The Agony of Atomic Genius Algis Valiunas
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2 2 The Agony of Atomic Genius Algis Valiunas ore than sixty years along, admiring gratitude of free peoples in the development of nucle- 1945 are reviled as the evil geniuses Mar weaponry remains the who made life more perilous than supreme technological innovation it ever was before. They shouldn’t of our time, and the atomic phys- have done it, the sentiment runs; they ics on which it is based is perhaps were scientists, after all, and they the most wondrous should have known intellectual achieve- J. Robert Oppenheimer and the better than to lend ment since Socrates American Century their intelligence to taught his admirers By David C. Cassidy so terrible an under- that death holds no Pi Press ~ 2005 ~ 462 pp. taking. But can sci- $27.95 (cloth) terrors for a good entists really be man. Of course, American Prometheus: expected to know few men have ever The Triumph and Tragedy of better—indeed, to been good enough J. Robert Oppenheimer know best? Does to be entirely free By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin their understand- of such terrors; and Knopf ~ 2005 ~ 721 pp. ing of the workings the unprecedented $35 (cloth) $17.95 (paper) of nature endow scientific advances them with a sounder The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer of the past centu- and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race moral understanding ry have added the By Priscilla J. McMillan than the common terror of thermo- Viking ~ 2005 ~ 373 pp. run of humanity? nuclear megadeath $25.95 (cloth) $16 (paper) Ought the immemo- and possible human rial guiding virtue of extinction to the things that saddle the political man, prudence, direct all but the very best men with mortal or instead be directed by the scien- angst. tific intellect? By descending into the These novel terrors have been political inferno, were the scientists intense and persistent enough in complicit in profound evil? the popular mind that atomic sci- The career of J. Robert Oppen- ence is widely regarded as the prin- heimer, the physicist who headed the cipal scourge of humanity; and the Manhattan Project, draws such ques- Manhattan Project physicists whose tions to a focus that resembles the skill as bombmakers earned them the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim’s FALL 2006 ~ 85 Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. ALGIS VALIUNAS breastbone. It was Oppenheimer do, reading poetry, collecting miner- whom the public lionized as the als; although inept at most sports, brains behind the bomb; who ago- he became a crackerjack sailor and nized about the devastation his bril- horseman, and was known for get- liance had helped to unleash; who ting along better with horses than hoped that the very destructiveness with human beings. of the new “gadget,” as the bomb- For ten years he attended the makers called their invention, might Ethical Culture School, which epito- make war obsolete; and whose some- mized Jewish high bourgeois secular time Communist fellow-traveling and liberalism, concerned with the plight opposition to the development of the of the poor, guided by ideals of social hydrogen bomb—a weapon a thou- justice, relentlessly hopeful, earnest, sand times more powerful than the and progressive; Ethical Culture bombs that incinerated Hiroshima Society members promoted women’s and Nagasaki—brought about his suffrage and the prohibition of alco- political disgrace and downfall, hol, and took part in the founding of which of course have marked him the ACLU and the NAACP. To trans- in the eyes of some as all the more form society was the express aim of heroic, a visionary persecuted by Ethical Culture, and to produce an warmongering McCarthyite troglo- intellectual and moral elite devoted dytes. His legacy, of course, is far to service was the School’s appoint- more complicated. ed task. In this heroic order, intel- lectual excellence pointedly ranked ulius Robert Oppenheimer was just as high as moral virtue; and Jborn in Manhattan in 1904. His for an aspiring polymath like young father, Julius, was a German Jewish Oppenheimer, the highest life of the immigrant who made a fortune in mind was indispensable to the life of clothing manufacture, and young moral striving. Robert grew up a child of privilege, Oppenheimer entered Harvard fussed over by a live-in governess intending to study chemistry and and maid in a high-rise apartment emerged three years later an experi- on Riverside Drive. A dorky brai- mental physicist on his way to becom- niac, virtually friendless, the poor ing a theoretical physicist. That he kid was something of a Little Lord happened to be a wizard at abstract Fauntleroy in the bargain. At school speculation, had a “passion for the a teacher complained that Robert purely useless,” and was something took the elevator to the second floor, of a dolt at what scientists call the and asked his parents to teach him bench—soldering copper wires gave how to walk up and down stairs. The him fits—made his ultimate career child made his own world, as loners choice an easy one. But his overarch- 86 ~ THE NEW ATLANTIS Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. THE AGONY OF ATOMIC GENIUS ing purpose, he announced, was to flair for the devastating remark, as confront and master “the serious busi- though discussing the mysteries ness of life, which is growing wise.” of the universe were a competitive To that end he read French poetry, sport. The purest, most disinter- which may have been a dubious course ested life, untrammeled by egotism, to wisdom, and wrote English verse is supposed to be that of thought and stories, perhaps a more inno- about the highest things, according cent activity. In J. Robert Oppenheimer to the thinkers who have pursued and the American Century, his biog- such activity. Oppenheimer’s van- rapher David C. Cassidy, a historian ity or amour-propre, which impelled and philosopher of science, chastises him to measure himself incessant- Oppenheimer for lacking the profes- ly against his colleagues, whom he sional single- mindedness essential to treated as rivals, muddied this theo- a scientific career at the highest level, retical purity even more than it does and faults him for having too many for most scientists. talents, none of which he concen- Oppenheimer turned out a dozen trated on sufficiently. Oppenheimer’s research papers before he was twenty - champagne mind sparkled, fizzed, five, mostly training the searchlight of and sprayed in all directions, yet he the latest quantum theory on certain still managed to become a superb experimental observations old and theoretician, teacher, and administra- new: important work, Cassidy avers, tor. He continued his formal training but derivative, well short of the theo- at Cambridge University, where he retical cutting edge, where the fin- studied with Ernest Rutherford and est minds—Heisenberg, Bohr, Born, met Niels Bohr, founding father of Pauli, Paul Dirac—were laying bare quantum physics; then he completed the secrets of the subatomic world his Ph.D. at Göttingen, where he and transforming the understanding worked under Max Born and met of matter and energy. The “quan- Werner Heisenberg, who would lead tum revolution,” in Cassidy’s phrase, the German effort to develop an began to take the staid precincts of atomic bomb; and he did postdoc- academic physics by storm, and by toral training with Wolfgang Pauli the late 1920s its leaders occupied in Zurich. some of the most prestigious chairs Born recalled Oppenheimer as in European universities. a shining intelligence but a brash America saw the future of physics upstart, who would break in snidely in Europe, sent over young theore- on seminar presentations to explain ticians by the boatload to sit at the matters more lucidly than the dis- feet of the masters, and coaxed some tinguished speakers could. Already of the masters across the Atlantic he was cultivating his high- handed to teach. Oppenheimer, a fledgling FALL 2006 ~ 87 Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. ALGIS VALIUNAS instructor at Berkeley in 1929, soon ets of Oppenheimer’s achievement established himself as a professorial has been largely ignored. Although master. Hans Bethe was to declare Oppenheimer’s accepting the direc- that far and away “the greatest school torship of the A-bomb project of theoretical physics that the United despite lacking a Nobel Prize caused States has ever known” was the one something of a scandal among top- Oppenheimer headed at Berkeley and flight physicists, Cassidy claims Caltech during the 1930s and early that Oppenheimer had already con- 1940s. Oppenheimer’s style of intel- ducted work worthy of the highest ligence was perfectly suited to the scientific honor: his “application of seminar room: he possessed a mind nuclear physics and of general rela- quick as a striking cobra, capable tivity theory at the end of a star’s life of penetrating to the essentials of cycle” anticipated by nearly thirty a new discovery while lesser men years the astronomical observations were fogged in by the details, rec- of the collapsed stars known as black ognizing straightaway the practical holes. Oppenheimer’s theorizing was implications of abstruse theorizing, so startlingly original—so far in so thoroughly versed in the various advance of the corroborating obser- relevant fields that concision and vations and so far off the beaten track exactitude in explanation came natu- of astrophysical research—that his rally as breathing, and graced with colleagues’ ignorance cost him the a charm that captivated serious per- recognition he deserved. sons and drew the best out of them. Oppenheimer’s continuing quest Among topflight scientists, of course, for wisdom led him far beyond the prodigious feats of calculation or confines of modern science.