Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (16 page)

As well as being up to date, the list also revealed a much deeper interest in the history and philosophy of science than one would expect from an undergraduate science student. It included, for example, the work usually credited as the very foundation of thermodynamics, ‘On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances’ by Josiah Willard Gibbs, which was first published as a pair of articles in the journal,
Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences
between 1874 and 1878. Oppenheimer also included a number of works by scientists known for their contributions to the philosophy of their subject, including Henri Poincaré and Wilhelm Ostwald. The aforementioned William C. McC. Lewis, though much less well known than either Poincaré or Ostwald, was also someone with a deep interest in philosophy. He had, on his appointment to the chair in physical chemistry at Liverpool University in 1914, devoted his inaugural lecture to a philosophical discussion of ‘Physical Chemistry and Scientific
Thought’, in which he expressed many thoughts that chime with the brief remarks Oppenheimer made on the subject. Urging his listeners not to adhere to an overly rigid demarcation between philosophy and science, Lewis remarked that ‘any man who has followed a line of directed thought is necessarily a philosopher and science is really only a particular form of philosophy’.

At its meeting of 6 June, Harvard’s physics department considered Oppenheimer’s letter to Kemble and, noting that ‘Mr Oppenheimer, according to his own statement, had read rather widely in Physics for one of his age’, voted to allow him to take Physics 6a without taking Physics C. Surprisingly, no one from the department seems to have done anything to ascertain whether Oppenheimer was telling the truth about having read these books, or to check whether, if he had read them, he had learned anything from them. According to Oppenheimer’s recollection: ‘Years later I was told that when the faculty met to consider this request, George Washington Pierce [a member of the physics department] . . . said, “Obviously if he says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a PhD for knowing their titles.”’

It would be astonishing if there were not some exaggeration, at the very least, in Oppenheimer’s claims to have read all the books that he lists, and there are, indeed, a few indications that he was not
entirely
familiar with them all. For example, the bibliographic information he provides is scanty and occasionally inaccurate. For none of the books does he offer such standard citation details as the first names or the initials of the author, the name of the publisher, the date or place of publication. ‘On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances’ is listed as ‘On the Equilibria of Heterogeneous Systems’; the German word
Spektrallinien
in the title of one of the books he lists
^fn14
is given as ‘Spectral-linien’; and the details of the three-volume work by William C. McC. Lewis mentioned above are given in such a mangled way that a good deal of detective work is needed to identify the books being referred to.
^fn15
If one could get a PhD for knowing these titles, Oppenheimer would, it seems, only just have scraped through the viva.

Nevertheless, when he returned to Harvard for his second year in the autumn of 1923, he did so as someone who, though lacking any kind of
formal training in physics, was eager to begin graduate-level courses in the subject. His passion for physics, which became more intense as his undergraduate career progressed, eclipsed and eventually extinguished his earlier preoccupation with short-story writing, a process no doubt helped by the fact that Francis Fergusson was no longer at Harvard, having left for Oxford to pursue his studies in English literature. On the day Fergusson left, Oppenheimer sent him a telegram, delivered to his ship, the SS
Albania
, offering ‘one last wave of ululation applause’ and telling him that ‘it would delight me to hear from time to time of your achievements’. During the following months, he continued to write to Fergusson and also to Horgan in Rochester and to Smith in New York, but his letters grew less frequent and dwelt less and less on literature and more and more on physics – his earlier talk of the stories he had written or planned to write now replaced with talk about equations and theoretical ideas.

Some of the courses he took in his second year provided him with genuine and lasting stimulation. As in his first year, he took a great variety of courses, including a year-long course in French literature, a philosophy course in the theory of knowledge, two mathematics courses and three in chemistry, but it was the graduate physics courses – especially Heat and Elementary Thermodynamics, taught by Edwin Kemble, and Advanced Thermodynamics, taught by the distinguished experimental physicist Percy Bridgman – that really made him come alive intellectually. Astonishingly, his lack of foundational training in physics proved no hindrance to him in mastering the very difficult material these courses contained, and Oppenheimer was not only able to hold his own with the graduate students taking them, many of whom were three or four years older, but quickly established himself as one of the very best students in the classes.

It is customary to describe physics at Harvard at this time as being something of a backwater, with the important theoretical advances being made in Copenhagen and the German universities and the decisive experimental work being done at Cambridge, England. And it is true that neither Kemble nor Bridgman was the equal of such towering figures in physics as Rutherford at Cambridge, Bohr at Copenhagen or Born at Göttingen. However, neither were they entirely negligible figures. Kemble was at the forefront of the development of American theoretical physics and Bridgman was justifiably pleased to have brought him to Harvard, where he provided the foundation for one of the most rapidly growing centres of theoretical physics in the United States. Bridgman himself was an experimenter rather than a theorist, and had little knowledge or understanding of the quantum theory that was then being developed in Europe. He was nevertheless one of the leading American physicists of his
generation, a position acknowledged in 1946, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on high pressures.

Though Bridgman had fought hard to attract Kemble to Harvard, there is little sign that they became particularly good friends. In many ways they were opposites; Kemble, the theorist, was a devout Christian, while Bridgman, the experimentalist, was a strident atheist. Both of them became enormously impressed with Oppenheimer, though neither of them seemed to grow especially close to him. The only anecdote Bridgman told about Oppenheimer in later life was designed to illustrate his rather off-putting intellectual showiness. Once, he said, he invited Oppenheimer to his house for dinner. Seeing Oppenheimer admiring a picture of the Greek temple at Segesta, Sicily, Bridgman mentioned that it had been built around 400
BC
. ‘I’m sorry to contradict you about the date,’ responded Oppenheimer, ‘but I judge from the capitals on the columns that it was built about 50 years earlier.’

Oppenheimer was at this time still just nineteen years old. As always, he seemed intellectually much older, and socially and personally much younger. This meant that, on an intellectual level, he was able to mix with people who, on a social and personal level, remained distant from him. One such person was Jeffries Wyman, whom Oppenheimer had probably met during his first year, but who became a friend during this second year, when they were both enrolled on the same graduate physics courses. A few years older than Oppenheimer, Wyman had majored in philosophy before switching to biology. In Oppenheimer’s first year at Harvard, Wyman had been in his final year of undergraduate study, planning to enter Harvard Graduate School the following year to take courses in chemistry as well as physics, prior to leaving for England, where he would pursue postgraduate research in biochemistry at Cambridge.

Wyman was as secure and as confident a member of Harvard’s intellectual and social elites as it was possible to be. He came from an old, established Bostonian family, many of whom were extremely distinguished. His grandfather, also called Jeffries Wyman, was one of the most celebrated naturalists of his generation and had been professor of anatomy at Harvard in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the first curator of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and one of the founders of the National Academy of Sciences. Wyman’s best friend, both as an undergraduate at Harvard and throughout much of his life, was John Edsall, whom Oppenheimer had met through the Liberal Club, and who was from a similarly established background.

Wyman had been encouraged to befriend Oppenheimer by Francis Fergusson (‘Francis was full of talk about Bob Oppenheimer,’ Wyman later remembered). In his last-minute telegram to Fergusson, Oppenheimer had been careful to add ‘Jeffries too sends greetings’, in order, perhaps,
to let Fergusson know that he and Wyman had indeed become friends. In fact, Wyman’s attitude to Oppenheimer was a little circumspect. His initial impressions, he said later, were that Oppenheimer ‘was a little precious, and perhaps a little arrogant, but very interesting, full of ideas’. He noted, as Boyd had, that Oppenheimer was ‘completely blind to music. In fact he told me that music was positively painful to him.’ He also remembers that Oppenheimer ‘found social adjustment very difficult, and I think he was often very unhappy. I suppose he was lonely and he didn’t fit in well with the human environment.’ ‘We were good friends,’ Wyman added, ‘and he had some other friends, but there was something that he lacked, perhaps some more personal and deep emotional contact with people than we were having, because our contacts were largely, I should say wholly, on an intellectual basis. We were young people falling in love with ideas right and left and interested in people who gave us ideas, but there wasn’t the warmth of human companionship perhaps.’

The nearest Oppenheimer got to ‘the warmth of human companionship’ was with Bernheim and Boyd. For their second and third years, Oppenheimer and Bernheim occupied large adjoining rooms in a house in Mount Auburn Street, known in Harvard as the ‘Gold Coast’ because of its reputation as the place where only the wealthiest students lived. Oppenheimer brought to these rooms oil paintings, etchings and a tea urn in which he brewed only Russian tea. ‘He wasn’t a comfortable person to be around, in a way,’ Bernheim later commented, ‘because he always gave the impression that he was thinking very deeply about things. When we roomed together he would spend the evenings locked in his room, trying to do something with Planck’s constant or something like that.
^fn16
I had visions of him suddenly bursting forth as a great physicist and here I was just trying to get through Harvard.’ Boyd was a regular visitor to the house on Mount Auburn Street, and remembers that Oppenheimer seemed never to study, or in any case that ‘he was pretty careful not to let you catch him at it’.

In fact, Oppenheimer did little else
but
study. He was determined to get through his degree in three years, rather than the customary four (as, indeed, were Bernheim and Boyd), which meant that he had to take six courses at a time, rather than the usual four, but he also audited a number of courses and, in addition, spent vast amounts of time in the library (he later said he ‘ransacked’ the library in something like the way the Goths
ransacked Rome), reading an extraordinary number of books on a vast range of subjects. He seemed determined, if not to know everything, then at least to give the impression that he knew everything.

‘I am working very hard now,’ Oppenheimer wrote to Smith in November 1923, ‘so hard that I fear your epithet of grind.’ In a subsequent letter, he outlined to Smith the kinds of things that filled his day-to-day existence:

It is this particular letter of which Jeremy Bernstein has remarked: ‘The whole tone makes one’s flesh creep.’ And yet it is one of Oppenheimer’s most honest and forthright letters. The tone is affected, to be sure, but the picture it draws of his time at Harvard, full of intense and varied intellectual activities, mixed with frustrated glances at apparently unattainable women and the constant battle to keep suicidal depression at bay, rings entirely true.

Jeffries Wyman says about himself and his circle of friends at Harvard: ‘We were all too much in love with the problems of philosophy and science and the arts and general intellectual life to be thinking about girls.’ But Oppenheimer’s letters to Smith reveal that this was not
entirely
true. As well as the contemplation of the ‘lovely lady’ studying Spinoza described above, there was also, in a letter written in January 1924, mention of a ‘ravishing creature’ who served food to the people who attended a literary salon on Beacon Hill, and ‘whose charm is pretty largely responsible for my frequent ascents of the hill’. For the most part, though, Oppenheimer’s company at Harvard was restricted to men. None of his friends remembers him ever taking a girl out.

It was not all hard work, however. Oppenheimer, Bernheim and Boyd would often have dinner at Locke-Ober’s, the famously elegant and famously expensive French restaurant in Boston, after which they would walk the six miles back to Cambridge, along the Charles River. Boyd also remembers an occasion on which, during a winter walk along the shore with Oppenheimer and Bernheim, one dared the others to go swimming,
upon which they all stripped and plunged into the freezing water. And Bernheim recalls that sometimes they would take a train out of Cambridge, get off at a randomly chosen point and spend the night walking back. There were also weekend trips to Cape Ann. Here, Oppenheimer and Bernheim, sometimes joined by Boyd, would stay overnight at an inn they had discovered at Folly Cove, where the food was extremely good. In a letter to Smith, Oppenheimer claimed that he and Bernheim were thinking of buying, or possibly renting, a ‘ramshackle cottage way out on Cape Ann’, which ‘lies way above the water, amid huge cliffs of yellow granite, and looks across a miraculously blue ocean to the shore line of Maine’. But these plans never came to anything and Bernheim later remarked that, as far as he was concerned, those cliffs of yellow granite existed only in a ‘mythological landscape’ of Oppenheimer’s imagining.