Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2 page)

To take an example that might seem unimportant, but in fact is not, one would never know from reading Bird and Sherwin’s book how much of Oppenheimer’s time and intellectual energy was taken up with thinking about mesons. Mesons are subatomic particles, the existence of which was predicted in 1934 and discovered in 1936. For much of Oppenheimer’s scientific career they were a puzzle, resisting all attempts to make sense of the apparently contradictory evidence about their nature and their behaviour that was gathered from laboratory experiments and observations of cosmic rays. Oppenheimer’s student, Edward Gerjuoy, in illustration of his point that ‘Oppie did his physics, talked about his physics, lived his physics, with an unusual passion’, gave as his prime example Oppenheimer’s frustrated determination to make sense of mesons: ‘it bothered him, it tore at him’. If one wants to understand Oppenheimer, one might think this passionate, decades-long search for an understanding of mesons is something one should look at. And yet almost nothing is said about it in Bird and Sherwin’s book. The word ‘meson’ is not even in the index.

The relationship between a biographical subject and his or her work has often been discussed. Many people, rightly in my opinion, insist that
of course
it is possible to understand a person’s work without knowing anything about their lives, Shakespeare being the obvious and most telling example. This does not make biography useless or superfluous, since the understanding of individual people is a worthwhile and interesting pursuit
in itself
. We want to understand Oppenheimer, not
in order
to understand his work, but just because he was an interesting man. However, though it is possible to understand Oppenheimer’s work in isolation from his life, the reverse, it seems to me, is not possible: we cannot claim to understand Oppenheimer unless we have at least some understanding of his work, especially when, as Gerjuoy’s comments make clear, that work was pursued with such passion and intensity and was such an important part of what made him the person he was.

So, much as I admire Bird and Sherwin’s achievement, and much as
I have learned from their work, theirs is not the book I imagined after I had read Oppenheimer’s letters. Nor, for basically similar reasons, is Charles Thorpe’s
Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect
, which came out the year after Bird and Sherwin’s and which has much of interest to say about Oppenheimer’s life as it was affected by, and as it affected, the society and politics of the time, but almost nothing to say about Oppenheimer’s life as it was shaped and driven by his desire to understand physics.

Many people, including me, thought that a biography of Oppenheimer that put his contributions to physics at the centre of the narrative would be written by the late Abraham Pais, who, it was widely known, had been working on a biography of Oppenheimer for many years before his death in 2000. A renowned particle physicist himself, Pais had known Oppenheimer well at Princeton, and had previously written excellent lives of Bohr and Einstein. Alas, when he died, Pais was a long way from finishing the book. What he
had
written, together with ‘supplementary material’ added by Robert P. Crease, was published in 2006 as
J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life
. It turned out that what Pais had been concentrating on was not Oppenheimer’s contributions to physics (to which he devotes only a short and highly derivative chapter), but rather his directorship of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Those looking for a scientific biography of Oppenheimer were thus forced to look elsewhere.

David C. Cassidy, who had previously written an outstandingly good, scientifically literate biography of Heisenberg, published a biography of Oppenheimer in 2005 that many thought would fill the gap left open by Pais. Cassidy’s book,
J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century
, certainly gives more prominence to Oppenheimer’s scientific work than any previous biography. However, as indicated by his title, Cassidy has, like Thorpe, chosen to approach Oppenheimer’s life from a broadly historical and sociological perspective. Though there is much new biographical information in the book, its focus, for much of the time, is on Cassidy’s theme of ‘the American century’ – that is, the growth of American political power and the pre-eminence of American science during the twentieth century.

There is nothing wrong with such an approach, and much to be gained by pursuing it, but it cannot possibly produce the kind of biography that I envisaged and that I have tried to write. Oppenheimer’s place in history, his impact on American society and that society’s impact on him are all interesting topics, and ones that a biography of him cannot ignore. However, what
most
interests me is Oppenheimer
himself
, his extraordinary intellectual powers, his emotional and psychological complexity and his curious mixture of strengths and weaknesses in dealing with other people. Of the books that have come out in the last few years on Oppenheimer, the one that most closely approximates to the one I wanted to write, in
terms of balance and focus, is Jeremy Bernstein’s wonderful memoir,
Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma
. If Bernstein had chosen to write a full biography rather than a brief memoir, he might well have made my book entirely superfluous.

I have entitled my book ‘Inside the Centre’ for many reasons, the first of which is to indicate my intention of writing an internal rather than an external biography – one that aims, first and foremost, to understand Oppenheimer himself. Of course this does not mean that I am not interested in the social and political background to Oppenheimer’s life. On the contrary, I am deeply interested in that background and, indeed, devote my first chapter to the German Jewish community in New York in which he was born and brought up. The legacy of that community, in fact, forms another reason for my title, as it seems to me that Oppenheimer cannot be understood without taking into account the importance of his deeply felt desire to overcome the sense of being an outsider that he inherited from his German Jewish background and his desire to get inside the centre of American political and social life. This desire lies at the root of the ambivalence towards his Jewish ancestry that was noted by many of his closest friends, and at the root of what Einstein perceptively described as his unrequited love for the US government. It also, I think, figures largely in his willingness to undertake the enormous task of leading the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb, and his determination after the war to play a leading part in shaping US atomic policy. It must be taken into account too in understanding why he felt compelled to defend himself against charges of disloyalty when it would have been so much easier simply to walk away from the battle.

Moreover, as I have said above, it seems to me that, if one wants to understand Oppenheimer, one must attempt to understand his contributions to science, and the phrase ‘inside the centre’ captures some of the themes that dominate that work. Oppenheimer’s striving to understand mesons, for example, was driven, at least in part, by a desire to know what forces are acting inside the centre of an atom, the pi-meson being the carrier of the strong nuclear force that binds nucleons (neutrons and protons) together. And, of course, the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb are possible only because of an understanding – which Oppenheimer helped to create – of the fission and fusion processes undergone by atomic nuclei. What many people consider to be Oppenheimer’s greatest contribution to physics – his work in the late 1930s on neutron stars and black holes – sheds light on what happens at the centre of a massive star when it has burned up all its hydrogen and gravitational collapse takes over.

Finally, there is Oppenheimer’s determination to be at the centre of scientific discovery, an ambition that took him first to Cambridge to work at Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory, and then to Göttingen
to work with Max Born at precisely the time when Born was playing a leading part in the creation of quantum mechanics. Eventually, combined with his fervent patriotism, this drove Oppenheimer to make America the world centre of advances in physics. At every stage in this development the problems that he and his students chose to tackle were strongly influenced by his insistence on being at the centre of theoretical physics, always wanting to be dealing with the fundamental questions, not the peripheral ones.

I am not myself a physicist, but during the ten years that it has taken me to write this book I have made a concerted effort to understand those parts of physics to which Oppenheimer contributed. I have been helped in this by some wonderful historical and expository work that has been published in the last decade or so, most notably those books listed in the Bibliography by Jeremy Bernstein, Helge Kragh, Manjit Kumar, Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg, and Silvan Schweber. I have also benefited considerably from the expertise of my friend James Dodd, whose work
The Ideas of Particle Physics: An Introduction for Scientists
, jointly authored with C. D. Coughlan and B. M. Gripaios, is one of the clearest textbooks I have ever read, and whose comments on an early draft of this book were invaluable. At an early stage in the research for this book I also received help from Brian Ridley, who kindly explained some notions in theoretical physics that were confusing me, and, at a much later stage, I received help via email from the physicists Jeremy Bernstein, Silvan Schweber and Kip Thorne.

I would like to extend special thanks to my friend David Pugmire, who has provided me with unstinting encouragement and support throughout the writing of this book and who, when it was finished, read it through with meticulous care, making many astute and helpful comments. In this connection I would also like to thank Mike Cleeter, Sophia Efstathiou, Peter Middleton, Frederic Raphael, Danika Stow-Monk and Alan Thomas, who also read and made helpful comments upon an early draft.

Research on this book necessitated several trips to Washington DC to use the Library of Congress, the staff at which could not possibly have been more helpful and obliging. The same is true of the staff at the Nils Bohr Library in Copenhagen. I also need to thank the staff at my own institution, the University of Southampton, for providing such an excellent service. The university gave me research leave in order to concentrate on the book, for which I am immensely grateful.

In Kristine Puopolo and Dan Franklin I have had the best publishers an author could wish for, giving me great support when I needed it most, showing encouraging faith in me and my project and exercising patience to the point of saintliness. I would also like to thank my editor, Alex Bowler, for his interest in the project, for his indispensable editorial skills
and for the many ways in which he helped me to avoid errors and improve my text. The text has been improved in many ways too by the superb copy-editing it received from Mandy Greenfield. I could not have written this book without the help of my agent, Gill Coleridge, who has become a good friend as well as an inexhaustible supply of good sense and cheering encouragement. My greatest debt, as always, is to my wonderful partner, Jenny, and our lovely children, Zala, Danika, Zeno and Myron, who are not children any more, but whose loveliness has kept me going during the sometimes difficult years in which this book was written.

Ray Monk

Southampton

May, 2012

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER,
his friend Isidor Rabi once remarked, was ‘a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters’, who ‘never got to be an integrated personality’. What prevented Oppenheimer from being fully integrated, Rabi thought, was his denial of a centrally important part of himself: his Jewishness. As the physicist Felix Bloch, echoing Rabi, once put it, Oppenheimer ‘tried to act as if he were not a Jew and succeeded well because he was a good actor’. And, because he was always acting (‘you carried on a charade with him. He lived a charade,’ Rabi once remarked), he lost sight of who he really was. Oppenheimer had an impressive and wide-ranging collection of talents, abilities and personal characteristics, but where the central, united core of his personality ought to have been, Rabi thought, there was a gap and so there was nothing to hold those ‘bright shining splinters’ together. ‘I understood his problem,’ Rabi said, and, when asked what that problem was, replied simply: ‘Identity.’

Rabi spoke as someone who, by virtue of his background, intelligence and education, was well placed to understand Oppenheimer’s ‘problem’. He and Oppenheimer had a great deal in common: they were roughly the same age (Rabi was six years older), they were both theoretical physicists, were both brought up in New York City and were both descended from European Jewish families. Behind this last similarity, however, lay a fundamental difference. Rabi was proud of his Jewish inheritance and happy to define himself in terms of it. Though he had no religious beliefs, and never prayed, he once said that when he saw Orthodox Jews at prayer, the thought that came into his mind was: ‘These are my people.’

No such thought could have entered Oppenheimer’s mind, no matter who he was looking at. There was
no
group to whom he could point and say, ‘These are my people’, and not just because of his ambivalence about
his Jewish background. It was also because that background itself, regardless of Oppenheimer’s feelings about it, could not have provided him with the sense of belonging and, therefore, the sense of identity that Rabi thought was missing in him. Rabi, despite his lack of religious beliefs, was Jewish in a fairly straightforward and unambiguous way; the Jews simply
were
‘his people’. Theirs was the community to which he belonged. One cannot say the same about Oppenheimer. The sense in which
he
was Jewish, the sense in which he did – and did not – come from, and belong to, a Jewish community, is far more complicated and, as Rabi has perceptively noted, crucial in understanding the fragility of his sense of identity.