The great synthesiser

14 Oct 2023

After watching Oppenheimer recently, I turned to reading American Prometheus, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin that apparently inspired Nolan to make the movie.

Not having known very much about Oppenheimer before watching the film, I’ll admit to feeling like the film still left me a little in the dark as to the true nature of Oppenheimer’s genius. Why, for instance, was he—above all other physicists who seemed more comfortable with the experimental and not just theoretical side of things—appointed as the one to lead the national American endeavor to produce the world’s first atomic bomb?

In fact, Colonel Leslie R. Groves (played by Matt Damon in the film), who was put in charge of overseeing the bomb project, said that the “scientific leaders of that era” were opposed to the suggestion of Oppenheimer’s appointment as director of the Manhattan Project laboratory. According to the book’s authors, one of the drawbacks Groves perceived to Oppenheimer’s selection was apparently that he “lacked a Nobel Prize and Groves thought that might make it difficult for him to direct the activities of so many of his colleagues who had won that prestigious award”. And for another, he was more of a theorist (the film did make the point that he was incompetent at lab work), when one would assume that building an atomic bomb would require more practical talents.

Add to all this the fact that he was said to have terrible administrative qualities—one peer said he couldn’t be depended to run a burger stand, much less a bomb-making lab—why, then, was he ultimately judged to be the man for the job?

According to the authors, from testimonials gleaned from his peers, it was above all because he was an “articulate synthesizer” of knowledge. They wrote:

While Oppenheimer was a theorist who knew how incompetent he was in the laboratory, he nevertheless stayed close to experimentalists like Lawrence. Unlike many European theorists, he appreciated the potential benefit from close collaboration with those who were involved in testing the validity of the new physics. Even in high school, his teachers had noted his gift for explaining technical things in plain language. As a theorist who understood what the experimentalists were doing in the laboratory, he had that rare quality of being able to synthesise a great mass of information from disparate fields of research.

And also: he could then explain it better than anyone else. A peer, Martin D. Kamen, called him “the official explainer”.

Hans Bethe said, “His grasp of problems was immediate—he could often understand an entire problem after he had heard a single sentence.”

According to David Hawkins: “He was very persuasive, very cogent, elegant in language and able to listen to what other people said and incorporate it in what he would say. I had the impression that he was a good politician in the sense that if several people spoke he could summarise what they said and they would discover that they had agreed with each other as a result of his summary.”

But this strength of Oppenheimer’s was also the reason, judged the authors, that he never won the Nobel Prize: “the Nobel Prize is a distinction awarded to scientists who achieve something specific. By contrast, Oppenheimer’s genius lay in his ability to synthesize the entire field of study.”

The way they saw it: “Robert did not have the patience to stick with any one problem very long. As a result, it was frequently he who opened the door through which others then walked to make major discoveries.”

As they illustrated in more detail:

“Oppenheimer’s work with [Hartland] Snyder is, in retrospect, remarkably complete and an accurate mathematical description of the collapse of a black hole,” observed Kip Thorne, a Caltech theoretical physicist. “It was hard for people of that era to understand the paper because the things that were being smoked out of the mathematics were so different from any mental picture of how things should behave in the universe.”

Characteristically, however, Oppenheimer never took the time to develop anything so elegant as a theory of the phenomenon, leaving this achievement to others decades later. And the question remains: Why? Personality and temperament appear to be critical. Robert instantly saw the flaws in any idea almost as soon as he had conceived it. Whereas some physicists—Edward Teller immediately comes to mind—badly and optimistically promoted all of their new ideas, regardless of their flaws, Oppenheimer’s rigorous critical faculties made him profoundly skeptical. “Oppie was always pessimistic about all the ideas,” recalled Serber. Turned on himself, his brilliance denied him he dogged conviction that is sometimes necessary for pursuing and developing original theoretical insights. Instead, his skepticism invariably propelled him on to the next problem. Having made the initial creative leap, in this case to black-hole theory, Oppenheimer quickly moved on to another new topic, meson theory.

I’m still making my way through this heft of a book, among others. (Yes, I read multiple nonfiction books at once, though just one novel at any one time 😅) I just wanted to share this because I thought it was interesting, and because I relate very much to the part where Oppenheimer was “profoundly skeptical” of all his ideas. I mean, I’ll often think I have a brilliant idea, but then I’ll rethink it, and question it, and rethink it some more, and then more likely than not, I’ll end up thinking it’s not a great idea after all and fail to even start pursuing it.

Also, I’ve been worrying a little over my long-term outlook on writing lately, and I guess this made me reflect some on what I think my strengths and proclivities are in this work I’ve always been so sure I wanted to devote myself to.