Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  Born was at that time a forty-three-year old professor at one of the most distinguished universities in the world, at the height of his career, having, in the preceding few years, published work of fundamental, Nobel Prize-winning importance – work that persuaded brilliant young physicists from all over the world to come to Göttingen to study with him. Oppenheimer, meanwhile, was a twenty-two-year-old student, recently recovered from a severe mental illness, who was entirely unknown to the world at large and whose publications to date numbered just two articles. From the point of view of mathematical competence, Born had taken a PhD in mathematics, examined by David Hilbert, widely recognised as the greatest mathematician of his day, who regarded Born as a student of exceptional mathematical ability. Born was also regarded by his peers in theoretical physics as a scientist whose greatest strength was his facility with difficult and esoteric mathematics. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, had not yet taken a PhD in either mathematics or physics, and, though regarded as an undergraduate as someone who, in Percy Bridgman’s words, had ‘much mathematical power’, acknowledged himself that there were significant gaps in his mathematical education. His first published paper had been marred by mathematical errors and throughout his life he would have a reputation among physicists as someone prone to mistakes in mathematical calculations. Objectively, there was no reason whatsoever for Born to look up to Oppenheimer, particularly with regard to his mathematical acumen, nor was there any excuse for Oppenheimer to look down on Born. That, within a month of knowing each other, their relationship developed in a way that made it possible for Oppenheimer to be condescending towards Born about his mathematical competence says a great deal about the personalities of both men; about Born’s insecurities and about Oppenheimer’s ability to, as it were, cast a spell.

  Another key to understanding Oppenheimer’s self-assurance at Göttingen, compared to the self-doubts and anxieties he had felt at Cambridge, may lie in the contrast between the two universities themselves. The University of Göttingen, though not the oldest in Germany (Heidelberg, Leipzig and several others pre-date it by hundreds of years), is certainly one of the most prestigious and is commonly held to be Germany’s equivalent to Cambridge (with Heidelberg its equivalent to Oxford). What would have struck Oppenheimer when he arrived in Göttingen in the summer of 1926, however, are the many ways in which it is very unlike Cambridge. These differences are immediately apparent: the University of Göttingen’s oldest and grandest buildings are elegant and graceful, rather than Gothic and ecclesiastical, betraying its origins in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, rather than in thirteenth-century monastic scholarship. Not being a collegiate university, it has no dons, fellows or high table. It has its own famous and celebrated esoteric rituals (the most famous of which is that PhD students should, on passing their oral examination, be carried by cart to the market square in the centre of town, where they have to kiss the statue of the Gänseliesel, the goose girl), but it does not have the weight of 700 years of tradition bearing down upon it.

  Moreover, the post-war atmosphere of a defeated nation is very different from that of the victors. At Göttingen in the 1920s one would not have been aware of living in a carefree ‘Jazz Age’ or the ‘Roaring Twenties’; neither was there any parallel to the calculatedly unconventional, self-consciously effete aestheticism that characterised British university life in the post-war period: the world depicted, for example, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The atmosphere at Göttingen in the 1920s was emphatically not ‘gay’. Rather, as Oppenheimer later put it, it was ‘bitter, sullen . . . discontent and angry and loaded with all those ingredients which were later to produce a major disaster’. Göttingen was, as this description hints, fertile ground for the then-burgeoning Nazi movement. In 1922, one of the very first branches of the Nazi Party was set up there and three years later, just a year before Oppenheimer arrived, a chemistry student named Achim Gercke, later a key figure in the Nazi movement, began to compile a list of Jewish professors at the university, so that, when the Nazis came to power, they would immediately know whom to expel in the name of racial purity.

  The portentous sullenness created by such racial hatred was felt deeply by Oppenheimer, who, after less than a year, was glad to leave Göttingen. And yet, despite all this, for the nine months or so that he was there, Oppenheimer thrived at Göttingen as conspicuously as he had floundered at Cambridge. The anger, the resentment, the increasingly vehement and vicious anti-Semitism, though of course extremely unpleasant, were not, as it turned out, as debilitating or oppressive as the ‘excellence’ at Cambridge had been. At Göttingen, no matter what else he had to endure, he did not have to deal with people who mixed with dukes, who felt comfortable at high table, and who discussed literature and philosophy with internationally renowned French intellectuals. Rather, at Göttingen, he was the one who intimidated people with his social, intellectual and cultural pre-eminence, as exhibited by his ostentatious wealth, his mastery of the French language and French poetry, his astonishingly wide-ranging knowledge and his refined taste in everything from literature to clothes, architecture to hand luggage.

  If anyone at Göttingen seemed aristocratic, it was Oppenheimer himself, who was elaborately well mannered in an almost courtly fashion and seemed to take towards his fellow students an attitude of noblesse oblige. Word got out among the other graduate students that, if you admired any of Oppenheimer’s possessions, he would feel obliged to present it to you as a gift. Soon after he arrived at Göttingen he and some other students travelled by train to Hamburg to attend a seminar. Among the group was a doctoral student named Charlotte Riefenstahl (no relation to the film-maker Leni Riefenstahl), who, when the group’s luggage was collected together at the platform, could not help noticing a very fine, and obviously extremely expensive, pigskin bag, which looked out of place among the cheap and battered suitcases surrounding it. When she asked whose it was, she received the answer: ‘Who else but Oppenheimer’s.’ Intrigued, she sought out Oppenheimer, sat next to him on the train home and, somewhat to his bafflement, complimented him on his beautiful luggage. Thus began a friendship that Oppenheimer, in his courtly way, tried unsuccessfully to turn into a romance, and, sure enough, when he left Göttingen, he insisted on giving his pigskin bag to Fräulein Riefenstahl.

  Post-war Göttingen provided Oppenheimer with plenty of opportunities for condescension, full as it was with people who had fallen on hard times. Among those was the family with whom Oppenheimer lodged. At Cambridge he had complained of the ‘miserable hole’ he lodged in; at Gottingen, his lodgings were in a large and comfortable house on Giesmarlandstrasse owned by a recently impoverished family. The family were the Carios, who, Oppenheimer later remembered, ‘had the typical bitterness on which the Nazi movement rested’. Dr Cario was a physician who, having lost his savings as a result of post-war inflation, also lost his job when he was disqualified for malpractice. To make a living and to keep their spacious home, the family was forced to take lodgers, which was clearly a source of resentment and humiliation for them.

  Among those lodgers were two other physicists, Karl T. Compton and Edward Condon (the connection between the Cario family and the physics department may have been made through Dr Cario’s son, who was a physics student). Condon was a couple of years older than Oppenheimer, and, on the face of it at least, further advanced academically, having completed his PhD at Berkeley that summer. Like many other postdoctoral American physicists, he decided to come to Germany to study with the pioneers of quantum mechanics. He came quickly to regret his choice of Göttingen, finding that Max Born, with whom he had wanted to study, was unwilling to spare him much time or attention. As Born remembers it: ‘The Americans were too numerous for me to have much time for all of them.’

  Some of them, such as Condon, were therefore disgruntled. He complained about everything in Göttingen: the primitive digs without a proper bath, the food in the restaurants, the bad bus services, etc., and last but not least the overwork
ed professor who had so little time for him.

  It was not an easy time for Condon. His only income was a small postdoctoral fellowship, and, though just twenty-four, he had a wife and baby to support. Such pressures were entirely alien to Oppenheimer, who did nothing to disguise his own great wealth and took an uncomprehendingly lofty view of Condon’s domestic commitments. An incident that stayed in Condon’s mind, and that he relayed many years later, concerns an occasion when Oppenheimer invited him and his wife, Emilie, for a walk. Emilie explained that she had to refuse the invitation because she had to look after their infant child. ‘All right,’ replied Oppenheimer, ‘we’ll leave you to your peasant tasks.’

  Though clearly intended as a joke, such displays of faux-aristocratic hauteur were, from Condon’s point of view, irritating rather than amusing, but what Condon found even worse was Oppenheimer’s determination to impress upon everybody at Göttingen just how very clever he was. ‘Trouble is,’ Condon once remarked, ‘that Oppie is so quick on the trigger intellectually that he puts the other guy at a disadvantage. And, dammit, he is always right, or at least right enough.’ Oppenheimer did not, like Condon, arrive at Göttingen with a doctorate. However, what Oppenheimer did have – and what Condon was never to have, but what he most craved at Göttingen – was Max Born’s admiration and respect. ‘He and Born became very close friends,’ Condon later remembered, ‘and saw a great deal of each other, so much so, that Born did not see much of the other theoretical physics students who had come there to work with him.’

  Born’s respect for Oppenheimer was clear to everyone at Göttingen and seemed to elevate him above his fellow students. But, having got away with taking a condescending attitude towards Born himself, it was not only his fellow postgraduates and postdoctoral students like Condon that Oppenheimer felt able to look down upon, but also established physicists such as his other co-lodger, Karl T. Compton. Compton was not an easy target for superciliousness. He came from an extremely distinguished family; his father, Elias Compton, was dean of Wooster University, and his brother, William, would later become president of the State College of Washington. His other brother, Arthur, was a world-renowned experimental physicist, with whose work Oppenheimer would certainly have been familiar. Arthur Compton’s most famous work was his discovery in 1922 of the ‘scattering’ of X-rays, a discovery for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 and, since 1923, he had been professor of physics at the University of Chicago. Though Arthur did not lodge with the Cario family, he, like his brother Karl, was spending the year 1926–7 in Göttingen. In his memoir, Atomic Quest, he recalls how he met Oppenheimer ‘when he was a member of the colony of American students of James Franck and Max Born at Göttingen’, and describes him as ‘one of the very best interpreters of the mathematical theories to those of us who were working more directly with the experiments’. Coming from the man about to win the Nobel Prize, this is an extraordinary compliment to pay a twenty-two-year-old who had not yet completed his PhD thesis.

  Though not a Nobel laureate, Karl Compton himself was, when Oppenheimer met him, an established physicist and a man of some eminence. Thirty-nine years old, he was a full professor at Princeton and a key figure in the American scientific establishment. He was already vice president of the American Physical Society and, during Oppenheimer’s year at Göttingen, was to become its president. Compton was also that year made chairman of the physics section of the National Academy of Sciences. His career culminated just a few years later, in 1930, when he was appointed president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  Extraordinarily, despite his many distinctions, honours and positions, Compton felt intimidated by Oppenheimer. He is reported as feeling that, though he could hold his own with the younger man on science, when Oppenheimer talked about literature, philosophy or politics, he felt at a loss. For his part, Oppenheimer felt able to be as condescending towards Compton as he was towards Condon. In a letter to Francis Fergusson, of November 1926, he wrote:

  There are about 20 American physicists & such here. Most of them are over thirty. Professors at Princeton or California [where Condon had taken his PhD] or some such place, married, respectable. They are mostly pretty good at physics, but completely uneducated & unspoiled. They envy the Germans their intellectual adroitness, & want physics to come to America.

  Of course, as usual in Oppenheimer’s letters to Fergusson, one has to make allowance for his apparent need to impress and his consequent compulsion to show off. Thus, telling Fergusson in uncharacteristically direct terms that ‘the science is much better than at Cambridge, & on the whole, probably the best to be found’, he could not resist adding:

  They are working very hard here & combining a fantastically impregnable metaphysical disengenuousness with the gogetting habits of a wall-paper manufacturer. The result is that the work done here has an almost demoniac lack of plausibility to it & is highly successful.

  The description this offers of Born’s statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, alluding to both its success in making sense of the results obtained from experiment and the high philosophical (metaphysical) cost it exacts (the abandonment of causal determinism), is very apt, but it could be seen to be so, surely, only by someone who already knew something about it.

  Even allowing for a certain theatrical tendency to exaggerate, there is an extraordinarily self-confident tone in this letter, and in the few others from this period that survive. Oppenheimer tells Fergusson that he is not sure whether he will go back to Cambridge before he returns to the States, and adds, almost as a casual aside: ‘I’ll probably get a degree here in March.’ At the root of the extreme confidence manifested in his relations with others, and in his prediction that he could complete his PhD within six months of arriving at Göttingen, was his close relationship with Born, with whom – in striking contrast to Condon – he spent an immense amount of time, not only in lectures and seminars, but also at Born’s home. Within a very short time he became regarded, and came to regard himself, not as Born’s student, but as his collaborator. For example, in a letter to Edwin Kemble, written about two weeks after his letter to Fergusson, Oppenheimer uses the phrase ‘another problem on which Prof. Born and I are working’, as if he and the head of the most prestigious centre of theoretical physics in the world at that point were now essentially partners.

  Nor did he seem to regard himself as the junior partner in this collaboration. In Born’s seminar on quantum mechanics, Oppenheimer would unapologetically interrupt whoever was speaking – whether another student or Born himself – walk up to the blackboard, take the chalk from the speaker’s hand and say something like ‘No, that is wrong’, ‘That is not how it is done’ or ‘This can be done much better in the following manner’. This lordly manner impressed his fellow students, one of whom later remarked, ‘I felt as if he were an inhabitant of Olympus who had strayed among humans and was doing his best to appear human.’ But it also irritated them. Some of them complained to Born and asked him to do something about it. ‘But,’ Born writes in his autobiography, ‘I was a little afraid of Oppenheimer, and my half-hearted attempts to stop him were unsuccessful.’

  Still, however brilliant Oppenheimer was, and however certain he himself was of the value of what he had to say, the students had come to Göttingen to learn from Born, not him. And so, one day, Born arrived at his seminar to find on his desk a sheet of paper disguised as a piece of medieval parchment, upon which was written, in archaic ornamental script, a threat to boycott the seminars unless Oppenheimer’s disruptions ceased. The driving force behind the document, Born later came to believe, was the future Nobel laureate Maria Göppert, then a precocious twenty-year-old undergraduate physics student. Realising that he had to take the boycott threat seriously, but still afraid to confront Oppenheimer directly, Born devised an elaborate plan to make Oppenheimer aware of the trouble he was causing. The next time Oppenheimer came round to Born’s house, Born left the ‘parchment’ document on his desk
, then exited the room to take a pre-arranged call from his wife, Heidi. ‘This plot worked,’ Born writes in his autobiography. ‘When I returned I found him rather pale and not so voluble as usual. And the interruptions in the seminar ceased altogether.’ Born worried for the rest of his life whether he had offended Oppenheimer in this way and was inclined to believe that Oppenheimer’s lingering resentment over the incident was the reason why, in later life, Born never received any invitations from universities in the US.

  Born’s intense interest in, and admiration of, Oppenheimer naturally aroused the interest of other physicists and, by the end of 1926, Oppenheimer – though he had not by then published anything remotely comparable to the path-breaking work of Dirac, Heisenberg, Jordan and Born himself – was beginning to be spoken of in the same breath. At that time the US National Research Council was, in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, looking to fund promising young American physicists who could bring to the US a knowledge and understanding of cutting-edge European physics. (This is what Oppenheimer was alluding to in his letter to Fergusson when he wrote that: ‘They [the American physicists at Göttingen] envy the Germans their intellectual adroitness, & want physics to come to America.’) In his role as a member of the NRC’s fellowship selection committee, Karl Compton reported to the Rockefeller Foundation on 6 December 1926: ‘As far as I can learn, Condon and a very young chap named Oppenheimer are the star performers in physics.’ Two weeks later, this view was echoed by Born himself, who, when asked by the Rockefeller Foundation for his opinion on the young American physicists he had encountered, wrote: ‘I would like to point out here only one who rises above the average. He is Mr Robert Oppenheimer, a young American who is extraordinarily good in mathematics, has good physical understanding and promises to become an exceptional scholar.’