Everything about Robert Oppenheimer totally explained
J. Robert Oppenheimer (
April 22,
1904 –
February 18,
1967) was an
American theoretical physicist and professor of
physics at the
University of California, Berkeley. He is widely known for his role as the scientific director of the
Manhattan Project: the
World War II effort to develop the first
nuclear weapons at the secret
Los Alamos National Laboratory in
New Mexico. For this reason he's universally remembered as "
the father of the atomic bomb". In reference to the
Trinity test in New Mexico, where his Los Alamos team first tested the bomb, Oppenheimer famously quoted from the
Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I'm become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
After the war Oppenheimer was a chief advisor to the newly created
United States Atomic Energy Commission and used that position to lobby for international
control of
atomic energy and to avert the
nuclear arms race with the
Soviet Union. After invoking the ire of many politicians with his outspoken political opinions during the
Red Scare, he'd his
security clearance revoked in a much-publicized and politicized hearing in 1954. Though stripped of his direct political influence Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write, and work in
physics. A decade later
President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him with the
Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of
political rehabilitation.
As a
scientist Oppenheimer is remembered most for being the chief founder of the American School of Theoretical Physics while at the
University of California, Berkeley. At the
Institute for Advanced Study he'd hold
Einstein's old position of Senior Professor of Theoretical Physics. Oppenheimer's notable achievements in physics include the
Born-Oppenheimer approximation, work on
electron-
positron theory, the
Oppenheimer-Phillips process,
quantum tunneling,
relativistic quantum mechanics,
quantum field theory,
black holes, and
cosmic rays.
Childhood and Education
Robert Oppenheimer was born to Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy textile importer, who had immigrated to the
United States from
Germany in 1888, and Ella Friedman, a painter. He had one brother,
Frank, eight years younger, who also became a physicist.
Oppenheimer studied at the
Ethical Culture Society School. It was founded by
Felix Adler to promote a form of ethical training based on the
Ethical Culture movement. Informally its motto was "
Deeds before creeds." At the school he studied mathematics, science, Greek, French literature, and other subjects. Oppenheimer was a versatile scholar. He was interested in the humanities, in
psychotherapy, and in science. He entered
Harvard University one year late because he'd suffered an attack of
colitis. To recuperate he went with a former
English teacher to
New Mexico. There he fell in love with
horseback riding, the mountains, and the plateau of the
Southwest. At Harvard he majored in
chemistry. He also continued his studies of Greek, architecture, classics, art, and literature. He made up for the delay caused by his illness by taking six courses each term and graduating
summa cum laude in just three years.
In his first year as an undergraduate at Harvard Oppenheimer was admitted to graduate standing in physics on the basis of independent study. As an undergraduate he never took a class in physics. During a course on
thermodynamics taught by
Percy Bridgman Oppenheimer found himself drawn to experimental physics. In 1933 he learned
Sanskrit and met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley. He read the
Bhagavad Gita in the original language. Later he cited it as one of the most influential books to shape his philosophy of life.
Europe
After graduating from Harvard Oppenheimer was encouraged to go to
Europe for future study. A world-class education in modern physics wasn't then available in the United States. He was accepted for postgraduate work at
Ernest Rutherford's famed
Cavendish Laboratory in
Cambridge under the eminent but aging
J.J. Thomson.
Oppenheimer's clumsiness in the laboratory made it apparent that his forte wasn't experimental but rather theoretical physics. So he left in 1926 for the
University of Göttingen to study under
Max Born. Göttingen was one of the top centers for theoretical physics in the world. Oppenheimer made a number of friends who would go on to great success, such as
Werner Heisenberg,
Pascual Jordan,
Wolfgang Pauli,
Paul Dirac,
Enrico Fermi and
Edward Teller. At Göttingen Oppenheimer was known for being a quick student. However, he was also known for being too enthusiastic in discussions, sometimes to the point of taking over seminar sessions, a fact that irritated some of Max Born's pupils so much that they signed a petition to make Oppenheimer stay quiet during class (Born left it out on his desk where Oppenheimer could read it, and it was effective without a word needing to be said). In 1927 Oppenheimer obtained his
Ph.D. at the young age of 22 at the
University of Göttingen, supervised by Born. After the oral exam for his Ph.D., the professor administering it's reported to have said, "Phew, I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."
At Göttingen, Oppenheimer published more than a dozen articles, including many important contributions to the then newly-developed
quantum theory. Most notably he and Born published a famous paper on the so-called "
Born-Oppenheimer approximation," which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules, an action which allows nuclear motion to be neglected in order to simplify calculations.
Early professional work
In September 1927, Oppenheimer returned to Harvard as a young
maven of
mathematical physics and a National Research Council Fellow, and in early 1928 he studied at the
California Institute of Technology.
While at Caltech he received numerous invitations for teaching positions, and accepted an assistant professorship in physics at the
University of California, Berkeley. In his words, "it was a desert", yet paradoxically a fertile place of opportunity. He maintained a joint appointment with Caltech, where he spent every spring term to avoid isolation from mainstream research. At Caltech, Oppenheimer struck a close friendship with
Linus Pauling and they planned to mount a joint attack on the nature of the chemical bond, a field in which Pauling was a pioneer—apparently Oppenheimer would supply the mathematics and Pauling would interpret the results. However, this collaboration, and their friendship, was nipped in the bud when Pauling began to suspect that the theorist was becoming too close to his wife, Ava Helen. Once when Pauling was at work, Oppenheimer had come to their place and blurted out an invitation to Ava Helen to join him on a tryst in
Mexico. She flatly refused and reported this incident to Pauling. This, and her apparent nonchalance about the incident, disquieted him, and he immediately cut off his relationship with the Berkeley professor. Oppenheimer later invited Pauling to be the head of the Chemistry Division of the
atomic bomb project but Pauling refused, saying that he was a
pacifist.
In the autumn of 1928, Oppenheimer visited
Paul Ehrenfest's institute at the
University of Leiden, the
Netherlands, where he impressed those there by giving lectures in
Dutch despite having little experience with the language. There he was given the nickname of "Opje," which was later Anglicized by his students as "Oppie". From Leiden he continued on to
Zurich,
Switzerland to work with
Wolfgang Pauli on problems relating to quantum theory and the continuous spectrum before heading back to the United States. Oppenheimer highly respected and liked Pauli, and some of his own style and his critical approach to problems was said to be inspired by Pauli. During his time with Ehrenfest and Pauli, Oppenheimer polished his mathematical skills.
Before his Berkeley professorship began, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with a mild case of
tuberculosis and, with his brother
Frank, spent some weeks at a ranch in New Mexico, which he leased and eventually purchased. When he heard the ranch was available for lease, he exclaimed, "Hot dog!"—and later on the name of the ranch became "Perro Caliente," which is the translation of "hot dog" into Spanish.
Later, Oppenheimer used to say that "physics and desert country" were his "two great loves", loves that would be combined when he directed the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
He recovered from his tuberculosis and returned to Berkeley where he prospered as an advisor and collaborator to a generation of physicists who admired him for his intellectual virtuosity and broad interests.
Nobel Prize winner
Hans Bethe later said about him:
Ernest O. Lawrence and his
cyclotron pioneers, helping the experimentalists understand the data their machines were producing at the Lawrence's
Radiation Laboratory.
Oppenheimer became known as a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics, and developed a reputation for his erudition in physics, his eclecticism, his quick mind, his interest in languages and Eastern philosophy, and the eloquence and clarity with which he thought. But he was also emotionally troubled throughout his life, and professed to experiencing periods of depression. "I need physics more than friends," he once informed his brother. A tall, thin
chain smoker who often neglected to eat during periods of intellectual discomfort and concentration, Oppenheimer was marked by many of his friends as having a self-destructive tendency and, during numerous periods of his life, worried his colleagues and associates with his melancholy and insecurity. When he was studying in Cambridge and had taken a vacation to meet up with his friend Francis Ferguson in Paris, a disturbing event had taken place. During a conversation in which Oppenheimer was narrating his frustration with experimental physics to Ferguson, he'd suddenly leapt up and tried to strangle him. Although Ferguson easily fended off the attack, the episode had convinced Ferguson of his friend's deep psychological troubles. Oppenheimer developed numerous affectations, seemingly in an attempt to convince those around him—or possibly himself—of his self-worth. He was said to be mesmerizing, hypnotic in private interaction but often frigid in more public settings. His associates fell into two camps: one that saw him as an aloof and impressive genius and an aesthete; another that saw him as a pretentious and insecure poseur. His students almost always fell into the former category, adopting "Oppie's" affectations, from his way of walking to talking and beyond—even trying to replicate his inclination for reading entire texts in their originally transcribed languages.
Scientific work
Oppenheimer did important research in
theoretical astronomy (especially as it relates to
general relativity and nuclear theory),
nuclear physics,
spectroscopy, and
quantum field theory (including its extension into
quantum electrodynamics). The formalism of
relativistic quantum mechanics also attracted his attention, although because of the then existing well-known problem of the
self-energy of the electron, he doubted the validity of quantum electrodynamics at high energies. His best-known contribution, made as a graduate student, is the
Born-Oppenheimer approximation mentioned above. He also made important contributions to the theory of
cosmic ray showers and did work that eventually led toward descriptions of
quantum tunneling. His work on the
Oppenheimer-Phillips process, involved in artificial radioactivity under bombardment by
deuterons, has served as an important step in nuclear physics. In the late 1930s, he, along with the help of Hartland Snyder, was the first to write papers suggesting the existence of what we today call
black holes. In these papers, he demonstrated that there was a size limit (the so called
Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit) to stars beyond which they wouldn't remain stable as
neutron stars, and would undergo gravitational collapse. After the Born-Oppenheimer approximation paper, these papers remain his most cited ones, and they were key in the rejuvenation of astrophysical research in the United States in the 1950s, mainly by
John Wheeler. As early as 1930, he also wrote a paper essentially predicting the existence of the
positron (which had been postulated by
Paul Dirac), a formulation that he however didn't carry to its natural outcome, because of his skepticism about the validity of the
Dirac equation. As evidenced above, his work predicts many later finds, which include, further, the
neutron,
meson, and
neutron star. He was known also to have midwifed
Robert Marshak's innovative 2-meson
hypothesis which led to
Cecil Frank Powell's breakthrough—and a Nobel Prize later (mentioned in the new
Pulitzer Prize biography book,
American Prometheus, by
Kai Bird and
Martin J. Sherwin). Even beyond the immense abstruseness of the topics he was expert in, Oppenheimer's papers were considered difficult to understand. Oppenheimer was very fond of using elegant, if extremely complex, mathematical techniques to demonstrate physical principles though he was sometimes criticized for making mathematical mistakes, presumably out of haste.
Many people thought that Oppenheimer's discoveries and research were not commensurate with his inherent abilities and talents. They still considered him an outstanding physicist, but they didn't place him at the very top rank of theorists who fundamentally challenged the frontiers of knowledge. One reason for this could have been his diverse interests, which kept him from completely focusing on any individual topic for long enough to bring it to full fruition. His close confidant and colleague, Nobel Prize winner
Isidor Rabi, later gave his own interpretation:
Luis Alvarez) have suggested that if he'd lived long enough to see his predictions substantiated by experiment, Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on
gravitational collapse, concerning neutron stars and black holes. In retrospect, some physicists and historians consider this to be his most important contribution, though it wasn't taken up by other scientists in his own lifetime. Interestingly, when the physicist and historian
Abraham Pais once asked Oppenheimer about what he considered to be his most important scientific contributions, Oppenheimer cited his work on electrons and positrons, but didn't mention anything about his work on gravitational contraction.
Radical politics
During the 1920s, Oppenheimer kept himself aloof of worldly matters, and claimed not to have learned of the
Stock Market Crash of 1929 until some time after the fact. Only when he became involved with
Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a Berkeley literature professor, in 1936, did he show any interest in politics. Like many young intellectuals in the 1930s he became a supporter of social reforms which were later alleged to be
communist ideas. After inheriting over $300,000 (equivalent to about $4.3 million in
2006 dollars) upon his father's death in 1937, he donated to many progressive efforts which were later branded as "
left-wing" during the
McCarthy era. The majority of his allegedly radical work consisted of hosting fundraisers for the
Republican cause in the
Spanish Civil War and other anti-
fascist activity. He never openly joined the
Communist Party, though he did pass money to
liberal causes by way of acquaintances who were alleged to be Party members. Historian Gregg Herken has recently claimed to have evidence that Oppenheimer did interact with the Communist Party during the 1930s and early 1940s.
Oppenheimer’s brother Frank, Frank’s wife Jackie, Oppenheimer’s own wife Kitty Oppenheimer (widow of Communist political commissar Joe Dallet, killed in the Spanish Civil War), his mistress,
Jean Tatlock, and his landlady were all active members of the Communist Party.
In addition, several of Oppenheimer’s graduate students at Berkeley, including Joe Weinberg,
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz,
David Bohm and
Philip Morrison were Communist Party members.
Oppenheimer laughingly agreed with a security agent's quip during an interview that he [Oppenheimer] was “a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast,” but he didn't know he was being taped and that the words would more significantly be put into his own mouth in records presented at his trial a decade later, without informing him that the transcript wasn't being strictly followed. He was a subscriber to the
People’s World, a Communist Party organ, and he testified in 1954, “I was associated with the Communist movement.”
In 1937–42, in the midst of the
Great Purge and
Hitler-Stalin pact, Oppenheimer was a member at Berkeley of what he called a "discussion group," which was later identified by fellow members
Haakon Chevalier and Gordon Griffiths as a “closed” (secret) unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty. If Oppenheimer wasn't a Communist, he was the only member of this group who was not.
Surveillance by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded that J. Robert Oppenheimer attended a meeting in the home of self-proclaimed Communist
Haakon Chevalier with the
Communist Party’s California state chairman William Schneiderman and
Isaac Folkoff, West Coast liaison between the Communist Party and
Soviet intelligence, in Fall 1940, during the
Hitler-Stalin pact. Shortly thereafter, the FBI added Oppenheimer to its
Custodial Detention Index, listed as “Nationalistic Tendency: Communist.”
A 1943 FBI report summarizing recent surveillance reported that Hannah Peters, organizer of the Doctor's Branch of the Professional Section of the Communist Party, told Communist Party National Committee member
Steve Nelson, the organizer for Alameda County, "that Dr. OPPIE, believed by the informant to be J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER ... couldn't be active in the Party at the present time." The report continued, reporting that Alameda County Communist Party Secretary Bernadette Doyle proposed that the Alameda County Communist Party confer with the State Committee of the Communist Party regarding "the two OPPIES, inasmuch as they were regularly registered [asmembers of the Communist Party] and everyone in the county knew they were Communists. It is believed that the two OPPIES mentioned above had reference to subject J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER and his brother FRANK OPPENHEIMER."
In a 1944 letter to Soviet Commissar for Internal Affairs
Lavrenty Beria,
NKVD chief Boris Merkulov reported:
World War II started, Oppenheimer became involved in the efforts to develop an
atomic bomb, which were already taking up much of the time and facilities of Lawrence's
Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. In 1941, Lawrence,
Vannevar Bush,
Arthur Compton, and
James Conant worked to wrest the bomb project from the
S-1 Uranium Committee, because they felt it was proceeding too slowly. Oppenheimer was invited to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task that he threw himself into with full vigor. At this time he renounced what he called his "left-wing wanderings" to concentrate on his responsibilities, though he continued to maintain friendships with many who were quite radical.
In 1942, the
U.S. Army was given jurisdiction over the bomb effort, which was renamed as the Manhattan Engineering District, or
Manhattan Project.
General Leslie R. Groves was appointed project director, and Groves, in turn, selected Oppenheimer as the project's scientific director. Groves knew Oppenheimer would be viewed as a security risk, but thought that Oppenheimer was the best man to direct a diverse team of scientists and would be unaffected by his past political leanings.
Los Alamos
One of Oppenheimer's first acts was to host a summer school for bomb theory at his building in Berkeley. The mix of European physicists and his own students—a group including
Robert Serber,
Emil Konopinski,
Felix Bloch,
Hans Bethe, and
Edward Teller—busied themselves calculating what needed to be done, and in what order, to make the bomb. Teller put forward the remote possibility that the bomb would generate enough heat to ignite the atmosphere. While such an event was soon shown to be impossible by Bethe, Oppenheimer nevertheless was concerned enough to meet with
Arthur Compton in
Michigan to discuss the situation. At the time, research for the project was going on at many different universities and laboratories across the country, presenting a problem for both security and cohesion. Oppenheimer and Groves decided that they needed a centralized, secret research laboratory. Scouting for a site in late 1942, Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico, not far from his ranch (the final site picked would be 40 miles from
Perro Caliente). After Groves turned down a proposed site in a walled canyon, Oppenheimer suggested a site which he knew well: a flat
mesa near
Santa Fe,
New Mexico, which was the site of a private boys' school called
The Los Alamos Ranch School (Sp.
Los Alamos means "The Cottonwoods"). Minutes after seeing the mesa site, Groves was convinced, and approached the owners to sell it. The
Los Alamos laboratory was thus hastily built on the site of the school, taking over some of its buildings, but building many others in great haste. There Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top physicists of the time, which he referred to as the "luminaries."
Enrico Fermi,
Richard Feynman (then an unknown post-doctoral student),
John von Neumann,
Robert R. Wilson, and
Victor Weisskopf, as well as Bethe and Teller, were already famous or would soon become famous.
Oppenheimer at first had difficulty with organizational division of large groups, but soon rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence on the mesa. He was noted for his mastery of all scientific aspects of the project and for his efforts to control the inevitable cultural conflicts between scientists and the military. He was an iconic figure to his fellow scientists, as much a figurehead of what they were working towards as a scientific director. Victor Weisskopf put it thus:
The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the first
nuclear explosion near
Alamogordo on
July 16,
1945, the site of which Oppenheimer named "
Trinity", Oppenheimer later said this name was from one of
John Donne's Holy
Sonnets. According to the historian Gregg Herken, this naming could have been an allusion to Jean Tatlock, who had committed suicide a few months previously, and had in the 1930s introduced Oppenheimer to Donne's work. Oppenheimer later recalled that while witnessing the explosion he thought of a verse from the
Hindu holy book, the
Bhagavad Gita:
Years later he'd explain that another verse had also entered his head at that time: It is the famous verse, which begins as "Kalo Asmi" and was quoted by Oppenheimer after the successful detonation of the first nuclear weapon. He translated it as "Now I'm become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Oppenheimer later would be persuaded to quote again in 1965 for a television broadcast:
According to his brother, at the time Oppenheimer simply exclaimed, "It worked." News of the successful test was rushed to President
Harry S. Truman, who authorized the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Oppenheimer later became an important figure in the debates on the repercussions of this act.
Postwar activities
Overnight, Oppenheimer became a national spokesman for science, and emblematic of a new type of technocratic power. Nuclear physics became a powerful force as all governments of the world began to realize the strategic and political power that came with nuclear weapons and their horrific implications. Like many scientists of his generation, he felt that security from atomic bombs would come only from some form of transnational organization (such as the newly formed
United Nations), which could institute a program to stifle a
nuclear arms race.
Atomic Energy Commission
After the
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was created in 1946, as a civilian agency in control of nuclear research and weapons issues, Oppenheimer was immediately appointed as the Chairman of its General Advisory Committee (GAC) and left the directorship of Los Alamos. From this position he advised on a number of nuclear-related issues, including project funding, laboratory construction, and even international policy—though the GAC's advice wasn't always implemented.
As a member of the Board of Consultants to a committee appointed by President Truman to advise the
United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer strongly influenced the
Acheson-Lilienthal Report.}}
Oppenheimer's critics have accused him of equivocating between 1949, when he opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and 1951, when he supported it. Some have made this a case for reinforcing their opinions about his moral inconsistency. Historian Priscilla McMillan has argued, however, that if Oppenheimer has been accused of being morally inconsistent, then so should Rabi and Fermi, who had also opposed the program in 1949. Most of the GAC members were against a crash hydrogen bomb development program then, and in fact, Conant, Fermi and Rabi had submitted even more strongly worded reports against it than Oppenheimer. McMillan's argument is that because the hydrogen bomb appeared to be well within reach in 1951, everybody had to assume that the Russians could also do it, and that was the main reason why they changed their stance in favor of developing it. Thus this change in opinion shouldn't be viewed as a change in morality, but a change in opinions purely based on technical possibilities.
The first true hydrogen bomb, dubbed "
Ivy Mike", was tested in 1952 with a yield of 10.4 megatons, more than 650 times the strength of the weapons developed by Oppenheimer during World War II.
Security hearings
In his role as a political advisor, Oppenheimer made numerous enemies. The FBI under
J. Edgar Hoover had been following his activities since before the war, when he showed Communist sympathies as a radical professor. They were willing to furnish Oppenheimer's political enemies with incriminating evidence about Communist ties. These enemies included
Lewis Strauss, an AEC commissioner who had long harbored resentment against Oppenheimer both for his activity in opposing the hydrogen bomb and for his humiliation of Strauss before Congress some years earlier, regarding Strauss's opposition to the export of radioactive isotopes to other nations. Strauss and Senator
Brien McMahon, author of the 1946
Atomic Energy Act, pushed President
Eisenhower to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. This came following controversies about whether some of Oppenheimer's students, including
David Bohm, Joseph Weinberg, and Bernard Peters, had been Communists at the time they'd worked with him at Berkeley.
Robert Oppenheimer was forced to testify in front of the
House Un-American Activities Committee, where he admitted that he'd been a member of the Communist Party in the
1930s, but he refused to name other members. Frank Oppenheimer was subsequently fired from his university position, couldn't find work in physics for many years, and became instead a cattle rancher in
Colorado, and later the founder of the San Francisco
Exploratorium.
Oppenheimer had also found himself in the middle of more than one controversy and power struggle, in the years from 1949 to 1953. Edward Teller, who had been so uninterested in work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war that Oppenheimer had (instead of firing him) actually given him time instead to work on his own project of the hydrogen bomb, had eventually left Los Alamos to help found, in 1951, a second laboratory at what would become the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, he could be free of Los Alamos control to develop the hydrogen bomb. This laboratory would go on to develop long-range jet-bomber delivered themonuclear "strategic weapons" (city-destroyers) which would necessarily be under control of the new
Air Force. By contrast, Oppenheimer had for some years pushed for smaller "tactical" nuclear weapons which would be more useful in a limited theater against enemy troops, and which would be under control of the
Army. As these two branches of the service fought for control of nuclear weapons, often allied with different political parties, the Air Force, with Teller pushing its program, had begun to gain ascendence in the Republican controlled government, after the election of Eisenhower in 1952.
In the 1953 Executive Sessions of the “
McCarthy Hearings” on Security and the United Nations (made public in 2003), Paul Crouch, Communist Party organizer for Alameda County from April 1941 to early January 1942, testified that J. Robert Oppenheimer had been a Communist at that time:
Dwight D. Eisenhower asked him to resign. Oppenheimer refused and requested a hearing to assess his loyalty; in the meantime, his security clearance was suspended. The public hearing that followed focused on Oppenheimer's past Communist ties and his association during the Manhattan Project with suspected disloyal or Communist scientists. One of the key elements in this hearing was Oppenheimer's earliest testimony about George Eltenton's approach to various Los Alamos scientists, a story that Oppenheimer confessed he'd fabricated to protect his friend
Haakon Chevalier. (Unknown to Oppenheimer, both versions were recorded during his interrogations of a decade before, and, in a breach of standard trial procedure, which went unappealed, he was surprised on the witness stand with transcripts of these, which he'd had no chance to review). In fact, Oppenheimer had never told Chevalier that he'd finally named him, and the testimony had led to Chevalier losing his job. (Both Chevalier and Eltenton confirmed mentioning that they'd a way to get information to the Soviets, Eltenton admitting he said this to Chevalier, and Chevalier admitting he mentioned it to Oppenheimer, but both put the matter in terms of gossip and denying any thought or suggestion of treason or thoughts of espionage, either in planning or in deed. Neither was ever convicted of any crime.)
Teller testified against Oppenheimer, saying that he considered him loyal, but of such questionable judgement that he should be relieved of clearance on the basis of bad decision-making. This led to outrage by the scientific community and Teller's virtual expulsion from academic science. Physicist
I.I. Rabi's comment was that Oppenheimer was merely a government consultant at the time anyway, and that if the government "didn't want to consult the guy, then don't consult him." However, the prosecution wouldn't settle for anything less than public humiliation of Oppenheimer.
During his hearing, Oppenheimer testified willingly on the left-wing behavior of many of his scientific colleagues.
Cornell University historian Richard Polenberg has speculated that if Oppenheimer's clearance hadn't been stripped (it would have expired in a matter of days anyhow, as he knew while testifying), he'd have been remembered as someone who had "named names" to save his own reputation. As it happened, Oppenheimer was seen by most of the scientific community as a
martyr to
McCarthyism, an eclectic liberal who was unjustly attacked by warmongering enemies, symbolic of the shift of scientific creativity from academia into the military.
Wernher von Braun summed up his opinion about the matter with a quip to a Congressional committee: "In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."
Institute for Advanced Study
In 1947, Oppenheimer left Berkeley, citing difficulties with the administration during the war, and took up the directorship of the
Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton,
New Jersey. He later held
Albert Einstein's old position of senior professor of
theoretical physics.
The rehabilitation implied by the award was partly symbolic, as Oppenheimer still lacked a security clearance and could have no effect on official policy, but the award came with a $50,000 tax free stipend, and its award to Oppenheimer outraged many prominent Republicans in Congress. The late President Kennedy's widow Jacqueline, still living in the White House, made it a point to meet with Oppenheimer to tell him how much her husband had wanted him to have the medal. While still a congressman in 1959, JFK had been instrumental in voting to narrowly deny Oppenheimer's enemy
Lewis Strauss, a coveted government position as
Secretary of Commerce, effectively ending Strauss' political career. This was partly due to lobbying on the basis of the scientific community on behalf of Oppenheimer, as was the Fermi prize later.
In his final years, Oppenheimer continued his work at the Institute for Advanced Study, bringing together intellectuals at the height of their powers and from a variety of disciplines to solve the most pertinent questions of the age. He directed and encouraged the research of many well-known scientists, including
Freeman Dyson, and the duo of
Yang and
Lee, who won a Nobel Prize for their discovery of
parity non-conservation. He also instituted temporary memberships for scholars from the humanities, such as
T. S. Eliot and
George Kennan. Some of these activities were resented by a few members of the mathematics faculty, who wanted the institute to stay a bastion of pure scientific research. Abraham Pais said that Oppenheimer himself thought that one of his failures at the institute was a failure to bring together scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities.
Oppenheimer's lectures in America, Europe, and
Canada were published in a number of books. Still, he thought the effort had little effect on actual policy.
Final years
After the 1954 security hearings, Oppenheimer started to retreat to a simpler life. In 1957, he purchased a piece of land on Gibney Beach in the island of
St John in the
Virgin Islands. He built a spartan vacation home on the beach, where he'd spend holidays, usually months at a time, with his wife Kitty. Oppenheimer also spent a considerable amount of time sailing with his wife.
Increasingly concerned about the potential danger to humanity arising from scientific discoveries, Oppenheimer joined with
Albert Einstein,
Bertrand Russell,
Joseph Rotblat and other eminent scientists and academics to establish what would eventually become the
World Academy of Art and Science in 1960. Significantly, however, after his public humiliation, Oppenheimer didn't sign the major open protests against nuclear weapons of the 1950s, including the
Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955. He also didn't attend the first
Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957, though invited. However, in his speeches and public writings, Oppenheimer continually stressed the difficulty of managing the power of knowledge in a world in which the freedom of science to exchange ideas was more and more hobbled by political concerns.
A chain-smoker since adulthood, Robert Oppenheimer was diagnosed with
throat cancer in late 1965, and after inconclusive surgery, underwent radiation treatment by cobalt gamma rays and high energy electrons, then finally chemotherapy late in 1966. These were not curative, and the tumor spread to his palate, affecting his swallowing, hearing, and breathing.
Upon the death of Mrs. Oppenheimer (Kitty died of an intestinal infection complicated by pulmonary embolism in
October 1972), Oppenheimer's ranch in New Mexico was inherited by his son Peter, while the beach property in St. John was inherited by their daughter Toni. Toni, who had been refused security clearance for her chosen vocation as a U.N. translator, committed suicide by hanging in the beach house in St. John in January 1977, and left it in her will to "the people of St. John for a public park and recreation area." The original house, built too close to the coast, succumbed to a hurricane, but today, the Virgin Islands Government maintains a Community Center in the area, which can be rented. The northern portion of the beach is colloquially known to this day as "Oppenheimer Beach".
Legacy
As a scientist, Oppenheimer is remembered by his students and colleagues as being a brilliant researcher and engaging teacher, the founder of modern theoretical physics in the United States. Many have asked why Oppenheimer never won a
Nobel Prize. Scholars respond that his scientific attentions often changed rapidly and he never worked long enough on any one topic to achieve enough headway to merit the Nobel Prize. His lack of a Prize wouldn't be odd (many great scientists never won Nobel Prizes) hadn't so many of his associates (Einstein, Fermi, Bethe, Lawrence, Dirac, Rabi, Feynman, etc.) won them. Some scientists and historians have speculated that his investigations towards black holes may have warranted the Nobel, had he lived long enough to see them brought into fruition by later astrophysicists.
When Oppenheimer was ejected from his position of political influence in 1954, he symbolized for many the folly of scientists thinking they could control how others would use their research. Oppenheimer has been seen as symbolizing the dilemmas involving the moral responsibility of the scientist in the nuclear world. The hearings were motivated both by politics, as Oppenheimer was seen as a representative of the previous administration, and also by personal considerations stemming from his enmity with Lewis Strauss.
Later he told an interviewer:
Despite Oppenheimer's remorseful, or at least conflicted, attitudes, Oppenheimer was a vocal supporter of using the first atomic weapons on "built-up areas" in the days before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rather than consistently opposing the "Red-baiting" of the late 1940s and early 1950s, he'd testified against many of his former colleagues and students, both before and during his hearing. In one incident, Oppenheimer's damning testimony against former student Bernard Peters was selectively leaked to the press. Historians have interpreted this as an attempt by Oppenheimer to please his colleagues in the government (and perhaps to divert attention from his own previous left-wing ties and especially from those of his brother, who had earlier been a target of the anti-Red lobby). In the end it became a liability: under cross-examination, it became clear that if Oppenheimer had really doubted Peters' loyalty, then his recommending him for the Manhattan Project was reckless, or at least contradictory.
The question of the scientists' responsibility towards humanity, so manifest in the dropping of the atomic bombs and Oppenheimer's public questioning, in addition to Kipphardt's play, inspired
Bertolt Brecht's drama
Galileo (from 1955), left its imprint on
Friedrich Dürrenmatt's
Die Physiker, and is the basis of the opera
Doctor Atomic by John Adams (2005), which portrays Oppenheimer as a modern
Faust.
Works
- Science and the Common Understanding (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954).
- The Open Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).
- The flying trapeze: Three crises for physicists (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).
- Uncommon sense (Cambridge, MA: Birkhäuser Boston, 1984). (posthumous)
- Atom and void: Essays on science and community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). (posthumous)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Robert Oppenheimer'.
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