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Inside The Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer is among the most contentious and important figures of the twentieth century. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis to develop the first atomic bomb - a breakthrough which was to have eternal ramifications for mankind, and made Oppenheimer the 'father of the Bomb'.
But his was not a simple story of assimilation, scientific success and world fame. A complicated and fragile personality, the implications of the discoveries at Los Alamos were to weigh heavily upon him. Having formed suspicious connections in the 1930s, in the wake of the Allied victory in World War Two, Oppenheimer's attempts to resist the escalation of the Cold War arms race would lead many to question his loyalties - and set him on a collision course with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunters.
836 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2012
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About the author
Ray Monk
29 books131 followersRay Monk is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, where he has taught since 1992.
He won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the 1991 Duff Cooper Prize for Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. His interests lie in the philosophy of mathematics, the history of analytic philosophy, and philosophical aspects of biographical writing. He is currently working on a biography of Robert Oppenheimer. (Source: Wikipedia)
He won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the 1991 Duff Cooper Prize for Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. His interests lie in the philosophy of mathematics, the history of analytic philosophy, and philosophical aspects of biographical writing. He is currently working on a biography of Robert Oppenheimer. (Source: Wikipedia)
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April 17, 2018
Monk has written an engaging, deep and thoughtful biography of an enigmatic man. He digs into the science and offers clear concise explanations of complex topics. He is equally adept at exploring Oppenheimer’s personality, helping us understand why Oppenheimer was so conflicted. Having read about the Manhattan Project, I wanted to know more about Oppenheimer the scientist. With so many eminent scientists available why was he chosen to lead the Los Alamos lab and why did that choice prove to be so stunningly correct. Monk answers this question and many more in this outstanding account.
Monk spends considerable time on Oppenheimer’s childhood, exposing him at the core. What we see is a shy exceptionally gifted child who is very insecure despite the good fortune of being born into wealth and to parents who genuinely care about him. He grew up in the Upper West Side of New York, part of an established German Jewish community that was trying to integrate and be accepted as part of Americana. His own struggle with identity reflects that. Oppenheimer’s parents belonged to the Ethical Cultural Society, a secular alternative for the Jewish community that sponsored a school providing a first rate education for Jews often barred from other fine schools.
Self-conscious about his Jewishness, Oppenheimer strove to be accepted by gentiles. He was hurt by his own social ineptness and desire to show off his brilliance. He friends were few and often represented ideals of what he would like to be. Being extraordinarily smart was not enough for Oppenheimer. He aspired to be the cultivated man that would be sought out in the best circles. At the Ethical Cultural Society school he became close friends with Francis Fergusson, a gentile from an established New Mexico family. Fergusson represented the heritage and social acceptance Oppenheimer envied. They traveled together to New Mexico which freed Oppenheimer’s spirit becoming a life long love.
Both Fergusson and Oppenheimer attended Harvard. Antisemitism was notable at Harvard as well as almost everywhere in the America of the 1920’s and combined with Oppenheimer’s own insular difficult personality kept him relatively isolated. He started in chemistry and soon discovered physics. He began devouring physics books including ones written in German which he had learned from his German born father and French which he mastered on his own. Simply submitting a list of physics books he had read Oppenheimer received permission to take with no prior physics coursework advanced graduate courses. He showed his intellectual prowess by excelling in these classes quickly impressing his professors.
Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from Harvard and enrolled at Christ’s College Cambridge to study physics being accepted as an undergraduate, a disappointment. Fergusson who attended Harvard with Oppenheimer had been accepted at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to study English literature. Oppenheimer’s forte was theoretical physics. He struggled at experimental physics which required being handy about the lab, finding it difficult to solder two copper wires together. Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish lab passed him down to the aging J. J. Thomson where Oppenheimer languished, although he did get accepted as a graduate student. His identity issues became a crisis and his behavior became bizarre. Oppenheimer’s mental instability reflected his chagrin at being unable to fit in with British upper class society as Fergusson had easily done.
Fortunately Oppenheimer was saved by the quantum mechanics revolution which was gaining steam in 1925-6. It quickly caught his interest and he developed a passion. At Cambridge Oppenheimer was exposed to the great minds of physics. He was one of few students who attended Paul Dirac’s course on recent developments in quantum mechanics and one of even fewer who understood him. Oppenheimer wrote his first paper on quantum physics and got it published in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Rutherford introduced him to Niels Bohr whose brief comments inspired Oppenheimer to resolve the difficulties he was having with his second paper. This one was noticed by Max Born, a leader in defining quantum theory, who footnoted it in one of his papers. Born went on to use Oppenheimer to translate one of his major research papers into English for publication in Nature. Oppenheimer was now considered an important up and coming young physicist.
Oppenheimer was only 22 in 1926 and did not have a PhD. Still, Born, who had many physicists clamoring to study under him, agreed to take on Oppenheimer where he taught at the University of Göttingen, a world class university. Here Oppenheimer was “inside the center” of the physics world where he would meet and interact with all the leaders in the field. Born who gave many students little personal time, gave Oppenheimer practically unlimited time. But Born’s admiration for Oppenheimer’s talents drew out Oppenheimer’s arrogance and he was resented by the other students. The self-effacing Born was a bad personality match for Oppenheimer and later Born admitted he found the relationship exasperating. At Göttingen Oppenheimer wrote two papers published in the leading quantum mechanics journal, Zeitschrift für Physik, a collaborative paper with Born regarding quantum effects on molecules that remains a classic of quantum chemistry, and as an afterthought he got his PhD.
Oppenheimer, homesick, spent five months at Harvard in 1927 before moving on to a position at Caltech. At Harvard he published what would become his most cited paper, one of the first to explore the mysterious idea of “tunneling” followed by two more. In 1928 he took leave from Caltech to return to Europe, but first visited his beloved New Mexico with his brother Frank. Here he felt in his element and he and Frank purchased a property to which he would return throughout his life. Returning to Europe Oppenheimer spent time with Einstein’s close friend Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden. In his few months there Oppenheimer remarkably learned Dutch well enough to deliver seminars in it. Ehrenfest realized he too was the wrong teacher for Oppenheimer but he knew who was. He sent Oppenheimer packing to Zurich to work under Wolfgang Pauli, famous for his exclusion principle. The blunt Pauli, never afraid to criticize, was just what Oppenheimer needed. Pauli praised a paper Oppenheimer wrote in Zurich telling Bohr it was an extension of Pauli’s work with Heisenberg on QED. In ill health or perhaps again homesick, Oppenheimer, a chain smoker with a bad cough, returned to New Mexico, a cure he had used before that always worked.
In 1929, after a rest in New Mexico, Oppenheimer began building what would be hailed the best theoretical physics program in the U.S. at the University of California at Berkeley. He also maintained his professorship at Caltech enabling him to keep up on the research there and the experimental side of physics. He stayed close to Ernest Lawrence who was single-mindedly developing the cyclotron at Berkeley. Oppenheimer chose Berkeley because it was a blank state. He began filling it with talented PhD students and postgraduate fellows from around the country, many of whom would be very successful. He worked closely with his students and postdocs authoring numerous papers with them. Oppenheimer’s many papers were noted for their originality and some broke significant new ground, but they were also noted for many careless mathematical errors. Amazingly Oppenheimer also found time to teach himself Sanskrit and explore the sacred Hindu texts, his identity issues still far from resolved.
Events in Europe brought dramatic changes. Jewish physicists left Germany in droves enriching physics departments from Copenhagen to California. Oppenheimer started following politics supporting causes particularly the Loyalists in Spain. He joined groups filled with communists and fellow travelers although he says he never joined the party nor took any direction from it. Despite political distractions these were his best years for physics research. His astrophysics papers co-written with students in 1938-9 defined the mass limits of neutron stars and predicted the existence of black holes. These are now regarded as his best work. It would be over twenty years before neutron stars were found to exist and the name black hole to be coined.
In 1939 the discovery that a uranium nucleus could be split creating enormous amounts of energy was the buzz of the physics world. Oppenheimer focused on other areas, most importantly QED. The brilliant future Nobel Prize winner Julian Schwinger could have done his postdoctoral work for just about anyone but chose Oppenheimer, becoming his research assistant. Together they wrote papers on QED that anticipated the great progress Schwinger and others would make a decade later. 1941 was the end of Oppenheimer’s creative work. He was gradually losing touch with emerging technical details as Schwinger surmised due to the time he spent as a manager and organizer. Politically Oppenheimer’s opinion of Russia was diminished by the 1938 purges and the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact in 1939, but he maintained his left wing connections. The precipitous fall of France in 1940 alarmed Oppenheimer. He now spoke to friends about the need to preserve Western civilization and criticized Russia. In 1940 Oppenheimer married Kitty Harrison who had been married to a man high up in the communist party who was killed fighting in Spain. Even though Kitty herself was not an activist, her many communist connections would bring serious scrutiny to Oppenheimer from the FBI.
In 1941 Oppenheimer learned by accident from a conversation between Ernst Lawrence and a British scientist that they were in a secret project to evaluate the feasibility of an atom bomb. Despite security concerns, through the concerted efforts of Lawrence, Oppenheimer became a consultant to the evaluation committee. In the summer of 1942 General Leslie Groves was put in charge of a project to build an atom bomb. Groves met with Lawrence, Fermi, Compton, Wigner and many other top physicists, but he felt none was a leader. But just as Max Born had immediately taken to Oppenheimer so did Groves. Groves appointed Oppenheimer to help him select a site for a central Lab and of course it was in New Mexico, on a remote mountain plateau at Los Alamos. Groves then, despite the misgivings of many, selected Oppenheimer to run the Los Alamos lab because “it became apparent that we were not going to find a better man.” Oppenheimer immediately began recruiting the top physicists and structuring the departments, even before formal appointment as Scientific Director.
Oppenheimer would be plagued by suspicions that he was engaged in Soviet espionage. He was married to a former communist party member. His former girlfriend had been a communist party member. His brother Frank had been a communist party member. Oppenheimer himself had been a member of and contributor to many communist front organizations. The FBI and military security would never stop following, tapping, and investigating Oppenheimer and all his contacts. Despite many calls for Groves to remove Oppenheimer from the project, Groves stood firm because he felt there was no one else who could manage it successfully. Oppenheimer did not make it easy on himself. While there is no evidence of Oppenheimer being engaged in espionage, he maintained his old relationships. He made up convoluted stories to protect some of them while exposing others. All of this held up Oppenheimer’s security clearance but in July 1943 Groves instructed that a “clearance be issued…without delay, irrespective of the information which you have concerning Mr. Oppenheimer. He is absolutely essential to the project.”
Groves was right. As Norris Bradbury who would later replace Oppenheimer as the lab’s director said, “Oppenheimer could understand everything, and there were some hard physics problems here to understand.” “I’ve seen him deal incredibly well with what looked like dead end situations…his decisions… were made with a sense of dedication that moved the whole laboratory. Don’t forget what an extravagant collection of prima donnas we had here. By his own knowledge and personality he kept them inspired and moving forward.” Monk notes Oppenheimer’s, “entire life up to that point – his early interest in minerals, his determinedly wide ranging education at Harvard, his absorption in the literature and art of America, France, Germany, Italy and Holland, his mastery of several European languages, his omnivorous devouring of all aspects of theoretical physics – turned out to be the perfect preparation for the task he had been set. He was the ideal man to lead Los Alamos.” On July 16, 1945 Oppenheimer vindicated Groves’ judgement when the first atom bomb was exploded at the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert. Jubilation was measured by solemn reflection. Groves said,”…we had a sobering appreciation of what the results of our work would be.” Oppenheimer Later recalled, “We knew the world would not be the same.” He went on to quote from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Following the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the national debate turned to how to control atomic energy. Truman, the military and conservatives wanted tight US control, regarding the bomb as a secret that other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, could not figure out. Oppenheimer like other physicists felt other nations would soon be able to engineer their own bombs with their own physicists. They believed only an international agreement and control would prevent proliferation and a subsequent nuclear war. Scientists also feared military control and draconian restrictions on their ability to share information with each other and perform fundamental research. Oppenheimer wanted to put atomic energy under UN control. This public position convinced J. Edgar Hoover that Oppenheimer must be a communist agent since this would result in the Soviets getting access to US secrets. The FBI watched Oppenheimer 24/7. Despite the FBI’s dossier, Oppenheimer became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee. Oppenheimer also took a position as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
In the three years after the war, Oppenheimer focused on physics. He organized three groundbreaking US conferences that would include the advances in QED by Noble Prize winners Rabi, Lamb, Schwinger and Feynman. The first was in 1947 at Shelter Island with 23 of the world’s best physicists. Feynman later noted “There have been many conferences in the world since, but I’ve never felt any to be as important as this.” Abraham Pais recalled Oppenheimer’s role at Shelter Island, “I had heard Oppenheimer speak before but had never yet seen him in action directing a group of physicists during their scientific deliberations. At that he was simply masterful…” The second and third conferences were the Pocono and Oldstone conferences in 1948 and 1949. The three conferences would establish Schwinger’s QED approach and Feynman’s very different one and the genius of Freeman Dyson for showing how the two theories complimented each other. Back at the Institute, Oppenheimer recruited young talented scientists such as Dyson and Abraham Pais to work among luminaries. As Pais put it, “Bohr comes into my office to talk, I look out my window and see Einstein walking home with his assistant. Two offices away sits Dirac. Downstairs sits Oppenheimer.”
The years 1949 – 53 witnessed a nationwide debate about the future of nuclear weapons and the development of the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet detonation of an atom bomb in in September 1949 teed it off. Oppenheimer and many scientists wanted more openness and international agreements. Their conservative political opponents looked upon them as doing the communists bidding. Lewis Strauss, an AEC commissioner, thought Oppenheimer was a Soviet agent. In November of 1952 the US detonated a 10 megaton fusion bomb equal to 700 Hiroshima bombs. An even larger 15 megaton bomb test would follow. Oppenheimer and friends believed the fusion bomb was not a practical military weapon. Their opponents’ justification for stockpiling it was the doctrine of massive retaliation to prevent a Soviet first strike. After the Soviet H-bomb detonation in 1953, this view became entrenched.
Given the hysteria of the McCarthy period, it is not surprising that Strauss after becoming AEC chairman in 1953 pulled out all the stops to discredit Oppenheimer, challenging renewal of his security clearance. Oppenheimer fought back, but the hearing was a hatchet job and accompanied by an orchestrated propaganda campaign to paint Oppenheimer as a communist. The campaign was effective. Oppenheimer lost his clearance and his hero image among the American public. Oddly it was the TV show “See It Now” in January 1955 in which the chain smoking Edward R. Murrow interviewed the chain smoking Oppenheimer that put Oppenheimer’s reputation on the path to recovery. In 1959 Eisenhower nominated Strauss for Secretary of Commerce. In the Senate confirmation hearings, Strauss was publically humiliated by blistering attacks exposing his misconduct at the AEC. Oppenheimer went on to be awarded the AEC’s Fermi Prize by President Johnson in a ceremony in December 1963. Oppenheimer died in 1967 at the age of 63 of throat cancer.
Monk spends considerable time on Oppenheimer’s childhood, exposing him at the core. What we see is a shy exceptionally gifted child who is very insecure despite the good fortune of being born into wealth and to parents who genuinely care about him. He grew up in the Upper West Side of New York, part of an established German Jewish community that was trying to integrate and be accepted as part of Americana. His own struggle with identity reflects that. Oppenheimer’s parents belonged to the Ethical Cultural Society, a secular alternative for the Jewish community that sponsored a school providing a first rate education for Jews often barred from other fine schools.
Self-conscious about his Jewishness, Oppenheimer strove to be accepted by gentiles. He was hurt by his own social ineptness and desire to show off his brilliance. He friends were few and often represented ideals of what he would like to be. Being extraordinarily smart was not enough for Oppenheimer. He aspired to be the cultivated man that would be sought out in the best circles. At the Ethical Cultural Society school he became close friends with Francis Fergusson, a gentile from an established New Mexico family. Fergusson represented the heritage and social acceptance Oppenheimer envied. They traveled together to New Mexico which freed Oppenheimer’s spirit becoming a life long love.
Both Fergusson and Oppenheimer attended Harvard. Antisemitism was notable at Harvard as well as almost everywhere in the America of the 1920’s and combined with Oppenheimer’s own insular difficult personality kept him relatively isolated. He started in chemistry and soon discovered physics. He began devouring physics books including ones written in German which he had learned from his German born father and French which he mastered on his own. Simply submitting a list of physics books he had read Oppenheimer received permission to take with no prior physics coursework advanced graduate courses. He showed his intellectual prowess by excelling in these classes quickly impressing his professors.
Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from Harvard and enrolled at Christ’s College Cambridge to study physics being accepted as an undergraduate, a disappointment. Fergusson who attended Harvard with Oppenheimer had been accepted at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to study English literature. Oppenheimer’s forte was theoretical physics. He struggled at experimental physics which required being handy about the lab, finding it difficult to solder two copper wires together. Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish lab passed him down to the aging J. J. Thomson where Oppenheimer languished, although he did get accepted as a graduate student. His identity issues became a crisis and his behavior became bizarre. Oppenheimer’s mental instability reflected his chagrin at being unable to fit in with British upper class society as Fergusson had easily done.
Fortunately Oppenheimer was saved by the quantum mechanics revolution which was gaining steam in 1925-6. It quickly caught his interest and he developed a passion. At Cambridge Oppenheimer was exposed to the great minds of physics. He was one of few students who attended Paul Dirac’s course on recent developments in quantum mechanics and one of even fewer who understood him. Oppenheimer wrote his first paper on quantum physics and got it published in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Rutherford introduced him to Niels Bohr whose brief comments inspired Oppenheimer to resolve the difficulties he was having with his second paper. This one was noticed by Max Born, a leader in defining quantum theory, who footnoted it in one of his papers. Born went on to use Oppenheimer to translate one of his major research papers into English for publication in Nature. Oppenheimer was now considered an important up and coming young physicist.
Oppenheimer was only 22 in 1926 and did not have a PhD. Still, Born, who had many physicists clamoring to study under him, agreed to take on Oppenheimer where he taught at the University of Göttingen, a world class university. Here Oppenheimer was “inside the center” of the physics world where he would meet and interact with all the leaders in the field. Born who gave many students little personal time, gave Oppenheimer practically unlimited time. But Born’s admiration for Oppenheimer’s talents drew out Oppenheimer’s arrogance and he was resented by the other students. The self-effacing Born was a bad personality match for Oppenheimer and later Born admitted he found the relationship exasperating. At Göttingen Oppenheimer wrote two papers published in the leading quantum mechanics journal, Zeitschrift für Physik, a collaborative paper with Born regarding quantum effects on molecules that remains a classic of quantum chemistry, and as an afterthought he got his PhD.
Oppenheimer, homesick, spent five months at Harvard in 1927 before moving on to a position at Caltech. At Harvard he published what would become his most cited paper, one of the first to explore the mysterious idea of “tunneling” followed by two more. In 1928 he took leave from Caltech to return to Europe, but first visited his beloved New Mexico with his brother Frank. Here he felt in his element and he and Frank purchased a property to which he would return throughout his life. Returning to Europe Oppenheimer spent time with Einstein’s close friend Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden. In his few months there Oppenheimer remarkably learned Dutch well enough to deliver seminars in it. Ehrenfest realized he too was the wrong teacher for Oppenheimer but he knew who was. He sent Oppenheimer packing to Zurich to work under Wolfgang Pauli, famous for his exclusion principle. The blunt Pauli, never afraid to criticize, was just what Oppenheimer needed. Pauli praised a paper Oppenheimer wrote in Zurich telling Bohr it was an extension of Pauli’s work with Heisenberg on QED. In ill health or perhaps again homesick, Oppenheimer, a chain smoker with a bad cough, returned to New Mexico, a cure he had used before that always worked.
In 1929, after a rest in New Mexico, Oppenheimer began building what would be hailed the best theoretical physics program in the U.S. at the University of California at Berkeley. He also maintained his professorship at Caltech enabling him to keep up on the research there and the experimental side of physics. He stayed close to Ernest Lawrence who was single-mindedly developing the cyclotron at Berkeley. Oppenheimer chose Berkeley because it was a blank state. He began filling it with talented PhD students and postgraduate fellows from around the country, many of whom would be very successful. He worked closely with his students and postdocs authoring numerous papers with them. Oppenheimer’s many papers were noted for their originality and some broke significant new ground, but they were also noted for many careless mathematical errors. Amazingly Oppenheimer also found time to teach himself Sanskrit and explore the sacred Hindu texts, his identity issues still far from resolved.
Events in Europe brought dramatic changes. Jewish physicists left Germany in droves enriching physics departments from Copenhagen to California. Oppenheimer started following politics supporting causes particularly the Loyalists in Spain. He joined groups filled with communists and fellow travelers although he says he never joined the party nor took any direction from it. Despite political distractions these were his best years for physics research. His astrophysics papers co-written with students in 1938-9 defined the mass limits of neutron stars and predicted the existence of black holes. These are now regarded as his best work. It would be over twenty years before neutron stars were found to exist and the name black hole to be coined.
In 1939 the discovery that a uranium nucleus could be split creating enormous amounts of energy was the buzz of the physics world. Oppenheimer focused on other areas, most importantly QED. The brilliant future Nobel Prize winner Julian Schwinger could have done his postdoctoral work for just about anyone but chose Oppenheimer, becoming his research assistant. Together they wrote papers on QED that anticipated the great progress Schwinger and others would make a decade later. 1941 was the end of Oppenheimer’s creative work. He was gradually losing touch with emerging technical details as Schwinger surmised due to the time he spent as a manager and organizer. Politically Oppenheimer’s opinion of Russia was diminished by the 1938 purges and the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact in 1939, but he maintained his left wing connections. The precipitous fall of France in 1940 alarmed Oppenheimer. He now spoke to friends about the need to preserve Western civilization and criticized Russia. In 1940 Oppenheimer married Kitty Harrison who had been married to a man high up in the communist party who was killed fighting in Spain. Even though Kitty herself was not an activist, her many communist connections would bring serious scrutiny to Oppenheimer from the FBI.
In 1941 Oppenheimer learned by accident from a conversation between Ernst Lawrence and a British scientist that they were in a secret project to evaluate the feasibility of an atom bomb. Despite security concerns, through the concerted efforts of Lawrence, Oppenheimer became a consultant to the evaluation committee. In the summer of 1942 General Leslie Groves was put in charge of a project to build an atom bomb. Groves met with Lawrence, Fermi, Compton, Wigner and many other top physicists, but he felt none was a leader. But just as Max Born had immediately taken to Oppenheimer so did Groves. Groves appointed Oppenheimer to help him select a site for a central Lab and of course it was in New Mexico, on a remote mountain plateau at Los Alamos. Groves then, despite the misgivings of many, selected Oppenheimer to run the Los Alamos lab because “it became apparent that we were not going to find a better man.” Oppenheimer immediately began recruiting the top physicists and structuring the departments, even before formal appointment as Scientific Director.
Oppenheimer would be plagued by suspicions that he was engaged in Soviet espionage. He was married to a former communist party member. His former girlfriend had been a communist party member. His brother Frank had been a communist party member. Oppenheimer himself had been a member of and contributor to many communist front organizations. The FBI and military security would never stop following, tapping, and investigating Oppenheimer and all his contacts. Despite many calls for Groves to remove Oppenheimer from the project, Groves stood firm because he felt there was no one else who could manage it successfully. Oppenheimer did not make it easy on himself. While there is no evidence of Oppenheimer being engaged in espionage, he maintained his old relationships. He made up convoluted stories to protect some of them while exposing others. All of this held up Oppenheimer’s security clearance but in July 1943 Groves instructed that a “clearance be issued…without delay, irrespective of the information which you have concerning Mr. Oppenheimer. He is absolutely essential to the project.”
Groves was right. As Norris Bradbury who would later replace Oppenheimer as the lab’s director said, “Oppenheimer could understand everything, and there were some hard physics problems here to understand.” “I’ve seen him deal incredibly well with what looked like dead end situations…his decisions… were made with a sense of dedication that moved the whole laboratory. Don’t forget what an extravagant collection of prima donnas we had here. By his own knowledge and personality he kept them inspired and moving forward.” Monk notes Oppenheimer’s, “entire life up to that point – his early interest in minerals, his determinedly wide ranging education at Harvard, his absorption in the literature and art of America, France, Germany, Italy and Holland, his mastery of several European languages, his omnivorous devouring of all aspects of theoretical physics – turned out to be the perfect preparation for the task he had been set. He was the ideal man to lead Los Alamos.” On July 16, 1945 Oppenheimer vindicated Groves’ judgement when the first atom bomb was exploded at the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert. Jubilation was measured by solemn reflection. Groves said,”…we had a sobering appreciation of what the results of our work would be.” Oppenheimer Later recalled, “We knew the world would not be the same.” He went on to quote from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Following the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the national debate turned to how to control atomic energy. Truman, the military and conservatives wanted tight US control, regarding the bomb as a secret that other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, could not figure out. Oppenheimer like other physicists felt other nations would soon be able to engineer their own bombs with their own physicists. They believed only an international agreement and control would prevent proliferation and a subsequent nuclear war. Scientists also feared military control and draconian restrictions on their ability to share information with each other and perform fundamental research. Oppenheimer wanted to put atomic energy under UN control. This public position convinced J. Edgar Hoover that Oppenheimer must be a communist agent since this would result in the Soviets getting access to US secrets. The FBI watched Oppenheimer 24/7. Despite the FBI’s dossier, Oppenheimer became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee. Oppenheimer also took a position as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
In the three years after the war, Oppenheimer focused on physics. He organized three groundbreaking US conferences that would include the advances in QED by Noble Prize winners Rabi, Lamb, Schwinger and Feynman. The first was in 1947 at Shelter Island with 23 of the world’s best physicists. Feynman later noted “There have been many conferences in the world since, but I’ve never felt any to be as important as this.” Abraham Pais recalled Oppenheimer’s role at Shelter Island, “I had heard Oppenheimer speak before but had never yet seen him in action directing a group of physicists during their scientific deliberations. At that he was simply masterful…” The second and third conferences were the Pocono and Oldstone conferences in 1948 and 1949. The three conferences would establish Schwinger’s QED approach and Feynman’s very different one and the genius of Freeman Dyson for showing how the two theories complimented each other. Back at the Institute, Oppenheimer recruited young talented scientists such as Dyson and Abraham Pais to work among luminaries. As Pais put it, “Bohr comes into my office to talk, I look out my window and see Einstein walking home with his assistant. Two offices away sits Dirac. Downstairs sits Oppenheimer.”
The years 1949 – 53 witnessed a nationwide debate about the future of nuclear weapons and the development of the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet detonation of an atom bomb in in September 1949 teed it off. Oppenheimer and many scientists wanted more openness and international agreements. Their conservative political opponents looked upon them as doing the communists bidding. Lewis Strauss, an AEC commissioner, thought Oppenheimer was a Soviet agent. In November of 1952 the US detonated a 10 megaton fusion bomb equal to 700 Hiroshima bombs. An even larger 15 megaton bomb test would follow. Oppenheimer and friends believed the fusion bomb was not a practical military weapon. Their opponents’ justification for stockpiling it was the doctrine of massive retaliation to prevent a Soviet first strike. After the Soviet H-bomb detonation in 1953, this view became entrenched.
Given the hysteria of the McCarthy period, it is not surprising that Strauss after becoming AEC chairman in 1953 pulled out all the stops to discredit Oppenheimer, challenging renewal of his security clearance. Oppenheimer fought back, but the hearing was a hatchet job and accompanied by an orchestrated propaganda campaign to paint Oppenheimer as a communist. The campaign was effective. Oppenheimer lost his clearance and his hero image among the American public. Oddly it was the TV show “See It Now” in January 1955 in which the chain smoking Edward R. Murrow interviewed the chain smoking Oppenheimer that put Oppenheimer’s reputation on the path to recovery. In 1959 Eisenhower nominated Strauss for Secretary of Commerce. In the Senate confirmation hearings, Strauss was publically humiliated by blistering attacks exposing his misconduct at the AEC. Oppenheimer went on to be awarded the AEC’s Fermi Prize by President Johnson in a ceremony in December 1963. Oppenheimer died in 1967 at the age of 63 of throat cancer.
October 17, 2014
This lengthy (700 pages or 36 hours audio book) book aspires to be a comprehensive biography of Robert Oppenheimer. Monk covers more of the Oppenheimer’s work and love of physics than some other of the biographers.
Monk goes into the German-Jewish tradition into which Oppenheimer was born and the ethical cultural belief that shaped his family and education. The author claims Oppenheimer was so brilliant that Harvard University forgot its anti-Semitic discrimination. Monk follows “Oppie’s” education from Harvard, Cambridge and to Gottingen University. The author tells of Oppenheimer fluency in French and his love of French literature, he also wrote poetry and learned Sanskrit. Oppenheimer also spoke German and Dutch. In 1927 Oppenheimer co wrote with Max Born a paper entitled “On the Quantum Theory of Molecules”. This paper helped “Oppie” become known in the field of Physics.
The author cover in great detail Oppenheimer‘s teaching jobs at Caltech and the University of California Berkeley. When I took physics at UC Berkeley my professors were proud to have been students of Oppenheimer and E. Lawrence. He was able to pass on to his students his love of physics. Monk then covers the time at the lab in Los Alamos and the work on the bomb. The author covers the two pillars of Oppenheimer’s life. His scientific leadership role in WWII atomic bomb project and his status as a martyr of the McCarthy era after the 1954 security hearing that stripped him of his clearance.
The remainder of the book Monk describes Oppenheimer’s years leading the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Monk provides by far the most thorough survey yet written of Oppenheimer’s physics and his work on neutron stars and black holes. His paper he wrote in 1938-39 was considered his most important theoretical work of his career. But “Oppie” died in 1967 before astronomical discoveries made his work relevant. He lost his chance for a Nobel Prize because they cannot be given posthumously. The book kept my attention throughout the 36 hours. I read this as an audio book downloaded from Audible. Michael Goldstrom did a good job narrating the book.
Monk goes into the German-Jewish tradition into which Oppenheimer was born and the ethical cultural belief that shaped his family and education. The author claims Oppenheimer was so brilliant that Harvard University forgot its anti-Semitic discrimination. Monk follows “Oppie’s” education from Harvard, Cambridge and to Gottingen University. The author tells of Oppenheimer fluency in French and his love of French literature, he also wrote poetry and learned Sanskrit. Oppenheimer also spoke German and Dutch. In 1927 Oppenheimer co wrote with Max Born a paper entitled “On the Quantum Theory of Molecules”. This paper helped “Oppie” become known in the field of Physics.
The author cover in great detail Oppenheimer‘s teaching jobs at Caltech and the University of California Berkeley. When I took physics at UC Berkeley my professors were proud to have been students of Oppenheimer and E. Lawrence. He was able to pass on to his students his love of physics. Monk then covers the time at the lab in Los Alamos and the work on the bomb. The author covers the two pillars of Oppenheimer’s life. His scientific leadership role in WWII atomic bomb project and his status as a martyr of the McCarthy era after the 1954 security hearing that stripped him of his clearance.
The remainder of the book Monk describes Oppenheimer’s years leading the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Monk provides by far the most thorough survey yet written of Oppenheimer’s physics and his work on neutron stars and black holes. His paper he wrote in 1938-39 was considered his most important theoretical work of his career. But “Oppie” died in 1967 before astronomical discoveries made his work relevant. He lost his chance for a Nobel Prize because they cannot be given posthumously. The book kept my attention throughout the 36 hours. I read this as an audio book downloaded from Audible. Michael Goldstrom did a good job narrating the book.
August 6, 2023
this is the eighth biography of JRO i've read, and the second best (behind American Prometheus). it's difficult to write anything truly new about Oppenheimer; he's been picked pretty well clean. Monk promises to write a "scientific biography", correcting the one true major lacuna of Bird and Sherwin, but all in all there's not much one wouldn't already be aware of after reading Bernstein's Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma plus basic histories of prewar science. for all Monk's talk of mesons in the Prologue's justification, readers won't come out of this knowing even their most basic details (quark+antiquark hadronic matter, etc.) -- indeed, no serious diversion is made into particle physics, nor the relativistic and quantum effects at work in stellar remnants. i'm not sure how much of a "scientific biography" one can really be claiming to write in such a case. that said, it moves much more quickly than Prometheus, despite covering all the basic ground. chapters on the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos are pretty slim, but the years 1942--1945 have been covered in all the depth one cares to read elsewhere. a fun read, but take the full week and just read American Prometheus if you care to read anything.
July 12, 2023
I think I'm ready for the movie. And I must thank my dear physicist friend Dr. Mustafa Gündoğan who strongly recommended me this book a few years ago, based on our mutual interest in history of science. I had high expectations and this book went way beyond them!
It's difficult for me to express how much I enjoyed this book. I have tremendous respect for Ray Monk because he managed to pull such a feat: writing a page-turner about a larger than life figure, whose immense impact is difficult to quantify, is no easy task; I'm sure everyone would agree with this. Accomplishing this while not refraining from going into the scientific and technological details is a huge risk because a reader without some science, physics and technology background can get easily bored. Meshing personal details, scientific history, science itself, political history, as well as many other aspects, Monk eloquently and almost magically brought everything together in an unbelievably fluent manner. He said he spent about ten years for this book, and it shows because it's like a diamond, polished to perfection.
Some descriptions and events are so vivid and full of exciting details that I almost like I was there, witnessing them in real life. This, I must admit, is a rare feeling for me when reading a biography.
Do I recommend this book? Of course! Because by reading this, not only will you spend a great time and have fun, but you will also learn many finer details about the key scientific figures of the 20. century physics, as well as the scientific, political, and technological context in which they operated. Moreover, you will also learn a great deal about one of the great men, and his ideals about what it means to be a scientist in every sense.
It's difficult for me to express how much I enjoyed this book. I have tremendous respect for Ray Monk because he managed to pull such a feat: writing a page-turner about a larger than life figure, whose immense impact is difficult to quantify, is no easy task; I'm sure everyone would agree with this. Accomplishing this while not refraining from going into the scientific and technological details is a huge risk because a reader without some science, physics and technology background can get easily bored. Meshing personal details, scientific history, science itself, political history, as well as many other aspects, Monk eloquently and almost magically brought everything together in an unbelievably fluent manner. He said he spent about ten years for this book, and it shows because it's like a diamond, polished to perfection.
Some descriptions and events are so vivid and full of exciting details that I almost like I was there, witnessing them in real life. This, I must admit, is a rare feeling for me when reading a biography.
Do I recommend this book? Of course! Because by reading this, not only will you spend a great time and have fun, but you will also learn many finer details about the key scientific figures of the 20. century physics, as well as the scientific, political, and technological context in which they operated. Moreover, you will also learn a great deal about one of the great men, and his ideals about what it means to be a scientist in every sense.
September 21, 2024
An excellent account of Oppenheimer’s life from his childhood until his death, including building the atomic bomb, the physics behind the atomic and hydrogen bomb, the ethics, consequences, aftermath, and politics that surround the building of the bomb, political affiliations, what his peers thought of him, and his romantic relationships. I’m curious how this compares to American Prometheus🤔
July 18, 2016
I’ve been torn about how to rate and review Ray Monk’s biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. I learned a great deal from it, including the evolution of modern physics and details of Oppenheimer’s hearing that lead to his security clearance being stripped. It also led me down the path to think about the bigger picture: education, morality and justice. However, there was a definite tabloid journalism feel whenever Monk ventured beyond the physical sciences. Passing along innuendo and making unsubstantiated guesses at what other people thought really bothered me. And while Monk started me down the path to thinking about the bigger things, he never really sounded the klaxon himself. If I hadn’t brought a background to the table, I think I would have been lost.
Oppenheimer as an individual intrigued me. I relished his Renaissance approach to life. He wasn’t just a physicist, but he studied languages, read poetry and fiction, followed philosophy and religion and politics. One of his mentors at the University of Utrecht played the cello. Today’s focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and the downplaying and defunding of music and liberal arts threatens our humanity.
I think a classical education is important to understanding the world about us. Throughout history, humanity’s technology has alway outstripped its advances in morality. Without an appreciation for what differentiates us from machines, e.g. our art, literature, music, and so forth, we can never humanely use the tools we create. This is especially true of the weapons we make. Oppenheimer was called a traitor or subversive for even thinking that the Hydrogen bomb was only a weapon of genocide, something that had no military value except to create massive death. The original atom bomb paled in comparison. But free thought, speech and association, cherished on paper by the US, were all but missing in practice.
Monk also taught me a great deal about universities in the early 20th century. Many graduate students and professors could move about relatively freely, spending a year here, a few years there, especially when they were young and sough after. Oppenheimer helped create an American school of physics, gathering great minds from Europe and mentoring new homegrown talent who then spread across the nation’s universities. Within a generation, US-born and educated physicists were making groundbreaking discoveries. Oppenheimer also worked with his students, co-authoring papers and including them in cutting edge research.
But, Monk noted anti-Communist which hunts that got people fired and kept others from getting hired or receiving tenure. Happily, my alma mater, the University of Rochester, stood up against one such anticommunist witch hunt in 1949. Instead of heeding public calls and firing an assistant professor who had been accused of communist sympathies, they promoted him. Monk notes that the University displayed "a moral steadfastness that was all too rare during these troubled times" (p. 557).
Monk certainly covered a lot of material in 695 pages, plus 72 pages of notes and 22 pages of bibliography. He included a lot but it sometimes reminded me of reading Wikipedia. Monk would tell me a little about X, then switch to Y, then Z, back to X and maybe off to R for a little bit. He would always close the loop and finish all his open thought threads, but I felt like I was mentally bouncing all over the place at times. This was more prominent in the first three parts of the book. The final part, which covered his life after the end of World War II until his death, seemed more focused. I wonder if this was his core part of the book that he then grew into the larger opus.
I wish he delved deeper into Oppenheimer’s wife and children, who are mentioned only in passing and often in a derogatory manner without substantiation or elucidation. Also, he should have had a stronger critique of the red scare and its impact. I applaud Monk for unveiling the way the scare itself was used by unscrupulous people to wage their personal feuds at the expensive of others. But he never really talked about how circumscribed American rights were at this time.
In the end, I gave the book three stars and would say that it s a good history of physics and a solid jumping off point on Oppenheimer. Many have recommended Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus: The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. These two books, along with Hans Bethe’s essays The Road from Los Alamos and Jay Feldman’s Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America might be a great way to further study on Oppenheimer and these times.
Oppenheimer as an individual intrigued me. I relished his Renaissance approach to life. He wasn’t just a physicist, but he studied languages, read poetry and fiction, followed philosophy and religion and politics. One of his mentors at the University of Utrecht played the cello. Today’s focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and the downplaying and defunding of music and liberal arts threatens our humanity.
I think a classical education is important to understanding the world about us. Throughout history, humanity’s technology has alway outstripped its advances in morality. Without an appreciation for what differentiates us from machines, e.g. our art, literature, music, and so forth, we can never humanely use the tools we create. This is especially true of the weapons we make. Oppenheimer was called a traitor or subversive for even thinking that the Hydrogen bomb was only a weapon of genocide, something that had no military value except to create massive death. The original atom bomb paled in comparison. But free thought, speech and association, cherished on paper by the US, were all but missing in practice.
Monk also taught me a great deal about universities in the early 20th century. Many graduate students and professors could move about relatively freely, spending a year here, a few years there, especially when they were young and sough after. Oppenheimer helped create an American school of physics, gathering great minds from Europe and mentoring new homegrown talent who then spread across the nation’s universities. Within a generation, US-born and educated physicists were making groundbreaking discoveries. Oppenheimer also worked with his students, co-authoring papers and including them in cutting edge research.
But, Monk noted anti-Communist which hunts that got people fired and kept others from getting hired or receiving tenure. Happily, my alma mater, the University of Rochester, stood up against one such anticommunist witch hunt in 1949. Instead of heeding public calls and firing an assistant professor who had been accused of communist sympathies, they promoted him. Monk notes that the University displayed "a moral steadfastness that was all too rare during these troubled times" (p. 557).
Monk certainly covered a lot of material in 695 pages, plus 72 pages of notes and 22 pages of bibliography. He included a lot but it sometimes reminded me of reading Wikipedia. Monk would tell me a little about X, then switch to Y, then Z, back to X and maybe off to R for a little bit. He would always close the loop and finish all his open thought threads, but I felt like I was mentally bouncing all over the place at times. This was more prominent in the first three parts of the book. The final part, which covered his life after the end of World War II until his death, seemed more focused. I wonder if this was his core part of the book that he then grew into the larger opus.
I wish he delved deeper into Oppenheimer’s wife and children, who are mentioned only in passing and often in a derogatory manner without substantiation or elucidation. Also, he should have had a stronger critique of the red scare and its impact. I applaud Monk for unveiling the way the scare itself was used by unscrupulous people to wage their personal feuds at the expensive of others. But he never really talked about how circumscribed American rights were at this time.
In the end, I gave the book three stars and would say that it s a good history of physics and a solid jumping off point on Oppenheimer. Many have recommended Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus: The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. These two books, along with Hans Bethe’s essays The Road from Los Alamos and Jay Feldman’s Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America might be a great way to further study on Oppenheimer and these times.
March 12, 2023
As I finished this excruciatingly long book, I had to sit back and ponder the question - are we all just morally flawed in some way - or, just generally flawed as humans? With my background in physics and astronomy I had held in my mind that Oppenheimer was a a bit of hero - an iconoclast against the tyranny of the 1950s (which in some ways was true). But, this book changed my mind about him overall - Oppenheimer was a deeply disturbed yet brilliant man.
Disturbed? There are too many stories to tell about his younger years in the 1910s and 20s. He obviously grew up very privileged with wealthy parents that were instrumental within the Ethical Culture Society - a highly progressive group believing in the ethical growth, social justice - the essentials of civilized life based on Kantian moral law. He was also surrounded and protected only by cultured individuals and not privy to the underbelly of the world. This also isolated him from other children (he went to the Ethical Culture School). This beginning seems to have impacted three characteristics in his life - a disdain for those not as smart as he was, lack of worldly understanding and some deep psychological issues.
How did some of these issues manifest? He tried to force himself on a woman in a train carriage then falling to his knees sobbing; tried to drop his suitcase on a woman at a train station to injure her; was coerced by his mother to sleep with a female friend but ended up sobbing with her in bed; tried to kill a tutor at the university with a poisoned apple; grabbed and strangled a friend at the university. How Oppenheimer made it past those problems is befuddling (especially considering the Ethical Culture Society).
Of course, he was brilliant as well. His contributions when finally graduating into theoretical physics were nearly the top during one of the most prolific times in physics history - the developments of relativity and quantum mechanics. He had deep insights (but lacked mathematical rigor) that led to many major breakthroughs in the 1930s. His brilliance, however, didn't necessarily rub people the right way - he was very condescending with an easily bruised ego. This, of course, did not work in his favor once he was involved in the Manhattan Project and post WW2 communist witchhunt of the 1950s.
I'll leave it at that - the book is very long and very detailed and saddened me. I'm not going to go into the HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee) details since this is mostly common knowledge and the more public facing Oppenheimer. Needless to say, he was incredibly naive about his own activities and associations. Overall, I found it engaging at some points while dwelling on other points much too long. But, it is very well researched and probably one the definitive biographies of Oppenheimer overall. I give it 3.5 stars.
Disturbed? There are too many stories to tell about his younger years in the 1910s and 20s. He obviously grew up very privileged with wealthy parents that were instrumental within the Ethical Culture Society - a highly progressive group believing in the ethical growth, social justice - the essentials of civilized life based on Kantian moral law. He was also surrounded and protected only by cultured individuals and not privy to the underbelly of the world. This also isolated him from other children (he went to the Ethical Culture School). This beginning seems to have impacted three characteristics in his life - a disdain for those not as smart as he was, lack of worldly understanding and some deep psychological issues.
How did some of these issues manifest? He tried to force himself on a woman in a train carriage then falling to his knees sobbing; tried to drop his suitcase on a woman at a train station to injure her; was coerced by his mother to sleep with a female friend but ended up sobbing with her in bed; tried to kill a tutor at the university with a poisoned apple; grabbed and strangled a friend at the university. How Oppenheimer made it past those problems is befuddling (especially considering the Ethical Culture Society).
Of course, he was brilliant as well. His contributions when finally graduating into theoretical physics were nearly the top during one of the most prolific times in physics history - the developments of relativity and quantum mechanics. He had deep insights (but lacked mathematical rigor) that led to many major breakthroughs in the 1930s. His brilliance, however, didn't necessarily rub people the right way - he was very condescending with an easily bruised ego. This, of course, did not work in his favor once he was involved in the Manhattan Project and post WW2 communist witchhunt of the 1950s.
I'll leave it at that - the book is very long and very detailed and saddened me. I'm not going to go into the HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee) details since this is mostly common knowledge and the more public facing Oppenheimer. Needless to say, he was incredibly naive about his own activities and associations. Overall, I found it engaging at some points while dwelling on other points much too long. But, it is very well researched and probably one the definitive biographies of Oppenheimer overall. I give it 3.5 stars.
July 14, 2019
An immersive, powerful book. Intellectual histories - let alone intellectual biographies - are complex. When it comes to Oppenheimer, that complexity has an intensity that can injure both the writer and the reader. Monk has created a masterpiece here. This prose is tough. Confusing. Messy. Riven with paradoxes. But so memorable.
This is an immersive experience for the reader. I have been framed, shaped and grazed by this book. This book is recommended to those who would like to read about how an intellectual is formed, and how and why doubt, confusion, fear and reflection are part of a scholarly life.
This is an immersive experience for the reader. I have been framed, shaped and grazed by this book. This book is recommended to those who would like to read about how an intellectual is formed, and how and why doubt, confusion, fear and reflection are part of a scholarly life.
August 19, 2014
A biography of Robert Oppenheimer that is also a history of Jewish immigration and the inner life of second generation migrants, of quantum physics, of the Manhattan Project, of quantum electrodynamics, of McCarthy's communism hysteria, the history of theoretical physics as an institution in the United States, and much more.
One of the last polymaths, Oppenheimer could read Sanskrit and Greek, speak and read several languages (he liked to quote Baudelaire in French, and his famous quote 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds' from the Bhagavad Gita comes from his reading it in the Sanskrit), yet for all of his intelligence he had quite a few brainfarts in his time. Without his stupid and unnecessary lies in the 50s, the entire FBI communist scare theatre in which he lost his security clearance wouldn't have happened this way. His earlier physics papers had quite a few mathematical errors, but he did predict the existence of positrons and of black holes.
This book is full of small, beautiful details and inspiring stories, too many to quote here. I only have '18246 characters left'.
Recommended for: Fans of everything.
Not recommended for: People who need to see thoughts laid out in linear time. When describing the development of physical theories, Monk has a habit of jumping into the future, as in: 'The first clue towards this new particle was #{something} (20 years later, it was revealed that this particle was actually two particles). The second clue was #{something else}.' It's a bit like Holmes describing the first clue, then revealing who the murder was, and then revealing the second clue.
P.S.: Who knew that after relativity, Einstein's contributions to physics were less than minor for more than 30 years?
P.P.S.: Two quotes of Oppenheimer that are very important today.
On secrecy around the atomic bombs:
On knowing yourself:
One of the last polymaths, Oppenheimer could read Sanskrit and Greek, speak and read several languages (he liked to quote Baudelaire in French, and his famous quote 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds' from the Bhagavad Gita comes from his reading it in the Sanskrit), yet for all of his intelligence he had quite a few brainfarts in his time. Without his stupid and unnecessary lies in the 50s, the entire FBI communist scare theatre in which he lost his security clearance wouldn't have happened this way. His earlier physics papers had quite a few mathematical errors, but he did predict the existence of positrons and of black holes.
This book is full of small, beautiful details and inspiring stories, too many to quote here. I only have '18246 characters left'.
Recommended for: Fans of everything.
Not recommended for: People who need to see thoughts laid out in linear time. When describing the development of physical theories, Monk has a habit of jumping into the future, as in: 'The first clue towards this new particle was #{something} (20 years later, it was revealed that this particle was actually two particles). The second clue was #{something else}.' It's a bit like Holmes describing the first clue, then revealing who the murder was, and then revealing the second clue.
P.S.: Who knew that after relativity, Einstein's contributions to physics were less than minor for more than 30 years?
P.P.S.: Two quotes of Oppenheimer that are very important today.
On secrecy around the atomic bombs:
There is grave danger for us that these decisions have been taken on the basis of facts held secret. This is not because the men who must contribute to the decisions, or must make them, are lacking in wisdom; it is because wisdom itself cannot flourish, nor even truth be determined, without the give and take of debate and criticism. The relevant facts could be of little use to an enemy,yet they are indispensable for an understanding of questions of policy.
On knowing yourself:
It is the knowledge of the inwardness of evil, and an awareness that in our dealings with this we are very close to the center of life. It is true of us as a people that we tend to see all devils as foreigners,; it is true of us ourselves, most of us, who are not artists, that in our public life, and to a distressing extent our private life as well, we reflect and project and externalize what we cannot bear to see within us. When we are blind to the evil in ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves, and we deprive ourselves not only of our own destiny, but of any possibility of dealing with the evil in others.
September 12, 2023
A very detailed biography covering all aspects of the subject's life including the scientific theories he worked on.
December 1, 2013
This is a very fine biography of a very brilliant and very strange individual.
In his youth Oppenheimer was, to say it mildly a very deeply disturbed young man, but who managed to stabilize his personality to a certain degree.
His friend I. I. Rabi called him a collection of bright shining fragments. Despite this he was strangely charismatic.
Nonetheless, he was very charismatic, and perhaps the best possible choice for leading the Manhattan project.
There's so much in this book, I can't even begin to cover it.
Note for the literati--
Oppenheimer credits his salvation with achieving a certain uneasy balance and a forgiveness of self around the time he read Proust, a writer who more than any other gave voice to those sorts of thoughts we never quite acknowledge.
Also, there's an excellent extended review in physicsworld.com here:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/i...
(note, you may have to sign up to read the article--it's free.)
In his youth Oppenheimer was, to say it mildly a very deeply disturbed young man, but who managed to stabilize his personality to a certain degree.
His friend I. I. Rabi called him a collection of bright shining fragments. Despite this he was strangely charismatic.
Nonetheless, he was very charismatic, and perhaps the best possible choice for leading the Manhattan project.
There's so much in this book, I can't even begin to cover it.
Note for the literati--
Oppenheimer credits his salvation with achieving a certain uneasy balance and a forgiveness of self around the time he read Proust, a writer who more than any other gave voice to those sorts of thoughts we never quite acknowledge.
Also, there's an excellent extended review in physicsworld.com here:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/i...
(note, you may have to sign up to read the article--it's free.)
August 28, 2013
This biography goes so much deeper into the complexities of Robert Oppenheimer. The Washington Post says "[Monk] writes well and provides a convincing portrait of Oppie’s success and his ambivalence after the bombs were dropped on Japan. Monk gives equally detailed coverage of the postwar years of Oppenheimer’s national celebrity, followed by a gathering storm over his past and his questioning of the H-bomb ... Monk’s biography is judicious, comprehensive and reliable, and bids fair to become one of the two most important lives of Oppenheimer. It certainly puts science back squarely in the middle of that life."
October 25, 2013
A servicable biography. Focused on his education and work and politics. The work sections were interesting and the depth was good. His wife and kids are mentioned so rarely, the few mentions were annoying -- don't bother throwing in a token comment if it isn't worth discussing.
The tone of the biography was odd. It read like it was presenting a counter to something I hadn't read -- very defensive at times. The amount of time spent insisting he really was a good scientist was odd.
The tone of the biography was odd. It read like it was presenting a counter to something I hadn't read -- very defensive at times. The amount of time spent insisting he really was a good scientist was odd.
August 16, 2017
On June 29, 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission announced its decision not to reinstate the security clearance for J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bom" and, next to Alfred Einstein, the most famous scientist in the world. Oppenheimer's Promethean fall reinforced his mythic status as a man tortured by his part in developing a weapon of mass destruction like no other in the history of humankind. A popular play summed up his tragic plight by distorting his declaration that with the dropping of the bomb scientists had known sin. In fact, Oppenheimer never regretted his role in the invention and deployment of a nuclear device and sought, for many years after the war, to remain a major player in the management of America's atomic arsenal. In the end, he came to grief over his ineffectual efforts to drive public policy toward his goal of sharing nuclear knowledge with the world, and over his shame at having the hubris to think "we [scientists] knew what was good for man.” “This is not,” he concluded, “the natural business of the scientist."
But then it was largely J. Robert Oppenheimer who defined for the modern world what the natural business of a scientist should be. He was not content—like physicists such as Paul Dirac, whose development of quantum mechanics helped make nuclear bombs a reality—to adhere narrow definitions of science and scientists. Deeply immersed in literature and languages, absorbed in the study of psychology, a connoisseur of fine food and wine, the owner of luxury cars who, and a man who had his military uniform hand tailored, Oppenheimer became the impresario of science, a charismatic teacher with a cadre of young physicists who imitated his mannerisms, habits, politics, and tastes. And beginning in the 1930s after Roosevelt's election, he sought to shape public policy. Not content with mere support of left-wing causes, he could not resist rewriting Communist Party position papers and associating with communist agents, forming alliances that almost prevented him from becoming the director of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos—and then, after the war, did lead to the suspension and ultimate revocation of his security clearance.
This much readers of Oppenheimer biographies can learn without tackling Ray Monk's tome, as Monk acknowledges in his generous preface. He credits, above all, the "staggering amount of research in "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. But as Mr. Monk emphasizes, no book about Oppenheimer has attempted to assess his contributions to physics, and to explore how those contributions shape an understanding of Oppenheimer's life and career.
And so in this new biography a good deal is revealed about how Oppenheimer's mind worked, the papers he published, the students he taught, why "Oppie" (as he liked to be called) dueled with his competitors, especially Paul Dirac. At the same time, however, Mr. Monk reveals why previous biographers have not bothered with detailed descriptions of Oppenheimer's scientific work. And there is no getting round it: The summaries of work—literary or scientific—arrive dead on the page, plopped into the narrative, where they stall the story. Now, Mr. Monk probably finesses this problem about as well as a biographer can, relating Oppenheimer's work to his personality. For example, he explores Oppenheimer's stubborn effort to prove Dirac wrong because Dirac's quantum theory was incomplete, when other researchers realized that there were ways to complete Dirac's work and make him right.
Ironically, Mr. Monk's approach demonstrates that Oppenheimer's work was really on the periphery of the physics research that led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Indeed, Oppenheimer's most original contributions were to astrophysics and to the discovery of "black holes," a discovery that neither Oppenheimer nor his contemporaries were able to appreciate during his lifetime. While breakthroughs in nuclear physics excited Oppenheimer, he never explored them in his own work, and it might follow that strictly speaking, an Oppenheimer biographer need not bother with the subject’s oeuvre—if the narrative is about Oppenheimer’s part in the development of the atomic bomb.
But if the narrative is about the whole man, then why Oppenheimer did not win a Nobel Prize, and why he did not carry on his work in nuclear physics, becomes legitimate and telling parts of the story. Mr. Monk shows that what Oppenheimer enjoyed most was forming communities of scientists and shaping consensus among them. Oppenheimer had a way of bringing together the most brilliant and contentious minds, absorbing their arguments, and then disclosing a way out of disagreements and impasses. In the laboratory he was clumsy, and he did not seem to have the stamina to stay with work that would ultimately produce original results. But in the arena of science, among groups of dedicated researchers, he could weld competing factions into a smoothly functioning organization.
Oppenheimer's political and scientific intelligence made him the only possible director of the atomic bomb project. His left-wing activities were well known to the government administrators who vetted him, and J. Edgar Hoover and like-minded security officials never ceased believing that Oppenheimer was a security risk and almost certainly a communist. But Oppenheimer proved indispensable and even appealing, especially when he proposed the creation of Los Alamos, which became the kind of remote, secretive, project that governments gravitate toward. Instead of worrying about scientists at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Berkeley (Oppenheimer's fiefdom), and other institutions, the government had its own base of operations, which Oppenheimer ran with his customary efficiency and panache.
So how did it all go so wrong? One key turning point is Oppenheimer's meeting with President Truman. With half of Europe occupied by the Soviet Union, Truman was in no mood to entertain Oppenheimer's morose confession that he had "blood on his hands." An outraged Truman cut the meeting short, saying he had even more blood on his hands. What Mr. Monk does not say is that in this fateful interview with a new president, Oppenheimer's celebrated ability to empathize with his auditors and to restate their arguments so as to achieve consensus deserted him. Clearly, as far Truman was concerned, Oppenheimer was thinking only about himself and was therefore useless in a discussion of geopolitical issues.
Even worse for Oppenheimer, he was never willing to come clean about exactly what his political affiliations were, and he was therefore never above suspicion. He was slow to realize that his calls for sharing nuclear knowledge with the Soviet Union only increased suspicion that he was funneling key information to America's Cold War adversary, just as other scientists like Klaus Fuchs did. Competing for the role of top scientist, Edward Teller regarded Oppenheimer's initial skepticism about the development of a hydrogen bomb as verging on the treasonous. At a time when Senator McCarthy was heading the charge against communist subversion, Oppenheimer's characterization of himself as having been a "fellow traveler" was damning.
Although Mr. Monk touts his treatment of Oppenheimer's scientific work, the biographer's nuanced view of his subject's politics and mindset seem every bit as groundbreaking.
But then it was largely J. Robert Oppenheimer who defined for the modern world what the natural business of a scientist should be. He was not content—like physicists such as Paul Dirac, whose development of quantum mechanics helped make nuclear bombs a reality—to adhere narrow definitions of science and scientists. Deeply immersed in literature and languages, absorbed in the study of psychology, a connoisseur of fine food and wine, the owner of luxury cars who, and a man who had his military uniform hand tailored, Oppenheimer became the impresario of science, a charismatic teacher with a cadre of young physicists who imitated his mannerisms, habits, politics, and tastes. And beginning in the 1930s after Roosevelt's election, he sought to shape public policy. Not content with mere support of left-wing causes, he could not resist rewriting Communist Party position papers and associating with communist agents, forming alliances that almost prevented him from becoming the director of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos—and then, after the war, did lead to the suspension and ultimate revocation of his security clearance.
This much readers of Oppenheimer biographies can learn without tackling Ray Monk's tome, as Monk acknowledges in his generous preface. He credits, above all, the "staggering amount of research in "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. But as Mr. Monk emphasizes, no book about Oppenheimer has attempted to assess his contributions to physics, and to explore how those contributions shape an understanding of Oppenheimer's life and career.
And so in this new biography a good deal is revealed about how Oppenheimer's mind worked, the papers he published, the students he taught, why "Oppie" (as he liked to be called) dueled with his competitors, especially Paul Dirac. At the same time, however, Mr. Monk reveals why previous biographers have not bothered with detailed descriptions of Oppenheimer's scientific work. And there is no getting round it: The summaries of work—literary or scientific—arrive dead on the page, plopped into the narrative, where they stall the story. Now, Mr. Monk probably finesses this problem about as well as a biographer can, relating Oppenheimer's work to his personality. For example, he explores Oppenheimer's stubborn effort to prove Dirac wrong because Dirac's quantum theory was incomplete, when other researchers realized that there were ways to complete Dirac's work and make him right.
Ironically, Mr. Monk's approach demonstrates that Oppenheimer's work was really on the periphery of the physics research that led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Indeed, Oppenheimer's most original contributions were to astrophysics and to the discovery of "black holes," a discovery that neither Oppenheimer nor his contemporaries were able to appreciate during his lifetime. While breakthroughs in nuclear physics excited Oppenheimer, he never explored them in his own work, and it might follow that strictly speaking, an Oppenheimer biographer need not bother with the subject’s oeuvre—if the narrative is about Oppenheimer’s part in the development of the atomic bomb.
But if the narrative is about the whole man, then why Oppenheimer did not win a Nobel Prize, and why he did not carry on his work in nuclear physics, becomes legitimate and telling parts of the story. Mr. Monk shows that what Oppenheimer enjoyed most was forming communities of scientists and shaping consensus among them. Oppenheimer had a way of bringing together the most brilliant and contentious minds, absorbing their arguments, and then disclosing a way out of disagreements and impasses. In the laboratory he was clumsy, and he did not seem to have the stamina to stay with work that would ultimately produce original results. But in the arena of science, among groups of dedicated researchers, he could weld competing factions into a smoothly functioning organization.
Oppenheimer's political and scientific intelligence made him the only possible director of the atomic bomb project. His left-wing activities were well known to the government administrators who vetted him, and J. Edgar Hoover and like-minded security officials never ceased believing that Oppenheimer was a security risk and almost certainly a communist. But Oppenheimer proved indispensable and even appealing, especially when he proposed the creation of Los Alamos, which became the kind of remote, secretive, project that governments gravitate toward. Instead of worrying about scientists at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Berkeley (Oppenheimer's fiefdom), and other institutions, the government had its own base of operations, which Oppenheimer ran with his customary efficiency and panache.
So how did it all go so wrong? One key turning point is Oppenheimer's meeting with President Truman. With half of Europe occupied by the Soviet Union, Truman was in no mood to entertain Oppenheimer's morose confession that he had "blood on his hands." An outraged Truman cut the meeting short, saying he had even more blood on his hands. What Mr. Monk does not say is that in this fateful interview with a new president, Oppenheimer's celebrated ability to empathize with his auditors and to restate their arguments so as to achieve consensus deserted him. Clearly, as far Truman was concerned, Oppenheimer was thinking only about himself and was therefore useless in a discussion of geopolitical issues.
Even worse for Oppenheimer, he was never willing to come clean about exactly what his political affiliations were, and he was therefore never above suspicion. He was slow to realize that his calls for sharing nuclear knowledge with the Soviet Union only increased suspicion that he was funneling key information to America's Cold War adversary, just as other scientists like Klaus Fuchs did. Competing for the role of top scientist, Edward Teller regarded Oppenheimer's initial skepticism about the development of a hydrogen bomb as verging on the treasonous. At a time when Senator McCarthy was heading the charge against communist subversion, Oppenheimer's characterization of himself as having been a "fellow traveler" was damning.
Although Mr. Monk touts his treatment of Oppenheimer's scientific work, the biographer's nuanced view of his subject's politics and mindset seem every bit as groundbreaking.
April 10, 2023
Quite the enigma of a human. Can’t wait to see Cillian Murphy play him on screen 🙌🏼
December 19, 2017
This book was a bit laborious to get through due to alot of explainations about quantum physics and other scientific subjects. At times I felt that there was not a whole lot of biographical information being given in a book that was supposed to BE a bio on Oppy. That said, I am very glad I stuck with it and completed it, as the last third of this book was worth the earlier struggle. Most interetsing to me were the discusions and personal emotions of all scientists involved in the Manhattan Project in the aftermath of the bomb having been used.
I had read Ray Monk's two volume bio of Bertrand Russell, and found those tomes much more readable, but given the subject matter in this book, kudos to Monk for his in depth research, taking difficult information, and trying to make it a bit more understandable to the general reader.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the history of the development of atomic power.
I had read Ray Monk's two volume bio of Bertrand Russell, and found those tomes much more readable, but given the subject matter in this book, kudos to Monk for his in depth research, taking difficult information, and trying to make it a bit more understandable to the general reader.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the history of the development of atomic power.
September 24, 2018
Ray Monk notes in his preface here that previous biographies of Oppenheimer hadn’t dealt much with Oppenheimer’s work in physics before he was involved in the atomic bomb project, and he more than makes up for that deficit in his book. And he clearly has taken some pains to become reasonably fluent in the science involved. It’s an admirable effort, but it makes for a dry first third of the book. Things pick up once the atomic bomb project begins. I must say the book seems very even handed - no one comes off particularly well in it.
August 18, 2023
Amazing book!
November 18, 2023
Even after reading this long bio I still don't feel I have much understanding of this man who seems full of contradictions. But I have to thank him. As someone was quoted on p. 474: "There were an awful lot of guys who weren't looking forward to landing on the Japanese beaches." That included my father.
May 6, 2021
One of the best biographies I've read. Well-written and enjoyable if somewhat tragic.
August 18, 2023
Very detailed biography of Oppenheimer. Recommended.
October 30, 2023
DNFing bc I chose happiness (I'm still gonna day I read it bc i suffered theought those 100 pages)
November 15, 2024
Wat een boek. Zeker een aanrader als je een zieke nerd bent
September 14, 2023
Sarebbe stato perfetto se fosse stato la metà. Nelle biografie occorre pesare con cura i dettagli e le storie incrociate, altrimenti finisci per fare un mattone di 1000 pagine, vero Monk?
April 13, 2023
Brilliant! A pleasure to read for the young physics and history enthusiast. Monk's intensive research (which I have never seen paralleled in a non-academic title) cannot go overstated nor did it go to waste. I absolutely loved learning every little fact brought to light, from Oppenheimer's New York City youth to his final years at Princeton. His intellect and personality were given a complete treatment. Oppenheimer's successes and failures are made understandable through the rich descriptions of his acquaintances and environments and so much is tied back to the author's guiding theme: "the center". Monk expertly captured the feelings of triumph, heartbreak, regret, and humor throughout this great physicist's life. I loved this biography more than I ever would have expected.
January 19, 2026
So much better than Kai Bird’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Here’s why.
Physics. It’s the physics, stupid.
In Bird’s book, you could be forgiven, as a reader, for an impression of Oppenheimer (RO) becoming leader of the Manhattan Project mainly on the strength of his personality and connections. There is an overweening focus on RO’s connection with Communist front organizations, with whom he talked, and when he did so. And lots about Jean Tatlock and his other women friends. The making of the bomb does have some allusive technical drama, but the trail of decadal discoveries, that made it all possible, is absent.
In this Monk book, The Manhattan Project doesn’t get started until about halfway through. I was listening at 0.85 mostly just to savor the prose. To understand Oppie’s overall makeup, one must understand something about Ethical Culture.
Kant: act only in accordance with that maxim, that at that same time you can will that it will become a universal law. “Do as you will be done by,” or “Do to others what you will be happy to have done to you.” Adler of Ethical Culture: “Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature, of the other.” One brings out the spiritual personality by awakening in other people a sense of the sublime, of the infinite. Art is able to do this, Adler emphasizes, since it is a high endeavor, and true disinterestedness is the distinguishing mark of every high endeavor. Another Adler maxim: “not religion as a duty, but duty as a religion.” Monk, like other biographers, draws connections between such Ethical Culture teachings of RO’s upbringing, to explain some patterns of behavior. “In place of fun, achievement,” and “working on difficult physics with the work being the end goal, rather than the solution to the physics problem itself.”
Asking whether RO was a communist, writes Monk, is the same as asking whether he was a German Jew. He means that it all depends on your definitions. If you define Communist as “one who pays dues and carries a CP membership card,” then probably “no”. Just as RO was not at any time a German citizen, he never paid CP dues. Just as he never participated in Jewish faith rituals, he never carried a CP membership card. But, he gave considerable sums of money to certain individuals with the obvious understanding that it would be used directly by the CP. And he attended meetings where the CP “party line” was disseminated and discussed. There is no evidence of disloyalty to the United States, provided one’s definition of “loyalty” can include something like “abstractly desiring radical policy change in service of social justice.”
For the biographer, RO can be the “slippery bastard” as a 1950s FBI man characterized him. Not a supporter of the CP but donating to it up to 7% of his income. Not remembering by name his school friend Francis Fergusen, but also able to say, in some other context, that “he is to this day one of my closest friends, and our paths have crossed often.” This latter is an inconsequential matter, yet typical of the kind of RO statement that can only be true with reference to highly parsed definitions found somewhere in RO’s head.
Fergusen is one who provides a narrative of a mentally unstable RO at university. He says that RO “began to get very queer.” He says this, having already recounted episodes of Oppenheimer A) forcing himself upon a woman in a train carriage, B) attempting to injure that woman by dropping a suitcase on her, C) sobbing at the prospect of sex with an old school friend, D) attempting to murder his university tutor by presenting him with a poisoned apple. “Began?”
Oppenheimer affected modesty, but at the same time, he always wanted to impress, and this made him insufferable to many, and in many different contexts. Here he is on the subject of discipline, in a letter to his brother Frank: “I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small, but precious, measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces.
Oh really. “Accidents of incarnation”? “Detachment which preserves the world which it renounces”? To some, this sounds like obscurantist postmodern twaddle, and, like a certain camp of his contemporaries who considered him as a poseur, I refuse to be overawed by such gnomic constructions.
Trouble was, RO combined this kind of literary wankery with actually being right, and it made him magnetic to many and intimidating to some. Those intimidated by him included the physicist David Bohm, who was nominally his PhD adviser in Göttingen, [sounds like “Gertingham”] but to whom Opje was prone to saying stuff like “this [math] is good; did you do it yourself??”
Paul Dirac recognized RO’s literary skills but disapproved of their use in a science context, dryly commenting, “in science you want to say something nobody knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something that everybody knows already, in words that nobody can understand.
Isidor Rabi thought that Oppenheimer was over-educated in those fields which lie outside the scientific tradition: Hindu religion in particular resulted in a feeling for the universe, that surrounded him almost like a fog. He saw physics clearly, when looking toward what had already been done. But at the border, he tended to feel that there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was. He was insufficiently confident in the power of the intellectual tools he already possessed, and did not drive his thought to the very end, because he felt instinctively that new ideas and new methods were necessary to go further than he and his students had already gone.
Monk does a great job of drawing out the heroic physics discoveries of the 1930s. As late as 1938, scientists knew that they could synthesize heavier elements by bombarding elemental samples with neutrons. They thought they could make a heavier version of uranium in the same way. The evidence for fission of the uranium nucleus was, at first, simply a perplexing experimental result by Otto Frisch. But poor Frisch: by the time he got his paper published, Bohr had blabbed so much that the news was actually in the newspapers. The idea of fission took the physics world by storm, and Oppenheimer saw at once – almost literally, at once – that a bomb could be possible.
As the story of the Manhattan Project unfolds, Monk spends a good deal of time on the physics problems and therefore, on the contributions of the many physicists who collectively solved these problems. How to produce U-235. What is its critical mass. How to produce plutonium. What is its critical mass. Gun-style versus implosion-style detonation. Damping of neutrons to enhance the chain reaction. All fascinating, and Oppenheimer is often in the background – but all the physicists involved gave him great credit for understanding everything and for synthesizing and identifying the important points to work on.
Much later, Monk draws out the “communism” theme at a length similar to Bird’s treatment, but unlike Bird, Monk is more apt to discredit the suspicion that still clouds Oppenheimer’s reputation to this day. Despite all the wiretapping and uncountable interviews of atomic scientists, there never has been any evidence of Oppenheimer passing, or causing to be passed, information to the Soviets. Later aspersions that he delayed development of the H-bomb were formulated almost post-hoc to the first successful H-bomb test, the very fact of which, so close on the heels of the decision to pursue it, must negate the idea.
Despite that he characterizes Oppenheimer as unquestionably and unimpeachably loyal to the US, Monk does show how Oppenheimer largely has himself to blame for the suspicions that piled up. He could not have foreseen the far-reaching consequences of an FBI interview he did in 1943, for which he was woefully unprepared, and during which he inexplicably invented (by his own admission) a “cock and bull” story involving Haakon Chevalier and supposedly multiple unnamed others.
What makes this cock-and-bull story all the worse is how it smeared the reputations of trusting friends, Chevalier primarily, but also others. Chevalier was flabbergasted to learn, upon publication of the AEC Oppenheimer security hearings, how Oppenheimer was the source of the tale that had dogged his career for more than a decade, despite his maintenance all the while of untrammeled close affection.
Something his detractors could never accept: Oppenheimer was a man capable of changing his mind. He changed his mind about Russia, and about communism. Another incomprehensible idea was that Oppenheimer was driven to dutiful service to his country, even in opposition to his personal opinions. Notably, he strongly disagreed with the strategic policy of “massive retaliation,” and advocated a principle of openness and sharing of atomic science: positions which were unfathomable to the FBI. He opposed further nuclear testing, even as his Berkely lab pushed forward to the first successful hydrogen bomb.
Lesser men saw only their own venality reflected in Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer, for all his merits, seems to have badly miscalculated that his undenied interpersonal charm could be extrapolated to the entire FBI and security apparatus.
A complicated and wonderful book, like its subject.
Physics. It’s the physics, stupid.
In Bird’s book, you could be forgiven, as a reader, for an impression of Oppenheimer (RO) becoming leader of the Manhattan Project mainly on the strength of his personality and connections. There is an overweening focus on RO’s connection with Communist front organizations, with whom he talked, and when he did so. And lots about Jean Tatlock and his other women friends. The making of the bomb does have some allusive technical drama, but the trail of decadal discoveries, that made it all possible, is absent.
In this Monk book, The Manhattan Project doesn’t get started until about halfway through. I was listening at 0.85 mostly just to savor the prose. To understand Oppie’s overall makeup, one must understand something about Ethical Culture.
Kant: act only in accordance with that maxim, that at that same time you can will that it will become a universal law. “Do as you will be done by,” or “Do to others what you will be happy to have done to you.” Adler of Ethical Culture: “Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature, of the other.” One brings out the spiritual personality by awakening in other people a sense of the sublime, of the infinite. Art is able to do this, Adler emphasizes, since it is a high endeavor, and true disinterestedness is the distinguishing mark of every high endeavor. Another Adler maxim: “not religion as a duty, but duty as a religion.” Monk, like other biographers, draws connections between such Ethical Culture teachings of RO’s upbringing, to explain some patterns of behavior. “In place of fun, achievement,” and “working on difficult physics with the work being the end goal, rather than the solution to the physics problem itself.”
Asking whether RO was a communist, writes Monk, is the same as asking whether he was a German Jew. He means that it all depends on your definitions. If you define Communist as “one who pays dues and carries a CP membership card,” then probably “no”. Just as RO was not at any time a German citizen, he never paid CP dues. Just as he never participated in Jewish faith rituals, he never carried a CP membership card. But, he gave considerable sums of money to certain individuals with the obvious understanding that it would be used directly by the CP. And he attended meetings where the CP “party line” was disseminated and discussed. There is no evidence of disloyalty to the United States, provided one’s definition of “loyalty” can include something like “abstractly desiring radical policy change in service of social justice.”
For the biographer, RO can be the “slippery bastard” as a 1950s FBI man characterized him. Not a supporter of the CP but donating to it up to 7% of his income. Not remembering by name his school friend Francis Fergusen, but also able to say, in some other context, that “he is to this day one of my closest friends, and our paths have crossed often.” This latter is an inconsequential matter, yet typical of the kind of RO statement that can only be true with reference to highly parsed definitions found somewhere in RO’s head.
Fergusen is one who provides a narrative of a mentally unstable RO at university. He says that RO “began to get very queer.” He says this, having already recounted episodes of Oppenheimer A) forcing himself upon a woman in a train carriage, B) attempting to injure that woman by dropping a suitcase on her, C) sobbing at the prospect of sex with an old school friend, D) attempting to murder his university tutor by presenting him with a poisoned apple. “Began?”
Oppenheimer affected modesty, but at the same time, he always wanted to impress, and this made him insufferable to many, and in many different contexts. Here he is on the subject of discipline, in a letter to his brother Frank: “I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small, but precious, measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces.
Oh really. “Accidents of incarnation”? “Detachment which preserves the world which it renounces”? To some, this sounds like obscurantist postmodern twaddle, and, like a certain camp of his contemporaries who considered him as a poseur, I refuse to be overawed by such gnomic constructions.
Trouble was, RO combined this kind of literary wankery with actually being right, and it made him magnetic to many and intimidating to some. Those intimidated by him included the physicist David Bohm, who was nominally his PhD adviser in Göttingen, [sounds like “Gertingham”] but to whom Opje was prone to saying stuff like “this [math] is good; did you do it yourself??”
Paul Dirac recognized RO’s literary skills but disapproved of their use in a science context, dryly commenting, “in science you want to say something nobody knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something that everybody knows already, in words that nobody can understand.
Isidor Rabi thought that Oppenheimer was over-educated in those fields which lie outside the scientific tradition: Hindu religion in particular resulted in a feeling for the universe, that surrounded him almost like a fog. He saw physics clearly, when looking toward what had already been done. But at the border, he tended to feel that there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was. He was insufficiently confident in the power of the intellectual tools he already possessed, and did not drive his thought to the very end, because he felt instinctively that new ideas and new methods were necessary to go further than he and his students had already gone.
Monk does a great job of drawing out the heroic physics discoveries of the 1930s. As late as 1938, scientists knew that they could synthesize heavier elements by bombarding elemental samples with neutrons. They thought they could make a heavier version of uranium in the same way. The evidence for fission of the uranium nucleus was, at first, simply a perplexing experimental result by Otto Frisch. But poor Frisch: by the time he got his paper published, Bohr had blabbed so much that the news was actually in the newspapers. The idea of fission took the physics world by storm, and Oppenheimer saw at once – almost literally, at once – that a bomb could be possible.
As the story of the Manhattan Project unfolds, Monk spends a good deal of time on the physics problems and therefore, on the contributions of the many physicists who collectively solved these problems. How to produce U-235. What is its critical mass. How to produce plutonium. What is its critical mass. Gun-style versus implosion-style detonation. Damping of neutrons to enhance the chain reaction. All fascinating, and Oppenheimer is often in the background – but all the physicists involved gave him great credit for understanding everything and for synthesizing and identifying the important points to work on.
Much later, Monk draws out the “communism” theme at a length similar to Bird’s treatment, but unlike Bird, Monk is more apt to discredit the suspicion that still clouds Oppenheimer’s reputation to this day. Despite all the wiretapping and uncountable interviews of atomic scientists, there never has been any evidence of Oppenheimer passing, or causing to be passed, information to the Soviets. Later aspersions that he delayed development of the H-bomb were formulated almost post-hoc to the first successful H-bomb test, the very fact of which, so close on the heels of the decision to pursue it, must negate the idea.
Despite that he characterizes Oppenheimer as unquestionably and unimpeachably loyal to the US, Monk does show how Oppenheimer largely has himself to blame for the suspicions that piled up. He could not have foreseen the far-reaching consequences of an FBI interview he did in 1943, for which he was woefully unprepared, and during which he inexplicably invented (by his own admission) a “cock and bull” story involving Haakon Chevalier and supposedly multiple unnamed others.
What makes this cock-and-bull story all the worse is how it smeared the reputations of trusting friends, Chevalier primarily, but also others. Chevalier was flabbergasted to learn, upon publication of the AEC Oppenheimer security hearings, how Oppenheimer was the source of the tale that had dogged his career for more than a decade, despite his maintenance all the while of untrammeled close affection.
Something his detractors could never accept: Oppenheimer was a man capable of changing his mind. He changed his mind about Russia, and about communism. Another incomprehensible idea was that Oppenheimer was driven to dutiful service to his country, even in opposition to his personal opinions. Notably, he strongly disagreed with the strategic policy of “massive retaliation,” and advocated a principle of openness and sharing of atomic science: positions which were unfathomable to the FBI. He opposed further nuclear testing, even as his Berkely lab pushed forward to the first successful hydrogen bomb.
Lesser men saw only their own venality reflected in Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer, for all his merits, seems to have badly miscalculated that his undenied interpersonal charm could be extrapolated to the entire FBI and security apparatus.
A complicated and wonderful book, like its subject.
May 1, 2014
A short addition to this excellent book is Freeman Dyson's review of it in the New York Review of Books. I would recommend seeking it out for Dyson's take on the man he worked with.
This is my first biography of the man, so whatever superlatives I praise on the book will not be based on other books I have read and what I know of his life. I didn't know anything before coming here. After finishing, I came out with a full portrait of the man, and a comprehensive look at his life and times.
Monk goes into his family's history and the larger history of Jews in America as a way of explaining the psychological problems Oppenheimer had. As a kid, he was very socially awkward. He was a loner. He was brilliant but could not socially trade in on that, and he always felt the outsider. Even in college and at grad school in Cambridge, where, allegedly, his mental problems made him try to poison his teacher.
But that changed when he went to New Mexico, and then Germany as a post grad. There he was at the center of the great advancements in physics taking place. The birth of quantum physics. Here Monk fulfills his thesis laid out in his introduction by talking about the science of Oppenheimer's work and laying out a little primer on quantum physics. For those new to the topic, there is a rich bibliography one can take advantage of.
Instead of summarizing the book, I will just mention the two great areas Monk describes in depth: Oppenheimer's time at Los Alamos as they try to build an atomic weapon. And his security problems later during the McCarthy period where his loyalty to his country was questioned. Both could be--and have been--books on their own. But Monk goes deep enough into them to satisfy. Given the hundreds of pages of intimate biography Monk has laid out before, when some officials keep insisting that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy, you shake your head in incredulity.
In Dyson's words, Oppenheimer was the "good soldier" and this is reflected after the world had created weapons of mass destruction. He never regretted working on the bomb, because he felt that to do so would no longer make him a loyal American. But he did try to limit their use, wanting to share the technical details with the Soviet Union so that both sides would know of their destructive power and try not to get in wars again. His advice wasn't followed by government officials and certainly not by the military which went on to develop insane nuclear war plans that would kill millions if carried out.
Overall, this is a very good book with perfect telling of history. Monk is a professor of philosophy but could be a historian, so fine is his investigation and look at all the evidence of the time and of this very complicated man.
This is my first biography of the man, so whatever superlatives I praise on the book will not be based on other books I have read and what I know of his life. I didn't know anything before coming here. After finishing, I came out with a full portrait of the man, and a comprehensive look at his life and times.
Monk goes into his family's history and the larger history of Jews in America as a way of explaining the psychological problems Oppenheimer had. As a kid, he was very socially awkward. He was a loner. He was brilliant but could not socially trade in on that, and he always felt the outsider. Even in college and at grad school in Cambridge, where, allegedly, his mental problems made him try to poison his teacher.
But that changed when he went to New Mexico, and then Germany as a post grad. There he was at the center of the great advancements in physics taking place. The birth of quantum physics. Here Monk fulfills his thesis laid out in his introduction by talking about the science of Oppenheimer's work and laying out a little primer on quantum physics. For those new to the topic, there is a rich bibliography one can take advantage of.
Instead of summarizing the book, I will just mention the two great areas Monk describes in depth: Oppenheimer's time at Los Alamos as they try to build an atomic weapon. And his security problems later during the McCarthy period where his loyalty to his country was questioned. Both could be--and have been--books on their own. But Monk goes deep enough into them to satisfy. Given the hundreds of pages of intimate biography Monk has laid out before, when some officials keep insisting that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy, you shake your head in incredulity.
In Dyson's words, Oppenheimer was the "good soldier" and this is reflected after the world had created weapons of mass destruction. He never regretted working on the bomb, because he felt that to do so would no longer make him a loyal American. But he did try to limit their use, wanting to share the technical details with the Soviet Union so that both sides would know of their destructive power and try not to get in wars again. His advice wasn't followed by government officials and certainly not by the military which went on to develop insane nuclear war plans that would kill millions if carried out.
Overall, this is a very good book with perfect telling of history. Monk is a professor of philosophy but could be a historian, so fine is his investigation and look at all the evidence of the time and of this very complicated man.
March 18, 2018
This is one of three biographies I’ve read of Robert Oppenheimer, including the Pulitzer Prize winner “American Prometheus” a few years ago. And although in the beginning I wasn’t sure I was going to like this one, it soon drew me in and I thought it was excellent. Oppenheimer was beloved and reviled, but even those who were drawn to him were never sure they knew him. This has stymied biographers, who don’t agree on how to interpret his choices and actions, much less what he may have been feeling at pivotal moments in his life. Monk’s premise—based on views expressed to him by one of Oppenheimer’s closest and lifelong friends and colleagues, Isidore Rabi—was that Oppenheimer lacked a cohesive sense of identity. As the son of a secular German Jew, Oppenheimer didn’t feel Jewish, but he was treated as one by others. This made him feel like an outsider and perhaps as a counter-balance to this he developed a passionate love of his country. But he was never the “my country right or wrong” kind of patriot; he felt it was his duty to criticize when the US went wrong. His lack of identity also caused him to constantly seek outside himself and the way he was raised in order to create one: hence the study of Sanskrit and Hinduism. But it never stuck; it never felt wholly real to him. And perhaps as compensation he felt an intense desire to be at the center of physics and later government.
That is Monk’s premise, and by the end of the book he had convinced me of that. However, in the middle he almost seems to forget that. Although this biography is comprehensive, it focuses more on Oppenheimer’s work life than his personal life, with a heavy emphasis on physics. This book is a great companion to “American Prometheus.” Read them both!
That is Monk’s premise, and by the end of the book he had convinced me of that. However, in the middle he almost seems to forget that. Although this biography is comprehensive, it focuses more on Oppenheimer’s work life than his personal life, with a heavy emphasis on physics. This book is a great companion to “American Prometheus.” Read them both!
May 4, 2014
He is a human being like the rest of us with some remarkable interests. This was a wonderful book for shedding light on, and expanding my understanding of the Manhattan Project. That is a pretty cool thing, being a Feynman fan it is cool to get stories that cross paths with his life line. This book gives us a peek into the lives of other great physicists of that age too which I also enjoyed. It is written well enough to have you emotionally attached and sympathizing for him as the course of his life is unfolded in such a seemingly complete way. Bravo to Ray Monk! If while reading a book I am brought to empathetic tears I am a fan. This book did that for me, as well as educated me on historical and physical matters concerning some of the most exciting parts of United States history.
Buy this!
Buy this!
March 27, 2017
This should be a superb book: Monk is a first rate biographer and Oppenheimer led an interesting life, in the middle of the physics revolution of the mid/ late 1920, running Los Alamos, getting caught up in the McArthyite witch hunts of the the early 50s. However, it is just too long: 670 pages which frequently go into too much detail, confuse the reader with names, and slow up 'the plot'. It's a book, really, for those people who know about and care about the fine details of whether Oppenheimer did or did not deserve to have his security revoked in 54. Good, overall, but less would have been more.
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