Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (20 page)

‘The combination of these abilities in one individual with the right temperament to use them is rare,’ Blackett adds. ‘Many a theoretically gifted student may fail, while learning to be an experimenter, through clumsy fingers.’

His confidence already severely dented by Rutherford’s rejection of him as a research student, Oppenheimer’s self-esteem took a further battering when he failed abjectly to live up to the demanding criteria spelled out by Blackett for being a successful experimental physicist. He simply did not have the practical abilities emphasised by Blackett, and his unsuccessful attempts to acquire such abilities brought him deep unhappiness. This, together with his other emotional problems, led him, within a few months of being at Cambridge, to the brink of mental, emotional and physical collapse.

At Harvard, Oppenheimer might have behaved in ways that struck people as odd, affected or intense, but at Cambridge his behaviour was not just strange – it was indicative of severe mental instability. Sometimes, he later recalled, he would stand alone in front of a blackboard for hours, chalk in hand, waiting for inspiration to strike. On other occasions the silence would be broken by his own voice, repeating over and over again, ‘The point is, the point is . . . the point is.’ Once Rutherford himself was alarmed to see Oppenheimer fall fainting to the floor of the laboratory. In an interview he gave late in life, Jeffries Wyman recalled that Oppenheimer told him he ‘felt so miserable in Cambridge, so unhappy, that he used to get down on the floor and roll from side to side’.

Most bizarre, though, was an event that occurred towards the end of Oppenheimer’s first term at Cambridge. In what looks like an attempt to murder his tutor, or at the very least to make him seriously ill, Oppenheimer left on Blackett’s desk an apple poisoned with toxic chemicals. The act seems charged with symbolism: Oppenheimer as the jealous queen leaving a poisoned apple for Snow White, the ‘fairest of them all’, whose beauty and goodness are admired by everybody. The incident was hushed up at the time, and none of his friends knew about it until they were told of it by Oppenheimer himself, usually in some more or less misleading version. That his feelings towards Blackett mixed fervent admiration with fierce jealousy, however, was obvious to those who knew him well. John Edsall, for example, noticed the jealousy and speculated plausibly about what had aroused it. It was, he suggested, due to Oppenheimer’s feeling that:

There has been some confusion (most of it created by Oppenheimer himself) as to whether he really did leave an apple on Blackett’s desk or whether his claim to have done so should be regarded as metaphorical. In his interview with Martin Sherwin, conducted in 1979, Francis Fergusson says that Openheimer told him that ‘he had actually used cyanide or something somewhere’, suggesting that the attempted poisoning had been very real indeed. Fergusson adds: ‘Fortunately the tutor discovered it. Of course there was hell to pay with Cambridge.’

In fact, Cambridge seems to have reacted with extraordinary equanimity. They did not press criminal charges, nor did they expel Oppenheimer or even suspend him. The reason for this seems to be that his parents were still in Cambridge. His father negotiated an agreement with the university authorities, according to which Oppenheimer would be allowed to continue his studies and merely be put on probation, on condition that he agreed to undergo frequent treatment by a Harley Street psychiatrist.

Fergusson describes meeting Oppenheimer in London after one of his psychiatric sessions. ‘I saw him standing on the corner,’ he recalls, ‘waiting for me, with his hat on one side of his head, looking absolutely weird.’ And he went on, ‘He looked crazy at that time . . . He was sort of standing around, looking like he might run or do something drastic.’ When he asked Oppenheimer how the session had gone, Oppenheimer ‘said that the guy was too stupid to follow him and that he knew more about his troubles than the doctor did’.

As soon as this dreadful first term at Cambridge was over, Oppenheimer was taken by his parents to France for a recuperative holiday. He later remembered that on a cold, rainy day he was walking along the Brittany coast when, just as Smith had foreseen: ‘I was on the point of bumping myself off.’ A few days after Christmas 1925, Oppenheimer had arranged to meet Fergusson in Paris, where he told him about the poisoned-apple incident and confessed that there was some doubt as to whether he would be allowed to continue as a student at Cambridge. ‘My reaction was dismay,’ Fergusson later told Sherwin, adding, somewhat oddly: ‘But then, when he talked about it, I thought he had sort of gone beyond it, and that he was having trouble with his father.’

In Paris, Fergusson said, Oppenheimer ‘began to get very queer’. Considering that, up to this point in his narrative Fergusson had described Oppenheimer as: (a) forcing himself upon a woman in a train carriage, (b) attempting to injure that woman by dropping a suitcase on her, (c) sobbing at the prospect of sex with an old school friend, and (d) attempting to murder his university tutor by presenting him with a poisoned apple, the word ‘began’ seems a little out of place. But Oppenheimer’s behaviour in Paris, as described by Fergusson, was very odd indeed. After finding that her son had locked her into her hotel room, Ella insisted that he see a Parisian psychiatrist. The diagnosis was sexual frustration and the prescription, accordingly, sex with a prostitute.

Soon after this, Fergusson went to see Oppenheimer in his Parisian hotel room and discovered him to be in ‘one of his ambiguous moods’. He showed Oppenheimer some poetry written by his girlfriend, Frances Keeley, and told him that she was now his fiancée. Then, Fergusson describes:

Having failed to kill one paragon of excellence, it seems, Oppenheimer was moved to attempt to kill the other.

When Oppenheimer returned to Cambridge, he wrote to Fergusson:

The nearest Oppenheimer came to explaining his odd behaviour was to highlight the importance of what he described in this letter to Fergusson as ‘the awful fact of excellence’: ‘As you know, it is that fact now, combined with my inability to solder two copper wires together, which is probably succeeding in getting me crazy.’

Oppenheimer was by this time a graduate research student, though not, as he had earlier hoped, supervised by Rutherford, but rather by Rutherford’s predecessor, the aged and semi-retired J.J. Thomson. When Rutherford took over as director of the Cavendish in 1919, he insisted on having complete control and got Thomson to put in writing that he would not in any way interfere with Rutherford’s running of the place. In return for this assurance, Thomson was granted space in the laboratory for his own research and was allowed to supervise some research students. These tended to be the ones, like Oppenheimer, that Rutherford did not want to supervise.

Thomson was nearly seventy years old and had been for many years somewhat off the pace in the rapidly changing world of theoretical physics. The monumental developments in the subject that had occurred in the early twentieth century were things that he either ignored or resisted. He never accepted either Einstein’s theory of relativity or Rutherford’s planetary model of the atom, and quantum theory had passed him by altogether. In his old age, he remained deeply devoted to Trinity College and developed an absorbing interest in gardening. He is remembered fondly by those who knew him as genial and kind, but he was not the man to guide an emotionally turbulent, brilliant young man – suffering agonies of sexual frustration, social isolation and a crippling ineptitude for practical laboratory work – through the intricacies of modern physics.

The details of Oppenheimer’s research under Thomson’s supervision are now lost. In a letter to Fergusson of November 1925, he says that Thomson ‘thought my experiments quite good, but didn’t help much otherwise’, but he does not say what those experiments were. Later in life he described his research as a study of ‘what happened with beams of electrons and thin films of metal’, a description that could perfectly well apply to a good deal of the research conducted at the Cavendish during this period, but which also ties in with Oppenheimer’s description to Priestley that September of his intended research topic: the theory of electronic conduction, especially those aspects of it ‘which can give an indication of the laws of force to which the motion of electrons is subject’. To make the ‘thin films of metal’ he needed for this research, Oppenheimer had to undergo what he later recalled as ‘the miseries of evaporating beryllium on to collodion, and then getting rid of the collodion, and so on’. The resulting beryllium films were used not only by Oppenheimer, but also by James Chadwick, Rutherford’s second-in-command at the Cavendish, famous for the discovery of neutrons in 1932.

‘The business in the laboratory was really quite a sham,’ Oppenheimer later remarked, ‘but it got me into the laboratory, where I heard talk and found out a good deal of what people were interested in.’ In other words, the only value he later saw in his experience of experimental physics at Cambridge was that it stimulated his interest in contemporary developments in
theoretical
physics. As it turns out, that stimulus was enough to help him eventually overcome the acute psychological problems he had suffered in the autumn of 1925. John Edsall remembers that in the New Year of 1926, though it was obvious that Oppenheimer was undergoing some sort of crisis (‘there was a tremendous inner turmoil’), he nevertheless ‘kept on doing a tremendous amount of work, thinking, reading, discussing things’.

What brought about this burst of activity was Oppenheimer’s discovery that theoretical physics was undergoing what the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has described as ‘the most profound revolution in physical theory since the birth of modern physics in the seventeenth century’. Most of the important contributions to this ‘profound revolution’ were made by young physicists just a few years older than Oppenheimer himself. It was, it was commonly remarked, the period of
Knabenphysik
(boy physics).

The ‘boys’ in question fully realised that they were living in exciting times. Oppenheimer, soon after arriving at Cambridge, found himself caught up in that excitement. In November 1925, he had written to Fergusson saying that there were ‘certainly some good physicists’ at Cambridge, emphasising ‘the young ones I mean’. He had, he told Fergusson, ‘been taken to all sorts of meetings’, including ‘several rather pallid science clubs’. Pallid or not, it was at these science clubs that Oppenheimer was introduced to the epoch-making work in theoretical physics that was then going on, and where he got to meet and get to know some of the
Knaben
who were ushering in the new epoch.

The best known of these clubs is the Kapitza Club, which had been formed by the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza upon his arrival at the Cavendish in 1921, to provide an informal atmosphere within which ideas in physics could be discussed and debated. Kapitza, the son of a tsarist general, but a fervent supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, was one of the most colourful characters at the Cavendish and a favourite of Rutherford’s. He and Blackett vied with each other to be regarded as Rutherford’s chief assistant. The club Kapitza established in his own name became an important forum for the exploration of new ideas in physics, providing both a means by which experimentalists and theorists at Cambridge could learn from each other and an opportunity for Cambridge physicists to hear papers from distinguished physicists from other countries. Blackett was a member of this club and it was no doubt
he who introduced Oppenheimer to it. The club met at the young experimentalist John Cockcroft’s room in the Cavendish, where, in addition to Kapitza himself, Oppenheimer would have encountered not only all the leading experimental physicists at Cambridge, but also the man who would very soon become recognised as one of the world’s leading theorists: Paul Dirac.

Just two years older than Oppenheimer, Dirac had been a research graduate student in physics at St John’s College since 1923, having previously completed degrees in both electrical engineering and applied mathematics at the University of Bristol. He was tall and thin and had a reputation for saying as little as possible. He would now almost certainly be diagnosed as ‘autistic’; the many stories that circulated about him describe the kind of behaviour characteristic of Asperger’s syndrome. He combined an extraordinarily intense, obsessive interest in mathematics and physics with an almost complete lack of interest in anything else, including politics, literature and everyday conversation. Oppenheimer, remembering Dirac later in life, remarked that he was ‘not easily understood [and] not concerned to be understood. I thought he was absolutely grand.’

Coming from a relatively impoverished, lower-middle-class family in Bristol, Dirac was certainly not ‘grand’ in the social sense, but there was, undeniably, a certain grandeur in his exceptional intellectual ability. That he was socially awkward may have been, for Oppenheimer, an advantage; there is no sign that Dirac, for all his extraordinary brilliance, induced in Oppenheimer the murderous envy that Fergusson and Blackett had provoked. Dirac may have been the cleverest graduate physicist at Cambridge, and possibly even the greatest scientist the university had produced since Newton, but he did not, like Fergusson, mix with Europe’s literary, artistic and philosophical elite; nor was he, like Blackett, widely regarded as the most handsome, best-dressed and most charismatic figure on the Cambridge social scene. Oppenheimer was thus able to admire him without feeling awed or envious.