American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Fluent in German, Robert quickly grasped the debilitating political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. He later speculated that the Carios “had the typical bitterness on which the Nazi movement rested.” That autumn, he wrote his brother that everyone seemed concerned with “trying to make Germany a practically successful & sane country. Neuroticism is very severely frowned upon. So are Jews, Prussians & French.” Outside the university’s gate, Robert could see that times were tough for most Germans. “Although this [university] society was extremely rich and warm and helpful to me, it was parked there in a very miserable German mood.” He found many Germans “bitter, sullen . . . angry and loaded with all those ingredients which were later to produce a major disaster. And this I felt very much.”

Phoebe, also roomed that year in the Cario mansion and found Oppenheimer’s behavior sometimes odd. Phoebe often saw him lying in bed, doing nothing. But then these periods of hibernation were invariably followed by episodes of incessant talking. Phoebe thought him “highly neurotic.”

Robert routinely interrupted whoever was speaking, not excluding Born, and, stepping to the blackboard with chalk in hand, would declare in his American-accented German, “This can be done much better in the following manner. . . .” Though other students complained about these interruptions, Robert was oblivious to his professor’s polite, halfhearted attempts to change his behavior. One day, however, Maria Göppert—a future Nobelist—presented Born with a petition written on thick parchment and signed by her and most of the other members of the seminar: Unless the “child prodigy” was reined in, his fellow students would boycott the class. Still unwilling to confront Oppenheimer, Born decided to leave the document on his desk in a place where Robert could not help but see it when he next came to discuss his thesis. “To make this more certain,” Born later wrote, “I arranged to be called out of the room for a few minutes. This plot worked. When I returned I found him rather pale and not so voluble as usual.” Thereafter his interruptions ceased altogether.

Adiabatic

He could be engaging and considerate one moment and in the next rudely cut someone off. At the dinner table, he was polite and formal to an extreme. But he seemed incapable of tolerating banalities. “The trouble is that Oppie is so quick on the trigger intellectually,” complained one of his fellow students, Edward U. Condon, “that he puts the other guy at a disadvantage. And, dammit, he is always right, or at least right enough.”

Upon seeing Karl Compton’s two-year-old daughter pretending to read a small red book—which just happened to be on the topic of birth control—Robert looked over at the very pregnant Mrs. Compton and quipped, “A little late.”

“They tell me you write poetry as well as working at physics,” Dirac said to Oppenheimer. “How can you do both? In physics we try to tell people in such a way that they understand something that nobody knew before. In the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” Flattered, Robert just laughed. He knew that for Dirac life was physics and nothing else; by contrast, his own interests were extravagantly catholic.

When he discovered that two friends were regularly reading Dante in the original Italian, Robert disappeared from Göttingen’s cafés for a month and returned with enough Italian to read Dante aloud. Dirac was unimpressed, grumbling, “Why do you waste time on such trash? And I think you’re giving too much time to music and that painting collection of yours.” But Robert lived comfortably in worlds beyond Dirac’s comprehension and so was merely amused by his friend’s urgings, during their long walks around Göttingen, to abandon the pursuit of the irrational.

“Great ideas were coming out so fast during that period,” Edward Condon recalled, “that one got an altogether wrong impression of the normal rate of progress in theoretical physics. One had intellectual indigestion most of the time that year, and it was most discouraging.”

Heisenberg published his paper on the central role of uncertainty in the quantum world. What he meant was that it is impossible to determine at any given moment both an entity’s precise position and its precise momentum: “We cannot know, as a matter of principle, the present in all its details.” Born agreed, and argued that the outcome of any quantum experiment depended on chance. In 1927, Einstein wrote Born: “An inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory accomplishes a lot, but it does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice.”

Robert got into the habit of working all night and then sleeping through a good part of the day.

By all accounts, Oppenheimer admired Heisenberg and respected his work. He could not have known then that in the years ahead they would become shadowy rivals. Oppenheimer would one day find himself contemplating Heisenberg’s loyalty to wartime Germany and wondering whether the man was capable of building an atomic bomb for Adolf Hitler.

Oppenheimer published the first paper to describe the phenomenon of quantum mechanical “tunneling,” whereby particles literally are able to “tunnel” through a barrier.

He is doubtless very gifted but completely without mental discipline. He’s outwardly very modest, but inwardly very arrogant.” Ehrenfest’s reply is lost, but Born’s next letter is indicative: “Your information about Oppenheimer was very valuable to me. I know that he is a very fine and decent man, but you can’t help it if someone gets on your nerves.”

Pauli was a pugnacious young man with a biting wit; like Oppenheimer, he was always quick to jump to his feet and aggressively question a lecturer if he perceived the slightest flaw in an argument. He frequently disparaged other physicists by saying that they were “not even wrong.” And he once said of another scholar that he was “so young and already so unknown.”

“His ideas are always very interesting,” Pauli said, “but his calculations are always wrong.” After listening to Robert lecture one day, and hearing him pause, groping for words and murmuring little “nim-nim-nim” sounds, Pauli took to calling him the “nim-nim-nim man.” Yet Pauli was fascinated by this complicated young American. “His strength,” Pauli soon wrote Ehrenfest, “is that he has many and good ideas, and has much imagination. His weakness is that he is much too quickly satisfied with poorly based statements, that he does not answer his own often quite interesting questions for lack of perseverance and thoroughness. . . . Unfortunately, he has a very bad trait: he confronts me with a rather unconditional belief in authority and considers all I say as final and definitive truth. . . . I do not know how to make him give that up.”

Rabi later speculated that Robert “never got to be an integrated personality. It happens sometimes, with many people, but more frequently, perhaps, because of their situation, with brilliant Jewish people. With enormous capacities in every direction, it is hard to choose. He wanted everything. He reminded me very much of a boyhood friend of mine, who’s a lawyer, about whom someone said, ‘He’d like to be president of the Knights of Columbus and B’nai B’rith.’ God knows I’m not the simplest person, but compared to Oppenheimer, I’m very, very simple.”

Rabi recalled many years later. “I think he had fantasies thinking he was not Jewish. I remember once saying to him how I found the Christian religion so puzzling, such a combination of blood and gentleness. He said that is what attracted him to it.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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.

over the years she grew to think of Oppenheimer as somewhat faux, a man whose elaborate affectations betrayed a certain shallowness of character.

Lawrence conceived of a way around the impossible. He suggested that a machine could be built that used relatively small 25,000-volt potential to accelerate protons back and forth in an alternating electric field. By means of vacuum tubes and an electromagnet, the ion particles might then be accelerated by the electric field to greater and greater speeds along a spiral path. He was not sure how big an accelerator had to be to penetrate an atom’s nucleus—but he was convinced that with a large enough magnet and a big enough circular chamber, he could break the million-volt mark.

Oppenheimer had a laissez-faire attitude toward the role of money in his own research. When one of his graduate students wrote him for help in raising money for a particular project, Oppie replied whimsically that such research, “like marriage and poetry, should be discouraged and should occur only despite such discouragement.”

“It was amazing,” recalled one Berkeley colleague, “that Oppenheimer and his group essentially got something on all these problems, about the same time as the competition.” The result might not be elegant or even particularly accurate in all the details—others would have to come along and clean up his work. But Oppenheimer invariably had the essence. “Oppie was extremely good at seeing the physics and doing the calculation on the back of the envelope and getting all the main factors. . . . As far as finishing and doing an elegant job like Dirac would do, that wasn’t Oppie’s style.” He worked “fast and dirty, like the American way of building a machine.”

Some months later, at a time when Harvard was trying to recruit Oppenheimer away from Berkeley, Fowler wrote that “his work is apt to be full of mistakes due to lack of care, but it is work of the highest originality and he had an extremely stimulating influence in a theoretical school as I had ample opportunity of learning last fall.” Robert Serber agreed: “His physics was good, but his arithmetic awful.”

Robert did not have the patience to stick with any one problem very long. As a result, it was frequently he who opened the door through which others then walked to make major discoveries.

“He was an idea man,” recalled Phillips. “He never did any great physics, but look at all the lovely ideas that he worked out with his

Robert instantly saw the flaws in any idea almost as soon as he had conceived it. Whereas some physicists—Edward Teller immediately comes to mind—boldly and optimistically promoted all of their new ideas, regardless of their flaws, Oppenheimer’s rigorous critical faculties made him profoundly skeptical. “Oppie was always pessimistic about all the ideas,” recalled Serber. Turned on himself, his brilliance denied him the dogged conviction that is sometimes necessary for pursuing and developing original theoretical insights. Instead, his skepticism invariably propelled him on to the next problem.5 Having made the initial creative leap, in this case to black-hole theory, Oppenheimer quickly moved on to another new topic, meson theory.

But he admitted that “the longer I was acquainted with him, the more intimately I was acquainted with him, the less I knew about him.” A keen observer of people, Cherniss sensed a disconnect in Robert. Here was a man, he thought, who was “very sharp intellectually.” People thought him complicated simply because he was interested in so many things, and knew so much. But on an emotional level, “he wanted to be a simple person, simple in the good sense of the word.” Robert “wanted friends very much,” Cherniss said. And yet, despite his tremendous personal charm, “he didn’t quite know how to make friends.”

He then went on to try to answer a question posed by his younger brother: “How far is it wise to respond to a mood?” Robert’s answer suggests that his fascination with the psychological was still acute: “. . . my own conviction is that one should use moods, but not be greatly deflected by them; thus one should try to use the gay times to do those things one wants to do which require gaiety, and the sober moods for the work one wants, and the low moods for giving oneself hell.”

one evening he drove her out to Grizzly Peak, in the Berkeley hills, with a fine view of San Francisco Bay in the distance. After wrapping a blanket around Phillips, Oppenheimer announced, “I’ll be back presently. I’m going for a walk.” He came back shortly and briefly leaned in toward the car window and said, “Melba, I think I’ll walk on down to the house, why don’t you bring the car down?” Melba, however, had dozed off and didn’t hear him. When she awoke, she waited patiently for Oppie to return, but finally, after two hours had gone by with no sign of him, she hailed a passing policeman and said, “My escort went for a walk hours ago and he hasn’t returned.” Fearing the worst, police combed the bushes for Oppenheimer’s body. Phillips eventually drove herself home in Oppie’s car, and the police went to his quarters in the Faculty Club—where they roused a sleepy Oppenheimer from his bed. Apologizing, he explained to the police that he had forgotten all about Miss Phillips: “I’m awfully erratic, you know. I just walked and walked—and I was home and I went to bed. I’m so sorry.” A reporter on the police beat heard the story, and the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle ran a short story on the front page headlined “Forgetful Prof Parks Girl, Takes Self Home.” It was Oppenheimer’s first exposure to the press. Newspapers around the world picked up on the story.

Consciously or not, some of Oppie’s students began imitating his quirks and eccentricities. They came to be called the “nim nim boys,” because they mimicked his “nim nim” humming. Almost all of these budding young physicists began chain-smoking Chesterfields, Oppie’s brand, and, like Oppie, flicked their lighters whenever anyone took out a cigarette. “They copied his gestures, his mannerisms, his intonations,” recalled Robert Serber. Isidor Rabi observed, “He [Oppenheimer] was like a spider with this communication web all around him. I was once in Berkeley and said to a couple of his students, ‘I see you have your genius costumes on.’ By the next day, Oppenheimer knew that I had said that.” It was a cult or mystique that some found annoying.

One night late in the spring semester, 1932, Oppie announced that Frank Carlson—who suffered from occasional bouts of depression—needed help in finishing his thesis. “Frank has done this work,” Oppenheimer said, “and now it’s got to be written up.” In response, Oppie’s other students pitched in and formed what amounted to a sort of little factory: “Frank [Carlson] wrote,” Phillips recalled, “Leo [Nedelsky] edited . . . I proofread and wrote all the equations in the thesis.” Carlson got his thesis accepted that June and served as Oppenheimer’s research associate for the academic year 1932–33.

With his facility for languages, it wasn’t long before Robert was reading the Bhagavad-Gita. “It is very easy and quite marvelous,” he wrote Frank. He told friends that this ancient Hindu text—“The Lord’s Song”—was “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.”

The fact that discipline, he argued, “is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation . . . and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable.” And only through discipline is it possible “to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror.”

Like many Western intellectuals enthralled with Eastern philosophies, Oppenheimer the scientist found solace in their mysticism. He knew, moreover, that he was not alone; he knew that some of the poets he admired most, like W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, had themselves dipped into the Mahabharata. “Therefore,” he concluded in his letter to the twenty-year-old Frank, “I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, and war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.” In his late twenties, Oppenheimer already seemed to be searching for an earthly detachment; he wished, in other words, to be engaged as a scientist with the physical world, and yet detached from it. He was not seeking to escape to a purely spiritual realm. He was not seeking religion. What he sought was peace of mind. The Gita seemed to provide precisely the right philosophy for an intellectual keenly attuned to the affairs of men and the pleasures of the senses.

It is impossible to know the full results of one’s actions, and sometimes even good intentions lead to horrific outcomes. Robert was acutely attuned to the ethical, and yet endowed with ambition and an expansive, curious intelligence. Like many intellectuals aware of the complexities of life, perhaps he sometimes felt paralyzed to the point of inaction. Oppenheimer later reflected upon precisely this dilemma: “I may, as we all have to, make a decision and act or I may think about my motives and my peculiarities and my virtues and my faults and try to decide why I am doing what I am. Each of these has its place in our life, but clearly the one forecloses the other.” At the Ethical Culture School, Felix Adler had subjected himself to “constant self-analysis and self-evaluation by the same high standards and objectives that he set for others.” But as Oppenheimer approached his thirties, he became increasingly uncomfortable with this relentless introspection. As the historian James Hijiya has suggested, the Gita provided an answer to this psychological dilemma: celebrate work, duty and discipline—and worry little as to the consequences. Oppenheimer was acutely attuned to the consequences of his actions, but, like Arjuna, he was also driven to do his duty. So duty (and ambition) overrode his doubts—though doubt remained, in the form of an ever-present awareness of human fallibility.

But Serber was completely unprepared for the conditions at Perro Caliente. When they arrived, after driving on unpaved roads for hours, the Serbers found Frank Oppenheimer, Melba Phillips and Ed McMillan already there. Oppie greeted them nonchalantly and suggested that because the cabin was already full, perhaps they ought to take two horses and ride north eighty miles to Taos. That meant a three-day ride across the Jicoria Pass at 12,500 feet. Serber had never been on a horse! Following Oppie’s instructions, the Serbers saddled up, packing only a change of socks and underwear, a toothbrush, a box of chocolate graham crackers, a pint of whiskey and a bag of oats to feed the horses. Three days later, with muscles aching and leg skin rubbed raw by so many hours in the saddle, the Serbers arrived in Taos. After a night in the inn at Ranchos de Taos, they rode back to meet Oppenheimer. Along the way, Charlotte twice fell off her horse and arrived with her jacket splattered with blood.

“To many of my friends,” he testified in 1954, “my indifference to contemporary affairs seemed bizarre, and they often chided me for being too much of a highbrow. I was interested in man and his experience; I was deeply interested in my science; but I had no understanding of the relations of man to his society.” Years later, Robert Serber observed that this self-portrait of Oppenheimer as “an unworldly, withdrawn un-esthetic person who didn’t know what was going on—all [this was] exactly the opposite of what he was really like.”

“Never since the Greek tragedies has there been heard the unrelieved pomposity of a Robert Oppenheimer.”

Oppie once remarked to Leo Nedelsky, “I know three people who are interested in politics. Tell me, what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?” But after January 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, politics began to intrude into Oppenheimer’s life. By April of that year, German Jewish professors were being summarily dismissed from their jobs. A year later, in the spring of 1934, Oppenheimer received a circular letter soliciting funds to support German physicists as they attempted to emigrate from Nazi Germany. He immediately agreed to earmark for this purpose three percent of his salary (about $100 a year) for two years. Ironically, one of the refugees who may have been assisted by this fund was Robert’s former professor in Göttingen, Dr. James Franck. When Hitler first came to power, Franck, who had won two Iron Crosses during World War I, was one of the few Jewish physicists permitted to keep his post. But a year later he was forced into exile when he refused to dismiss other Jews from their jobs. By 1935, he was teaching physics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Similarly, Max Born was forced to flee Göttingen in 1933 and ended up teaching in England.

Almost five years of depression had impoverished millions of ordinary citizens. Early that year, labor strife turned violent. In late January, 3,000 lettuce pickers in the Imperial Valley went on strike. Acting on behalf of employers, police arrested hundreds of workers. The strike was quickly broken, and wages fell from 20 cents to 15 cents an hour. Then, on May 9, 1934, more than 12,000 longshoremen set up picket lines at ports up and down the West Coast. By the end of June, the dock strike had virtually strangled the economies of California, Oregon and Washington. Early in July, authorities attempted to open the port of San Francisco; police lobbed tear gas bombs at thousands of longshoremen and a riot ensued. After four days of running skirmishes, several policemen fired into a crowd; three men were wounded and two of them died. July 5, 1934, became known as “Bloody Thursday.” That same day, the Republican governor ordered the California National Guard to seize control of the streets. Eleven days later, on July 16, San Francisco labor unions called a general strike. For four days the city was paralyzed. Federal mediators at last stepped in, and by July 30 the largest strike in the history of the West Coast ended. The longshoremen returned to work having achieved almost none of their wage demands, but it was clear to all that the unions had achieved a major political victory. The strike had garnered popular sympathy for the longshoremen’s plight and greatly strengthened...

Oppie tried repeatedly to get Serber appointed to a tenure-track position as an assistant professor. But Birge stubbornly refused, writing another colleague that “one Jew in the department was enough.” Oppenheimer was unaware of this remark at the time, but he was not unfamiliar with the sentiment. If anything, anti-Semitism in polite society was on the rise in America during the 1920s and ’30s. Many universities had followed Harvard’s lead in the early twenties and imposed restrictive quotas on the number of Jewish students. Elite law firms and social clubs in major cities like New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco were segregated by both race and religion. The California establishment was no different on this score from the East Coast establishment.

She was also what would later be called, in irony, a “premature antifascist”—an early opponent of Mussolini and Hitler. When a professor gave her Max Eastman’s Artists in Uniform, hoping that it might serve as a sobering antidote to her woolly-headed admiration of Russian communism, Jean confided to a friend, “I just wouldn’t want to go on living if I didn’t believe that in Russia everything is better.”

A dues-paying Party member, Jean regularly attended two CP meetings a week. A year before she met Robert, Tatlock wrote Priscilla Robertson: “I find I am a complete Red when anything at all.” Her anger and passion were easily aroused by the stories she encountered of social injustice and inequity. Her reporting for the Western Worker reinforced her outrage as she covered such incidents as the trial of three children arrested for selling copies of the Western Worker on the streets of San Francisco, and the trial of twenty-five lumber-mill workers accused of staging a riot in Eureka, California.