American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Kai Bird
Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific leader of the Manhattan Project -- the project that developed the first atomic bombs, including the two that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The scientists who developed the Bomb had at first few or no moral qualms about it. (The best history of this effort is The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes, an extraordinarily good book.) They knew that Germany was working on a bomb, and they were morally certain that if Germany made a Bomb, Hitler would use it. Developing the Bomb just looked like a matter of survival. In the event, the German bomb project came to nothing, and the Manhattan Project continued after the military defeat and occupation of Germany.
Oppenheimer was one of the first to question the wisdom of developing the Bomb. After the war he agitated for limitations on atomic weapons. (Surely he would be a candidate for the all-time "Too Little, Too Late" award.) As a result he fell foul of the pro-Bomb establishment, was prosecuted in an absurd show trial and lost his clearance for classified material, a death-blow to his career. And he died, disgraced in the eyes of many, at the age of 62 of throat cancer. (Not, as you might guess, a result of being exposed to nuclear fallout -- he was a pipe smoker -- that was what got him.)
Kai Bird's biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a revelation to me. I had not before realized what a great physicist Oppenheimer was before he became the leader of the Manhattan Project. He was one of the key scientists to flesh out the meaning of Quantum Mechanics. I already knew, from quantum chemistry classes, of something called the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which forms the basis of molecular quantum chemistry. I learned in this biography that Oppenheimer was the first to realize that Einstein's theory of gravity predicted the existence of Black Holes. (The theory of Black Holes was developed in 1915 by Karl Schwarzschild, but it is notoriously difficult to understand what the Schwarzschild metric actually means -- Oppenheimer was the first.) His intelligence was not limited to physics -- he was a versatile genius.
Pre-Manhattan Oppenheimer was a difficult and tortured man. He tried therapy. Bird makes the claim that therapy is not useful unless the therapist is as intelligent as the patient, and that therefore Oppenheimer never found a therapist who could help him. He could be a difficult person to get along with. As described in The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Although Segrè found Oppenheimer “the fastest thinker I’ve ever met,” with “an iron memory . . . brilliance and solid merits,” he also saw “grave defects” including “occasional arrogance . . . [that] stung scientific colleagues where they were most sensitive.” “Robert could make people feel they were fools,” Bethe says simply. “He made me, but I didn’t mind.”
An anecdote from the same source tells of Enrico Fermi's first impressions of him
Out of curiosity in 1940, while visiting Berkeley to deliver a lecture, Enrico Fermi attended a seminar one of Oppenheimer’s protégés led in the master’s style. “Emilio,” Fermi joked afterward with Segrè, “I am getting rusty and old. I cannot follow the highbrow theory developed by Oppenheimer’s pupils anymore. I went to their seminar and was depressed by my inability to understand them. Only the last sentence cheered me up; it was: ‘and this is Fermi’s theory of beta decay.’ ”
By most accounts, Oppenheimer conquered his demons as leader of the Manhattan Project. He became an extraordinary leader of the scientists and other workers there. Those who were there at the time speak of him with nothing but praise. He understood every detail of the research and knew every person on the project and was concerned with all of them. This behavior did not come naturally to him, but he made it happen.
PS, 29-Jul-2023: Just got back from seeing the movie version, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. I liked it a lot. For people who haven't the patience to get through this very long and detailed biography, the movie is perhaps an adequate substitute.
Excellent/helpful!!!!
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