The Age of Radiance (26 page)

Leo Szilard: “There was a crowd there, and when it dispersed, Enrico Fermi and I remained. I shook hands with Fermi and I said that I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind. I was quite aware of the dangers. . . . But I was also aware of the fact that something had to be done if the Germans get the bomb before we have it. They had knowledge. They had the people to do it and would have forced us to surrender if we didn’t have bombs also.

“We had no choice, or we thought we had no choice.”

D
URING
that autumn of 1938 when Enrico Fermi won his Nobel and exiled his family to America, fellow
ragazzo Corbino
Emilio Segrè was a visiting professor at Berkeley, who learned through the newspapers about Italy’s new anti-Semitic laws, which meant he was now both a man without a job, and a man without a country. In Palermo the year before, Emilio had done what Enrico had failed to do by discovering technetium, the first of what would be an avalanche of human-engineered additions to the periodic table, with Segrè an essential figure in many of those breakthroughs. The head of Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, gave Emilio a job. But what Segrè called “the Cyclotron Republic” paid him so little that he soon left for the Republic’s competitor, the University of California at Berkeley physics department, even though Lawrence’s work was very, very interesting.

Cyclotrons were a racetrack of vacuum tubes edged with magnets and coils—similar to the cat toy that traps a Ping-Pong ball in a spinner track—which pushed and pulled subatomic particles faster and faster, until they were a bright blue beam. Ernest Lawrence described it to would-be investors as a
“proton merry-go-round.” Every lab tool in the Cyclotron Republic, from wrench to ruler, had to be made of rust-resistant silicon bronze, with all other steel items banned, from watches to belt buckles, key chains, tie clips, boot tips, and even buttons, since the machine’s magnets were so powerful they could snatch anything steel with immense greed, potentially damaging the beam window, or the accelerator’s delicate mechanisms, or various graduate students in the way.

Known as Maestro or Boss by his subjects, Lawrence was a South Dakota–bred Norwegian Lutheran who’d financed his college education by selling pans door-to-door. In a commencement address, he borrowed from Pasteur and called laboratories “temples of the future—temples of well-being and happiness.” When his beloved cyclotrons failed, however, as they often did, veins would pop out in his temples and he would bellow, “Oh, sugar!” Besides inventing the proton merry-go-round, he was even better than Marie Curie at getting financed. With money from California banker William Crocker, he built the sixty-inch “Crocker Cracker,” but then Ernest found the golden ticket when he convinced Wall Street tycoon Alfred Lee Loomis to turn away from MIT’s original Rad Lab (which pioneered radar and developed the first worldwide radio navigation system—LRN, Loomis Radio Navigation—the most widely used navigation system until GPS) to finance and create the biggest cyclotron on the planet. It would be named for its state of birth—the calutron—and one of its cyclotroneers would be Frank Oppenheimer.

At this time, though, Lawrence and his Republic were less than successful in getting results out of their big science machines. The Berkeley cyclotron had been creating artificial radiation for at least a year when the Joliot-Curies announced their breakthrough, but no one had looked at the instruments after the machine was fired down, so no one noticed that the cyclotrons were irradiating everything, including, they now discovered, the cyclotroneers’ spare change and tooth fillings. Ernest wasted no time in bandwagoning himself onto the Curies’ discovery, curving his machine’s focus to generate medical radioisotopes, with his brother John developing cyclotron isotope science into a profit center in an annex known for its resident test subjects—not the Rad Lab, but the Rat Lab. Ernest had become by this time so financially well-endowed and so politically powerful that Berkeley’s physics department chairman said that they were less a university with a cyclotron than a cyclotron with a university.

Ernest Orlando Lawrence’s best friend, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, was his polar opposite—wealthy, Jewish, of Riverside Drive and Harvard. The two shared bright blue eyes and frequently double-dated, camping in Yosemite and horseback riding through the Berkeley hills. When Oppenheimer—called Bob by his close friends as a child, and Robert or Oppie as an adult—chalked up a notice for a Spanish Loyalists benefit on the Rad Lab blackboard in 1940, Lawrence erased it, yelling that the laboratory was no place for politics. The incident was noted by Luis Alvarez—who was not
Hispanic, but of Irish descent, his name pronounced Louie, and who would in time be best known as one of those theorizing the extinction of dinosaurs from extraterrestrial collision—as the first time he had ever seen the two men fight. They were so close that Lawrence even named his second son Robert, much against the wishes of his wife, Molly—she judged her husband’s best friend as lightweight, callow, and fundamentally lacking in character.

By calculating the collapse of dying stars, Robert Oppenheimer predicted what would become the pulsar, and his interest in particle physics would influence the next generation of American physicists. Like the
ragazzi
Corbino
in Rome, Berkeley physics students and visiting acolytes imitated Robert’s style of speech—he murmured while thinking of what to say—as well as his shambling walk, and his baroque chain-smoking. Friend Haakon Chevalier:
“He was tall, nervous and intent, and he moved with an odd gait, a kind of jog, with a great deal of swinging of his limbs, his head always a little to one side, one shoulder higher than the other. But it was the head that was most striking: the halo of wispy black curly hair, the fine, sharp nose, and especially the eyes, surprisingly blue, having a strange depth and intensity, and yet expressive of a candor that was altogether disarming.”
“He wanted everything and everyone to be special, and his enthusiasms communicated themselves and made these people feel special,” Frank, Oppenheimer’s younger brother, remembered. “He couldn’t be humdrum. He would even work up those enthusiasms for a brand of cigarettes, even elevating them to something special. His sunsets were always the best.”

Another of Oppie’s closest friends was Isidor Rabi, who enjoyed introducing himself to Germans as an Austrian Jew since he knew Austrian Jews were the most hated (he was in fact from an Orthodox Hungarian-émigré family raised on New York’s Lower East Side). Rabi:
“Oppenheimer was Jewish, but wished he wasn’t and pretended he wasn’t. . . . [He] never got to be an integrated personality. . . . I remember once saying to him how I found the Christian religion so puzzling, such combination of blood and gentleness. He said that is what attracted him to it. . . . God knows I’m not the simplest person, but compared to Oppenheimer, I’m very, very simple. . . . In Oppenheimer, the element of earthiness was feeble.” There was also what Hans Bethe noted, that
“Robert could make people feel that they were fools,” a point echoed by Emilio Segrè:
“Oppenheimer’s prestige and ascendancy were great among his close entourage, but he sometimes appeared amateurish and snobbish to people more remote from him, who were not under the spell of his personality. For all his brilliance and
solid merits, he had some great defects, which in part account for the mortal enmity by which he was later unjustly victimized. Very conscious of his intellectual distinction, he was occasionally arrogant and thereby stung scientific colleagues when they were most sensitive; furthermore, he was sometimes devious in his actions. All this bore ugly fruit years later.” Then there was this item in the local paper:

J. Robert Oppenheimer, 30, associate professor of physics at the University of California, took Miss Melba Phillips, research assistant in physics . . . for an automobile ride in the Berkeley Hills at 3 o’clock this morning.

He stopped his machine on Spruce Street at Alta Street and tucked a large robe about his passenger.

“Are you comfortable?” Prof. Oppenheimer asked.

Miss Phillips replied that she was.

“Mind if I get out and walk for a few minutes?” he queried.

Miss Phillips didn’t mind, so the professor climbed from the auto and started to walk.

One hour and 45 minutes later Patrolman C. T. Nevins found the professor’s car and Miss Phillips, still comfortable, dozing in the front seat. He woke her up and asked for an explanation of her early morning nap.

Miss Phillips told her story. Police headquarters was notified that Prof. Oppenheimer was missing and a search was launched.

A short time later the professor was awakened from a sound sleep in his room at the Faculty Club, two miles distant from his auto, and asked to explain.

“I am eccentric,” he said.

I
n 1921, a young woman by the name of Katherine Chaves was told that she was not long for this earth, that soon she would die. Katherine decided to spend the rest of her days as a wife to Winthrop Page, a Chicago millionaire as old as her father, and live out West on the Page family ranch, which lay in a desert of lavender, mariposa, bluebirds, and deer, between the Pecos River and the Sangre de Cristos Mountains, named for their sunsets, when the peaks’ snowcaps burned a red both corporeal and incandescent, like the sacred yet potable blood of the Lord. The following year, a pale, neurasthenic Jewish boy with such a serious cough his doctors suspected
TB (but not chain-smoking) showed up to stay at Katherine’s Los Piños ranch, and she taught him how to ride a horse through the canyons and across the mesas in every kind of weather. Bob returned to New Mexico with brother Frank, and this time, Katherine Page—whose death would not come for decades, and whose husband would never come West—took them ninety-five hundred feet into the peaks, to a cabin with a fireplace made from clay, surrounded by 154 acres of alpine meadow, fields of clover, and heart-stopping views of the Pecos River and the Sangre de Cristos.
“Hot dog!” Robert said. “No, Perro Caliente!” Katherine explained. The two boys convinced their father to rent it, a lease Robert would continue as an adult, until he could buy Perro Caliente for $10,000 in 1947. He and Frank went there every chance they could, living the great guy dream of the American West, riding for thousands of miles all the way to Colorado, living on Vienna sausages, chocolate-covered raisins, cheese, and whiskey. During one stay, Oppie wrote to a friend, “My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined,” and one trek he took with Katherine was through a volcano crater, the Jemez Caldera, and then through a canyon with a stream, along which cottonwood flourished. The canyon was named for the trees: Los Alamos.

In the spring of 1940, Robert invited Dr. Richard Stewart Harrison and his wife, Kitty, for a vacation at Perro Caliente. At the last minute, the doctor had to regretfully decline, but Kitty went anyway and stayed for two months. At summer’s end, Robert called Dr. Harrison to tell him that his wife was pregnant, and the two men agreed that the right thing to do was for Harrison to divorce Kitty and Robert to marry her. When Robert’s best friend, Bob Serber, heard the news, he was so shocked that he wasn’t sure if Oppenheimer had said he would be marrying Jean Tatlock, the great love of his life for decades, or Kitty. It could’ve been either.

In 1939, when Niels Bohr publicly revealed Meitner and Frisch’s discovery of fission, California’s Rad Lab boys knew they’d blown another chance. Luis Alvarez:
“I remember exactly how I heard about it. I was sitting in the barber chair in Stevens Union having my hair cut, reading the
Chronicle
, and in the second section, buried away someplace, was an announcement that some German chemists had found that the uranium atom split into pieces when it was bombarded with neutrons—that’s all there was to it. So I remember telling the barber to stop cutting my hair and I got right out of the barber chair and ran as fast as I could up to the Radiation Laboratory. And my student Phil Abelson had been working very hard to try and
find out what transuranium elements were produced when neutrons hit uranium. And he was so close to discovering fission that it was almost pitiful. I mean, he would have been there, guaranteed, in another few weeks—when I arrived panting from the Student Union with my news about fission, and I played it kind of dramatically. I saw Phil there and I said, ‘Phil, I’ve got something to tell you but I want you to lie down first.’ So, he lay on the table (right alongside the control room of the cyclotron). ‘Phil, what you are looking for are not transuranium elements, but they are elements in the middle of the periodic table.’ I showed him what was in the
Chronicle
, and, of course, he was terribly depressed.”