American Prometheus (66 page)

At Los Alamos, he had supervised thousands and spent millions; now he presided over an institution with just one hundred people and a budget of $825,000. Los Alamos was completely dependent on the federal government; but the Institute’s trustees specifically forbade the director to solicit federal funds. The Institute was a singularly independent place. It had no official relationship with its neighbor, Princeton University. By 1948, some 180 scholars were affiliated with one of two “schools,” Mathematics or Historical Studies. The Institute housed no laboratories, no cyclotrons and no more complicated apparatus than a blackboard. No courses were taught, and there were no students—only scholars. Most were mathematicians, some were physicists, and there were a few economists and humanists. The Institute was, in fact, so heavily weighted toward mathematics that some thought Oppenheimer’s arrival signaled a decision by the trustees that henceforth the Institute would be devoted to mathematics/physics and nothing else.

Indeed, Oppenheimer’s first appointments made it seem as if his only priority was to transform the Institute into a major center for theoretical physics. He brought with him as temporary members five research physicists from Berkeley. After coaxing Pais to stay on, he recruited another promising young English physicist, Freeman Dyson, to become a permanent member of the Institute. He persuaded Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Hideki Yukawa, George Uhlenbeck, George Placzek, Sinitiro Tomonaga and several other young physicists to spend occasional summers or sabbaticals at the Institute. In 1949, he recruited Chen Ning Yang, a brilliant twenty-seven-year-old who would win the 1957 Nobel in physics with T. D. Lee, another Chinese-born physicist Oppenheimer brought to the Institute. “This is an unreal place,” Pais wrote in his diary in February 1948. “Bohr comes into my office to talk, I look out of the window and see Einstein walking home with his assistant. Two offices away sits Dirac. Downstairs sits Oppenheimer. . . .” It was a concentration of scientific talent like no other in the world . . . except, of course, Los Alamos.

In June 1946, well before Oppenheimer’s arrival at the Institute, Johnny von Neumann had begun to build a high-speed computer in the boiler room basement of Fuld Hall. Nothing so practical had ever existed at the Institute. And nothing so expensive. The trustees initially gave von Neumann $100,000 to get started. And then, in a rare departure from Institute policy, he was allowed to obtain additional funding from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the U.S. Army, the Office of Naval Research and the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1947, a small brick building was constructed a few hundred yards away from Fuld Hall to house the computer von Neumann envisioned.

The whole idea of building a machine was rather controversial among scholars who thought their job was to think. “There was never anything that we needed a lot of computing for,” complained one mathematician, Deane Montgomery. Oppenheimer himself was of two minds about von Neumann’s computer. Like many others, he thought the Institute should not be turned into a laboratory funded by defense dollars. But this was different. von Neumann was building a machine that would revolutionize research. And so he supported the project. Von Neumann agreed not to patent his machine, which soon became the model for a generation of commercial computers.

Oppenheimer and von Neumann formally unveiled the Institute computer in June 1952. At the time, it was the fastest electronic brain in the world—and its mere existence launched the computer revolution of the late twentieth century. But when the machine was surpassed by better, faster computers in the late 1950s, the permanent members of the Institute met in Oppenheimer’s living room and voted to close the computer project altogether. They also passed a motion never to bring another such piece of equipment onto the grounds of the Institute.

In 1948, Oppie recruited the classicist Harold F. Cherniss, an old Berkeley friend and the country’s leading scholar on Plato and Aristotle. That same year, he persuaded the trustees to establish a $120,000 “Director’s Fund,” which gave him personal discretion to bring in short-term scholars. Using this discretionary money, he brought his childhood friend Francis Fergusson to the Institute. Fergusson used the fellowship to write his book
The Idea of a Theatre.
At the instigation of Ruth Tolman, Oppie appointed an advisory committee on psychological scholarship. Once or twice a year, Ruth herself came to the Institute with her brother-in-law Edward Tolman, George Miller, Paul Meehl, Ernest Hilgard and Jerome Bruner. (Ed Tolman and Hilgard had both been members with Oppenheimer of Siegfried Bernfeld’s monthly study group which had met in San Francisco during the years 1938–42.) Gathering in Oppenheimer’s office, these eminent psychologists would brief him on the “deep questions” in their field and otherwise “keep him in the picture.” Oppenheimer soon gave short-term appointments to Miller, Bruner and David Levy, a noted child psychologist. Oppenheimer loved to talk about things psychological. Bruner found him “brilliant, discursive in his interests, lavishly intolerant, ready to pursue any topic anywhere, extraordinarily lovable. . . . We talked about most anything, but psychology and the philosophy of physics were irresistible.”

Soon, other such humanists were joining the Institute, including the archaeologist Homer Thompson, the poet T. S. Eliot, the historian Arnold Toynbee, the social philosopher Isaiah Berlin and, later, the diplomat and historian George F. Kennan. Oppenheimer had always admired Eliot’s
The
Waste Land,
and was delighted when he agreed to come to the Institute for one semester in 1948. But it didn’t work out. Having a poet in residence didn’t sit well with the Institute’s mathematicians, some of whom snubbed Eliot, even after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature that year. Eliot, for his part, kept to himself and spent more time at the university than he did at the Institute. Oppenheimer was disappointed. “I invited Eliot here,” he told Freeman Dyson, “in the hope that he would produce another masterpiece, and all he did here was to work on
The Cocktail Party,
the worst thing he ever wrote.”

Nevertheless, Oppenheimer strongly believed it was essential that the Institute remain a home to both science and the humanities. In his speeches about the Institute, Oppenheimer continually emphasized that science needed the humanities to better understand its own character and consequences. Only a few of the senior resident mathematicians agreed with him, but their support was critical. Johnny von Neumann was almost as interested in ancient Roman history as he was in his own field. Others shared Oppenheimer’s interest in poetry. He hoped that he could make the Institute a haven for scientists, social scientists and humanists interested in a multidisciplinary understanding of the whole human condition. It was an irresistible opportunity, a chance to bring together the two worlds, science and the humanities, that had engaged him equally as a young man. In this sense, Princeton would be the antithesis of Los Alamos, and perhaps a psychological antidote to it.

The Institute was as idyllic and comfortable as Los Alamos was spartan. Particularly for its lifelong members, it was a Platonic heaven. “The point of this place,” Oppenheimer once said, “is to make no excuses for not doing something, for not doing good work.” To outsiders, the Institute sometimes had the appearance of a pastoral asylum for the certifiably eccentric. Kurt Gödel, the renowned logician, was a painfully shy recluse. His only real friend was Einstein, and the two men were often seen walking together from town. In between bouts of severe paranoid depression—convinced that his food was being poisoned, he suffered from chronic malnutrition— Gödel spent years trying to solve the continuum problem, a mathematical conundrum involving a question of infinities. He never found an answer. Spurred on by Einstein, he also worked on general relativity, and in 1949 published a paper that described a “rotating universe” in which it was theoretically possible to “travel into any region of the past, present, and future, and back again.” For most of his decades at the Institute, he was a solitary, ghostly figure, dressed in a shabby black winter coat, scribbling German shorthand into reams of notebooks.

Dirac was almost equally strange. When he was a young boy, his father had announced that he should speak to him only in French. This way, he thought, his son would quickly learn another language. “Since I found that I couldn’t express myself in French,” Dirac explained, “it was better for me to stay silent than to talk in English. So I became silent at that time.” Wearing long rubber boots, he was often seen hacking trails through the neighboring woods with an ax. This was his form of recreational exercise, and over the years it became something of an Institute pastime. Dirac was maddeningly literal-minded. One day a reporter called to ask him about a lecture he was scheduled to give in New York. Oppenheimer had long since decided that scholars should not be distracted by having phones in their offices, so Dirac had to take the call from a hallway phone. When the reporter said he wanted a copy of the speech, Dirac put the phone down and went into Jeremy Bernstein’s office to ask for advice: He feared, he said, being misquoted. So Abraham Pais, who happened to be standing there, suggested that he write “Do Not Publish in Any Form” atop a copy of the speech. Dirac absorbed this simple advice for several minutes in complete silence. Finally, he said, “Isn’t ‘in any form’ redundant in that sentence?”

Von Neumann was unusual too. Like Oppenheimer, he was multilingual and catholic in his interests. He also loved to throw a good party, staying up well into the morning hours. And, like Edward Teller, he was rabidly anti-Soviet. One night at a party, when the conversation turned to discussion of the early Cold War, von Neumann said quite matter-of-factly that it was obvious: The United States should launch a preventive war and annihilate the Soviet Union with its atomic arsenal. “I think that the USA-USSR conflict,” he wrote to Lewis Strauss in 1951, “will very probably lead to an armed ‘total’ collision, and that a maximum rate of armament is therefore imperative.” Oppie was appalled by such sentiments, but did not allow political considerations to influence his decisions with respect to the permanent faculty.

Scholars from a wide range of disciplines were constantly amazed at the range of Oppenheimer’s interests. One day a foundation executive from the Commonwealth Fund, Lansing V. Hammond, sought Oppenheimer’s advice on some sixty young British applicants for scholarships to study in various American universities. The topics ranged from the liberal arts to the hard sciences. Hammond, a scholar in English literature, hoped to get Oppenheimer’s advice on a few of the candidates working in math or physics. As soon as Hammond was ushered into his office, Oppenheimer surprised him by saying, “You got your doctorate at Yale in eighteenth-century English literature—Age of Johnson; was Tinker or Pottle your supervisor?” Within ten minutes, Hammond had all the information he needed to match his English physicist-applicants with suitable American universities. As he rose to leave, thinking he had taken enough of the busy director’s time, Oppenheimer said, “If you have a few minutes you can spare, I’d be interested in looking at some of your applications in other fields. . . .” Over the next hour, Oppenheimer spoke at length about the strengths and weaknesses of various graduate schools around the country. “Umm . . . indigenous American music, Roy Harris is just the person for him. . . . Social psychology . . . I’d suggest looking into Vanderbilt; smaller numbers, he’d have a better opportunity of getting what he wants . . . Your field, eighteenth-century English literature; Yale is an obvious choice, but don’t rule out Bate at Harvard.” Hammond had never even heard of Bate. He left feeling overwhelmed. “Never before,” he later wrote, “never since have I talked with such a man.”

OPPENHEIMER’S RELATIONSHIP with the Institute’s most famous resident was always tentative: “We were close colleagues,” he later wrote of Einstein, “and something of friends.” But he thought of Einstein as a living patron saint of physics, not a working scientist. (Some in the Institute suspected that Oppenheimer was the source of a statement in
Time
magazine that “Einstein is a landmark, not a beacon.”) Einstein harbored a similar ambivalence about Oppenheimer. When Oppenheimer was first suggested in 1945 as a candidate for a permanent professorship at the Institute, Einstein and the mathematician Hermann Weyl wrote a memo to the faculty recommending the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli over Oppenheimer. At the time, Einstein knew Pauli well, and Oppenheimer only in passing. Ironically, Weyl had tried hard in 1934 to recruit Oppenheimer to the Institute; but Oppenheimer had adamantly refused, saying, “I could be of absolutely no use at such a place.” Now, however, Oppenheimer’s credentials as a physicist just didn’t measure up to Pauli’s: “Certainly Oppenheimer has made no contributions to physics of such a fundamental nature as Pauli’s exclusion principle and analysis of electronic spin. . . .” Einstein and Weyl conceded that Oppenheimer had “founded the largest school of theoretical physics in this country.” But after noting that his students universally praised him as a teacher, they cautioned, “It may be that he is somewhat too dominant and [that] his students tend to be smaller editions of Oppenheimer.” On the basis of this recommendation, the Institute offered the job in 1945 to Pauli—who turned it down.

Einstein eventually acquired a grudging respect for the new director, whom he described as an “unusually capable man of many-sided education.” But what he admired about Oppenheimer was the man, not his physics. Still, Einstein would never count Oppenheimer as one of his close friends, “perhaps partly because our scientific opinions are fairly diametrically different.” Back in the 1930s, Oppie had once called Einstein “completely cuckoo” for his stubborn refusal to accept quantum theory. All of the young physicists Oppenheimer brought to Princeton were wholly convinced of Bohr’s quantum views—and uninterested in the questions that Einstein posed to challenge the quantum view of the world. They could not fathom why the great man was working indefatigably to develop a “unified field theory” to replace what he saw as the inconsistencies of quantum theory. It was lonely work, and yet he was still quite satisfied to defend “the good Lord against the suggestion that he continuously rolls the dice”—his thumbnail critique of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one of the foundations of quantum physics. And he didn’t mind that most of his Princeton colleagues “see me as a heretic and a reactionary who has, as it were, outlived himself.”