Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [95]
The army had made its unlikely choice of a civilian chief: a Jew, an aesthete, a mannered, acerbic, left-flirting, ultimately self-destructive scientist whose administrative experience had not extended beyond a California physics group. J. Robert Oppenheimer—Oppy, Oppie, Opje—held the respect of colleagues more for his quicksilver brilliance than for the depth of his work. He had no feeling for experimentation, and his style was unphysical; so, when he made mistakes, they were notoriously silly ones: “Oppenheimer’s formula … is remarkably correct for him, apparently only the numerical factor is wrong,” a theoretician once wrote acidly. In later physicist lingo a calculation’s Oppenheimer factors were the missing π’s, i’s, and minus signs. His physics was, as the historian Richard Rhodes commented, “a physics of bank shots”—“It works the sides and the corners … but prefers not to drive relentlessly for the goal.” No one understood the core problems of quantum electrodynamics and elementary particle physics better than he, but his personal work tended toward esoterica. As a result, though he became the single most influential behind-the-scenes voice in the awarding of Nobel Prizes in physics, he never received one himself. In science as in all things he had the kind of taste called exquisite. His suits were tailored with exaggerated shoulders and broad lapels. He cared about his martinis and black coffee and pipe tobacco. Presiding over a committee dinner at a steak house, he expected his companions to follow his lead in specifying rare meat; when one man tried to order well-done, Oppenheimer turned and said considerately, “Why don’t you have fish?” His New York background was what Feynman’s mother’s family had striven toward and fallen back from; like Lucille Feynman he had grown up in comfortable circumstances in Manhattan and attended the Ethical Culture School. Then, where Feynman assimilated the new, pragmatic, American spirit in physics, Oppenheimer had gone abroad to Cambridge and Göttingen. He embraced the intellectual European style. He was not content to master only the modern languages. To physicists Oppenheimer’s command of Sanskrit seemed a curiosity; to General Groves it was another sign of genius. And genius was what the general sought. Solid administrator that he was, he saw no value in a merely solid chief scientist. Much to the surprise of some, Groves’s instincts proved correct. Oppenheimer’s genius was in leadership after all. He bound Feynman to him in the winter of early 1943, as he bound so many junior colleagues, taking an intimate interest in their problems. He called long-distance from Chicago—Feynman had never had a long-distance telephone call from so far—to say that he had found a sanatorium for Arline in Albuquerque.
In the choice of a site for the atomic bomb project, the army’s taste and Oppenheimer’s coincided. Implausible though it may have seemed afterward, military planning favored desert isolation for security against enemy attack as well as more reasonably for the quarantine of a talkative and unpredictable scientific community. Oppenheimer had long before fallen in love with New Mexico’s unreal edges, the air clear as truth, the stunted pines cleaving to canyon walls. He had made Western work shirts and belt buckles part of his casual wear, and now he led Groves up the winding trail to the high mesa where the Los Alamos Ranch School for boys looked back across the wide desert to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Not everyone shared their immediate sympathy with the landscape. Leo Szilard, the Budapest native who first understood the energy-liberating chain reaction—at other times so prescient about the bomb project—declared: “Nobody could think straight in a place like that.