A Scientific Life, Minus the Science
A slightly unfair review of AMERICAN PROMETHEUS
Contrary to what many people expect, I don’t actually read all that many books about science and science history. It feels a bit too much like work— not because they’re badly written as a rule, but because it’s too directly related to my day job and my principal side hustle. I don’t really read much “hard SF” either for the same reason.
I offer that as a bit of context for why I’m only just now getting around to reading American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, despite the book being nigh on 20 years old. I ended up picking it up basically as work: we’re going to do a screening of the movie Oppenheimer in February, followed by a panel discussion that I’ll be on, and I feel a bit of an obligation to read up on the source material— my copy of the book even has a banner at the top declaring it “The inspiration for the major motion picture.” (My first thought was to get it from the college library, but it was checked out. Next in the read-as-work queue is Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, an even older book which I also haven’t read before, which was also checked out of the college library…)
I wrote about the movie back in the summer, in an instant reaction post and then a more meta reaction-to-the-#discourse post, and one of the things that jumped out was how little science is in it. That’s not wholly inappropriate, of course— it’s a three-hour movie as it is, and Oppenheimer’s principal contributions to the Manhattan Project were more managerial than scientific. But it was striking, and also a source of mild irritation when people talk about why they haven’t seen it— the political content of the movie is more confusing than the science.
I was surprised, then, to find out that the movie arguably has more science in it than the book does. Specifically, there’s some discussion early in the film about Oppenheimer’s work on black holes, probably because Christopher Nolan knew about it from working on Interstellar with Kip Thorne. There’s a bit of detail about his work with Hartland Snyder on the collapse of massive stars, and a dramatization of the moment when they’re celebrating the paper’s publication on September 1, 1939 only to be upstaged by Hitler invading Poland.
It’s a small moment in the film, but even smaller in the book— the work with Snyder gets a few paragraphs in a kind of whirlwind five-page summary of things Oppenheimer worked on at Berkeley before the war, and that’s it. His other work gets even shorter shrift— the Born-Oppenheimer approximation gets barely a paragraph, the post-war Shelter Island workshop he organized is mentioned briefly, but doesn’t rate an index entry, and the follow-up Pocono workshop that I wrote about here and for Nature Reviews Physics isn’t mentioned at all. Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, whose version of QED is regarded as co-equal with Schwinger and Feynman in no small part because of Oppenheimer’s action in support of him, gets only a tiny name-check, in a list of physicists who visited Princeton; there’s no mention at all of their correspondence, which played a pivotal role in the development of quantum field theory.
This is a biography of a scientist, but it is not remotely a book about science. It quotes any number of eminent physicists praising Oppenheimer’s intellect and ability to grasp technical details in a way that clarified problems, but is maddeningly vague about what those problems were, or how they were solved. And, look, I know that not every biography can be …Subtle Is the Lord or QED and the Men Who Made It, equation-laden books that could serve as starter texts for majors-level courses on their subject matter. But this is way to the other extreme, skimming past the science in a way that I found really superficial.
What this is is a book about politics and personalities. It’s got a pretty exhaustive report on all of Oppenheimer’s personal relationships, and goes into minute detail about his activities during the Manhattan Project and in Washington after the war. And, like the movie, about a third of it is devoted to his political downfall, when his earlier dalliance with Communism was used to punish him for expressing negative opinions about the emerging nuclear consensus in Washington.
The movie is very faithful to the book in this regard, but plays with the sequencing a bit by intercutting between the Manhattan Project and the security hearing. I noted in my initial post about the movie that “this would be pretty dry if done straight” and, in fact, in the book, it’s pretty dry. The story of the hearing is well-told, but it’s both kind of a lot and kind of repetetive, and it was hard not to start skimming.
I realize this is sliding toward the most unhelpful type of book review, namely “it’s good if you like this sort of thing,” but, well, at some level, that’s the most honest summary I can give. The book is exhaustively researched, exceptionally thorough in its presentation, and by and large compellingly written, but its primary focus is on stuff that I just wasn’t that excited by. If you’re more interested in the politics of the emerging Cold War than the history of physics, you’ll probably like the last third of this a lot more than I did. As it is, though, I wish it had more about Oppenheimer’s influence on physics, both directly as a scientist and indirectly as an administrator/ inspirational figure.
This is, as I said in the subtitle, a slightly unfair review, but it’s my blog, so I can run that. If you want to see whether I’m more fair to Rhodes, here’s a button:
And if you want to take me to task for not caring enough about exactly what kind of communist JRO was, the comments will be open:
This is precisely the kind of "science book" I don't read. I get it that in practice, success in science requires at least as much in the way of "soft skills" as skills more obviously scientific; that's one reason I became an engineer rather than a scientist. (Engineering is a lot less "star system" than science, and doubly so in areas with an undersupply of practitioners. There's room for people who prefer dealing with things to dealing with people.)
But I don't want to be reminded that, to the average person, and to most of those with power to make decisions for others, soft skills matter more than just about anything else, and while they don't explicitly say it, generally in their negative forms, from sycophancy to sociopathy. Show me someone whose success is attributed to "soft skills", and I'll show you someone who got where they are by backstabbing, taking credit for other people's work, and similar methods. There are exceptions, as there are in anything, and it's a happy thing to discover one of those exceptional people.
But I still don't want to read about someone schmoozing, politicking, and probably worse. The science is inherently interesting to me. The politicking merely tends to make me angry.
I started reading American Prometheus about 15 years ago but never finished, largely due to the lack of science. It just wasn't interesting enough to hold my attention.
Rhodes' books on the atom and hydrogen bombs, otoh, are real page turners. At least for me.
And Pais' book on Bohr is worth reading. I liked it even more than "Subtle..."
Following your previous post, I sent off for a copy of Canticle... I remember really liking it when I read it in maybe 7th grade.