Louisa Gilder and Robert Oppenheimer

Louisa Gilder’s book “The Age of Entanglement” is a rather unique and thoroughly engrossing book which tells the story of quantum mechanics and especially the bizarre quantum phenomenon called entanglement through a unique device- recreations of conversations between famous physicists. Although Gilder does take considerable liberty in fictionalizing the conversations, they are based on real events and for the most part the device works.

Gilder’s research seems quite exhaustive and well-referenced, which was why the following observation jumped out of the pages and bothered me even more.

On pg. 189, Gilder describes a paragraph from a very controversial and largely discredited book by Jerrold and Leona Schecter. The book which created a furor extensively quotes a Soviet KGB agent named Pavel Sudoplatov who claimed that, among others, Niels Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer were working for the Soviet Union and that Oppenheimer knew that Klaus Fuchs was a Soviet spy (who knew!). No evidence for these fantastic allegations has ever turned up. In spite of this, Gilder refers to the book and essentially quotes a Soviet handler named Merkulov who says that a KGB agent in California named Grigory Kheifets thought that Oppenheimer was willing to transmit secret information to the Soviets. Gilder says nothing more after this and moves on to a different topic.

Now take a look at the footnotes on pg. 190-191 of Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s authoritative biography of Oppenheimer. B & S also quote exactly the same paragraph, but then emphatically add how there is not a shred of evidence to support what was said and how the whole thing was probably fabricated by Merkulov to save Kheifets’s life (since Kheifets had otherwise turned up empty-handed on potential recruits).

What is troubling is that Gilder quotes the paragraph and simply ends it there, leaving the question of Oppenheimer’s loyalty dangling and tantalizingly open-ended. She does not quote the clear conclusion drawn by B & S that there is no evidence to support this insinuation. She also must surely be aware of several other works on Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, none of which give the slightest credence to such allegations.

You would expect more from an otherwise meticulous author like Gilder. I have no idea why she gives credence to the canard about Oppenheimer. But in an interview with her which I saw, she said that she was first fascinated by Oppenheimer (as most people were and still are) but was then repulsed by his treatment of his student David Bohm who dominates the second half of her book. Bohm was a great physicist and philosopher (his still-in-print textbook on quantum theory is unmatched for its logical and clear exposition), a dedicated left-wing thinker who was Oppenheimer’s student at Berkeley in the 1930s. After the War, he was suspected of being a communist and stripped of his faculty position at Princeton which was then very much an establishment institution. After this unfortunate incident, Bohm lived a peripatetic life in Brazil and Israel before settling down at Birkbeck College in England. Oppenheimer essentially distanced himself from Bohm after the war, had no trouble detailing Bohm’s left-wing associations to security agents and generally did not try to save Bohm from McCarthy’s onslaught.

This is well-known; Robert Oppenheimer was a complex and flawed character. But did Gilder’s personal dislike of Oppenheimer in the context of Bohm color her attitude toward him and cause her to casually toss out a tantalizing allegation which she must have known is not substantiated? I sure hope not.

The aesthete

I had a great time visiting Santa Fe and Los Alamos over the weekend. At Los Alamos there is a nice little museum in Fuller Lodge, where the Manhattan Project scientists used to socialize on weekends. One of the amusing artifacts there is a set of two letters sent by Oppenheimer’s secretary asking for a nail to be driven into the wall so that he could hang his hat. There is the first letter…and then there is the follow up.

It’s remarkable that this intellectual aesthete did not have the practical drive to hammer a nail into the wall. One could not have imagined someone like Fermi or Feynman leaving the problem unattended for so long. In light of this it seems even more astonishing that a dyed-in-the-wool hands-off theoretician like Oppenheimer could not only direct a world-class group of Nobel Prize winning scientists and engineers to achieve the impossible in record time, but also keep the most practical details of an unimaginably vast project in his head. He even knew who was the best person in the country to manage the organic chemistry stockroom.

Physicist Victor Weisskopf of MIT said it well:

“He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and even 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”

PBS FILM ON OPPENHEIMER

I accidentally came to know about this film about Oppenheimer on American Experience on PBS yesterday. It was a 2 hour piece, a docu-drama, with David Strathairn playing Oppenheimer during his infamous trial. The trial was an opportunity for Oppenheimer to recapitulate his life, and this is what the docu-drama does. It would undoubtedly be repeated and I would strongly encourage those unfamiliar with the man and the period in this country’s history to watch it. It shows the rise of a truly brilliant and iconic character, followed by his fall that was orchestrated by a vindictive and self-serving government.

Given my long interest in Oppenheimer, there wasn’t much in the film that was new for me. It was highly informative, poignant and fortunately well-grounded in facts and consensus. Interviewed among others were historians Richard Rhodes, Martin Sherwin, Priscilla McMillan and veteran scientists Harold Agnew, Herbert York, Nobel Laureate Roy Glauber and Marvin Goldberger. Prudently, the film does not speculate on Gregg Herken’s belief that Oppenheimer was a member of the communist party; to my knowledge only Herken holds this opinion, and to be honest it does not even matter. But as the record shows, 30 years of constant investigation by the FBI turned up nothing that indicated party membership, and that says a lot.

The disturbing thing about the trial of course is that it is a poster boy case for how disagreement and dissent are equated with disloyalty by the government, a tale for our times even as its essential unlawful scare tactics have been repeated in numerous administrations, and most recently in the Bush administration when opposition to the Iraq war was often deemed “unpatriotic”. The Oppenheimer story, one of the most shameful episodes in this country’s history in my opinion, is a cautionary tale that should always be remembered as an example of how we need to be constantly alert and aware in a democracy and watch out for abuse of power by the government. The film does a good job of demonstrating this.