The Madness of J. Robert Oppenheimer: A poem

The day you were born, the world died.
Died in glitter and grist, in skeletons and slogans.

Scenic Riverside Drive which bequeathed you to us.
Sparkling New York lent us its sordid dreams
To trample underfoot, like so many lost souls.
You were born of a merchant;
Of loathsome success,
Of a hurried past,
Whose pogroms pushed him into the future.

Precious, precocious little one
You lit up your mother's eyes.
Her arm you were coy about,
Gloved as it stayed, seemingly hiding
The misfortune of your future mischief.
Never to be spoken of
In that household of labored repute.

You went to the Ethical Culture School,
Where they taught the holy gospel.
A man is known not by his creed but by his deed.
A reformed Jew would know this, they said.
But what consequences that deed had,
Free floating things, of dubious character,
They never said
Or thought respectable to do so.

A mind of formidable power and reach,
That everyone knew from the beginning.
Painfully aware, plumbing minerals and poetry.
Grandpa Ben from the old German country,
Hands you a set of stones; birefringent, languidly green and blue.
I want to be good at many things, you say,
And still see the world through a tear-stained countenance.

At twelve you read Katherine Mansfield and Plato.
Sink deeper in your chair.
Ponder what men do when they make poetry and figure out politics.
You say, "Ask me a question in Latin, and I will answer.
In Greek."
You freak.
You're an unctuous, repulsively good little boy.

A gift to Ethical you are.
Driven by a chauffeur,
Waiting for the elevator.
Can your son please not, they plead,
Hold up the class.

They had their revenge, the boys from proper households,
Who, out in a camp in the Catskills, painted your genitals green,
Locked you in an icehouse.
Silently you bore the frigid embarrassment,
Out to prove yourself a man, embarrassed of your parents who rescued you,
For not giving you a normal, healthy way
To be a bastard.

Holding a valedictory flame, you set forth.
Ethical's motto, "Fiat lux", you take to heart,
Your light will set everything aglow,
In its own private, luminous agony.

An unholy constriction of the innards,
Sends you into bouts of pale melancholy,
The cavalry comes in the disguise
Of your English teacher, Herbert Smith,
To elevate you with mountains and air.

Go west, young man, away from those "bizzness" men,
To New Mexico, where the old ones speak.
To pueblos and horses and the sunset ablaze.
Joy alternating with conscious self-hatred,
An endearing quality all your life.
Smith asks you to fold a shirt,
"The tailor's son would know, won't he".

Harvard beckons, the Harvard of Ivy and anti-Semitism.
You raid the library, swallow Eliot and Baudelaire.
Exhaust yourself with Russell and Whitehead and Kant,
Pound the streets of Cambridge
With unrequited longings for girls and gentiles.
To prove you are still alive.

You write letters and poetry,
Solid efforts at vaporous endeavors,
Undertaken with disembodied spirituality.
Science is reassuring, tangible,
A refuge, a corner of your own.

Chemistry solidifies its hold over you,
The capacity for change and renewal.
Easy, you ask, for salt and sulfur.
Why does it escape human beings?

The golden age of physics is upon the world,
Bohr and Einstein and Rutherford; names in books.
What will they say, when you show them your wares?
Chemistry becomes physics, physics becomes soma.

In Cambridge, the New Zealand lion roars.
Sets you upon a gloriously numbing task,
Something to do with thin films of a metal oxide.
Splendid, you say, while your heart weeps.

Months of lugubrious effort in the lab.
You are clumsy at women and workmanship.
Gazing into the inky blackness of the Cam,
How wonderful it would be, you ask,
To bump myself off.

Your toils fail in the wilderness of error.
With old Cambridge friends you undertake
A voyage to Corsica.
Southern comfort for the wounded soul.
You travel over mountains and rivers,
Shielded by horses in the rain, violent vistas out there.
Assaulted by pangs of hunger, you light up.
Feels good, you say. I think I will keep the habit.
Suddenly you remember, you must go back.
There is the trivial matter, of ambition and murder,
A poisoned apple you kept on your tutor's desk,
Must be disposed of, before it causes a minor inconvenience.

Feverishly they send for the New Yorkers, who rush with great concern.
You will no longer try to poison your tutor, they promise the university,
In return for silence and a shrink,
Who diagnoses you with dementia praecox.
Friday finds you walking at a furious clip,
Contemptuous of the man, what kind of psychobabble?
Does he dabble in? I understand my own troubles better.

The Great Dane visits his favorite son,
Master of Theory meeting Master of Experiment.
Casually he comes over and asks,
"Are your difficulties experimental or conceptual"?
"I don't know".
"That's bad", he says.
But his avuncular, insipid sweetness perseveres.
The clog starts clearing up.

Eagerly you go to Göttingen, to the tutelage of Max Born.
Born; of thin skin, shrinking fear and complete mastery.
With Heisenberg he invented quantum theory,
Reduced the world to waves of probability.
"The point can be made more simply thusly", you say,
Grasping the chalk from Born's hands,
While he cowers in fear of your untutored cleverness.

Göttingen unfurls the colors of your creative soul.
Mathematics and equations come tumbling out.
So do Dante and Goethe and Nietzsche.
Glowing embers of the intellect,
Surrounded by international scientists
And national socialists.

From the world over come savants and penniless wanderers,
To dive into the depths of the alien world.
They come from Rome and Cambridge, Leiden and Warsaw.
Benighted, intellectual altar boys, eyes full of wonderment.
Arguing, calculating, wandering among scenic streets and mountains.
Parked in a land nursing old wounds, creeping toward the precipice.

You befriend most; they regard you with jealousy and admiration.
The most austere one, Dirac, regards your crisscrossings with impatience.
How can you work, he asks, at both poetry and physics?
In physics we try to explain something that was not clear before.
In poetry it is the exact opposite.
You pity Dirac's exact mind; how could it fathom
The part where the humans who create science matter.

Triumphant from your glorious explorations you come home.
King of the atomic realm; a thicket of papers; the old guard calling.
Harvard and Princeton, Caltech and Berkeley, you feign considered respect.
Berkeley sounds interesting, a desert in the middle of civilization, you call it.
Your mission, should you choose it, is to bring physics to the barbarians.

You make your bed, you sleep here.
Should civilization come undone, as it seems to be,
This is where you make your last stand,
Among partial differential equations and scattering matrices.
You buy a fast steed, name it Garuda, for the Hindu god of speed,
It terrifies your friends; the speed of your own mind awes them.

The universe is your playground, physics alone never satisfied you.
Arthur Ryder, old soul with a laconic mind, infused with Eastern philosophy.
With him you read the Bhagavad Gita in the original.
Princes and duty, detachment and effort,
The fire in your heart glows brighter every day.

Gradually the world takes notice, the center of physics starts shifting.
You get a new friend with a pragmatic, earthy mind.
Aw shucks, says Ernest Lawrence; he works sixteen-hour days,
As his new cyclotron accelerates particles to the end of kingdom come.
Lawrence and you, you make a fine team, politics aside.
What does politics have to do with beauty, purity and truth anyway?

They come to you as they came to Born.
Eager schoolboys burning with intellectual thirst.
Living on cat food, from depression-ridden Oklahoma and Philadelphia.
You introduce them to an unfamiliar life.
Spicy food and martinis, Beethoven and Sanskrit.
Late night ruminations reverberating against the silent hills.
Mesmerizing sermons on truth and quantum electrodynamics.
The cigarette always lit, the mind finishing others' sentences.
Your wealthy father's trust fund allowing you to feign asceticism.

The brilliance marked by casual cruelty,
The Beastliness, you call it. An old friend.
Generously offered, seldom controlled.
You cut them down to size;
They learn at your feet.

With your students you gaze upwards into cosmic rays
And downwards into the vacuous space
Inside collapsing stars.
You Trump the Europeans at their own game,
The world beats a reluctant path to your door.
They will no longer have to make pilgrimages
To Göttingen and Cambridge.
Home is where the good stuff is.
You have put America on the map.

And yet you don't always pursue
Your soaring ideas to their logical ends.
Later others will say you hesitated;
A first rate mind which could have achieved more.
You remain enamored with detachment.
Perhaps you should have studied the Talmud after all.

The world around you collapsing,
Communism the one fond hope.
Parched minds begging to be watered,
Looking for redemption from
The wretchedness of self-interest.
You plunge in yourself,
While never making sense of Communist dogma.
But the die has been cast.

One parched mind belongs to Jean Tatlock.
Lithe, with a smoldering passion
For ideas and depressive thoughts,
John Donne living rent free inside her head.
A tumultuous relationship, simmering,
At the edge of sanity, sometimes.

Your own brother, sometimes soulmate,
The one you lectured on the virtue of discipline,
Discipline undertaken for its own sake.
Feckless Frank joins the party.
You dissuade and dissemble,
In the prison of your own uncertainty.

The unstable Jean discourages you,
You seek succor in other arms.
Kitty Harrison, twice divorced,
Cradling the lost memory of her husband,
Killed fighting Franco in Spain,
A good communist.
It all adds up, the stars aligned.
You become a family man,
You could get used to encroaching normalcy.

Events overtake the best-laid plans.
War and peace, but war always wins.
A dingy laboratory in Berlin
Steals a secret from Nature's bosom.
A squadron of grinning pilots
Carpet an island with death and blood.

When can you stop, asks Lawrence,
This political nonsense?
Truth and honesty being a small price,
To pay for fame and fortune.
We want you.
We want you to save the world.

The future calls with its crooked smile,
Will you come join our little project?
Will the King don his armor,
And fulfill the goal destiny has thrust on him?
The verdict of his grandchildren be damned.

You team up with a gruff general. Blistering efficiency.
The house of principles is a house of cards.
Sure I'll be a commissioned officer, you say,
Until cooler heads threaten to resign.
Your friends remain important to you.
For now.

A millennial weapon, as yet unshaped.
A figment of men's wild imagination.
Would it end a madman's jackbooted visions?
They ask for an isolated place.
Where a bang will sound like a whimper.
You thought it a pity physics and desert country
Could never be combined.
You were wrong.

A great city arises in the middle of the desert,
Untamed, wrung out of infant uncertainty.
Coated with the gloss of brutal aspirations.
Barbed wire, secrecy, the gnarled green of the army.
Did we leave Berlin and come here for this, ask the refugees?
Thankfully, they say in thick European accents,
Soon there may be no Berlin.

Until then, the mountains provide solace.
The desert air stirs something elemental in you.
You take over with a whirlwind of enthusiasm,
Entrust the initiation to your close associate with the lisp.

You have wrested free discussion from the general
With great effort and cloying pleas.
You are a good soldier.

"The object of this project
Is to create a practical weapon in the form of a bomb."
Leave behind your particles and fields,
Except as precision instruments of mass murder.
And spare me your talk of morality,
Says famous, friendly Fermi,
When it's all superb physics.

A constellation of egghead geniuses, diverted from their life's goals.
Fleeing from a world gone half mad to the crucible of freedom.
In which they now forge this weapon which can end freedom.
Brainstorming neutrons and diffusion,
Lenses and implosion.
The mechanics of annihilation
Never embodied such fine craftsmanship.

Dancing, devilish dervish Edward Teller,
Visions of megatons in his head.
Just let me know how big you want it,
I can make it so.
Quickly though, I have to get back to my piano,
And raise Bach from the dead.
My neighbors' sleep be damned,
The world really needs to wake up now.

Gently you soothe these rumpled egos,
Feynman and Groves and even terrible Teller;
They call you the best director they have seen.
Everything has a home in your mind;
The problems of pregnant women.
The high fertility rate.
The height of detonation.
How to turn humans to embers.

The Great Dane arrives one March,
His presence a reassurance
That you may be able to redeem yourself after all.
This could be the weapon to end all wars, says Bohr,
If mankind gets tired of killing, that is.
But whatever else transpires between
The devil and angel of fate,
Don't forget, until then,
It's all superb physics.

There is no solution without a test.
You know where it has to happen.
A desolate scrub of land at the end of time,
The Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of Death,
Which never looked so full of promise.
The name should be logical; Trinity.
In deference to the mystical Donne
And his disciple Jean Tatlock.
Poor, wretched Jean,
Who could not blind the demons in her mind,
Until they were immersed in a tub full of water.

What burdens men's hearts may bear,
Are drowned out in the din of a downpour,
Trying to desperately wash away the vulgarities,
About to be visited on this primeval landscape.

The cigarettes have started to show their power.
The chronic cough racks up your inner desires.
The Gita speaks to you; convenient balm for your sins.
You tell everyone that in the middle of javelins and arrows,
The good that men do sustains them.
Philosophy can perhaps wipe away the stain of physics.

The lever thrown, the sunglasses donned,
The future triggered irrevocably,
Set in murderous motion.
At the chosen hour the heavens rumble,
Nuclei split, the elemental light shines.
It bores and pounces,
Tracelessly drills into your conscience,
Proclaims obscenity,
In a boiling cauldron of neutrons.
Invented by the one species,
Capable of shaping its future,
Which having worshipped the sun,
Now strives to create its own.

The hand tears away from the face,
Streaked with tears.
You always wanted to be the man
Who saw the world through a tear-stained countenance.
At first, Donne.
"Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you 
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; 
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend 
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new." 

Then Krishna, inaugurating death in our times.
"I am become death, destroyer of worlds."
"I am time, destroyer of worlds."
It must feel mighty good to be Krishna.

Then silence, jubilation, indifference to the ghost in the machine.
The best compliment, from a man named Bainbridge.
"We are all sons of bitches."
You have finally found a healthy way
To be a bastard.

The war is over; the scientists are going home.
They have been good soldiers, dutiful sons.
But you have tasted power
And spat out the morsels of fame.
It feels good.
The thread constricts you tighter.

What does it matter
That a hundred thousand souls
Were burnt, beaten, and irradiated to death.
War does these things to men.
They killed ours, we killed theirs.
A simple moral calculus.
Maybe we will finally stop killing
Because of this great adventure we took part in.
What a marvelous time it was.

A great power rises to the East,
Fuelled by similar ambitions,
To enslave the dirt of humanity,
Through the precise application of science.
You plead with the leader of the free world,
Confess your guilt.
A crybaby scientist, he says.
The blood is on his hands, not yours, he says.
Get him out of here, he says.

Hostile men, enamored with power,
Resentful of your silver tongue and fame.
You are too clever for your own good.
Goading them, mocking them,
Making them aware
Of their own frailties.
They wait and watch.

An even bigger force of nature looms,
Engineered by devilish dervish Teller.
Having raised Bach from the dead,
He now raises Hell about the new danger.
He's paranoid, shaped by childhood trauma.
His scheme will make your invention
Look like a parlor trick.
Fusion instead of fission,
Coming together instead of breaking apart,
Will rent the world asunder.

The Eastern promise claims its own morbid authority.
The laws of nature are not privy only to the West.
Paranoia sweeps through the land
Like a miasma extolling urgent action.
You despair, you warn.
Answering in kind
Only breeds more hatred.
You would know.
You started it.

The paranoia claims its victims.
Mob justice ignoring reason.
Your own pupils fall prey to it.
But what are old bonds
Compared to new horizons.
And when they come for your pupils,
You betray them to save your hide,
Call them radicals,
Ignoring your own radical past.
And who will speak for you
When they come for you?

They come swiftly and surely,
Embattled, resentful, seeing treason.
Your position of privilege rattled,
Your loyalties questioned,
Your past newly scrutinized.
They say you are the Mandarin
Who with his silver tongue and powers of persuasion,
Is striking a blow against his country's monopoly,
On its exclusive capability to kill other human beings.

You decide to fight.
You are the good soldier.
An unctuous, repulsively good little boy.

On trial you go,
Warped arguments digging up past indiscretions,
Of friends betrayed, lies and equivocations.
It didn't matter before, but the world has changed.
You were the man who changed it.

Men of the law running roughshod over it, hiding evidence used against you.
No chauffeur to drive you to school this time.
You remember the character of Karna from the Mahabharata.
At the opportune moment his knowledge of weapons deserts him.
What happened to your quick mind? Its dazzling sweep?
At this time it seems more appropriate
To lie catatonic on the couch.

Your friends come to your aid,
And the devilish dervish Teller damns you.
But no friend can save you from
The moral morass you created,
Which clutches souls in its tentacles,
And averts the gaze of history
By distracting it with visions of glory.

The axe falls swiftly,
Expertly wielded by the man of the law.
"Doctor, why did you lie?", he asks.
"Because I was an idiot", you say.
You were an idiot.
You were a son of a bitch.
We are all sons of bitches.

You are done, you are spent,
You lie sprawling on the battlefield
Wrapped in the robes of self-inflicted sin,
Your role in history subverted by the unrelenting
Machinery of maniacal power.

Men and women still come to you, seeking advice and attention,
Wanting to let some of your bloodied wisdom
Sprinkle on themselves.
They want you to lick your war wounds,
To wring your hands
In their presence.
But you won't.
Not when you know
You did your duty with detachment.

They still try to string up your liver
On the hard wire of original guilt.
And you say to them;
Yes, I gave you Hiroshima,
But you gave us Guernica and Dresden,
And Hamburg and Tokyo,
Manmade death borne of the same mother,
And you call me Father of the Bomb.

Your intellect still commands
Wide attention and benign admiration,
But you cannot help but think of yourself
As a cast off piece of wood.
Once supporting a mighty house,
Now drifting silently on the waves.

Now your body is beaten.
The puff that quieted those hunger pangs
Has finally caught up with you.
The cancer spreading rapidly,
Claiming territory cell by cell.
It's all fields and particles in the end.

You wait with bated breath for the end to come.
Your body weakens, your spirit strengthens.
Eyes sunken, bones visible, frame invisible.
And as mind and body fail, you still think of Donne.
And Eliot.
And Krishna.
And Eliot and Krishna.
You think of those fragments from your life
That you have shored against your ruins.
May those fragments give you peace,
May those fragments give you Shantih.

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

My latest column for 3 Quarks Daily.

Black holes and the curse of beauty: When revolutionary physicists turn conservative

This is my latest monthly column for 3 Quarks Daily.

On September 1, 1939, the leading journal of physics in the United States, Physical Review, carried two remarkable papers. One was by a young professor of physics at Princeton University named John Wheeler and his mentor Niels Bohr. The other was by a young postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Hartland Snyder, and his mentor, a slightly older professor of physics named J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The first paper described the mechanism of nuclear fission. Fission had been discovered nine months earlier by a team of physicists and chemists working in Berlin and Stockholm who found that bombarding uranium with neutrons could lead to a chain reaction with a startling release of energy. The basic reasons for the large release of energy in the process came from Einstein's famous equation, E = mc², and were understood well. But a lot of questions remained: What was the general theory behind the process? Why did uranium split into two and not more fragments? Under what conditions would a uranium atom split? Would other elements also undergo fission?

Bohr and Wheeler answered many of these questions in their paper. Bohr had already come up with an enduring analogy for understanding the nucleus: that of a liquid drop that wobbles in all directions and is held together by surface tension until an external force that is violent enough tears it apart. But this is a classical view of the uranium nucleus. Niels Bohr had been a pioneer of quantum mechanics. From a quantum mechanical standpoint the uranium nucleus is both a particle and a wave represented as a wavefunction, a mathematical object whose manipulation allows us to calculate properties of the element. In their paper Wheeler and Bohr found that the uranium nucleus is almost perfectly poised on the cusp of classical and quantum mechanics, being described partly as a liquid drop and partly by a wavefunction. At twenty five pages the paper is a tour de force, and it paved the way for understanding many other features of fission that were critical to both peaceful and military uses of atomic energy.

The second paper, by Oppenheimer and Snyder, was not as long; only four pages. But these four pages were monumental in their importance because they described, for the first time in history, what we call black holes. The road to black holes had begun about ten years earlier when a young Indian physicist pondered the fate of white dwarfs on a long voyage by sea to England. At the ripe old age of nineteen, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar worked out that white dwarfs wouldn't be able to support themselves against gravity if their mass increased beyond a certain limit. A few years later in 1935, Chandrasekhar had a showdown with Arthur Eddington, one of the most famous astronomers in the world, who could not believe that nature could be so pathological as to permit gravitational collapse. Eddington was a previous revolutionary who had famously tested Einstein's theory of relativity and its prediction of starlight bending in 1919. By 1935 he had turned conservative.

Four years after the Chandrasekhar-Eddington confrontation, Oppenheimer became an instant revolutionary when he worked out the details of gravitational collapse all the way to their logical conclusion. In their short paper he and Snyder demonstrated that a star that has exhausted all its thermonuclear fuel cannot hold itself against its own gravity. When it undergoes gravitational collapse, it would present to the outside world a surface beyond which any falling object will appear to be in perpetual free fall. This surface is what we now call the event horizon; beyond the event horizon even light cannot escape, and time essentially stops flowing for an outside observer.

Curiously enough, the black hole paper by Oppenheimer and Snyder sank like a stone while the Wheeler-Bohr paper on fission gained wide publicity. In retrospect the reason seems clear. On the same day that both papers came out, Germany attacked Poland and started World War 2. The potential importance of fission as a source of violent and destructive energy had not gone unnoticed, and so the Wheeler-Bohr paper was of critical and ominous portent. In addition, the paper was in the field of nuclear physics which had been for a long time the most exciting field of physics. Oppenheimer's paper on the other hand was in general relativity. Einstein had invented general relativity more than twenty years earlier, but it was considered more mathematics than physics in the 1930s. Quantum mechanics and nuclear physics were considered the most promising fields for young physicists to make their mark in; relativity was a backwater.

What is more interesting than the fate of the papers themselves though is the fate of the three principal characters associated with them. In their fate as well as that of others, we can see the differences between revolutionaries and conservatives in physics.

Niels Bohr had pioneered quantum mechanics with his paper on atomic structure in 1913 and since then had been a founding father of the field. He had run an intellectual salon at his institute at Copenhagen which had attracted some of the most original physicists of the century; men like Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and George Gamow. By any definition Bohr had been a true revolutionary. But in his later life he turned conservative, at least in two respects. Firstly, he stubbornly clung to a philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics called the Copenhagen Interpretation which placed the observer front and center. Bohr and his disciples rejected other approaches to quantum interpretation, including one named the Many Worlds Interpretation pioneered by John Wheeler's student Hugh Everett. Secondly, Bohr could not grasp the revolutionary take on quantum mechanics invented by Richard Feynman called the sum-over-histories approach. In this approach, instead of considering a single trajectory for a quantum particle, you consider all possible trajectories. In 1948, during a talk in front of other famous physicists in which Feynman tried to explain his theory, Bohr essentially hijacked the stage and scolded Feynman for ignoring basic physics principles while Feynman had to humiliatingly stand next to him. In both these cases Bohr was wrong, although the verdict is still out on the philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics. It seems however that Bohr forgot one of his own maxims: "The opposite of a big truth is also a big truth". For some reason Bohr was unable to accept the opposites of his own big truths. The quantum revolutionary had become an old-fashioned conservative.

John Wheeler, meanwhile, went on to make not just one but two revolutionary contributions to physics. After pioneering nuclear fission theory with Bohr, Wheeler immersed himself in the backwater of general relativity and brought it into the limelight, becoming one of the world's foremost relativists. In the public consciousness, he will probably be most famous for coining the term "black hole". But Wheeler's contributions as an educator were even more important. Just like his own mentor Bohr, he established a school of physics at Princeton that produced some of the foremost physicists in the world; among them Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne and Jakob Bekenstein. Today Wheeler's scientific children and grandchildren occupy many of the major centers of relativity research around the world, and until the end of his long life that remained his proudest accomplishment. Wheeler was a perfect example of a scientist who stayed a revolutionary all his life, coming up with wild ideas and challenging the conventional wisdom.

What about the man who may not have coined the term "black holes" but who actually invented them in that troubled year of 1939? In many ways Oppenheimer's case is the most interesting one, because after publishing that paper he became completely disinterested in relativity and black holes, a conservative who did not think the field had anything new to offer. What is ironic about Oppenheimer is that his paper on black holes is his only contribution to relativity – he was always known for his work in nuclear physics and quantum mechanics after all – and yet today this very minor part of his career is considered to be his most important contribution to science. There are good reasons to believe that had he lived long enough to see the existence of black holes experimentally validated, he would have won a Nobel Prize.

And yet he was utterly oblivious to his creations. Several reasons may have accounted for Oppenheimer's lack of interest. Perhaps the most obvious reason is his leadership of the Manhattan Project and his fame as the father of the atomic bomb and a critical government advisor after the war. He also became the director of the rarefied Institute for Advanced Study and got saddled with administrative duties. It's worth noting that after the war, Oppenheimer co-authored only a single paper on physics, so his lack of research in relativity really reflects his lack of research in general. It's also true that particle physics became the most fashionable field of physics research after the war, and stayed that way for at least two decades. Oppenheimer himself served as a kind of spiritual guide to that field, leading three key postwar conferences that brought together the foremost physicists in the field and inaugurated a new era of research. But it's not that Oppenheimer simply didn't have the time to explore relativity; it's that he was utterly indifferent to developments in the field, including ones that Wheeler was pioneering at the time. The physicist Freeman Dyson recalls how he tried to draw out Oppenheimer and discuss black holes many times after the war, but Oppenheimer always changed the subject. He just did not think black holes or anything to do with them mattered.

In fact the real reason for Oppenheimer's abandonment of black holes is more profound. In his later years, he was afflicted by a disease which I call "fundamentalitis". As described by Dyson, fundamentalitis leads to a belief that only the most basic, fundamental research in physics matters. Only fundamental research should occupy the attention of the best scientists; other work is reserved for second-rate physicists and their graduate students. For Oppenheimer, quantum electrodynamics was fundamental, beta decay was fundamental, mesons were fundamental; black holes were applied physics, worthy of second-rate minds.

Oppenheimer was not the only physicist to be stricken by fundamentalitis. The malady was contagious and in fact had already infected the occupant of the office of the floor below Oppenheimer's – Albert Einstein. Einstein had become disillusioned with quantum mechanics ever since his famous debates with Bohr in the 1920s and his belief that God did not play dice. He continued to be a holdout against quantum mechanics; a sad, isolated, often mocked figure ignoring the field and working on his own misguided unification of relativity and electromagnetism. Oppenheimer himself said with no little degree of scorn that Einstein had turned into a lighthouse, not a beacon. But what is less appreciated is Einstein's complete lack of interest in black holes, which in some sense is even more puzzling considering that black holes are the culmination of his own theory. Einstein thought that black holes were a pathological example of his relativity, rather than a general phenomenon which might showcase deep mysteries of the universe. He also wrongly thought that the angular momentum of the particles in a purported black hole would stabilize its structure at some point; this thinking was very similar to Eddington's rejection of gravitational collapse, essentially based on faith that some law of physics would prevent it from happening.

Unfortunately Einstein was obsessed with the same fundamentalitis that Oppenheimer was, thinking that black holes were too applied while unified field theory was the only thing worth pursuing. Between them, Einstein and Oppenheimer managed to ignore the two most exciting developments in physics – black holes and quantum mechanics – of their lives until the end. Perhaps the biggest irony is that the same black holes that both of them scorned are now yielding some of the most exciting, and yes – fundamental – findings in cosmology, thermodynamics, information theory and computer science. The children are coming back to haunt the ghosts of their parents.

Einstein and Oppenheimer's fundamentalitis points to an even deeper quality of physics that has guided the work of physicists since time immemorial. That quality is beauty, especially mathematical beauty. Perhaps the foremost proponent of mathematical beauty in twentieth century physics was the austere Englishman Paul Dirac. Dirac said that an equation could not be true until it was beautiful, and he had a point. Some of the most important and universal equations in physics are beautiful by way of their concision and universal applicability. Think about E= mc², or Ludwig Boltzmann's equation relating entropy to disorder, S=klnW. Einstein's field equations of general relativity and Dirac's equation of the electron that marries special relativity with quantum mechanics are both prime examples of elegance and deep beauty. Keats famously said that "Beauty is truth and truth is beauty", and Dirac and Einstein seem to have taken his adage to heart.

And yet stories of Dirac and Einstein's quest for beauty are misleading. To begin with, both of them and particularly their disciples seem to have exaggerated the physicists' reliance on beauty as a measure of reality. Einstein may have become enamored of beauty in his later life, but when he developed relativity, he was heavily guided by experiment and stayed very close to the data. He was after all the pioneer of the thought experiment. As a patent clerk in the Swiss patent office at Bern, Einstein gained a deep appreciation for mechanical instrumentation and its power to reveal the secrets of nature. He worked with his friend Leo Szilard on that most practical of gadgets – a refrigerator. His later debates with Bohr on quantum mechanics often featured ingenious thought experiments with devices that he had mentally constructed. In fact Einstein's most profoundly emotional experience came not with a mathematical breakthrough but when he realized that his theory could explain deviations in the perihelion of Mercury, an unsolved problem for a century; this realization left him feeling that "something had snapped" inside him. Einstein's success thus did not arise as much from beauty as from good old-fashioned compliance with experiment. Beauty was a sort of secondary effect, serving as a post-facto rationalization for the correctness of the theory.

Unfortunately Einstein adopted a very different attitude in later years, trying to find a unified field theory that was beautiful rather than true. He started ignoring the experimental data that was being collected by particle physicists around him. We now know that Einstein's goal was fundamentally flawed since it did not include the theory of the strong nuclear force, a theory which took another thirty years to evolve and which could not have progressed without copious experimental data. You cannot come up with a complete theory, beautiful or otherwise, if you simply lack one of the key pieces. Einstein seems to have forgotten a central maxim of doing science, laid down by the sixteenth century natural philosopher Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the scientific method: "All depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed upon the facts of nature and so receiving their images simply as they are. For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world". In his zeal to make physics beautiful, Einstein ignored the facts of nature and pursued the dreams of his once-awesome imagination.

Perhaps the biggest irony in the story of Einstein and black holes comes from the words of the man who started it all. In 1983, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar published a dense and authoritative tome called "The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes" which laid out the complete theory of this fascinating object in all its mathematical glory. In it Chandra (as he was called by his friends) had the following to say:

"In my entire scientific life, extending over forty-five years, the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein's equations of general relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician, Roy Kerr, provides the absolutely exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe. This shuddering before the beautiful, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound."

Black holes and beauty had come full circle. Far from being a pathological outlier as believed by Einstein and Oppenheimer, they emerged as the epitome of austere mathematical and physical beauty in the cosmos.

Dirac seems to have been guided by beauty to an even greater extent than Einstein, but even there the historical record is ambiguous. When he developed the Dirac equation, he was very closely aware of the experimental results. His biographer Graham Farmelo notes, "Dirac tried one equation after another, discarding each one as soon as it failed to conform to his theoretical principles or to the experimental facts". Beauty may have been a criterion in Dirac's choices, but it was more a way of serving as an additional check rather than a driving force. Unfortunately Dirac did not see it that way. When Richard Feynman and others developed the theory of quantum electrodynamics – a framework that accounts for almost all of physics and chemistry except general relativity - Dirac was completely unenthusiastic about it. This was in spite of quantum electrodynamics agreeing with experiment to a degree unprecedented in the history of physics. When asked why he still had a problem with it, Dirac said it was because the equations were too ugly; he was presumably referring to a procedure called renormalization that got rid of infinities that had plagued the theory for years.

He continued to believe until the end that those ugly equations would somehow metamorphose into beautiful ones; the fact that they worked spectacularly was of secondary importance to him. In that sense beauty and utility were opposed in Dirac's mind. Dirac continued to look for beauty in his equations throughout his life, and this likely kept him from making any contribution that was remotely as important as the Dirac equation. That's a high bar, of course, but it does speak to the failure of beauty as a primary criterion for scientific discovery. Later in his life, Dirac developed a theory of magnetic monopoles and dabbled in finding formulas relating the fundamental constants of nature to each other; to some this was little more than aesthetic numerology. Neither of these ideas has become part of the mainstream of physics.

It was the quest for beauty and the conviction that fundamental ideas were the only ones worth pursuing that turned Einstein and Dirac from young revolutionaries to old conservatives. It also led them to ignore most of the solid progress in physics that was being made around them. The same two people who had let experimental facts serve as the core of their decision making during their youth now behaved as if both experiment and the accompanying theory did not matter.

Yet there is something to be said for making beauty your muse, and ironically this realization comes from the history of the Dirac equation itself. Perhaps the crowning achievement of that equation was to predict the existence of positively charged electrons or positrons. This discovery seemed so alien and unsettled Dirac so much at the beginning that he thought positrons had to be protons; it wasn't until Oppenheimer showed this could not be the case that Dirac started taking the novel prediction seriously. Positrons were finally found by Carl Anderson in 1932, a full three years after Dirac's prediction. This is one of the very few times in history that theory has genuinely predicted a completely novel fact of nature with no experimental basis in the past. Dirac would claim that it was the tightly knit elegance of his equation that logically ordained the existence of positrons, and one would be hard pressed to argue with him. Even today, when experimental evidence is lacking or absent, one has to admit that mathematical beauty is as good a guide to the truth as any other.

Modern theoretical physics has come a long way from the Dirac equation, and experimental evidence and beauty still guide practitioners of the field. Unfortunately physics at the frontiers seems to be unmoored from both these criteria today. The prime example of this is string theory. According to physicist Peter Woit and others, string theory has made no unique, experimentally testable prediction since its inception thirty years ago, and it also seems that its mathematics is unwieldy; while the equations seem to avoid the infinities that Dirac disliked, they also presents no unique, elegant, tightly knit mathematical structure along the lines of the Dirac equation. One wonders what Dirac would have thought of it.

What can today's revolutionaries do to make sure they don't turn conservative in their later years? The answer might come not from a physicist but from a biologist. Charles Darwin, when explaining evolution by natural selection, pointed out a profoundly important fact: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change". The principle applies to frogs and butterflies and pandas, and there is no reason why it should not apply to theoretical physicists.

What would it take for the next Dirac or Einstein to make a contribution to physics that equals those of Einstein and Dirac themselves? We do not know the answer, but one lesson that the lives of both these physicists has taught us – through their successes as well as their failures – is to have a flexible mind, to always stay close to the experimental results and most importantly, to be mindful of mathematical beauty while not making it the sole or even dominant criterion to guide your thought processes, especially when an "uglier" theory seems to agree well with experiment. Keep your eye fixed on the facts of nature, not just on the dream of your imagination.

October, 1949: Oppenheimer is on the cover of LIFE, and cigarettes are still cool

Back in the good old days of the late 1940s, the age of innocence still writ large on this country's lifeline, LIFE magazine was a microcosm of American life, a daily staple that brought the leading lights and events of the country into the living rooms of the middle class. When readers received the October, 1949 issue in their mail they found the godlike face of American science and technology gazing beneficently at them from the cover. Thanks to the substantial capabilities of eBAY I was able to retrieve a copy.

J. Robert Oppenheimer had already become a household name because of his leadership of the atomic bomb project, and now he seemed to have outdone himself by becoming the director of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, effectively making himself the boss of Albert Einstein, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel. The 1949 issue paints a picture of Oppenheimer as the quintessential polymath genius and new frontiersman, with a healthy contribution from Oppenheimer the Family Man making the picture complete. There are also other goodies in the installment, with a cheerful smattering of old-fashioned 1940s sexism advertising household products for men and their doting wives. And yes, the biggest concern about cigarettes is throat irritation, a myth reassuringly dismissed by Camel.

The good old times.

First, the father of the atomic bomb inspiring readers with his steel-blue eyes, thoughtful gaze and ever-present cigarette.

Oppenheimer was regarded as the quintessential intellectual plumbing the intricate depths of physics. His signature porkpie hat, cigarette, dazzling mastery of topics as far-flung as French poetry and Sanskrit literature made him the poster boy for the rarefied American intellectual, a species which until then had largely seemed endemic to Europe.

Daddy's Home!: The glowing, breathless profile packed with quotes from Oppie painted Oppenheimer as that rare combination of ivory tower genius and everyman with a great family life who enjoyed romping around with his kids when he returned from work. Reality was different: his wife Kitty was given to bouts of heavy drinking even during the day, and she could be a very unpleasant person in personal interactions. His children Toni and Peter lived in the shadow of their often acerbic and absent father, and both their lives ended in tragedy: Toni committed suicide after her parents' deaths, and Peter Oppenheimer is a recluse who very rarely talks about his father.

But enough about Oppie. Nothing says class and poise better than Van Heusen shirts for the modern American man, worn especially when his wife lovingly bathes him.

Finally, a piece of good news to divert readers' minds from all that heavy mathematical physics and philosophizing. Camel cigarettes don't cause any throat irritation! (only lung cancer).

Oppenheimer's folly: On black holes, fundamental laws and pure and applied science

On September 1, 1939, the same day that Germany attacked Poland and started World War 2, a remarkable paper appeared in the pages of the journal Physical Review. In it J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder laid out the essential characteristics of what we today call the black hole. Building on work done by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Fritz Zwicky and Lev Landau, Oppenheimer and Snyder described how an infalling observer on the surface of an object whose mass exceeded a critical mass would appear to be in a state of perpetual free fall to an outsider. The paper was the culmination of two years of work and followed two other articles in the same journal.

Then Oppenheimer forgot all about it and never said anything about black holes for the rest of his life. 

He had not worked on black holes before 1938, and he would not do so ever again. Ironically, it is this brief contribution to physics that is now widely considered to be Oppenheimer’s greatest, enough to have possibly warranted him a Nobel Prize had he lived long enough to see experimental evidence for black holes show up with the advent of radio astronomy.

What happened? Oppenheimer’s lack of interest wasn’t just because it was published on the same day on which World War 2 was launched. It wasn’t because he became the director of the Manhattan Project a few years later and got busy with building the atomic bomb. It also wasn't because he despised the freethinking and eccentric Zwicky who had laid the foundations for the field through the discovery of black holes' parents - neutron stars. It wasn’t even because he achieved celebrity status after the war, became the most powerful scientist in the country and spent an inordinate amount of time consulting in Washington until his carefully orchestrated downfall in 1954. All these factors contributed, but the real reason was far more mundane – Oppenheimer just wasn’t interested in black holes. Even after his downfall, when he had plenty of time to devote to physics, he never talked or wrote about them. The creator of black holes basically did not think they mattered.

Oppenheimer’s rejection of one of the most fascinating implications of modern physics and one of the most enigmatic objects in the universe - and one he sired - is documented well by Freeman Dyson who tried to initiate conversations about the topic with him. Every time Dyson brought it up Oppenheimer would change the subject, almost as if he had disowned his own scientific children.

The reason, as attested to by Dyson and others who knew him, was that in his last few decades Oppenheimer was stricken by a disease which I call “fundamentalitis”. Fundamentalitis is a serious condition that causes its victims to believe that the only thing worth thinking about is the deep nature of reality as manifested through the fundamental laws of physics.

As Dyson put it:

“Oppenheimer in his later years believed that the only problem worthy of the attention of a serious theoretical physicist was the discovery of the fundamental equations of physics. Einstein certainly felt the same way. To discover the right equations was all that mattered. Once you had discovered the right equations, then the study of particular solutions of the equations would be a routine exercise for second-rate physicists or graduate students.”

Thus for Oppenheimer, black holes, which were particular solutions of general relativity, were mundane; the general theory itself was the real deal. In addition they were anomalies, ugly exceptions which were best ignored rather than studied. As Dyson mentions, unfortunately Oppenheimer was not the only one affected by this condition. Einstein, who spent his last few years in a futile search for a grand unified theory, was another. Like Oppenheimer he was uninterested in black holes, but he also went a step further by not believing in quantum mechanics. Einstein’s fundamentalitis was quite pathological indeed.

History proved that both Oppenheimer and Einstein were deeply mistaken about black holes and fundamental laws. The greatest irony is not that black holes are very interesting, it is that in the last few decades the study of black holes has shed light on the very same fundamental laws that Einstein and Oppenheimer believed to be the only thing worth studying. The disowned children have come back to haunt the ghosts of their parents.

Black holes took off after the war largely due to the efforts of John Wheeler in the US and Dennis Sciama in the UK. The new science of radio astronomy showed us that, far from being anomalies, black holes litter the landscape of the cosmos, including the center of the Milky Way. A decade after Oppenheimer’s death, the Israeli theorist Jacob Bekenstein proved a very deep relationship between thermodynamics and black hole physics. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose found out that black holes contain singularities; far from being ugly anomalies, black holes thus demonstrated Einstein’s general theory of relativity in all its glory. They also realized that a true understanding of singularities would involve the marriage of quantum mechanics and general relativity, a paradigm that’s as fundamental as any other in physics.

In perhaps the most exciting development in the field, Leonard Susskind, Hawking and others have found intimate connections between information theory and black holes, leading to the fascinating black hole firewall paradox that forges very deep connections between thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and general relativity. Black holes are even providing insights into computer science and computational complexity. The study of black holes is today as fundamental as the study of elementary particles in the 1950s.

Einstein and Oppenheimer could scarcely have imagined that this cornucopia of discoveries would come from an entity that they despised. But their wariness toward black holes is not only an example of missed opportunities or the fact that great minds can sometimes suffer from tunnel vision. I think the biggest lesson from the story of Oppenheimer and black holes is that what is considered ‘applied’ science can actually turn out to harbor deep fundamental mysteries. Both Oppenheimer and Einstein considered the study of black holes to be too applied, an examination of anomalies and specific solutions unworthy of thinkers thinking deep thoughts about the cosmos. But the delicious irony was that black holes in fact contained some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos, forging unexpected connections between disparate disciplines and challenging the finest minds in the field. If only Oppenheimer and Einstein had been more open-minded.

The discovery of fundamental science in what is considered applied science is not unknown in the history of physics. For instance Max Planck was studying blackbody radiation, a relatively mundane and applied topic, but it was in blackbody radiation that the seeds of quantum theory were found. Similarly it was spectroscopy, the study of light emanating from atoms, that led to the modern framework of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Scores of similar examples abound in the history of physics; in a more recent case, it was studies in condensed matter physics that led physicist Philip Anderson to make significant contributions to symmetry breaking and the postulation of the existence of the Higgs boson. And in what is perhaps the most extreme example of an applied scientist making fundamental contributions, it was the investigation of cannons and heat engines by French engineer Sadi Carnot that led to a foundational law of science – the second law of thermodynamics.

These days there is a lot of valid discussion about how the pursuit of pure science usually leads to unexpected applied results, but sometimes the opposite is also true: the pursuit of what Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar called “derived science” leads to new horizons in pure science. Derived science consists of exploring the implications and results of pure science, but as the history of science has regularly demonstrated, this investigation can also feed back into the advancement of pure science itself.

Today many physicists are again engaged in a search for ultimate laws, with at least some of them thinking that these ultimate laws would be found within the framework of string theory. These physicists probably regard other parts of physics, and especially the applied ones, as unworthy of their great theoretical talents. For these physicists the story of Oppenheimer and black holes should serve as a cautionary tale. Nature is too clever to be constrained into narrow bins, and sometimes it is only by poking around in the most applied parts of science that one can see the gleam of fundamental principles.

As Einstein might have said had he known better, the distinction between the pure and the applied is often only a "stubbornly persistent illusion". It's an illusion that we must try hard to dispel.