Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (33 page)

‘I have been pretty busy,’ Oppenheimer wrote to Frank on 7 September 1929, shortly before the start of term, ‘preparing lectures and giving miscellaneous counsel and working and getting to know people.’ In his next letter he offered Frank himself some counsel when he returned to the question of how to treat women, or ‘the refractory problem of the
jeunes filles Newyorkaises
’, as Oppenheimer put it. Frank had evidently mentioned being ill at ease with women, in response to which Oppenheimer’s counsel was to associate only with those women who took responsibility for putting him at ease. ‘The obligation,’ he told Frank, ‘is always on the girl for making a go of conversation: if she does not accept the obligation, nothing that you can do will make the negotiations pleasant.’

Perhaps this advice offers some clue as to why Oppenheimer’s relations with women during this time seem to have been restricted to those who were already married. To meet a woman who was the wife of a colleague did not impose on him the obligation to initiate contact, with all the potential for embarrassment and risk of rejection that is involved in, say, asking a woman out for a date. Helen Allison, with whom Oppenheimer had flirted during his time as an NRC fellow at Caltech in 1928, remembers at Berkeley ‘young wives falling for Robert, charmed by his conversation, gifts of flowers, etc.’ Oppenheimer, she thought, ‘had an eye for women’, but his attentions ‘should not be taken too seriously’.

‘I can’t think that it would be terrible of me to say –’ Oppenheimer wrote to Frank, ‘and it is occasionally true – that I need physics more than friends.’ At Berkeley, Oppenheimer was eventually able to combine his need for friends with his need for, and love of, physics, and to combine both with his desire to build an
American
school of theoretical physics by finding his friends from among his students. This, however, was a long process. In the first year or two, most of the students who took his courses found them incomprehensible and him intimidating.

The lectures Oppenheimer mentions preparing in his letter to Frank were part of a graduate course on quantum mechanics that he gave in the first semester of the 1929–30 academic year. His teaching at Berkeley was entirely confined to graduates. It was, he said later, ‘very rarely and only in quite different contexts that I ever worked with undergraduates. I think
they didn’t think I’d be any good for them and it didn’t occur to me to ask to teach freshman physics or anything like that.’ As well as the course on quantum mechanics, he gave a graduate seminar concentrating on some aspect of theoretical physics, the title of which rotated between ‘Introduction to Theoretical Physics’ and ‘Methods of Theoretical Physics’. Oppenheimer did not approach this teaching in the spirit of someone preparing students for an exam (in fact, as some of his students complained, he never set them any tests and so had no formal means of assessing how much they had understood). Rather, as he says in the quotation given at the beginning of this chapter, he approached it from the point of view of ‘a propagator of the theory which I loved’. As far as he was concerned, he was there not to teach – and certainly not to assess – students, but to bring quantum mechanics to Berkeley.

‘I think from all I hear I was a very difficult lecturer,’ he admitted. ‘I started as a lecturer who made things very difficult.’ Oppenheimer’s notes for his lectures on quantum mechanics survive and show that he did indeed make great demands upon his students. The way he remembered it was that ‘I found myself . . . the only one who understood what this was all about, and the gift which my high-school teacher of English had noted for explaining technical things came into action.’ Presumably by ‘this’ he meant quantum mechanics, though in fact he was not the only one at Berkeley with any understanding of quantum mechanics: Birge, Loeb, Williams and Lawrence were all familiar with the Schrödinger wave-function version of the theory. All of them, however, were unfamiliar with, and baffled by, Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Dirac’s transformation theory, and these are what, just two weeks into the course, Oppenheimer asked his students to understand. Naturally many of them struggled, and when they asked for further elucidation, they were referred to books, most of which were written in German.

‘Almost immediately,’ Birge later said, ‘students came to complain that he was going too fast.’ Birge asked to see Oppenheimer’s notes and, after reading them, urged his students to persevere. Oppenheimer, meanwhile, complained to Birge: ‘I’m going so slowly that I’m not getting anywhere.’ ‘This,’ Birge recalled, ‘was my first intimation of the speed at which Oppenheimer’s mind worked.’ Oppenheimer delivered his lectures in a low, quiet voice, while smoking incessantly; as soon as he finished a cigarette, he stubbed it out and lit a new one, almost in a single action. ‘Since we couldn’t understand what he was saying,’ one of his students remembered, ‘we watched the cigarette. We were always expecting him to write on the board with it and smoke the chalk, but I don’t think he ever did.’

For the first two years of his joint post Oppenheimer would lecture at Berkeley from August until Christmas and then journey 350 miles south to Pasadena, teaching at Caltech from January until June, before spending
as much of the summer as he could in New Mexico. After two years of this, Berkeley (the administrators of which were never entirely happy with having to share Oppenheimer with another university) changed the dates of their semesters, so that the first semester extended into January, making this arrangement impossible. Oppenheimer was determined to maintain the connection with Caltech, so he negotiated with Berkeley an agreement to teach at Caltech for the last six weeks of the academic year, just before the summer break. In this way, the fifty–fifty split that he had originally envisaged was transformed into an arrangement whereby he was basically employed by Berkeley, but released by them to spend a few weeks each year at Pasadena.

‘In Pasadena,’ Oppenheimer later said, ‘I taught all right, but it was never an important part of the Caltech curriculum except conceivably that first year in the spring of ’30 when I was there a long time and where I probably gave a pretty good “course of sprouts” in quantum theory.’ The title of this ‘course of sprouts’ was ‘Topics in Theoretical Physics’. Again, it was restricted to graduates, and, perhaps because Oppenheimer had higher expectations of Caltech students than he had of Berkeley students, it was pitched at an even higher level, consisting of dense and concentrated discussions of subjects dealt with in recent research papers.

His first lecture in this course attracted about forty students, among whom was Carl D. Anderson, then a PhD student and later a very eminent physicist. ‘I didn’t know what Oppenheimer was talking about,’ Anderson has recalled. ‘He, in those days, was not a good lecturer. He paced back and forth, and wherever he happened to be at that instant, he would write some squiggles on the blackboard – part of an equation – and they were scattered all over at random.’ Within a few weeks Anderson was the only student still registered for the course. When he, too, went to see Oppenheimer to ask him for permission to drop the course, Oppenheimer pleaded with him to stay – without Anderson, he would have no course, and without a course, he would have no official position at Caltech. As an inducement, Oppenheimer promised Anderson that, if he remained on the course, he would be guaranteed to get an A, on which basis Anderson remained.

In addition to his ‘course of sprouts’, Oppenheimer was persuaded by Richard Tolman to give some extra evening lectures on Dirac’s quantum electrodynamics. These were open to anyone who wanted to come, but were intended chiefly for academic members of staff. In the event, the first of the proposed series was attended by about a dozen people. Again, Carl Anderson was present and remembers that, after Oppenheimer had talked for about two hours, Richard Tolman got up and said: ‘Robert, I didn’t understand a damn word you said tonight, except . . .’ And then he went up to the blackboard and wrote an equation. ‘That’s all I understood.’ In
reply, Oppenheimer told him that he had got that equation wrong. ‘And,’ says Anderson, ‘there was never a second meeting of this attempt on Oppenheimer’s part to tell various people, mostly faculty, what Dirac’s theory was all about.’

During this first spring at Pasadena, Oppenheimer was visited by his parents. The previous year Julius had sold his share of the family business. Whether by luck or judgement, it is impossible to say, but Julius had thus protected the family fortune from the effects of the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. So little impact did the crash have on his family, and so little interest did he show in politics at this time, that Oppenheimer later recalled that he did not even know the crash had happened until long after the event, when he was told about it by Ernest Lawrence. In March 1930, Julius and Ella, their fabulous wealth still intact, came out west to visit their son. ‘We had a delightful evening at the Tolmans,’ Julius wrote to Frank from Pasadena. ‘Tomorrow afternoon we are going there for tea and shall meet a number of the professors and some other of Robert’s friends, and on Friday we are going with Mrs Tolman to Los Angeles to hear the Tchaikovsky concert.’ Robert, Julius wrote, was ‘very busy with conferences, lectures, and his own work, but we manage to see him a short time daily.’

Julius was unhappy about the state of Oppenheimer’s car, an old Chrysler, and so, ‘against severe protest’, insisted on buying him a new one, which ‘he is most delighted with . . . he has reduced his speed about 50% from what he used to drive, so we hope no further accidents will occur’. The recklessness of Oppenheimer’s driving was legendary. In a previous letter to Frank, he himself had written: ‘From time to time I take out the Chrysler, and scare one of my friends out of all sanity by wheeling corners at seventy. The car will do seventy-five without a tremor. I am and shall be a vile driver.’ The accident Julius mentions is possibly the occasion on which Oppenheimer crashed his car while trying to impress and scare his passenger, the writer Natalie Raymond (‘Nat’ as she was known to her friends, one of whom described her as ‘a dare-devil, an adventurer’), by racing a train. She was knocked unconscious and, at first, Oppenheimer thought she was dead. Her compensation was to be presented by Julius with a Cézanne drawing and a small painting by the French artist Maurice de Vlaminck.

The day after Julius wrote to Frank, Oppenheimer also wrote to him. Oppenheimer’s letter is one of the most interesting he ever sent his brother, containing as it does a series of reflections on what Rabi recognised as Oppenheimer’s central problem: identity. Frank had written to him expressing a fear characteristic of his age (he was then seventeen), namely that the Frank his older brother had known had disappeared. Oppenheimer responded with warmth and reassurance. ‘It is not easy,’ he told Frank, ‘to
believe that the Frank I know is completely vanished; and I should be very very sorry if that were so.’ Nevertheless, he paid Frank the compliment of treating the issue he had raised – the question of personal identity – with complete seriousness. ‘I think,’ he wrote, ‘that you do overestimate the inconstancy and incoherence of personal life’:

Oppenheimer was, evidently, inclined to take philosophical questions very seriously indeed, for a reason he spelled out to Frank: ‘The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in the times of preparation that determines what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.’ The letter ended with the affectionate plea: ‘Don’t you go and change too much, now; because I think you were pretty damn nice before.’

As he did at Berkeley, Oppenheimer lived, while he lectured at Caltech, in the faculty club. His friends in Pasadena included Richard Tolman, whom he already knew, and the Danish physicist Charles C. Lauritsen. Tolman and his wife, Ruth, became especially close friends (it was they who introduced Oppenheimer to Natalie Raymond), and he often dined at the Tolmans’ home, as did his parents when they were in Pasadena. Contact with people like Tolman and Lauritsen, people who were closely in touch with recent developments in physics, was one of the main reasons Oppenheimer was reluctant to give up his position at Caltech.

However, although it was at Caltech that Oppenheimer thus stayed in touch with current research, it was at Berkeley that he hoped to build his peculiarly American school of theoretical physics. To accomplish this, he knew that he would have to attract to Berkeley more able students than the ones he had inherited, and so, at the many conferences and meetings he attended, he kept an eye out for possible recruits. One of the most promising recruiting grounds in this respect was the summer school at Ann Arbor, which, together with a restorative few weeks at Perro Caliente, became one of the annual fixtures of his summers. The very first graduate student to begin a PhD thesis under Oppenheimer’s supervision had gone to Berkeley as a result of having attended the summer school at Ann Arbor. This was Melba Phillips, originally from Indiana, who, while a master’s student at Battle Creek College in Michigan, had attended the summer school and been inspired by a course given by Edward Condon on quantum mechanics. On Condon’s
recommendation, she applied to Berkeley and found herself in the autumn of 1930 being assigned Oppenheimer as her PhD supervisor.

By that time, Oppenheimer already had three PhD students, but they had begun their research work under another supervisor. They were Harvey Hall and J. Franklin Carlson, both of whom had started under William Howell Williams, and Leo Nedelsky, who had been working with Samuel Allison. All three flourished under Oppenheimer and went on to have successful careers in physics. Oppenheimer devoted considerable energy to his PhD students, working closely with them and making sure that when they left Berkeley they had significant publications to their name. To achieve this, he developed a practice of publishing joint papers with his PhD students, and during the 1930s a good proportion of his work consisted of such joint publications.