Oppy at Harvard

“The Great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture-its logic, its faith, its vision.” -- E.I.  Doctorow 

My youth was overshadowed by the Bomb. It is still around but, despite sometimes being revisited, the Bomb is in the background. Strangely, the scientist who successfully ran the Bomb's creation, was a poetic fellow. But, given that, it is not surprising that he came to be haunted by his creation, and his fall from the technology pedestal his triumph had allowed him. Robert Oppenheimer is a truly haunting figure, well depicted in “American Prometheus" by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. [2005]

There is much to recommend the book, and much to learn from it. Here I am going to focus on Oppenheimer's life in Boston and Cambridge, where he attended to school. Like others that came to maturity in these parts in those times (the 1920s), he helped build the latter 20th Century's military-industrial complex based on the startling strings of scientific breakthroughs and technical innovations that came before.

The son of a wealthy West Side New York clothier, Oppenheimer refused the fellowship Harvard offered him when he entered the university in 1922. Oppenheimer began his Harvard days as a chemistry student. The chemist had been the epitome of the scientist – but that was changing just as he was entering college.

In the '20s, Physics was steep in its ascent. He looked to take as many advanced physics classes as he possibly could. He didn’t have the basic courses. But he read five science books a week. And he was picking physics texts unknown to the typical student. American Prometheus authors report that one physics professor, reviewing Oppy’s petition [replete with a list of texts he’d read] to take graduate classes, remarked: “Obviously, if he says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a PH.D. for knowing their titles.”

He was brash and precocious.

The famous of science and math [in which Oppenheimer thought himself deficient] passed through Harvard’s gates. "Oppy" attended lectures by Whitehead and Bohr. Still, he nurtured a love for literature. He was a great polymath. He read The Waste Land, and wrote poetry of sadness and loneliness. He edited a school literary journal known as The Gad-Fly [under the auspices of the Liberal Club at 66 Winthrop St]. After Harvard, he discovered Proust.

He kept to himself. Had but a few friends. “His diet often consisted of little more than chocolate, beer and artichokes. Lunch was often just a ‘black and tan’ –  a piece of toast slathered with peanut butter and topped with chocolate syrup.” When he lived in Cambridge, like so many other great scientific thinkers in so many places, he took long walks. He lived for a while at 60 Mount Auburn Street.

His outsider status at Harvard could be laid to his sensitivity, but just as significant if not more so was his Jewish heritage. He came to the school at a time when its head was considering a quota system to reduce the growing number of Jewish entrants. Surely, the straight road to Harvard success was not fully open to him, even if that is what he’d desired. He was offered a graduate teaching position but turned it down. Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in three years. He and his friends skipped the Harvard commencement to drink lab alcohol in a dorm room. He had one drink and retired.

Surely the Jewish Ethical Culture School he attended as a lad, which had a summer school adjunct in New Mexico, and the mesas of New Mexico, where he placed the crucial workings of the Manhattan Project, was a most formative step in Oppenheimer's education. From Harvard he went on to study in Gottingen in Germany, Thomson’s famed Cavendish Lab, CalTech, Berkeley, and, after the War, Princeton. But Oppy developed the skills of a quick learner, and advanced theory at Harvard. A chemist in those days could easy go into industry and the emerging mass consumer businesses. In a letter he'd confided in a friend his fear of becoming a chemist at a corporation "testing toothpaste." He swiched to physics at Harvard, and set out to climb that science's parapets. His Cambridge days girded him for the journey, which turned out to be full of both triumph and tragedy.  - Jack Vaughan

This is a revision of a blog posted to RJ-11 in 2007.

For more, read  American Prometheus, Vintage, 2005