How to thrive as a fox in a world full of hedgehogs

This is my fourth monthly column for 3 Quarks Daily.

The Nobel Prize winning animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz once said about philosophers and scientists, “Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.” Lorenz had good reason to say this since he worked in both science and philosophy. Along with two others, he remains the only zoologist to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. His major work was in investigating aggression in animals, work that was found to be strikingly applicable to human behavior. But Lorenz’s quote can also said to be an indictment of both philosophy and science. Philosophers are the ultimate generalists, scientists are the ultimate specialists.

Specialization in science has been a logical outgrowth of its great progress over the last five centuries. At the beginning, most people who called themselves natural philosophers – the word scientist was only coined in the 19^th century – were generalists and amateurs. The Royal Society which was established in 1660 was a bastion of generalist amateurs. It gathered together a motley crew of brilliant tinkerers like Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Henry Cavendish and Isaac Newton. These men would not recognize the hyperspecialized scientists of today; between them they were lawyers, architects, writers and philosophers. Today we would call them polymaths.

These polymaths helped lay the foundations of modern science. Their discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany and physiology were unmatched. They cracked open the structure of cells, figured out the constitution of air and discovered the universal laws governing motion. Many of them were supported by substantial hereditary wealth, and most of them did all this on the side, while they were still working their day jobs and spending time with their families. The reasons these gentlemen (sadly, there were no ladies then) of the Royal Society could achieve significant scientific feats were many fold. Firstly, the fundamental laws of science still lay undiscovered, so the so-called “low hanging fruit” of science was ripe and plenty. Secondly, doing science was cheap then; all Newton needed to figure out the composition of light was a prism.

But thirdly and most importantly, these men saw science as a seamless whole. They did not distinguish much between physics, chemistry and biology, and even when they did they did so for the sake of convenience. In fact their generalist view of the world was so widespread that they didn’t even have a problem reconciling science and religion. For Newton, the universe was a great puzzle built by God, to be deciphered by the hand of man, and the rest of them held similar views.

Fast forward to the twentieth century, and scientific specialization was rife. You could not imagine Werner Heisenberg discovering genetic transmission in fruit flies, or Thomas Hunt Morgan discovering the uncertainty principle. Today science has become even more closeted into its own little boxes. There are particle astrophysicists and neutrino particle astrophysicists, cancer cell biologists, organometallic chemists and geomicrobiologists. The good gentlemen of the Royal Society would have been both fascinated and flummoxed by this hyperspecialization.

There is a reason why specialization became the order of the day from the seventeenth century onwards. Science simply became too vast, its tendrils reaching deep into specific topics and sub-topics. You simply could not flit from topic to topic if you were to understand something truly well and make important discoveries in the field. If you were a protein crystallographer, for instance, you simply had to spend all your time learning about instrumentation, protein production and software. If you were a string theorist, you simply had to learn pretty much all of modern physics and a good deal of modern mathematics. Studying any topic in such detail takes time and effort and leaves no time to investigate other fields. The rewards from such single-minded pursuit are usually substantial; satisfaction from the deep immersion that comes from expertise, the enthusiastic adulation of your peers, and potential honors like the Nobel Prize. There is little doubt that specialization has provided great dividends for its practitioners, both personal and scientific.

And yet there were always holdouts, men and women who carried on the tradition of their illustrious predecessors and left the door ajar to being generalists. Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe were true generalists in physics, and Fermi went a step further by becoming the only scientist of the century who truly excelled in both theory and experiment; he would have made his fellow countryman Galileo proud. Then there was Linus Pauling who mastered and made seminal contributions to quantum chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry and medicine. John von Neumann was probably the ultimate polymath in the tradition of old natural philosophers, contributing massively to every field from pure mathematics and economics to computing and biology.

These polymaths not only kept the flame of the generalist alive, but they also anticipated science ironically coming full circle. The march of science from the seventeenth to the twentieth century might have been one toward increasing specialization, but in the last few years we have seen generalist science again blossoming. Why is this? Simply because the most important and fascinating scientific questions we face today require the meld of ideas from different fields. For instance: What is consciousness? What is life? How do you combat climate change? What is dark energy? These questions don’t just benefit from an interdisciplinary approach but they require it. Now, the way modern science approaches these questions is to bring together experts from various fields rather than relying on a single person who is an expert in all the fields. The Internet and global communication have made this kind of intellectual cross-pollination easier. 

And yet I would contend that there is a loss of insight when people keep excelling in their chosen fields and simply funnel the output of their efforts to other scientists without really understanding in what way it’s used. In my own field of drug discovery for instance, I have found that people who at least have a conceptual understanding of other areas are far more likely to contribute useful insights compared to those who simply do their job well and shove the product on to the next step of the pipeline.

I thus believe there is again a need for the kind of generalist who dotted the landscape of scientific research two hundred years ago. Both the poet Archilochus as well as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin have fortunately given us the right vocabulary to describe generalists and specialists. The fox, wrote Archilochus, knows many things while the hedgehog knows one big thing. Generalists are foxes; specialists are hedgehogs.

The history of science demonstrates that both foxes and hedgehogs are necessary for its progress. But history also shows that foxes and hedgehogs can alternate. In addition there are fields like chemistry which have always benefited more from foxes than hedgehogs. Generally speaking, foxes are more important when science is theory-rich and data-poor, while hedgehogs are more important when science is theory-poor and data-rich. The twentieth century was largely the century of hedgehogs while the twenty-first is likely to be the century of foxes.

Being a fox is not very easy though. Both personal and institutional forces in science have been built to support hedgehogs. You can mainly blame human resources personnel for contriving to make the playing field more suitable for these creatures. Consider the job descriptions in organizations. We want an “In vivo pharmacologist” or “Soft condensed matter physicist”, the job listing will say; attached would be a very precise list of requirements – tiny boxes within the big box. This makes it easier for human resources to check all the boxes and reject or accept candidates efficiently. But it makes it much harder for foxes who may not fit precise labels but who may have valuable insights to contribute to make it past those rigid labels. Organizations thus end up losing fine, practical minds who pay the price for their eclectic tastes. Academic training is also geared toward producing hedgehogs rather than foxes, and funding pressures on professors to do very specific kinds of research do not make the matter any easier. In general, these institutions create an environment in which being a fox is actively discouraged and in which hedgehogs and their intellectual children and grandchildren flourish.

As noted above, however, this is a real problem at a time when many of the most important problems in science are essentially interdisciplinary and would greatly benefit from the presence of foxes. But since institutional strictures don’t encourage foxes to ply their trade, they also by definition do not teach the skills necessary to be a fox. Thus the cycle perpetuates; institutions discourage foxlike behavior so much that the hedgehogs don’t even know how to be productive foxes even if they want to, and they in turn further perpetuate hedgehogian principles.

Fortunately, foxes in the past and present have provided us with a blueprint of their behavior. The essence of foxes is generalist behavior, and there are some commonsense steps one can take to inculcate these habits. Based on both historical facts about generalists as well as, well, general principles, one can come up with a kind of checklist on being a productive fox in an urban forest full of hedgehogs. This checklist draws on the habits of successful foxes as well as recent findings from both the sciences and the humanities that allow for flexible and universal thinking that can be applied not just in different fields but especially across their boundaries. Here are a few lessons that I have learnt or read about over the years. Because the lessons are general, they would not be confined to scientific fields.

1. Acknowledge psychological biases.

One of the most striking findings over the last three decades or so, exemplified by the work of Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and others, is the tendency of human beings to make the same kinds of mistakes when thinking about the world. Through their pioneering research, psychologists have found a whole list of biases like confirmation bias, anchoring effects and representativeness that dog our thinking. Recognizing these biases doesn’t just help connect ideas across various disciplines but also helps us step back and look at the big picture. And looking at the big picture is what foxes need to do all the time.

2. Learn about statistics.

A related field of inquiry is statistical thinking. In fact, many of the cognitive biases which I just mentioned arise from the fundamental inability of human beings to think statistically. Basic statistical fallacies include: extrapolating from small sample sizes, underestimating or ignoring error bars, putting undue emphasis on rare but dramatic effects (think terrorist attacks), inability to think across long time periods and ignoring baselines. In an age when the news cycle has shrunk from 24 hours to barely 24 seconds of our attention span, it’s very easy to extrapolate from random, momentary exposure to all kinds of facts, especially when the media’s very existence seems to depend on dramatizing or exaggerating them. In such cases, stepping back and asking oneself some basic statistical questions about every new fact can be extremely helpful. You don't have to actually be able to calculate p values and confidence intervals, but you should know what these are.

3. Make back-of-the-envelope calculations.

When the first atomic bomb went off in New Mexico in July, 1945, Enrico Fermi famously threw a few pieces of paper into the air and, based on where the shockwave scattered them, came up with an accurate estimate of the bomb’s yield. Fermi was a master of the approximate calculation, the rough, order of magnitude estimate that would give the right ballpark answer. It’s illuminating how that kind of thinking can help to focus our thinking, no matter what field we may be dealing with. Whenever we encounter a fact that would benefit from estimating a number, it’s worth applying Fermi’s method to find a rough answer. In most cases it’s good enough.

4. Know your strengths and weaknesses.

As the great physicist Hans Bethe once sagely advised, “Always work on problems for which you possess an undue advantage.” We are always told that we should work on our weaknesses, and this is true to some extent. But it’s far more important to match the problems we work on with our particular strength, whether it’s calculation, interdisciplinary thinking or management. Leveraging your strengths to solve a problem is the best way to not get bogged down in one place and being able to nimbly jump across several problems like a fox. Hedgehogs often spend their time not just honing their strengths but working on their weaknesses; this is an admirable trait, but it’s not always the most optimal for working across disciplinary boundaries.

5. Learn to think at the emergent level that’s most useful for every field.

If you have worked in various disciplines long enough, you start realizing that every discipline has its own zeitgeist, its own way of doing things. It’s not just about learning the technical tools and the facts, it’s about knowing how to pitch your knowledge at a level that’s unique and optimal for that field. For instance, a chemist thinks in terms of molecules, a physicist thinks in terms of atoms and equations, an economist thinks in terms of rational individuals and a biologist thinks in terms of genes or cells. That does not mean a chemist cannot think in terms of equations or atoms, but that is not the most useful level of thinking to apply to chemistry. This matching of a particular brand of thinking to a particular field is an example of emergent thinking. The opposite of emergent thinking is reductionist thinking which breaks down everything into its constituent parts. One of the discoveries of science in the last century is the breakdown of strict reductionism, and if one wants to be a productive fox, he or she needs to learn the right level of emergent thinking that applies to a field.

6. Read widely outside your field, but read just enough.

If you want to become a generalist fox, this is an obvious suggestion, but because it’s obvious it needs to be reiterated. Gaining knowledge of multiple fields entails knowing something about those fields, which entails reading about them. But it’s easy to get bogged down in detail and to try to become an expert in every field. This goal is neither practical nor the correct one. The goal instead is to gain enough knowledge to be useful, to be able to distill general principles, to connect ideas from your field to others. Better still, talk to people. Ask experts what they think are the most important facts and ideas, keeping in mind that experts have their own biases and can reach different conclusions.

A great example of someone who learnt enough about a complementary field to not just be useful but very good at his job was Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was a dyed-in-the-wool theorist, and at first had little knowledge of experiment. But as one of his colleagues said,

“He began to observe, not manipulate. He learned to see the apparatus and to get a feeling of its experimental limitations. He grasped the underlying physics and had the best memory I know of. He could always see how far any particular experiment would go. When you couldn’t carry it any further, you could count on him to understand and to be thinking about the next thing you might want to try.”

Oppenheimer thus clearly learnt enough about experimental physics to know the strengths and limitations of the field, imparting another valuable piece of advice: know the strengths and limitations of every field at the very least, so you know whether the connections you are forming are within its purview. In other words, know the domain of applicability of every field so that you can form reasonable connections.

7. Learn from your mistakes, and from others.

If you are a fox trying to jump across various disciplinary boundaries, it goes without saying that you might occasionally stumble. Because you lack expertise in many fields you are likely to make mistakes. This is entirely understandable, but what’s most important is to acknowledge those mistakes and learn from them. In fact, making mistakes is often the best shortcut to quick learning (“Fail fast”, as they say in the tech industry). Learning from our mistakes is of course important for all of us, but especially so for foxes who are often intrinsically dealing with incomplete information. Make mistakes, revise your worldview, make new mistakes. Rinse and repeat. That should be your philosophy.

Parallel to learning from your mistakes is to learn from others. During her journey a fox will meet many interesting people from different fields who know different facts and possess different mental models of thinking about the world. Foxlike behavior often entails being able to flexibly use these different mental models to deal with various problems in different fields, so it’s key to keep on being a lifelong learner of these patterns of thought. Fortunately the Internet has opened up a vast new opportunity for networking, but we don’t always take advantage of this opportunity in serious, meaningful ways. Everyone will benefit from such deliberate, meaningful connections, but foxes in particular will reap rewards.

8. “The opposite of a big truth is also a big truth” – Niels Bohr

The world is almost always gray. Foxes must imbibe this fact as deeply as Niels Bohr imbibed quantum mechanics. Especially when you are encountering and trying to integrate disparate ideas from different fields, it’s very likely that some of them may seem contradictory. But often the contradiction is in our minds, and there’s actually a way to reconcile those ideas (as a general rule, only in the Platonic world of mathematics can contradictory ideas not be tolerated at all). The fact is that most ideas from the real world are fuzzy and ill defined, so it’s no surprise that they will occasionally run into each other. Not just ideas but patterns of thinking may seem contradictory; for example, what a biologist sees as the most important feature of a particular system may not be the most important feature for a physicist (emergence again). In most cases the truth lies somewhere in between, but in others it may lie wholly on one side. As they say, being able to hold opposite ideas in your mind at the same time is a mark of intelligence. If you are a fox, prove this.

These are but a few of the potential avenues that you can explore for being a generalist fox. But the most important principle that foxes can benefit from is, as the name indicates, general. When confronted by an idea, a system or a problem, learn to ask the most general questions about it, questions that flow across disciplines. A few of these questions in science are: What’s the throughput? How robust is the system? What are the assumptions behind it? What is the problem that we are trying to solve? What are its strengths and limitations? What kinds of biases are baked into the system and our thinking about it?


Keep on asking these questions, make a note of the answers and you will realize that they can be applied across domains. At the same time, remember that as a fox you will always work in tandem with specialized hedgehogs. Foxes will be needed to explore the uncharted territory of new areas of science and technology, hedgehogs will be needed to probe its corners and reveal hidden jewels. The jewels will further reflect light that will illuminate additional playgrounds for the foxes to frolic in. Together the two creatures will make a difference.

Lessons on management styles from Edward Teller, Hans Bethe and Robert Oppenheimer: A question of temperament

Oppenheimer entertaining at Los Alamos. He could be a
wonderful host.

March, 1943. War is raging across the European continent. The Nazis have faced two significant drawbacks in their relentless quest for racial and geographical conquest - one at El Alamein in North Africa and the other at Stalingrad in the Soviet Union - but Hitler's war machine shows no sign of stopping.

Meanwhile, halfway across the world, the largest and most secret scientific project in history is underway. A laboratory high up in the New Mexico mountains is being staffed with some of the world's best physicists, chemists, engineers, army officers and other personnel. Its express purpose is to build an atomic bomb before Hitler's scientists do so. The brilliant, conflicted Robert Oppenheimer, a polymath equally at home with nuclear physics and Sanskrit poetry, has been chosen to lead the project. He has tapped universities, industrial laboratories and other institutions across the country, recruiting the wealth of brilliant emigre scientists who have fled Nazi Germany for new shores; Adolf Hitler's greatest gifts to the United States. His well known powers of persuasion are on full display as he convinces friends and colleagues to join a secret project whose details he cannot yet fully divulge.

At the top of the list of scientists who Oppenheimer wants to recruit are the Hungarian-born Edward Teller and the German-born Hans Bethe. Both have arrived in the United States during the early 1930s and are now firmly ensconced in their scientific homes - Teller at George Washington University and Bethe at Cornell University. Both men who are still in their late 30s have already made significant contributions to physics. While Teller is more comfortable contributing to the more molecular and chemical aspects of the field, Bethe has uncovered the puzzle to one of science's oldest puzzles - the source of energy in the sun. Both men have been close friends for almost a decade, and Teller has been best man at Bethe's wedding. When the war started the duo wanted to help with the country's war effort, and even though they then lacked a security clearance, worked together on a theory of shock waves (ironically, the paper was classified after it was published, thus closing off access to its own authors).

Teller has also been one of the select key people responsible for sounding the alarm and alerting the government to the potential destructive applications of nuclear fission. Before Oppenheimer and Bethe had fully grasped the implications of a nuclear chain reaction, Teller had already driven his friend, Leo Szilard, to Albert Einstein's summer home in Long Island for what turned out to be a fateful meeting. Szilard had convinced his old friend Einstein to draft a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt; that letter had set the wheels of our nuclear future rolling toward their uncertain destination. Teller is thus one of three or four people, mostly Hungarian emigre scientists, to have been in the loop since the beginning as far as nuclear weapons are concerned. Along with Bethe, he has also been part of a summer study in Berkeley in 1942 led by Oppenheimer in which a handpicked group of physicists worked out the preliminary principles of a fission bomb. More than almost any other scientist and certainly more than Oppenheimer and Bethe, Teller has lived with the bomb since 1939. In fact Bethe did not even believe in an actual bomb until Teller showed him Enrico Fermi's famed nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago in late 1942.

Now, in March 1943, Oppenheimer is in the process of making some key strategic decisions that would shape the organization of the Manhattan Project. Among these decisions, few are as important important as deciding who to put in charge of the theoretical physics division at Los Alamos. It was theoretical physicists who first worked out the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction, and it would undoubtedly be theoretical physicists who would continue to play a foundational role in the success of the project.

Teller, having lived and breathed the bomb, having contributed to both its politics and its science, having seen the vision of its even more powerful descendant (a bomb drawing its energy from nuclear fusion), thinks of himself as a logical choice to head the division.

Oppenheimer instead picks Bethe. It's an omission Teller will not forget.

The decision would have far-reaching consequences for the organization of the Manhattan Project. It would sow the seeds of discontent that would fracture the community of American physicists a decade later. And it would drive home the interplay between management philosophies and the mechanics of complex technological projects that is relevant to this day.

Why did Oppenheimer pick Bethe instead of Teller, and what does this decision say about his own management style and about those of Teller and Bethe? Teller and Bethe actually shared similar backgrounds. Both were born in the early years of the 20th century to cultured and educated middle class parents in Hungary and Germany. Both were seized by a passion for mathematics and physics, and studied the subjects under two world-class masters of the trade: Teller with Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig and Bethe with Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich. Coming as they did from enlightened Jewish families, both became ominously aware of the noose of fascism tightening around Germany in the early 1930s, and left for the United States where they established leading centers of physics research and study. 

Unlike many American scientists who had led relatively tranquil lives until then, Teller and Bethe were acutely sensitive to the spread of totalitarian regimes, and they grasped the political implications of the chain reaction before many others. But Teller who had seen both Nazi and Communist occupations was the more sensitive of the two, and this awareness led him to be an early proponent of American dominance in nuclear weapons. It was at a conference organized by Teller and his fellow physicist, Russian emigre George Gamow, that Niels Bohr brought news of fission to American shores at the end of 1938.

But there the similarities between the two physicists ended, and it was their differences that led to their very different and fateful life trajectories. Throughout his life Teller was known to be as volatile and moody as brilliant. He was often short-tempered and brooding and could not always be relied upon to carry calculations to their fruition; while to be fair to him he fully recognized this quality, most of his papers were with collaborators who made sure his calculations were fully fleshed out and correct. Teller later classified physicists as 'brick builders' and 'bricklayers', and called Bethe a 'builder of tiny bricks'. In his view his own skills as well as those of Oppenheimer were more suited to bricklaying. Interestingly, both men's bricklaying was more inspired than thorough, brilliant than always right. Their personalities too shared commonalities: both of them could be sharp-tongued, vicious and unpredictable, charming at one moment and cold at another.

Bethe in contrast was one of the most thoroughgoing scientists of the twentieth century, a steady rock of Gibraltar in both science and life. He could meticulously carry through every task to completion; in the 1930s he single-handedly authored a comprehensive survey of nuclear physics running to hundreds of pages that was so all-encompassing and up to date that it became known as 'Bethe's Bible'. He was also a universalist who could solve problems in almost any branch of pure or applied physics. Renowned for ploughing ahead through obstacles and going straight for the solution, his colleagues fondly called him "The Battleship". Stability and wholeness exemplified his personal and professional lives. Unlike Oppenheimer and Teller he was almost always mild-mannered and diplomatic, gentle if firm in his opinions.

Bethe (second from left) on a weekly mountain hike at
Los Alamos with other scientists such as Enrico Fermi.

Given these highly desirable personal qualities, it should come as no surprise that Oppenheimer picked Bethe instead of Teller to head the theoretical division. Bethe's take on the decision recognizes Teller's contribution but also drives home the requirements of the project at this stage and Bethe's suitability for these requirements.

"That I was named to head the division was a severe blow to Teller, who had worked on the bomb project almost from the day of its inception and who considered himself, quite rightly, as having seniority over everyone then at Los Alamos, including Oppenheimer. I believe I was chosen because my more plodding but steadier approach to life and science would serve the better at that stage of its development, where decisions had to be adhered to and detailed calculations had to be carried through, and where therefore a good deal of administrative work was inevitable...I believe Teller resented my being placed on top of him." 

Teller's assessment of Oppenheimer's choice is unsurprisingly critical: "Bethe was given the job to organize the effort, and in my opinion, in which I may well have been wrong, he over-organized it. It was too much of a military organization, a line organization."

Considering the fact that an explicit military style organization was rejected by Oppenheimer and weekly open seminars were set up to avoid compartmentalization, it's hard to substantiate Teller's opinion. Moreover, there is no evidence that Bethe's leadership of the theoretical division was anything but highly accomplished. Implosion, computing, the gun-type bomb design; everything proceeded smoothly under his direction, and during the process he also led outstanding theorists like Richard Feynman, Stan Ulam and Robert Serber.

Feeling sidelined by Bethe's appointment, nursing his passionate dream of a fusion weapon, increasingly loathe to do the kind of detailed calculations that Bethe's group was good at, Teller finally asked Oppenheimer to relieve him of his position in Bethe's division. He spend most of the rest of the war largely thinking about what became the hydrogen bomb. Unlike Bethe's role, Teller's role at Los Alamos was not indispensable. He made some valuable contributions in calculating the behavior of imploding plutonium cores at superdense pressures, but beyond this he seems to have mainly focused on his pet project and kept half a dozen Nobel Laureates awake at night by playing the piano.

Teller was an accomplished pianist

Strikingly, the one thing that stands out even from the embittered Teller's view of Los Alamos is his outstanding paean to Oppenheimer's leadership. Especially considering his growing animosity toward Oppenheimer and the general resentment he must have felt, this tribute is nothing short of profound and speaks to Oppenheimer's extraordinary role in making Los Alamos work.

"Throughout the war years, Oppie knew in detail what was going on in every part of the laboratory. He was incredibly quick and perceptive in analyzing human as well as technical problems. Of the more than ten thousand people who eventually came to work at Los Alamos, Oppie knew several hundred intimately, by which I mean that he knew what their relationships with one another were and what made them tick. He knew how to organize, cajole, humor, soother feelings - how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so. He was an exemplar of dedication, a hero who never lost his humanness. Disappointing him somehow carried with it a sense of wrongdoing. Los Alamos's amazing success grew out of the brilliance, enthusiasm and charisma with which Oppenheimer led it."

Not a bad tribute to a man who, when he was appointed to lead the project, left almost everyone astonished and dismayed because of his lack of experience. A man who had not even led a university department and who, in the words of one of his eminent colleagues, was "not fit to run a hot dog stand." A man who lacked a Nobel Prize but who was asked to lead a group of the world's most brilliant physicists, many of whom would either win or had already won a Nobel Prize. And yet Oppenheimer seems to have blown everyone away, and this includes men like Bethe and Fermi who were far from easily impressed; Bethe said that Oppenheimer was "intellectually superior" to everyone at Los Alamos.

Physicist Victor Weisskopf also attested to Oppenheimer's quality of instantly comprehending everyone's problem, inspiring them and seemingly being everywhere at once:

"He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and physically present at each decisive step. He was present in the laboratory or in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from something else. It was his continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us; it created that unique atmosphere of enthusiasm and challenge that pervaded the place throughout its time."

Oppenheimer's quintessential quality in doing all this seems to have been that of an actor, a man who could always wear whatever role history had chosen for him like the finely tailored three piece suits which his wealthy New York father's trust fund allowed him to indulge in. Some of his qualities had been on display when he was a highly regarded professor at Berkeley. It seemed he was acutely tuned to the wishes of everyone in the room. His martinis were spicy and his parties famous for their joie de vivre, and his immensely wide knowledge of esoteric subjects like Sanskrit and 17th century French poetry mostly seemed to amplify his charisma. There were a few people who found him pretentious, but these were in the minority; his students emulated his mannerisms. At Los Alamos he was at the peak of his powers, and his instant grasp of every technical and human matter, lightning fast mind and ability to connect with everyone's problems seem to have charmed even Edward Teller.

When the war ended, Bethe, Teller and Oppenheimer went their own ways. Oppenheimer carried over his Los Alamos charm to the leadership of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he presided over the likes of Einstein, Godel, and von Neumann. Unfortunately the same powers of persuasion that had been so effective at Los Alamos did not work so well in Washington's corridors of power. Oppenheimer made enemies among politically well-connected men who accused him of hindering the country's hydrogen bomb program. Their unconstitutional tactics and allegations of guilt by association combined with his own equivocation on some of his left wing history and casual arrogance led to a hearing in 1954 and brought about his downfall. He spent the rest of his life speaking out on the philosophy of science and on the relationship between science and society, still efficiently leading the Princeton institute and evoking admiration around the world.

Bethe spent the rest of his career - all 60 years of it - at Cornell University. In the process he elevated Cornell to a world center of physics, advised half a dozen presidents on nuclear arms control, and kept on doing significant scientific work well into his 90s. The same qualities of steadfast stability and integrity that had been on display before served him exceedingly well during the politically tumultuous times of the Cold War and gained him the admiration and loyalty of scores of friends and colleagues. Just like Oppenheimer, he became a wise man whose advice fueled and reassured the hopes of others.

Teller's trajectory was less tranquil. He became the century's most vocal proponent of nuclear weapons and spent most of the next decade obsessing over the hydrogen bomb. He started a rival laboratory which competed with Los Alamos in building the next generation of lethal nuclear weapons, and his own brand of volatile proselytizing drew the admiration of a select group of mostly right wing scientists and politicians. Like Bethe he became advisor to conservative presidents and was a key force in advocating the ill-fated 'Star Wars' weapons system during the Reagan administration's tenure. Most importantly, his fateful testimony against Oppenheimer during Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing was considered an act of betrayal by the majority of the scientific establishment. While Teller lost many of his friends as the result of his testimony, this also allowed him to shed past aspects of his life and make new friends who were more sympathetic to his cause.

By most standards Teller with his volatile temperament and inability to carry projects through to their conclusion should have been largely unsuited for leadership. And yet there was another side of him, a side that could charm and display loyalty. This side could allow him to occasionally perform the function of inspiring others which most of us expect from a good leader. It was a side that was on full display when he became part of a team put together to design an intrinsically safe nuclear reactor, one whose safety features would depend not on the IQ of the operator but on the natural laws of physics. Teller was not technically the leader of the team. The leader was a physicist named Frederic de Hoffmann who along with Teller, recruited other brilliant scientists like Freeman Dyson.

In his biography, Dyson praised the fun and inspiration that Teller brought to the project. He had interacted with Teller at the University of Chicago before and liked Teller's playful attitude toward physics; Dyson thought Teller was a man who did physics for fun rather than glory. That attitude seemed to be particularly visible during the reactor project.

"Working with Teller was as exciting as I had imagined it would be. Almost every day he came to the schoolhouse with some hare-brained new idea. Some of his ideas were brilliant, some were practical and some were brilliant and practical. I used his ideas as starting points for a more systematic analysis of the problem...I fought with Teller as I had fought with (Richard) Feynman, demolishing his wilder schemes and squeezing his intuitions down into equations. Out of our fierce disagreements the shape of the safe reactor gradually emerged."

What lessons do Bethe, Oppenheimer and Teller hold for present day managers and CEOs? Today's CEOs face the same problem that Oppenheimer faced. They have to direct the work of a large group of scientists and other personnel of diverse skill sets and temperaments. They have to soothe egos and give everyone adequate freedom to pursue their ideas while still constraining them to meet project guidelines. They have to please shareholders and the general public. And they have to do all this without appearing to do so, without giving the impression of being heavy handed and dictatorial.

From Oppenheimer they can learn the value of keeping on top of all aspects of a project, whether managerial or technical, and for being informed enough about the role of every person to assure that person of their importance to the team. Like Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, they also have to inspire people to give their very best and to inject enthusiasm and hope into the work especially when things are not going well. And just like the technical seminars at Los Alamos which encouraged open and free discussion, they have to let everyone voice their opinions.

From Bethe they can learn the vital importance of being technically accomplished even as an administrator, and of the importance of perseverance and meticulousness. One of the laments about the present day pharmaceutical industry for instance is that too often you have CEOs with MBA degrees who have little understanding of the great technical challenges of biotechnology or drug discovery. A Hans Bethe would have combined deep knowledge of the science with a plodding and careful approach to getting things done. In addition he would have combined geniality with a gravity that was inspiring rather than intimidating or depressing. Just like Bethe, the best CEOs would combine technical excellence with outstanding managerial capabilities, and even CEOs without a technical background should learn enough of the technical material to empathize with the scientists in the trenches.

Teller exemplifies a different kind of lesson for today's CEOs. In an age where employees are often supposed to fit a particular mold, Teller provides a refreshing example of someone who constantly tried to think outside the box. People like Teller provide a unique function in an organization by frankly speaking their mind and pushing the envelope on what can be achieved. They are useful in shaking up everyone's conventional thinking and charting new directions. Not all their ideas work, but the ones that do can lead to novel horizons. They need to be guided by good managers like Oppenheimer and Bethe who can make them work harmoniously with other employees. These employees in turn must have the patience to actually implement the ideas of Teller-like minds. As long as the Tellers of the world are not allowed to go rogue, they can actually be valuable additions to all kinds of organizations. What matters is whether there is an Oppenheimer or Bethe to lead the way.