Richard Feynman, the Genius, (the title of his biography by James Gleick) was thrilled when he learned that the Descriptive Astronomy can be considered a required course in humanity at MIT. I was surprised to learn that A.J. Jacobs, in his The-Know-It-All, says Feynman read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In contrast to Richard Feynman, J Robert Oppenheimer is a completely different breed of physicist. While Feynman couldn’t tolerate any non-scientific reading, Oppenheimer enjoyed French literature and Shakespeare, wrote poetry; sometimes in French, read Dante aloud in Italian, gave a lecture in Dutch six weeks after arriving Netherlands to study with Ehrenfest. And of course he knew German well as it was at Göttingen where he thrived. He studied Greek and Latin before going to Harvard in 1922. When Alfred North Whitehead arrived on Harvard campus, he was one of the only two undergraduates had the courage to sign up for a course with the philosopher and mathematician. The following is from his obituary in the New York Times.
“On a train trip from San Francisco to the East Coast he read Edward Gibbon's seven-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. On another such trip he read the four volumes of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in German.”They do share many similar characteristics: Jewish, outrageous intellect and quick mind, charismatic, and handsome. Both lack ‘music cells’ (a Chinese expression of saying one has no musical talent) Even though Feynman was a gifted drummer; he didn’t read the musical notes. And Oppie never could ‘suffer’ through or beyond the first act of an opera. After the success of the Trinity (the code name of the test explosion of the first atomic bomb), the mood at Los Alamos was elated and Feynman ‘was sitting on the hood of a jeep beating his bango drum.’
It was during his stay with Paul Ehrenfest at Holland that he obtained the nick name of ‘Opje’ which was anglicized into ‘Oppie’ by students at Berkeley. (A non-English language transforming into more English language is called ‘anglicize. Jo, this is how Oppie got his nickname.)
Oppie graduated from Harvard in 1925 with a degree in chemistry in 3 years; when he petitioned to take upper-level of physics courses, he listed 15 books he claimed to have read. A professor quipped, “Obviously if he [Oppenheimer] says he’s read these books, he is a liar, but he should get a Ph.D. for knowing these titles.” “He was assigned a single room in Standish Hall, a freshman dormitory facing the Charles River.” (Janice, apparently the freshmen’s dorms were not in the Yard then.)
When it was announced that Oppei will head the Manhattan Project, one scientist remarked, “He couldn’t run a hamburger stand.’ This is reminiscent of what E.O. Wilson said of James Watson when the latter was appointed as the Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Lab, “He couldn’t run a lemonade stand.” Both turned out to be a resounding success.
After graduating from Harvard, he went to Cavendish Lab at Cambridge U. where be barely survived (This was also where Watson & Crick figured out the DNA structure.) and Göttingen U at Germany, where he thrived. So he was at the 2 of the 3 birth places of the quantum mechanics at the time every thing was happening. He was in the company of an extraordinary collection of the greatest physicists. His mentor, Max Born (also a Jew, whose granddaughter is Olivia Newton-John of the Grease fame; this is why Olivia was born in Cambridge, England), coined the term quantum mechanics in 1924. Heisenberg, Eugene Wigner, Wlofgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi were also under Born's wings.
On his second tour to Europe, he wanted to spend 6 months with Bohr at Copenhagen, but his mentor, Ehrenfest (mathematician and theoretic physicist) then suggested him to go to Pauli for a better match, otherwise, he would have studied at all 3 birth places of quantum mechanics. In May 1927, when he sat down for his Ph.D. oral exam at Göttingen U, one of his examiners, James Franck (got a Nobel 2 years earlier) told a colleague, “I got out of there just in time. He was beginning to ask me questions.” In the world of quantum physics, “Niels Bohr was God, and Oppie was his prophet.”
His greatest gift is his intellect, quick mind, and capacity to understand things esoteric and was not known for his original idea which is a prerequisite for a Nobel Prize. The only exception that I am aware is Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which is all Oppenheimer’s idea. His understanding of quantum mechanics was incomparable in its breadth and depth in his time. He was nominated for the Nobel after the War; and his direct association with the atomic bomb probably wouldn’t help.
And this same characteristic also explains why he was chosen as the Director of Manhattan Project and later the Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. It was James Conant (then Harvard President) said he should be the man for the job.
A cultivated scientist, “a linguist of eight tongues” who once said, “Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful .” A Renaissance man, indeed he was. Let me conclude by quoting from his obituary of the New York Times which touched the scientific and spiritual quest that marked his life.
As he clung to one of the uprights in the desert control room that July morning and saw the mushroom clouds rising in the explosion, a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Hindu sacred epic, flashed through his mind. He related it later as:
“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.”And as the black, then gray, atomic cloud pushed higher above Point Zero, another line--"I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds"--came to him from the same scripture.
