Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  It was Stan Livingston who chafed most deeply under the Lawrence regime. Despite his stature as a charter member of Ernest’s inner circle—after all, he was one of Lawrence’s first PhDs and the designer of his first working cyclotron—Livingston remained aloof to the camaraderie of the Rad Lab, seldom a participant in the off-hours horseplay. Having come to Berkeley at the age of twenty-five, he was the other researchers’ contemporary, yet he struck them as older, more restless. “I don’t know what makes him so prickly,” Malcolm Henderson would remark later.

  Livingston was an indefatigable worker, keeping such long hours while Lawrence was on his honeymoon in 1932 that physics chairman Elmer Hall, alarmed at his bedraggled appearance, ordered him to “get away from Berkeley and from his problem” for a spell. Hall informed Lawrence: “Livingston looks tired, and I suggested to him yesterday that he ought by all means to take at least two weeks’ vacation. I fear he will go ‘stale’ . . . if he plods on without intermission.” But Livingston had just had his brainstorm about removing the grids from the dees, and taking a respite at such a moment fit neither his personality nor Lawrence’s calendar. He worked hard through the summer, and harder when Ernest returned. They labored together so closely for such long, unbroken hours that it was understandable that their contributions to the finished product blurred into one another.

  Livingston considered himself an equal partner with Lawrence in the cyclotron’s early development. Was it not his name next to Ernest’s on the very first article ever published describing a working cyclotron (in the Physical Review of April 1932), the device pictured in its pages his own handmade eleven-inch brass box? Whether the success of the project owed more to Lawrence’s vision or to Livingston’s design technique sometimes seemed debatable, even if in retrospect it was self-evident that without Ernest Lawrence, the Berkeley cyclotron could not have been born. About that, there was never any doubt in Lawrence’s mind, at least.

  To most of his students and colleagues, Ernest seemed generous with credit to a fault. He often allowed their names to come first in journal articles announcing new Rad Lab discoveries, sometimes even refusing any byline whatsoever—both practices almost unheard of in major scientific laboratories led by an eminent figure. Most of the staff seemed to think the distribution of credit at the Rad Lab was fair. “Ernest had enough credit to go around, and we all got it,” reflected Henderson. “I know I got fully as much as I deserved.”

  Not so Stan Livingston. As the cyclotron attracted more attention nationwide, and Lawrence spent more time escorting luminaries through the Rad Lab, basking in their compliments and sometimes obliviously walking them silently past the laboring Livingston, the matter of credit began to grate. One day he broached the issue with Ernest face-to-face, explaining that he considered his contribution unappreciated.

  The coldness of Ernest’s reply was shocking. “I’m running this myself,” he said. “If you’re unhappy, why, feel free to go on any other project. Because I can get any number of graduate students to do what you are doing.”

  Staggering out of Ernest’s office, Livingston ran into Jim Brady, whose seniority at the lab matched his own. His face ashen, he recounted the interview in all its excruciating detail. Brady mouthed some sympathetic words, but privately, he agreed with the boss. Lawrence provided the vision, he reflected later, and “Livingston was a pair of arms.” This was perhaps unduly harsh; Lawrence’s effort to secure Livingston another year’s stipend through Crocker’s medical school donation attested to the esteem he held for this particular pair of arms.

  But Stan Livingston plainly could no longer survive in the psychological environment of the Rad Lab, where the boss’s vision was realized through the resourcefulness of the staff—but where no one was permitted to forget that Ernest’s vision was the animating force. Leonard Loeb, an outsider secure in his own self-importance who had the luxury of pondering the dynamics of the Rad Lab from a safe remove, observed: “Certain things will occur when a man like Ernest Lawrence with his . . . unconscious and clean enthusiasm and leadership in general draws into his orbit the more suggestible and the weaker members of the scientific community.” The most brilliant researchers drawn into the Lawrence orbit—Nobel-caliber scientists such as Luis Alvarez, Edwin McMillan, and Glenn Seaborg—would find their own methods to exploit Lawrence’s laboratory resources to make their own reputations independently. Lawrence recognized that their accomplishments added luster to the Rad Lab, and, accordingly, gave them as much freedom as they needed. Others, like Wilson, absorbed what knowledge and experience they needed from the Rad Lab and launched successful careers elsewhere. Still others, like Donald Cooksey, settled into long and fruitful careers as acolytes to the leader. The research paradigm Ernest was creating was novel for everyone.

  By Loeb’s reckoning, Livingston was a personality type destined to occupy an uneasy limbo within this continuum. “Livingston unquestionably belonged to the fringe of the suggestible,” Loeb observed to Lawrence’s authorized biographer, Herbert Childs, “but had sufficient individualism in himself to desire to escape . . . The bitterness came in that Livingston had worked too hard and for too many years as a cooperator . . . and became acutely aware of his contributions. Being on the fringe of belonging to the leadership group and unquestionably under Lawrence having achieved beyond his normal capabilities, he suffered a serious setback to his morale when he . . . realized that after all the credit went to Lawrence. As society is constituted, it could not have been otherwise.” It is telling that even after Livingston left Berkeley in July 1934 for a faculty post at Cornell University—another American physics backwater that was about to leap up in stature with the appointments to its faculty of Hans Bethe and Robert Bacher, both physicists of the first rank—he remained a devoted member of what became known as the Cyclotron Republic. Cornell had hired him primarily to build its cyclotron; its eleven-inch dimension was dictated by the school’s meager resources, but Livingston brought it the distinction of building the first successful cyclotron in the United States outside Berkeley. More broadly, he became the unofficial curator of cyclotron history and an assiduous chronicler of the spread of the technology, keeping Ernest supplied with frequent reports from the field.

  Yet he never lost the conviction that his role in the machine’s development had been overlooked. For this, he chose to blame Donald Cooksey, who, as the longtime associate director of the Rad Lab, served as the official keeper of the Lawrence flame. Cooksey “brought a certain idolization of Lawrence into the laboratory,” Livingston observed more than thirty years after his departure. “Cooksey’s handling of the story of the early days caused the new generation to be unaware of what had been done in those early days and to think that Lawrence must have done all of it with his own hands . . . I think he did harm to history.”

  Livingston may not have recognized that the Rad Lab already had acquired unique prestige at the moment that he challenged Lawrence for credit. If Lawrence’s attention was still devoted more to perfecting the machine than to exploit its powers, both its performance and its results already were being noticed around the world. Physicists of international standing were showing up in Berkeley to see the marvel in action and contemplate what they might accomplish with a cyclotron of their own. Berkeley and its remarkable style of scientific inquiry was on the rise, and that was Ernest Lawrence’s doing—mostly.

  For there was one other factor: Ernest had forged a partnership with an outstanding young scientist who was building his own international reputation as a theoretical physicist. He was Lawrence’s great friend, yet as different from the South Dakota boy as the moon is different from the sun. His name was Oppenheimer.

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  Oppie

  It is the emblematic photograph of Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer together in the full bloom of their friendship, long before their personal relations became soured by rivalry, suspicion, and politics. Snapped at Perro Caliente (“Hot Dog”),
the New Mexico ranch Oppenheimer leased with his brother, Frank, it is undated, but the time must have been the early 1930s. The friends are both wearing riding boots encrusted up to the calf with desert sand from a recent outing on horseback. Ernest stands evenly balanced on the balls of his feet, like a youthful Mark Antony, in command of his surroundings; he wears a neat checked jacket over a V-necked sweater and a knotted tie, grinning broadly at the camera. Robert slouches against the fender of his Packard automobile, his shapeless dark jacket covered with dust, his hair an unkempt mop, his eyes glaring mistrustfully at the lens from under hooded brows.

  What was it that united these men from irreconcilably divergent backgrounds? To those who knew them both during the quarter century in which they joined to create Big Science and dominated American physics, Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer were a most enigmatic pair: Ernest, the offspring of Lutheran schoolteachers, raised in the upper Midwest and educated at a land-grant college; Robert, the scion of a Jewish merchant family, the product of Harvard and the great European temples of learning. Lawrence was broad shouldered and athletic (Robert would marvel at his “unbelievable vitality”) and always neatly groomed; Oppenheimer was alarmingly thin and permanently disheveled, a cigarette almost invariably drooping from his lips. Even their personal inconsistencies seemed like photographic negatives of each other’s. Ernest projected the air of a worldly bon vivant, but, in truth, the work of his lab always came first; Robert projected the air of an ascetic, but his indulgences were manifold and libertine: wine, women, food, music, and politics. Around the time they first met, the extroverted Lawrence was preparing to become engaged to the woman to whom he would remain married all his life; the introspective Oppenheimer arrived in Berkeley with several love affairs under his belt and with more yet to come.

  The common force in their lives was physics. But that is an incomplete answer, for their approaches to science were also divergent: Oppenheimer was a theorist who could barely turn a bolt with a wrench; Lawrence an experimentalist whose inspired gadgetry transformed how physics—including Oppenheimer’s physics—was done. Perhaps that was the secret. They seemed to be complementary pieces making a whole, the way particle and wave manifestations together defined a photon. “Lawrence the experimentalist and Oppenheimer the theoretical man formed about as strong a team as you could imagine in physics,” James Brady told an interviewer years later. “And they were always together.”

  They felt an indentical compulsion to ride the dramatic new developments in their chosen field to their logical destination—to a Big Science focused paradoxically on the infinitesimally small—and to turn their academic home into the dominant center of learning and discovery in that field. Lawrence would provide the instrumentation and nurture the new sources of money and patronage needed to make it ever more powerful; Oppenheimer would provide the intellectual bedrock on which Lawrence’s machinery would stand. Neither could have achieved his goals without the other.

  This would be the most important and lasting professional relationship in either man’s life. And it would resonate worldwide. The bond between Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer would influence the development of nuclear physics itself, allied strategy in World War II, and civilian and military nuclear policy through the postwar years. There could be few relationships between any two men that left so profound a legacy for the world we live in today.

  • • •

  Julius Robert Oppenheimer had arrived on the Berkeley campus almost exactly one year after Ernest Lawrence, and with every bit as much thunder.

  It was the summer of 1929, a few weeks before the beginning of term. Oppenheimer had received his doctorate only two years earlier under Max Born at Göttingen, where he had communed with such rising stars of quantum mechanics as Werner Heisenberg and Paul Ehrenfest. He seemed to absorb the baffling paradoxes of quantum theory with ease. Following the oral examination for his doctorate, one of the examiners who had grilled him, the freshly minted Nobel laureate James Franck, told a colleague, “I got out of there just in time. He was beginning to examine me.”

  From among ten job offers awaiting Oppenheimer upon his return to the United States, he selected two, reaching an unusual joint arrangement with the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley that would allow him to teach in each place in alternating semesters. That served both universities well, but served him better: He could build a new school of theoretical physics in the “desert” that was Berkeley, while remaining au courant with the latest work in the field via Caltech’s more traditional Physics Department. Berkeley, he would recall, “had no theoretical physics. Its experimental physics was pretty old-fashioned and sleepy . . . And that was a nice climate and a challenge. And I regarded Caltech as so much more in touch with physics that I wouldn’t get completely isolated.” The willingness of the two universities to share Robert Oppenheimer attested to the scarcity of qualified theoretical physicists in American academia, especially theoreticians of Oppenheimer’s distinction. Within the decade, Oppenheimer’s theoretical teachings and Ernest Lawrence’s cyclotron would transform Berkeley into very much Caltech’s superior—no longer a desert but the preeminent center of nuclear physics in the world.

  Oppenheimer’s arrival at Berkeley was rather less dramatic than his arrival a few months earlier at Caltech, which he had reached after a breakneck automobile drive through the desert punctuated by two serious crack-ups. Fresh from the journey, he materialized in Caltech’s physics lab with his arm in a sling, and declared, “I am Oppenheimer.” At Berkeley, he moved into the Faculty Club, a haven for bachelors where Ernest Lawrence—at twenty-eight, Oppenheimer’s senior by nearly three years—was his neighbor. The two became instant friends.

  While it was not unusual for a scientist with an advanced degree to have read widely outside his or her chosen specialty, Oppenheimer’s range of interests was unusually broad. At Harvard, a fellow student marveled, “he intellectually looted the place,” drinking deeply of physics and chemistry, of course, but also mathematics, philosophy, and French literature. He learned Greek in order to read Plato in the original and later took up Sanskrit to study the Bhagavad Gita. During a European sojourn, he surprised a colloquium at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands by delivering a lecture in Dutch, which he had taught himself. “I don’t think it was very good Dutch, but it was [appreciated],” he recalled. Years later he would ask Leo Nedelsky, one of his Berkeley graduate assistants, to substitute for him in delivering a lecture. “It won’t be any trouble,” he told Nedelsky. “It’s all in this book.” When Nedelsky pointed out that the book was in Dutch, Oppenheimer replied, “But it’s such easy Dutch.”

  Oppenheimer’s compulsive polymathy, however, pointed to his one outstanding intellectual flaw: he lacked the patience to make a single subject his own. That was surely a factor in his becoming perhaps the most accomplished American physicist not to receive a Nobel Prize, but it does not mean he failed to do pioneering research. During a period of unexampled intellectual ferment in physics, there were few topics on which Oppenheimer failed to publish a letter or paper. These were always original and often influential, even seminal. In 1930 he predicted the existence of the positron, a positively charged electron. But having “argued himself into a correct conclusion,” as a fellow theoretician put it, he lost interest in the topic; it would be Carl Anderson, his own student at Caltech, who would discover the particle—and collect a Nobel Prize for doing so. Oppenheimer’s study of astrophysics during the 1930s predicted the existence of neutron stars and, more astonishingly, of black holes: massive stars that collapsed into objects of such enormous gravitational force that not even light could escape their pull. Neutron stars would not be detected until 1967 and hard evidence of black holes not found until the twenty-first century, underscoring Oppenheimer’s achievement and the tragedy of his curiously unfulfilled career.

  “Oppie was extremely good at seeing the physics and doing the calculation on the back of the envelope and ge
tting all the main factors,” recalled his colleague Robert Serber. “As far as finishing and doing an elegant job . . . that wasn’t Oppie’s style.” Quite the contrary: some of his most famous papers are marred by rudimentary mathematical errors, occasionally leading to erroneous conclusions. Serber again: “His physics was good, but his arithmetic awful.”

  Oppenheimer’s true gift was for synthesis. His grasp of physics enabled him to establish a theoretical foundation for almost any new experimental finding. Luis Alvarez, one of the most distinguished members of Lawrence’s Rad Lab, witnessed this talent in action one afternoon in 1939 when he burst in on Oppenheimer with the startling news that the German chemist Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann had announced the discovery of nuclear fission, which split the heavy uranium nucleus in two. Standing by the blackboard in his office at LeConte Hall, attended by his ever-present students, Oppenheimer declared promptly, “That’s impossible,” and proceeded to demonstrate mathematically why Hahn and Strassmann must have been mistaken. This was Oppenheimer’s intellectual arrogance, his least endearing quality, in action. But the very next day, he visited Alvarez’s lab to witness a demonstration of the phenomenon. “In less than fifteen minutes, he not only agreed that the reaction was authentic,” Alvarez recalled, “but also speculated that in the process, extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs.” It was an extraordinary demonstration of scientific percipience, and classic Oppenheimer. Abandoning his own initial error, he promptly apprehended the underlying physics and, more impressively, envisioned the extended implications like a chess master thinking dozens of moves ahead.