Looking back today at “American Prometheus” – the book upon which this summer’s widely noted Oppenheimer film is based. Recalling I fashioned a mini tour/book review covering Oppenheimer’s Cambridge as I originally read Kai Bird’s and Martin J Sherwin’s 2005 book.
Yes, it’s still summer, so, I am sharing it here! With some editing. Editing is ever with us.
Oppenheimer’s tragedy truly is an American tragedy, and it is too little known. Worth noting: The creation of the Atom bomb is the ultimate tale of science and technology for bad and good. It redefined life for the generations that followed.
At the start, in his college days, the leader of the team of scientists that created the first A-bomb was a delicate mesh of scientist and poet. In the end, he was a heart-broken figure, done in by his lethal invention, and his soft-spot for arty friends who, steeped in the ethos of their times, promoted liberal and communist causes.
Oppenheimer did not have his roots in Boston, but he did pass through here, like so many others. It was in the air in Boston/Cambridge as much as anywhere: the mechanical, fluid and electronic sounds of a military-industrial complex based on the scientific breakthroughs and technical innovations of the mid-20th Century.
The son of a wealthy West Side New York clothier, Oppenheimer refused the fellowship Harvard offered him when he entered the university in 1922.Oppenheimer began his Harvard days as a chemistry student.
The chemist had been the epitome of the scientist – but that was changing just as he was entering college. He was not looking for a lucrative career. Oppenheimer worried his future would be that of an industrial chemist, testing toothpastes. But physics was uncovering wonder after wonder. He read prodigiously. His tenure at Harvard preceded construction of the Mallinckrodt Lab, so his chemistry studies were like in the basement of University Hall in Harvard Yard.
He looked to take as many advanced physics classes as he possibly could. He didn’t have the basic courses. But he read five science books a week. And he was picking physics texts unknown to the typical student. American Prometheus authors report that one physics professor, reviewing Oppy’s petition [replete with a list of texts he’d read] to take graduate classes, remarked: “Obviously, if he says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a PH.D. for knowing their titles.” He was brash and precocious.
The famous figures of science and math [in which Oppenheimer thought himself deficient] passed through Harvard’s gates. Oppenheimer attended lectures by Whitehead and Bohr. Still, he nurtured a love for literature. He was a great polymath. He read The Waste Land, and wrote poetry of sadness and loneliness. He edited a school literary journal known as The Gad-Fly [under the auspices of the Liberal Club at 66 Winthrop St]. After Harvard, he discovered Proust.
He kept much to himself. Had but a few friends. “His diet often consisted of little more than chocolate, beer and artichokes. Lunch was often just a ‘black and tan’ – a piece of toast slathered with peanut butter and topped with chocolate syrup.” When he lived in Cambridge, like so many other great scientific thinkers in so many places, he took to long walks. He lived for a while at 60 Mount Auburn Street.
A mentor at Harvard could well have been future Nobelist Percy Bridgman. Oppenheimer admired a strain in this physicist noted for his studies of materials at high temperatures and pressures and his openness to imaginatively approaching the philosophy of science.
“Oppy’s” outsider status at Harvard could be laid to his sensitivity, but just as significant if not more so was his Jewish heritage. He came to the school at a time when its head was considering a quota system to reduce the growing number of Jewish entrants. Surely, the straight road to Harvard success was not fully open to him, even if that is what he’d desired. He was offered a graduate teaching position but turned it down.
Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in three years. He wrote a friend: “Even in the last stages of senile aphasia I will not say that education, in an academic sense, was only secondary when I was at college. I plough through about five or ten big scientific books a week, and pretend to research. Even if, in the end, I’ve got to satisfy myself with testing toothpaste, I don’t want to know it till it has happened.”
From Harvard he went on to study in Gottingen in Germany, Thomson’s famed Cavendish Lab, CalTech, Berkeley, and, after the War, Princeton. Surely the Jewish Ethical Culture School he attended as a lad, which had a summer school adjunct in New Mexico, and the mesas of New Mexico, where he placed the crucial workings of the Manhattan Project, was most formative.
He and his friends skipped the Harvard commencement to drink lab alcohol in a dorm room. He had one drink and retired.
Other books on this topic worth noting include “Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project” by Leslie Groves and, most particularly, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes.
When first there shook the decentralization tsunami of client-server computing, the mainframers responded successfully – well, IBM anyway. Some hemming and hawing, of course. But the IBM PC was a pivotal instrument of client-server’s move away from the domination of centralized mainframe-based computing.