American Prometheus (30 page)

Kitty certainly had a sharp tongue and easily antagonized some of Robert’s friends, but some thought her “very smart.” Chevalier considered her intelligence more intuitive than astute or profound. And as their friend Bob Serber recalled, “Everybody was talking about Kitty being a communist.” But it was also true that she had a stabilizing influence on Robert’s life. “Her career,” Serber said, “was advancing Robert’s career, which was the overwhelming, controlling influence on her from then on.”

SOON AFTER THEIR HASTY WEDDING, Oppie and Kitty rented a large house at 10 Kenilworth Court, north of the campus. After selling his aging Chrysler coupe, he presented his bride with a new Cadillac; they nicknamed it “Bombsight.” Kitty persuaded her husband to dress in a style more suited to his station in life. And so he began for the first time to wear tweed jackets and more expensive suits. But he kept his brown porkpie hat. “A certain stuffiness overcame me,” he later confessed of married life. At this point in their marriage, Kitty was an excellent cook, and so they entertained frequently, inviting close friends like the Serbers, the Chevaliers and other Berkeley colleagues. Their liquor cabinet was always well stocked. One evening Maggie Nelson recalled a discussion in which Kitty confessed that “their bill for liquor was even higher than their bill for food.”

One evening early in 1941, John Edsall, Robert’s friend from his Harvard and Cambridge years, dropped by for dinner. Now a professor of chemistry, Edsall hadn’t seen Robert in over a decade. He was startled by the change. The introspective boy he had known in Cambridge and Corsica was now a figure of commanding personality. “I felt that he obviously was a far stronger person,” Edsall recalled, “that the inner crises that he had been through in those earlier years he had obviously worked out and achieved a great deal of inner resolution of them. I felt a sense of confidence and authority, although still tension and [a] lack of inner ease in some respects . . . he could reach and see intuitively things that most people would be able to follow only very slowly and hesitatingly, if at all. This was not only in physics, but in other things as well.”

By then, Robert was about to become a father. Their child was born on May 12, 1941, in Pasadena, where Oppenheimer was on his regular spring teaching schedule at Caltech. They christened the boy Peter—but Robert impishly nicknamed him “Pronto.” Kitty told some of her friends, tongue in cheek, that the eight-pound baby was premature. It had been a difficult pregnancy for Kitty, and that spring Oppenheimer himself was suffering from a case of infectious mononucleosis. By June, however, they had both recovered their health enough to invite the Chevaliers to visit them. They arrived in mid-June and spent a week catching up with their old friends. Haakon had recently befriended the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and spent the days sitting in Oppie’s garden working on a translation of Dalí’s book
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.

A few weeks later, Oppie and Kitty approached the Chevaliers to ask an enormous favor. Kitty badly needed a rest, Robert explained. Would the Chevaliers take two-month-old Peter, along with his German nanny, while he and Kitty escaped to Perro Caliente for a month? Haakon saw the request as a confirmation of his own feeling that Oppie was his closest, most intimate friend. “Deeply flattered,” the Chevaliers promptly agreed and kept Peter for not one but two full months, until Kitty and Oppenheimer returned for the fall semester. This rather unusual arrangement, however, may have had long-term consequences for mother and child. Kitty never properly bonded with Peter. Even a year later, friends noticed that it was always Robert who took them into the baby’s room and showed him off with obvious pride and delight. “Kitty seemed quite uninterested,” said this old friend.

Robert felt reinvigorated almost as soon as he arrived at Perro Caliente. That first week he and Kitty found the energy to nail new shingles on the cabin’s roof. They went for long rides in the mountains. One day Kitty showed her spunk by cantering her horse in a meadow while standing up in the saddle. Robert was pleased when in late July he ran into his old friend Hans Bethe, the Cornell physicist he had first met in Göttingen, and persuaded him to visit them at the ranch. Unfortunately, soon afterwards Robert was trampled by a horse he was trying to corral for Bethe to ride and had to have X rays taken at the hospital in Santa Fe. In more ways than one, it was a memorable visit.

Upon their return, the Oppenheimers retrieved baby Peter and moved into a newly purchased home at Number One, Eagle Hill, in the hills overlooking Berkeley. Earlier that summer, Robert had briskly toured the house once and then immediately agreed to pay the full asking price of $22,500— plus another $5,300 for two adjoining lots. A Spanish-style, one-story villa with whitewashed walls and a red-tiled roof, their new home stood on a knoll surrounded on three sides by a steep wooded canyon. They had a stunning view of the sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge. The large living room had redwood floors, twelve-foot-high beamed ceilings and windows on three sides. An image of a ferocious lion was carved into a massive stone fireplace. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined each end of the living room. French doors opened onto a lovely garden framed by live oak trees. The house came with a well-equipped kitchen and a separate apartment over the garage for guests. It was already partially furnished, and Barbara Chevalier helped Kitty with some of the interior decorating. Everyone thought it a charming, well-designed structure. Oppenheimer called it home for nearly a decade.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“We Were Pulling the
New Deal to the Left”

I had had about enough of the Spanish cause, and there
were other and more pressing crises in the world.

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 1939, Luis W. Alvarez—a promising young physicist who worked closely with Ernest Lawrence— was sitting in a barber’s chair, reading the San Francisco Chronicle. Suddenly, he read a wire service story reporting that two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, had successfully demonstrated that the uranium nucleus could be split into two or more parts. They had achieved fission by bombarding uranium, one of the heaviest of the elements, with neutrons. Stunned by this development, Alvarez “stopped the barber in mid-snip, and ran all the way to the Radiation Laboratory to spread the word.” When he told Oppenheimer the news, his reply was, “That’s impossible.” Oppenheimer then went to the blackboard and proceeded to prove mathematically that fission couldn’t happen. Someone must have made a mistake.

But the next day, Alvarez successfully repeated the experiment in his laboratory. “I invited Robert over to see the very small natural alpha-particle pulses on our oscilloscope and the tall, spiking fission pulses, twenty-five times larger. In less than fifteen minutes he not only agreed that the reaction was authentic but also speculated that in the process extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs. It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked. . . .”

Writing his Caltech colleague Willie Fowler a few days later, Oppie remarked, “The U business is unbelievable. We first saw it in the papers, wired for more dope, and have had a lot of reports since. . . . Many points are still unclear: where are the short lived high energy betas one would expect? . . . In how many ways does the U come apart. At random, as one might guess, or only in certain ways? . . . It is I think exciting, not in the rare way of positrons and mesotrons, but in a good honest practical way.” Here was a significant discovery, and he could hardly contain his excitement. At the same time, he also saw its deadly implications. “So I think it really not too improbable that a ten cm [centimeter] cube of uranium deuteride (one should have something to slow the neutrons without capturing them) might very well blow itself to hell,” he wrote his old friend George Uhlenbeck.

Coincidentally, that same week, a twenty-one-year-old graduate student named Joseph Weinberg found his way to Room 219 in LeConte Hall and knocked on the door. Cocky and opinionated, Weinberg had been sent packing in mid-year by his physics professor at Wisconsin, Gregory Breit, who told him that Berkeley was one of the few places in the world where “a person as crazy as you could be acceptable.” He belonged with Oppenheimer, Breit had said, ignoring Weinberg’s protests that Oppenheimer’s papers in
Physical Review
were the only articles that he couldn’t understand.

“There was a tremendous hubbub behind the door,” Weinberg recalled, “so I knocked very loudly and after a moment somebody sprang out with a great puff of smoke and noise as the door opened and closed again.”

“What the hell do you want?” the man asked Weinberg.

“I’m seeking Professor J. Robert Oppenheimer,” young Weinberg said.

“Well, you found him,” replied Oppenheimer.

Behind the door, Weinberg could hear excited men shouting and arguing. “What are you doing here?” Oppenheimer asked.

He had just come from Wisconsin, Weinberg explained.

“And what did you do there?”

“I worked with Professor Gregory Breit,” replied Weinberg.

“That’s a lie,” snapped Oppenheimer, “that’s your first lie.”

“Sir?”

“You’re here,” explained Oppenheimer. “You worked away from Breit, you worked loose from Breit.”

“That would be a more accurate statement,” conceded Weinberg.

“Very well,” Oppenheimer said, “congratulations! Come in and join the madness.”

Oppenheimer introduced Weinberg to Ernest Lawrence, Linus Pauling, and several of Oppenheimer’s graduate students: Hartland Snyder, Philip Morrison and Sydney M. Dancoff. Weinberg was astonished to meet these luminaries of physics. “It was first names all around, which was ridiculous,” he later recalled. Afterwards, Weinberg went out to lunch with Morrison and Dancoff and while sitting at a table in the student union restaurant, the Heartland, they discussed the significance of a telegram from Niels Bohr about the discovery of fission. Someone got out a napkin and began sketching a bomb based on the notion of a chain reaction. “On the basis of the data,” said Weinberg, “we designed a bomb.” Phil Morrison did some preliminary calculations and came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t work, that the chain reaction would fizzle before exploding. “You see,” Weinberg recalled, “at that time we didn’t know that the uranium could eventually be purified and isolated in much greater concentrations—which of course could lead to fission.” Within a week, Morrison recalls walking into Oppie’s office and seeing on the blackboard “a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.”

The very next day, Oppenheimer sat down with Weinberg to define his course of study. “You think you’re going to be a physicist,” Oppie teased him, “so what have you done?” Flustered, Weinberg replied, “Do you mean lately?” Oppenheimer leaned back and roared with laughter. He didn’t really expect a new graduate student to have done anything original. But Weinberg volunteered that he had worked on a theoretical problem and when he explained it, Oppenheimer interrupted to say, “You have this written up, of course?” Weinberg didn’t, but he rashly promised to have a paper ready the next morning. “He looked at me,” Weinberg recalled, “and said coldly, ‘How about 8:30 a.m.?’ ” Trapped by his own cockiness, Weinberg spent the rest of the day and all night writing up that paper. He got it back from Oppenheimer a day later with one unpronounceable word scribbled across the flyleaf, “Snoessigenheellollig.”

“I looked at him,” Weinberg recalled, “and he said, ‘Of course, you know what that means?” Weinberg knew the word was Dutch slang, but he could decipher only just enough of it to know that it was a favorable comment. Oppie grinned and explained that, roughly translated, it meant “ducky.”

“But why Dutch?” Weinberg asked.

“That I cannot tell you—I dare not tell you,” replied Oppie. He then spun around and left the room, closing the door behind him. A moment later, however, the door cracked open; Oppenheimer poked his head in the room and said, “I really shouldn’t tell you but then maybe I owe it to you— because the paper reminded me of [Paul] Ehrenfest.”

Weinberg was stunned. He knew enough about Ehrenfest’s reputation to grasp what Oppie was saying. “That was the only compliment he ever paid me. . . . He loved Ehrenfest, [who] had the knack of making things luminously clear and witty and pregnant in the simplest terms.” That same week, Oppenheimer flattered Weinberg by having him present this paper in place of a previously scheduled seminar. But afterwards, as if to compensate for the flattery, Oppenheimer told him with a sneer that what he had presented was “kid stuff.” There was, he said, a “grown-up way to do this kind of problem,” and he suggested that Weinberg should get onto it right away. Weinberg duly spent the next three months laboring to produce an elaborate calculation. In the end, he had to report back that he could find no trace of the empirical relationship that he had predicted from his initial and very simple-minded argument. “Now you have learned a lesson,” Oppenheimer told him. “Sometimes the elaborate, the learned method, the grown-up method is not as good as the simple and childishly naïve method.”

Weinberg was a devoted disciple of Bohr’s even prior to his arrival in Berkeley. Like many physicists, he found himself attracted to the discipline chiefly because it promised to open the door to fundamental philosophical insights. “I was interested in the fun of tampering with the laws of nature,” Weinberg said. And indeed, when for a period he considered dropping physics, he only continued with it after a friend encouraged him to read Niels Bohr’s classic work
Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature.
“I read Bohr and I was reconciled with physics,” Weinberg said. “It really reconverted me.” In Bohr’s hands, quantum theory became a joyous celebration of life. The day Weinberg arrived at Berkeley, he happened to mention to Phil Morrison that Bohr’s book was one of the few volumes he had thought worth bringing along. Phil burst out laughing, because at Berkeley, among those in Oppenheimer’s tight-knit circle, Bohr’s little book was considered the Bible. Weinberg happily realized that at Berkeley, “Bohr was God and Oppie was his prophet.”