Big Science Read online

  At Berkeley, Oppenheimer displayed the peculiar combination of personal charm and intellectual magnetism that would make him so effective a leader of the atomic bomb program at Los Alamos. On campus, he emerged as the “Pied Piper of theoretical physics,” Serber later remarked. His “entourage,” as Alvarez labeled it with perhaps a hint of jealousy, adopted his every tic and peculiarity. They chain-smoked his brand of cigarette, Chesterfields, and mimicked his long-legged gait and his scarcely audible mumble. His artistic taste became their own: “We weren’t supposed to like Tchaikovsky, because Oppenheimer never liked Tchaikovsky,” objected one student, Edwin Uehling. At the semester break every spring when Oppenheimer decamped for Caltech, the entourage followed him south in a caravan of rickety vehicles. Come August, they would migrate north again together.

  Oppie’s classroom style was unusual. He would stand with his back to the class, scribbling complex formulas at random spots on the blackboard, sometimes erasing them to make room for more before the class had a chance to copy them down. “I still visualize him in his characteristic blackboard pose, one hand grasping a piece of chalk, the other hand dangling a cigarette, and his head wreathed in a cloud of smoke,” recalled Edward Gerjuoy, who got his Berkeley PhD under Oppie. He would mumble sotto voce, pausing now and then to emit a murmur that students caricatured as “nim-nim-nim.” Visiting Caltech, Paul Ehrenfest, his friend from Europe, strained during one lecture to make out Oppenheimer’s words from the front row and finally exclaimed, “Oppie, is it a secret?”

  Not only his mumbling made his lectures incomprehensible. The subject matter was beyond obscure: a challenge even to the most experienced theoreticians in the world. As a Caltech graduate student, Carl Anderson spent several days in a packed lecture hall straining unsuccessfully to make sense of Oppenheimer’s class on quantum mechanics. Finally, he confessed to Oppenheimer that he was so thoroughly at sea he would have to drop the course. Unnerved, Oppenheimer confided that every other registered student had already done the same—the hall was filled with students auditing the course for no credit, struggling to understand the subject matter without risking a grade. He pleaded with Anderson to stay, for without a single student, the course could not be counted as part of the Caltech curriculum. Anderson did so and received an A, even though the material “was over my head, all the way through,” he recalled.

  Unlike Lawrence, who was skilled at communicating concepts but impatient with the burden of classroom teaching, Oppenheimer liked teaching; he just was not very good at it. The opacity of his classroom manner reflected his own insecurity with newly discovered phenomena that require a novel cast of mind to understand even today. “In those days,” he explained sheepishly to a former graduate student who reproached him for talking over his students’ heads, “I was just trying to educate myself.”

  Those outside Oppie’s charmed circle found it all rather bewildering—even Enrico Fermi, who should have recognized the behavior, since he was the object of similar veneration by his own students. Sitting in on a Berkeley seminar given by a group of Oppenheimer students in 1940, Fermi found himself unable to follow the mumbled discussion. Afterward he lamented to his friend and colleague Emilio Segrè: “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.’ ”

  But Oppenheimer was building the leading school of theoretical physics in the country. The two dozen doctoral theses he supervised at Berkeley between 1929 and 1943 (when he left for Los Alamos) comprised a large share of all the American doctorates awarded in the field during that period. One reason is surely that he was one of the few teachers in the United States whose grounding in quantum mechanics came directly from the Europeans who originated the theory, and one of the few determined to impart his knowledge to a new generation. Another reason is that until the late 1930s, when the clouds of dictatorship and war in Europe inspired the great emigration of European physicists to the United States, Oppenheimer had the American market virtually to himself. As late as 1937, when Gerjuoy asked his advisors at New York’s City College where he might continue the study of theoretical physics he had begun there as an undergraduate, “the only established group they could point me to was Oppie’s.”

  • • •

  In those first years of joint bachelorhood, Lawrence and Oppenheimer were virtually inseparable. They socialized together, played together, shared a few of the same habits, though each in his own way: they both smoked, but Oppenheimer ceaselessly and Lawrence sporadically (and, as though in deference to his puritan upbringing, furtively). The effort to define, or merely understand, the relationship between Lawrence and Oppenheimer consumed the idle hours of many who knew or worked with them. The chemist Martin Kamen left a succinct effort: “Oppie—highly cerebral and introspective, by turns arrogant and charming—was continually plagued by a sense of insecurity. He possessed extraordinary analytic powers, but little manual ability. E.O.L.—less cerebral and highly intuitive—showed practically no self-doubt and remarkable mechanical skills . . . With the theoretical acumen of the one complementing the experimental skills of the other, there was a basis for an intimacy that minimized the gulf separating them intellectually and culturally.” In one respect, they matched each other precisely, Kamen observed: “They shared a common drive to be center stage.”

  What made their partnership extraordinary was that during this nascent period of nuclear physics, theorists and experimentalists customarily regarded each other with mutual condescension and suspicion. They had stereotypically different personalities, different worldviews, and even different politics. “Theorists tend to be more liberal in their politics, liberal ranging on into radical,” the Nobel laureate Edwin McMillan, Lawrence’s laboratory associate and brother-in-law, observed years later. “Experimenters . . . were more on the political right.” McMillan was looking back at a postwar era when the war in scientific politics had raged out of control, ruining careers and reputations, but there was no question that even in the twenties and thirties, the way that one approached physics reflected, and determined, the way that one viewed the world.

  But Lawrence and Oppenheimer understood that they could not have achieved what they did without each other. “Lawrence leaned heavily on Oppie,” Brady said. Let the cyclotron produce a perplexing result, and Lawrence’s reaction was invariably, “Let’s ask Oppie.”

  “So we went to Oppenheimer,” Brady recalled of one such occasion, “and Lawrence hardly finished the first sentence when Oppie said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. This can’t be. It would be a violation of the first law of thermodynamics. Can’t be.’ And Lawrence just said, ‘Okay, forget that.’ They worked this way all the time.”

  For his own part, Oppie was profoundly stimulated by the torrent of experimental results from Lawrence’s magnificent machine. “Very often the things they found [via the cyclotron] were so astonishing that I said I just don’t see how that could be,” he recalled late in life. “Sometimes I’m sure I was astonished. I was wrong.” He was equally enthralled by Lawrence’s innovative Journal Club, that weekly free-form exchange of scientific data and news for graduate students, physics faculty, and the occasional visiting eminences that Oppie called Lawrence’s “other great invention.” While he was in residence at Berkeley, Oppenheimer rarely missed a session and not infrequently chaired them, although on those occasions, Lawrence, having ceded the floor, could be spotted in the audience straining to comprehend Oppenheimer’s mumbling, like everyone else.

  Nor did Oppenheimer share the hauteur that other theoretical physicists displayed toward Lawrence and his crew of preoccupied tinkers. Lawrence’s achievement, he judged, “wasn’t in the realm of understanding of nature, but it was in the realm of understanding the problem of studying nature. And he as much as anybody contributed to the whole style of physics.” Oppenheimer was rare among theorists in conceding value to the uncomplicated perception of nature, free of abs
tractions, that happened to be Lawrence’s approach. Abstraction, he related, “wasn’t primarily [Lawrence’s] dish. His dish was to build and to expand a technique. This is an instrumental approach, something without which astronomy and physics would not amount to much.”

  On the surface, the warmth of their friendship endured well into the 1940s, surviving the kinds of changes in personal lives and careers that can drive a rift between the closest of friends. Ernest was a regular visitor to Perro Caliente, where he would don “very proper riding clothes” and perch on a English saddle. At home, he and Oppenheimer would take long walks around Berkeley and into the bucolic woods of Northern California. “We talked about physics,” Oppenheimer recalled, recognizing that Ernest’s intellectual interests were narrower than his own and that he might not be especially receptive to wide-ranging symposia on Eastern philosophy and Western art.

  There was something endearing about their mutual trust and solicitude. In October 1931, when the mortal illness of Oppenheimer’s mother called him away to New York, Lawrence wrote him every couple of days, plainly aware of how deeply Oppenheimer would be affected by his mother’s death. “I feel pretty awful to be away so long,” Oppenheimer responded to one such expression of solicitude, and even went so far as to ask Lawrence to “do what you can for the fatherless theoretical children, won’t you”—though what he thought the arch-experimentalist could do for Oppenheimer’s students of theory remained unsaid.

  Toward the end of that year, the friends reunited at the American Physical Society meeting in New Orleans, where they basked in their rising eminence and remained, evidently, inseparable. One colleague’s wife witnessed them holding an extended conversation on either side of an elevator door, Lawrence stepping in and out to elucidate one more point for Oppenheimer, until the elevator operator put an end to the dance with the words “Break it up, sweethearts.”

  The same meeting showed Ernest in another light, one that would become more pronounced as their relationship matured: as counsel and mentor, very much the role that Merle Tuve had played for him at that critical moment before his departure for Berkeley. At the presentation of his conference paper, Oppenheimer was run through the intellectual wringer by Robert Millikan, the notoriously prickly Caltech president. Millikan may have been irked by Oppenheimer’s challenge to his theory of the origin of cosmic rays, which he had vehemently defended for more than a decade (and which eventually was proven wrong). Oppie deeply appreciated Ernest’s moral support at the event. “It was like you, Ernest, and very sweet, that you should whisper to me so comforting words about the Wednesday meeting,” Oppenheimer wrote him a few days later. “I was pretty much in need of them, feeling ashamed of my report, and distressed rather by Millikan’s hostility and his lack of scruple.” As if to repay Lawrence for the consoling words, Oppie revealed that Millikan’s behavior had pushed him to start cutting the cords with Caltech and commit himself more to Berkeley, as long as that could be achieved “without complete rupture with Tech.”

  • • •

  But it was around this time that their relationship began to change subtly. Oppenheimer’s repute as a theoretician was growing, but the rise in Lawrence’s professional stature was on a higher plane entirely. Lawrence “became a relatively prominent guy during the thirties, and rightly so,” Oppenheimer would recall. “He regarded me as potentially a very good physicist . . . But in a certain sense, not worldly, not experienced, and not very sensible.”

  Oppenheimer recognized that their social milieus were fated to remain distinct. Robert and his wife, Kitty, were happiest among intellectual bohemians and political leftists; they chose their physicist friends from among those with catholic tastes in music and art, people like the Serbers and Caltech’s Linus Pauling. As Lawrence rose in professional esteem, his social circle came to encompass the banking and oil magnates who had become his financial patrons. As early as 1932, Sproul sponsored him for membership in the Bohemian Club, the most august organization of prominent citizens in San Francisco. For Oppenheimer, a genuine bohemian and a Jew, membership was out of the question.

  Indeed, throughout the thirties, Oppenheimer swam upstream against a genteel anti-Semitism in the professions and academia. In 1936 he had struggled to obtain an appointment for Robert Serber as his research assistant at Berkeley, where Birge refused to contribute more than a cheeseparing $1,200 for Serber’s salary. (At Oppie’s request, Lawrence chipped in another $400 from Rad Lab funds.) But his efforts to secure an assistant professorship for Serber came to naught; only years later did Serber discover that the roadblock was Birge: as he had written to a friend at the time, “One Jew in the department is enough.”

  Yet what really drove a wedge between Lawrence and Oppenheimer was politics. Through the 1930s, Lawrence considered himself a New Deal Democrat. But he was intent on keeping politics out of the lab. Indeed, he thought it inappropriate for scientists to engage in political activity of any kind—“political fiddling around,” as he called it in a conversation with Oppenheimer. “Why do you fool with these politics?” he once asked Oppenheimer’s younger brother, Frank, a member of the Rad Lab. “You don’t have to—you’re a good physicist.” It was a prescient question, for Frank Oppenheimer’s association with Lawrence’s lab would end abruptly, following the disclosure of his earlier membership in the Communist Party.

  Robert Oppenheimer could no more divest himself of political concerns than he could give up music and wine; they were all essential to his method of engaging with the outside world. What would irk Lawrence most about his political activism was not merely its tinge of radicalism, to which Ernest would grow increasingly hostile, but Robert’s insensitivity to the damage it could do to the university in general and the Physics Department in particular, as the breadth of acceptable political discourse narrowed in the immediate postwar years. At first Lawrence dealt quietly with Oppie’s thoughtlessness, as on the day when Oppie scribbled an announcement of a cocktail party for relief of the antifascist forces in the Spanish Civil War on the Rad Lab’s blackboard. Spotting it on his daily rounds of the lab, Lawrence mutely obliterated it with the violent strokes of an eraser. As time passed, he found it harder to remain silent about his friend’s politics, eventually upbraiding Robert for what he termed his “leftwandering activities” and counseling him that they were likely to constrict his opportunities at the university, in industry, and, as war loomed, in government service.

  For a few years, the tension remained submerged. After Lawrence brought his bride, Molly, to Berkeley, Oppenheimer remained an intimate part of the family circle. The Lawrences’ second son, born just after New Year’s Day 1941, was christened Robert, after Oppenheimer. And the day after Oppenheimer brought his own new bride, the divorcee Katherine “Kitty” Harrison, home to Berkeley in November 1940 (Kitty already in maternity clothes), the Lawrences were the first couple in town to welcome them with a dinner.

  But as their careers and their politics began to pull them apart, something even more fundamental seemed to come between them. Years later, when J. Robert Oppenheimer was facing the great public crisis of his life and a word from Ernest Lawrence might have spared him from a politically motivated ordeal, Jim Brady asked Lawrence why he and his group at Berkeley had not uttered a word in Oppie’s defense.

  “There’s a very good reason for it,” Lawrence replied. “We’re the only ones who really know that man.”

  “It seemed to me,” Brady reflected, “to be almost personal.” Only time would clear up the mystery.

  But the split lay far in the future. By 1933, their collaboration had poised the University of California to take its place as one of the great academic centers of the world, one of the richest institutions and most ambitious. Berkeley attracted the most promising young graduate students, hosted the most eminent visiting lecturers, pocketed the largest contributions from research foundations and garnered the lion’s share of public interest and acclaim. Robert Oppenheimer was the leading theoretician in the na
tion. Ernest Lawrence’s renown as an experimentalist and the father of the most productive instrument for researching the atom had spread coast to coast. A thrilling sign arrived that year that his fame had spread to Europe. It was an invitation to the Solvay Conference, an elite triennial international convocation in Brussels, Belgium. Lawrence was the only American invited to an event at which he would be rubbing shoulders with twenty-one other present and future Nobel laureates.

  Asked by the conference chairman, the French physicist Paul Langevin, to outline his proposed presentation, Lawrence replied that it would be his dramatic new theory that nuclei of deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, disintegrated upon striking another nucleus. This was an extraordinary claim that promised to rewrite fundamental laws of physics, backed up by extensive results from the cyclotron. Reassuringly, the results had been validated theoretically by Oppenheimer, who was gratified that they undermined certain European theories of quantum dynamics with which he heartily disagreed. As Oppie wrote his brother cheerily on the eve of the conference, Lawrence “has definitely established the instability of the H2 nucleus. It decomposes upon collision into neutron and proton . . . That makes as far as I can see a hopeless obstacle to Heisenberg’s pseudo qm [quantum mechanics] of the nucleus.”

  It could have been the greatest moment in the partnership of Lawrence and Oppenheimer; the unveiling of earthshaking experimental findings with solid theoretical underpinnings. Instead, they committed a world-class blunder on an international stage. Big Science, as it happened, was not quite ready for its time in the sun.

  Part Two

  * * *

  THE LABORATORY