Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (29 page)

In a letter he wrote to Frank at about the time he was wooing Ava Pauling, Oppenheimer offered his teenage brother some advice on how to treat women – advice that, he wrote, ‘may possibly be of use to you, as the fruit and outcome of my erotic labours’. The woman’s profession, he told Frank, was ‘to make you waste your time with her’, while ‘it is your profession to keep clear’. ‘The whole thing,’ he added, ‘is only important for people who have time to waste. For you and me, it isn’t.’

Another woman in whom Oppenheimer showed especial interest during his time at Caltech was as unavailable to him as Ava Pauling had been. This was Helen Campbell, who was a friend and Vassar classmate of Inez Pollak, and, when Oppenheimer first met her, was engaged to a physicist at Berkeley called Samuel K. Allison. She and Allison married in May 1928. This, however, did not deter Oppenheimer from spending as much time alone with her as he could. He took her out to dinner, read Baudelaire to her and talked with her about psychoanalysis and New Mexico. It did not lead to romance, but neither did it lead to Samuel Allison breaking off contact with Oppenheimer.

While Oppenheimer was having his amorous advances rebuffed, he himself was fending off professional advances from universities. He later recalled that he had ‘many invitations to university positions, one or two in Europe, and perhaps ten in the United States’. In his letter to Frank
he says: ‘I am trying to decide whether to take a professorship at the University of California next year or go abroad.’ He had visited Berkeley and was attracted to it partly because it was
not
an important centre of theoretical research, thus offering him, as it were, a blank sheet upon which to write his own script. Or, as he put it:

What he wanted was a joint appointment, working half the time at Berkeley and the other half at Caltech.

Meanwhile, he was being assiduously courted by Harvard. On 10 April 1928, Professor Theodore Lyman, director of the department of physics at Harvard, wrote to Oppenheimer offering him a lectureship. Oppenheimer replied on 21 April, saying that he would ‘like to be able to accept’ the offer, but he ‘planned to spend next year in Europe’. About two weeks later, Oppenheimer wrote again to Lyman, finally refusing the offer at Harvard and telling him that he had accepted instead precisely the arrangement he had wanted: first he would spend the following year abroad, then he would take up a joint appointment, dividing himself between Berkeley and Caltech.

Oppenheimer’s plan to spend a year abroad conducting postdoctoral research under the guidance of the great European physicists was perhaps a result of what he described in his letter to Edwin Kemble as ‘the Ramsauer fiasco’, feeling that he still needed to improve his technical competence if he was to make important contributions to theoretical physics. Explaining the decision to the head of the Berkeley physics department, Elmer Hall, Oppenheimer said it was based on his intention to ‘try to learn a little physics there’. Abraham Pais thought, more specifically, that Oppenheimer’s experiences at Caltech ‘revealed to him his deficiencies in mathematics’, which made him want to return to Europe. Because he wanted to pursue postdoctoral work in Europe rather than the US, Oppenheimer’s application to renew his NRC fellowship came under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Education Board, which on 26 April 1928 considered and approved Oppenheimer’s application to work on ‘problems of quantum mechanics’ first with Ralph Fowler in Cambridge and then with either Ehrenfest in Leiden or Bohr in Copenhagen.

Having thus secured both his fellowship for the year 1928–9 and his two teaching positions, starting the year after that, Oppenheimer left Caltech in July 1928, intending to spend the first part of the
summer at Ann Arbor and the second part in New Mexico with his family. The attraction of Ann Arbor was not only the chance it offered of reuniting with Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck, but also the opportunity of attending the famous summer school in theoretical physics, which had become (and would remain until the Second World War) an annual event, attracting distinguished theoretical physicists from all over the world.

From Ann Arbor, Oppenheimer on 2 August wrote to the International Education Board to tell them that he would have to postpone his fellowship because he had tuberculosis and ‘several doctors have told me that it would not be very wise to go abroad until I am better’. For a few years Oppenheimer had suffered from a nasty, persistent cough, caused no doubt by his heavy smoking, but it is unlikely that he had tuberculosis. Frank, asked many years later, thought there never had been a secure and confirmed diagnosis of tuberculosis, leading some to wonder – just as Herbert Smith had wondered about Oppenheimer’s ‘dysentery’ before starting at Harvard – whether Oppenheimer, ill with worry about whether he could meet the expectations he and others had of himself, had invented a medical cause for his feeling unwell, one that would allow him to delay the challenge that he faced.

After the summer school finished, Oppenheimer headed for New Mexico, as planned. In his letter to Frank the previous spring, Oppenheimer had asked him what his plans were for the summer. ‘If you are out here [that is, in the South-west],’ he suggested, ‘we might knock around for a fortnight on the desert.’ During Oppenheimer’s time at Caltech, his family’s situation had changed somewhat. Having already sold the Bay Shore house, in 1928 they sold the Riverside Drive apartment too and moved into a smaller apartment on Park Avenue, between 47th and 48th Street in Midtown, Manhattan – then, as now, one of the most expensive areas in the world. Frank, who would turn sixteen on 14 August 1928, was, like his older brother, tall, slim and good-looking, but without his brother’s intensity and instability.

While Oppenheimer had been attending the summer school at Ann Arbor, Frank had been at a summer camp in Colorado. They arranged to meet at Katherine Page’s house in Los Pinos. Oppenheimer arrived a few days before Frank and was taken by Katherine to a cabin a mile or so from her ranch at Cowles. It was built of half-trunks and adobe mortar and commanded a magnificent view of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the Pecos River. ‘Like it?’ Katherine asked, and when Oppenheimer nodded, she told him that it was available for rent. ‘Hot dog!’ said Oppenheimer. ‘That’s what you should call it,’ Katherine told him. ‘Hot Dog.
Perro Caliente
.’

When Frank arrived, he and Oppenheimer moved into Perro Caliente,
which they persuaded their father that winter to lease. When the lease ran out in 1947, Oppenheimer bought it outright. For the rest of his life Perro Caliente was to be his refuge. For two weeks, Oppenheimer and his brother stayed at the cabin and cemented a mutual admiration for, and bond with, each other. Almost every day they rode in the mountains, acquiring a reputation among the locals for expert horsemanship. While they rode, they talked about physics, poetry, literature, philosophy and religion. Francis Fergusson visited them and would later tell how, after a hot and tiring day on the range, he headed for the icebox in the cabin, to find only half a bottle of vodka, a jar of pickled artichokes, some caviar and a can of chicken livers.

Despite this inadequate nutrition, Oppenheimer’s health improved enormously during his time in New Mexico, and on 25 August he wrote from there to the NRC’s Fellowship Board, thanking them for their letter of 16 August (in which, in response to Oppenheimer’s statement that he had tuberculosis, they had told him that his fellowship had been withdrawn) and telling them: ‘It now seems certain that I shall be able to take the fellowship of the International Education Board . . . I therefore very much hope that the withdrawal of the fellowship will not prove permanent.’

Understandably perplexed, the IEB asked Oppenheimer to undergo a complete medical examination. The Oppenheimer brothers had arranged, after their two-week sojourn in New Mexico, to meet their parents at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. Thus it was in Colorado Springs that Oppenheimer underwent the medical examination insisted upon by the IEB. It took place on 18 September 1928 and was conducted by a Dr Gerald B. Webb, who found no trace of tuberculosis and reported that, apart from having some ten months previously a ‘slight sinus infection and slight tonsillitis since’, Oppenheimer was in ‘first class’ medical condition. After receiving this report, the NRC approved the IEB stipend, although, unusually, it was not for twelve months but for nine, starting on 1 November.

In the meantime, after taking a few driving lessons, the Oppenheimer brothers bought a car, a Chrysler Roadster, and set off for Pasadena. Before they were even out of Colorado, they had an accident. With Frank at the wheel, the car skidded on some loose gravel and rolled over into a ditch. The windscreen was shattered, the cloth top ruined and Oppenheimer’s right arm broken. Remarkably, they got the car running again the next day, but Frank drove it onto a slab of rock from which they were unable to move. They spent that night on the desert floor, as Frank remembered it, ‘sipping from a bottle of spirits . . . and sucking on some lemons’. Oppenheimer arrived in Pasadena dishevelled, unshaven, one arm in a sling and with little time to pack and prepare
to leave for Europe. However, during what had been an eventful and memorable summer, his little brother had been transformed into his closest friend.

In his original submission to the NRC for a postdoctoral fellowship, Oppenheimer had stated his intention of starting on 16 September, working first with Fowler in Cambridge and then with either Ehrenfest in Leiden or Bohr in Copenhagen. In the event, with the fellowship starting in November, he went straight to Leiden. Of all the great physicists he had met during his previous two years in Europe, it was Ehrenfest with whom he formed the closest attachment. They all admired Oppenheimer’s manifest intellect, but Ehrenfest really
liked
him.

And for Ehrenfest, more than perhaps any other great scientist, liking people and being liked by them was important. A working-class Jew from Vienna who became the successor to the great H.A. Lorentz at Leiden, Ehrenfest was a man of passionate intensity, who inspired admiration as a physicist and devotion as a teacher and friend. His biographer Martin Klein has written of him:

His close friend Einstein said:

Though perfectly capable of following highly abstract mathematics, Ehrenfest was famous among physicists for distrusting overly complicated formalistic treatments of physical problems. In this, he was often contrasted with Max Born. The great physicist Victor Weisskopf, who studied at Göttingen, remarked that Ehrenfest taught him ‘to distrust
the complicated mathematics and formalisms that were then very popular at Göttingen’ and thereby ‘showed me how to get at the real physics’.

When, in the early summer of 1928, Oppenheimer expressed a desire to spend some of his time as a postdoctoral student working with Ehrenfest at Leiden, he naturally wrote to Ehrenfest asking for his support and received in reply the following characteristically forthright and warm response:

Though it had been Ehrenfest who had spotted the mathematical mistakes in Oppenheimer’s Ramsauer paper, it is typical of him that his concern was not that Oppenheimer was incompetent in mathematics, but that he would attach too much importance to it. Ehrenfest’s greatest concern in physics was always with attaining
clarity
, genuine understanding.

Oppenheimer in later life emphasised how much he admired Ehrenfest. ‘I thought of him,’ he once said, ‘in semi-Socratic terms, and I thought I would learn something from him and indeed certainly did.’ The intention of both Oppenheimer and Ehrenfest was that Oppenheimer would, during his time at Leiden, not only pursue his own research, but also act as Ehrenfest’s assistant. To everybody’s astonishment, Oppenheimer, in this latter capacity, gave a few seminars at Leiden
in Dutch
, a language he seemed to have learned in a matter of months. ‘I don’t think it was very good Dutch,’ he later recalled, but it was, nevertheless, greatly appreciated.

However, Oppenheimer’s principal interest was his own research, and, despite his great admiration of Ehrenfest, he could not be persuaded to abandon altogether his tendency to look for mathematical techniques to solve the questions of physics. ‘I think that his [Ehrenfest’s] interest in simplicity and clarity was really a great thing,’ Oppenheimer once said, ‘but I probably still had a fascination with formalism and complication, so that the large part of what had me stuck or engaged was not his dish.’ Very quickly after arriving at Leiden, therefore, Oppenheimer came to
think that – his affection for, and admiration of, Ehrenfest notwithstanding – he would be better off somewhere else. ‘There was not a great deal of life in the physics in Leiden at the time,’ he recalled. ‘I think Ehrenfest was depressed: I don’t think that I was of great interest to him then. I don’t think he told me what was on his mind and I have a recollection of quiet and gloom.’