Few lives are as eventful as that of Robert Oppenheimer. A life so dramatic, so full of twists and turns, so celebrated and yet so tragic, it might as well have played itself out on the silver screen.
Oppenheimer was a first-rate theoretical physicist — during a period when theoretical physicists were the rockstars of science — but he is best known for having led the Manhattan Project, the top-secret American effort in the 1940s that resulted in the world’s first atomic bombs, the ones that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That single role, which he got when he was only 39, made him the most famous, adored and influential scientist in America, with an aura rivalled only by that of Albert Einstein, who, at that time, happened to be at the same institution that Oppenheimer shortly thereafter went on to lead. He himself remained torn, however.
He was genuinely proud of the scientific feat of making the atomic bomb and was supportive of its use on Hiroshima, but fervently hoped that that would be the last time it would ever be used. In fact, he became a strong anti-war advocate, just like Einstein.
Robert Oppenheimer (in light-coloured hat with foot on tower rubble), General Leslie Groves (man in military dress to Oppenheimer’s left), and others at the ground zero site of the Trinity test after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (some time after the actual test). (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
But Oppenheimer could not go out on a high. Suspected of being a communist — a bad word in America and its allies at that time — and, its corollary, a Soviet spy, he was questioned, humiliated and stripped off his security clearance in a famous hearing in 1954. That meant he was not considered safe to be made privy to national secrets and would lose all his advisory positions in government.
The Institute of Advanced Studies at the Princeton University, however, continued to keep him as its director, a position he held with distinction almost till his death in 1967, aged 63, due to throat cancer.
In December last year, almost 70 years after the 1954 hearings and more than 50 years after his death, the United States formally reversed that decision and restored his security clearance.
Brilliant beginnings
Oppenheimer, a second-generation Jewish immigrant from Germany, grew up in an upscale locality of New York, his father having made money in a textile business. Academically brilliant but socially aloof, Oppenheimer enrolled at Harvard University to study Chemistry in 1921 at the age of 17. Once there, he developed an interest in the new revolutionary discoveries being made in Physics at that time, and sought permission to attend higher level Physics classes. To buttress his case, he enclosed a list of books and papers he had read in Physics.
“Obviously if he says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a PhD for knowing their titles,” is how one of the faculty members examining Oppenheimer’s case is said to have reacted, according to an account in Oppenheimer’s biography Inside the Centre by Ray Monk.
From Harvard, Oppenheimer moved to Europe where physicists had been reporting a series of astonishing results that eventually led to the establishment of Quantum Theory. Oppenheimer intended to do experimental physics but was rejected by Ernest Rutherford’s laboratory at Cambridge. He managed a small stint at J J Thomson’s laboratory but was a laggard.
Facing failure and rejection for the first time, for Oppenheimer, these few months happened to be one of the worst phases in his life. He slumped into depression and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Multiple biographers have mentioned that during this phase, Oppenheimer even tried to strangulate his childhood friend Francis Fergusson during a get-together in Paris, apparently without any reason.
They also describe an incident in which Oppenheimer is said to have told a few friends that he had kept a poisoned apple on the desk of one of his teachers in the laboratory, Patrick Blackett. Whether he actually did is not known but Blackett clearly survived that attempt and went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948. In Monk’s biography, one of Oppenheimer’s friends, John Edsall, is quoted as saying that Oppenheimer had “perhaps a personal sense of being physically unattractive compared to Blackett” who happened to be “brilliant and handsome and a man of great social charm”.
First successes
Oppenheimer, then 22, was lucky to have caught the attention of Max Born, one of the pioneers of Quantum Theory, who invited him to work with him in the university at Gottingen in Germany. It is here, working as a theoretical physicist, that Oppenheimer came into his own and completed his PhD in just one year. He published his first papers, at least one of which, written in collaboration with Born, contained a groundbreaking result.
Oppenheimer made some significant contributions to Quantum Theory but he himself, and many others, thought that if only he had arrived on the scene a couple of years earlier he would have been standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Dirac in laying the foundations of Quantum Theory. New Physics was developing at such a rapid pace in the early 1920s that a couple of years of difference meant a gap of a generation.
“I believe that Oppenheimer, given his talents, could have made a singular contribution to the creation of quantum mechanics during the decisive years of 1925 and 1926 had he arrived on the scene at that time. Because of the trench dysentery he contracted in 1921 on a trip to Germany while searching for mineral samples, he had to postpone entering Harvard for a year, and thus came into his own a year too late to make contributions to the genesis of quantum mechanics of the same importance, if not as those of Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli, then perhaps those of Max Born and Pascual Jordan,” wrote Sylvan Schweber, a physicist and author of the book Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius.
Abraham Pais, a distinguished physicist himself and colleague of Oppenheimer at Princeton who has written two masterly biographies of Einstein and Neils Bohr, agrees with this view.
“At that time, when physics was roaring forward, an age difference of just a few years meant a difference of a generation. Heisenberg, Dirac and Pauli, founders of the new mechanics, were only two to four years older than Oppenheimer when they had ushered in the new era of quantum mechanics. It is no criticism of those who started next that they did not contribute in equal measure. I should stress at this point that in my opinion Oppenheimer’s scientific contributions between 1925 and 1940 were very substantial indeed, nothing to be ashamed of, quite the contrary. All that said, I can well understand that a brilliant and ambitious young man would feel that by just a few years he had missed his chance for immortality,” Pais wrote on his biography of Oppenheimer, his last work.
Oppenheimer had a very productive decade between 1930 and 1940, publishing extensively in a number of topics in quantum physics, nuclear physics and astrophysics.
This was also the phase that he started flirting with the communist movement. Though he himself never became a member of the Communist party, many of his associates, including his first girlfriend, his wife, friends and many of his students were. These associations, as
Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos ID. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
well as donations to communist causes, made Oppenheimer a target of FBI surveillance, which, by the time his security clearance was revoked, ran into more than 7,400 pages, according to an account in the biography by Pais. These associations proved to be fateful for Oppenheimer during his later life.
It was also during this time that Oppenheimer famously learnt Sanskrit and read ancient Hindu texts, especially Gita, whose messages, he said, he was reminded of when the first atomic bomb was tested.
Tryst with Gita
Oppenheimer’s interest in Sanskrit and Hinduism was not trivial. Many other scientists, including the greats of quantum physics like Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg, have been inspired with the messages in the ancient Hindu texts, but Oppenheimer was among the few who actually learnt the language, Sanskrit, to study these.
As Ray Monk writes in Inside the Centre, Oppenheimer read not just Gita, but also the Vedas, Kalidas’ Meghdootam and Panchtantra. Schweber wrote that Oppenheimer described Gita as “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue” and “quoted from it at singular extraordinary moments”.
“He kept a well-worn copy of it conveniently on hand on the bookshelf closest to his desk and often gave the book (in translation) to friends as a present. He continued to browse in it while director of the Los Alamos laboratory (where the atomic bomb was made),” Schweber wrote in his book.
The influence of Gita, particularly its emphasis on karma, or duty, and detachment from the end result, is seen as having played a crucial role in Oppenheimer’s leadership of the atomic bomb effort. Like many others, he was of the opinion that the bomb would bring an end to all wars. He was part of the committee that selected Hiroshima as a target, well after the threat from Hitler had ended and Germany surrendered. In his later years, he was repeatedly asked whether he regretted having led the Los Alamos laboratory, and he always replied in the negative.
His farewell speech at the Los Alamos laboratory in November 1945 brilliantly captures the prevailing situation as he saw it, the steps that needed to be taken towards a war-free world, and the role that science and scientists should play, and remains a highly-recommended read.
But he was not unshaken by the horrors of the war, and remained conflicted. He once remarked that even Krishna’s message in Gita on detachment wasn’t able to comfort him, probably because he was not Hindu enough.
“If I cannot be comforted by Vishnu’s argument to Arjuna, it is because I am too much a Jew, much too much a Christian, much too much a European, far too much an American. For I believe in the meaningfulness of human history, and of our role in it, and above all, of our responsibility to it,” he is quoted as saying in Monk’s Inside the Centre.
Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer in a posed photograph at the Institute for Advanced Study. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) 
Robert Oppenheimer (in light-coloured hat with foot on tower rubble), General Leslie Groves (man in military dress to Oppenheimer’s left), and others at the ground zero site of the Trinity test after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (some time after the actual test). (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos ID. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Share
