Oppenheimer is a chameleon who goes from psychopath to humanist – 07/19/2023 – Ilustrada

Who was the real Julius Robert Oppenheimer? A voluminous biography of the American physicist who led the development of the first atomic bombs, despite meticulously mapping his personal and scientific trajectory, is not capable of providing a definitive answer to this question.

The task, however, may be impossible, which means that indeterminacy is a virtue and not a defect of the book that has just arrived in the country, accompanying the release of the film “Oppenheimer”, by Christopher Nolan, which was based on it.

The Portuguese subtitle of the work by journalist Kai Bird and historian Martin Sherwin refers to the biographer as an “American Prometheus”. But it would make just as much sense to compare him to another Greek mythological figure: the hero Ulysses.

The first parallel is obvious: like Prometheus, Oppenheimer would have brought the “fire of the gods”, or atomic power, to humanity, with tragic consequences for himself and his fellow men. On the other hand, the Ulysses of the ancient poems is the “man of many manners”—or personalities, depending on how you interpret Homer’s Greek—an essentially chameleon-like and imprecise figure, which fits the portrait of the physicist rather well. new Yorker.

It is almost impossible to reconcile, for example, the Oppenheimer of his youth —a nerd with hints of psychopathy who ate almost exclusively chocolate, artichokes and peanut butter and would have offered a poisoned apple to his advisor at the University of Cambridge— with the able coordinator of the Manhattan Project, whose billionaire budget made the first atomic explosions possible.

Also immensely odd is the juxtaposition between the stature of philosopher-statesman he acquired towards the end of his life, a lone voice warning against the Cold War threat of nuclear holocaust, and the rumors that, on the anniversary of the bomb’s detonation, he used to put on a cowboy hat and strut like a sheriff.

Which of these very different characters would be the real Oppenheimer? All of them, or none?

According to his friend, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Isidor Rabi, “Robert never became an integrated personality.” “When you’re endowed with enormous capabilities in any direction, it’s hard to choose. He wanted it all. God knows I’m not the simplest person in the world, but compared to Oppenheimer I’m very, very simple.”

Rabi’s observations are among the most illuminating in the work, but they are part of a broad set of similar passages that help build an image of Oppenheimer based on the reactions he provoked in those who knew him.

Son of a wealthy couple from the Jewish community of German origin, Robert acquired a gifted aura since he became literate. His intellectual aspirations were forged in the schools of the Society for Ethical Culture, an association founded by liberal American Jews whose aim was to create a new kind of humanist and secular society, combining art and science.

This environment explains, in part, the diversity of interests of Oppenheimer, who felt equally comfortable discussing quantum physics, psychoanalysis, French poetry or the mystical classics of ancient India, such as the “Bhagavad-Gita” —the text from which the phrase came that he would have remembered seeing the first atomic explosion: “now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds”.

Almost everyone was impressed by the encyclopedic scope of his knowledge, his facility for languages ​​—when studying in Europe, he learned Dutch in a few weeks and soon gave a lecture in the language— and the intensity of his blue eyes, which seemed to mesmerize the viewers. interlocutors.

On the one hand, the ability to connect different areas of knowledge and to fascinate those who knew him helped Oppenheimer to assemble the “dream team” of scientists for the Manhattan Project.

The irony is that the political engagement of the physicist and his colleagues with egalitarian and progressive causes was an important stimulus for the creation of the first atomic weapons, since they considered themselves to be in a life and death dispute with Nazi Germany, whose physicists also had the theoretical knowledge needed to create the bomb.

Oppenheimer, however, was never able to focus sufficiently on fundamental problems in physics to produce results that would earn him a Nobel, which went to many of the participants in the Manhattan Project.

And his left-wing humanism, which included opposition to nuclear proliferation and advocacy of international controls on atomic energy, made him a target of the anticommunist wave that was gaining strength in postwar Washington.

The profusion of details with which the book’s authors reconstruct Oppenheimer’s complicated connection with members of the American Communist Party —which he never joined— is the biography’s Achilles heel. It is, however, a minor flaw compared to a compelling portrayal of one of the most complicated minds of the 20th century.