At a moment of great discovery, one Big Idea can change the world …
Oppenheimer and his Big Idea, the atomic bomb, exemplify one of the very real dilemmas of modern science. Scientifically unprecedented yet ethically questionable, atomic weapons may have brought World War II to an end, saving thousands of lives, but at what cost? Hiroshima, Nagasaki and a new political balance, teetering on the threat of nuclear annihilation, were part of the legacy of the man best known as “the father of the bomb”.
Oppenheimer and the Bomb tells the gripping story of the scientist behind The Manhattan Project, from his early days as a Harvard prodigy to his final years as a victim of McCarthyism. A brilliant snapshot of a man and his controversial work, Oppenheimer’s Big Idea offers a clear and engaging introduction to the complex theoretical work behind the bomb, the context of the time and the implications for our future.
The Big Idea series is a fascinating look at the greatest advances in our scientific history, and at the men and women who made these fundamental breakthroughs.
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Copyright © Paul Strathern, 1998
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First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Arrow Books
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ISBN 9780099237921
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Paul Strathern
Title Page
Introduction
Life & The Bomb
Some Facts & Fizzles on The Bomb
The History of The Bomb
Suggestions for Further Reading
Copyright
Paul Strathern was born in London and studied philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. He was a lecturer at Kingston University where he taught philosophy and mathematics. He is a Somerset Maugham prize-winning novelist. He is also the author of the Philosophers in 90 Minutes series. He wrote Mendeleyev’s Dream which was shortlisted for the Aventis Science Book Prize, Dr. Strangelove’s Game: A History of Economic Genius, The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance, Napoleon in Egypt and The Artist, The Philosopher and The Warrior, which details the convergence of three of Renaissance Italy’s most brilliant minds: Leonardo Da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia. He lives in London and has three grandchildren.
In THE BIG IDEA series:
Archimedes and the Fulcrum
Bohr and Quantum Theory
Crick, Watson and DNA
Curie and Radioactivity
Darwin and Evolution
Einstein and Relativity
Galileo and the Solar System
Hawking and Black Holes
Newton and Gravity
Oppenheimer and the Bomb
Pythagoras and his Theorem
Turing and the Computer
OPPENHEIMER IS BEST remembered today as ‘the father of the bomb’. It was he who headed ‘the biggest collection of eggheads ever’ – who put together the first atomic bomb at the secret laboratories in Los Alamos, in the remote New Mexico mountains. Oppenheimer is also remembered by many as the scientist who was hounded to an early grave by a communist witch-hunt. What is often overlooked is that he also made an original contribution to early quantum mechanics, and published one of the first theoretical models of a black hole.
In between times, Oppenheimer was also a charismatic teacher who inspired a generation of American physicists; and was later director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for almost 20 years, when giants like Einstein, von Neumann and Gödel were in residence.
Some career, some man. In private Oppenheimer was a slightly odd, highly cultured man. When he saw the first luminous mushroom cloud blooming its false dawn over the desert, he found himself muttering some words from the Bhagavad-Gita – a reference which probably escaped the other assembled boffins, generals and intelligence personnel. Oppenheimer was a sophisticated man – but he was a cold fish too. Capable of inspiring great loyalty, he was also regarded by many as élitist and arrogant. This didn’t matter so much as long as it was confined to the lab. (Science doesn’t develop the personality per se, tending to make its practitioners more tolerant of such gaucheness than those in the savage social swim.) But when Oppenheimer became a bigwig in Washington, he quickly made political enemies. It was his arrogance which led to his downfall as much as his left-wing views, no matter how misguided or ambiguous these might have been. ‘Oppie’, as he was known to his friends, remained a divided man to the end. He was proud to be ‘the father of the bomb’, but he had no illusions about its horrific potential.
J ROBERT OPPENHEIMER WAS born on April 22nd 1904, in New York City. His father Julius was a German-Jewish immigrant who had made a fortune in the textile importing business. The family home was a luxurious apartment on fashionable Riverside Drive. The Oppenheimers were ‘assimilated’, having put aside orthodox culture and religion in favour of becoming American plutocrats. Robert’s mother Ella was a painter of genuine talent who had studied in Paris. She was strikingly beautiful – apart from a deformed right hand, which she always wore in a chamois leather glove. A family friend described her as ‘a very delicate person, highly attenuated emotionally, and she always presided with great delicacy and grace at the table and other events, but a mournful person’. The father was described as ‘desperately amiable, anxious to be agreeable, and … essentially a very kind man’. But the home had ‘a sadness: there was a melancholy tone’.
Young Robert was to inherit a potent blend of these complexities. Indicatively, he grew up (in his own words) ‘an abnormally repulsive good little boy.’ For the first eight years he was an only child, until a brother called Frank was born in 1912. Robert was educated at the Ethical Cultural School in New York, which believed in instilling high academic standards and liberal ideas – a combination which was then possible in the earnest well-meaning society of the pre-First World War era. At school Robert proved to be a serious-minded, solitary pupil. He quickly asserted both his academic and social superiority, making very few friends in the process. He was tall, with a spindly physique. Somewhat lacking in physical coordination, he soon decided that he didn’t like games. (He couldn’t stand losing.) But he was no coward, and did possess some physical skills. Typically, he took up solo sailing at the family holiday home on Long Island, and here his daring often bordered on the foolhardy, when he stayed out in squalls. At night he read widely, from minerology to Plato. He particularly liked the aloof melancholy poetry of the modernist T.S. Eliot.
At the age of 18, on a family holiday to Europe, he was struck down with dysentery. It took him a year to recover, during which his teenage rebelliousness made a late appearance. In the words of his mother, this took the form of ‘boorishness, and often a complete rejection of my attentions’. The ingrate invalid would lock himself in his room and read.
Eventually the over-intellectual young prig was despatched to a dude ranch in New Mexico to recover. Here he came alive again – as he had only previously done whilst scudding the wind-torn breakers in his yacht. For days he would ride the winding trails through the canyons and over the mountains, camping out at night under the stars.
In 1922, Robert Oppenheimer went to Harvard to study chemistry. A contemporary records: ‘I suppose he was lonely, and felt he didn’t fit in well with the human environment.’ However, in all other environments he was supreme. He still wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do with his life. Besides topping the class at chemistry, he excelled in physics, oriental philosophy, ancient greek and latin, and architecture. Between times he emulated his mother by painting, and even wrote avant-garde poetry which was published in the college literary magazine. All this took time, but as a young man who didn’t deign to have a social life and was above such things as a sporting career, Oppenheimer found that he had considerable energies to burn. He was regularly at the labs by 8am, spent the rest of the day attending lectures and working his way through his various subjects in the library, and continued reading into the night. Instead of meals, he would simply break for a hasty ‘black and tan’: a toasted open sandwich topped with peanut butter and a large dollop of chocolate sauce. This evidently kept his digestive tract sufficiently primed.
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