Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (117 page)
Read Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer Online
Authors: Ray Monk
As a spectator, Oppenheimer was unusually well informed, and at the institute he had some excellent people to keep him up to date with the latest research. The one who was intellectually closest to him was Abraham Pais, whose work centred on what Oppenheimer regarded as the most
interesting part of the subject: particle physics. In the early 1950s, Pais had done some pioneering and important work attempting to find order in what Oppenheimer referred to as the ‘particle zoo’. Oppenheimer was not exactly a collaborator on this work, but, for an observer, he was very close to it, even making the odd contribution here and there. For example, Pais’s paper at the second Rochester Conference in January 1952 had a title provided by Oppenheimer – ‘An Ordering Principle for Megalomorphian Zoology’ – and, when this was turned into an article for the
Physical Review
, a footnote acknowledged: ‘J.R. Oppenheimer, discussion remark at the Rochester Conference’.
In 1954, Pais began a fruitful collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann, a brilliant young physicist who had spent a year at the institute in 1951 before accepting a position at Chicago as an instructor. Pais and Gell-Mann made an important contribution to fundamental particle theory when they introduced a new quantum number to which Gell-Mann gave the name ‘strangeness’. Oppenheimer kept a close eye on this development, but did not contribute to it. At the end of 1954, Pais left the institute for a year to take a sabbatical at Columbia.
Freeman Dyson was still at the institute, but he and Oppenheimer never became close, either personally or intellectually. ‘I disappointed him by not becoming a deep thinker,’ Dyson has said.
When I came to Oppenheimer asking for guidance, he said: ‘Follow your own destiny.’ I did so, and the results did not altogether please him. I followed my destiny into pure mathematics, into nuclear engineering, into space technology and astronomy, solving problems that he rightly considered remote from the mainstream of physics.
The same ‘difference of temperament’, Dyson recalls, also appeared in their discussions about the School of Physics at the Institute: ‘He liked to concentrate new appointments in fundamental particle physics; I liked to invite people in a wide variety of specialities.’
Two people they did agree on, however, were the Chinese physicists Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee. Yang came to the institute in 1949, after taking his PhD in Chicago under Edward Teller. In 1950, he was awarded a five-year institute membership, and when that came to an end he was made a full professor. Lee had also taken his PhD at Chicago, which is where he and Yang met. In 1951, after a year at Berkeley, Lee came to the institute on a two-year membership, during which time he and Yang became close collaborators, a partnership that continued after he left the institute for Columbia in 1953. Oppenheimer did not work closely with Yang and Lee, nor was he particularly close to them personally, but he did take great pride in their achievements. By the mid-1950s,
Yang, in collaboration with Lee, was the greatest physicist of which the institute could boast. As Dyson puts it, he and Oppenheimer ‘rejoiced together as we watched them grow over our heads and into great scientific leaders’.
Just a month after Oppenheimer’s reappointment as director, Ed Murrow, the television journalist who fronted the programme
See It Now
, came to Princeton with his producer Fred Friendly to discuss the possibility of devoting an episode of their programme to the institute. What they had in mind was a general introduction to the place where, in Murrow’s words, ‘you find a Nobel Prize winner every time you open a door’, featuring interviews with Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr (who happened to be visiting at the time) and whoever else they could find. As it turned out, Einstein refused to be involved, and though Bohr agreed to be interviewed, he seemed incapable of saying anything that would be intelligible to a general audience. This left Oppenheimer, who gave a mesmerising performance, talking about his childhood, the institute, quantum physics, but
not
the security hearing, about which neither Murrow nor Oppenheimer said a single word during three hours of filming.
On their way back to New York it was clear to Murrow and Friendly that what they had recorded in Princeton was not a programme about the institute (‘There isn’t one foot of usable film in all that stuff we did with Bohr and all the others,’ Murrow said to Friendly), but a first-rate interview with Oppenheimer. He needed a great deal of persuading to allow the programme to go ahead on this new basis, but Murrow was so convinced of the quality of the interview, and that it could not possibly do anything but good for both Oppenheimer and the institute, that he finally gave his consent.
The programme went out on 4 January 1955 and fully lived up to Murrow’s expectations. It was hugely popular, offering as it did a glimpse of Oppenheimer that was many times more interesting and engaging than the saint depicted by the Alsops or the sinner condemned by Shepley and Blair. The charisma that had enchanted Born in the 1920s, Oppenheimer’s graduate students in the 1930s and Groves and the Los Alamos team in the 1940s had finally been captured on film and made available for everyone to see. Key to the charm of the programme was that Oppenheimer was relaxed in Murrow’s company, both of them smoking heavily and each clearly trusting and admiring the other. Not that Oppenheimer’s performance was entirely without artifice. Pais recalls that on the day of the filming he and Rabi ‘tiptoed into Robert’s office and sat silently in a corner, watching the proceedings. When it was over and Murrow had left, Rabi turned to Oppenheimer and said: “Robert, you’re a ham.”’
The conversation, as broadcast, began with Oppenheimer talking about the institute and some of its members, including the mathematician Hassler Whitney and the psychologist Jean Piaget. ‘And Professor Einstein is still here too, isn’t he?’ Murrow says. ‘Oh, indeed he is,’ replies Oppenheimer with a smile. ‘He’s one of the most lovable of men.’ Turning to the subject of Oppenheimer himself, Murrow asks: ‘Well, sir, apart from running the institute, what do you do here?’ ‘I do two kinds of things,’ Oppenheimer replies:
One is to write about what I think I know, hoping that it will be understandable in general, and one is to try to understand physics and talk and work with the physicists and sometimes . . . try to have an idea that may be helpful.
‘The part I really get excited about,’ he continued, ‘is just what is called particle physics or atomic physics in its modern sense.’ He then goes up to his blackboard and gives a mini-lecture on physics.
Turning from physics to politics, Oppenheimer is asked about the dangers of secrecy and replies: ‘The trouble with secrecy isn’t that it doesn’t give the public a sense of participation. The trouble with secrecy is that it denies to the government itself the wisdom and resources of the whole community.’ In any case, he insists, ‘there aren’t secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men. Sometimes they are secret because a man doesn’t like to know what he’s up to if he can avoid it.’
Though there was no mention of the security hearing or of the suspension of Oppenheimer’s clearance, the Murrow programme achieved precisely what Lloyd Garrison had hoped to achieve at the hearing: it presented the public with the ‘whole man’, and, in doing so, put the charges against him in perspective. The press reviews of the programme were uniformly enthusiastic, most critics being captivated by, as the
New York Times
put it, Oppenheimer’s ‘lean, almost ascetic face and his frequent poetic turn of phrase’. Friendly and Murrow received 2,500 letters in response to the programme, only thirty-five of which were critical of Oppenheimer, an ‘approval rating’ of more than 98 per cent.
After his appearance on
See It Now
, Oppenheimer was no longer the ‘controversial figure’ he had been six months earlier: he was a celebrity. Wherever he went, the press followed and crowds gathered. On 31 January to 2 February, Oppenheimer attended the fifth Rochester Conference, at which he chaired a session on K-mesons, his presence prompting one journalist to describe him with what Robert Marshak has called a ‘brilliant non sequitur’: ‘Dr Oppenheimer, who is the world’s greatest nuclear theorist despite Federal withdrawal of his top security clearance . . .’
When Oppenheimer gave public lectures now, the audiences were huge. In April 1955, he was invited to give the Condon Lectures at Oregon State University. His subject was ‘The Sub-Nuclear Zoo: The Constitution of Matter’, and he attracted 2,500 listeners, most of whom, as a newspaper report of the time put it, ‘didn’t know a meson from a melon’. The
Eugene Register-Guard
reported that the audience for the first of these lectures ‘was several hundred larger than the previous peak crowd’. ‘Listeners sat on the floor, stood in the hallways, and filled the coffee bar and a lounge downstairs where the scientist’s voice was carried by the public address system.’ ‘Not one in 50 could really understand what he was talking about,’ the reporter estimated. ‘So why did they stay?’ His answer was: ‘The great nuclear physicist turned out to be a very appealing, human guy.’
They also saw a man so obviously in love with his work. As he warmed up to his subject and talked about protons and neutrons and the other creatures of his sub-nuclear zoo, he became quite excited. The audience, not knowing what he was talking about, became excited too.
It was on this trip out west that Oppenheimer learned (from a newspaper reporter) of the death of the only physicist whose fame and popularity exceeded his own. ‘For all scientists and most men,’ Oppenheimer said on hearing the news, ‘this is a day of mourning. Einstein was one of the greats of all ages.’
Before returning to Princeton, Oppenheimer went to Iowa State College to give the first John Franklin Carlson Lecture. Frank Carlson, who had done his PhD under Oppenheimer at Berkeley and had published a joint paper with him, had been a professor of physics at Iowa State from 1946 to 1954, when he committed suicide. Oppenheimer’s memorial lecture, the text of which was published in
Physics Today
, was entitled ‘Electron Theory: Description and Analogy’. It began with an eloquent and heartfelt tribute to Carlson:
It is a very special sort of privilege to give this lecture in honor and in memory of Carlson who was, for many of us, both a friend and a colleague . . .
Carlson was a student of mine in Berkeley. To those in this audience who are graduate students, I would recall the earnestness, the intensity, almost the terror with which he underwent the rites of initiation in a great science, and the seriousness with which he met it. In those days, he used to say, ‘I have only one wish, and that is to be a good physicist.’ I think he lived to see that wish abundantly fulfilled.
In recalling Carlson, one feels that Oppenheimer was also articulating an ideal to which he himself had aspired all his life:
He loved the history of science; he was interested in philosophy and in literature. He was concerned and sensitive to all human problems, and yet very balanced and unfanatic, a real scholar, one of the most modest of men, a man with a great gift for teaching . . . He was loyalty itself and great friendliness, and he was very funny. He had a wonderful sense of humor which softened the sobriety, the depth, and the sense of pathos and tragedy with which he looked at human affairs. He exemplified and, with a kind of steadfastness which none of us will forget, he established that being a scientist is harmonious with and continuous with being a man.
The lecture then dealt – at a level that was no doubt somewhat beyond most of the 1,200 people crammed into the hall – with the history of electron theory, from Newton, via Heisenberg, to the new quantum electrodynamics developed by Schwinger and Feynman a few years earlier. This last Oppenheimer attempted to summarise as follows:
And physicists then said, ‘Good, we will give up this attempt. We cannot calculate the mass of the electron. It would be meaningless anyway in a theory in which there are no other particles, because we could give meaning only to its ratio to the mass of something else. We would like to calculate the charge; we would like to calculate that number one in a thousand; but we will give that up too. These things we will measure; then everything else will be given by the theory in a finite way.’ So they said; and this is what is called the renormalization program.
Along the way, Oppenheimer managed to fit in a description of the work that he and Carlson had done together. He also – and this was characteristic of the talks he gave in this period – hinted at an imminent breakthrough:
It is clear that we are in for one of the very difficult, probably very heroic, and at least thoroughly unpredictable revolutions in physical understanding and physical theory. One of the great times in physics lies ahead; it is certainly something that will often make us remember how much we miss the guidance and the companionship that Carlson could have given us had he lived.
Oppenheimer’s sense that a fundamental breakthrough was imminent was in part based on his sense that there was something provisional about
QED, that, as he put it in his Carlson lecture, ‘electrodynamics cannot be the whole story’. Though, to a general audience, this gave the impression that Oppenheimer was at the very cutting edge of contemporary physics, to physicists it was reminiscent of Einstein’s refusal to accept quantum mechanics. Oppenheimer showed no sense of being aware of this. In January 1956, he published in
Reviews of Modern Physics
a handsome appreciation of Einstein’s work, which, however, having described the great advances Einstein made during ‘two golden decades early in this century’, lingered on Einstein’s increasing isolation from the mainstream of physicists during the last twenty-five years of his life and his devotion to a research programme that ‘did not arouse the hope or indeed the active interest of many physicists’.
At about the same time Oppenheimer wrote a tribute on the occasion of Bohr’s seventieth birthday that was, by comparison with his tribute to Einstein, completely unequivocal in its admiration and praise.
