Oppenheimer in the PT archives

“When all is interwoven with the dramatic events that centered around him, we remember Oppenheimer as one of the most remarkable personalities of this century. In the years to come the physicist will speak of him. So will the historian and the psychologist, the playwright and the poet.”

Abraham Pais, a theoretical physicist and historian of science, expressed this sentiment in his 1967 Physics Today tribute to J. Robert Oppenheimer. The director Christopher Nolan apparently agrees: His movie Oppenheimer, based on a 2005 biography of the theoretical physicist and Los Alamos National Laboratory director, opens in theaters on 21 July.

It should come as no surprise that Oppenheimer’s name has appeared frequently in Physics Today, a publication founded in part to unify a postwar physics community that was influenced so profoundly by the Manhattan Project. Here we explore how the magazine has covered Oppenheimer and his legacy.

PT‘s first cover

In his tribute, Pais described it as a symbol of “the dialogue between theory and experiment.” Henry Barton, the director of the American Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics Today) from 1931 to 1957, stated that it depicted the tension between civilian life and atomic work that characterized postwar US physics. Whatever the intended message, the image of “Oppenheimer’s famous porkpie hat placed jauntily amid cyclotron piping,” as historian of science David Kaiser put it , certainly made an impression in May 1948 when it appeared on the cover of a new magazine called Physics Today. Oppenheimer’s name comes up twice in that issue , the first of many mentions over the next 75 years. According to Barton, Oppenheimer approved of the cover.

Security clearance

In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was famously stripped by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Physics Today reported on the Oppenheimer case in an unsigned News and Views column that July.

Although the article struck a dispassionate tone, the author or authors were clearly on Oppie’s side. They emphasized that he had “repeatedly” discussed with security officers his associations with left-wing groups and known Communists “over a period of many years.” They noted that 30 out of 38 witnesses who testified at the AEC hearing did not believe Oppenheimer was a “bad security risk,” and that only five did. (Three weren’t asked about it at all.) And they quoted in full a four-paragraph statement by Hans Bethe—writing in his capacity as president of the American Physical Society—that emphasized the “adverse effect” the decision would have on scientists doing government work.

The AEC’s ruling on Oppenheimer’s security clearance was overturned only in December 2022. Recent research by atomic historian Alex Wellerstein emphasizes that the infamous incident in which John Wheeler lost a document containing the secret to the hydrogen bomb on an overnight train in 1953 was a crucial catalyst in the AEC’s decision to strip Oppenheimer of his credentials.

One of the men who took the fall for Wheeler’s blunder, William Borden, was the chief of staff of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. After he was removed, Borden denounced Oppenheimer to the FBI, without evidence, as a Soviet spy. That letter started the campaign of intrigue that culminated in the AEC hearing.

Oppenheimer’s contributions to PT

Although Oppenheimer never authored an article specifically for Physics Today, the magazine reprinted several lectures he gave during the 1950s and 1960s. The first, “Physics Tonight,” delivered at a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the American Institute of Physics, is perhaps the most interesting. Appearing in July 1956 , it urged physicists to try to communicate more of the “substance” of their work to the “man of art or letters or affairs.” On a more poignant note, it also lamented the “sorrows” and “evils” of the US national security system, which Oppenheimer himself had suffered under.

The other two lectures discussed in great detail the history of electron theory (July 1957 ) and mesons (November 1966 ).

Oppenheimer remembered

Physics Today dedicated a special issue to Oppenheimer in October 1967 , eight months after his death. The issue included four edited versions of speeches that had been delivered for a memorial session held at an April 1967 meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington, DC. Robert Serber chronicled Oppenheimer’s early work , prior to the US entering World War II. (Interestingly, Serber mentioned only in passing the Born–Oppenheimer approximation, one of Oppie’s most important contributions to physics.) Pais detailed Oppenheimer’s postwar tenure as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and offered his perspective on the 1954 hearing that resulted in the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Glenn Seaborg reflected on Oppenheimer’s public service and human contributions .

Victor Weisskopf, a leader of the theoretical division at Los Alamos and later an advocate for nuclear disarmament, wrote about the Manhattan Project years . He concluded his essay with a retrospective on the impact of the work led by Oppenheimer. In terms of physics, Weisskopf touted the road to “the new ways of big science” that Oppenheimer had helped pave. But the broader outlook was far more uncertain: “The achievement of Los Alamos made the world of human relations much more complex than it ever was, and we carry a much heavier load of responsibilities on our shoulders. I doubt that we are ready to carry this load. The ordeal that Oppenheimer had to suffer in 1954 is a sad indication of how little some of the responsible people understood the problems involved.”

Debating Oppie’s leadership

Although many aspects of Oppenheimer’s life are often debated, his management of the Manhattan Project has typically been viewed as exceptionally successful. But in September 1999, Lawrence Cranberg, a prolific writer of letters to Physics Today who had worked at Los Alamos in the 1950s, wrote a letter to the editor arguing the contrary. According to Cranberg, Oppenheimer’s leadership skills had been vastly overrated, and Enrico Fermi had been far more important to the project.

Cranberg’s letter set off a firestorm in response from Manhattan Project veterans and former acquaintances of Oppenheimer. One selection of letters was published in February 2000 under the cheeky headline “Debate on Oppenheimer’s Role in Manhattan Project Reaches Critical Stage.” James Osborn, who worked on the project, stated that Cranberg was “misinformed,” and Nobel laureate Jack Steinberger, who was a postdoc under Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1948–49, asserted that Cranberg was “hardly correct.”

But their defenses of Oppenheimer paled in comparison with the one presented by two Manhattan Project leaders, Hans Bethe and Robert Christy, who in June 2000 wrote a full-page letter stating that Oppenheimer was a “brilliant leader” who was “fully informed” of all aspects of the project. Fifty-five years after the end of the war, Oppenheimer remained a talismanic figure for many of his former colleagues.

Oppenheimer biographies

The new film is based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Physicist and historian of science John S. Rigden reviewed the book in Physics Today‘s November 2005 issue , noting that it “stimulates the mind and stirs the emotions.”

Over the years, Physics Today has covered many other books about the chameleonic Oppenheimer. Two of the most prominent include a 2006 biography by Pais and Robert Crease (reviewed in October 2006 ) and a 2012 biography by Ray Monk (reviewed in October 2013 ).

Doctor Atomic

Nolan is not the first artist to find inspiration in Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. In the early 2000s, the minimalist composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars collaborated on an opera depicting the lead-up to the 16 July 1945 Trinity test. Doctor Atomic was a hit when it premiered at the San Francisco Opera in October 2005 and has been widely performed since. Physics Today‘s Mark Wilson interviewed Adams in September 2005 , just before the opera’s opening. The composer noted that he believed Oppenheimer’s tale was “really worthy of dramatic treatment” as one of the “great American stories.” Physics Today also covered the production’s 2018 revival in the bomb’s backyard, at the Santa Fe Opera. In her review , Cheryl Rofer, a former chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, deemed it “outstanding.”