The Eternal Apprentice

(See Cover)

It was a calm Sunday morning in Princeton, N.J. and the door of the red brick building was securely locked. Two college boys rattled the knob and shouted: “Einstein! We want Einstein!” Pausing on her way to church, a lady inquired what the matter was. The boys explained: they were fraternity pledges at Bucknell University who had been dumped out the night before on a lonely road 200 miles from Princeton, with orders to thumb their way to “that place where Einstein thinks” and bring back his signature.

Like the Bucknell boys, most tourists and many Princeton residents consider the Institute for Advanced Study “that place where Einstein thinks.” It is the truth, but not the whole truth. At 69, Albert Einstein is still an Institute faculty member, still comes floating, corona-haired, across “the grounds” to Fuld Hall every fair morning. But in the close-knit fraternity of physicists, it is sadly recognized that Einstein is a landmark, not a beacon; in the quick progress of physics, he has been left some leagues behind.

More & more physicists are coming to know the Institute as the home of an authentic contemporary hero of their trade: Dr. J. (for nothing) Robert Oppenheimer, who is president of the American Physical Society, chairman of the technical advisers to the Atomic Energy Commission, and one of the world’s top theoretical physicists. Laymen know him as the man who bossed the production of the atom bomb. Last week, at 44, Oppenheimer was beginning his second year as director of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Sitting & Thinking. The Institute he presides over has neither teachers nor pupils in the ordinary sense; some “faculty members” never teach a class. Says Oppenheimer: “None of the usual apparatus of education will be found at the Institute, nor the people usually regarded as still capable of education.” The Institute is perhaps the world’s most exclusive school (almost everybody has a Ph.D.), but many of its members would deny that it is a school at all.

Oppenheimer himself suffered from this understandable misconception. At a faculty meeting, he remarked offhandedly: “After all, this is a school.” Some of his colleagues objected: “If we had thought that the Institute was a school, we would never have come.” There are other easy misconceptions. The Institute is not related to its neighbor, Princeton University, and is not engaged in making atomic bombs, though a 24-hour armed guard outside Oppenheimer’s office protects atomic documents in his safe.

The Institute was born (in 1933) out of the union of one man’s mind and another man’s money. Comparing the scholarly output of Germany, England, France and the U.S., Abraham Flexner deplored the “wild, uncontrolled and uncritical expansion” in U.S. universities. Newark Merchant Louis Bamberger and his sister Mrs. Felix Fuld gave Flexner $5,000,000 to start a place where a few scholars could just “sit and think.” Scientist Vannevar Bush was skeptical: “Well, I can see how you could tell whether they were sitting.”

Under J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Institute’s third director (the first two: Flexner and Frank Aydelotte), sitting and thinking are still encouraged. But so are writing and talking; Robert Oppenheimer thinks that ideas were meant to be shared.

He likes to tell about a Bible study group in Germany that had begun with Genesis and doggedly plowed clear through to Ezekiel. Asked an impressed visitor: “Don’t you find Ezekiel terribly difficult?” Replied one Bible student: “Yes—but what we don’t understand, we explain to each other.”

That is a fitting motto for the Institute. It also describes the education of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who by all the standards of the market place is a well-educated man, and who by his own restless, relentless standards is still an apprentice, with 3 a lot to learn.

A Decent Character. His father was a bluff, warmhearted German-Jewish immigrant who had achieved his principal ambition—to become an American. Julius Oppenheimer had also made a very considerable success as a Manhattan textile importer: the Oppenheimers had a country house at Islip, N.Y., a sunny, nine-room apartment on Riverside Drive with three Van Gogh originals hanging in the living room. Julius doted on his son, took him to Europe four times and asked only that the boy be “a decent character.”

His mother was kind in a very strict way and every inch a lady. In the Oppenheimer household, it was possible to think something rude, harsh or improper, but never possible to say it. “My life as a child,” Robert recalls, “did not prepare me in any way for the fact that there are cruel and bitter things.” He remembers himself unfondly as “an unctuous, repulsively good little boy.” The trouble, he thinks, was that his home offered him “no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.”

Lonely Man. School was the same. Manhattan’s Ethical Culture Schools tried to find a moral equivalent for religion (credo: “Deed, not Creed”) and went in for the production of quiz kids. By the time he graduated, Robert could read Caesar, Virgil and Horace without a Latin dictionary, had read Plato and Homer in the Greek, composed sonnets in French, and tackled treatises on polarized light.

So long as schoolboy conversations were intellectual Robert got along fine, a classmate remembers, but surrounded by small talk, Robert sat morose, “exactly as though he weren’t getting enough to eat or drink.” The boy told his favorite English teacher, Herbert Winslow Smith: “I’m the loneliest man in the world.”

His interest in science had been kindled by accident: at five, visiting his grandfather in Germany, Robert got a little box of minerals as a gift. In time, a collection of rocks from many countries filled the Oppenheimer hallway.

It was Augustus Klock, a cheerful little Ethical teacher, who first introduced Robert to a laboratory. Klock wore Herbert Hoover collars, had a fund of jokes and a communicable delight in chemistry and physics. Julius Oppenheimer—who had begun to consider his son as a kind of public trust—arranged for Klock to give Robert a special, intensive summer course in chemistry. They brought their lunches to the laboratory. While Klock brewed strong tea in beakers over a Bunsen burner, Rbbert turned out “a bushel of work” that never failed to rate the coveted Klock rubber stamp: “OK-AK.” In six weeks, Robert completed a year’s course. Says Klock: “He was so brilliant that no teacher would have been skillful enough to prevent him from getting an education.” Robert got his introduction to the atomic theory (“A very exciting experience . . . beautiful, wonderful regularities!”).

He had everything that money could buy, including a 27-ft. sloop, which he christened Trimethy (after trimethylene chloride) and liked to sail when the wind and the waves were highest. A frail, good-looking kid, he picked up dysentery one summer, “chasing rocks” in Europe, and had to be shipped home on a stretcher.

Robert’s worried father sent “him west for his health, engaging Teacher Smith as his companion. It was the boy’s first look at New Mexico, and he fell in love with it. Teacher and pupil talked like philosophers, and dressed like prospectors; Robert added to his crystal specimens, and learned to sit a horse.

Rampage in the Stacks. Then came Harvard, “the most exciting time I’ve ever had in my life. It was like the Goths coming into Rome.” Oppenheimer rampaged through the Widener Library stacks: he read Dante in Italian, got a “working knowledge” of French literature, dipped into Chinese, philosophy, mathematics. In his third year, he took six courses and attended four more (normal quota: five). He liked exams—”the definiteness and excitement”—and got A’s. One Oppenheimer remark is a Harvard legend: “It was so hot today the only thing I could do all afternoon was lie on my bed and read Jeans’s Dynamical Theory of Gases.”

At Harvard, Oppenheimer sought out and apprenticed himself to two great teachers: Physicist Percy Williams Bridgman and the late Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He had already made an important discovery: the best way to learn is to find the right person to learn from.

Gruff, honest Bridgman assigned Robert to a project involving a copper-nickel alloy. Oppenheimer built a furnace, made his alloy, completed the study with sufficient precision for Bridgman to publish the findings. Says Bridgman: “A very intelligent student. He knew enough to ask questions.” After hours, at the Bridgman home, the conversation ranged far & wide, giving Oppenheimer chances to display his often irritating erudition. Once Bridgman identified a picture as a temple at Segesta, Sicily, built about 400 B.C. Young Oppenheimer quickly set his professor straight: “I judge from the capitals on the columns that it was built about 50 years earlier.”

In those days he wrote poems and stories (“an attempt to make peace with the world”), wore his hair long, liked to debate hours with highbrow friends, and took solitary walks. Says Oppenheimer, who discusses his own life as dispassionately as he does Archimedes’ Law: “My feeling about myself was always one of extreme discontent. I had very little sensitiveness to human beings, very little humility before the realities of this world.” He was, in fact, an intellectual snob.

He graduated summa cum laude in three years. On his 21st birthday Julius gave him a sizable sum of money. But not before Robert had told his father that “I might turn out a little different from what he wanted. He wasn’t concerned.”

Robert sailed for England and another apprenticeship, this time under Lord Rutherford and Sir J. J. Thomson at Cambridge University. Before he left, Bridgman told him: “You cannot be satisfied with just measuring up with other people. You can consider yourself a failure unless you stand out in front.”

Science & Soul-Wrestle. At Cambridge, he was “a complete failure in the lab” but a success at theory: “Quantum mechanics had just begun to come into existence. It was a very exciting time in physics. Anyone could just get in there and have fun.” At Cambridge, Oppenheimer met some of the leaders in the fellowship of physics—such men as Max Born, Paul Dirac, and Niels Bohr (“It would be hard to exaggerate how much I venerate Bohr”).

But without the friendships he had painfully made at Harvard, Oppenheimer was soon deep in depression and doubt. He convinced himself that he could no longer postpone “the problem of growing up.” He read Dostoevsky, Proust and Aquinas and explored the defects in his own character. At Christmas time, walking by the shore near Cancale in Brittany, “I was on the point of bumping myself off. This was chronic.” He came out of this period of self-examination, he now feels, “much kinder and more tolerant—able to form satisfactory, sensible attachments.”

Max Born invited him to Göttingen, where he earned his Ph.D. (at 23) three weeks after enrolling. Oppenheimer’s Ph.D. thesis was a brilliant paper on quantum mechanics: Zur Quantentheorie kontinuierlicher Spektren. After the oral exam, a colleague asked Physicist James Franck (now at the University of Chicago) how it had gone with Oppenheimer. Replied

Franck: “I got out of there just in time. He was beginning to ask me questions.”

Go West, Young Man. Oppenheimer came back from Europe (after further study at Leiden and Zurich) with a racking cough. The doctors feared T.B., and advised the young man to go west. In New Mexico, near the spot where he had vacationed with Herbert Smith, Oppenheimer leased a ranch 35 miles from Santa Fe.

Perro Caliente (Hot Dog), near the headwaters of the Pecos River, 9,500 feet up, was just a corral and a crude ranch house in the middle of nowhere. With a Stetson on his head and a bar of chocolate in his pocket, Oppenheimer liked to ride his horse Chico 40 rugged miles in a day, exploring the Sangre de Cristo Mountains up to the peaks. In the evenings, he would nibble on canned artichoke hearts, drink fine Kirschwasser, and read Baudelaire by the light of an oil lamp. He invented an abstruse variety of tiddlywinks, played on the geometric designs of a Mexican rug. Perro Caliente was “the kind of place one reads about in dreams.”

It was Oppenheimer’s good fortune that in 1928 a center of the world’s ablest and most vigorous physicists was also in the west — at the California Institute of Technology, to which they had been pulled by such powerful magnets as Robert Millikan and Richard Tolman. Oppenheimer recognized that CalTech had a great deal to offer. At that time, by contrast, the University of California seemed to have “a hick school of science.” Both wanted him ; he arranged to oscillate between the two’.

The newcomer’s scientific standing and what admirers call his “genius look” won him an instant audience on both campuses. But the theater almost emptied after the first act. Professor Tolman wryly congratulated Oppenheimer on his first lecture: “Well, Robert, I didn’t understand a damn word.” He had lectured at a breakneck pace, in abstract prose punctuated by a dozen distracting mannerisms.

Answers Before Questions. Oppenheimer was tolerated only because his brilliance was as evident as his impatience. (Says CalTech’s Professor Charles Lauritsen: “The man was unbelievable! He always gave you the right answer before you formulated the question.”) Gradually and painfully, coached by colleagues and profiting by errors, Oppenheimer learned to put a checkrein on his galloping mind, to raise his voice, and to save, his sarcasms for showoffs and frauds.* In time, Cal and CalTech realized that Oppenheimer (like Whitehead and Bridgman) was “a man to whom you could be an apprentice.” By 1939, “Oppie” (as his apprentices called him) had 25 full-time graduate students working under him. In the spring, when he headed south from Berkeley for the CalTech term, many of his students went with him. Driving down to Pasadena, they stopped for “roadside seminars.”

What made him so good a teacher was that he was still a student—and always would be. In seminars he was forever reading aloud the latest letter from a top physicist friend in Denmark or England, reporting a hot tip just telephoned from Harvard, or commenting on a physical journal fresh from a Japanese press. Privy to this latest scientific,gossip (“the lifeblood of physics,” Oppenheimer calls it), his students felt themselves in the vanguard of advancing knowledge.

They also found themselves imitating their master’s mannerisms. They scribbled furiously on the nearest blackboard, talked in soft, deep tones, combed agitated fingers through tousled hair, grunted an excited “Ja, Ja” or a nervous “Hunh, Hunh.” They learned to careen along with a perpetual, preoccupied stoop; some even took up chain-smoking and blue shirts.

Oppie’s apprentices also acquired something of his intolerance for shoddy and fuzzy thinking, his intuitive grasp of difficulties, his mathematical precision of speech. Eventually, Oppenheimer products made their debuts on lecture platforms and in seminars all over the U.S.: Harvard’s Schwinger, California’s Serber, CalTech’s Christy, Stanford’s Schiff, Columbia’s Lamb, Iowa State’s Carlson, Illinois’ Nordsieck, Washington’s Uehling. (Brother Frank, the original Oppie apprentice, is now a physicist at the University of Minnesota.) Says Nobel Prizewinner Robert Millikan: “Oppenheimer developed at Berkeley an outstanding school of theoretical physics, and its products are leaders of modern physics today.”

A Tragic Sense. At Berkeley, Oppenheimer also apprenticed himself to the late Professor Arthur Ryder, greatest Sanskrit student of his day. In the long winter evenings, he and a handful of other students visited Ryder’s house to share his Sanskrit learning and his Stoic faith.

Ryder taught Oppenheimer to read the Hindu scriptures in Sanskrit, his eighth language. Oppie still reads them, for his “private delight” and sometimes for the public edification of friends (the Bhagavad-Gita, its worn pink cover patched with Scotch tape, occupies a place of honor in his Princeton study). He is particularly fond of one Sanskrit couplet: “Scholarship is less than sense, therefore seek intelligence.”

From Ryder, the eternal apprentice also got a new “feeling for the place of ethics.” Says Oppenheimer: “Ryder felt and thought and talked as a Stoic … a special subclass of the people who have a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation. Ryder knew that a man could commit irretrievable error, and that in the face of this fact, all others were secondary.” Tartly intolerant of humbug, laziness, stupidity and deceit, Ryder thought that “Any man who does a hard thing well is automatically respectable and worthy of respect.”

A Mean Martini. Other evenings Oppie would corral a handful of his favorite students, take them in his big, fast car for a leisurely feast at such San Francisco restaurants as Amelio’s and Jack’s. Good

conversation was cheap, but dinner was always expensive; it was Oppie who picked up the checks.

A more fluent conversationalist than in the old, shy days, the handsome and unattached Oppie was much sought after as a guest at cocktail and dinner parties. He gave bachelor dinners, serving his own expertly cooked hot Mexican dishes, and mixed a mean Martini with laboratory precision.

After a late party, he would frequently sit up most of the night working on some involved problem (“How much sleep do I need? This is like what Mrs. Lenin said about the meat: ‘When we are hungry, we cook it five minutes; when we are not hungry, two hours'”). Once, on a date with a coed in the Berkeley hills, he felt the urge to solve a problem in physics, got out of the car to pace up & down, wandered off into the night. On another occasion, emboldened by his own Martinis, Oppenheimer decided to telephone a girl he “knew,” found that he could not remember her name; all he recalled was that her address was a power of seven.

Late But Indispensable. Until 1936, Oppenheimer had never even voted; he was “certainly one of the most unpolitical people in the world.” But in the depression he watched young, finely trained physicists cracking up because they were unemployed; he also heard about relatives forced to leave Nazi Germany. Says Oppenheimer: “I woke up to a recognition that politics was a part of life. I became a real left-winger, joined the Teachers Union, had lots of Communist friends. It was what most people do in college or late high school. The Thomas Committee doesn’t like this, but I’m not ashamed of it; I’m more ashamed of the lateness. Most of what I believed then now seems complete nonsense, but it was an essential part of becoming a whole man. If it hadn’t been for this late but indispensable education, I couldn’t have done the job at Los Alamos at all.”

Comes the Revolution. It was at a Pasadena party in 1939 that Robert Oppenheimer, then 35, met Katherine Puening Harrison. A small, German-born brunette, Mrs. Harrison was the wife of a radiologist, and herself a graduate student in plant physiology at U.C.L.A. A year later, after the Harrisons were divorced, Kitty and Robert were married. Of the subsequent revolution in his habits, Oppenheimer says: “A certain stuffiness overcame me.”

Mrs. Oppenheimer made him have his suits pressed occasionally, and persuaded him to wear tweeds and even sport jackets in a variety of colors besides his traditional blue-greys. She got Robert to cut his hair shorter & shorter (he wears a crew cut now). He started eating three meals a day and stopped staying up all night except on rare occasions.

At Princeton, Mrs. Oppenheimer has had a greenhouse installed at the Institute’s 18-room Olden Manor. But she has abandoned her own studies to run the house, and look after the children (a boy, Peter, 7, and a girl, “Toni,” going-on-4). Oppie, who has a theory about everything, has formulated one for raising children: “Just pour in the love and it will come out.”

Porkpies & Primai Donnas. In March 1943, Major General Leslie R. Groves chose Oppenheimer to head the new Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. It was probably the best decision that Groves ever made. Oppie, who had never even been chairman of a physics faculty, became top executive of a $60 million company with 4,500 workers, including such eminent physicists as Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr.

Oppie was ready for the job: “In a way, Los Alamos was a kind of confluence of my highbrow past, my physics, my students, my horses, my ranch, and my slight knowledge of politics.”

At Cal and Cal Tech, Oppie had been at home with the blackboard and the slipstick. At Los Alamos he proved that he could direct experimental physics. And he had the capacity to make prima donnas pull together, and ordinary people work like the devil. He worked like the devil himself—sometimes as much as 20 hours a day. A six-footer, he shrank to 115 Ibs.

When Oppenheimer was not bossing the laboratory at Los Alamos, he was dealing with military and civilian brass in Washington, and growing in personal assurance at each new contact. He acquired a new trademark. Worried about security, General Groves told Oppie that his broad-brimmed Stetson was too much hat; every spy within a mile of Union Station could spot his comings & goings. Oppie compromised on a brown porkpie (size 6 7/8|), and has worn it ever since. Physicists were not mystified when the hat appeared, uncaptioned and unexplained, on the cover of the magazine Physics Today.

On July 16, 1945, all the long months at Los Alamos were put to the test in the New Mexico desert. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell was watching Oppenheimer when it happened; “He grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself . . . When the announcer shouted ‘Now!’ and there came this tremendous burst of light, followed … by the deep-growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief.” Oppenheimer recalls that two lines of the Bhagavad-Gita flashed through his mind: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.”

A Sense of Sin. Los Alamos and its aftermath left him with “a legacy of concern.” Two years later Oppenheimer told his fellow physicists that their weapon had “dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”*

As if to expiate this sense of sin Oppenheimer threw himself into the campaign for international atomic regulation. He was appointed to a seven-man board (chairman: David Lilienthal) to suggest U.S. policy on the future of atomic energy. Chalk in hand, Oppie lectured to the nonscientific members for ten days on atomic energy, patiently repeating the lesson whenever some member got lost. Oppenheimer was responsible for much of the writing, and many of the ideas, in the resulting 34,000-word Acheson-Lilienthal Report (TIME, April 8, 1946), which called for an international atomic development authority. Says Lilienthal: “Robert is the only authentic genius I know.”

To a reporter who asked him the bomb’s “limitations,” Oppenheimer replied: “The limitations lie in the fact that you don’t want to be on the receiving end.” He is still convinced that an international program is essential, and for the best of selfish reasons: “Our atomic monopoly is like a cake of ice melting in the sun . . .”

Sober Penetration. Soon after the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japanese physicists sent messages to

Oppenheimer and other U.S. “colleagues,” congratulating them on their “fine job” in achieving nuclear fission. To Oppenheimer, there was nothing very remarkable or shocking about this: it simply illustrated how international science has always been.

Testifying before a Senate committee in 1945, Oppenheimer pleaded for continued free trade in information and ideas. Wartime’s fettered physics, he argued, was not really science at all: “The real things were learned in 1890 and 1905 and 1920 . . . and we took this tree with a lot of ripe fruit on it and shook it hard and out came radar and atomic bombs. [The] whole [wartime] spirit was one of frantic and rather ruthless exploitation of the known.”

Oppenheimer feared that postwar science would be organized to death, and scientists reduced to subservient government functionaries. He pleaded for the freedom and the future of “the small institutions in which scientists . . will have the leisure and privacy to think those essential, dangerous thoughts which are the true substance of science.”

Then, accepting the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study, he went off to Princeton in search of leisure for some dangerous thoughts of his own.

Wrap It Up. His attitude toward his new job was characteristic: “I regard it as a very open question whether the Institute is an important place, and whether my coming will be of benefit.” By last week, he had answered the first half of the question to his own satisfaction.

His first visit to Europe in 20 years had helped do the trick. Attending scientific conferences in Brussels and Birmingham, Oppenheimer had learned how despairing the life of the intellect had become in postwar Europe. Viewed from Princeton, the Institute might have its shortcomings; viewed from Europe, it had something of the special glow of a monastery in the Dark Ages.

Director Oppenheimer preferred to think of the Institute as an “intellectual hotel”—a place for transient thinkers to rest, recover and refresh themselves before continuing on their way. He wanted an international clientele at his Grand Hotel. Expatriate and exiled scholars have always been welcome at the Institute, but Oppenheimer had something different in mind: a continuous world traffic in ideas. For such foreign scholars as Denmark’s Bohr and Britain’s Dirac and Toynbee, Oppenheimer hoped to work out periodic repeat performances, so that they would never wholly lose touch either with the U.S. or with home base. Said Oppenheimer: “The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.”

Wrapped up in the persons of Max von Laue and Hideki Yukawa, some of the best German and Japanese physical ideas were on hand at the Institute last week. The two were the first German and Japanese physicists to visit the U.S. as free agents since the war’s end. (Several years ago the Institute invited two Russian mathematicians, but one regretfully declined and the other neglected to R.S.V.P.)

The guest list at Oppie’s hotel this year will also include Historian Arnold Toynbee, Poet T. S. Eliot, Legal Philosopher Max Radin—and a literary critic, a bureaucrat and an airlines executive. There was no telling who might turn up next: maybe a psychologist, a Prime Minister, a composer or a painter. Oppenheimer was just working up courage: “If a man is a full professor at Harvard, he may be a fool, but he’s a respectable fool. In the world of action, criteria for acceptability are more confused.”

As the Institute’s director, Oppie still intends to find time to teach and learn. His predecessor’s Oxford prints are gone from the director’s office; in their place is a wall-length blackboard, covered with equations. And three afternoons a week, out in the new wing, Oppie and 15 young friends can be found talking over elementary-particle physics, explaining things to each other.

*But not always. In Washington, D.C., Oppenheimer once interrupted a lecture by a slow-moving ex-pupil: “Well, really, this room is full of people who know the answer to this question. Let’s get on.” *This view does not sit well with many scientists -— among them Nobel Prizewinner Percy Bridgman, Oppenheimer’s ol’d Harvard teacher. Says Bridgman: “If anybody should feel guilty, it’s God. He put the facts there.”