1 00:00:00,390 --> 00:00:05,790 Oh, so. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this week's Physics Colloquium. 2 00:00:06,420 --> 00:00:16,200 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. 3 00:00:16,650 --> 00:00:21,570 And if you look at some of his publications starting in the early 1990s, you know, they got his start. 4 00:00:21,570 --> 00:00:26,520 Look, look, they can. STEIN For which he won the John Llewellyn Rees Prize. 5 00:00:27,240 --> 00:00:28,890 Then he wrote about Bertrand Russell. 6 00:00:30,110 --> 00:00:43,159 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. 7 00:00:43,160 --> 00:00:47,960 Robert Oppenheimer. And it's many of us, of course, I expect to read it by now. 8 00:00:48,440 --> 00:00:51,470 Those of you who haven't. I'm sure he won't mind me saying you should. 9 00:00:51,980 --> 00:00:59,600 And it's a great pleasure to have him here today to talk about one of the famous physicists of the 20th century. 10 00:00:59,870 --> 00:01:03,080 Right. Thank you. Is his microphone on? 11 00:01:03,620 --> 00:01:12,080 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. 12 00:01:12,910 --> 00:01:19,550 I'd like to thank my friend James also for being instrumental in getting me here. 13 00:01:20,930 --> 00:01:24,290 As John said, I'm not a physicist. I'm a philosopher. 14 00:01:24,980 --> 00:01:30,320 And it makes some sort of sense to me to for me to do a biography of Wittgenstein and of Russell. 15 00:01:30,530 --> 00:01:36,079 But I just want to say something about why I decided to write a biography of Oppenheimer, 16 00:01:36,080 --> 00:01:43,370 which turned out to be an extraordinarily difficult and endlessly fascinating undertaking. 17 00:01:43,820 --> 00:01:54,050 It took me 11 years, and I never for one moment got bored with him or his work or his environment. 18 00:01:54,950 --> 00:02:00,620 What attracted me to the idea of writing a biography of Oppenheimer was many years ago, 19 00:02:00,620 --> 00:02:06,500 about 12 or 13 years ago, The Observer newspaper asked me to review a collection of his correspondence. 20 00:02:07,160 --> 00:02:14,930 Now, until then, I knew about Oppenheimer. What everybody knows about Oppenheimer, that he was the director of the Los Los Alamos Laboratory, 21 00:02:16,130 --> 00:02:27,650 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. 22 00:02:27,830 --> 00:02:32,840 And notorious. Well, it was, in fact, the trial officially a security hearing in the 1950s. 23 00:02:32,840 --> 00:02:37,190 So I knew that. But when I read the correspondence, I discovered much more. 24 00:02:37,190 --> 00:02:41,870 I discovered what an enormously multifaceted and interesting man he was. 25 00:02:42,290 --> 00:02:49,609 I didn't know, for example, before I read these letters, that he had a very keen interest in literature, particularly French literature. 26 00:02:49,610 --> 00:02:56,000 He was an expert. He could discuss French literature with the most informed experts in the world. 27 00:02:56,510 --> 00:03:05,240 He also had a deep interest in philosophy. He'd studied with Whitehead at Harvard and maintained his interest in philosophy throughout his life. 28 00:03:06,440 --> 00:03:09,500 Also, maybe I'll just stop. 29 00:03:09,950 --> 00:03:30,090 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. 30 00:03:30,100 --> 00:03:36,520 He learned Sanskrit in order to read the Hindu literatures in their original language. 31 00:03:36,970 --> 00:03:40,780 And he read the Bhagavad Gita, particularly so many times. 32 00:03:40,780 --> 00:03:42,430 He knew it practically by heart. 33 00:03:42,880 --> 00:03:51,190 He was, by the way, and this goes hand-in-hand with his the multifaceted nature of his intelligence and his interests. 34 00:03:52,600 --> 00:03:55,750 He was wonderfully quick at learning languages. 35 00:03:57,430 --> 00:03:59,979 He he he went to Holland. He learned Dutch. 36 00:03:59,980 --> 00:04:09,130 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. 37 00:04:09,520 --> 00:04:16,630 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? 38 00:04:16,880 --> 00:04:25,330 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. 39 00:04:25,570 --> 00:04:31,450 And when Oppenheimer got back, the students said, You know, I'm surprised you gave me this book in Dutch. 40 00:04:31,990 --> 00:04:38,260 Oppenheimer said, Yes, but it's such easy, Dutch. He knew French. 41 00:04:39,190 --> 00:04:49,870 He was an extraordinary individual. So and I also hadn't realised the extent of his political involvement in the 1930s. 42 00:04:49,870 --> 00:04:54,189 He himself once said that he joined every communist front organisation on the West 43 00:04:54,190 --> 00:05:00,220 Coast of America and and his personal relationships with his family and his friends. 44 00:05:00,820 --> 00:05:04,120 So there's far, far more to him that I'd ever imagined. 45 00:05:04,120 --> 00:05:09,070 And in my review of this collection of correspondence, I pointed all this out and I said, 46 00:05:09,580 --> 00:05:13,270 There is a really good biography to be written of Oppenheimer. 47 00:05:14,200 --> 00:05:18,970 And then publishers got in touch him and said, Well, why don't you do it? And so I did. 48 00:05:19,390 --> 00:05:30,820 And and then 11 years later, produced this 800 page book now called the book Inside the Centre for a number of reasons. 49 00:05:30,830 --> 00:05:36,330 It's a phrase that chimes with many aspects. I said that Oppenheimer was a multifaceted person. 50 00:05:36,910 --> 00:05:44,560 Several of those facets are alluded to in the phrase inside the centre. 51 00:05:45,430 --> 00:05:53,320 Okay. For one of them, he always wanted to be at the centre of things intellectually, and particularly in physics. 52 00:05:53,590 --> 00:06:01,030 And this motivated, this decided a lot of the crucial decisions he made in life when he went to Cambridge, 53 00:06:01,030 --> 00:06:05,800 when he wanted to be right at the centre of where things were happening in his subject, 54 00:06:07,540 --> 00:06:17,200 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. 55 00:06:18,490 --> 00:06:25,990 And then there's another meaning, too, which is he wanted politically and socially to be inside the centre. 56 00:06:26,230 --> 00:06:29,740 And this is something that not many physicists hanker after. 57 00:06:30,070 --> 00:06:37,510 Einstein, for example, couldn't care less whether he was, you know, he exerted any power in America. 58 00:06:38,020 --> 00:06:44,260 Oppenheimer cared very much. He wanted to be both socially and politically an insider. 59 00:06:45,490 --> 00:06:50,860 And I think this had much to do with his feelings of being an outsider, 60 00:06:51,790 --> 00:07:02,019 starting when he was a young student at Harvard, where his Jewish background excluded him from the centre of things. 61 00:07:02,020 --> 00:07:06,040 But he he always wanted to be inside the centre. 62 00:07:07,870 --> 00:07:10,900 Okay. So to begin with, a bit of family history. 63 00:07:11,980 --> 00:07:17,260 The family name Oppenheimer identifies exactly where that family came from. 64 00:07:17,260 --> 00:07:27,790 It was a name adopted by German Jewish families when in 1808, when the Napoleonic decree required Jews to adopt a surname, 65 00:07:28,120 --> 00:07:33,370 many of them in the town of Oppenheim chose to become Oppenheimer. 66 00:07:34,210 --> 00:07:37,990 And you can see there's a picture of Oppenheimer in 1847. 67 00:07:38,260 --> 00:07:44,780 On the present day, it's changed remarkably little. It's in the in the wine growing area by the Rhine in Germany. 68 00:07:44,780 --> 00:07:54,220 It's a very a very pleasant town. So why would the Oppenheimer's leave that lovely town and go to America? 69 00:07:55,240 --> 00:08:05,500 Well, they were part of a wave of immigration, Jewish immigration from Germany to America that went under. 70 00:08:08,820 --> 00:08:14,430 They were prompted by idealistic motives. They had an idealistic sense of what America was, 71 00:08:14,940 --> 00:08:23,880 and this made them very different to the Eastern European Jews who were what's called the third wave of Jewish immigration. 72 00:08:25,590 --> 00:08:32,610 Oppenheimer's friend, Isidor Rabi was an east Kent, came from an Eastern European Jewish family. 73 00:08:33,240 --> 00:08:38,480 And he once said, he once said, I knew what Oppenheimer's problem was when someone said, Well, what was it? 74 00:08:38,490 --> 00:08:45,809 He said, Identity that Oppenheimer did not have, what Rabi had and what the Eastern European Jews had, 75 00:08:45,810 --> 00:08:50,880 which is a very solid sense of their cultural and ethnic identity. 76 00:08:51,600 --> 00:08:57,360 The Eastern European Jews went to America because they were fleeing for their lives, a lot of them. 77 00:08:58,030 --> 00:09:01,200 And they went to survive and to keep alive their culture. 78 00:09:01,980 --> 00:09:08,130 The German Jews in the middle 19th century, a lot of them went to shake off their past. 79 00:09:08,820 --> 00:09:14,280 And their hopes for America are expressed in this poem by Go to America. 80 00:09:14,520 --> 00:09:22,799 Thou hast it better than our ancient hemisphere. Thou has no falling castles nor basalt is here Thy children they know, 81 00:09:22,800 --> 00:09:30,240 not they useful prime time are vain retrospection or ineffective war fortune wait on thy glorious spring, 82 00:09:30,240 --> 00:09:37,920 and when in time they poets sing, may some good genius guard them all from barren robber knight and ghost traditional. 83 00:09:38,670 --> 00:09:48,299 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 84 00:09:48,300 --> 00:09:56,070 the barons and the robbers and the knights and the ghosts and all the accumulated prejudice that they had to suffer while in Germany, 85 00:09:56,070 --> 00:10:10,680 because the German Jews had tried in the thirties, 1830s, 1840s to shake off what distinguish them from their German contemporaries. 86 00:10:10,860 --> 00:10:14,460 So they adopted German as the language of of of their religion. 87 00:10:14,730 --> 00:10:24,390 They abandoned the old Yiddish and the old Hebrew, and they were disappointed in Germany to find that the old laws that prevented them, 88 00:10:24,400 --> 00:10:30,270 that the governed who they could marry, what kind of jobs they could do, where in the cities they could live. 89 00:10:30,480 --> 00:10:36,540 Those laws stayed in place and they were still, despite their best efforts, a repressed minority. 90 00:10:36,960 --> 00:10:44,580 And so they went to America to shake off that repression and to build, as it were, a new world. 91 00:10:45,090 --> 00:10:48,660 So here are the three migrations of European Jews to America. 92 00:10:49,140 --> 00:10:51,180 The first Jews to arrive in America. 93 00:10:51,360 --> 00:10:58,710 The first migration were the Sephardic Jews, and they were expelled from Spain and Portugal back in the 17th century. 94 00:10:59,250 --> 00:11:03,540 And by 1840, there were 15,000 of them in the USA. 95 00:11:05,550 --> 00:11:09,540 The second migration with the German Jews, of which the Oppenheimer's were part. 96 00:11:09,570 --> 00:11:10,680 Looking for a new life. 97 00:11:10,680 --> 00:11:20,790 And by 1880 that wave had increased the Jewish population in the States to 280,000, the vast majority of whom were German Jews. 98 00:11:21,450 --> 00:11:30,090 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. 99 00:11:30,300 --> 00:11:36,660 First two decades of the 20th century. And those were numbered not in thousands, but in millions, two and a half million. 100 00:11:37,770 --> 00:11:43,980 And my opening chapter in my book is all about the context of New York City. 101 00:11:44,580 --> 00:11:54,920 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. 102 00:11:54,930 --> 00:12:01,740 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. 103 00:12:02,700 --> 00:12:09,510 The Eastern Jews like Rabi himself, tended to settle to begin with in the Lower East Side of of Manhattan. 104 00:12:10,230 --> 00:12:15,390 And between those two, even though they were both from Jewish backgrounds, 105 00:12:15,780 --> 00:12:22,650 there was a certain kind of competitiveness for, you know, for leadership of the American Jewish community. 106 00:12:23,400 --> 00:12:32,730 And those separate worlds, the genteel world of the Upper West Side, the crowded, busy, bustling world of the Lower East Side. 107 00:12:33,980 --> 00:12:37,130 Julius Oppenheimer was J. Robert Oppenheimer's father. 108 00:12:37,610 --> 00:12:41,000 He was part of that second wave of migration. 109 00:12:41,810 --> 00:12:50,970 He'd been preceded by his uncles. Who established the firm Rothfeld Stern and Company, which was a tailoring company. 110 00:12:50,980 --> 00:12:56,410 A lot of German Jews, when it when they settled in Manhattan, set up tailoring companies. 111 00:12:56,710 --> 00:13:00,400 And that company, Rothfeld Stern and Company did did very well. 112 00:13:00,400 --> 00:13:04,300 So when Julius Oppenheimer arrived, he was only 17 years old. 113 00:13:04,750 --> 00:13:12,219 In 1888, his uncles had already established the company, were already extremely wealthy people. 114 00:13:12,220 --> 00:13:19,090 And so Julius Oppenheimer could just slot in to their life in in Manhattan. 115 00:13:19,960 --> 00:13:24,030 Now, Julius Oppenheimer himself became very wealthy. 116 00:13:24,040 --> 00:13:32,379 He joined the family firm. He he specialised in buying and selling very fine cloth. 117 00:13:32,380 --> 00:13:39,730 And he became a great expert in that. And he rose in the ranks of the company to to to become its director. 118 00:13:40,360 --> 00:13:52,420 He also. Join this movement, the ethical culture movement, which was a movement very popular among the Upper West Side Jews, 119 00:13:53,740 --> 00:13:58,390 which seemed to many of them to offer a solution to this problem. 120 00:14:00,010 --> 00:14:09,760 How do you preserve what's best in Jewish culture while shaking off any belief in the supernatural? 121 00:14:09,760 --> 00:14:14,050 Any as it were. Belief for which there is no evidence. 122 00:14:15,940 --> 00:14:21,080 And the ethical culture movement was perceived by them to be an answer to that. 123 00:14:21,100 --> 00:14:28,030 It was founded by Felix Adler, who was himself the son of a rabbi. 124 00:14:30,850 --> 00:14:35,590 And he he delivered a famous sermon called The Judaism of the Future, 125 00:14:36,190 --> 00:14:41,950 in which he said, We proposed to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual. 126 00:14:42,790 --> 00:14:50,500 His new religion was not to be distinguished by its belief, by its creed, but by the ethical deeds. 127 00:14:50,830 --> 00:14:53,560 It was to be a religion of deed, he said, not of creed. 128 00:14:54,430 --> 00:15:03,190 That is to say that what Felix Adler identified as the non supernatural core of the Jewish tradition, 129 00:15:03,460 --> 00:15:10,630 the thing worth preserving was the ethics, the ethics of the of the religion, social ethics. 130 00:15:10,990 --> 00:15:20,140 And so the ethical culture movement developed a number of ways of trying to improve the population, trying to improve society. 131 00:15:20,830 --> 00:15:31,960 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. 132 00:15:32,230 --> 00:15:33,830 And this had a great influence on J. 133 00:15:33,880 --> 00:15:43,930 Robert Oppenheimer himself, that he [INAUDIBLE] always considered it his duty to do whatever he could for society. 134 00:15:44,140 --> 00:15:54,340 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, 135 00:15:54,880 --> 00:16:03,460 Joseph Seligman, Jacob Schiff, Henry Morgenthau, as well as Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld, who were Julius Oppenheimer's uncles. 136 00:16:06,160 --> 00:16:09,850 Those families all lived within a few streets of one another. 137 00:16:11,620 --> 00:16:15,730 So to go back to this is where Oppenheimer was brought up. 138 00:16:16,000 --> 00:16:23,530 J. Robert Oppenheimer on Riverside Drive with a view on the on the west side of Manhattan, with a view over the River Hudson. 139 00:16:26,110 --> 00:16:33,220 The his family owned the whole 11th floor of that building, 155 Riverside Drive. 140 00:16:34,270 --> 00:16:40,330 It's hard to imagine how much that piece of real estate would be worth now. 141 00:16:40,870 --> 00:16:44,710 An unimaginable fortune. One. Curiously enough, one, five, five. 142 00:16:44,890 --> 00:16:54,790 Riverside Drive has become a famous address to anybody who knows anything about American sitcoms, of all things, 143 00:16:58,360 --> 00:17:06,160 because it was it was a featured that the name of the sitcoms Escape Me for a moment and it'll come to you. 144 00:17:07,270 --> 00:17:13,090 But anyway, so Oppenheimer lived there 155 Riverside Drive with a view of the River Hudson. 145 00:17:13,420 --> 00:17:22,540 The the family decorated the rooms of this enormous flat with paintings acquired by his mum. 146 00:17:22,840 --> 00:17:32,650 His mother was a trained painter and an expert on French painting particularly, but European painting in general. 147 00:17:33,190 --> 00:17:36,810 And their collection of paintings was a. 148 00:17:38,200 --> 00:17:44,830 Was unparalleled. It included several van golfs included Suzanne, a Picasso. 149 00:17:45,460 --> 00:17:53,140 When Jay, Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank lost his job because of his communist affiliations, 150 00:17:53,590 --> 00:17:57,550 he was unable to find work in academic life and unable to find work anywhere, 151 00:17:58,360 --> 00:18:04,120 but was able to live in some style by selling one painting that had belonged to his parents. 152 00:18:04,360 --> 00:18:09,940 And that painting enabled him to buy a ranch in Colorado where he lived for the rest of his life, 153 00:18:10,810 --> 00:18:16,300 so that at 155 Riverside Drive, Oppenheimer was brought up, surrounded by this these lovely paintings. 154 00:18:17,410 --> 00:18:25,569 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. 155 00:18:25,570 --> 00:18:34,930 If he if he took any interest in music, they would pay for the greatest the best teachers to come to the house. 156 00:18:35,290 --> 00:18:39,339 If he showed any interest in architecture, he was taught architecture. 157 00:18:39,340 --> 00:18:43,360 He was taught privately until he went to the ethical culture school. 158 00:18:43,630 --> 00:18:46,720 The ethical culture movement had its own school. 159 00:18:47,590 --> 00:18:50,680 And Oppenheimer, of course, signed up for it. 160 00:18:51,910 --> 00:18:54,489 His younger brother, Frank, was eight years younger. 161 00:18:54,490 --> 00:19:03,760 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. 162 00:19:03,760 --> 00:19:08,379 When he eventually went to the school, he went to school fairly late in life. 163 00:19:08,380 --> 00:19:15,730 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, 164 00:19:15,730 --> 00:19:25,480 partly because he had had this strange, isolated existence at Riverside Drive and partly because he was so precocious. 165 00:19:25,810 --> 00:19:30,700 One of his schoolmates at the Ethical Culture School remembers him saying to her, 166 00:19:31,420 --> 00:19:40,450 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. 167 00:19:42,130 --> 00:19:45,550 And he was remembered by his his schoolmates as being a bit gauche. 168 00:19:45,550 --> 00:19:51,400 He didn't really fit in. He stuck out because he was he was better dressed than anybody else. 169 00:19:51,400 --> 00:19:55,630 He was better educated than anybody else. He was a bit posher than anybody else. 170 00:19:57,550 --> 00:20:03,340 And one of the things he most like to do, he's pictured here doing building building things with building blocks. 171 00:20:03,760 --> 00:20:07,030 So very unusual picture in that it shows another child with him. 172 00:20:07,360 --> 00:20:14,050 He didn't very often have playmates to his house, partly because his parents were were very fastidious, 173 00:20:14,950 --> 00:20:25,900 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. 174 00:20:26,470 --> 00:20:30,350 The one friend he made at school. And this is very striking. 175 00:20:30,350 --> 00:20:35,420 The Ethical Culture School was, of course, dominated by members of the ethical culture movement, 176 00:20:35,660 --> 00:20:40,580 which is to say members of the German Jewish community in New York City. 177 00:20:41,480 --> 00:20:49,760 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. 178 00:20:50,540 --> 00:20:58,760 He made a friend called Francis Ferguson, who was later in life to be a well-known literary critic and professor of English literature. 179 00:20:59,300 --> 00:21:06,350 And Francis Ferguson came from New Mexico, from the, uh, and he, he, 180 00:21:06,530 --> 00:21:13,790 his family had a house in the Upper Pecos Valley in New Mexico, like most of the kids at the Ethical Culture School. 181 00:21:13,880 --> 00:21:17,000 Francis Ferguson came from a very privileged background. 182 00:21:17,870 --> 00:21:23,450 His father was the first member of the House of Representatives representing New Mexico, 183 00:21:24,230 --> 00:21:30,710 and his family for generations had been right at the heart of political power in New Mexico. 184 00:21:31,790 --> 00:21:40,190 But it was a it was it was a Western American background and in some ways, crucially, a non-Jewish background. 185 00:21:41,090 --> 00:21:51,469 Now, at school, Oppenheimer, partly because of the excellence of its science teachers, was drawn towards science and particularly chemistry. 186 00:21:51,470 --> 00:21:56,420 And he applied to Harvard to study chemistry, and he was accepted. 187 00:21:57,110 --> 00:22:03,650 But he became very ill in the in the months before he was supposed to go to Harvard. 188 00:22:04,190 --> 00:22:12,590 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. 189 00:22:12,890 --> 00:22:18,920 He went, of course, to Francis Ferguson's home, Francis Ferguson, and introduced him to a man called Paul Haugen, 190 00:22:19,520 --> 00:22:26,090 who was a writer who became later on a very famous writer writing about the southwest of the United States, 191 00:22:26,750 --> 00:22:31,760 Francis Ferguson's own family, his his his brother and his sister, Erna. 192 00:22:32,000 --> 00:22:34,459 They themselves are also famous writers. 193 00:22:34,460 --> 00:22:42,560 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. 194 00:22:43,940 --> 00:22:48,709 So Oppenheimer went there and for the first time in his life, he felt as if he belonged. 195 00:22:48,710 --> 00:22:54,080 He felt as if he was with people who understood him, people who he liked, people who liked him. 196 00:22:54,620 --> 00:23:03,829 And it's quite interesting. Paul Holguin, remembering Oppenheimer in those days, and we're talking now in the early twenties, uh, 23, 197 00:23:03,830 --> 00:23:12,860 24 in those days said that he was astonished at the later, the later accounts of Oppenheimer as, as rude and brusque consultancies, 198 00:23:12,860 --> 00:23:21,650 as he remembers Oppenheimer as getting on very well with people and of having exquisite manners and being very popular and confident among people, 199 00:23:22,070 --> 00:23:26,209 which shows, I think, the effect that going to New Mexico had. 200 00:23:26,210 --> 00:23:31,100 And then people who'd known him in New York City when he returned to New York City, 201 00:23:31,100 --> 00:23:36,620 having had this holiday in New Mexico, remember that he came back to New York City, 202 00:23:36,770 --> 00:23:46,370 a transformed man, much more confident, much more sociable, much jolly, much more inclined to make jokes and be less intense and serious. 203 00:23:47,030 --> 00:23:52,370 He also became an excellent horse rider in New Mexico, and he developed a great love. 204 00:23:52,370 --> 00:24:00,620 And this would would influence later on the placement of the other laboratory that produced the first atomic bomb. 205 00:24:02,090 --> 00:24:11,540 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. 206 00:24:11,990 --> 00:24:18,620 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. 207 00:24:19,620 --> 00:24:26,269 He he he fell in love with a woman called Katherine Chavez, who was already married. 208 00:24:26,270 --> 00:24:27,889 So that wasn't going to go anywhere. 209 00:24:27,890 --> 00:24:37,160 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. 210 00:24:37,610 --> 00:24:43,310 And it still to this day called Lake Katherine after Oppenheimer named it so. 211 00:24:45,200 --> 00:24:50,690 So in 1922, Oppenheimer started at Harvard. 212 00:24:53,090 --> 00:24:59,190 And as I say, his as I said right at the beginning, his Jewish background was held against him at Harvard. 213 00:24:59,210 --> 00:25:09,860 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. 214 00:25:10,730 --> 00:25:20,059 The president of Harvard, President Lowell, was had looked aghast at Columbia University in New York City and to his dismay, 215 00:25:20,060 --> 00:25:31,490 had discovered that Columbia University was up to over over 40% Jews, and he didn't want that to happen at Harvard. 216 00:25:31,880 --> 00:25:39,290 And so suggested to the staff that they that they vote on a motion that would restrict the number, 217 00:25:39,620 --> 00:25:42,950 impose a limit on the number of Jews that were admitted into Harvard. 218 00:25:43,580 --> 00:25:52,670 The staff refused to do that, whereupon Lowell got the same measure enforced through the backdoor, as it were. 219 00:25:52,730 --> 00:26:00,440 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. 220 00:26:02,230 --> 00:26:09,730 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 221 00:26:09,730 --> 00:26:15,010 national controversy with people writing to The New York Times for and against Lowell suggestion. 222 00:26:16,810 --> 00:26:20,320 The very summer when this was happening was when Oppenheimer went to Harvard. 223 00:26:22,180 --> 00:26:26,170 But he himself never mentions it once in any of his letters. 224 00:26:26,390 --> 00:26:31,510 A lot of his letters have survived to his old teachers at the Ethical Culture School. 225 00:26:32,050 --> 00:26:36,850 Some letters have survived to to his parents, some to his friends. 226 00:26:37,450 --> 00:26:40,420 Not one of them ever mentions the controversy. 227 00:26:41,590 --> 00:26:54,690 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. 228 00:26:54,700 --> 00:27:04,389 One of his best friends there. The the bottom right, Frederick Bernheim, came from exactly the same background as Oppenheimer himself. 229 00:27:04,390 --> 00:27:11,380 Bernheim also was brought up in Riverside Drive. He'd also gone to school in ethical culture at the Ethical Culture School. 230 00:27:11,590 --> 00:27:13,750 He'd also applied to do chemistry. 231 00:27:14,770 --> 00:27:24,219 The only non-Jewish friend that Oppenheimer made at Harvard was William Boyd, who became a very distinguished chemist. 232 00:27:24,220 --> 00:27:33,310 And later on in life. Now. So Harvard Oppenheimer at Harvard did very little else but study. 233 00:27:33,320 --> 00:27:42,950 Actually, he didn't. I think he'd gone there expecting to experience, know a wider social circle, a more a fuller social life. 234 00:27:43,220 --> 00:27:48,860 But actually, that didn't happen. What did happen was he read voraciously and not just in chemistry. 235 00:27:49,160 --> 00:27:57,650 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. 236 00:27:58,490 --> 00:28:02,000 And he said that he he devoured the library. 237 00:28:03,380 --> 00:28:06,440 He said, you know, he sat at the library like the Goth sat room. 238 00:28:08,210 --> 00:28:16,280 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. 239 00:28:17,180 --> 00:28:24,550 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. 240 00:28:24,560 --> 00:28:34,639 So now in the summer of 1923, he became interested in physics and in the then very new physics of quantum physics, 241 00:28:34,640 --> 00:28:41,510 what's now called old quantum physics, not quantum mechanics, but the quantum physics of of Planck and Einstein. 242 00:28:43,010 --> 00:28:48,200 And even though he was he'd only just finished his first year studies as an undergraduate chemistry student. 243 00:28:49,400 --> 00:28:58,130 By the summer of 1923, he'd read many of the leading books in this rather new area of theoretical physics, 244 00:28:58,550 --> 00:29:05,570 and he wrote to the physics department saying that he would like to take certain graduate level courses in quantum physics, 245 00:29:07,850 --> 00:29:15,530 and he included a list of things that he'd read on the subject, which he was a very showy person. 246 00:29:15,530 --> 00:29:21,829 OPPENHEIMER And this list is characteristically showy, not only because it includes, you know, 247 00:29:21,830 --> 00:29:28,430 stuff at the very cutting edge of physics at that time, but also a smattering of stuff in German and French and so on. 248 00:29:29,120 --> 00:29:41,060 And when the when the physics department met to discuss his extraordinary application to enrol in a graduate level physics course, 249 00:29:41,360 --> 00:29:48,410 not having studied any physics formally before, somebody said, Well, you know, 250 00:29:48,770 --> 00:29:52,400 he should be given a Ph.D. just for knowing the titles of the things that he's listed. 251 00:29:54,140 --> 00:29:57,290 And he was extraordinarily accepted onto this graduate level course. 252 00:29:57,740 --> 00:30:07,280 And so from his second year onwards, as well as pursuing his undergraduate studies in chemistry, he was attending graduate level courses in physics. 253 00:30:08,240 --> 00:30:10,129 Now, as I said right at the beginning, 254 00:30:10,130 --> 00:30:20,540 he wanted to be at the centre of things and he knew from his reading how important Rutherford's work was at Cambridge. 255 00:30:21,410 --> 00:30:30,200 And so he applied to be a student of Rutherford's at Cambridge for the first time in his life, 256 00:30:30,200 --> 00:30:36,230 and more or less well, one of the very few times in his life he was met with rejection. 257 00:30:37,310 --> 00:30:43,040 Rutherford rejected him. And I don't think it's difficult to see why Rutherford rejected him, 258 00:30:43,220 --> 00:30:52,160 because his letter of recommendation was from the physics professor at Harvard, Percy Bridgman, experimental physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize. 259 00:30:53,360 --> 00:31:01,819 And Bridgman said to said in his letter of recommendation to Rutherford that Oppenheimer was a very brilliant young man. 260 00:31:01,820 --> 00:31:11,330 He was a had a very quick, very incisive mind, good at the theoretical parts of the subject, but hopeless in the laboratory. 261 00:31:13,400 --> 00:31:16,040 And so Rutherford naturally didn't accept him. 262 00:31:16,070 --> 00:31:25,340 What's curious, though, is why Oppenheimer, who was always a disaster in the laboratory, famously, even though he headed the biggest, 263 00:31:25,640 --> 00:31:34,580 most expensive laboratory in the country later on, he was never a laboratory physicist and he was never any good at it. 264 00:31:35,030 --> 00:31:42,980 So why should he apply to an experimentalist, an experimental physicist to work under him? 265 00:31:43,280 --> 00:31:49,339 And I think the reason is that he'd identified Rutherford and the Cavendish Laboratory as being at the centre, 266 00:31:49,340 --> 00:31:55,040 and that's where he wanted to be, regardless of whether it suited his particular talents or not. 267 00:31:55,970 --> 00:32:08,780 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. 268 00:32:09,080 --> 00:32:15,410 But he also had to apply to a college, and he applied to Christ's college Cambridge, and was accepted. 269 00:32:16,370 --> 00:32:24,139 And so he he took that place that he was offered, but he arrived at Cambridge, rather, 270 00:32:24,140 --> 00:32:29,880 humiliatingly, for somebody who'd been identified as the best student of his generation at Harvard. 271 00:32:29,900 --> 00:32:36,710 He arrived at Cambridge with the rather, you know, with the status of an undergraduate, not as a research postgraduate. 272 00:32:38,120 --> 00:32:50,270 And he was assigned low level experimental work under Thomson, the discoverer of the electron. 273 00:32:52,040 --> 00:33:02,870 And he struggled. He Rutherford he kept applying to to study, you know, as a research student. 274 00:33:03,470 --> 00:33:14,150 And Rutherford assigned a peer Blackett, Patrick Blackett, to work with Oppenheimer to improve his skills in the laboratory, 275 00:33:14,150 --> 00:33:20,330 because it was obvious to everybody that Oppenheimer had very little laboratory experience or skills. 276 00:33:20,810 --> 00:33:28,280 And so Blackett, who was, as you will know, an extremely gifted and able experimentalist, 277 00:33:28,460 --> 00:33:35,210 was given the task of getting Oppenheimer up to speed so that he could pursue research at Cambridge. 278 00:33:36,200 --> 00:33:42,950 Blackett has been described as a young Oedipus tall, slim, beautifully balanced, always looking better dressed than anyone else. 279 00:33:43,610 --> 00:33:49,670 And he intimidated Oppenheimer both by being charismatic, well-dressed, popular, 280 00:33:50,060 --> 00:33:55,250 and also being a brilliant researcher, which Oppenheimer quite conspicuously wasn't. 281 00:33:56,150 --> 00:34:03,170 And so for the first six months of his time at Cambridge, Oppenheimer had the worst time in his life. 282 00:34:05,750 --> 00:34:09,620 And it's no exaggeration, I think, to say that he went crazy during those six months. 283 00:34:09,620 --> 00:34:15,320 He was diagnosed as schizophrenic, almost certainly misdiagnosed, because, you know, 284 00:34:15,590 --> 00:34:21,170 you know that that schizophrenics have more fundamental problems then than Oppenheimer had. 285 00:34:21,710 --> 00:34:27,200 But there's no doubt that he behaved very, very oddly during his six months at Cambridge. 286 00:34:27,830 --> 00:34:34,490 He's described by some students at the Cavendish as rolling around the floor. 287 00:34:35,150 --> 00:34:41,150 And once when he was invited to present his work, he studied. 288 00:34:41,210 --> 00:34:44,210 He stood in front of a blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand. 289 00:34:44,630 --> 00:34:50,630 And he said, The point is the point is the point is until he was led away. 290 00:34:51,620 --> 00:35:05,020 So he he he suffered enormously. And when he when he met Francis Ferguson during a break in Paris, he tried to kill Ferguson. 291 00:35:05,030 --> 00:35:08,750 He tried he tried to strangle him with a strap. 292 00:35:09,650 --> 00:35:13,340 He also notoriously tried to kill Blackett himself. 293 00:35:13,370 --> 00:35:17,689 He went on to he went on a holiday having left. 294 00:35:17,690 --> 00:35:23,240 And this is charged with sort of symbolism, having left a poisoned apple on black its desk. 295 00:35:24,920 --> 00:35:28,040 Black. It didn't bite the apple. Oppenheimer removed it. 296 00:35:28,910 --> 00:35:36,500 Amazingly, the University of Cambridge didn't send him down, didn't refuse to, you know, have anything more to do with him. 297 00:35:36,890 --> 00:35:42,920 They said, okay, you can carry on being a student so long as you receive medical attention, which he did. 298 00:35:42,920 --> 00:35:49,970 He was sent to a psychoanalyst in London, and that's where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. 299 00:35:50,810 --> 00:36:01,730 But now here's the most amazing thing, that within three months of being diagnosed schizophrenic, going to London and receiving psychiatric treatment. 300 00:36:02,150 --> 00:36:12,170 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. 301 00:36:12,960 --> 00:36:19,940 Theoretical physics, and particularly with quantum mechanics, which was, you know, 302 00:36:19,980 --> 00:36:25,320 being developed at the very time when he was a when he was arrived in Cambridge. 303 00:36:26,660 --> 00:36:33,620 2526, and he happened to have the good fortune of becoming friends with Paul Dirac. 304 00:36:34,830 --> 00:36:38,120 Who gave the first lectures at Cambridge on quantum mechanics. 305 00:36:38,130 --> 00:36:40,020 And Oppenheimer was at those lectures. 306 00:36:41,430 --> 00:36:52,920 He discussed this this the view breakthroughs in quantum mechanics of of Heisenberg and Bull and Bourne with Paul Dirac. 307 00:36:53,310 --> 00:36:58,470 And amazingly quickly he grasped these new ideas and was contributing to them. 308 00:37:01,040 --> 00:37:05,630 Not that Paul Dirac entirely approved of everything Oppenheimer did. 309 00:37:07,670 --> 00:37:13,490 Paul Dirac once said to Oppenheimer, I can't understand how you can be both a physicist and a poet. 310 00:37:14,950 --> 00:37:23,440 He said, because in physics, what we do is we look at really complicated ideas and try to make them as simple as possible. 311 00:37:24,310 --> 00:37:28,210 He says, whereas in poetry you do exactly the opposite. 312 00:37:28,960 --> 00:37:37,180 And so Dirac rather disapproved of Oppenheimer's interest in Hinduism, in his literary interests, in his literary activities. 313 00:37:37,420 --> 00:37:44,110 But nevertheless, they became friends. And that, I think, was the saving of Oppenheimer. 314 00:37:44,120 --> 00:37:52,780 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. 315 00:37:53,020 --> 00:38:02,709 And he was able to make a contribution to those exciting developments so that when Max born on the pitch, 316 00:38:02,710 --> 00:38:09,850 picture on the right, he's the one in the chair. When Max born visited Cambridge in 1926. 317 00:38:10,360 --> 00:38:18,760 He was so struck by the intelligence of Oppenheimer's questions and the interest that Oppenheimer took in Born's own work, 318 00:38:19,450 --> 00:38:26,019 that he invited Oppenheimer to go and to study with him. And so Oppenheimer left Cambridge behind. 319 00:38:26,020 --> 00:38:30,070 He'd had, as I said, in the first six months at Cambridge, a dreadful time there. 320 00:38:30,340 --> 00:38:41,170 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. 321 00:38:41,590 --> 00:38:51,700 Niels Bohr visited Cambridge and again was struck by the intelligence of Oppenheimer's questions and by the intensity of his intellect. 322 00:38:52,210 --> 00:39:00,910 And Bohr remained for Oppenheimer, the ideal man, bul was the man whom Oppenheimer admired more than anybody else, 323 00:39:01,270 --> 00:39:05,400 and not just scientifically, but also politically. 324 00:39:05,410 --> 00:39:07,990 So that in the post-war period, 325 00:39:09,370 --> 00:39:18,189 the views that Oppenheimer was espousing that he was campaigning for were views that he'd acquired from discussing politics, 326 00:39:18,190 --> 00:39:23,500 and particularly the politics of atomic energy control with Niels Bohr. 327 00:39:25,700 --> 00:39:32,360 So I'll stick with that slide. So in the summer of 1926, Oppenheimer left Cambridge, 328 00:39:32,510 --> 00:39:39,589 went to work at Gutting and with Max born and made completely the opposite impression on people to what he'd made in Cambridge. 329 00:39:39,590 --> 00:39:42,950 At Cambridge. He struck people as an oddball. He didn't really fit in. 330 00:39:43,370 --> 00:39:52,910 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. 331 00:39:53,360 --> 00:39:59,840 He was confident. He was outgoing. He was the centre of student life. 332 00:40:01,340 --> 00:40:04,909 And he was popular with with certain limitations. 333 00:40:04,910 --> 00:40:09,630 People didn't like him taking over the lectures. It's a remarkable thing. 334 00:40:09,650 --> 00:40:16,970 Max Born was then at the height of his powers and had had a very solid education in mathematics and physics. 335 00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:20,090 Oppenheimer, as we've seen, had this slightly erratic education. 336 00:40:20,090 --> 00:40:30,710 He said himself that his education had holes in it. But nevertheless, when Max Born gave lectures at gutting them and Oppenheimer interrupted, 337 00:40:31,130 --> 00:40:39,530 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. 338 00:40:40,280 --> 00:40:49,490 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, 339 00:40:50,750 --> 00:40:58,640 one of which contains the famous Born Oppenheimer approximation method that is still in use today 340 00:40:59,270 --> 00:41:06,140 and had established himself as one of the most promising young scientists of his generation. 341 00:41:06,290 --> 00:41:07,250 Very, very quickly. 342 00:41:08,270 --> 00:41:18,300 So that within a year of being at Curtin and American universities were competing to sign him up for for their theoretical physics. 343 00:41:18,800 --> 00:41:28,010 The situation internationally at this time was this that the acknowledged leaders of theoretical physics were in Europe. 344 00:41:29,420 --> 00:41:37,820 America had very distinguished experimental physicists like Percy Bridgman, but very few distinguished theoretical physicists. 345 00:41:38,240 --> 00:41:44,660 And the the young theoretical physicists in America went over to Europe and studied at the feet of Niels Bohr, 346 00:41:44,660 --> 00:41:47,660 Max born and so on, and then went back to America. 347 00:41:48,440 --> 00:41:58,759 The American universities knew that this was the situation. And so they recruited they went to Europe to recruit their physicists in Europe. 348 00:41:58,760 --> 00:42:05,390 And so Oppenheimer was was received while he was still in Germany, received several offers from American universities. 349 00:42:07,820 --> 00:42:13,190 And eventually he accepted a unique position where he was halfway between. 350 00:42:13,190 --> 00:42:20,240 He was employed both by University of California in Berkeley and also by Caltech. 351 00:42:20,750 --> 00:42:24,710 So he spent half the year at Berkeley and then the other half in Pasadena, 352 00:42:25,550 --> 00:42:36,920 and he was able to do that because there was such a such a demand for bright, young, theoretical physicists among the American universities. 353 00:42:37,520 --> 00:42:43,910 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, 354 00:42:44,360 --> 00:42:49,460 and then decided before he took up this unusual joint position in California, 355 00:42:49,850 --> 00:42:58,400 he decided to spend some more time in Europe, and he went to Zurich to work with Wolfgang Pauli. 356 00:42:58,640 --> 00:43:07,310 And again, he was in the right place at the right time because Pauli was then laying the foundations for what would become QED, 357 00:43:07,910 --> 00:43:12,620 quantum electrodynamics. He was writing papers with Heisenberg on the subject. 358 00:43:12,890 --> 00:43:21,020 Oppenheimer was there on the spot and contributed to two of these papers written with Heisenberg and Pauli. 359 00:43:22,970 --> 00:43:30,830 And so he was able to go back to America having, you know, again, been there at the time, 360 00:43:30,830 --> 00:43:35,030 at the very cutting edge of developments in theoretical physics, physics. 361 00:43:35,540 --> 00:43:41,719 This is a picture taken by Rudolf Pyles, who was also in Zurich on Lake Zurich. 362 00:43:41,720 --> 00:43:48,260 And it's a wonderful picture. I think Oppenheimer's there on the left with his by hat smoking a cigarette. 363 00:43:48,680 --> 00:43:58,610 Raab is looking very thoughtful and I suppose in some sense in control of the boat and then probably looking at the picture looks, 364 00:43:59,570 --> 00:44:05,450 looking at the camera partly looks sort of malevolent and, uh, slightly sinister. 365 00:44:05,810 --> 00:44:14,540 It's a great, great picture, I think. So having been at Zurich, Oppenheimer returned to to America and to California. 366 00:44:15,290 --> 00:44:21,980 Now, the reason he said that he wanted to go to Berkeley was that Berkeley, he said, was a was a desert, theoretically. 367 00:44:22,640 --> 00:44:28,000 And so he could establish. For himself, a school of physics. 368 00:44:28,960 --> 00:44:32,950 So there was nothing there, and he could create it, as it were, in his own image. 369 00:44:33,910 --> 00:44:40,410 While at Caltech, there were established and eminent physicists from whom he could learn. 370 00:44:40,420 --> 00:44:43,740 And so he spent half the year at Berkeley teaching graduate. 371 00:44:43,770 --> 00:44:49,240 He never taught undergraduates, he only taught graduate students, but he was build a built up throughout the thirties, 372 00:44:49,450 --> 00:44:54,690 this school of graduate students at Berkeley starting almost from nothing. 373 00:44:54,700 --> 00:44:59,290 And by the end of the 1930s that had become the most distinguished, 374 00:44:59,500 --> 00:45:08,079 most successful graduate school of physics in the U.S. and his students were so devoted to him, they would make the trip. 375 00:45:08,080 --> 00:45:14,560 When he left Berkeley to go down the Californian coast down to Pasadena, they would go with him. 376 00:45:14,710 --> 00:45:19,330 So they had this strange nomadic existence where they they they sit at his feet at Berkeley, 377 00:45:19,570 --> 00:45:24,190 get in their cars, move everything they had down to Pasadena and sit at his feet. 378 00:45:24,460 --> 00:45:29,470 They're two of his students became his his best friends. 379 00:45:29,800 --> 00:45:34,690 One of them here is Robert Sperber, who was a lifelong friend and who, of course, 380 00:45:34,690 --> 00:45:40,450 made great contributions to physics and was also one of the leading lights at Los Alamos. 381 00:45:42,010 --> 00:45:43,659 But it was also the beginnings of big science. 382 00:45:43,660 --> 00:45:52,510 And one of the things that although Oppenheimer's School of Graduate School of Physics was theoretical physics also at Berkeley was Ernest Lawrence, 383 00:45:53,440 --> 00:45:58,569 who built ever bigger particle accelerators, ever bigger cyclic cyclotron, 384 00:45:58,570 --> 00:46:03,190 and who received the Nobel Prize, of course, for his invention of the cyclotron. 385 00:46:03,730 --> 00:46:05,230 And Lawrence and Oppenheimer, 386 00:46:05,230 --> 00:46:11,740 though they were very different individuals from very different backgrounds and took very different approaches to physics, 387 00:46:12,190 --> 00:46:15,250 had a mutually beneficial relationship with each other, 388 00:46:15,880 --> 00:46:21,280 Lawrence would present to Oppenheimer and his students findings from his experimental 389 00:46:21,280 --> 00:46:25,660 work that he himself couldn't account for and asked them to explain it. 390 00:46:25,990 --> 00:46:30,729 Likewise, Oppenheimer and his students would present to Lawrence some problem and asked 391 00:46:30,730 --> 00:46:35,980 Lawrence to devise some experimental way of investigating and treating the problem. 392 00:46:36,400 --> 00:46:44,860 And so the two together theory and experiment uh, mutually helped one another. 393 00:46:44,860 --> 00:46:52,179 And the result was that Berkeley became, as I said, the leading centre of physics by the end of the 1930s, 394 00:46:52,180 --> 00:46:55,060 acknowledged as the leading centre of physics in the U.S. 395 00:46:56,400 --> 00:47:06,210 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. 396 00:47:07,020 --> 00:47:11,820 The story goes The reason it's Paro Caliente is Spanish for hot dog. 397 00:47:12,240 --> 00:47:21,510 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. 398 00:47:21,750 --> 00:47:34,980 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, 399 00:47:35,850 --> 00:47:38,970 where they could continue their discussions of theoretical physics. 400 00:47:40,320 --> 00:47:47,219 The stories of people who spent weeks in Pedro Caliente are of, you know, 401 00:47:47,220 --> 00:47:54,570 endless discussions of theoretical physics, lots of lots of excellent drink and very little food. 402 00:47:57,120 --> 00:48:00,509 And there is and Ernest Lawrence, of course, was also a guest. 403 00:48:00,510 --> 00:48:07,980 And that other photograph shows a slightly foppish looking Oppenheimer leaning against his car with with Ernest Lawrence there. 404 00:48:08,460 --> 00:48:14,130 And so it became a sort of thing for for the students at Berkeley to receive an invitation. 405 00:48:14,130 --> 00:48:20,580 If you received an invitation to go to and say you'd made it into the inner ring of Oppenheimer's circle. 406 00:48:21,840 --> 00:48:31,620 Right now, I haven't mentioned politics so far because and amazingly, until the until the 1930s, 407 00:48:32,670 --> 00:48:38,220 really until the mid 1930s, Oppenheimer took no interest in politics whatsoever. 408 00:48:39,600 --> 00:48:44,400 He didn't even know the great crash would happen in 1929 until he was told by Ernest Lawrence. 409 00:48:46,260 --> 00:48:49,980 What changed? That was his relationship with his students. 410 00:48:52,500 --> 00:48:56,309 As I said, he you know, he got very close with his graduate students. They admired him. 411 00:48:56,310 --> 00:49:00,300 It was said that they used to impersonate the way he walked, the way he talked. 412 00:49:01,680 --> 00:49:04,979 He liked very hot food when he when he ate at all. 413 00:49:04,980 --> 00:49:10,830 And they would pick that up. They would they would dress the way he did and so on. 414 00:49:12,480 --> 00:49:17,430 And he got to know them very well and discovered, much to his dismay, 415 00:49:17,430 --> 00:49:23,430 that his most brilliant students in the recession of the 1930s were not able to get jobs. 416 00:49:23,640 --> 00:49:29,310 Or if they were, they were they were getting very poor, poorly paid, menial jobs. 417 00:49:30,920 --> 00:49:36,650 And through discovering that he got interested in the recession and therefore what to do about the recession, 418 00:49:36,950 --> 00:49:41,660 and he got drawn into left wing politics of the 1930s. 419 00:49:42,440 --> 00:49:48,890 We tend to forget, but because of what happened in the 1950s and the violent reaction against communism, 420 00:49:49,310 --> 00:49:57,560 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. 421 00:49:57,950 --> 00:50:03,320 And people a lot of people were quite open about their affiliation with the Communist Party. 422 00:50:03,590 --> 00:50:16,340 This changed actually during the 1930s when the Communist Party became increasingly under suspicion of helping Soviet espionage activities. 423 00:50:17,240 --> 00:50:23,540 And that was for the very good reason that there's lots of evidence that they were helping Soviet espionage activities. 424 00:50:24,890 --> 00:50:37,460 So anybody involved in communist and communist front organisations in the starting from from about 1936 onwards attracted the attention, 425 00:50:38,090 --> 00:50:42,860 the close attention of the FBI and the security services. 426 00:50:43,670 --> 00:50:48,829 So what we've got in the middle here are four students of Oppenheimer's Joe Weinberg, 427 00:50:48,830 --> 00:50:55,040 Rosie laminates, David Boehm and Max Friedman, all of them students of Oppenheimer's. 428 00:50:55,460 --> 00:51:07,880 And all of them members of the Communist Party. Now, this photograph was taken by a street photographer who outside the campus at Berkeley. 429 00:51:08,690 --> 00:51:12,740 There are four friends and they decided to have this photograph taken by a street photographer. 430 00:51:13,190 --> 00:51:16,520 What they didn't know is that they were being followed by an FBI agent. 431 00:51:17,360 --> 00:51:28,790 And the reason for that is that Rose Illuminates had been picked up by some microphones discussing espionage with with a Communist Party member. 432 00:51:29,330 --> 00:51:32,630 And so the FBI were tailing Rossi Luminance. 433 00:51:33,290 --> 00:51:39,440 So this FBI agent approached the street. Photographer said, I'll have that picture, thank you very much, 434 00:51:39,980 --> 00:51:46,970 and took it to the FBI offices and they pulled out all the stops to identify these other people. 435 00:51:47,570 --> 00:51:55,550 And all the people in that photograph, once they'd been identified, were then marked on the blacklist. 436 00:51:56,090 --> 00:52:05,540 None of them succeeded in getting stable, secure jobs in the United States of America after that. 437 00:52:06,860 --> 00:52:14,540 And because they were all students of Oppenheimer, the FBI opened a file on Oppenheimer himself, which became enormous. 438 00:52:15,740 --> 00:52:19,580 Oppenheimer's work office was was bugged. 439 00:52:19,850 --> 00:52:23,330 His home was bugged. He was followed everywhere. 440 00:52:24,050 --> 00:52:32,960 The FBI tried everything they could to find evidence of Oppenheimer's own involvement with espionage activities, and they never found anything. 441 00:52:33,410 --> 00:52:37,070 He himself knew of this intense interest. 442 00:52:37,610 --> 00:52:45,290 I looked through the entire FBI file, which is absolutely huge, and has transcripts of all the conversations that he had on the phone. 443 00:52:46,520 --> 00:52:50,599 And there's one where he phones his wife, Kitty. He's away from home. 444 00:52:50,600 --> 00:52:55,160 He phones her. And because there's a noise on the line. 445 00:52:55,730 --> 00:52:59,900 And Kitty says, What was that? And Oppenheimer said, Oh, that'll be the FBI hanging up. 446 00:53:03,290 --> 00:53:07,550 On the on the left, there is Jeanne Cutler, who Oppenheimer didn't marry. 447 00:53:08,930 --> 00:53:14,180 But she was his first great love. I mean, he fell in love with Catherine Chavez in New Mexico. 448 00:53:14,600 --> 00:53:22,070 But Gene Tetlock at Berkeley was his first really deep and passionate love affair. 449 00:53:22,610 --> 00:53:29,780 She was a member of the Communist Party, and she encouraged his involvement in the Communist Party. 450 00:53:30,080 --> 00:53:34,460 Now, there's some dispute about whether Oppenheimer was ever a member of the Communist Party or not. 451 00:53:34,470 --> 00:53:40,700 It seems to me it doesn't really matter. He didn't. Unlike his brother Frank, he wasn't a card carrying member. 452 00:53:40,700 --> 00:53:44,030 He didn't have a little card saying, you know, I'm a member of the Communist Party. 453 00:53:44,690 --> 00:53:48,829 But he gave a substantial amount of money every month to the Communist Party. 454 00:53:48,830 --> 00:53:54,770 He met with Communist Party officials. He went to Communist Party events and activities. 455 00:53:55,640 --> 00:53:58,970 He helped to publish Communist Party literature. I mean. 456 00:54:02,410 --> 00:54:08,860 If he wasn't actually formally a member of the party, he was as good as, 457 00:54:08,860 --> 00:54:13,660 if not for the purposes of the Communist Party, better than most of the people who were. 458 00:54:14,260 --> 00:54:22,700 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. 459 00:54:23,080 --> 00:54:30,610 And they had what Chevalier described as a communist cell, which they a discussion group. 460 00:54:31,330 --> 00:54:36,910 Oppenheimer insisted it wasn't a communist cell. It was just a group of people who were interested in discussing politics. 461 00:54:37,270 --> 00:54:42,130 But controversially in his autobiography described it as a communist cell. 462 00:54:44,310 --> 00:54:51,000 Now, you know, the story of of the discovery of vision and the the realisation that vision, 463 00:54:51,000 --> 00:54:56,640 the energy released, an efficient reaction could be explosive and used for a tremendously powerful bomb. 464 00:54:57,090 --> 00:55:02,100 It took a surprisingly long time for the USA to get a project to build a bomb way. 465 00:55:02,790 --> 00:55:11,100 When they did, it was handed over to this man, General Groves, who had been responsible for building the Pentagon. 466 00:55:13,710 --> 00:55:16,950 And he was known as a man of iron will. 467 00:55:18,450 --> 00:55:20,740 And he was given this fight. He didn't really want this project. 468 00:55:20,770 --> 00:55:26,100 He you know, he had no time, really, for eggheads and didn't want to spend his time with a bunch of physicists. 469 00:55:26,430 --> 00:55:30,160 He wanted to, you know, be out there with with the men. 470 00:55:30,570 --> 00:55:40,860 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 471 00:55:40,860 --> 00:55:47,670 insisted that Oppenheimer become the director of the laboratory that was to produce the bomb. 472 00:55:51,060 --> 00:55:55,160 The number of reasons why he shouldn't have chosen Oppenheimer is very long indeed. 473 00:55:55,170 --> 00:55:59,610 Oppenheimer wasn't an experimental physicist. He'd never been in charge of a laboratory. 474 00:55:59,850 --> 00:56:03,239 So it's one of the physicists who argued with Groves that he shouldn't appoint 475 00:56:03,240 --> 00:56:07,200 Oppenheimer said Oppenheimer has never been in charge of so much as a hot dog stall, 476 00:56:07,200 --> 00:56:12,240 you know, and you're putting him in charge of this project worth $2 billion. 477 00:56:13,560 --> 00:56:16,650 And he was followed everywhere by FBI agents. 478 00:56:16,650 --> 00:56:21,270 And J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that he was a security risk. 479 00:56:21,690 --> 00:56:26,339 So of all the people to put in charge of the laboratory, you know, 480 00:56:26,340 --> 00:56:32,700 that was going to design and build the first atom bomb, Oppenheimer would be very low on your list of guesses. 481 00:56:33,660 --> 00:56:37,200 So why was Oppenheimer put in charge of the laboratory? 482 00:56:37,800 --> 00:56:41,460 Well, because he had this tremendous gift of explaining things. 483 00:56:41,790 --> 00:56:49,890 And so Groves, when he took charge of this project, he went to he went to Chicago and he went to New York City. 484 00:56:50,100 --> 00:57:02,270 He went to Berkeley to discuss with Lawrence. And he was dispirited and dismayed that when he met with the physicists in Chicago, 485 00:57:02,270 --> 00:57:06,560 when he met with Rob in New York City, he couldn't understand a word they said. 486 00:57:09,360 --> 00:57:14,970 Now at Berkeley as it happened, he was meeting with with Lawrence and Oppenheimer happened to come into the room. 487 00:57:16,200 --> 00:57:25,110 And Oppenheimer realised what was going on and discussed with Groves, explained the physics of vision to Groves, 488 00:57:25,740 --> 00:57:30,780 explained what Bohr had been the first to discover, which was that you needed. 489 00:57:30,780 --> 00:57:38,220 If you were going to build a bomb with uranium, you needed the rare isotope of uranium, uranium two, three, five. 490 00:57:38,760 --> 00:57:45,000 And Oppenheimer explained the difficulties of isotope separation to grows and grows. 491 00:57:45,210 --> 00:57:51,150 Was delighted that he finally understood what this was all about, what was required to build a bomb. 492 00:57:51,960 --> 00:57:55,470 And so and also Oppenheimer had ideas. 493 00:57:55,800 --> 00:58:00,420 Oppenheimer is really excited about fission and about the possibility of making a bomb. 494 00:58:00,900 --> 00:58:02,860 And he already had formulated a plan. 495 00:58:02,880 --> 00:58:11,580 He said to Groves, Look, it's no good, you know, having Compton in Chicago and Rob in New York and Lawrence in Berkeley, 496 00:58:11,760 --> 00:58:15,030 you've got to get all the people involved in a single place. 497 00:58:15,360 --> 00:58:22,169 And he said, and I know just the place the upper was valley in New Mexico, which again was just a mad idea, 498 00:58:22,170 --> 00:58:26,550 you know, getting all that stuff, you know, to to the plateau in the Upper Pecos Valley. 499 00:58:27,660 --> 00:58:32,160 But Groves was so impressed with Oppenheimer, he absolutely insisted. 500 00:58:32,160 --> 00:58:36,270 And when Jake Hoover said, look, you can't appoint this man. He's a red, he's a communist. 501 00:58:36,270 --> 00:58:37,920 He's a security leak. 502 00:58:38,760 --> 00:58:50,530 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. 503 00:58:50,550 --> 00:58:53,730 He's going to be in charge of of the laboratory. 504 00:58:54,720 --> 00:58:58,920 And so he was now notoriously the project. 505 00:58:58,920 --> 00:59:05,370 The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion and employed over 100,000 people. 506 00:59:06,210 --> 00:59:13,110 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. 507 00:59:13,380 --> 00:59:18,000 That was rather small proportion of the total number of the total workforce. 508 00:59:18,420 --> 00:59:24,990 Most of them worked in Oakridge, Tennessee, or in Hanford, in Washington, working on isotope separation. 509 00:59:26,490 --> 00:59:29,530 And there's this picture here of these poor women. 510 00:59:29,730 --> 00:59:37,740 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. 511 00:59:38,850 --> 00:59:43,980 Their work, they didn't know until after the bomb had exploded in Hiroshima. 512 00:59:44,250 --> 00:59:48,660 They didn't know that what they were doing was isotope separation. 513 00:59:48,690 --> 00:59:53,610 They didn't. These are working in a, uh, electronic plant, I think. 514 00:59:54,840 --> 00:59:59,070 And they were just told, look, here's your sap. Looking at dials. 515 00:59:59,220 --> 01:00:03,060 If the dial goes to the left, turn this thing. If goes the right, turn this thing. 516 01:00:03,340 --> 01:00:11,250 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. 517 01:00:11,760 --> 01:00:23,280 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. 518 01:00:24,810 --> 01:00:28,320 And the secret was amazingly kept until the end of the war. 519 01:00:30,130 --> 01:00:34,320 Okay. So Oppenheimer was put in charge of Los Alamos. 520 01:00:34,330 --> 01:00:39,010 He attracted a lot of his friends, a lot of the best scientists in the country. 521 01:00:39,760 --> 01:00:44,979 And extraordinarily, you know, within less than two years, they didn't move in until 43. 522 01:00:44,980 --> 01:00:51,700 Within less than two years, they not only had a working uranium bomb, they had a working plutonium bomb. 523 01:00:51,850 --> 01:00:54,819 Now, as you know, you know, nobody knew anything about plutonium. 524 01:00:54,820 --> 01:01:00,280 At the beginning of this project, they were having to do very little plutonium existed at that time. 525 01:01:00,970 --> 01:01:04,210 The plutonium was arriving at Los Alamos and they were doing experiments on it. 526 01:01:04,840 --> 01:01:09,670 Amazingly, they produced not only a uranium bomb but also a plutonium bomb. 527 01:01:09,940 --> 01:01:13,870 They were so confident that the uranium bomb would work, they didn't even test it. 528 01:01:14,290 --> 01:01:16,899 What they tested at Trinity was the plutonium bomb. 529 01:01:16,900 --> 01:01:26,110 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, 530 01:01:26,110 --> 01:01:31,900 you have to implode it rather than shoot pellets of the stuff together to form a critical mass. 531 01:01:32,590 --> 01:01:40,660 And that required an incredible amount of scientific work and literally thousands of experiments at Los Alamos, 532 01:01:41,140 --> 01:01:50,580 all leading to the moment in Trinity when they exploded the first atomic bomb in southern New Mexico. 533 01:01:51,870 --> 01:01:56,579 And Oppenheimer, remembering it later on, said a few people laughed. 534 01:01:56,580 --> 01:02:01,530 A few people cried. Most people were silent. He said, I remember the line from the Bhagavad Gita. 535 01:02:02,130 --> 01:02:05,190 Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. 536 01:02:06,840 --> 01:02:12,930 It was an awe inspiring sight. And again, astonishingly, they were able to keep it secret. 537 01:02:12,960 --> 01:02:21,870 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. 538 01:02:24,980 --> 01:02:32,300 And then, of course, having that successful experiment at Trinity, they were able to use it. 539 01:02:32,930 --> 01:02:37,040 The little boy bomb, the uranium bomb exploded over Hiroshima. 540 01:02:37,040 --> 01:02:44,930 The fat man bomb, the plutonium implosion device exploded over Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people. 541 01:02:46,710 --> 01:02:51,900 And suddenly the tone at Los Alamos was became very sober. 542 01:02:54,640 --> 01:03:01,990 They had all wanted. Amazingly, they'd all been recruited with the argument, Look, if we don't get the bomb, the Germans will. 543 01:03:02,860 --> 01:03:08,020 And then in 1944, it became apparent that the German bomb project had got nowhere. 544 01:03:08,950 --> 01:03:12,640 The Germans hadn't got anywhere close to building an atomic bomb. 545 01:03:13,720 --> 01:03:17,800 And at that point, you just thought that people would leave the project and they didn't. 546 01:03:17,890 --> 01:03:21,730 They stayed with the project and they were keen to see it through. 547 01:03:23,940 --> 01:03:33,730 But then. Shortly after the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer's friend Robert Server went on a fact finding trip, 548 01:03:34,390 --> 01:03:38,380 saw the extraordinary devastation that the bombs had produced. 549 01:03:38,920 --> 01:03:46,180 So something of the agony that resulted from radiation poisoning reported all this, 550 01:03:46,180 --> 01:03:53,559 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. 551 01:03:53,560 --> 01:04:00,460 And almost to a man, the physicists at Los Alamos, to a man or woman. 552 01:04:01,820 --> 01:04:10,070 Wanted to be involved in ensuring that an atomic bomb would never, ever be used again. 553 01:04:13,000 --> 01:04:17,920 And the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was was established in that period for that very reason, 554 01:04:18,190 --> 01:04:28,330 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. 555 01:04:31,330 --> 01:04:39,460 And Oppenheimer at the end of the war was that he had replaced Einstein as the most famous scientist in the country, 556 01:04:39,850 --> 01:04:44,299 so famous that when the journal Physics Today started, they could have a cover. 557 01:04:44,300 --> 01:04:47,920 Its first cover was a picture of Oppenheimer. Didn't even need to picture Oppenheimer. 558 01:04:48,700 --> 01:04:54,910 All it needed was Oppenheimer's hat on the cyclotron. And that immediately said to people. 559 01:04:55,210 --> 01:05:05,180 Oppenheimer. So he was a celebrity, and he used his celebrity for political ends after the Second World War. 560 01:05:05,200 --> 01:05:08,500 Oppenheimer did remarkably little scientific research. 561 01:05:08,710 --> 01:05:16,090 Most of his time was taken up in Washington, D.C., with various committees, the Atomic Atomic Energy Committee, 562 01:05:16,720 --> 01:05:24,220 and he involved himself in every project to do with atomic energy control. 563 01:05:24,520 --> 01:05:32,980 And he initially was involved in the Baruch proposal that was put forward at the United Nations in 1946. 564 01:05:33,340 --> 01:05:35,080 He helped draft the proposal. 565 01:05:35,560 --> 01:05:47,920 He did everything he could internationally and nationally to argue for peace and cooperation, international control of uranium and so on. 566 01:05:51,240 --> 01:05:56,970 And he even moved to Princeton. He was very happy in California with this arrangement at Berkeley and Caltech. 567 01:05:57,450 --> 01:06:03,330 But because he wanted to spend most of his time in Washington, D.C., he no longer wanted to live on the West Coast. 568 01:06:03,480 --> 01:06:07,740 So he accepted the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, 569 01:06:08,160 --> 01:06:11,640 mainly, partly because it was a nice place to be and it was a good job, 570 01:06:11,820 --> 01:06:18,420 but mainly because it gave him easy access to Washington, D.C., which is where he spent most of his time. 571 01:06:19,700 --> 01:06:24,590 Now, Teller, as we all know, was at Los Alamos. 572 01:06:25,100 --> 01:06:32,000 But he he thought the problem of making a fission bomb was theoretically trivial, 573 01:06:32,300 --> 01:06:40,190 and that what interested him far more was the potential of a fusion bomb, a hydrogen bomb. 574 01:06:41,060 --> 01:06:48,470 Oppenheimer, in his various committees in Washington, D.C., argued against an accelerated program. 575 01:06:49,280 --> 01:06:55,190 Teller was was then campaigning for an accelerated program to produce a fusion bomb. 576 01:06:55,730 --> 01:07:02,570 And Oppenheimer used his influence to argue against it, partly because Teller's original design. 577 01:07:02,930 --> 01:07:06,380 Oppenheimer knew was going nowhere and couldn't possibly work. 578 01:07:08,060 --> 01:07:12,690 And partly also because Oppenheimer thought that, you know, 579 01:07:12,870 --> 01:07:19,399 the potential of a hydrogen bomb to be thousands of times more powerful than the bomb that 580 01:07:19,400 --> 01:07:26,270 destroyed Hiroshima would produce something so ghastly that no sane person would ever use it. 581 01:07:26,510 --> 01:07:30,920 So Oppenheimer's reasoning was, Why on earth would you want to develop this thing? 582 01:07:32,390 --> 01:07:40,160 Now, he was slightly swayed when Ulam amended Teller's original design to produce something 583 01:07:40,850 --> 01:07:46,670 that Oppenheimer himself described as technically sweet and that could and did work. 584 01:07:47,000 --> 01:07:53,210 But in the meantime, he'd made several influential enemies, not least of which was Edward Teller himself, 585 01:07:53,750 --> 01:07:58,639 and also this man he insisted on pronouncing his name straws wrong. 586 01:07:58,640 --> 01:08:03,080 Straws. So, Louis Straws was a civilian. 587 01:08:03,080 --> 01:08:08,750 He wasn't a scientist, but he was very interested in atomic energy. 588 01:08:08,990 --> 01:08:11,900 And he became the civilian head of the Atomic Energy Commission. 589 01:08:13,160 --> 01:08:21,800 And he was persuaded by Teller and also Ernest Lawrence of the importance of developing the hydrogen bomb 590 01:08:22,160 --> 01:08:29,830 and therefore began to be suspicious of Oppenheimer's influence and the result of all that was throughout. 591 01:08:29,840 --> 01:08:33,650 And also, of course, you know, starting from 1949 onwards, 592 01:08:33,980 --> 01:08:41,300 it became apparent of the what became apparent was the extraordinary extent of Soviet espionage in the United States of America. 593 01:08:41,690 --> 01:08:50,120 And they realised that Klaus folks had had supply details of Los Alamos to the Soviets, so had at least three other spies. 594 01:08:51,560 --> 01:08:59,810 And in that atmosphere that built up in the 1950s, stimulated also by Joe McCarthy. 595 01:09:02,070 --> 01:09:06,300 The winds of change, as it were, began to blow against Oppenheimer. 596 01:09:06,510 --> 01:09:12,540 And he just made too many influential enemies so that by 1954, 597 01:09:14,160 --> 01:09:21,450 people like Louis Straws and Edgar Hoover persuaded the Atomic Energy Commission 598 01:09:21,840 --> 01:09:26,970 to withdraw Oppenheimer's security clearance and have a security hearing. 599 01:09:27,720 --> 01:09:32,040 Oppenheimer was presented with this choice. 600 01:09:32,100 --> 01:09:41,160 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. 601 01:09:41,970 --> 01:09:50,310 Or if you don't do that, we will hold a security hearing at which your suitability for security clearance can be accessed. 602 01:09:50,940 --> 01:09:56,760 Oppenheimer, incredibly, chose the latter. So the security hearing was held. 603 01:09:57,120 --> 01:10:00,540 It was always going to go against him. It was it was rigged. 604 01:10:01,050 --> 01:10:08,460 And we now know exactly how it was rigged. I mean, the details of this are astonishing. 605 01:10:11,230 --> 01:10:20,410 The the lawyer whose job it was to show that Oppenheimer was not a fit person to have security 606 01:10:20,410 --> 01:10:27,640 clearance was given the transcripts of the conversations held between Oppenheimer and his lawyer. 607 01:10:29,230 --> 01:10:40,330 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. 608 01:10:41,470 --> 01:10:43,770 So Oppenheim had never stood any chance at all. 609 01:10:43,780 --> 01:10:51,400 And, of course, the committee decided the hearing decided that he was not a fit person to have security clearance. 610 01:10:51,730 --> 01:10:57,190 Therefore, he was not allowed to see these documents, many of which he himself had produced. 611 01:11:00,620 --> 01:11:10,640 Very quickly, though. Reconciliation started at the very time that Oppenheimer was undergoing this horrendous security hearing. 612 01:11:11,780 --> 01:11:25,220 McCarthy himself was taking on the Army and losing, and McCarthy became persona non grata very quickly towards the end of 1954. 613 01:11:25,730 --> 01:11:31,220 At the beginning of 1955, Oppenheimer was the subject of this television program. 614 01:11:31,700 --> 01:11:35,570 See it now, conducted by the journalist Ed Murrow, 615 01:11:36,460 --> 01:11:41,300 who had wanted to do a program on the Institute for Advanced Study generally, but had gone to the institute, 616 01:11:41,450 --> 01:11:46,370 recorded lots of footage of people explaining things, taking it home, 617 01:11:46,370 --> 01:11:49,370 and realised that the only one who was any good at explaining anything was Oppenheimer. 618 01:11:50,540 --> 01:11:55,489 So he devoted the whole program to Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer was shown doing what he does best, 619 01:11:55,490 --> 01:12:01,300 explaining abstruse concepts into theoretical physics and even lessons. 620 01:12:01,340 --> 01:12:05,480 So this is six months after he he'd been declared a dangerous subversive. 621 01:12:05,720 --> 01:12:12,230 At the security hearing, he was suddenly again the most popular scientist in the United States. 622 01:12:12,440 --> 01:12:17,480 The program was enormously popular, and he started giving public lectures. 623 01:12:17,660 --> 01:12:21,380 And at these public lectures, you wouldn't just get hundreds of people. He would get thousands of people. 624 01:12:23,420 --> 01:12:29,030 Then in 1960, he was invited to Japan, an invitation he accepted. 625 01:12:29,030 --> 01:12:34,670 And you can see there in that photograph the effect that those years had had on him. 626 01:12:36,760 --> 01:12:46,520 He was born in 1904, so he's 56. In that photograph, he looks more like 86, completely emaciated and prematurely aged. 627 01:12:46,790 --> 01:12:58,890 Not helped by the fact that he was a chain smoker. The final reconciliation was with Oppenheimer and Teller in 1964. 628 01:12:58,900 --> 01:13:02,170 It was agreed to present Oppenheimer with the Fermi Prize. 629 01:13:02,560 --> 01:13:05,830 And here he is at the reception for the Fermi Prize. 630 01:13:05,980 --> 01:13:10,510 And Edward Teller came up to say hello. You can see how ancient Oppenheimer looks. 631 01:13:10,510 --> 01:13:15,370 There is only 60 years old. Edward Teller came up to shake his hand. 632 01:13:16,120 --> 01:13:22,420 And Oppenheimer was very gracious. You can't entirely say in that photograph, but Kitty was rather less so. 633 01:13:24,790 --> 01:13:29,680 She always bore a grudge against Edward Teller for testifying against Oppenheimer 634 01:13:29,860 --> 01:13:34,059 in the security hearing and for campaigning against him in Washington, 635 01:13:34,060 --> 01:13:44,490 D.C. But anyway, in 1964, Oppenheimer was given the Fermi Prize and was officially, as it were, forgiven for whatever he'd done. 636 01:13:45,640 --> 01:13:49,030 And he only had three years left to live. 637 01:13:49,900 --> 01:13:56,860 He got cancer. One of the last things he said to a friend at the Princeton Institute was, Don't smoke. 638 01:13:58,980 --> 01:14:05,070 And he died in 1967. And I'm going to finish with a remark he made in one of his public lectures in 639 01:14:05,070 --> 01:14:12,330 1960 where he tried to open up about himself and about his deepest feelings. 640 01:14:13,350 --> 01:14:19,950 And he mentioned this argument to Arjuna in the back about Geeta argument for the justification of war. 641 01:14:21,000 --> 01:14:26,640 And he says, If I cannot be comforted by Vishnu, his argument to Arjuna, it is because I am too much a Jew, 642 01:14:27,450 --> 01:14:32,130 much too much a Christian, much too much a European, far too much an American. 643 01:14:32,910 --> 01:14:39,870 For I believe in the meaningfulness of human history and of our role in it, and above all, of our responsibility to it. 644 01:14:40,880 --> 01:14:41,480 Thank you very much.