Berkeley Talks: Oppenheimer’s Berkeley years

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.

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Steve Kahn: Good afternoon and welcome. If people could take their seats and we’ll get this started. I’m Steve Kahn. I’m the dean of mathematical and physical sciences here at Berkeley, and I want to take this opportunity to welcome you.

Today, we’ll discuss Oppenheimer’s remarkable life, career and enduring legacy at Berkeley. His time here was marked by groundbreaking research, nurturing of brilliant minds and profound contributions to the field of physics. Not unlike today, it was also a time of significant and complex ethical and political dilemmas, as most of you are well aware.

Oppenheimer is widely known, of course, as the so-called father of the atomic bomb. But within the physics community, he’s credited with creating the tradition of theoretical physics at Berkeley, which continues to this day with our Center for Theoretical Physics. And he completed his Ph.D. under the tutelage of Max Born in 1929 and then returned to the U.S. and simultaneously became assistant professor of physics here at Berkeley, but also at Caltech. He spent his fall and his winters at Berkeley and his spring terms at Caltech. Through this dual arrangement, which is somewhat unusual, he enjoyed the opportunity to interact closely with some of the leading experimentalists of the time, such as Carl Anderson at Caltech, and of course, Ernest Lawrence here at Berkeley.

Part of what distinguishes Oppenheimer’s time at Berkeley was the quality of the outstanding students and postdocs that he was able to assemble here. Leading physicists like Bob Serber, Willis Lamb, David Bohm, Melba Phillips and Philip Morrison were all part of his circle or trained by him. His research group was extremely lively and addressed a wide array of topics on the cutting edge of physics at the time. Oppenheimer was also a well-known humanist who was widely read and attentive to the arts. He was fluent in Latin and Greek, and he studied Sanskrit so that he could read the Upanishads in their original text. No doubt he benefited greatly from the outstanding breadth of Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science even back then.

Thank you to our esteemed panelists, each an expert in their respective fields, who will share their insights and knowledge with us today. We look forward to an engaging and thoughtful discourse and we’ll conclude with a Q&A session whereby we’ll respond to questions from the audience.

So, without further ado, let me introduce our panel. To begin is Cathryn Carson, here at my left, who is a professor and the current chair of the Department of History at UC Berkeley. Cathryn’s research fields include nuclear history and the history of 20th-century physics. She also leads the Context and Ethics program in Berkeley’s undergraduate data science major. Cathryn will be our moderator today and she will organize the discussion.

To her left, we have Mark Chadwick, chief scientist and chief operating officer for weapons physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Mark recently edited and published a suite of papers on the technical history of the Trinity Project, the Trinity Test, on its 75th anniversary.

To his left is Jon Else, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Jon created the documentary The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb.

And again to his left is Yasunori Nomura, the professor and the current director of Berkeley’s Center for Theoretical Physics. Yasunori’s research includes theoretical particle physics, quantum gravity and quantum information.

And then finally, Karl van Bibber, professor and former chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Berkeley, and also former executive associate dean of the College of Engineering. Karl’s research areas include basic and applied nuclear science and particle astrophysics. He also spent 25 years of his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which was created in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project.

So thank you all for being here, and as a reminder, please take a moment to turn off or silence your cell phones. And at this stage, let me turn it over to Cathryn. Thank you.

Cathryn Carson: Thank you, Steve. Well, it’s extraordinary to see all of you here today and really significant to come together around this topic. Robert Oppenheimer’s years at Berkeley were a crucible for him. This campus and its environs were a kind of center of gravity in his life for a crucial decade and more.

So, to start us off, I want to set the scene just a bit why it was that these years were so rich and exciting, and also give us some shared background about Oppenheimer’s life and his science so that we have this common platform we can then discuss on.

As you probably know, Oppenheimer was born in 1904 in New York City. He was the brilliant older son of a highly cultivated family, a child who skipped grades and devoted his high school years to literature and languages, the arts and the sciences. His education during that time was at the Private Ethical Culture Society School, which is a gathering point for non-observant Jewish families like his own.

He went on to Harvard and got his B.A. in chemistry, graduating summa, as they say, in 1925. Still, he’d used his time at Harvard to start exploring this discipline of physics, and he knew that he had to leave the United States to learn more. America was a backwater. Europe was where the action was.

Now, in 20th century physics, there are two years that are turning points. One is 1905, keyword Einstein. The other is 1925, which was the year when Oppenheimer set off to Cambridge in England and Göttingen in Germany. Nineteen twenty-five was the year when quantum mechanics was birthed and Oppenheimer disembarked in Europe at a ground zero of a scientific revolution centered on this confounding quantum theory of the particles that make up atoms and with them, ultimately, nearly the entirety of objects and phenomena that are available to our senses and our experiments.

As Steve said, he got his Ph.D. in Germany with a theoretical physicist, Max Born, and began putting out a body of work applying quantum mechanics to molecules. He got introduced to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, went to study with Paul Ehrenfest and Wolfgang Pauli, and he learned from them not just to apply quantum mechanics to calculate, but to grapple with the puzzles that the theory inherently posed at the edge of our physical intuition, which became one of his signature strengths. And then he caught the wave by the late 1920s to extend quantum mechanics to a farther horizon: what’s called quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics.

Now, we’re all used today to thinking of theoretical physics as a central discipline of modern intellectual endeavors. It wasn’t always that way. In the 1920s when Robert Oppenheimer chose his métier, theoretical physicists were curious creatures, very few in number, and largely removed from the world. That would change extraordinarily fast over the course of just two decades, from 1925 to 1945, and Oppenheimer’s life unfolded in the midst of that transformation. In crucial ways, he helped drive it at Berkeley.

Because when the Berkeley Physics Department hired Oppenheimer in 1929, one year after, his experimental counterpart, Ernest Lawrence, arrived. When the physics department hired Oppenheimer, it hired the best-trained, most intellectually adventurous theoretical physicist in the United States, and Oppenheimer set out to build a school of theoretical physics to cultivate the next generation.

As Steve noted, exceptional students and postdocs flocked here to Berkeley to work with him. They worked together on quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics. On puzzling observational phenomena like cosmic ray showers, which happen when particles and nuclei from the sun and from the wider universe impinge on the earth’s atmosphere and cascade from there. They worked on relativistic astrophysics, understanding stars using quantum theory and relativity. And they worked on theories of the nucleus. Its constitution, the interactions that hold it together, its behavior. They did this work in dialogue with Ernest Lawrence and his crew at the RAD Lab, the radiation laboratory.

Now as context, I want you to remember that the neutron, one of two basic nuclear particles, was only discovered in 1932. Within a year or two, the neutron had been turned into an experimental probe of the nucleus. Within seven years, it had been deployed to discover nuclear fission, and the story of fission and weapons unfolds from there. Oppenheimer’s school at Berkeley was hands down the first and the best school of theoretical physics in the United States. His success marked this department and this university permanently, even after he departed for Los Alamos in ’43 and the Institute for Advanced Study in ’47 for good.

As we’ll hear today, the style of work that Oppenheimer unfolded at Berkeley was collaborative, pointed, directed at hard problems, not always successful. His modus operandi, you could say, was work hard, play hard. He landed in the Bay at a time when much else was in ferment. At the same time that he devoted himself to physics, he got engaged with contemporary left-wing politics. In the Bay Area in the 1930s, that included the fight against fascism in Nazi Germany and Spain and struggles for economic justice and labor in California. The Communist Party was part of that setting, and Oppenheimer immersed himself in the life of the Berkeley faculty, efforts to unionize it, and intellectual currents across the university, this broad liberal arts institution, that fed his roving mind.

Now, there will be much more to say about all of these topics, but I hope that sets sets the scene. And let me at this point say just a few words about how the panel will unfold. My colleagues and I will start by exploring a range of questions in a discussion format. Along the way, we’ll open it up to your questions and answers. For the Q&A, if you’d like to submit a question, please raise your hand at any time, and one of our staff members will pass down an index card and a pen to you. You can write down your question and return the card and the pen, just pass them back to the end of the aisle where you get it from. We’re really looking forward to hearing your questions, so thank you in advance for contributing to this event. We’ll be fielding some of your questions through the panel as well as at a dedicated time at the end.

So, with that, without further ado, I’d like to start with questions to my colleagues, and I think I’m going to start with Jon Else, but then I’m sure everyone else will want to chime in. So the first question, just to get started, is how did being at Berkeley shape Oppenheimer as a person and as a scientist?

Jon Else: Well, being at Berkeley shapes all of us. I mean, Berkeley is Berkeley. I have to say that Oppenheimer’s years, Oppenheimer is probably the most intensely scrutinized citizen of Berkeley today. I can’t think of anyone else in the history of the city whose life has come under such a magnifying glass, especially with this cultural urgency at the moment around Chris Nolan’s film.

Well, Oppenheimer arrived in Berkeley in 1929, and as Cathryn said, there was an explosion happening in Europe in the sciences. There was launched in 1929 with the stock market crash what many people thought was the collapse of capitalism just as physics was exploding. There was also a tremendous importing of culture in the arts from Europe. This is the time of Picasso and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and Oppenheimer was very, very fluent in those. I mean, his friend Freeman Dyson once told me he thought it was strange that Oppenheimer became a physicist and came to Berkeley. He said that he could just as easily have been a philosopher or a poet or a painter.

So, Oppenheimer arrived here bearing this knowledge. He was, as far as I can tell, throughout most of his life considered to be the smartest guy in the room by many around him. I think often by his own likes, he was considered that way. He was famously apolitical when he arrived here. You have to remember that Berkeley at the time was remote from the East Coast. He had come from privilege, great privilege in uptown New York from a very wealthy family. Arrived here via New Mexico, where there were seeds of the American West and the frontier that were firmly planted in his psyche for the rest of his life. Arrived here at Berkeley, by the way, was rather barren at that time. He talks in his letters about riding a horse up through the barren Berkeley Hills.

He created this physics boom town here, this beehive of physics. And it wasn’t until the late ’30s, around 1936, that he suddenly began to notice the world around him. It was the time of, there had been the great longshoreman strike in San Francisco in 1934. And among the many contradictions in Oppenheimer’s life and psyche are the fact that this man who came from substantial inherited wealth engaged the cause of working people, particularly marginalized working people in California, migrant workers, in the 1930s. He, of course, embraced the cause of the Spanish loyalists who were fighting for their lives against fascism in Spain. And he and many, many others saw that as the first front against the rise of fascism in Europe.

And throughout all this, he remains sort of a rather unworldly, a great student of metaphysical poetry. And his time at Berkeley is bracketed. It finally ends up in the summer of 1942 with the convening of this rather extraordinary seminar to figure out how to make a fission bomb, which subsequently then turned into a seminar about how to make a fusion bomb. So, during that decade or so in Berkeley, you see the transformation of this fellow into a gentleman who would become this extraordinary administrator, who was the conductor of the orchestra at Los Alamos, and produced the atomic bomb. So it’s quite a transformation. He also, I should say, his friend Francis Fergusson told me that he learned how to eat well in Berkeley, which I second that. It’s a common affliction.

Cathryn Carson: I wonder, Karl van Bibber down at the end, as someone who plays between theory and experiment as well in nuclear physics, how did it matter that Oppenheimer and Lawrence were at Berkeley together? That seems like a key here, doesn’t it?

Karl van Bibber: Very much. And that’s very much of the headwaters of the whole story. Lawrence himself, when he came here, was already recognized. I think he was kind of the experimental sort of photonegative of Oppenheimer. He was the leading experimentalist in the United States. He had was at Yale at the time. He’d already had several really quite spectacular results. He had a prestigious fellowship that he turned down to go to Europe. Had offers everywhere, universities were vying for him, but he chose to come to Berkeley.

And I think a year later, I think Lawrence’s presence here probably was part of the attractor for Oppenheimer, as well, to come to Berkeley. And they were an incredible, just a famous couple. They were kind of an odd couple because, and you see this so often, I think you’ve experienced it where people who are sort of diametric opposites in terms of style and upbringing all of a sudden become such deep and fast friends.

Lawrence was this very staid, puritanical Midwesterner. His parents were Lutheran school teachers. He was educated in South Dakota and Minnesota and did his work at Yale. And I think it’s reported that although he had a very strong temper and a very strong personality, no one ever remembers, I think this is a true statement, ever hearing him utter a foul word, a single foul word. And he was a pretty strong guy and a very tall, proper. And then you had this Bohemian from a very, very different background, sort of liberal Jewish background.

And they would spend time in New Mexico together. There’s this iconic photograph you may have seen of the two of them down in New Mexico, and there’s Lawrence there with his spats on and his riding outfit and a tie and there’s Oppenheimer not looking at the camera slouching against the car with a cigarette and his hair all disheveled. And it was really the odd couple, but their families got along famously. They were very, very close, their families. And I think the complementarity was super. I mean, you had the just greatest U.S. theoretical physicist and the greatest experimental physicist. And I think they were just envisioning what was going to evolve here, and that’s what really made Berkeley a powerhouse.

Of course, those differences were the beginning, the sort of thin end of the wedge of what ultimately grew into the drama that unfolded and I think is well-known and then brought out in the film. Lawrence took a very hard line that, as the father of large science, he built up this laboratory that was developing ever larger and larger machines, that he did not want any intrusion of personal politics into the enterprise. And he warned, at first gently, and then more and more strongly later on, Oppenheimer, that he should stick to science and not be flirting around with his left-wing politics. And I think that was the beginning of what turned out to be a significant fissure. With that, I’ll probably stop, and maybe you should enter in another question.

Cathryn Carson: All right. Because it seems like this also feeds very naturally into what Oppenheimer’s contributions to science were during his time at Berkeley. And that might be something that Yasunori, maybe you could lead us off on.

Yasunori Nomura: Yeah. I don’t really know the history that well. And in fact, I’m the only physicist, real physicist, theoretical physicist here, so I don’t know. But in terms of the Berkeley shaping Oppenheimer, I think it’s the other way around. Oppenheimer just shaped Berkeley and theoretical physics in this country, in the U.S. And as Carol said, it’s like theoretical physics is a strange set of people, and he’s a very strange person, as far as I kind of read. And that strange person made strange people to be in the mainstream, and that’s interesting.

I had the chance to see the list of his students and postdocs when he was at Berkeley. Amazing. And around that time, the Berkeley, right after his arrival was the top theoretical groups of the country, perhaps maybe Columbia at some point. But the interesting thing is that after that landscape of theoretical physics and which institutions grade best, it slightly changed, but Berkeley has been the top theoretical physics group, which I have the pleasure to be directing right now. And that’s really something his name and legacy contributed.

And that’s very interesting, maybe we come back to this, but he’s not really at… He’s a great physicist, I can talk about his physics later, but not truly exceptional at the level with Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr or something, at least in my opinion. But his impact is really exceptional.

So, there must be something about his personality, charisma, and/or maybe his skill in managing and so on, which I really interested. Actually, I didn’t have time to watch the movie because I was driving around to attend the conference. I’m very interested to learn that and what kind of person he was and why that was possible. In fact, he’s here around his thirties, right? I mean, I’m now approaching, though I’m about 50, he did this much of things in his 30s. It’s amazing. It’s a great guy. And I don’t know, yes.

Cathryn Carson: Well, I want to follow up a little more on Oppenheimer and Lawrence, because I bet, Mark, you have something that you want to…

Mark Chadwick: Yes, thank you. I’m not sure if people appreciate that Lawrence played a really key role in getting Oppenheimer the job to run Los Alamos. And that was one of these sort of happenstance things in life. He was a little bit of a late addition to the whole enterprise of trying to understand whether a weapon could be built.

In 1941, much of the U.S. effort was actually being run by Arthur Compton in Chicago, and Compton would’ve been sort of a natural person to run the project. At that point, the aspects of sort of what we’d call fast neutron bomb physics was actually a subdivision under Compton that was being run by Gregory Breit, who was the editor of the Physical Review at the time. And Breit was a very famous physicist, Compton was a very famous physicist. You’d think that all these people could actually have been the Los Alamos lab leader. I think Compton wasn’t, because at this point, he thought he was the big boss over everything. In fact, Los Alamos kind of took over.

But Breit was running the program on sort of bomb physics and was very concerned about security. He thought that the rules were far too lax. There was really very little control of need to know and he kept complaining. And in fact, Compton had a reputation for being very lax, and the government was trying to deal with this because they needed all these people like Compton, and they weren’t quite sure how to constrain it.

And in early 1942, Breit was just fed up and resigned. And so, the job became free. And I think Oppenheimer, maybe we can get back to this later for people who know him, his reputation a bit more than me, but he must have had quite a streak of ambition. He sort of really wanted to have this job. I think he knew that he could become a serious leader. And it was really Lawrence, who was a very famous person — Lawrence had all the security clearances at the time, which Oppenheimer didn’t have, and Lawrence was able to convince Compton, but especially people like Vannevar Bush who were running the Office of Scientific Research and Development in Washington, that Oppie was the man to take over this sort of bomb subproject.

And then once he got this in May of 1942, he really ran with it. He was very, very effective, very aggressive about setting up meetings, pulling people together. It was soon after that he organized this famous meeting at Berkeley in July 1942 that then cascaded towards the creation of the Los Alamos Project as part of the Manhattan Project. I’m sure we’re going to get back to those things.

Cathryn Carson: Well, let’s go with this set of…

Jon Else: We can’t leave this period without mentioning that there is a third rail running through American politics throughout the 1930s, and the third rail is the Communist Party. And that Robert Oppenheimer made many contributions to causes that were supported by the communists. He had many friends who were involved with the Communist Party. I’m not going to relitigate whether he himself was a member or not, but the fact is that he touched the third rail during the ’30s and it would set in motion various time bombs that would come back to haunt him and haunt the nation, actually, years later.

Cathryn Carson: So, was it surprising and if so, to whom, that this theorist ended up appointed the head of Los Alamos? I am seeing a no, for instance. You want to speak to that?

Yasunori Nomura: Yeah, I don’t think so. Of course, given that his study and his youth, it might be a little bit surprising. But in the end, it was a good choice. I mean, for example, he made this impact, and despite his kind of lack of super hyper contribution to say quantum mechanics or something, it’s a great contribution by the way he made. But it’s not like, again, of Einstein or Werner Heisenberg, somebody you probably know.

But he must be the person, very energetic. All the seminar he must be around, I read to some extent. And then he knows essentially everything from chemistry to physics and so on, engineering and so on. Those people are really necessary to complete this kind of very complicated project to make a real bomb which nobody ever made. And it’s even not know whether that succeeds or even makes sense.

And he had nuclear physics in his mind and chemistry and engineering. Those are really, really important things, and usually not many people have that kind of ability. And somebody, it could be maybe Leslie, General Grove, may have kind of noticed that. Maybe accident, I don’t know, but may have noticed that in him. And then there was a really right choice. I don’t know if it really was right choice, because I’m from Japan and so on. In the end, that’s a really subtle issue. But yes, that’s really, you can talk about and we probably shouldn’t ignore. But anyway, for the project, it was a really, really good choice.

Karl van Bibber: If I could just riff on that a little bit. And I think it was well said. The bomb was not simply fission. It wasn’t simply neutrons. It was a complex set of a half a dozen different disciplines. There was hydrodynamics, explosives, engineering, electrical engineering, computation, which was just, being in its infancy at the time, able to do very complex, multidisciplinary multiphysics computation, and even things that Oppenheimer didn’t know. He actually had two great strengths to him. One is that if he didn’t know it, more than anybody else on the planet, he could learn it just at light speed. Overnight he would actually come up to speed and know what to do.

The second thing is, in my reading of it, he was a very intuitive person. And in this crash program, there were some critical junctures where a decision had to be made to say, “OK, this is a potential liability or there’s a high risk of failure here. We need to do a design change.”

And, in fact, I think one that I’m sure Mark could speak to more authoritatively, but Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, a very famous British physicist, made a visit to Los Alamos weeks before the Trinity test, and he understood hydrodynamic instabilities. And the way they were going to upload the plutonium weapon could have just turned squishy instead of spherical. And all of a sudden the boss had to make a decision to do a fundamental design change there. And it was a combination of learning new things quickly and an intuition to know how quickly to navigate this process. You want to take over on this, Mark?

Mark Chadwick: Oh, yeah, that’s a fascinating story. One step before, it was the transition that they realized that for a plutonium bomb, they had to make an implosion weapon. And again, that was Oppenheimer’s, I think, clever leadership where he realized not only was this an important change to make, but he had to reorganize the lab. And so in 1944, he did a major reorganization. He created a new division, he put one of his best people, Bacher, in charge of that division, and they pulled off this idea of an implosion, which turned out to be the sensible way to go long-term, as well.

Now, in that process, they also realized that there were real challenges about making the implosion work. Amazing diagnostics were developed. I think maybe Oppenheimer, not alone, but with some of the other wonderful scientists at the time, understood that to try to solve these problems, you couldn’t just take one approach. You had to look at multiple approaches, multiple diagnostics to get a complete picture. But in the process, they realized they had to come up with a more conservative design to make sure it would work. We often call that the Christy Project, the Christy sphere, because it was a solid sphere of plutonium that they realized would have less instability problems.

And I think another interesting thing that maybe we’ll get to later is the patent for the Trinity device, for the Fat Man device, which is still in our archives at Los Alamos. I’m afraid it’s a classified document, but it’s a fascinating thing to read. But the patent is in the name of two foreign nationals. One of them, Robert Christy, who was an immigrant from Canada. He’d become a U.S. citizen as well, actually in Berkeley, before he came to Los Alamos. But he was Canadian.

And the other was Rudolf Peierls, who obviously with a name like that, is British. But he had come to Britain through Germany. And so, we have the patent of the atom bomb in the name of two foreign foreign-born scientists. And that was a design that then they thought they could pull off and indeed, they did. But they needed a test to convince themselves it would work. So that’s why we ended up doing the Trinity test, but not the test for the gun bomb, which wasn’t really needed.

Jon Else: How about the patent for the hydrogen bomb?

Mark Chadwick: Can I talk about that as well? Oh, well, that’s actually another fantastic Berkeley story. Because there’s a famous patent that was written a bit later, which was the patent that was associated with what we now call the modern hydrogen bomb, a bomb that was first tested in the Mike test in 1952. And that had names like Teller and Ulam on it. By the way, Teller never signed it because he was annoyed at having to share the glory with Ulam.

But in fact, the first patent of the hydrogen bomb goes back earlier, to 1944. And there were four people’s names on it, and that was Oppenheimer and Teller and Konopinski and I think Fermi, as well. And those four people had developed the concept of the first hydrogen bomb. They called it the classical super. And in that document, it refers to the first idea in patent law, you talk about prior art. And the first prior art was actually the Berkeley 1942 meeting here in the summer of 1942.

And what happened there was, this was a meeting where the intention was to develop ideas and conclusions regarding the feasibility of a fission atom bomb. And apparently what had happened was within the first couple of days, they quickly disposed of that, it was easy. And moved on to fun things, which was the hydrogen bomb. And it was fun for them because most of them had a sort of nuclear astrophysics background. People like Bethe and Teller, they’d all worked on nuclear physics in the stars. And hydrogen bombs bring all that physics together, whether it’s hydrodynamics, whether it’s plasma physics.

And the Berkeley meeting led to a memorandum by Oppenheimer, which is held in our vault at the lab. It’s actually still a classified document. I was lucky to find it. We’d lost it for many decades, and there’s a story about finding it, which is kind of fun. But anyway, I found it. It was kind of hiding in plain sight, actually as part of the supporting evidence for the patent. So, it was one document amongst 500 pages of other things.

But in that document, which was really signed by Oppenheimer, the first ideas of how to create a hydrogen bomb were laid out. And it was, looking back on it now, it was really, really quite shocking to read because they were so optimistic. They quickly came to the conclusion that it was easy. And it did prove doable, but it took them a decade, not a few years. It was harder than they thought.

And in fact, that document had a massive impact in Washington, because it was sent to the OSRD and it created waves immediately, because no longer were people just talking about the feasibility of an atom bomb, but they were now talking about 10 megatons, 100 megatons.

And the government firstly had to figure out what to invest in. And they actually had about a six-month flurry of activity doing hydrogen bomb physics before they kind of shut it down because they just realized, in fact, building an atom bomb was a real challenge to build quickly. So, the focus went back to the atom bomb after that.

But the other problem they had was security, because pretty much everybody at the Berkeley meeting did not have a military clearance, including Oppenheimer. There might have been one or two people like Van Vleck and maybe Bethe who actually had a clearance. But the rest of them were dealt with in an informal way in which the contractor for a project, for a military project, in this case, it was this man Compton again at Chicago, the contractor was responsible for security and for maintaining sort of appropriate need to know.

But it was sort of worse than that. And you might not be surprised, but some of the people, including Oppenheimer, had actually had clearances requested for them and actually been denied at this point. And so, once this information got to Washington, the main worry became how to control the information, because it was spreading from person to person wildly way beyond what they wanted. There was a memorandum telling everybody, if you’ve heard anything of this, please erase it from your mind. That was the kind of approach they had.

Cathryn Carson: Anyone want to follow on that? Yasunori, or no?

Yasunori Nomura: Oh, no, no. I just said I hope I could erase bad memory or something. No, but I don’t know, if you want. I mean, two things come to my mind, just something quite [inaudible] from what you’re talking.

One is how quick. I mean, it’s a wartime science, it’s probably completely different from what we’re doing. But I just learned that even the concept of the bomb changed around ’44 and then changing the organization of the thing. And then in ’45, July, I think mid-July, right? Trinity experiment, July 16, if I remember. And then August 6th was used in Hiroshima. And then August 9th in Nagasaki. So, it’s really very fast development and it’s just a week and a month and very intense. The atmosphere must be extremely intense, which I can only imagine. I probably cannot imagine. It’s just completely out of the scale of anything we are doing right now.

The second thing is, given all these things Oppenheimer is directing around the age, I don’t know, late 30s, I think. And given that, I think it’s very amazing, because he was here in 1930-ish, and one of the biggest of his contributions to science was the black hole. It’s nothing to do with the bomb. He was really scientist and a science, really thinking. You mentioned a nuclear astrophysicist. A lot of nuclear astrophysicists worry about the fate of the stars and so on. Usually, if the stars… Sorry, I’m talking about physics [inaudible], OK.

So, if the stars burning out all the kind of energies, usually gravity is pouring everything because gravity is attraction. It’s pouring matters towards center. And usually that’s balanced with the energy created by burning. And in the case of sun, it’s a nuclear burning. This is actually what it’s used in hydrogen bomb, essentially same mechanism, that energy. And then if the energy is used up, it’s just only gravity remains and what happens, a lot of people debating that.

The one that his contribution is that if the mass of that particle exceeds a certain limit that he computed, it was factor a few off, but it’s just the idea was correct. And then, nothing can stop this collapse, gravitational, collapsible things. And he concluded that becomes something what we call now black holes, which is a very pure science so far. OK, I hope there is no black hole bomb or anything.

So, it’s a very academic thing he was doing only five years earlier than this developing bomb and then make a decision to use that bomb. That’s very, I don’t know. I want to watch the movie. All these things must be described there, that’s very hard to imagine.

Cathryn Carson: One thing that’s absolutely clear as historians looking at the dynamic is just how much happens step-by-step in incredibly short times. So, theories about particles that weren’t known to exist until the 1930s end up being the underlying explanation for how you could build both a fission and a fusion bomb.

And also one of the things that comes through in my sense, very, very effectively in the movie is looking at those weeks of July and August of 1945, when not only was there a test with uncertainty about what the outcome would be, but the tight tie-in to the unfolding of the war in exactly what ended up as the last weeks of the war. So, that sense of radical uncertainty and yet incredible concentration of attention and resources on producing an enormously expensive weapon that is then put into use at the very end of the war.

One of the things, thinking about this historically, often we historians go back and forth with counterfactuals, and I’m going to feed in one of the questions that’s come from the audience already. If someone else had been in charge of Los Alamos, would the timeline have been met to do the Trinity test on July 16th, knowing that Potsdam conference was going to follow immediately afterwards, and that the looking ahead to the invasion of Japan was so close up front. Could someone else have actually brought to the, with quotes around it, if you like, success of the Manhattan Project, given the very tight timing that was involved? Counterfactuals are tricky, but what do you say?

Mark Chadwick: Yeah, sure.

Cathryn Carson: Yeah, go for it.

Mark Chadwick: I mean, we love Oppenheimer. Los Alamos is still the lab that derives its culture from him, and he’s the hero there. But it took me quite a while before I appreciated something about the race to make the bomb, because I’m a physicist as well. I used to think that all the interesting challenges and problems were physics problems. The hydrodynamics, the how to deal with these instabilities, how to pull off the implosion.

At the end of the day, I actually think there was only one thing that set the timetable, and that was production. Production of uranium from Oak Ridge and plutonium from Hanford. And Oppenheimer played a role in that, but a very modest role. It was really Groves with other leaders who were setting the pace for that. And one way or another, that material just wasn’t available until, of course, until the spring of 1945 and the bomb would, some kind of bomb, successful bomb would’ve been produced on that timeframe.

Cathryn Carson: Jon?

Jon Else: Well, in answer to your question, if someone else had been in charge, I think it depends on, I agree with Mark, I think. But it depends on who would’ve been in charge, because there’s the matter of actually producing the bomb, and then there’s the matter of using it.

And if, for instance, someone from the Chicago lab, Fermi, had been in charge, perhaps there would’ve been more discussion within the project and in Washington about what exactly to do with this weapon that we now know works. Should there be, should we do a demonstration? Which is another counterfactual that we will never know if that would’ve worked. If Fermi was there, surrounded by James Franck and a number of people who [inaudible], people who had at various times in their careers, big reservations about what the ultimate use of this weapon would be. Who can say?

Cathryn Carson: I think Karl and Yasunori may have something to say on this, too?

Yasunori Nomura: Sorry, just because you mentioned Fermi, I just read that the Fermi was proposing even more dramatic thing of poisoning. Nuclear poisoning of food, things he may have been going to the other direction, an even more extreme thing.

Karl van Bibber: And I would just add, it comes back to this issue of it’s not simply, you know, you might initially say what a guy like Lawrence, who’s the great organizational man, the creator of big science. But the fact is that it was this very astute quarterbacking and a person with just uncanny intuition about the decision to make when decisions have to be made in a snap.

And I think, yes, that’s right. The gun-driven bomb, that was going to work. And so we would’ve had some bomb at the end of the war, and Mark was right. It was really limited by production. On the other hand, I think getting the plutonium bomb as quickly as possible, probably Oppenheimer was unmatched in terms of his intuition of how to navigate that. There were others that could have done it.

Mark Chadwick: I think General Groves was perhaps somebody who might be given even the most credit for actually pulling everything together. And his relationship with Oppenheimer is an amazing kind of thing to talk about. Now, it’s true that it’s said that there was no unpopularity contest at Los Alamos that Groves would not have won in a vote. So, amongst the staff, he was not very popular, but I think he played a really special role in knowing how to pull that project together.

Jon Else: Interestingly, a great fan of General Groves was Frank Oppenheimer, Robert’s brother. He spoke very, very highly of Grove’s leadership during the war. It’s an unlikely fan club.

Cathryn Carson: So, we’ve touched on physicists’ involvement in the decision to use nuclear weapons. Touched on it only very gingerly so far, because it’s obviously a point of deep contestation and concern. Maybe Jon, you could begin by describing some of the dialogues among scientists in the spring of ’45 or even earlier as it became…

Jon Else: Yeah, I mean, I’ll wade into these dark waters. I mean, we have to frame this by understanding that the spring of 1945, the choices were appalling, the choices to anyone in Washington or in Europe or in Japan, for that matter.

We were in the fifth year of the bloodiest war in history. And I will be the first to admit that I can’t say what I would’ve done. Now, there were, within the Manhattan Project in Chicago, there was a petition calling for caution about, “Let’s not use this weapon right now.”

Robert Wilson, famously at Los Alamos, physicist Robert Wilson, who had been a young grad student of Oppenheimer’s, convened the now famous seminar and they called it the impact of the Gadget on civilization, in which he raised the question, we now know that, “This thing’s going to work. We expect it’s going to work. Should we step back and should we think about our responsibility as scientists going forward? Should we advise? Should we raise our voices in how the weapon should be used, or should we simply say that our job that we were assigned is done and let folks who understand more about the policy make the decision?”

Robert Oppenheimer himself was on the target committee, which convened in Washington. He advocated in favor of using the weapon on civilians. He predicted, I think Oppenheimer’s prediction would be that there were 20,000 civilians were likely to die if it was used on a city. The figure, of course, is about four or five times that in the immediate death toll. The Frank Petition, as many people know, made it to Los Alamos, was dismissed by Oppenheimer, and then was promptly classified so that it could not go beyond a select group of folks. So, that’s kind of the background going into the decision.

The other fact underlying this is that Curtis LeMay’s Air Force had been saturation bombing Japan. I mean, the greatest loss of life in human history in the shortest period was the firebombing of Tokyo on, what was it, March 6th? So, the slaughtering of civilians was nothing new to Americans and to American policymakers by that time.

Cathryn Carson: One of the things that clearly happened with Oppenheimer’s role in the Manhattan Project, and then as he moved into the powerful stature of a scientific adviser after the war, was that he waded into and weighed in on these questions of the morality of the use of atomic weapons, whether fission weapons or later, as the hydrogen bomb came into view, fusion weapons.

One of the questions that may be of interest to discuss on the panel is how has Oppenheimer’s life influenced how we think now about the implications of scientific progress and the responsibilities of scientists who have unique knowledge and capacity to create weapons? How have we learned from his example, or are we still struggling with some of the questions that his life itself raised? Yasunori?

Yasunori Nomura: I think that’s related to the question you prepared, the last question really. Why Oppenheimer [inaudible] now? I think he is one of the first generation that scientist, whom we call scientists, had the real power of affecting and changing the world or even could potentially destroy the world. And then he made important decision and later he thought about it.

But it’s very subtle about this particular thing about the first nuclear bomb because it’s different from using it now. Now we know that this is a dangerous thing, we know the consequence, long-time pollution of the environment and so on. And so we have a kind of common understanding that we should not use this stuff. To which, by the way, he really contributed. He was one of the first people who really pushed that this weapon should never be used. And that’s why of course, he contradicted with the [inaudible], and then probably that contributed his termination of the security clearance. Of course, communist, blah, blah, blah, a lot of stuff. But I think that contributed. I think he was opposed to using this kind of weapon, never again.

And so, that kind of thing, it stays even now. May not be in the nuclear front, maybe in the biology front and so on, cloning technology and so on. And I think, I personally think that the scientist who really knows what that is, but don’t know, of course, because scientists do not know everything. That’s very, very important to recognize. But scientists know at least the best about the technological path, participating in the discussion of how to use it. It’s very important, and he laid out that path, and that’s probably one of the biggest legacy of him.

I think we should keep thinking about that this is not a yes or no and a very simple issue, but it’s very, very important. And my personal opinion is that scientists participating in the decision, not as a final decision-maker. Final decision-maker must be politician who is selected by people, but participating in the discussion, makes real sense and he was the first example of that. That’s what I would say.

Karl van Bibber: When I read your question, getting away from the whole issue about these kind of dual-use technologies and this terrible shadow we live under today of nuclear weapons, the threat of nuclear weapons. There was another, I think, lesson which came out of the Manhattan Project which is in incredibly germane today and has a very strong resonance with today’s condition.

So, initially, General Groves had a different mindset than Oppenheimer, but Oppenheimer could bring him around. At the outset, the Army basically said, “Look, this is going to be a secret project. If we’re going to keep it a secret, we’re going to have to have very tight security here and we’re going to have to compartmentalize,” the word, it’s a very special word in our business, “the various subunits here. Here’s hydrodynamics, here’s theory, here’s neutron physics, here’s fission, and so forth. And these little boxes can’t talk with one another simply to make the information hermetic.”

And Oppenheimer and the scientists leading this basically told Groves, “No, we cannot do this if we compartmentalize.” And so, Grove was convinced that he actually committed two mortal sins in this business. One was against all the admonitions of the security people, all the Europeans that were coming over, he said, “We have to basically clear them all if we’re going to get this thing done, we’re going to get it done in a crash program, we need all of these brains here.” And they knew very well that there would be would be Soviet espionage going on.

And then, the second was the whole thing of allowing scientists to do what they do best, which is to talk across boundaries. This was a multiphysics, multidisciplinary thing. We could not have done this had people been in their little boxes and not been able to talk with one another. And that was, I think the great, the secret sauce, the efficacy of the program.

And Groves was no fool. He knew very well that there were diplomatic pouches flying out almost every day from the U.S. to the Soviet Union and in fact, that’s exactly the case. We had the Klaus Fuchs, we had the Rosenbergs and so forth. But we got there and we got there first.

Today, we have a very interesting and acrimonious and consequential national dialogue going on having to do with protection of our intellectual property, federally funded property. And Berkeley is right in the crosshairs of this and every research university about this. And we have this tension going on, this sort of dialectic between the State Department and the Commerce Department, export control, ITAR, and yet academic freedom and getting the job done when we’re funded, given hundreds of billions of dollars by NAH and NSF and DOE.

There is one course which is basically saying we have to put on very, very, very strict controls. I think the academics, I think rightfully, say no. I mean, you can’t bottle up information that’s going to get out anyway and we need the brains of these young people coming over and we have to be open. And I think the lesson we derive from that, the right answer, is that you can’t bottle up information. What the U.S. needs to do is simply run faster, invest more and keep ahead. You can’t bottle up information like this. Mark, comment on this, the whole compartmentalization issue and the history of…

Mark Chadwick: Yes, I think Oppenheimer deserves great credit for that, because he was right that the only way for science to proceed is through the interchange of ideas. So many ideas come from sparks of creativity that come through interaction, discussion. And he was able at Los Alamos to bring together a remarkable group of people who came from all over the world.

And that’s another legacy, actually. Bringing, welcoming foreigners into Los Alamos and that’s still a culture we have today. And I would say there’s still tension with the government in trying to understand how to manage the right boundaries between constraints of information which are appropriate, and at the same time information flow.

But we at Los Amos do have a kind of view that there’s a large amount of what we’ve called just kind of classified information that people with acute clearance should all have because the only way to succeed as a lab is to learn from each other. And right now, it’s more important we have free flow of information, especially as we have so much turnover of retirees that we really need to bring in young staff and educate them and have open interactions. So, that culture is still there.

I was particularly interested by the earlier comments about the complexities of Oppenheimer’s role in speaking his mind and being a thought leader for the moral challenges regarding nuclear weapons. That’s still with us today, of course.

I think in many ways, the tragedy is that we’ve all become a bit numbed to it. I mean, we’ve lived with it for 75 years, and the risks of nuclear war, nuclear disaster are still there. I think maybe Oppenheimer and his thinking was setting the groundwork for things like the future non-proliferation treaty, where many governments, most governments have signed onto the idea of a future vision where we will not have nuclear weapons. And that’s kind of a vision that seems like an awful long way away. But for humanity, somehow, I think we need to get there one day.

At the same time, I think as I look at that early history, I would say whilst many of us sympathize with Oppenheimer’s struggles and thinking, I actually personally think he also was a bit naive about what we were up against with the Soviet Union. The arguments between Teller and Oppenheimer, for example. I suspect at the end of the day, Teller was probably right in realizing that the Soviets would be a terrible threat to us if they had the hydrogen bomb before us. And Oppenheimer I don’t think fully appreciated that, and that there’s an important kind of hard power that needs to go behind the liberal democracies that we value.

Yasunori Nomura: Privilege of being a panelist, one question people might be interested to. What’s the policy of the cell phone at Los Alamos? To the extent you can tell us? Yeah, what’s the policy about the cell phone in Los Alamos?

Mark Chadwick: Well, we’re not allowed them behind the fence.

Yasunori Nomura: Oh, sorry. Yeah. Was the microphone on? No.

Mark Chadwick: No. We are not allowed to have the cell phones behind the fence.

Yasunori Nomura: Ah.

Mark Chadwick: Makes sense.

Yasunori Nomura: OK.

Cathryn Carson: So I’m going to draw us a little bit back to Berkeley as we move towards closing this part of the discussion and opening up to more questions from the audience. We talked at the beginning about how Berkeley shaped Oppenheimer. We talked a little bit also about how Oppenheimer shaped Berkeley at that time. In what ways did Oppenheimer’s role in the Manhattan Project shape this institution that we are now in?

Jon Else: Well, Cathryn Carson convened a marvelous symposium about 10 years ago, the Oppenheimer Centennial, more than 10 years ago, 2004. And I remember on the website…

Cathryn Carson: Convened with my colleague David Hollinger, who’s also here.

Jon Else: I remember on the website for that, you wrote that the University of California became and remains the only public university in the world under contract to its government to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Cathryn Carson: That’s a quote from Oppenheimer himself.

Jon Else: Is that from Oppenheimer or from you?

Cathryn Carson: That’s not from me.

Jon Else: Oh, it’s not. I credited you with that. Well, it’s an interesting and a true fact, I believe. And the university has struggled with that, I think, over the years. I, for one, am perfectly comfortable having Mark as a colleague at Los Alamos, but it’s come and gone.

Cathryn Carson: Another way that the university drew benefits for itself out of the relationship was the enormous funding that the War Department sent to Lawrence after the Second World War. Knowing that keeping the Reserve Army of Physicists available for the next conflict was going to mean investing in growing a generation of theorists and experimentalists.

The growth of Berkeley Physics after the Second World War was in the wake of, in the shadow of Los Alamos. Understanding that the fast mobilization that Oppenheimer was able to carry out of his colleagues for the Second World War could not be left to chance in the view of the military establishment in the United States.

So, there’s very much a sense in which Berkeley Physics after the Second World War was built on the reputation created by the success of Manhattan Project in delivering the weapon.

Mark Chadwick: Yes. I think maybe we talked a bit about the big science, I think Karl used that phrase, that people often look to Los Alamos as one of the first examples of big science where the community comes together to bring many different disciplines together. But as you said, really, Lawrence’s accelerator project just up at the hill at Berkeley was the beginnings of that. And after the war, the remarkable breakthroughs in accelerator technologies that this country helped create was a wonderful offshoot from that kind of tradition.

Maybe there’s one other thing that I don’t know if you all know, but in terms of the history of fusion and hydrogen bombs, one of the key phenomena that we need for a successful fusion process is a large deuterium-tritium reaction rate. DT fusion is how we make fusion. It’s how the whole world is trying to make commercial magnetically-controlled fusion. It’s how Livermore makes fusion with ICF, with initial confined fusion with lasers. But it all resides on the DT process.

And for the very first measurement of the DT cross-section, tritium doesn’t exist in nature. And so, in 1942, when this meeting in Berkeley happened, they realized they’d really need to measure this cross-section. And the only place that they could actually make the tritium was actually act at Lawrence’s accelerator up on the hill here. So, they managed to make tritium not using a reactor, but using Lawrence’s accelerator. And that led to this breakthrough that they discovered the DT cross-section was a hundred times bigger than anybody thought. So, it’s a kind of exciting story that goes back to the very early days.

Cathryn Carson: At this point, we’re going to move towards questions from the audience. I’m going to maybe reserve one final question for all of us at the end, but I want to make the first question from the audience from my colleague, David Hollinger, who Jon Else, I had mentioned, we co-organized the Oppenheimer Centennial here at Berkeley in 2004.

And his question points us directly to the movie. For those of you who have seen the movie, is there anything you wish that the director would have included in the movie but did not? This is a tough one because it requires thinking about what’s not there.

Jon Else: Well, I’ll dive in. I felt it was… Well, first of all, I liked the movie, and I’m not going to try to remake Christopher Nolan’s movie. But I found the exclusion of any imagery from Hiroshima odd. We have three hours leading up to the test at Trinity, which is probably the most highly dramatized 10 seconds in history now with all the films and plays and operas, and that leads directly to Hiroshima. And in the film, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to tell you that we experience Hiroshima with an off-camera, off-screen slideshow, and we’re looking at Oppenheimer’s face responding to the slides.

I thought that was an interesting choice, let me put it that way. I think it let us off easy, frankly. I was also surprised that Robert Wilson, who convened the Gadget and the Future of Civilization seminar, had been replaced by a woman physicist, that Robert Wilson does not really appear anywhere in the film. So, those are my two things that if Christopher Nolan called me up and said, “How should I change the film?” That’s what I would answer.

Mark Chadwick: Firstly, I thought it was a fantastic movie, it was really amazing. But I had two criticisms, really. One was that the British really got screwed. I mean, the British hardly played any role. And the only role was Klaus Fuchs, who was promoted to be the group leader of hydrodynamics and he wasn’t, that was Rudolph Peierls. But the British role was really quite significant. And not only did they get everything going really with the Frisch-Peierls memorandum, but they had invented the high explosives formulations that we used, both Beratol and Cambi. They had invented the ideas of shape chargers that became the implosion.

One of the key mettalurgists who learned how to make the right alloy of plutonium that could be machined, Cyril Stanley Smith, was a British man who had come to work for the American Brass Company, and that’s a good background if you want to make alloys. So there was really quite a depth of British contributions that wasn’t presented at all.

I think the only other thing I didn’t like was that Los Alamos, if you’ve ever been there, is wonderfully high in the Jemez Mountains. It’s in a ponderosa forest and they filmed it near Abiquiú, down on the valley floor. And it was very beautiful, but it wasn’t high in the mountains. And in fact, the only scene that had ponderosas was actually in my backyard. So, they did do one of the scenes where Oppenheimer was crying after he’d heard about his lover’s death. And I think my wife here was actually watching them film it just down behind our house. But everything else was lacking in beautiful mountain scenery.

Jon Else: I just landed last night, too. We both landed last night.

Cathryn Carson: OK. You haven’t. And I just saw it on Wednesday having come back from a trip.

Jon Else: So, what would you say, what do you think?

Cathryn Carson: Oppenheimer’s at the center of so many different possible stories that we can tell, and this one felt extremely familiar. Familiar in the sense of it was the story that accompanied my own contemplations in the 1980s about whether I wanted to become a theoretical physicist during what ended up being the last years of the Cold War, but we didn’t know that at the time.

Thinking about the choices of politics and moral decision of moving into a field that was so profoundly shaped by the experience of Los Alamos. And in some sense, it very much brought me back to those earlier years of my own life.

I spent years studying physics and only dropped it after a master’s, in part because I discovered the pleasures of history. In some sense, a very familiar story now dramatized. And in another sense, I’m looking for different stories to tell.

One of my interesting experiences as chair of the Berkeley history department has been hiring a new assistant professor, Dmitri Brown, who is working on a Tewa history of Los Alamos. Dmitri is of the Tewa people of the area around Los Alamos and finding ways to re-narrate and re-understand what up until now has been a very classic, almost stereotyped focus on the singular mentality of the man at the top of the scientific pyramid.

So, I would not ask for Christopher Nolan to do a different film, but I would be looking for the next dramatists who will tell the next set of stories. So, in that sense, it was very much a sort of homecoming experience to go back through the film.

I mean, I still love Jon Else’s film more than anything, so I don’t want to. Jon, your film shaped my own life and the decision to do the Oppenheimer Centennial here, and yet the pluralization of the stories that we tell about Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, the representation of different perspectives feels to me like an opportunity now.

Jon Else: Let me just speak to that. I think that perhaps Christopher Nolan has opened the door for now much more adventuresome pieces of art about Oppenheimer. We were stuck with doing The Day After Trinity, with doing the very first film about Oppenheimer. And we started out to make a very opaque, essayistic art film, and we realized nobody would watch it and our job was to introduce a very wide public to Oppenheimer.

And I think Christopher Nolan’s film, whatever it is, I think the film is succeeding, obviously, in bringing a cultural urgency to the question of weapons, to the questions of the scientists’ responsibility. It resonates with all sorts of current issues, as Karl pointed out. So, maybe you can thank Nolan for opening up the door to the sorts of art you’d like to see coming ahead.

Yasunori Nomura: It must have been very difficult to do that, especially in the current atmosphere of the country, a lot of varying opinion, which is not necessarily agreeing. And so to some extent, some of the complaints might be kind of necessary things to get people together to the entry point of learning more. But anyway, I haven’t watched the movie. I’m really looking forward to it.

Cathryn Carson: I’m going to go to another question from the audience, and I’m sorry there are so many wonderful questions here that I can’t get to them all. But let me pick one that might be a little bit less intense than what we’ve been struggling with recently. Did any of the panelists meet Oppenheimer or his brother Frank and have a personal story to share? I think we could expand that also to anyone in this larger orbit of personalities, which might bring in some more comments.

Jon Else: Well, Frank is present throughout all of these conversations. Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother, Frank, an experimental physicist, and the be

Jon Else: Well, Frank is present throughout all of these conversations. Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother, Frank, an experimental physicist, and the beloved founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

I knew Frank quite well. I made a film about Frank, actually, after I did the film about Robert. And I was fortunate enough when we made the day after Trinity to meet a lot of these people. I spent time with Robert Serber, I spent time with Haakon Chevalier, with Frank Oppenheimer, obviously. We interviewed Bethe, we interviewed Robbie.

Frank was the most interesting of them, I have to… Well, I knew him better. I can’t say anyone is more interesting than Robbie or Bethe. And what I loved with all of these men was their descriptions of going to the Oppenheimer Ranch in the Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico. I mean, we have to remember that the Wild West is very much part of the Oppenheimer saga.

And the Oppenheimer brothers first leased and then purchased a marvelous 19th century cabin up in the mountains near Cowles, New Mexico. And these folks would all convene there. I mean, the world of physics that later became Los Alamos would convene for a month of drinking whiskey and as they said, eating graham crackers and riding through the wilderness at night in a thunderstorm talking about neutrons. And Frank’s description of that and Serber’s descriptions of that, I wish I could have been there. I mean, it must have been magic.

Karl van Bibber: I only met Frank briefly once, shortly after I had moved to the West Coast, and it was about the time he made the film, because I saw him sitting at the next table in the cafe at the old place where the Exploratorium was, and I was stunned. I introduced myself briefly, we didn’t have much of a conversation.

But I think what I think so powerfully resonated with me about your documentary, Jon, was so many of the people you interviewed are people I knew or people I saw in the footage there that were my professors at MIT or whose books I had read.

And one person I don’t think you interviewed, but he shows up in the pictures, is Viki, Victor Weisskopf, who was an Austrian-born physicist, and he was chair of the Department of Physics when I entered as a freshman. And I remember he gave a talk once at my fraternity, and I think he told an amazing story, which I thought might end up in your documentary, but it turns out that the morning of the Trinity test, they still had this violent thunderstorm going on. The shot was supposed to go off, I think at 5:00 a.m., and it was delayed by 30 minutes.

And what happened is they were waiting there, and of course everybody’s nerves were on edge, and it turns out one thing they did not remember was the local radio station turned on at 6:00 a.m. And every morning, just as the countdown starts going, 10, 9, 8, the radio station started playing “The Blue Danube.” And he said it was the most… And anyway, he says one of the most amazing things that colored his memory of it is this conjunction of listening to “The Blue Danube” when this bomb was going off. It was kind of amazing.

Jon Else: At that very moment, thousands of frogs had been awakened in by the rain pools from the thunderstorm, and they began this extraordinary loud copulating. So, the Trinity test was accompanied by “The Blue Danube” and by frog sex suddenly interrupted by the loudest noise humans had ever created.

Mark Chadwick: Yes, I got to Las Alamos in 1990, maybe. I started coming in the late ’80s as a summer student from England. And the only, really, person from that era who I was able to collaborate with closely was Heinz Marshall, a remarkable experimental physicist who was an emigre from Germany, a Jew trying to escape, etc. And he was a remarkable person to be able to interact with scientifically. We would really enjoy seeing Bethe and Feinman and Teller and others coming through the lab and giving lectures. And so that was a privilege to see them, but I never really knew them.

I mean, somebody who I think would be interesting to talk about a little bit is Hans Bethe, because Oppenheimer didn’t spend a lot of time at the lab after the Manhattan Project, but Hans Bethe did. And there was a long tradition of bringing back these academics who had played a key role in the Manhattan Project back for the summers. They would come back as consultants and we would benefit from their expertise and they would enjoy coming and bringing their grad students, and we would hire their grad students. So, it was a really advantageous thing for our lab.

And Bethe, I think Bethe played a special role. He loved Los Alamos. Some of the complexities regarding Oppenheimer’s struggling with nuclear, Bethe certainly had shared, as well. He was a remarkable physicist and he also had a major impact on the lab in terms of the discipline of writing up your work carefully. I think it was perhaps his methodical, German background. But he was famous not just for being somebody who could calculate anything by laying out a program and going step by step and solving any problem. He was the first division leader of the theoretical division.

But he also started a process where every month, each group leader was expected to write a very detailed monthly progress report. And those monthly progress reports are a remarkable historical summary of the process they were going through at the lab to try to solve the problems they were solving. And I think Bethe sort of set that expectation and the rest of the lab followed. And to this day, we sort of have some of those same traditions. I guess I was going to ask Jon, maybe he’s not quite as flamboyant as Oppie, but could a documentary be made about Bethe, do you think?

Jon Else: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Bethe told me that Oppenheimer was the smartest of all of us. Which is quite something coming from Hans Bethe, and I think he meant it. Yeah, I think Bethe was contemplative and eloquently plain-spoken in a way that often escaped Oppenheimer. I mean, Oppenheimer often, when you listen to a sentence that’s a paragraph long and it’s wonderful and takes your breath away and then you try to figure out what he actually meant. Hans Bethe, in my experience, was much more direct. I mean, he provides the topic sentence of the film I did about the first atomic bomb. He says that it’s the very first thing out of the gate in the movie. He says, “You may well ask how people with kind hearts and humanist values can go and work on weapons of mass destruction.” And that actually was the idea that got me going on.

Karl van Bibber: Thank you for bringing up Hans Bethe, who I’ve always had extraordinary reverence for. And I got to know him a little bit because when I was an assistant professor at Stanford, he’d visit often and the department chair asked me to shuttle him around campus if he needed to go over to Hoover Institute or such and such. And I’d be sweating bullets because I had this old jalopy that was worth about $50, and I was afraid the car would break down halfway going a mile across campus.

But the thing that really came out in this interview in your film, which is extraordinary, about the man is his modesty and humility and fairness in dealing with every topic. And I think when he said that Oppenheimer was head-and-shoulders clearly the superior of us all, I might dissent with that. I think Oppenheimer was very much his equal. And the thing I also remembered from the interview, the thing he says that after the Trinity, after Hiroshima, he said three things went through our mind. He said, “It has been accomplished, what we set out to do has been done.” And then he said, “The second is, what have we done?” And the third is, “This must never happen again.” And that came out in the interview in your documentary.

Cathryn Carson: That may be the note to end on. That may be the note to end on. So, I think Steve will be closing us. Have I got that right?

Steve Kahn: Right. I hope everybody will agree that this was a marvelous discussion. And I especially want to thank our panel of Cathryn, Mark, Jon, Yasunori, and Karl. Clearly you guys could go on for another five hours if we let you, but everybody else has some things to do, I presume.

Thanks to the audience for a very rich set of questions. As Cathryn said, we weren’t able to get to many of them, but the ones we did get to certainly brought out different topics. We appreciate your coming and hopefully look forward to future events on timely topics like this. I think the vast attendance we’ve had at this, and especially on the video channel as well, is a testament to the interest in the local community on two topics of significance in today’s age. Thanks again for coming.

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Outro: You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes with transcripts and photos on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.