During winter vacations, Oppenheimer and Lawrence went on highspeed trips to Death Valley in “Garuda”—the new Chrysler roadster which Robert’s father had bought for him and that he named for the flying mount of the Hindu god Vishnu.46 It was on one such jaunt that Oppie confided to Ernest that physics and the desert were his two enduring loves.
In summer, a rough-hewn log cabin on six acres in the mountains east of Santa Fe became a sanctuary. Years earlier, Oppie and Frank had come across the cabin while horseback riding in the Pecos wilderness near Cowles. The older brother had first come to the area as a sickly teenager, staying at a nearby dude ranch while he recovered from a bout with colitis. Oppie named the ranch “Perro Caliente” (hot dog in Spanish) upon learning that the land was available on a long-term lease from the Forest Service. Between the end of Caltech’s term and the start of classes at Berkeley in mid-August, the Oppenheimers and a select band of their friends, which often included Lawrence, spent idyllic days at the ranch.47
When Lawrence married, Oppie simply became part of Ernest’s extended family. Robert presented the couple with a silver coffee service as a wedding gift. Since Oppenheimer’s flat was only around the corner and up the hill from the Lawrences’ house, the man the children knew as “Uncle Robert” was a frequent and welcome dinner guest, always bringing flowers—usually orchids—for Molly.48
The bond between Oppenheimer and Lawrence was further strengthened by their work together at a time of great ferment in high-energy physics. He and Ernest were “busy studying nuclei and neutrons and disintegrations; trying to make some peace between the inadequate theory and the absurd revolutionary experiments,” Oppie wrote Frank in fall 1932.49
While Oppenheimer, as a theorist, likely viewed Lawrence’s focusing of the cyclotron beam with iron shims as akin to tuning a concert piano with matchbooks, he was surprisingly solicitous of his friend’s feelings—in contrast to his attitude toward the rest of Berkeley’s physics faculty. Slow colleagues and dim-witted students alike came to be familiar with Oppie’s notorious “‘blue glare’ treatment.”50 Despite his misstep at Solvay, Lawrence was the exception. “For all his sketchiness, and the highly questionable character of what he reports, Lawrence is a marvelous physicist,” Oppenheimer confided to his brother in early 1934, adding, “But I think that he is probably wrong about the disintegration of the [deuteron].”51
Lawrence, for his part, freely acknowledged his own intellectual debt to Oppie.52 In a confidential letter to university administrators urging his friend’s promotion to full professor, Ernest wrote of Oppenheimer: “He has all along been a valued partner at the Radiation Laboratory, providing on many occasions important interpretations of puzzling experimental facts brought to light in an almost virgin field of investigation.”53
A growing mutual dependence caused the two men to ignore not only disparate temperaments but other, more significant differences between them. Whereas Ernest was constitutionally unable to feign laughter at an uncomprehended joke, Oppie’s sly, enigmatic smile became a distinguishing trait at Berkeley seminars. It was Oppenheimer’s fanatically loyal graduate students, not Oppie himself, who made legend the story of how their mentor had read Marx’s entire Das Kapital—in German—during a cross-country train trip and was learning Sanskrit at Berkeley in order to read the Hindu classics in the original. Yet, in the eyes of more detached observers, like Molly Lawrence, Oppenheimer was, at heart, a poseur.54
His values had been influenced, if not shaped, by years spent at the Ethical Culture School, where a pedagogical philosophy known as “American Pragmatism” held sway. As interpreted by the school’s German-immigrant founder, Felix Adler, pragmatic ethics taught that there were few ideal, unchanging moral laws, but that values instead evolved over time to fit the needs of society.55 The result was a kind of high-minded ethical relativism that put the greatest emphasis upon the selfless act—what was known at the school as doing “the noble thing.”56
The impact of Adler’s teachings upon Oppenheimer in later life was evident in the ironic comment of a Dutch physicist who had befriended Oppie at Leiden. “Robert, the reason you know so much about ethics,” he observed cheerily, “is that you have no character.”57
Almost all who knew Oppenheimer at Berkeley agreed that one incident—Oppie’s date with Melba Phillips, his first graduate student—was emblematic of the riddle that was his personality. When Phillips had fallen asleep during a drive with Oppie up into the Berkeley hills, Oppenheimer had simply parked the car and left the girl stranded while he walked home. To Oppie’s defenders, the episode was an example of their professor’s endearing absent-mindedness. To his detractors, including many he had snubbed or humiliated on the Berkeley faculty, it was proof of his casual cruelty.58
“I can only think that perhaps when they were such really good friends, maybe they’d never really understood each other yet,” noted one of the boys who came to know both Oppenheimer and Lawrence well.59
* * *
One difference between them had to do less with temperament than with the times. As an experimentalist rather than a theorist, Lawrence was aware that a serpent lived in the garden of high-energy physics. The advent of the 27-inch cyclotron had flushed it out of the grass.
With the increasing scale of his machines came a corresponding rise in cost and a subsequent need to find practical applications. While an experimental apparatus on a laboratory bench provided its own justification, finding funds for an 80-ton behemoth that required constant attention and consumed an enormous amount of electrical power needed a firmer anchor on utility; even if, as Lawrence firmly believed, the ultimate benefit to humanity—knowledge—was real and indisputable. The depression had imposed further parsimony
