American Prometheus (11 page)
Late that spring, Cambridge organized a weeklong visit to the University of Leiden for American physics students. Oppenheimer went on the trip and met a number of German physicists. “It was wonderful,” he recalled, “and I realized then that some of the troubles of the winter had been exacerbated by the English customs.” Upon his return to Cambridge, he met another German physicist, Max Born, director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen. Born was intrigued by Oppenheimer, partly because the twenty-two-year-old American was grappling with some of the same theoretical problems raised in the recent papers by Heisenberg and Schrödinger. “Oppenheimer seemed to me,” Born said, “right from the beginning a very gifted man.” By the end of that spring, Oppenheimer had accepted an invitation from Born to study at Göttingen.
CAMBRIDGE HAD BEEN A disastrous year for Robert. He had narrowly escaped expulsion over the “poison apple” incident. For the first time in his life, he had found himself incapable of excelling intellectually. And his closest friends had witnessed more than one episode of emotional instability. But he had overcome a winter of depression, and was now ready to explore an entirely new field of intellectual endeavor. “When I got to Cambridge,” Robert said, “I was faced with the problem of looking at a question to which no one knew the answer—but I wasn’t willing to face it. When I left Cambridge, I didn’t know how to face it very well, but I understood that this was my job; this was the change that occurred that year.”
Robert later recalled that he still had “very great misgivings about myself on all fronts, but I clearly was going to do theoretical physics if I could. . . . I felt completely relieved of the responsibility to go back into a laboratory. I hadn’t been good; I hadn’t done anybody any good, and I hadn’t had any fun whatever; and here was something I felt just driven to try.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“I Find the Work Hard,
Thank God, & Almost Pleasant”
You would like Göttingen, I think. . . . The science is much
better than at Cambridge, & on the whole, probably the best
to be found. . . . I find the work hard, thank God, & almost
pleasant.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER TO FRANCIS FERGUSSON, November 14, 1926
LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1926, Robert—in far better spirits and considerably more mature than a year earlier—traveled by train through Lower Saxony to Göttingen, a small medieval town that boasted a city hall and several churches dating back to the fourteenth century. At the corner of Barfüsser Strasse and Jüden Strasse (Barefoot Street and Street of the Jews), he could dine on wienerschnitzel at the four-hundred-year-old Junkers’ Hall, sitting beneath a steel engraving of Otto von Bismarck and surrounded by three stories of stained glass. Quaint half-timbered houses were scattered about the town’s narrow, winding streets. Nestled on the banks of the Leine Canal, Göttingen had as its chief attraction Georgia Augusta University, founded in the 1730s by a German prince. By tradition, graduates of the university were expected to wade into a fountain that stood before the ancient city hall and kiss the Goose Girl, a bronze maiden that served as the fountain’s centerpiece.
If Cambridge could claim to be Europe’s great center for experimental physics, Göttingen was undoubtedly the center of theoretical physics. German physicists at the time thought so little of their American counterparts that copies of
Physical Review,
the monthly research journal of the American Physical Society, routinely sat unread for more than a year before the university librarian got around to putting them on the shelf.
It was Oppenheimer’s good fortune to arrive shortly before an extraordinary revolution in theoretical physics drew to its close: Max Planck’s discovery of quanta (photons); Einstein’s magnificent achievement—the special theory of relativity; Niels Bohr’s description of the hydrogen atom; Werner Heisenberg’s formulation of matrix mechanics; and Erwin Schrödinger’s theory of wave mechanics. This truly innovative period began to wind down with Born’s 1926 paper on probability and causality. It was completed in 1927 with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s formulation of the theory of complementarity. By the time Robert left Göttingen, the foundations for a post-Newtonian physics had been laid.
As chairman of the physics department, Professor Max Born nurtured the work of Heisenberg, Eugene Wigner, Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi. It was Born who in 1924 coined the term “quantum mechanics,” and it was Born who suggested that the outcome of any interaction in the quantum world is determined by chance. In 1954 he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. A pacifist and a Jew, Born was regarded by his students as an unusually warm and patient teacher. He was the ideal mentor for a young student with Robert’s delicate temperament.
That academic year Oppenheimer would find himself in the company of an extraordinary collection of scientists. James Franck, with whom Robert was also studying, was an experimental physicist who had won the Nobel Prize just a year earlier. The German chemist Otto Hahn would in just a few years contribute to the discovery of nuclear fission. Another German physicist, Ernst Pascual Jordan, was collaborating with Born and Heisenberg to formulate the matrix mechanics version of quantum theory. The young English physicist Paul Dirac, whom Oppenheimer had met at Cambridge, was then working on early quantum field theory, and in 1933 he would share a Nobel Prize with Erwin Schrödinger. The Hungarian-born mathematician John Von Neumann would later work for Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project. George Eugene Uhlenbeck was an Indonesian-born Dutchman who, together with Samuel Abraham Goudsmit, discovered the concept of electron spin in late 1925. Robert quickly drew the attention of these men. He had met Uhlenbeck the previous spring during his weeklong visit to the University of Leiden. “We got along very well immediately,” recalled Uhlenbeck. Robert was so deeply immersed in physics that it seemed to Uhlenbeck “as if we were old friends.”
Robert found lodging in a private villa owned by a Göttingen physician who had lost his medical license for malpractice. Once very well-to-do, the Cario family now had a spacious granite villa with a walled garden of several acres near the center of Göttingen—and no money. With the family’s fortune eaten away by Germany’s postwar inflation, they were compelled to take on boarders. 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.” He had one German friend, a member of the wealthy Ullstein publishing family, who owned a car. He and Robert used to take long drives in the countryside together. But Oppenheimer was struck by the fact that his friend “parked this car in a barn outside Göttingen because he thought it was dangerous to be seen driving it.”
Life for the American expatriates—and especially for Robert—was quite a different matter. For one thing, he was never short of money. At twenty-two, he dressed casually in rumpled herringbone suits made of the finest English wool. His fellow students noted that, in contrast to their own cloth luggage, Oppenheimer packed his belongings in gleaming, expensive pigskin suitcases. And when they strolled down to the fifteenth-century Zum Schwarzen Bären—the Black Bear pub—to drink
frisches Bier
or went to sip coffee at the Cron & Kon Lanz coffee shop, it was often Robert who picked up the tab. He was transformed; he was now confident, excited and focused. Material possessions were unimportant to him, but the admiration of others was something he sought every day. To that end, he would use his wit, his erudition and his fine things to attract those people he wanted within his orbit of admirers. “He was,” said Uhlenbeck, “so to say, clearly a center of all the younger students . . . he was really a kind of oracle. He knew very much. He was very difficult to understand, but very quick.” Uhlenbeck thought it remarkable that so young a man already had “a whole group of admirers” trailing around after him.
In contrast to Cambridge, at Göttingen Oppenheimer felt a pleasant camaraderie with his fellow students. “I was part of a little community of people who had some common interests and tastes and many common interests in physics.” At Harvard and Cambridge, Robert’s intellectual pursuits had been solitary forays into books; at Göttingen, for the first time, he realized that he could learn from others: “Something which for me—more than most people—is important began to take place, namely, I began to have some conversations. Gradually, I guess, they gave me some sense and, perhaps more gradually, some taste in physics, something that I probably would not have ever gotten to if I’d been locked up in a room.”
Lodging with him in the Cario family villa was Karl T. Compton, age thirty-nine, a professor of physics at Princeton University. Compton, a future president of MIT, felt intimidated by Oppenheimer’s extraordinary versatility. He could hold his own with the young man when the topic was science, but found himself at a loss when Robert began talking about literature, philosophy or even politics. No doubt with Compton in mind, Robert wrote his brother that most of the other American expatriates in Göttingen were “professors at Princeton or California or some such place, married, respectable. They are mostly pretty good at physics, but completely uneducated & unspoiled. They envy the Germans their intellectual adroitness & organization, & want physics to come to America.”
In short, Robert thrived in Göttingen. That autumn he wrote enthusiastically to Francis Fergusson, “You would like Göttingen, I think. Like Cambridge, it is almost exclusively scientific, & such philosophers as are here are pretty largely interested in epistemological paradoxes & tricks. The science is much better than at Cambridge, & on the whole, probably the best to be found. They are working very hard here, & combining a fantastically impregnable metaphysical disingenuousness with the go-getting habits of a wall paper manufacturer. The result is that the work done here has an almost demoniac(?) lack of plausibility to it, & is highly successful. . . . I find the work hard, thank God, & almost pleasant.”
Most of the time, he felt himself on an even keel emotionally. But there were some momentary relapses. One day, Paul Dirac saw him faint and fall to the floor, just as he had done the previous year in Rutherford’s laboratory. “I still was not entirely well,” Oppenheimer recalled decades later, “and I had several attacks during the year, but they became much more isolated and interfered less and less with work.” Another physics student, Thorfin Hogness, and his wife, 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.” On occasion, some witnessed Robert trying to overcome an episode of stuttering.
Gradually, with his self-assurance returning, Oppenheimer found that his reputation had preceded him. One of his last acts before leaving Cambridge had been to present two papers before the Cambridge Philosophical Society titled “On the Quantum Theory of Vibration-rotation Bands” and “On the Quantum Theory of the Problem of the Two Bodies.” The first paper dealt with molecular energy levels and the second investigated transitions to continuum states in hydrogenic atoms. Both papers represented small but important advances in quantum theory, and Oppenheimer was pleased to learn that the Cambridge Philosophical Society had published them by the time he arrived in Göttingen.
Robert responded to the recognition his publications brought him by throwing himself enthusiastically into seminar discussions—with such abandon that he often annoyed his fellow students. “He was a man of great talent,” Professor Max Born later wrote, “and he was conscious of his superiority in a way which was embarrassing and led to trouble.” In Born’s seminar on quantum mechanics, 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.
Not that he was by any means completely tamed. Robert could startle even his professors with his bruising candor. Born was a brilliant theoretical physicist, but because he sometimes made small mistakes in his long calculations, he often asked a graduate student to recheck his math. On one occasion, Born recalled, he gave a set of calculations to Oppenheimer. After a few days, Robert returned and said, “I couldn’t find any mistake—did you really do this alone?” All of Born’s students knew of his propensity for calculation errors, but, as Born later wrote, “Oppenheimer was the only one frank and rude enough to say it without joking. I was not offended; it actually increased my esteem for his remarkable personality.”
