Oh, so. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this week's Physics Colloquium.
It's a great pleasure to introduce Ray Munk Surveys, a philosopher, in fact, he's been a professor of philosophy at Southampton University since 1992.
And if you look at some of his publications starting in the early 1990s, you know, they got his start.
Look, look, they can. STEIN For which he won the John Llewellyn Rees Prize.
Then he wrote about Bertrand Russell.
He wrote about Russell again, then the Russell again, and for a change he went back to Vic and then he decided to write a book about J.
Robert Oppenheimer. And it's many of us, of course, I expect to read it by now.
Those of you who haven't. I'm sure he won't mind me saying you should.
And it's a great pleasure to have him here today to talk about one of the famous physicists of the 20th century.
Right. Thank you. Is his microphone on?
Yes. Oh, good. Well, thank you very much, John, for that introduction and for do me the honour of inviting me to address this colloquium.
I'd like to thank my friend James also for being instrumental in getting me here.
As John said, I'm not a physicist. I'm a philosopher.
And it makes some sort of sense to me to for me to do a biography of Wittgenstein and of Russell.
But I just want to say something about why I decided to write a biography of Oppenheimer,
which turned out to be an extraordinarily difficult and endlessly fascinating undertaking.
It took me 11 years, and I never for one moment got bored with him or his work or his environment.
What attracted me to the idea of writing a biography of Oppenheimer was many years ago,
about 12 or 13 years ago, The Observer newspaper asked me to review a collection of his correspondence.
Now, until then, I knew about Oppenheimer. What everybody knows about Oppenheimer, that he was the director of the Los Los Alamos Laboratory,
that he was a leading American physicist working in quantum theory, and that he had his security clearance taken away from him in a notorious trial.
And notorious. Well, it was, in fact, the trial officially a security hearing in the 1950s.
So I knew that. But when I read the correspondence, I discovered much more.
I discovered what an enormously multifaceted and interesting man he was.
I didn't know, for example, before I read these letters, that he had a very keen interest in literature, particularly French literature.
He was an expert. He could discuss French literature with the most informed experts in the world.
He also had a deep interest in philosophy. He'd studied with Whitehead at Harvard and maintained his interest in philosophy throughout his life.
Also, maybe I'll just stop.
There are plenty of seats. Also he had a a deep love of and fascination with Hinduism, so much so that he taught himself Sanskrit.
He learned Sanskrit in order to read the Hindu literatures in their original language.
And he read the Bhagavad Gita, particularly so many times.
He knew it practically by heart.
He was, by the way, and this goes hand-in-hand with his the multifaceted nature of his intelligence and his interests.
He was wonderfully quick at learning languages.
He he he went to Holland. He learned Dutch.
In just a few weeks after arriving in Holland, he was giving lectures in Dutch, and he took away with him some textbooks that he used.
Then later on in California, he went away for it for a term, and he said to one of his postgrad students, Will you do these lectures?
Said, Yeah, sure. And then the postgrad discovered that the book Oppenheimer had left for him to do it to basically his lectures on was in Dutch.
And when Oppenheimer got back, the students said, You know, I'm surprised you gave me this book in Dutch.
Oppenheimer said, Yes, but it's such easy, Dutch. He knew French.
He was an extraordinary individual. So and I also hadn't realised the extent of his political involvement in the 1930s.
He himself once said that he joined every communist front organisation on the West
Coast of America and and his personal relationships with his family and his friends.
So there's far, far more to him that I'd ever imagined.
And in my review of this collection of correspondence, I pointed all this out and I said,
There is a really good biography to be written of Oppenheimer.
And then publishers got in touch him and said, Well, why don't you do it? And so I did.
And and then 11 years later, produced this 800 page book now called the book Inside the Centre for a number of reasons.
It's a phrase that chimes with many aspects. I said that Oppenheimer was a multifaceted person.
Several of those facets are alluded to in the phrase inside the centre.
Okay. For one of them, he always wanted to be at the centre of things intellectually, and particularly in physics.
And this motivated, this decided a lot of the crucial decisions he made in life when he went to Cambridge,
when he wanted to be right at the centre of where things were happening in his subject,
but also in his subject, you know, of course, his he spent a lot of time investigating what happens, as it were, inside the centre of a nucleus.
And then there's another meaning, too, which is he wanted politically and socially to be inside the centre.
And this is something that not many physicists hanker after.
Einstein, for example, couldn't care less whether he was, you know, he exerted any power in America.
Oppenheimer cared very much. He wanted to be both socially and politically an insider.
And I think this had much to do with his feelings of being an outsider,
starting when he was a young student at Harvard, where his Jewish background excluded him from the centre of things.
But he he always wanted to be inside the centre.
Okay. So to begin with, a bit of family history.
The family name Oppenheimer identifies exactly where that family came from.
It was a name adopted by German Jewish families when in 1808, when the Napoleonic decree required Jews to adopt a surname,
many of them in the town of Oppenheim chose to become Oppenheimer.
And you can see there's a picture of Oppenheimer in 1847.
On the present day, it's changed remarkably little. It's in the in the wine growing area by the Rhine in Germany.
It's a very a very pleasant town. So why would the Oppenheimer's leave that lovely town and go to America?
Well, they were part of a wave of immigration, Jewish immigration from Germany to America that went under.
They were prompted by idealistic motives. They had an idealistic sense of what America was,
and this made them very different to the Eastern European Jews who were what's called the third wave of Jewish immigration.
Oppenheimer's friend, Isidor Rabi was an east Kent, came from an Eastern European Jewish family.
And he once said, he once said, I knew what Oppenheimer's problem was when someone said, Well, what was it?
He said, Identity that Oppenheimer did not have, what Rabi had and what the Eastern European Jews had,
which is a very solid sense of their cultural and ethnic identity.
The Eastern European Jews went to America because they were fleeing for their lives, a lot of them.
And they went to survive and to keep alive their culture.
The German Jews in the middle 19th century, a lot of them went to shake off their past.
And their hopes for America are expressed in this poem by Go to America.
Thou hast it better than our ancient hemisphere. Thou has no falling castles nor basalt is here Thy children they know,
not they useful prime time are vain retrospection or ineffective war fortune wait on thy glorious spring,
and when in time they poets sing, may some good genius guard them all from barren robber knight and ghost traditional.
So the idea here is that America is a sort of blank sheet upon which they can create a new a new world and leave behind the world of
the barons and the robbers and the knights and the ghosts and all the accumulated prejudice that they had to suffer while in Germany,
because the German Jews had tried in the thirties, 1830s, 1840s to shake off what distinguish them from their German contemporaries.
So they adopted German as the language of of of their religion.
They abandoned the old Yiddish and the old Hebrew, and they were disappointed in Germany to find that the old laws that prevented them,
that the governed who they could marry, what kind of jobs they could do, where in the cities they could live.
Those laws stayed in place and they were still, despite their best efforts, a repressed minority.
And so they went to America to shake off that repression and to build, as it were, a new world.
So here are the three migrations of European Jews to America.
The first Jews to arrive in America.
The first migration were the Sephardic Jews, and they were expelled from Spain and Portugal back in the 17th century.
And by 1840, there were 15,000 of them in the USA.
The second migration with the German Jews, of which the Oppenheimer's were part.
Looking for a new life.
And by 1880 that wave had increased the Jewish population in the States to 280,000, the vast majority of whom were German Jews.
Then the third migration dwarfed even that the Jews from from Russia and Poland fleeing for their lives at the end of the 19th century.
First two decades of the 20th century. And those were numbered not in thousands, but in millions, two and a half million.
And my opening chapter in my book is all about the context of New York City.
New York City in the context of these waves of Jewish emigration, because in the end of the 19th century, the German Jews were well-established.
Many of them had made a lot of money. A lot of them lived in the Upper West part of Manhattan, which is where Oppenheimer himself lived.
The Eastern Jews like Rabi himself, tended to settle to begin with in the Lower East Side of of Manhattan.
And between those two, even though they were both from Jewish backgrounds,
there was a certain kind of competitiveness for, you know, for leadership of the American Jewish community.
And those separate worlds, the genteel world of the Upper West Side, the crowded, busy, bustling world of the Lower East Side.
Julius Oppenheimer was J. Robert Oppenheimer's father.
He was part of that second wave of migration.
He'd been preceded by his uncles. Who established the firm Rothfeld Stern and Company, which was a tailoring company.
A lot of German Jews, when it when they settled in Manhattan, set up tailoring companies.
And that company, Rothfeld Stern and Company did did very well.
So when Julius Oppenheimer arrived, he was only 17 years old.
In 1888, his uncles had already established the company, were already extremely wealthy people.
And so Julius Oppenheimer could just slot in to their life in in Manhattan.
Now, Julius Oppenheimer himself became very wealthy.
He joined the family firm. He he specialised in buying and selling very fine cloth.
And he became a great expert in that. And he rose in the ranks of the company to to to become its director.
He also. Join this movement, the ethical culture movement, which was a movement very popular among the Upper West Side Jews,
which seemed to many of them to offer a solution to this problem.
How do you preserve what's best in Jewish culture while shaking off any belief in the supernatural?
Any as it were. Belief for which there is no evidence.
And the ethical culture movement was perceived by them to be an answer to that.
It was founded by Felix Adler, who was himself the son of a rabbi.
And he he delivered a famous sermon called The Judaism of the Future,
in which he said, We proposed to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual.
His new religion was not to be distinguished by its belief, by its creed, but by the ethical deeds.
It was to be a religion of deed, he said, not of creed.
That is to say that what Felix Adler identified as the non supernatural core of the Jewish tradition,
the thing worth preserving was the ethics, the ethics of the of the religion, social ethics.
And so the ethical culture movement developed a number of ways of trying to improve the population, trying to improve society.
And there was a great feeling among its members that one ought to dedicate one's life to the improvement of life for the people around one.
And this had a great influence on J.
Robert Oppenheimer himself, that he [INAUDIBLE] always considered it his duty to do whatever he could for society.
It was a very much a non individualist sense and it attracted a lot of the German Jews who'd done very well in in the United States,
Joseph Seligman, Jacob Schiff, Henry Morgenthau, as well as Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld, who were Julius Oppenheimer's uncles.
Those families all lived within a few streets of one another.
So to go back to this is where Oppenheimer was brought up.
J. Robert Oppenheimer on Riverside Drive with a view on the on the west side of Manhattan, with a view over the River Hudson.
The his family owned the whole 11th floor of that building, 155 Riverside Drive.
It's hard to imagine how much that piece of real estate would be worth now.
An unimaginable fortune. One. Curiously enough, one, five, five.
Riverside Drive has become a famous address to anybody who knows anything about American sitcoms, of all things,
because it was it was a featured that the name of the sitcoms Escape Me for a moment and it'll come to you.
But anyway, so Oppenheimer lived there 155 Riverside Drive with a view of the River Hudson.
The the family decorated the rooms of this enormous flat with paintings acquired by his mum.
His mother was a trained painter and an expert on French painting particularly, but European painting in general.
And their collection of paintings was a.
Was unparalleled. It included several van golfs included Suzanne, a Picasso.
When Jay, Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank lost his job because of his communist affiliations,
he was unable to find work in academic life and unable to find work anywhere,
but was able to live in some style by selling one painting that had belonged to his parents.
And that painting enabled him to buy a ranch in Colorado where he lived for the rest of his life,
so that at 155 Riverside Drive, Oppenheimer was brought up, surrounded by this these lovely paintings.
Whatever he wanted to do, his parents allowed him to do it and encouraged him in all sorts of attainments and talents that he had.
If he if he took any interest in music, they would pay for the greatest the best teachers to come to the house.
If he showed any interest in architecture, he was taught architecture.
He was taught privately until he went to the ethical culture school.
The ethical culture movement had its own school.
And Oppenheimer, of course, signed up for it.
His younger brother, Frank, was eight years younger.
So for the first eight years of his life, he led a rather solitary existence and he didn't really fit in very well with other children.
When he eventually went to the school, he went to school fairly late in life.
He didn't start at five. He started more like a ten years old, and he found it difficult to make friends at the Ethical Culture School,
partly because he had had this strange, isolated existence at Riverside Drive and partly because he was so precocious.
One of his schoolmates at the Ethical Culture School remembers him saying to her,
Ask me a question in Latin and I'll reply in Greek, which is very impressive, but not the way to make friends at a junior school.
And he was remembered by his his schoolmates as being a bit gauche.
He didn't really fit in. He stuck out because he was he was better dressed than anybody else.
He was better educated than anybody else. He was a bit posher than anybody else.
And one of the things he most like to do, he's pictured here doing building building things with building blocks.
So very unusual picture in that it shows another child with him.
He didn't very often have playmates to his house, partly because his parents were were very fastidious,
very fussy about other people coming to the house. And so he grew up more or less isolated even after he'd been to school.
The one friend he made at school. And this is very striking.
The Ethical Culture School was, of course, dominated by members of the ethical culture movement,
which is to say members of the German Jewish community in New York City.
But the one close friend at the school that Oppenheimer made came not from that background, but from a background as different from it as possible.
He made a friend called Francis Ferguson, who was later in life to be a well-known literary critic and professor of English literature.
And Francis Ferguson came from New Mexico, from the, uh, and he, he,
his family had a house in the Upper Pecos Valley in New Mexico, like most of the kids at the Ethical Culture School.
Francis Ferguson came from a very privileged background.
His father was the first member of the House of Representatives representing New Mexico,
and his family for generations had been right at the heart of political power in New Mexico.
But it was a it was it was a Western American background and in some ways, crucially, a non-Jewish background.
Now, at school, Oppenheimer, partly because of the excellence of its science teachers, was drawn towards science and particularly chemistry.
And he applied to Harvard to study chemistry, and he was accepted.
But he became very ill in the in the months before he was supposed to go to Harvard.
And so it was decided that he would take a year off before he went to Harvard, and he spent a lot of that year travelling in New Mexico.
He went, of course, to Francis Ferguson's home, Francis Ferguson, and introduced him to a man called Paul Haugen,
who was a writer who became later on a very famous writer writing about the southwest of the United States,
Francis Ferguson's own family, his his his brother and his sister, Erna.
They themselves are also famous writers.
And they were noted again for writing about the culture and the traditions and the people of south of the southwest of the United States.
So Oppenheimer went there and for the first time in his life, he felt as if he belonged.
He felt as if he was with people who understood him, people who he liked, people who liked him.
And it's quite interesting. Paul Holguin, remembering Oppenheimer in those days, and we're talking now in the early twenties, uh, 23,
24 in those days said that he was astonished at the later, the later accounts of Oppenheimer as, as rude and brusque consultancies,
as he remembers Oppenheimer as getting on very well with people and of having exquisite manners and being very popular and confident among people,
which shows, I think, the effect that going to New Mexico had.
And then people who'd known him in New York City when he returned to New York City,
having had this holiday in New Mexico, remember that he came back to New York City,
a transformed man, much more confident, much more sociable, much jolly, much more inclined to make jokes and be less intense and serious.
He also became an excellent horse rider in New Mexico, and he developed a great love.
And this would would influence later on the placement of the other laboratory that produced the first atomic bomb.
His he said that his first love was New Mexico, and particularly the Upper Peacock's Valley, which he explored on horseback in great detail.
It's said that he went to parts of the Upper Pecos Valley that no no human being, as it were, had ever been to.
He he he fell in love with a woman called Katherine Chavez, who was already married.
So that wasn't going to go anywhere.
But he on horseback with her found a lake that nobody had that was, you know, that hadn't appeared on any maps of the area.
And it still to this day called Lake Katherine after Oppenheimer named it so.
So in 1922, Oppenheimer started at Harvard.
And as I say, his as I said right at the beginning, his Jewish background was held against him at Harvard.
I happened to go to Harvard at a time when Harvard itself was undergoing some turmoil, about the about the proportion of its students that were Jews.
The president of Harvard, President Lowell, was had looked aghast at Columbia University in New York City and to his dismay,
had discovered that Columbia University was up to over over 40% Jews, and he didn't want that to happen at Harvard.
And so suggested to the staff that they that they vote on a motion that would restrict the number,
impose a limit on the number of Jews that were admitted into Harvard.
The staff refused to do that, whereupon Lowell got the same measure enforced through the backdoor, as it were.
He told the admissions people to keep an eye on the number of Jews that were being admitted and not to go above a certain percentage.
The remarkable thing is, though, that Oppenheimer, though, he went to Harvard in the very summer when this was being this was this this then became a
national controversy with people writing to The New York Times for and against Lowell suggestion.
The very summer when this was happening was when Oppenheimer went to Harvard.
But he himself never mentions it once in any of his letters.
A lot of his letters have survived to his old teachers at the Ethical Culture School.
Some letters have survived to to his parents, some to his friends.
Not one of them ever mentions the controversy.
But it's very it's very telling that his circle of friendship at Harvard was very small and restricted to people, more or less exactly like him.
One of his best friends there. The the bottom right, Frederick Bernheim, came from exactly the same background as Oppenheimer himself.
Bernheim also was brought up in Riverside Drive. He'd also gone to school in ethical culture at the Ethical Culture School.
He'd also applied to do chemistry.
The only non-Jewish friend that Oppenheimer made at Harvard was William Boyd, who became a very distinguished chemist.
And later on in life. Now. So Harvard Oppenheimer at Harvard did very little else but study.
Actually, he didn't. I think he'd gone there expecting to experience, know a wider social circle, a more a fuller social life.
But actually, that didn't happen. What did happen was he read voraciously and not just in chemistry.
He signed up for more courses and he had to sign up for he signed up for courses in English history, in French literature and all sorts of things.
And he said that he he devoured the library.
He said, you know, he sat at the library like the Goth sat room.
And he read almost, you know, the people who knew him at Harvard don't remember him doing much else apart from apart from reading.
One of the things that's really remarkable, though, is this, that he went to Harvard as a chemistry student after his first year there.
So now in the summer of 1923, he became interested in physics and in the then very new physics of quantum physics,
what's now called old quantum physics, not quantum mechanics, but the quantum physics of of Planck and Einstein.
And even though he was he'd only just finished his first year studies as an undergraduate chemistry student.
By the summer of 1923, he'd read many of the leading books in this rather new area of theoretical physics,
and he wrote to the physics department saying that he would like to take certain graduate level courses in quantum physics,
and he included a list of things that he'd read on the subject, which he was a very showy person.
OPPENHEIMER And this list is characteristically showy, not only because it includes, you know,
stuff at the very cutting edge of physics at that time, but also a smattering of stuff in German and French and so on.
And when the when the physics department met to discuss his extraordinary application to enrol in a graduate level physics course,
not having studied any physics formally before, somebody said, Well, you know,
he should be given a Ph.D. just for knowing the titles of the things that he's listed.
And he was extraordinarily accepted onto this graduate level course.
And so from his second year onwards, as well as pursuing his undergraduate studies in chemistry, he was attending graduate level courses in physics.
Now, as I said right at the beginning,
he wanted to be at the centre of things and he knew from his reading how important Rutherford's work was at Cambridge.
And so he applied to be a student of Rutherford's at Cambridge for the first time in his life,
and more or less well, one of the very few times in his life he was met with rejection.
Rutherford rejected him. And I don't think it's difficult to see why Rutherford rejected him,
because his letter of recommendation was from the physics professor at Harvard, Percy Bridgman, experimental physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize.
And Bridgman said to said in his letter of recommendation to Rutherford that Oppenheimer was a very brilliant young man.
He was a had a very quick, very incisive mind, good at the theoretical parts of the subject, but hopeless in the laboratory.
And so Rutherford naturally didn't accept him.
What's curious, though, is why Oppenheimer, who was always a disaster in the laboratory, famously, even though he headed the biggest,
most expensive laboratory in the country later on, he was never a laboratory physicist and he was never any good at it.
So why should he apply to an experimentalist, an experimental physicist to work under him?
And I think the reason is that he'd identified Rutherford and the Cavendish Laboratory as being at the centre,
and that's where he wanted to be, regardless of whether it suited his particular talents or not.
Now, given the sort of arcane processes in those days, so he had to apply to Rutherford for a position as a research student that was rejected.
But he also had to apply to a college, and he applied to Christ's college Cambridge, and was accepted.
And so he he took that place that he was offered, but he arrived at Cambridge, rather,
humiliatingly, for somebody who'd been identified as the best student of his generation at Harvard.
He arrived at Cambridge with the rather, you know, with the status of an undergraduate, not as a research postgraduate.
And he was assigned low level experimental work under Thomson, the discoverer of the electron.
And he struggled. He Rutherford he kept applying to to study, you know, as a research student.
And Rutherford assigned a peer Blackett, Patrick Blackett, to work with Oppenheimer to improve his skills in the laboratory,
because it was obvious to everybody that Oppenheimer had very little laboratory experience or skills.
And so Blackett, who was, as you will know, an extremely gifted and able experimentalist,
was given the task of getting Oppenheimer up to speed so that he could pursue research at Cambridge.
Blackett has been described as a young Oedipus tall, slim, beautifully balanced, always looking better dressed than anyone else.
And he intimidated Oppenheimer both by being charismatic, well-dressed, popular,
and also being a brilliant researcher, which Oppenheimer quite conspicuously wasn't.
And so for the first six months of his time at Cambridge, Oppenheimer had the worst time in his life.
And it's no exaggeration, I think, to say that he went crazy during those six months.
He was diagnosed as schizophrenic, almost certainly misdiagnosed, because, you know,
you know that that schizophrenics have more fundamental problems then than Oppenheimer had.
But there's no doubt that he behaved very, very oddly during his six months at Cambridge.
He's described by some students at the Cavendish as rolling around the floor.
And once when he was invited to present his work, he studied.
He stood in front of a blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand.
And he said, The point is the point is the point is until he was led away.
So he he he suffered enormously. And when he when he met Francis Ferguson during a break in Paris, he tried to kill Ferguson.
He tried he tried to strangle him with a strap.
He also notoriously tried to kill Blackett himself.
He went on to he went on a holiday having left.
And this is charged with sort of symbolism, having left a poisoned apple on black its desk.
Black. It didn't bite the apple. Oppenheimer removed it.
Amazingly, the University of Cambridge didn't send him down, didn't refuse to, you know, have anything more to do with him.
They said, okay, you can carry on being a student so long as you receive medical attention, which he did.
He was sent to a psychoanalyst in London, and that's where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
But now here's the most amazing thing, that within three months of being diagnosed schizophrenic, going to London and receiving psychiatric treatment.
He published his first paper not to do with any of the experimental work that he was doing with with Thomson, but to do with.
Theoretical physics, and particularly with quantum mechanics, which was, you know,
being developed at the very time when he was a when he was arrived in Cambridge.
2526, and he happened to have the good fortune of becoming friends with Paul Dirac.
Who gave the first lectures at Cambridge on quantum mechanics.
And Oppenheimer was at those lectures.
He discussed this this the view breakthroughs in quantum mechanics of of Heisenberg and Bull and Bourne with Paul Dirac.
And amazingly quickly he grasped these new ideas and was contributing to them.
Not that Paul Dirac entirely approved of everything Oppenheimer did.
Paul Dirac once said to Oppenheimer, I can't understand how you can be both a physicist and a poet.
He said, because in physics, what we do is we look at really complicated ideas and try to make them as simple as possible.
He says, whereas in poetry you do exactly the opposite.
And so Dirac rather disapproved of Oppenheimer's interest in Hinduism, in his literary interests, in his literary activities.
But nevertheless, they became friends. And that, I think, was the saving of Oppenheimer.
It wasn't that he received medical treatment. It's that he made the shift from experimental work to theoretical work at a particularly exciting time.
And he was able to make a contribution to those exciting developments so that when Max born on the pitch,
picture on the right, he's the one in the chair. When Max born visited Cambridge in 1926.
He was so struck by the intelligence of Oppenheimer's questions and the interest that Oppenheimer took in Born's own work,
that he invited Oppenheimer to go and to study with him. And so Oppenheimer left Cambridge behind.
He'd had, as I said, in the first six months at Cambridge, a dreadful time there.
He left that behind. He left experimental physics behind, and he moved to Göttingen to work with Max, born also in the summer of 26.
Niels Bohr visited Cambridge and again was struck by the intelligence of Oppenheimer's questions and by the intensity of his intellect.
And Bohr remained for Oppenheimer, the ideal man, bul was the man whom Oppenheimer admired more than anybody else,
and not just scientifically, but also politically.
So that in the post-war period,
the views that Oppenheimer was espousing that he was campaigning for were views that he'd acquired from discussing politics,
and particularly the politics of atomic energy control with Niels Bohr.
So I'll stick with that slide. So in the summer of 1926, Oppenheimer left Cambridge,
went to work at Gutting and with Max born and made completely the opposite impression on people to what he'd made in Cambridge.
At Cambridge. He struck people as an oddball. He didn't really fit in.
He was going through a particularly strange time himself at gutting, and he was back to the Oppenheimer of all the people have seen in New Mexico.
He was confident. He was outgoing. He was the centre of student life.
And he was popular with with certain limitations.
People didn't like him taking over the lectures. It's a remarkable thing.
Max Born was then at the height of his powers and had had a very solid education in mathematics and physics.
Oppenheimer, as we've seen, had this slightly erratic education.
He said himself that his education had holes in it. But nevertheless, when Max Born gave lectures at gutting them and Oppenheimer interrupted,
Max Born capitulated Max Ball and let Oppenheimer stride up to the blackboard and take over the lecture, much to the displeasure of the students.
And within a few months of being at Girton, Oppenheimer had finished his Ph.D. He'd written some joint papers with with Max Born,
one of which contains the famous Born Oppenheimer approximation method that is still in use today
and had established himself as one of the most promising young scientists of his generation.
Very, very quickly.
So that within a year of being at Curtin and American universities were competing to sign him up for for their theoretical physics.
The situation internationally at this time was this that the acknowledged leaders of theoretical physics were in Europe.
America had very distinguished experimental physicists like Percy Bridgman, but very few distinguished theoretical physicists.
And the the young theoretical physicists in America went over to Europe and studied at the feet of Niels Bohr,
Max born and so on, and then went back to America.
The American universities knew that this was the situation. And so they recruited they went to Europe to recruit their physicists in Europe.
And so Oppenheimer was was received while he was still in Germany, received several offers from American universities.
And eventually he accepted a unique position where he was halfway between.
He was employed both by University of California in Berkeley and also by Caltech.
So he spent half the year at Berkeley and then the other half in Pasadena,
and he was able to do that because there was such a such a demand for bright, young, theoretical physicists among the American universities.
So after he'd been at Göttingen, he spent a few years back, he spent a year back in the States as a postdoctoral student,
and then decided before he took up this unusual joint position in California,
he decided to spend some more time in Europe, and he went to Zurich to work with Wolfgang Pauli.
And again, he was in the right place at the right time because Pauli was then laying the foundations for what would become QED,
quantum electrodynamics. He was writing papers with Heisenberg on the subject.
Oppenheimer was there on the spot and contributed to two of these papers written with Heisenberg and Pauli.
And so he was able to go back to America having, you know, again, been there at the time,
at the very cutting edge of developments in theoretical physics, physics.
This is a picture taken by Rudolf Pyles, who was also in Zurich on Lake Zurich.
And it's a wonderful picture. I think Oppenheimer's there on the left with his by hat smoking a cigarette.
Raab is looking very thoughtful and I suppose in some sense in control of the boat and then probably looking at the picture looks,
looking at the camera partly looks sort of malevolent and, uh, slightly sinister.
It's a great, great picture, I think. So having been at Zurich, Oppenheimer returned to to America and to California.
Now, the reason he said that he wanted to go to Berkeley was that Berkeley, he said, was a was a desert, theoretically.
And so he could establish. For himself, a school of physics.
So there was nothing there, and he could create it, as it were, in his own image.
While at Caltech, there were established and eminent physicists from whom he could learn.
And so he spent half the year at Berkeley teaching graduate.
He never taught undergraduates, he only taught graduate students, but he was build a built up throughout the thirties,
this school of graduate students at Berkeley starting almost from nothing.
And by the end of the 1930s that had become the most distinguished,
most successful graduate school of physics in the U.S. and his students were so devoted to him, they would make the trip.
When he left Berkeley to go down the Californian coast down to Pasadena, they would go with him.
So they had this strange nomadic existence where they they they sit at his feet at Berkeley,
get in their cars, move everything they had down to Pasadena and sit at his feet.
They're two of his students became his his best friends.
One of them here is Robert Sperber, who was a lifelong friend and who, of course,
made great contributions to physics and was also one of the leading lights at Los Alamos.
But it was also the beginnings of big science.
And one of the things that although Oppenheimer's School of Graduate School of Physics was theoretical physics also at Berkeley was Ernest Lawrence,
who built ever bigger particle accelerators, ever bigger cyclic cyclotron,
and who received the Nobel Prize, of course, for his invention of the cyclotron.
And Lawrence and Oppenheimer,
though they were very different individuals from very different backgrounds and took very different approaches to physics,
had a mutually beneficial relationship with each other,
Lawrence would present to Oppenheimer and his students findings from his experimental
work that he himself couldn't account for and asked them to explain it.
Likewise, Oppenheimer and his students would present to Lawrence some problem and asked
Lawrence to devise some experimental way of investigating and treating the problem.
And so the two together theory and experiment uh, mutually helped one another.
And the result was that Berkeley became, as I said, the leading centre of physics by the end of the 1930s,
acknowledged as the leading centre of physics in the U.S.
While he was doing all that, he kept up his interest in New Mexico and he bought this undistinguished looking wooden house in New Mexico.
The story goes The reason it's Paro Caliente is Spanish for hot dog.
And the reason it was given that name is that when he was shown the house by the estate agent, he was so impressed with its location he said Hot dog.
And so it was named Pari Caliente. And throughout the drought in the 1930s, he invited his students to to the home for weeks during the summer break,
where they could continue their discussions of theoretical physics.
The stories of people who spent weeks in Pedro Caliente are of, you know,
endless discussions of theoretical physics, lots of lots of excellent drink and very little food.
And there is and Ernest Lawrence, of course, was also a guest.
And that other photograph shows a slightly foppish looking Oppenheimer leaning against his car with with Ernest Lawrence there.
And so it became a sort of thing for for the students at Berkeley to receive an invitation.
If you received an invitation to go to and say you'd made it into the inner ring of Oppenheimer's circle.
Right now, I haven't mentioned politics so far because and amazingly, until the until the 1930s,
really until the mid 1930s, Oppenheimer took no interest in politics whatsoever.
He didn't even know the great crash would happen in 1929 until he was told by Ernest Lawrence.
What changed? That was his relationship with his students.
As I said, he you know, he got very close with his graduate students. They admired him.
It was said that they used to impersonate the way he walked, the way he talked.
He liked very hot food when he when he ate at all.
And they would pick that up. They would they would dress the way he did and so on.
And he got to know them very well and discovered, much to his dismay,
that his most brilliant students in the recession of the 1930s were not able to get jobs.
Or if they were, they were they were getting very poor, poorly paid, menial jobs.
And through discovering that he got interested in the recession and therefore what to do about the recession,
and he got drawn into left wing politics of the 1930s.
We tend to forget, but because of what happened in the 1950s and the violent reaction against communism,
we tend to forget that in the 1930s for a while there was no great stigma attached to to to left wing politics, even extreme left wing politics.
And people a lot of people were quite open about their affiliation with the Communist Party.
This changed actually during the 1930s when the Communist Party became increasingly under suspicion of helping Soviet espionage activities.
And that was for the very good reason that there's lots of evidence that they were helping Soviet espionage activities.
So anybody involved in communist and communist front organisations in the starting from from about 1936 onwards attracted the attention,
the close attention of the FBI and the security services.
So what we've got in the middle here are four students of Oppenheimer's Joe Weinberg,
Rosie laminates, David Boehm and Max Friedman, all of them students of Oppenheimer's.
And all of them members of the Communist Party. Now, this photograph was taken by a street photographer who outside the campus at Berkeley.
There are four friends and they decided to have this photograph taken by a street photographer.
What they didn't know is that they were being followed by an FBI agent.
And the reason for that is that Rose Illuminates had been picked up by some microphones discussing espionage with with a Communist Party member.
And so the FBI were tailing Rossi Luminance.
So this FBI agent approached the street. Photographer said, I'll have that picture, thank you very much,
and took it to the FBI offices and they pulled out all the stops to identify these other people.
And all the people in that photograph, once they'd been identified, were then marked on the blacklist.
None of them succeeded in getting stable, secure jobs in the United States of America after that.
And because they were all students of Oppenheimer, the FBI opened a file on Oppenheimer himself, which became enormous.
Oppenheimer's work office was was bugged.
His home was bugged. He was followed everywhere.
The FBI tried everything they could to find evidence of Oppenheimer's own involvement with espionage activities, and they never found anything.
He himself knew of this intense interest.
I looked through the entire FBI file, which is absolutely huge, and has transcripts of all the conversations that he had on the phone.
And there's one where he phones his wife, Kitty. He's away from home.
He phones her. And because there's a noise on the line.
And Kitty says, What was that? And Oppenheimer said, Oh, that'll be the FBI hanging up.
On the on the left, there is Jeanne Cutler, who Oppenheimer didn't marry.
But she was his first great love. I mean, he fell in love with Catherine Chavez in New Mexico.
But Gene Tetlock at Berkeley was his first really deep and passionate love affair.
She was a member of the Communist Party, and she encouraged his involvement in the Communist Party.
Now, there's some dispute about whether Oppenheimer was ever a member of the Communist Party or not.
It seems to me it doesn't really matter. He didn't. Unlike his brother Frank, he wasn't a card carrying member.
He didn't have a little card saying, you know, I'm a member of the Communist Party.
But he gave a substantial amount of money every month to the Communist Party.
He met with Communist Party officials. He went to Communist Party events and activities.
He helped to publish Communist Party literature. I mean.
If he wasn't actually formally a member of the party, he was as good as,
if not for the purposes of the Communist Party, better than most of the people who were.
One of those was Haakon Chevallier there on the right, who was a French professor at Berkeley and became a very close friend of Oppenheimer's.
And they had what Chevalier described as a communist cell, which they a discussion group.
Oppenheimer insisted it wasn't a communist cell. It was just a group of people who were interested in discussing politics.
But controversially in his autobiography described it as a communist cell.
Now, you know, the story of of the discovery of vision and the the realisation that vision,
the energy released, an efficient reaction could be explosive and used for a tremendously powerful bomb.
It took a surprisingly long time for the USA to get a project to build a bomb way.
When they did, it was handed over to this man, General Groves, who had been responsible for building the Pentagon.
And he was known as a man of iron will.
And he was given this fight. He didn't really want this project.
He you know, he had no time, really, for eggheads and didn't want to spend his time with a bunch of physicists.
He wanted to, you know, be out there with with the men.
But he was he was given this project. Now, one of the most extraordinary aspects of the story of the building of the bomb is that Groves
insisted that Oppenheimer become the director of the laboratory that was to produce the bomb.
The number of reasons why he shouldn't have chosen Oppenheimer is very long indeed.
Oppenheimer wasn't an experimental physicist. He'd never been in charge of a laboratory.
So it's one of the physicists who argued with Groves that he shouldn't appoint
Oppenheimer said Oppenheimer has never been in charge of so much as a hot dog stall,
you know, and you're putting him in charge of this project worth $2 billion.
And he was followed everywhere by FBI agents.
And J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that he was a security risk.
So of all the people to put in charge of the laboratory, you know,
that was going to design and build the first atom bomb, Oppenheimer would be very low on your list of guesses.
So why was Oppenheimer put in charge of the laboratory?
Well, because he had this tremendous gift of explaining things.
And so Groves, when he took charge of this project, he went to he went to Chicago and he went to New York City.
He went to Berkeley to discuss with Lawrence. And he was dispirited and dismayed that when he met with the physicists in Chicago,
when he met with Rob in New York City, he couldn't understand a word they said.
Now at Berkeley as it happened, he was meeting with with Lawrence and Oppenheimer happened to come into the room.
And Oppenheimer realised what was going on and discussed with Groves, explained the physics of vision to Groves,
explained what Bohr had been the first to discover, which was that you needed.
If you were going to build a bomb with uranium, you needed the rare isotope of uranium, uranium two, three, five.
And Oppenheimer explained the difficulties of isotope separation to grows and grows.
Was delighted that he finally understood what this was all about, what was required to build a bomb.
And so and also Oppenheimer had ideas.
Oppenheimer is really excited about fission and about the possibility of making a bomb.
And he already had formulated a plan.
He said to Groves, Look, it's no good, you know, having Compton in Chicago and Rob in New York and Lawrence in Berkeley,
you've got to get all the people involved in a single place.
And he said, and I know just the place the upper was valley in New Mexico, which again was just a mad idea,
you know, getting all that stuff, you know, to to the plateau in the Upper Pecos Valley.
But Groves was so impressed with Oppenheimer, he absolutely insisted.
And when Jake Hoover said, look, you can't appoint this man. He's a red, he's a communist.
He's a security leak.
Groves just wrote a terse and straightforward letter to Jake Hoover saying, You must release you must now release the security clearance for this man.
He's going to be in charge of of the laboratory.
And so he was now notoriously the project.
The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion and employed over 100,000 people.
And what many people don't realise is that many of the most of the people who worked for the Manhattan Project weren't the scientists at Los Alamos.
That was rather small proportion of the total number of the total workforce.
Most of them worked in Oakridge, Tennessee, or in Hanford, in Washington, working on isotope separation.
And there's this picture here of these poor women.
And most of the people who worked for the Manhattan Project were women. And here's a picture of some typical people working in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Their work, they didn't know until after the bomb had exploded in Hiroshima.
They didn't know that what they were doing was isotope separation.
They didn't. These are working in a, uh, electronic plant, I think.
And they were just told, look, here's your sap. Looking at dials.
If the dial goes to the left, turn this thing. If goes the right, turn this thing.
And they spent all their working days doing that. They weren't allowed to discuss what they were doing with each other or with anybody outside.
And it was an incredibly well kept secret. As I say, over 100,000 people employed doing the job, the purpose of which they were shielded from.
And the secret was amazingly kept until the end of the war.
Okay. So Oppenheimer was put in charge of Los Alamos.
He attracted a lot of his friends, a lot of the best scientists in the country.
And extraordinarily, you know, within less than two years, they didn't move in until 43.
Within less than two years, they not only had a working uranium bomb, they had a working plutonium bomb.
Now, as you know, you know, nobody knew anything about plutonium.
At the beginning of this project, they were having to do very little plutonium existed at that time.
The plutonium was arriving at Los Alamos and they were doing experiments on it.
Amazingly, they produced not only a uranium bomb but also a plutonium bomb.
They were so confident that the uranium bomb would work, they didn't even test it.
What they tested at Trinity was the plutonium bomb.
And, uh, as you, as you all know, that the proof that they, the properties of plutonium are such that if you're going to use plutonium,
you have to implode it rather than shoot pellets of the stuff together to form a critical mass.
And that required an incredible amount of scientific work and literally thousands of experiments at Los Alamos,
all leading to the moment in Trinity when they exploded the first atomic bomb in southern New Mexico.
And Oppenheimer, remembering it later on, said a few people laughed.
A few people cried. Most people were silent. He said, I remember the line from the Bhagavad Gita.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
It was an awe inspiring sight. And again, astonishingly, they were able to keep it secret.
You got this atom bomb going off in New Mexico. People could see it from miles around and they said, oh, it's an accident in a weapons dump.
And then, of course, having that successful experiment at Trinity, they were able to use it.
The little boy bomb, the uranium bomb exploded over Hiroshima.
The fat man bomb, the plutonium implosion device exploded over Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
And suddenly the tone at Los Alamos was became very sober.
They had all wanted. Amazingly, they'd all been recruited with the argument, Look, if we don't get the bomb, the Germans will.
And then in 1944, it became apparent that the German bomb project had got nowhere.
The Germans hadn't got anywhere close to building an atomic bomb.
And at that point, you just thought that people would leave the project and they didn't.
They stayed with the project and they were keen to see it through.
But then. Shortly after the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer's friend Robert Server went on a fact finding trip,
saw the extraordinary devastation that the bombs had produced.
So something of the agony that resulted from radiation poisoning reported all this,
that Los Alamos scientists were still at Los Alamos for a month or so after the after the war and Cerber reported all of this.
And almost to a man, the physicists at Los Alamos, to a man or woman.
Wanted to be involved in ensuring that an atomic bomb would never, ever be used again.
And the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was was established in that period for that very reason,
to use their knowhow to try and secure cooperation and try to ensure that the bomb was never used again to murder thousands of people.
And Oppenheimer at the end of the war was that he had replaced Einstein as the most famous scientist in the country,
so famous that when the journal Physics Today started, they could have a cover.
Its first cover was a picture of Oppenheimer. Didn't even need to picture Oppenheimer.
All it needed was Oppenheimer's hat on the cyclotron. And that immediately said to people.
Oppenheimer. So he was a celebrity, and he used his celebrity for political ends after the Second World War.
Oppenheimer did remarkably little scientific research.
Most of his time was taken up in Washington, D.C., with various committees, the Atomic Atomic Energy Committee,
and he involved himself in every project to do with atomic energy control.
And he initially was involved in the Baruch proposal that was put forward at the United Nations in 1946.
He helped draft the proposal.
He did everything he could internationally and nationally to argue for peace and cooperation, international control of uranium and so on.
And he even moved to Princeton. He was very happy in California with this arrangement at Berkeley and Caltech.
But because he wanted to spend most of his time in Washington, D.C., he no longer wanted to live on the West Coast.
So he accepted the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton,
mainly, partly because it was a nice place to be and it was a good job,
but mainly because it gave him easy access to Washington, D.C., which is where he spent most of his time.
Now, Teller, as we all know, was at Los Alamos.
But he he thought the problem of making a fission bomb was theoretically trivial,
and that what interested him far more was the potential of a fusion bomb, a hydrogen bomb.
Oppenheimer, in his various committees in Washington, D.C., argued against an accelerated program.
Teller was was then campaigning for an accelerated program to produce a fusion bomb.
And Oppenheimer used his influence to argue against it, partly because Teller's original design.
Oppenheimer knew was going nowhere and couldn't possibly work.
And partly also because Oppenheimer thought that, you know,
the potential of a hydrogen bomb to be thousands of times more powerful than the bomb that
destroyed Hiroshima would produce something so ghastly that no sane person would ever use it.
So Oppenheimer's reasoning was, Why on earth would you want to develop this thing?
Now, he was slightly swayed when Ulam amended Teller's original design to produce something
that Oppenheimer himself described as technically sweet and that could and did work.
But in the meantime, he'd made several influential enemies, not least of which was Edward Teller himself,
and also this man he insisted on pronouncing his name straws wrong.
Straws. So, Louis Straws was a civilian.
He wasn't a scientist, but he was very interested in atomic energy.
And he became the civilian head of the Atomic Energy Commission.
And he was persuaded by Teller and also Ernest Lawrence of the importance of developing the hydrogen bomb
and therefore began to be suspicious of Oppenheimer's influence and the result of all that was throughout.
And also, of course, you know, starting from 1949 onwards,
it became apparent of the what became apparent was the extraordinary extent of Soviet espionage in the United States of America.
And they realised that Klaus folks had had supply details of Los Alamos to the Soviets, so had at least three other spies.
And in that atmosphere that built up in the 1950s, stimulated also by Joe McCarthy.
The winds of change, as it were, began to blow against Oppenheimer.
And he just made too many influential enemies so that by 1954,
people like Louis Straws and Edgar Hoover persuaded the Atomic Energy Commission
to withdraw Oppenheimer's security clearance and have a security hearing.
Oppenheimer was presented with this choice.
They said to him, Look, you can either withdraw your security clearance now and you have nothing more to do with any sensitive secret project.
Or if you don't do that, we will hold a security hearing at which your suitability for security clearance can be accessed.
Oppenheimer, incredibly, chose the latter. So the security hearing was held.
It was always going to go against him. It was it was rigged.
And we now know exactly how it was rigged. I mean, the details of this are astonishing.
The the lawyer whose job it was to show that Oppenheimer was not a fit person to have security
clearance was given the transcripts of the conversations held between Oppenheimer and his lawyer.
The FBI had had microphones installed in in the offices of this lawyer, and they passed to the other lawyer the transcripts of those conversations.
So Oppenheim had never stood any chance at all.
And, of course, the committee decided the hearing decided that he was not a fit person to have security clearance.
Therefore, he was not allowed to see these documents, many of which he himself had produced.
Very quickly, though. Reconciliation started at the very time that Oppenheimer was undergoing this horrendous security hearing.
McCarthy himself was taking on the Army and losing, and McCarthy became persona non grata very quickly towards the end of 1954.
At the beginning of 1955, Oppenheimer was the subject of this television program.
See it now, conducted by the journalist Ed Murrow,
who had wanted to do a program on the Institute for Advanced Study generally, but had gone to the institute,
recorded lots of footage of people explaining things, taking it home,
and realised that the only one who was any good at explaining anything was Oppenheimer.
So he devoted the whole program to Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer was shown doing what he does best,
explaining abstruse concepts into theoretical physics and even lessons.
So this is six months after he he'd been declared a dangerous subversive.
At the security hearing, he was suddenly again the most popular scientist in the United States.
The program was enormously popular, and he started giving public lectures.
And at these public lectures, you wouldn't just get hundreds of people. He would get thousands of people.
Then in 1960, he was invited to Japan, an invitation he accepted.
And you can see there in that photograph the effect that those years had had on him.
He was born in 1904, so he's 56. In that photograph, he looks more like 86, completely emaciated and prematurely aged.
Not helped by the fact that he was a chain smoker. The final reconciliation was with Oppenheimer and Teller in 1964.
It was agreed to present Oppenheimer with the Fermi Prize.
And here he is at the reception for the Fermi Prize.
And Edward Teller came up to say hello. You can see how ancient Oppenheimer looks.
There is only 60 years old. Edward Teller came up to shake his hand.
And Oppenheimer was very gracious. You can't entirely say in that photograph, but Kitty was rather less so.
She always bore a grudge against Edward Teller for testifying against Oppenheimer
in the security hearing and for campaigning against him in Washington,
D.C. But anyway, in 1964, Oppenheimer was given the Fermi Prize and was officially, as it were, forgiven for whatever he'd done.
And he only had three years left to live.
He got cancer. One of the last things he said to a friend at the Princeton Institute was, Don't smoke.
And he died in 1967. And I'm going to finish with a remark he made in one of his public lectures in
1960 where he tried to open up about himself and about his deepest feelings.
And he mentioned this argument to Arjuna in the back about Geeta argument for the justification of war.
And he says, If I cannot be comforted by Vishnu, his argument to Arjuna, it is because I am too much a Jew,
much too much a Christian, much too much a European, far too much an American.
For I believe in the meaningfulness of human history and of our role in it, and above all, of our responsibility to it.
Thank you very much.