Oppenheimer: the full story of a complex character

Ray Monk's biography of Oppenheimer reveals a complex character, says?Gino Segre, emeritus?professor?of physics at the University of?Pennsylvania?in Philadelphia

J. Robert Oppenheimer?(Image: Marvin Koner/Corbis)

He was was one of the 20th century's most interesting figures. A mercurial man, by turns charming, arrogant and self-destructive, nobody doubted J. Robert Oppenheimer's quickness of mind or his ability to grasp a problem and solve it. However, he was an unlikely choice as leader of the team assembled to build the first nuclear weapons since he was not an experimental physicist, nor had he led any kind of project before.

What Oppenheimer did have was the backing of powerful people - in particular, his military overseer General Leslie Groves. They entrusted him with enormous responsibility and at times protected him against insinuations that his left-leaning associations made him a security threat and therefore unfit for the position.

In fact, Oppenheimer proved to be an inspired choice. Indeed, it is debatable whether the project would have succeeded at all had it been led by anybody else.

The group that gathered on the New Mexico mesa of Los Alamos included a considerable number of the world's most prominent physicists, mathematicians, chemists and metallurgists. They were mainly young men from a range of backgrounds, many of whom were already world leaders in their fields. With such an ensemble, the project needed a director capable of commanding universal respect, who not only had a comprehensive understanding of all the problems under investigation, but who was also equipped with the tact and sensitivity to guide such a disparate group. They found this and more in Oppenheimer.

His leadership of the Manhattan Project from 1943 to 1945 and the public hearing in 1954 that resulted in the removal of his security clearance are the two most well-known episodes of Oppenheimer's life. These have already been depicted in a number of plays, movies and books.

However, the rest of his life is less well documented. Ray Monk fleshes out the story, describing Oppenheimer's lonely childhood as the son of wealthy German-Jewish New Yorkers, his lifelong love of the American Southwest, his trips to Europe, his founding of an American school of theoretical physics at Berkeley and Caltech, and his post-war years as both a public figure and as director of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study in New Jersey. But Monk does not neglect Oppenheimer's own research, which he describes with accuracy and flare, framing it within the great science debates of the time.

Monk took 10 years to complete the biography and it shows. The result is a sensitive portrayal of the chain-smoking figure who evolved from a troubled and uncertain young man into a successful player on the world stage. Oppenheimer is fortunate to have been given such an exemplary biographer.

Book Information
Inside The Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk
Published by: Jonathan Cape
?30

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