On Reading A Life in Twilight
I am a big fan of J. Robert Oppenheimer and I like reading about him. I just wrote a book note about Mark Wolverton's A Life in Twilight : The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York : St. Martin's Press, 2008; 339 pages).
What an excellent book it was! (You can tell I liked it from the way I babbled on writing about it.) Wolverton chose to leave the famous, Los Alamos Oppenheimer years to others and concentrate instead on JRO's life after the notorious Atomic Energy Commission hearings about his security clearance.
It was fascinating. There were all those elements of the tragic Oppenheimer coming to fruition, but there were many events in those nearly two decades that deserved the attention this book gave them. I won't even start the list here because my lengthy book note mentions quite a few of them.
Particularly after the security clearance issue gave them the pretext, reactionaries have always thought of Oppenheimer as an untrustworthy, liberal commie traitor; liberal scientists like myself see him objectively as a martyr to McCarthyism and personal vindictiveness on the part of Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller.
This passage below made me wonder why it's always the reactionaries who get to believe that the liberals are a threat to their country? (Yes, it's rhetorical and ironic, that question.)
Oppenheimer's case was different, though. Not only was he the leader of the scientists, he had an extensive leftist background, with a formerly Communist wife, brother, and sister-in-law, just or starters. Although he wasn't alone in such associations among the Manhattan Project scientific elite, he was the most prominent of those who were on to move in lofty government circles after the war, and arguably the most influential of all the atomic scientists. Obviously such a man continued to bear watching, thought some high government officials. [p. 15]
There was one other thing. A few times Oppenheimer was quoted saying this:
[p. 90] "Explaining atomic physics to the layman is both impossible—and necessary."
It's clever and I suppose sounded magnanimous and fit in with people's expectations that atomic physic (booga booga!) was sooo mysterious and inscrutable that it could never be understood by mere mortals.
I believe that is wrong, at least today. (Sorry Oppie!) It still is necessary but it also is possible–at least that's the philosophy and foundational belief of Ars Hermeneutica. Granted, it's unlikely the non-scientist will start solving integral equations, but all the main ideas are accessible and can be understood by anyone who wants to take a bit of time to understand them.
Authors beware: I pan books by "science writers" who prefer to obfuscate and mystify parts of science as inaccessible and not to be understood rather than getting on with making the effort to write clearly and explain.
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on Saturday, 23 May 2009 at 23.17
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I just read your booknote — this book sounds irresistible. I am always interested in the Los Alamos physicists, but my knowledge of what happened to Oppenheimer afterward is pretty vague. I guess this is a must read!