• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1167 0

hoping to work with Ernest Rutherford. Bridgman’s letter supporting him was qualified: Robert was a highly promising theorist, but weak ‘on the experimental side’. ‘It appears to me’, Bridgman concluded, ‘that it is a bit of a gamble as to whether Oppenheimer will ever make any real contributions of an important character, but if he does make good at all, I believe that he will be a very unusual success, and if you are in a position to take a small gamble without too much trouble, I think you will seldom find a more interesting betting proposition.’ Like Einstein and God, Rutherford did not throw dice. Robert ended up in the lab of J. J. Thomson, and only with the stipulation that he enroll in a course in laboratory technique; Robert admitted to an ‘inability to solder two copper wires together’. He was lonely in Cambridge, thought the lectures ‘vile’, and, while hiking along the cliffs of Brittany, he considered suicide. Things improved as he met other, younger physicists, and Cambridge also entertained Niels Bohr (who had appeared at Harvard when Oppenheimer was there) and Max Born. The latter thought Oppenheimer showed promise in quantum physics and invited him to Gottingen for the next academic year. Oppenheimer accepted. There, despite annoying Born by interrupting him during seminars and irritating some of his fellow students with what appeared to them as cultural and intellectual snobbery, Oppie found himself as a theoretical physicist. In 1927 he published with Born a paper on the quantum mechanics of molecules, and he finished his doctorate. He returned to the United States that fall with a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Research Council, teaching at Harvard for one semester then the California Institute of Technology in the spring. Ultimately he settled on a dual appointment at Caltech and Berkeley—then a ‘desert’ in physics and attractive to Oppenheimer as a place ‘to try to start something’.22

Lawrence had got to Cal first, and had begun to start something with his cyclotrons. He and Oppenheimer had personal lives ‘more complementary than similar’, as Herken puts it. Lawrence was a Lutheran from South Dakota who avoided profanity. Oppenheimer, an assimilated, or ambivalent, New York Jew, was a touchy, chainsmoking polymath who quoted (and wrote) poetry, took Sanskrit in his spare time, hosted at his hillside residences spirited parties lubricated by strong martinis, and cooked for his friends, with a zest Lawrence thought perverse, a Malay noodle dish called nasi goring (which Lawrence called ‘nasty gory’). They did not always get along. ‘Robert could make people feel they were fools,’ said Hans Bethe, the Cornell physicist who would play a key role at Los Alamos. ‘He made me, but I didn’t mind.’ (A dubious claim.) ‘Lawrence did... I think Robert would give Lawrence a feeling that he didn’t know physics, and since that is what cyclotrons are for, Lawrence didn’t like it.’ Lawrence resented the intrusion of Oppenheimer’s increasingly left-wing politics into the physics lab, as when Oppenheimer scribbled on the lab’s blackboard word of a benefit for the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. In general, though, the two men recognized their complementary strengths and worked together harmoniously. Lawrence would run his experiments, commanding apparatus with an expertise that Oppenheimer could not hope to match. Oppenheimer would interpret the results of these tests with recourse to a theoretical way of thinking that was alien to Lawrence. Oppenheimer wrote to his brother that he considered Lawrence ‘a marvelous physicist’; when Lawrence recommended Oppenheimer for promotion to full professor, he called him a ‘valued partner’ in the lab. The two men drove together to Death Valley during winter breaks. Lawrence sent roses to Oppenheimer’s dying mother in 1931, while the Lawrence children called Oppenheimer ‘Uncle Robert’ and looked forward to his visits.

No one questioned Oppenheimer’s brilliance. There was less conviction about the soundness of his physics. While many of his scientific colleagues,