpose well. A chance to do it better came in April 1967, when the American Physical Society organised its own memorial service. The speakers on this occasion included many of those whom one might have expected to speak at Princeton, each one allocated an aspect of Oppenheimer’s life about which they had special knowledge. Robert Serber spoke on ‘The Early Years’, Weisskopf on ‘The Los Alamos Years’, Pais on ‘The Princeton Period’ and Glenn Seaborg on ‘Public Service and Human Contributions’. When the speeches were published as a book, Rabi wrote a short but illuminating introduction, which, in trying to convey the nature of Oppenheimer’s complex character, emphasised his spirituality. ‘In Oppenheimer,’ Rabi remarked, ‘the element of earthiness was feeble.’
Yet it was essentially this spiritual quality, this refinement as expressed in speech and manner, that was the basis of his charisma. He never expressed himself completely. He always left a feeling that there were depths of sensibility and insight not yet revealed. These may be the qualities of the born leader who seems to have reserves of uncommitted strength.
The feebleness in Oppenheimer of the ‘element of earthiness’, the sense one has of him being almost disembodied, is connected with his enigmatic elusiveness and his inability to make ordinary close contact with the people around him. But it also, Rabi perceptively suggests, was what made him so fascinating and therefore enabled Oppenheimer to become the great man he showed himself to be.
* * *
fn70 ‘An exclusive document: Robert Oppenheimer, why did you lie? By Haakon Chevalier.’
fn71 At forty-three years old Kennedy was, in fact, only a few years younger than Nixon, who was then forty-seven.
fn72 Bernstein had by this time started writing regularly for the New Yorker.
fn73 Inexplicably, when this talk was published in Encounter, the last line was changed to: ‘Readers and writers still have a lot to do’, which removes the sting – and most of the humour – from it.
fn74 After they had found themselves on the same side on many political questions during the late 1940s, Oppenheimer and Kennan had become friends. At Oppenheimer’s invitation, Kennan had spent eighteen months as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study during the years 1950–2, and joined the faculty as a permanent member in 1956, after which the friendship between them became much closer.
The infant Oppenheimer with his mother, Ella.
Oppenheimer in the arms of his father, Julius, whom he later described as ‘one of the most tolerant and human of men’.
Oppenheimer (right) at about ten, with a friend, pursuing one of his childhood passions: building with blocks.
155 Riverside Drive, Oppenheimer’s childhood home (the picture was taken in 1910, just a year before the Oppenheimer family moved there).
‘A little precious and perhaps a little arrogant, but very interesting, full of ideas.’ Oppenheimer at Harvard.
William Boyd, one of the few close friends Oppenheimer had at Harvard.
Frederick Bernheim, Oppenheimer’s friend and Harvard room-mate.
One of Oppenheimer’s best friends from New Mexico, the writer Paul Horgan.
The Upper Pecos Valley, Oppenheimer’s favourite landscape, where ‘for the first time in his life’, according to Herbert Smith, who accompanied him on his first visit there in 1922, Oppenheimer ‘found himself loved, admired, sought after’.
Inside the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, c. 1920.
The great Cambridge physicist, Paul Dirac.
Patrick Blackett, ‘a young Oedipus. Tall, slim, beautifully balanced and always looking better dressed than anyone.’
Niels Bohr, the man whom Oppenheimer admired over all others, in 1922.
Max Born (seated), Oppenheimer’s PhD supervisor at Göttingen, in 1922. Behind him (left to right) are: William Osler, Niels Bohr, James Franck and Oscar Klein.
Charlotte Riefenstahl (centre).
Werner Heisenberg in 1933, the year after he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Paul Ehrenfest in 1927.
Oppenheimer on Lake Zurich with I. I. Rabi, H. M. Mott-Smith and (smiling rather sinisterly at the camera) Wolfgang Pauli, 1929.
Oppenheimer in 1930 during his first year at Berkeley.
Oppenheimer with his close friend and scientific collaborator, Robert Serber.
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Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley in the 1930s with one of the early cyclotrons.
Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, who was almost universally disliked among his colleagues at Los Alamos and later at Princeton.
Perro Caliente – ‘hot dog!’
Haakon Chevalier, whose very brief, half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to contribute to Soviet espionage had deep and lasting consequences for Oppenheimer and himself.
