Recently, the biopic "Oppenheimer" written and directed by Nolan was released in North America, bringing the legendary scientist with the title of "father of the atomic bomb" into the public eye again. The Harvard University Bulletin interviewed the famous historian of science Xia Ping about the complexity of Oppenheimer's man—he became an icon, but he was also what we promoted.
Written by | Translated by Samantha Laine Perfas 1/137
Oppenheimer at Harvard University in 1926 and 1958. Source: J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1926. HUD 326.870 Folder 4. Harvard University Archives; AP file photo
J. Robert was a complex man. A theoretical physicist who graduated from Harvard and scientific director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico during World War II, he is often referred to as the "father of the atomic bomb." But during the McCarthy era, his federal security clearance was revoked, a highly controversial decision that was revoked until 2022, long after his death.[Note 1] His ties to the communists were questioned, and most importantly, he opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb – he eventually became a staunch supporter of nuclear arms control. Ahead of the release of the new biopic, Oppenheimer, Harvard Gazette (HG) interviewed Franklin Gazette. Steven Shapin, the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science, to learn more about the charismatic figure behind him. Limited by length and readability, this interview has been edited.
HG: Professor Xia Ping, can you tell us a little bit about the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos?
Xia Ping: The Manhattan Project refers to the general term for the atomic bomb manufacturing enterprise in the United States, which began in the summer of 1942 and culminated in August 1945 when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The project takes its name from the Manhattan Project district in New York; It is administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and is managed by Gen. Leslie Groves. Leslie Groves).
It was called the largest technoscience project in world history: it cost more than $2 billion at the time. The Manhattan Project is often associated with Los Alamos, the design center of New Mexico, but it's important to recognize that it's the result of a truly massive national effort. The Manhattan Project is the collective name for all the facilities involved in designing and assembling the atomic bomb, with Los Alamos as the nerve center, and also includes a large plant for separating uranium-235 (in Oak Ridge, Tennessee) and a large plant for the production of plutonium (in Hanford, Washington).
HG: What is unique about Los Alamos National Laboratory that allows scientists like Oppenheimer to come together and develop such advanced technology?
Xia Ping: Actually, everything about it is unique. At Los Alamos, some of the world's greatest minds have been brought together — not just in physics, but also in computing, mathematics, metallurgy, chemistry and many fields of engineering — like never before. Here, "Everybody who was anybody" — including many Nobel laureates.
Another unique feature of it is that it is a military facility, but it includes a great scientific research center. This kind of gathering of scientific talent for military purposes has never happened before – and certainly not on this scale. The relationship between science and the military is very tense; The military's notions of secrecy and security often conflict with expectations of relatively free scientific communication. There is no obvious ready-made model for this scientific collaboration and organization, so it is not clear to scientists and the military what kind of place Los Alamos is.
For the scientists, time was of the essence, because they understood that they had to build such bombs before the Germans in order to defeat them. The complexity of the task is unimaginable, but the resources are enormous.
HG: Many people attribute the success of the atomic bomb to Oppenheimer's unique personality, which you called a "charismatic authority" in a paper you co-authored with Charles Thorpe in 2000,[Note 2]. Can you talk more about him? What does he look like as a real person and a leader?
Xia Ping: Oppenheimer is practically impossible to become the candidate for scientific director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Many people think he lacks organizational skills and does not know much how to manage people. One of his colleagues once said he couldn't even run a hamburger stand. However, he did manage Los Alamos successfully. Many later said he was a key figure in the project – his role in organizing, motivating people, and building bridges between scientists and the military was absolutely key. I love the British saying: "In times of crisis, turn the tide." ”
Oppenheimer was considered a charismatic leader, but thanks to the success of others. His unique individual is a collective achievement. That said, Oppenheimer is just one of hundreds of thousands of people involved in the project. He has little to do with the production of fissile material, without which there would be no atomic bomb. He didn't have a deep understanding of the math of shock waves or the engineering of explosive lenses. Of course, he also did not make a decision on how to use the nuclear bomb.
I suspect Oppenheimer is so compelling because he is so inscrutable and so complex. We have conventional stereotypes of eccentric scientific genius, and Oppenheimer fits that pattern well. By contrast, General Groves not only doesn't look like the scientific genius we think we think he would have—but one thing is for sure, his experience with large engineering projects makes him a central figure in the success of the project. If there had to be only one "father of the atomic bomb", why not Groves? But will a movie called "Groves" be equally popular? [I] am deeply skeptical.
HG: There is a description of Oppenheimer that sometimes he is almost a spiritual being. How does this affect people's respect for him and his leadership?
Xia Ping: Some scientists in Los Alamos were moved by this spiritual, moral vision, and cultural breadth. Other scientists thought it was a bit too much exaggeration, and Oppenheimer was showing off. When the Trinity[3] test bomb exploded, he famously recalled a quote from the Hindu holy Bhagavad Gita: "I am the Grim Reaper, the destroyer of the world." Others recall that he actually said something more mundane — something like: "This thing works." ”
I understand that actor Cillian Murphy lost a lot of weight to play Oppenheimer; People do recall how skinny Oppenheimer was, how much weight he lost on the program — partly due to illness, but partly due to anxiety and the daunting burden of responsibility. Some scientists in Los Alamos discovered a religiously ascetic ideal in Oppenheimer's thinness. Oppenheimer, they say, was almost scrawny, leaving only his mind and spirit, preoccupied.
Dr. Oppenheimer and General Groves at the Trinity Test Site. General Groves was the senior official in charge of the Manhattan Project. Source: Network
HG: There is a lot of uncertainty in this project, especially in terms of leadership, who is going to manage what. How did Oppenheimer help solve these problems?
Xia Ping: The story is often oversimplified: the military wants secrecy; Scientists want openness. The truth of the matter is that there is never a completely open communication in the scientific field, and many scientists are comfortable with military-type secrecy, especially in causes of strategic importance. But one of the things Oppenheimer did was advocate for weekly workshops where people from different departments could really interact with each other. He had to convince Groves that the project could not succeed if scientists in different fields were separated and only knew what they specifically needed to know. Oppenheimer was right to believe that it was necessary to have people with different skills communicate and solve different parts of the project. He did a lot for it.
HG: When Oppenheimer and an entire team of scientists were working on the atomic bomb, did they know how it would be used in the future?
Xiaping: Until the defeat of Nazi Germany, or until the establishment of intelligence agencies shortly before that, Germany did not have an emergency plan to make an atomic bomb – until then, Oppenheimer was fully committed to building an atomic bomb in order to prevent the Germans from monopolizing this weapon. Until then, scientists at Los Alamos had not seriously considered what to do with the weapon—whether it would be used against Germany, or whether the threat of using it would be sufficient. It was an extremely challenging scientific and technical problem, and they put their heart and soul into it to ensure the success of this project. As a result, the moral and political suffering caused by the atomic bomb, and how to use it, occurred only a short time before the end of the project, involving relatively few people.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, some project scientists saw no need to drop an atomic bomb on Japan, perhaps just to declare it along the coast or explicitly inform Japan of the existence of the atomic bomb and its power, but Oppenheimer helped them little or nothing. It's also unclear whether Oppenheimer could have had much influence on the use of the atomic bomb. He has scientific authority, but no direct political power. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military and political decisions. It is clear that, as painful as it is, many leading scientists want to know not only whether the atomic bomb is effective — the Trinity test has shown that it does — but also what it can achieve as a strategic weapon. I think it's fair to say that Oppenheimer's own attitude is somewhat contradictory.
Oppenheimer's Bocchalkavad Gita, a translation by Arthur W. Ryder, is part of the collection of the Los Alamos Laboratory Science Museum. In the upper right corner of the empty frontispiece is Oppenheimer's handwritten initials (R.O.). The book is one of the only personal items the lab owns, the other being his office chair. Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory website
HG: Do you think Oppenheimer's leadership eventually led to the invention of the atomic bomb?
Xia Ping: No, I don't think so — not because Oppenheimer doesn't have [leadership] and others do, but because you can't just talk about a project of this complexity and scale and attribute its success to one person. I think this is a matter of principle. You might be sensible to say that the form of industrial organization and huge capital expenditures made the atomic bomb. But no one is going to see a movie like that – industrial organization without gritty blue eyes, without charisma, and without moral anxiety.
HG: So what legacy did Oppenheimer leave to the scientific community?
Xia Ping: That's interesting. Oppenheimer did not win a Nobel Prize; Other physicists who participated in the Manhattan Project got it. After the war, he wrote only a few scientific papers. If he wasn't the scientific director of Los Alamos, would Oppenheimer have won a Nobel Prize in physics? Maybe not. Will there be a lot of biography about him? Probably not. Will he have a platform as a commentator on postwar culture, and will his views be heard? Probably not. Are we all going to see movies about him? Of course not. General Groves could well have chosen someone else to be the scientific director of Los Alamos. If he did, what would have become of Oppenheimer? If so, what would we think of him?
HG: Some people like him. Some people hate him. What do you think of Oppenheimer based on what you know about him over the years?
Xia Ping: I think great scientific leaders, like great political leaders, are partly made by what they bring and partly by the environment. We tend to overestimate the role of innate personality and underestimate the role of accidents, circumstances, and especially other people in shaping what we think of as unique personalities. Still, over the years, accidents, circumstances, dramatic conventions, historians' research, and many other factors have cast an aura over Oppenheimer that makes him particularly captivating. This is both a fact about Oppenheimer and a fact about us. We use Oppenheimer's image to think about science and morality, science and politics, science and religion, science and philosophy, and the role of intellectuals in modern society. He became an idol. Who is Schio (Benheimer)?
Translator's Note:
[1] See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/science/j-robert-oppenheimer-energy-department.html.
[2] 参见：Charles Thorpe, Steven Shapin, Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer?: Charisma and Complex Organization. Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer?: Charisma and Complex Organization - Charles Thorpe, Steven Shapin, 2000 (sagepub.com)
[3] Trinity, for convenience, is always translated as "Trinity." The name "Trinity test" was given by Oppenheimer inspired by the poet John Donne's poems. In 1962, General Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, wrote to Oppenheimer asking about the origin of the name Trinity. Oppenheimer replied: "I don't know why I chose the name, but I know what was in my head at the time. I love the poem John Donne wrote before his death. He then quoted the sonnet "Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness." Then continues, "This is still not the reason for choosing trinity, and in another, more famous prayer poem, Dorne begins with ''Batter my heart, three person'd God.'" Besides, there is no other clue. ”
postscript
For readers from non-physical industries, knowing Oppenheimer may come from the fame of the Manhattan Project much more than from his physical achievements. The translator tried to make an appropriate supplement to the physical content that was not covered too much in the text through a minimalist chronology and short notes, hoping to give readers a preliminary understanding of Oppenheimer's physical achievements. Of course, it is unrealistic to discuss Oppenheimer's scientific work in such a short afterword. In supplementing this afterword, the translator referred to several biographies of Oppenheimer and several articles reminiscing about him, related essays, which are limited to space and will not list them all.
Oppenheimer's minimalist chronology
Born in New York on April 22, 1904. 1911-1921 Ethical Culture School, New York. In 1915, he was elected to the New York Mineralogical Society, where he gave a geology lecture the following year at the age of 12. 1922-1925 Three years later, he graduated from Harvard University with summa laude, summa. At Harvard, Oppenheimer was heavily influenced by Professor Percy W. Bridgman. Professor Bridgman is a great experimental physicist with great ingenuity. Oppenheimer studied voraciously, saying, "I love it here... I took more courses than I should, and I lived on the shelves of the library and raided the place intellectually. In addition to studying physics and chemistry, he also studied Latin and Greek. He completed the four-year program in three years (he earned his doctorate even faster: just two years).
1925-1927 Studied at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England, and the University of Göttingen, Germany, and received a doctorate in physics from the University of Göttingen (1927). Oppenheimer was invited by Born to the University of Göttingen, where he met many famous physicists of the time, such as Pauli, Heisenberg and others. After receiving his PhD, Oppenheimer made brief visits to Leiden, the Netherlands, and Zurich, Switzerland. In Leiden he worked with Ehrenfest and in Zurich he worked with Pauli, which had a great influence on Oppenheimer's later scientific career. During his PhD (1927), Oppenheimer co-published a famous paper with Born "Zur Quantentheorie der Molekeln. Ann. Phys.84,(1927) 457-484.）。 In this paper, they show how to divide the problem into two parts: one describing the movement of electrons around a fixed atomic nucleus, and the other describing the motion of the nuclear skeleton (vibrations and degrees of rotational freedom). This is known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. This method is still the basis for processing molecules.
1929 Taught at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer taught at both schools. During his more than a decade of teaching, he "commuted" between the two places, in Berkeley in the fall and winter, and the spring semester began in April, in Pasadena. Many of his collaborators and students commute with him. Oppenheimer established a world-class theoretical physics department at Berkeley, or rather, his school of theoretical physics. Most of the best American theoretical physicists who grew up in that era were trained by Oppenheimer at some point in their lives. Many of them were his graduate students, and some were his postdocs. They affectionately called him "Oppie." Oppenheimer's early research focused specifically on the energy processes of subatomic particles, including electrons, positrons, and cosmic rays. He also did pioneering work on neutron stars and black holes, and in 1930 Oppenheimer completed a seminal paper, On the Theory of Electrons and Protons, Phys. Rev. 35, (1930) 562-563., essentially predicting the possibility of positrons. Oppenheimer showed through a very powerful argument involving symmetry that a positive charge cannot have the mass of a proton, but must be the same as the mass of an electron. This implicitly predicted the discovery of positrons three years later. Unfortunately, he was skeptical of the validity of Dirac's equations, which prevented him from discovering positrons.
1932 The energy loss of relativistic electrons was calculated. In 1933, Carl. D. Anderson discovered positrons in cosmic rays, which prompted Oppenheimer to immediately set about calculating the cross-section of positrons at low energies. He also used his electron pair generation theory to explain clusters in cosmic rays. Oppenheimer and his assistant Carlson have since undertaken. F. Carlson and student H. Snyder Snyder), together with Snyder, developed an elegant mathematical theory of atmospheric cluster multiplicity, and the famous physicist H. Bate commented, "This is a masterpiece of using mathematical tools to deal with physical phenomena." That same year, he and his students turned their attention to the field of nuclear physics. Oppenheimer's most important contribution in this area is the famous Oppenheimer-Phillips process. 1934 He and W. Farry H. Furry) developed a field theory of the Dirac equation that treats electrons and positrons on the same footing. This paper contains the modern form of electron-positron theory. He and his students also discovered vacuum polarization.
1936-1942 Suspected participation in the activities of the Communist Party of the United States 1939 Published one of the greatest papers in 20th-century physics, theoretically hinting at the possibility of black holes. As early as 1936, Oppenheimer was interested in the physics of neutron stars. Earlier in 1939, Oppenheimer met with student G. Volkov. M. Volkoff) proved that neutron stars cannot be infinitely dense. They combined general relativity with quantum mechanics to describe Neutron fluids. In the words of the paper, "For a cold neutron system with a symmetric distribution of spheres, if the total mass of these neutrons exceeds 0.7 Msun (Msun is the mass of the sun), then its corresponding spacetime cannot be a static solution of the field equation." In other words, this conclusion established an upper limit on the mass of stable neutron stars, which later more detailed astrophysical calculations showed was actually between 1.5 and 3 Msun, the famous Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit. This limit raises an important question: What are the consequences of continuous collapse of a sufficiently massive neutron star core? Oppenheimer and his student Snyder studied the gravitational collapse of massive stars (On continued gravitational contraction, Phys. Rev. 56, (1939) 455-459.), and came to an important conclusion: "Stars tend to isolate themselves from distant observers from any communication; Only its gravitational field exists... Although it would seem infinitely long to establish this asymptotic isolation from a distant observer, for co-observers of stellar matter, this time is finite and can be quite short. "This is almost a black hole prophecy. Unfortunately, this result did not attract enough attention at the time.
1940-1941 Oppenheimer's attention turned to the meson theory and attempts to use mesons to explain the nuclear force. October 15, 1942 Assigned to establish and operate the top-secret Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, he led the Manhattan Project for the next three years and devoted himself to the development of the atomic bomb. July 16, 1945 The Trinity test of the first atomic bomb was successfully conducted on the barren plains of the Alamogordo range, 100 miles south of Los Alamomos, New Mexico.
November 2, 1945 Farewell speech to other physicists at Los Alamos, denouncing the use of atomic weapons in future wars. From 1945 to 1952, Oppenheimer was one of the most important and respected advisors to U.S. and international atomic energy policy. 1946 Received the President's Commendation and Medal for his leadership of the Los Alamos Laboratory. 1947-1966 Director of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. Under his leadership, the IAS became one of the world-renowned centers for physics. Oppenheimer himself had become a representative figure in the American field of physics and even the field of natural energy science. 1953 Accused of being a member of the Communist Party and leaking the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. June 29, 1954 The Atomic Energy Commission formally stripped Oppenheimer's top-secret security clearance, ending his ties to the atomic energy program. 1963 President Lyndon Johnson awards Oppenheimer's famous Fermi Award. February 18, 1967 Died of throat cancer in Princeton at the age of 62.
Respondent profiles
Steven Shapin (1943-): Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and one of the most important "sociologists of scientific knowledge" of our time. In 2014, he received the Sutton Medal, the highest honor of the Society for the History of Science (HSS), in recognition of his "lifetime of scholarly achievements."
Professor Xia Ping is the author of numerous books, including Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (with Simon Schaefer), The Social History of Truth: Civilization and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, The Scientific Revolution (now translated into 16 languages), Wetenschap is cultuur (Science as Culture), The Scientific Life: A Moral History of the Late Modern Profession, and Never Impurity: A Historical Study of Science.
Translated from Sammantha Laine Perfas, Closer look at 'father of atomic bomb', Harvard Gazette, original link: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/07/closer-look-at-father-of-atomic-bomb/
(Source: Huipu WeChat public account.) Thanks to the original author, just for knowledge sharing. ）