Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (15 page)

What Marian Forrester was to Niel Herbert, Katherine Chaves Page was to Oppenheimer: the embodiment of a noble ideal, the representative of a way of life that was superior to, but threatened by, the culture within which Oppenheimer himself had grown up.

As it happened, during Oppenheimer’s first year at Harvard, Mrs Page was living in New York City, having accepted a one-year position teaching Spanish at Finch Junior College. When he returned home for a few days in February 1923, Oppenheimer invited her, along with Herbert Smith and Jane Didisheim, to dinner at Riverside Drive with his parents. It was an uncomfortable evening. The contrast, as Oppenheimer felt it, between the ‘princely’ romance of the Old West, represented by Katherine, and the world of commerce, represented by his father and his Ethical Culture circle, was almost unbearable for him. After the dinner he wrote to Smith reassuring him that he, at least, had ‘scintillated more than any of that dismal gathering’, adding: ‘Mrs Page started bravely enough, but soon grew silent under the weight of paternal banalities and Ethical gossip and Jane’s sighs of happiness came disastrously near, I thought, to groans of despair, when someone asked her if she had ever been out west.’

That evening was to be the last time Oppenheimer saw Katherine until he returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1925. In the meantime, whenever Smith, Fergusson or Horgan mentioned the South-west, Oppenheimer responded with effusive yearning for both the society of the Chaveses and the landscape of New Mexico. In January 1923, shortly before Katherine came to Riverside Drive for dinner, he wrote to Smith: ‘Are you again, O fortunate wretch, to spend a summer in New Mexico?’ When he heard from Fergusson that Smith was indeed planning to visit New Mexico that summer, and that Fergusson was planning to take him and his two companions to Hopi country, he declared himself to be ‘insanely jealous’:

And when, in the summer of 1923, Fergusson was back in New Mexico, prior to leaving for Oxford, Oppenheimer wrote:

And he ended: ‘Please, I almost whimper it, please write again.’

After the following summer, when Smith had again been in New Mexico, Oppenheimer told him that he wanted to ‘hear about your adventures’:

In the same letter Oppenheimer mentioned ‘the classic confectionery bearing the Chaves coat of arms’. This was a reference to a magnificent cake that Oppenheimer had sent to New Mexico for the seventieth birthday of Katherine’s father, Don Amado Chaves, having specially ordered it, at great expense, from a bakery in Manhattan. Smith, who went with him to the bakery to order it, remarked many years later that the gesture was characteristic of Oppenheimer’s thoughtfulness and an expression of how pleased he was to be accepted by the Chaves circle. But, however much he may have wished or aspired to have been from a non-Jewish, South-western family, preferably with ancestors that could be traced back to the conquistadors, or at least to the pioneers, the reality was that when the vacations came, Oppenheimer returned, not to Pecos, but to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and not to a family whose history in the United States spanned many generations, but to a nouveau-riche family who only a generation earlier had been (in Oppenheimer’s eyes) German ‘peasants’.

In that summer of 1923, Oppenheimer took a holiday job in a laboratory in New Jersey, in the hope, so he told Francis Fergusson in July, of finding an adventure ‘similarly satisfying’ to that he had experienced in New Mexico. Thus he had ‘searched the plant and the hotel for possible persons’ – that is, people who would interest him in something like the way Fergusson, Horgan and Page had interested him. But, he reported:

Once this non-Jewish, educated Bostonian left, there was nothing keeping Oppenheimer at the laboratory. ‘The job and people are bourgeois,’ he told Fergusson, ‘and lazy and dead; there is little work and nothing to puzzle at; and the establishment has among it less than one sixteenth of a sense of humour. So I am going home.’

By the time he wrote to Fergusson again, in the middle of August, Oppenheimer was at Bay Shore, where, he was delighted to report, ‘Paul [Horgan] has been with me for the past three weeks. Of course I have been happy.’ The two of them, he wrote, had been ‘spending a most civilized and unexciting time down here, writing, reading enormously, travelling to town from time to time for books and exhibits and plays, and sallying every evening in tuxedoes, pathetically to ransack Bayshore or Islip for a vestige of adventure’. Horgan has recorded that he found the Oppenheimers’ house at Bay Shore comfortable, spacious and impressive: ‘It was my first taste as a resident of rather excessive luxury and grandeur and comfort on that scale. I enjoyed it enormously.’ He recalls that some days they would go on
Trimethy
, some days they would go riding and other days they would go to the theatre in New York.

Horgan had by this time graduated from the Military Institute in New Mexico and, after the summer, was starting his course at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, in upstate New York. The Oppenheimers had planned to travel to Quebec for the last part of the summer and so agreed to give Paul a lift to Buffalo on the way – Buffalo being not far from Rochester. As Oppenheimer recounted the journey to Fergusson, it was the occasion for the tension between the Old West, as represented by Horgan, and the new money, as represented by his parents, to come to the fore once again:

Horgan himself was unaware of this ‘panorama of complications’ and remembers only that Oppenheimer’s parents were charming and welcoming. About his own ‘complex’ over money, and Mr and Mrs Oppenheimer’s complex about being Jewish, he remembers nothing.

During the weeks that Oppenheimer spent at Bay Shore that summer he had for company not only Paul Horgan, but also Bernheim and Boyd, both of whom were invited, but probably not at the same time as each other. Boyd was impressed with the elegance of the house and with Oppenheimer’s sailing skills; Bernheim, on the other hand, had doubts about Oppenheimer’s seamanship and considered the holiday home ‘just an ordinary kind of house’.

What everyone who spent time with Oppenheimer remembers about that summer was that he seemed always, whatever else he was doing, to be reading physics. Paul Horgan recalls:

It seems likely that the book Horgan saw Oppenheimer reading while sailing was not ‘a book on thermodynamics’, but rather
The Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism
by James Jeans. Towards the end of his life Oppenheimer still had the book and mentioned in an interview how ‘salt-encrusted’ his copy of it was, remarking: ‘it’s clear that I studied that when I went sailing in the summer’. The importance the book had for him is alluded to in his letter to Fergusson of 16 August, written from Bay Shore. Responding to the news that Fergusson had written stories set in both Harvard and Pecos, Oppenheimer writes: ‘But really, maestro, I am terribly – yes, terribly, eager to see your things, and would even burn my new Jean’s Electromagnetics for a glimpse of the Pecos one.’

First published in 1908,
The Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism
was, the author states in the preface, intended to cover the same ground as James Clerk Maxwell’s classic 1873 text,
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
, but in a ‘more elementary’ way: ‘The present book is written more especially for the student, and for the physicist of limited mathematical attainments.’ Jeans, in fact, had a gift for explaining
difficult ideas simply, a gift that he was to put to influential and lucrative use later on in life in his best-selling books
The Universe Around Us
(1929) and
The Mysterious Universe
(1930), as well as in his 1942 book,
Physics and Philosophy
. He was thus the ideal author to guide Oppenheimer through the arcane world of twentieth-century theoretical physics, as Oppenheimer had, up until the summer of 1923, no formal training in physics whatsoever, and rather less training in mathematics than one would expect a physicist to have had at that point in his education.

This had not prevented Oppenheimer, in his first year (as a
chemistry
student) from trying to master, in his spare time as it were, and without any formal guidance, some of the most difficult ideas of modern physics. During that year his scientific interests shifted from chemistry to physics as it gradually dawned on him that, as he later put it, ‘what I liked in chemistry was very close to physics’. After all, he reflected, ‘if you were reading physical chemistry and you began to run into thermodynamical and statistical ideas you’d want to find out about them’. In the same interview, he added: ‘I can’t emphasise strongly enough how
much
I read and more really just in exploration.’

His education in physics, he acknowledged, was best characterised as ‘a very quick, superficial, eager familiarisation with some parts of physics, with tremendous lacunae and often with a tremendous lack of practice and discipline’.

Characteristically, these lacunae did not prevent Oppenheimer from beginning his career as a physicist by jumping straight into the deep end. In May 1923, towards the end of his first year at Harvard, he wrote to Edwin C. Kemble. Though still a junior member of the physics department, Kemble was notable for being the only
theoretical
physicist at Harvard and for being the only one abreast of developments in the then rapidly developing and unnervingly novel field of quantum theory. In his letter, Oppenheimer asked Kemble for permission to take his course on thermodynamics, Physics 6a, which ran during the autumn semester of the following year. This was, on the face of it, an extraordinary request. Physics 6a was a graduate course, normally taken only by those students who had completed their undergraduate studies and
had excelled in advanced-level physics courses. A requirement for taking Physics 6a was that students had successfully completed Physics C, a final-year undergraduate course. Oppenheimer was asking Kemble to waive this requirement.

Besides having not completed Physics C, at this point in his education Oppenheimer had not taken
any
degree-level physics courses. Nor had he audited any. Realising that, under these circumstances, he would have to present a fairly exceptional case for being regarded as a graduate-level physics student, Oppenheimer provided Kemble with a list (a ‘partial list’, he insisted) of ‘several works on Thermodynamics and related subjects’ that he had read during his first few months at Harvard. The list goes far beyond what one would have expected from an undergraduate majoring in physics, let alone one majoring in chemistry, and demonstrates an impressive linguistic breadth, in that two of the books on the list were in French and another two in German.

Included on the list were some impressively up-to-date textbooks, two of which –
Thermodynamics
by Gilbert Newton Lewis and Merle Randall (which was to go into several editions and become a widely used, usually graduate-level textbook) and James Crowther’s
Molecular Physics
– had only just been published that year.
^fn12
Another book on the list, the massive three-volume work
A System of Physical Chemistry
by William C. McC. Lewis, devoted its third volume, first published in 1920,
^fn13
to quantum physics.