Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (121 page)
Read Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer Online
Authors: Ray Monk
This, fundamentally, is why the arts are important, since ‘it is almost wholly through the arts that we have a living reminder of the terror, of the nobility of what we can be, and what we are’.
At the institute Oppenheimer had to deal not so much with evil as with pettiness and squabbling. Several senior members of the institute – including, most vehemently, the mathematicians Deane Montgomery and André Weil – did not like the way it was going under Oppenheimer’s leadership. They thought he brought too many physicists, psychologists, poets and sociologists to the institute, and not enough mathematicians. ‘He was out to humiliate mathematicians,’ said Weil:
Oppenheimer was a wholly frustrated personality, and his amusement was to make people quarrel with each other. I’ve seen him do it. He loved to have people at the Institute quarrel with each other. He was frustrated essentially because he wanted to be Niels Bohr or Albert Einstein, and he knew he wasn’t.
Robert Crease tells a story that illustrates something about both the bitchiness of academic life and the kind of sniping at Oppenheimer that went on during this time:
Once in the 1950s, during the oral part of the physics qualifying exam at the University of Wisconsin, a student was asked what J. Robert Oppenheimer had contributed to physics. ‘I don’t know,’ the student answered – and was informed that was the correct answer.
Sniping at a more personal level went on too, with Deane Montgomery referring to the Oppenheimers’ home, Olden Manor, as ‘Bourbon Manor’.
George Kennan in his
Memoirs
writes that it was a ‘source of profound bewilderment and disappointment’ to Oppenheimer that he was unable to bring the disciplines of mathematics and history together at the institute, that he ‘remained so largely alone in his ability to bridge in a single inner world those wholly disparate workings of the human intellect’. Mathematicians and historians would not even sit together in the cafeteria. In place of interdisciplinary harmony there was a constant and fierce rivalry between the mathematicians and the exponents of other disciplines.
The squabbling became particularly intense whenever the question of new appointments came up, the hardest-fought and most unpleasant battle occurring in the academic year 1962–3. ‘The faculty meetings became so acrimonious,’ recalls Yang, ‘I was afraid to go unless I had to.’ Abraham Pais remembers that early in 1963 he decided he would leave the institute:
‘It started to dawn on me that I had better move on.’ One reason was that he was worried about becoming complacent and wanted some fresh challenges, but a contributing factor in his decision to leave was, he wrote, that ‘just about then, Oppenheimer was in trouble again with the faculty because of his vacillations in regard to two new faculty appointments in mathematics, which had taken days of mediation on my part, whereafter I said to myself: No more’.
The dispute began when the mathematicians started pushing for the appointment of John Milnor, a mathematician at Princeton University, as a permanent member of the institute. Oppenheimer turned the request down, whereupon the mathematicians presented two further nominations. Oppenheimer proposed postponing these appointments, but was overruled by the trustees at the mathematicians’ request, whereupon Pais wrote to Oppenheimer, announcing his resignation.
In April 1963, in the middle of this dispute, it was publicly announced that Oppenheimer would be the next recipient of the AEC’s Enrico Fermi Award. This was an award for outstanding achievement in the nuclear field that had been established soon after Fermi’s death at the end of 1954. It was awarded posthumously to Fermi, and then in successive years to von Neumann, Lawrence, Wigner, Seaborg, Bethe and Teller. Oppenheimer had known that he had been nominated for the award since the White House dinner in April 1962, when Seaborg, who had been appointed by Kennedy as the new chairman of the AEC, took him aside and told him. Seaborg had been mainly responsible for ensuring that the award went to Oppenheimer, intending it to be a public recognition by the AEC that it had done him an injustice by its decision to strip him of his clearance and that it regarded him as someone to honour rather than to hold in suspicion. Seaborg says that, having made the decision to award the prize to Oppenheimer, he called Strauss to invite him to lunch, where he told him the news: ‘He looked as if I’d leaned over the table and punched him.’
The decision was reported in the June edition of
Physics Today
, which reproduced the AEC’s announcement and the biographical sketch of Oppenheimer that they released alongside it. The biographical sketch ended with an appendix giving details of nine of Oppenheimer’s most important articles. Rather oddly, what is now regarded as his greatest scientific achievement – the paper on gravitational collapse that he wrote with Snyder – is not mentioned. The presentation ceremony,
Physics Today
reported, would take place in December 1963.
In the meantime, in the summer of 1963, Oppenheimer helped to organise an odd little conference that became the first in an annual series at Seven Springs Farm, Mount Kisco, New York. The conferences were
held on the estate of Agnes Meyer, the widow of Eugene Meyer, who, before his death in 1959, had been the owner of the
Washington Post
. Participation was by invitation only and the number of invitees was restricted to fifteen, in order to ‘maintain intimacy of discussion’. Those invited comprised a diverse collection, united only by their broad sympathy with the ideals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In 1963, the attendees included the Princeton scholar Julian Boyd, the Oxford philosopher Stuart Hampshire, the poet Robert Lowell, the architect Wallace K. Harrison, the psychiatrist Morris Carstairs, the physicist George Kistiakowsky, as well as Oppenheimer’s friends George Kennan
fn74
and Nicolas Nabokov.
The event provided Oppenheimer with the opportunity to give a different kind of talk from the public lectures he had been delivering to hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people during the previous decade. For one thing, he could, while speaking, mention the members of his audience by name, often using familiar versions of their names. Harrison was ‘Wally’, Nabokov was ‘Nico’, and Kistiakowsky ‘Kisty’. His talk expounded Bohr’s notion of ‘complementarity’, in a way that he had expounded in public many, many times before, except that, in extending it beyond physics, he applied it not only to the understanding of politics and society, but also to an understanding of
oneself
. This led him into an intimate, almost confessional passage, of a kind very rarely to be found in any of his other recorded utterances, whether private or public:
Up to now, and even more in the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took any action, hardly did anything, or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper on physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. It turned out to be impossible, I will not say to live with myself, because I think there is no problem there, but for me to live with anybody else, without understanding that what I saw was only one part of the truth. And in an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realise that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did. And I needed what they saw, needed them.
Never before had Oppenheimer tried so hard to reveal his inner self, as if he were determined to, so to speak, stand naked before these like-minded souls. In his mind, he told his audience, a recurring theme of the conference had been ‘a recognition of and a protest against, the elements of smugness, falsity, self-satisfaction and unction in our times, our societies and our lives, against the hypocritical’. In that sense, he said, the conference participants had something important in common with the Beat movement in poetry, which ‘is surely not without artistic portent, but which is essentially, if I know the people and what they do, a kind of brutal protest against what they feel to be false in the description of the world which their elders have given them and in which they live’.
On 21 November 1963 the White House issued an announcement that the Fermi Prize would be presented by the President himself to Oppenheimer on 2 December. The following day, the announcement was reported in the newspapers. That afternoon, in Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy was assassinated.
So it was that the presentation was made by President Johnson. ‘I know every person in the room grieves with me that the late President could not give this award as he anticipated,’ Johnson said. ‘I take great pleasure and pride that I substitute for him.’ He then handed Oppenheimer the citation, the gold medal and a cheque for $50,000. Oppenheimer’s short acceptance speech concentrated on ‘this great enterprise of our time, testing whether men can both preserve and enlarge life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and live without war as the great arbiter of history’:
In this enterprise, no one bears a greater responsibility than the President of the United States. I think it just possible, Mr President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. That would seem to me a good augury for all our futures.
At the reception afterwards Oppenheimer was photographed shaking Edward Teller’s hand, with Kitty standing beside him, looking at Teller with icy contempt. ‘I enjoyed what you had to say,’ said Teller. ‘I’m so very glad you came,’ replied Oppenheimer.
Another chance for America’s scientific establishment to honour Oppenheimer presented itself the following April, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. It was duly taken, but in a curiously unenthusiastic way. Oppenheimer’s colleagues at the institute, Dyson, Pais, Strömgren and Yang, undertook to edit a special issue of
Reviews of Modern Physics
dedicated to him. However, Robert Crease records that they had difficulty persuading people to contribute. Dyson wrote to forty leading physicists, many of whom, it seems, refused to contribute. Max Born
did
contribute,
but only a short and rather half-hearted ‘Message’, rather than a proper article. Those who did contribute included Leonard Schiff, David Hawkins, Phil Morrison, Cyril Smith, Willie Fowler, Robert Christy, Eugene Wigner, Julian Schwinger, Abraham Pais, Robert Serber and Kenneth Case. It was an impressive list, but more impressive was the list of people one would have expected to contribute, but who were not there: Isidor Rabi, Victor Weisskopf, Robert Bacher, Samuel Allison, Ed Condon, F.W. Loomis, Hans Bethe, Charles Lauritsen, and so on.
One of the most interesting articles in this Festschrift is a long and detailed study by Willie Fowler of ‘Massive Stars, Relativist Polytropes, and Gravitational Radiation’, which is one of the first published papers to recognise the importance of Oppenheimer’s work in this area. It begins by quoting from Oppenheimer’s papers on the subject and remarking: ‘It is a tribute to Robert Oppenheimer’s genius that these are the few statements about massive stars accepted as true today.’
This special issue of
Reviews of Modern Physics
was printed on 22 April 1964, the very day of Oppenheimer’s sixtieth birthday. According to the weekly letter that Dyson wrote home to his parents, the first copy ‘was rushed down from New York hot from the press’, just in time for the party they had arranged for Oppenheimer at the Strömgrens’ house. ‘Oppenheimer,’ Dyson wrote, ‘seemed to be genuinely surprised and greatly moved. It was the first time I have ever seen him at a loss for a suitable speech. He just said “Thank you” rather incoherently and sat down.’
The next day, Oppenheimer flew across the United States to Berkeley, where he delivered a lecture on the life and work of Niels Bohr to an audience of 12,500. ‘I am very pleased to be back home,’ he told the massive crowd that had come to hear him. ‘I lived here a long time and to those of you to whom a choice is offered, don’t go away.’ After Berkeley, Oppenheimer gave talks at Caltech, UCLA and, finally, on 18 May, at Los Alamos. Everywhere he went he lectured on Bohr, emphasising again and again the social, political and personal importance of Bohr’s notion of complementarity.
In September 1964, at the Rencontres Internationales de Genève, Oppenheimer gave a talk entitled ‘L’Intime et le Commun’ (‘The Intimate and the Open’), in which he touched again upon the themes of his 1963 Mount Kisco talk, urging that the openness espoused by Bohr should be expanded to include the private as well as the public. Referring to his security hearing, which by this time was ten years in the past, he said:
. . . when the proceedings were published, many said that my life had become an open book. That was not really true. Most of what meant most to me never appeared in those hearings. Perhaps much was not
known; certainly much was not relevant. I did have occasion then to think of what it might have been like to be an open book. I have come to the conclusion that if in fact privacy is an accidental blessing, and can be taken from you, if it is worth anyone’s trouble, for a few dollars, and a few hours, it may still not be such a bad way to live.
He was speaking here, of course, as someone who for many years had lived with the awareness that his phones were being tapped, his rooms bugged and his every movement followed and monitored. One might have expected him to be especially protective of his privacy, and indeed for most of his life he was. During these last years, however, he seemed to be striving for a very personal kind of openness, an important element of which was the recognition and acceptance of the evil in oneself:
We most of all should try to be experts in the worst about ourselves: we should not be astonished to find some evil there, that we find so very readily abroad and in all others. We should not, as Rousseau tried to, comfort ourselves that it is the responsibility and the fault of others, that we are just naturally good; nor should we let Calvin persuade us that despite our obvious duty we are without any power, however small and limited, to deal with what we find of evil in ourselves. In this knowledge, of ourselves, of our profession, of our country – our often beloved country – of our civilization itself, there is scope for what we most need: self knowledge, courage, humor, and some charity. These are the great gifts that our tradition makes to us, to prepare us for how to live tomorrow.
