Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (17 page)

Still, these walks and weekend trips aside, Oppenheimer’s time was mostly spent in intense study. ‘Even in the last stages of senile aphasia,’ as he put it to Smith, ‘I will not say that education, in an academic sense, was only secondary when I was at college. I plow through about five or ten big scientific books a week.’ In the New Year of 1924, Smith learned that he had been appointed the new principal of the Ethical Culture high school. Congratulating him, Oppenheimer begged him not to overwork and was also prompted to reflect: ‘For me, and, I suspect, for you, it was never the opinion merely of the multitude that counted so much; it was the opinion and the conduct of the great.’

At the end of the year, Oppenheimer discovered that he had been awarded an A in every course he took, except his second-semester maths course in probability, for which he got a B. His A in the notoriously difficult graduate course on thermodynamics, taught by Kemble, was especially noteworthy. For a second-year student of chemistry, who had never taken any undergraduate course in physics, to get an A on this course was completely unheard of. After spending part of the summer with his family in Europe, Oppenheimer returned to Harvard in October 1924 for his final year. Soon after the start of term, he wrote to Smith to tell him that his plans for the following year were not quite decided. One possibility was to follow Edsall and Wyman to Cambridge, England, for, as he told Smith, he had been offered a place at Christ’s College. Another was to stay at Harvard (‘I cannot decide to leave this Puritanical hole, even for all the vacuity of my life here’) and pursue research with Bridgman.

In his final year, Oppenheimer took more courses than ever, and, as always, they were extremely diverse. With a discernible note of excitement, he told Smith: ‘I am taking a course with Whitehead of Russell & Whitehead, Cambridge, on the Metaphysical presuppositions of science.’ Whitehead, who had been Bertrand Russell’s tutor in mathematics at Cambridge, had become
famous as Russell’s co-author of the monumental three-volume
Principia Mathematica
, published in 1910–13, which sought to show that the theorems of arithmetic could be derived from axioms of logic. In 1924, Whitehead, who since the First World War had concentrated on writing philosophy rather than mathematics, accepted an offer from Harvard to join their philosophy department. He was by then already sixty-three years old and was to stay in the United States for the rest of his life (he died in 1947, having retired from teaching ten years earlier).Whitehead’s course consisted of seminars rather than lectures and attracted very few students. In this first year it attracted just Oppenheimer and one other brave student. Many years later, writing to Bertrand Russell to congratulate him on his ninetieth birthday, Oppenheimer recalled:

In addition to Whitehead’s course, Oppenheimer took two courses each in chemistry, physics and mathematics and a history course called ‘History of England from 1688 to the Present Time’. He also audited many courses, including a graduate seminar given by the distinguished mathematician George Birkhoff on Sturm-Liouville equations (a type of differential equation), a subject chosen, Oppenheimer later remembered, ‘because he’d been working on it and wanted to talk about it’. Birkhoff, Oppenheimer recalled, ‘was a remarkable fellow. He would begin: “Well, you know, walking across the yard this morning it occurred to me . . .”’ Birkhoff’s course was, Oppenheimer said, the only mathematics course at Harvard that he remembered with any happiness.

Birkhoff, as well as being Harvard’s most eminent mathematician, was also one of its most controversial and eccentric professors, whose interests extended far beyond mathematics. In 1933, after spending a year travelling round the world studying the art, music and poetry of various cultures, he published a book called
Aesthetic Measure
, which put forward a mathematical theory of aesthetics, the centre of which was a formula for measuring aesthetic value. He was also passionate about promoting
American
mathematicians, and, in this capacity, famously aroused the ire of Einstein, who in the 1930s was once heard to denounce him as ‘one of the world’s greatest academic anti-Semites’,
after Birkhoff had urged the appointment of American mathematicians in favour of European Jewish refugees, whose cause Einstein was supporting. In the 1920s, Birkhoff wrote a recommendation for Oppenheimer that included a sentence that one could regard as evidence either of his anti-Semitism or of his willingness to overcome it: ‘He is Jewish but I should consider him a very fine type of man.’

Though it was
theoretical
physics that had excited Oppenheimer’s enthusiasm, it is interesting that it never occurred to him to pursue postgraduate research with Kemble, rather than with Bridgman, who was resolutely
experimental
in his approach to the subject. When he looked back on his time at Harvard, it was his relationship with Bridgman that Oppenheimer singled out as most important for his intellectual development. ‘I found Bridgman a wonderful teacher,’ he recalled, ‘because he never really was quite reconciled to things being the way they were and he always thought them out.’ Bridgman, he said, ‘was a man to whom one wanted to be an apprentice’.

Why Oppenheimer decided against becoming Bridgman’s ‘apprentice’, and why he opted instead to pursue research at Cambridge, is not entirely clear. He must have made the decision by the New Year of 1925, since he then wrote to Smith telling him that Christ’s College had written to him asking for fees and for ‘a certificate from my “head-master” at school, which is you’. In April, he wrote to Francis Fergusson, telling him that he would be in England at the end of August or the beginning of September, which would give him time before the start of term to see Fergusson. He proposed that they should go to Wales together, where they could ‘ruminate conjointly on our sins’ and Fergusson could pass on to Oppenheimer the benefit of his experience of English society, in particular ‘how to treat the tutors & the dukes’.

In the meantime, Oppenheimer completed his degree at Harvard. Despite describing his work to Smith as ‘frantic, bad and graded A’, in his final year he, for the first and only time in his undergraduate career, got two Bs: one for Whitehead’s course and the other for dynamics. Nevertheless, in June 1925 (though the record notes that it was ‘as of 1926’), Oppenheimer was awarded the AB summa cum laude (the equivalent of a first-class degree in the UK) in chemistry. Boyd and Bernheim also completed their degrees that summer and the three of them celebrated in Bernheim’s room with (this being the period of Prohibition) some laboratory alcohol. As Bernheim remembers it, he and Boyd ‘got plastered’, while Oppenheimer ‘took one drink and retired’.

^fn6
Strikingly, in this exchange, while Benesch speaks of the Jewish ‘faith’, Lowell speaks of the Jewish ‘race’.

^fn7
It must be stressed that most of Oppenheimer’s correspondence from this period has not survived. There are no letters, for example, to or from his parents, though it is certain that he wrote frequently to them throughout his three years at Harvard.

^fn8
In 1931, Standish and its neighbour Gore Hall combined to form Winthrop House.

^fn9
‘Qualitative analysis’ in chemistry contrasts with ‘quantitative analysis’; whereas the former is concerned with the identification of chemical compounds in a given sample, the latter is concerned with measuring the amount of each compound in the sample.

^fn10
After Oppenheimer moved to Cambridge, England, in 1925, his letters to Fergusson, then at Oxford,
do
mention Bernheim, referring to him as ‘Fred’.

^fn11
In connection with Fergusson’s disdain for the ritual of the annual Harvard–Yale football match and his (justifiably) confident expectation of a Rhodes Scholarship, it is interesting to compare him with Oppenheimer’s freshman friends: Bernheim, who was so keen to get tickets for the match that he applied
twice
, and Boyd, who applied for a Rhodes Scholarship, but was rejected.

^fn12
The first edition of Crowther’s
Molecular Physics
was published in 1914, but, given the nature of Oppenheimer’s list, it seems likely that he had in mind the third edition, published in 1923.

^fn13
It is not clear whether Oppenheimer was using the second or third edition of this work. It was, in any case, not the first – published in 1916 – since that had only two volumes. For publishing details of the second and third editions, see the Bibliography.

^fn14
Arnold Sommerfeld’s
Atombau und Spektrallinien
, which had originally been published in 1919 and by 1923 was available in English as
Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines
, was generally regarded as, in the words of one historian of science, ‘the textbook bible of the subject for physicists the world over’.

^fn15
A System of Physical Chemistry
was published in a series called
Textbooks of Physical Chemistry
edited by Sir William Ramsay. Oppenheimer does not give either the title of the series or of Lewis’s three-volume work; he only gives the titles of the individual volumes, listing their author as ‘Ramsay; Lewis’.

^fn16
Referred to by the letter
h
, Planck’s constant is a fixed numerical value (6.5 x 10
^-27
), which is the constant of proportionality between the energy of light and its frequency. It is central to quantum physics, and has been since its inception, being used by Planck and subsequent physicists to describe the very notion of a ‘quantum’ of energy. It is discussed at length in the third volume of Lewis’s
A System of Physical Chemistry
.

‘
YOU WILL TELL
me how to treat the tutors & the dukes & I shall tremble.’ Oppenheimer’s plea to Fergusson for help in preparing for Cambridge was partly in jest, but it also expressed a very real and deep anxiety. He was indeed trembling at the prospect of trying, and possibly failing, to achieve what Fergusson, with apparently very little effort, had already achieved: namely, acceptance into the highest level of English literary and intellectual society. Herbert Smith understood this all too well and tried to alert Fergusson to it in a letter written shortly before Oppenheimer’s arrival in England, in which he advised him that ‘your ability to show him [Oppenheimer] about should be exercised with great tact, rather than in royal profusion. And instead of flying at your throat – as I remember your being ready to do for George What’s-his-name . . . when you were similarly awed by him – I’m afraid he’d merely cease to think his own life worth living.’

Oppenheimer’s original plan, outlined in the letter quoted in the previous chapter, was to sail to England at the end of August or the beginning of September 1925, leaving him a few weeks before the start of term, which he hoped to spend in Wales together with Fergusson, ‘sailing and recuperating from America’. In a subsequent letter, written in July, this plan had changed somewhat. Giving an exact date on which he expected to arrive in England – 16 September – Oppenheimer told Fergusson that he intended to see him in Cambridge soon after this date, and then, after a couple of weeks in Cambridge (‘to see about laboratory facilities and such matters’), he planned to go with Fergusson not sailing in Wales, but walking in Cornwall.

In the meantime, Oppenheimer spent much of August in New Mexico, which he had not visited since his trip there in the summer of 1922, but which remained the place he most cherished and in which he felt most appreciated and accepted. This time he was accompanied by his parents
and Frank, who was now thirteen. ‘The Parents are really quite pleased with the place,’ Oppenheimer wrote to Smith from Los Pinos, ‘and are starting to ride a little. Curiously enough they enjoy the frivolous courtesy of the place, and all is well.’ In fact, Julius and Ella spent most of the trip staying in luxury at the exclusive and expensive Bishop’s Lodge hotel, on the outskirts of Santa Fe, joining their son at the Pages’ ranch for just a few days. Most of Oppenheimer’s time was spent with Katherine Page and Paul Horgan, who was back in New Mexico after finishing his course at Rochester. Horgan remembers one ride in particular, in which he and Oppenheimer, crossing the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, got caught in a thunderstorm, ‘immense, huge, pounding rain’, to shelter from which they sat under their horses while they ate their lunch. ‘I was looking at Robert,’ Horgan recalls, ‘and all of a sudden I noticed his hair was standing straight up . . . responding to the static. Marvellous.’

After this restorative time among the camaraderie of his New Mexican friends, Oppenheimer returned to New York to find rejection and his first taste of academic failure. Waiting for him on his return was a letter from Cambridge telling him that his application to study with Sir Ernest Rutherford as a research student had been rejected (though the offer of a place at Christ’s College still stood). This was a powerful blow. The reason Oppenheimer had chosen to go to Cambridge, rather than staying at Harvard and continuing to work with Bridgman, was that he hoped to work with Rutherford, so as, he later said, to get ‘near the centre’ of the world of physics.

In fact, Rutherford had, for many years, been right
at
the centre. A New Zealander by birth, he had arrived in Cambridge in 1895 to pursue postgraduate work and had been in England ever since, apart from a nine-year spell at McGill University in Montreal from 1898 to 1907, where he conducted the research into radioactivity that won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1907 he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Manchester, where he stayed until 1919, when – now Sir Ernest Rutherford (having been knighted in 1914) – he returned to Cambridge as director of the Cavendish Laboratory. Since its creation in 1874, under its first director, James Clerk Maxwell, the Cavendish had been recognised as the world’s foremost centre of experimental physics. In 1925, Rutherford’s list of honours and titles was completed when he was admitted into the Order of Merit, generally regarded as the most prestigious award it is possible to receive in the British honours system.