The Life and Times of J. Robert Oppenheimer

I just read American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Oppenheimer was an interesting person -- very smart, very fast thinking, with a great facility not only for physics but also for languages, an apparently successful womanizer in spite of the fact that he was far from traditionally handsome, tubercular, and slight of build. Born and brought up in New York, educated in the best universities of the United States and Europe, he loved roughing it in the mountains of New Mexico and sailing in the Caribbean.

Oppenheimer made friends with an amazing number of the best and brightest minds of his generation. His friends included the pantheon of scientists interested in physics and quantum theory in the 20th century, as well as the movers and shakers of the post-war years, not to mention the members of the intellectual community he gathered at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies.

What I found perhaps most striking was the fact that he managed to be placed to play a key role in some of the most amazing processes that took place in the 20th century. Yet, from another perspective, his career was not that unusual in that he did his most original scientific work when he was young, benefiting from apprenticeship to the best scientists in his field, and then went into academic administration and government advisory work later in his career. That is a trajectory followed by many scientists, albeit seldom so successfully.

Oppenheimer was deeply involved in the revolution in physics that took place in the early 20th century, getting his doctorate at 22 in Europe during the height of the paradigm shift that brought us quantum physics; he was a friend of Albert Einstein who created an earlier paradigm shift with relativity theory. Oppenheimer himself seems to have suggested the idea of anti-matter providing an early lead into the world of subatomic particles. He suggested quantum tunneling which has come to be an important physical property in the area of nano-electronics. Moreover he first predicted black holes, a theory which has helped transform modern astronomy. He lead in the creation of the first major center of theoretical physics and trained a generation of American physicists including Nobel Prize laureates.

Oppenheimer then had a critically important role in the creation of the atom bomb, which was the first of the mega projects dealing with cutting-edge technology. While Los Alamos, of which he was the scientific director, had some four thousand people at the peak of his time there, it was part of a much larger program. Oak Ridge had 75,000 people working to produce weapons grade uranium, and used some ten percent of the electricity generated in the United States, and Hanford had another 25,000 people working on the production of plutonium, with still other people working on the program in Chicago, not to mention the military personnel who were actually involved in delivering the first two atom bombs (or the quarter million people that were killed by those bombs). There had never before been such a project, and it made conceptually possible later projects such as the space program and the military industrial complex of the later 20th century.

Oppenheimer was also a key person in the rise of big science which occurred after World War II, and in the related rise of scientific advisors to play a key role in government. This was the period of the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. It was a time in which Oppenheimer and other scientists could get appointments with the president, and in which reports from scientific advisory panels were read in the White House and by the president -- something new in our government. Think of the process which led to President Eisenhower making his Atoms for Peace speech before the United Nations in 1953!

Oppenheimer, in what he called a farce, was also a victim of the conservative reaction and temporary triumph over liberalism. Impressed by the evils of the depression and the rise of fascism (not to mention the antisemitism of the Nazis and their ilk), Oppenheimer was a vocal liberal in the 1930's, lending his name and money to liberal causes. Historians and biographers are still arguing as to whether or not Oppenheimer was ever a Communist party member. He then, after the war, became a target of McCarthyism and of the Republican politicians who surrounded the Eisenhower administration, who removed his security clearance in a hearing compared with the Dreyfus Affair (and indeed the subject of an article by the Alsop brothers titled "We Accuse" harking back to Zola's "J'accuse".)

In his latter years, Oppenheimer lived a life that would be the envy of most people. He lived in a mansion on the grounds of the most prestigious academic institution in the United States which he headed. His wife was related to European royalty, and Oppenheimer had inherited wealth from his own family including a small collection of important modern art. He owned with his brother a ranch in New Mexico and had a beach house in the Virgin Islands. He was world famous, receiving honors in the United States and Europe, and invited to lecture worldwide.

All this in a life cut short by cancer, probably the result of a lifetime smoking too much, at 62.

I wish that the authors had devoted more time to the historical watersheds that marked Oppenheimer's life. Instead they produced a biography more designed to appeal to the readers of People magazine, focusing heavily on Oppenheimer's love life and relations with family members as well as on the evidence on the degree of his involvement in Communism. Of course, there are more readers of People than of the history of science and technology.