Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb

But Oppenheimer’s revulsion from what he considered vulgar, from just those “hard, crude methods” to which Rabi refers, must have been another and more directly punishing confusion. His elegant physics, so far as an outsider can tell—his scientific papers are nearly impenetrable to the nonmathematician and deliberately so—is a physics of bank shots. It works the sides and the corners and uses the full court but prefers not to drive relentlessly for the goal. Wolfgang Pauli and the hard, distant Cambridge theoretician Paul A. M. Dirac, Eugene Wigner’s brother-in-law, both mathematicians of formidable originality, were his models. Oppenheimer first described the so-called tunnel effect whereby an uncertainly located particle sails through the electrical barrier around the nucleus on a light breeze of probability, existing—in particle terms—then ceasing to exist, then instantly existing again on the other side. 549But George Gamow, the antic Russian, lecturing in Cambridge, devised the tunnel-effect equations that the experimenters used. Hans Bethe in the late 1930s first defined the mechanisms of carbon-cycle thermonuclear burning that fire the stars, work which won for him the Nobel Prize; Oppenheimer looked into the subtleties of the invisible cosmic margins, modeled the imploding collapse of dying suns and described theoretical stellar objects that would not be discovered for thirty and forty years—neutron stars, black holes—because the instruments required to detect them, radio telescopes and X-ray satellites, had not been invented yet. 550(Alvarez believes if Oppenheimer had lived long enough to see these developments he would have won a Nobel Prize for his work.) That was originality not so much ahead of its time as outside the frame.

Some of this psychological and creative convolution winds through a capsule essay on the virtues of discipline that Oppenheimer composed within a letter to his brother Frank in March 1932, when he was not quite twenty-eight years old. It is worth copying out at length; it hints of the long, self-punishing penance he expected to serve to cleanse any stain of crudity from his soul:

You put a hard question on the virtue of discipline. What you say is true: I do value it—and I think that you do too—more than for its earthly fruit, proficiency. I think that one can give only a metaphysical ground for this evaluation; but the variety of metaphysics which gave an answer to your question has been very great, the metaphysics themselves very disparate: the bhagavad gita, Ecclesiastes, the Stoa, the beginning of the Laws, Hugo of St Victor, St Thomas, John of the Cross, Spinoza. This very great disparity suggests that the fact that discipline is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we can learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror—But because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace. 551

Lawrence, orders of magnitude less articulate than Oppenheimer, was also fiercely driven; the question is what drove him. A paragraph from a letter to his brother John, written at about the same time as Oppenheimer’s essay, is revealing: “Interested to hear you have had a period of depression. I have them often—sometimes nothing seems to be OK—but I have gotten used to them now. I expect the blues and I endure them. Of course the best palliative is work, but sometimes it is hard to work under the circumstances.” 552That work is only a “palliative,” not a cure, hints at how blue the blues could be. Lawrence was a hidden sufferer, in some measure manicdepressive; he kept moving not to fall in.

To all these emotional troublings—Oppenheimer’s and Lawrence’s, as Bohr’s and others’ before and since—science offered an anchor: in discovery is the preservation of the world. The psychologist who studied scientists at Berkeley with Rorschach and TAT found that “uncommon sensitivity to experiences—usually sensory experiences” is the beginning of creative discovery in science. “Heightened sensitivity is accompanied in thinking by overalertness to relatively unimportant or tangential aspects of problems. It makes [scientists] look for and postulate significance in things which customarily would not be singled out. It encourages highly individualized and even autistic ways of thinking.” 553Consider Rutherford playing his thoroughly unlikely hunch about alpha backscattering, Heisenberg remembering an obscure remark of Einstein’s and concluding that nature only performed in consonance with his mathematics, Lawrence flipping compulsively through obscure foreign journals:

Were this thinking not in the framework of scientific work, it would be considered paranoid. In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from “normal” positions, and taking risks by departing from reality. The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter’s ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established—and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks. It is specifically because science provides such a framework of rules and regulations to control and set bounds to paranoid thinking that a scientist can feel comfortable about taking the paranoid leaps. Without this structuring, the threat of such unrealistic, illogical, and even bizarre thinking to overall thought and personality organization in general would be too great to permit the scientist the freedom of such fantasying. 554

At the leading edges of science, at the threshold of the truly new, the threat has often nearly overwhelmed. Thus Rutherford’s shock at rebounding alpha particles, “quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life.” Thus Heisenberg’s “deep alarm” when he came upon his quantum mechanics, his hallucination of looking through “the surface of atomic phenomena” into “a strangely beautiful interior” that left him giddy. Thus also, in November 1915, Einstein’s extreme reaction when he realized that the general theory of relativity he was painfully developing in the isolation of his study explained anomalies in the orbit of Mercury that had been a mystery to astronomers for more than fifty years. The theoretical physicist Abraham Pais, his biographer, concludes: “This discovery was, I believe, by far the strongest emotional experience in Einstein’s scientific life, perhaps in all his life. Nature had spoken to him. He had to be right. ‘For a few days, I was beside myself with joyous excitement.’ Later, he told [a friend] that his discovery had given him palpitations of the heart. What he told [another friend] is even more profoundly significant: when he saw that his calculations agreed with the unexplained astronomical observations, he had the feeling that something actually snapped in him.” 555