- Physics
- World.
Hello and welcome to the Physics World Stories podcast.
I'm Andrew Gluster. And in this episode,
we're gonna be hearing from Kai Bird, who, along
with Martin Sherwin won the Pulitzer Prize
for their biography, American Prometheus, the Triumph
and Tragedy of Jay Robert Oppenheimer.
The book has since been read by Christopher Nolan,
and it was that book that inspired the film Oppenheimer
and will hear Kai's thoughts on Nolan's film, as well
as some insights into the writing of the book
with his friend and physicist Martin Sherwin.
And of course, I wanted to understand how Kai
and Martin had gone about uncovering Oppenheimer's
enigmatic character.
If you haven't seen the film, don't worry, you still can.
It's about to be released on streaming services,
and more importantly, as far as I'm concerned, on Blu-Ray.
But there are no spoilers in this conversation,
so you can listen to this before watching the film.
Here's Kai Byrd.
- I'm a biographer and historian
and, uh, executive director of the Leon Levy Center
for biography in New York City.
And, uh, the author of a number of biographies, uh,
including I guess these days, most famously
American Prometheus, the triumphant trials,
the triumphant Tragedy of Jay Robert Oppenheimer.
And, uh, my last book was a biography of Jimmy Carter.
Uh, what else? I, I've also written, uh, biographies
of ACIA officer who worked in the Middle East,
and I wrote a memoir about my childhood growing up in,
in the very war Troubled Middle East.
And that book is rather relevant these days, ,
but, but, um, so is Oppenheimer, sadly,
because it's all about nuclear weapons and McCarthyism.
- Okay. So can you tell, it looks
to me like there's a thread of, well, what is it politics,
what is it that draws you
to these particular stories to write
- About?
Yes. My, my first biography was on John Jay McCloy,
a not well-known Wall Street lawyer,
who was essentially the chairman
of the American Foreign Policy Establishment.
So I've always been interested in sort of
how power works in a democracy like Americas
and, uh, uh,
and so I'm interested in the elites
and the establishment.
And, uh, so I wrote a book on McCloy
and then McGeorge Bundy, who was a major architect
of the war in Vietnam.
And, uh, then I was persuaded by Martin Sherwin
to join him on his project, uh, biography that
he had been working on
for 20 years about Robert Oppenheimer, who was also sort
of a member of the American Foreign Policy Establishment,
um, as father of the atomic bomb.
But then he was the,
essentially expelled from the establishment in 1954 when he
was put on trial for, in a security hearing
and stripped of his security clearance and such.
But anyway, yes, I'm, I'm interested in, in using biography
to explain, uh, politics
and how power works in a complicated democracy
like the United States.
- Okay. So go, just go back to the
American Pre Prometheus book.
You said that Martin had been writing it for 20 years.
Why, why did it taken him that long
and why did he come to you?
- Well, he had signed a contract with Alfred Kop, a
major publisher in New York in 1980
to do a biography of Oppenheimer.
And he sort of caught biographers disease, which is, uh,
when you can't start writing
because you know, there's one more archive you need
to visit, and there's always one more interview
that needs to be done.
And, uh,
and he became convinced that the story was so important
and so complicated, uh, that he sort
of got mired in the research he did, you know, off and on.
He was a tenured history professor, so he worked on it
every year, but part-time.
And, uh, after 20 years, he sort of realized he was stuck,
and he and I had become friends, colleagues,
and, uh, he came to me in, in
around 2000
and suggested that I should join him on, on his,
by his Oppenheimer project.
And I said, Marty, I I like you too much to do that ,
because I, I, I did like him.
He was a very funny and lovable guy.
Um, but, you know, co-authorship is often
fraught with many perils.
And, um, so I, I, I actually hesitated,
but he persisted and,
and, uh, he finally told me, you know,
if you don't join me on this,
my gravestone is gonna read. He took it with it
- .
- So I guess that was a persuasive argument.
And, uh, but it still took us five years to
write together the book and get it, get it published.
And it came out in 2005, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006,
and then here we are, you know, 18 years later.
And suddenly Christopher Nolan has turned it into
a major motion picture, uh, which is terrific.
I think the film is very good,
and I think the film is, uh, persuaded a lot of people
to go back and look at this biography, American Prometheus,
but others, and, and have made people curious about
Oppenheimer, but, but also the physics
and the history of World War II and the Manhattan Project
and, uh, the whole role of scientists in, in
our 21st century civilization. Mm-Hmm.
- I want to get onto that, but can I just ask you about
winning the, the Pulitzer Prize?
How was that? Uh,
- Well, it was terrific.
I, I told Marty at the time, this was in the spring of 2006,
that I thought we had a good chance of winning it,
because looking at the competition, I, I,
I thought we had done a very good book,
and Marty, uh, thought I was an inveterate, optimist
and naive, and that it was never gonna happen.
But you get a phone call out of the blue one day,
usually in April,
and, uh, you, you don't know that you've been nominated.
You don't, you don't know anything.
And suddenly you get a phone call saying,
they've chosen your book for the Pulitzer Prize
for biography this year.
And oh, you know, it was, it, it was terrific.
Um, it brought new attention to the book,
and we acquired many more readers.
And of course, I think that's one reason why, um,
the book was eventually turned into
a film, but you never know.
- Does winning Nepal Surprise
or Christopher Nolan making a film out
of your book Increase Sales more?
- Oh, definitely. Nolan , no question.
No.
The book, you know, has been, uh,
18 weeks now on the New York Times
bestseller list since July.
Right. And it was never on the bestseller list
in 2005, 2006.
Okay. You know, it sold moderately well
and got plenty of good reviews,
but it never became a bestseller.
You know, it's a 700 plus page biography,
and I think it, it's a,
that's intimidating to many readers.
And of course, you know,
until Nolan came along in this film, I,
I think most people on the planet had never heard
of the name Oppenheimer.
And, uh, if they had heard of him, all they knew was
that he was somehow associated with being father
of the atomic bomb.
- Those people who had heard of him, I think probably
the word enigmatic comes up quite a lot.
Right, right. So, how did you get to the bottom of
who he was and crucially what he thought?
- Well, Marty had done, you know, 20 years of research.
He'd accumulated 50,000 pages of archival documents.
He'd interviewed over 150 of Oppenheimer's
relatives, colleagues, students, fellow physicists.
Um, and,
you know, Oppenheimer is, uh, an endlessly fascinating,
uh, figure who is a scientist.
You know, he was on the cutting edge of quantum physics
in the 1920s studying at Cambridge,
and then Gerkin in Germany.
Uh, but, you know, he was also a polymath and a synthesizer.
And, you know, he, he loved, uh, he wrote poetry.
He loved the poetry of TS Elliot.
Uh, he loved the novels of Ernest Hemmingway.
He, you know, he was widely read.
Um, and, you know, he was born in New York City
of Jewish ancestry, uh,
but he was raised in the Ethical Culture Society,
which was a sort of offshoot, a secular offshoot of
reformed Judaism, um, a very intellectual
society that had a school,
the Ethical Culture school that he attended.
Um, and, uh, you know, he goes off to Harvard
and then Cambridge to study chemistry and then physics.
Um, and he's, he's endlessly complicated.
Uh, you know, he, he's of Jewish background,
but in the 1930s, he acquires a, uh,
interest in the Hindu spiritual, uh,
text the Gita Baba Gita,
and so much so that he learns Sanskrit so
that he can read the Gita in the original.
So this is a guy who's very complicated.
Um, he had a, an emotional nervous breakdown,
uh, at the age of 22, uh,
in Cambridge, England.
Uh, he went to see a series of psychiatrists psychologists,
um, uh,
and he was someone who was, you know, capable of
great empathy for other human beings,
and yet, uh, very complicated.
And he's capable of transforming himself.
You know, initially he was a terrible university professor.
He couldn't give the lecture, uh, but he learned to do it,
and he became quite charismatic.
Likewise, he was never any, he,
he never administered anything
more than a half dozen graduate students at Berkeley.
But then in 1942, he's most
and probably chosen to become scientific director
of this enormous project,
building a secret city in Los Alamos to build the gadget.
And he transforms himself into a brilliant administrator,
uh, again, very charismatic.
And, uh, he's capable of inspiring these, uh,
scientists all with high large egos, chemists and physicists
and engineers, and to come together and work
and collaborate on this project
to build the first atomic bomb.
And they do it in two and a half years.
You know, he's, he, Marty and I sort of, you know, even
after Marty spent 25 years on Oppenheimer,
he was still curious about him, still
frustrated with trying to understand some of the decisions
that Oppenheimer made, um, still,
you know, he was still a mysterious figure.
So, uh, we're,
we struggled to understand his politics
and to try to figure out, you know, was how, just
how close he was to the Communist Party.
Um, we concluded in the end that the 7,000 plus pages
of FBI documents
and his FBI file, um, proved that he was certainly
pink, but not red, okay.
, that he had never actually joined the
Communist Party formally.
And this made sense. He, we concluded he was not the kind
of intellectual, sort of free spirited intellectual
who would submit himself to party discipline.
Um, but you know, it's a mystery.
Uh, he certainly was very close to the communist party,
gave money to communist party projects,
like trying to
desegregate the local public swimming pool in Berkeley
and such.
But, uh, anyway, he, Marty and I, you know, even
after finishing the book, we were still fascinated,
still curious about this, um,
complicated man.
- So I wonder if you could sit down
with him maybe over dinner.
Uh, what would you ask him?
What, what, what are the questions left
that you would like to put to him?
- Oh, you know, we, Marty
and I couldn't understand why this brilliant scientist
would, uh, tackle an issue in physics, like, uh,
exploring the implications in the math of, uh,
that there of Black Hole theory
and could sit down
and write a very short theoretical physics paper
with his, one of his graduate students.
And he did this in 1939, you know, sort of whipped it out
and then walked away from it
and never, never studied the issue again.
, why not ?
You know, he might've, uh, well, this explains sort
of in one reason why he never won a Nobel,
because he never spent enough time on any one problem
to sort of make it, make it his own.
Um, but he dabbled, he was a dabbler in,
and he, he could see, um,
he could see interesting questions
and he would address them,
but then move on to the next interesting question.
But this is, this is
precisely why he was a great synthesizer
and, uh, a why he was able to rise
to the challenge of transforming himself into an
administrator of the Manhattan Project. Um,
- Yeah.
But that, so that's why he, why he was able to,
but why did he want to, what was,
what was his motivation for that?
- Oh, his motivation was political.
You know, he understood, uh,
from having studied in Germany with
people like Heisenberg
and Max Bourne, that these German physicists were just
as capable as any other physicists around the world
and himself to tackle this problem.
And it was clear from, you know, 19 39, 40 that
from the physics, that theoretically it was possible
to build a gadget that would have enormous explosive power.
And so he feared
that the German physicists were already working on this
since the war had started in 39,
and, uh, that they were gonna be able to give Hitler
an atomic bomb before anyone else.
And this would be, this would be a disaster.
It would allow Hitler to win the war.
Um, so his motivation was as an anti-fascist.
Um, and, you know, as a loyal American, he wanted
to contribute to the war effort.
And as a scientist, uh, this was, this is
where he could make the most dramatic impact.
Uh, but at the same time, he was perfectly aware
of the nature of this terrible weapon,
and he worried about the implications of
what he was building.
But, you know, this is, again, one of the sort of mysterious
enigmatic aspects of his personality.
He, he was aware of the contradictions in what he was doing.
He knew he had to do this.
And, uh, even after Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, you know, he never said
that he regretted what he had done.
He understood that what he had done was inevitable.
And, uh, you know, this is actually relevant
to our times because, uh, you, it's important for people
to understand that you cannot stop science.
Human beings are going to forever
explore the physical world around them and make discoveries
and figure out how things work.
Um, so the real question becomes, you know, how do you
manage these discoveries?
How do you manage technology? How do you regulate it?
How do you make it humane?
How do you integrate it into, uh, a
humane society, um,
and not allow it to get out of control?
So I'm thinking of course of AI
and climate change issues and,
and the environment,
and, you know, these are all issues that we're struggling
with as human beings.
And, and unfortunately we're surrounded by science
and technology, of course,
but, um, the average citizen anywhere here in America
or, uh, elsewhere, nevertheless, doesn't seem to, um,
understand the scientific quest
and the nature of the process.
And, and, uh,
and there's some even suspicion of science and scientists,
and you can see this most dramatically during the recent
pandemic where public health officials were questioned
and conspiracy theories rose and,
and, uh, the integrity
and authenticity of scientific, you know,
the scientific advice, public health advice that was
given, you know, scientists
and public health officials were struggling to figure out
how to respond to the pandemic.
And of course, it means experimenting.
It means trying to figure out what the facts are,
and you have to be able to change your mind.
And this is not understood well, uh, in
among the general population.
And that's a, that's, that's unfortunate seems
- To me that the film certainly is at least in part, about
politics getting involved in science as well.
And does that concern you still?
- Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
And, you know, Oppenheimer's life
and what happened to him is a, a, a major lesson,
you know, in nine, in 1945, he was hailed in America
as, um, as the country's
most famous scientist.
His image was put on the cover of time and life.
And, uh,
and then nine years later, he is literally destroyed
in this kangaroo court of a security hearing and humiliated
and, uh, stripped of his security clearance
and disinvited thereafter from university speeches
that had been scheduled.
And, you know, he becomes, he was once a scientist
who was also a public intellectual speaking out about public
policy issues.
And nine years, you know, in 1954, he was
prohibited from any longer being a public intellectual.
And of course, this sent a message to scientists everywhere,
you know, beware of getting,
speaking out from your narrow lane of expertise
because you could get in trouble politically.
And so this explains why even today, uh,
we do not have, uh,
uh, major public intellectuals
who are respected, who are scientists.
Uh, you know, they're just not very many of them.
And that's, that's odd given where we are in,
uh, with a, a global civilization based on science
, it's very, it's very, it's very odd. I
- Mean, the last one I can think
of is Stephen Hawking possibly was in that sort of,
you know, when Stephen Hawking said
something, it was the news. Right, right. But,
- But there are just a handful of people like that.
And, and again, I think
the average citizen seems to look at these scientists,
even somebody like Hawking as an eccentrics.
- How's your physics? Did you have
to read up on quantum physics a lot to write this book?
- Well, I had to bone up on it, yes.
But no, I'm not a scientist. Uh, I'm a biographer.
Um, in college I took a course in physics,
it was called Physics for Poets,
- .
Okay. Was that good?
- ? It, it, well, it helped me to fulfill my science
requirement in at college . Okay.
- . - But no, I don't, you know, I can't pretend
to understand quantum physics,
but I had to learn enough about it to be able to
write about it and plain English,
and, uh, hopefully not make any egregious mistakes
in describing it.
But, and there, there are no, you know,
American Prometheus is a long book about a scientist,
but there are no, there's very little quantum physics in it,
and no formula, no math .
So it's a, you know, it's a book about the men's, uh,
private life, his, his education,
his loves, his politics
and, uh, his role in, as a scientist in society.
But there's, it's not a book about quantum
physics, . Oh,
- I, I wonder if you, 'cause you wrote the book,
and then I'm, I, as I understand it, you went
to the set of the film.
Do you, do you have, uh, any insight in terms
of the storytelling as an author as opposed
to the storytelling as a, as a filmmaker?
- Well, it's very different, you know, in 700 plus pages,
you can get into a lot of detail and description and nuance.
Um, but I, as a biographer,
I count myself very luckily that Nolan was the director who,
um, landed on this project
because he's extremely, um, astute
and intelligent, and he's interested in science.
And, uh, he found a way to tell the story,
to transform the, the written narrative
and really capture a large part of the story on film.
It's a long film, three hours,
but that's nothing compared to the 720 pages
and of the narrative in the book.
But he captures, I think, you know, the personality of
Oppenheimer, the Intenseness, Killian Murphy's depiction
of Oppenheimer is, is very aptt.
And he comes across as this very intense
driven, extremely articulate, um,
young man who's interested in science,
but philosophy as well.
And, uh,
and has, uh, uh, a,
a re uh, uh, a fascinating relationship
with the women in his life.
His first love Gene Tatlock,
and then his long relationship with Kitty, who comes.
Anyway, kitty is, comes across as a very complicated, um,
vivacious and,
and, uh, uh, scientist in her own right,
um, biologist.
And, uh, so I think, you know,
Nolan was able to, the story
and to convey the, the
difficulty of what Oppenheimer was doing at Los Alamos
in building this gadget.
And at the same time, you see him wrestling with the ethical
dimensions of what he's doing, and then you see his politics
and his, um, the question of his relationship
to the Communist Party.
And then you see the consequences played out in 1954
with, so I was very happy, for instance, that Nolan chose
to concentrate a lot on the 1954 trial,
because that's really the, the, um,
aspect of the story that, you know, gives the story an arc.
It's the triumph and then the, the tragedy of his downfall.
And that reminds me that, you know, at one point when Marty
and I were in the midst of writing the book
in the early two thousands, Marty turned to me
and said, you know, you
and I wouldn't be spending all these years on this story if
it was just a story about the building of the gadget.
If it was just a story about the father of the atomic bomb,
what really makes it interesting is in a human way
as a human story, is how, um,
vulnerable and fragile Oppenheimer was,
and the fact that he was tragically brought down
after triumphing.
And, uh, that story is important politically
to understand politics in America today.
The McCarthyism that Oppenheimer was the chief victim
of in 1954 also explains our politics today
with Donald Trump
and the divisiveness of his brand of politics.
It's, there's a direct link between McCarthyism and,
and the politics of Trump.
- Right. Morality changes across time, right.
And it changes across cultures.
And you are a, a student of history.
When I'm watching the film, it seems really odd to me
that we have this juxtaposition of a man, the same man being
vilified for being left wing
and being celebrated for his role in
creating weapons of mass destruction, which
are dropped on two towns in Japan.
Is it just me that looks at that
and sees that juxtaposition as really odd? Oh,
- It is odd.
And, and that's, yeah, it's a theme
of both the book and the film.
Um, this contradiction between, uh,
the man who is creating this terrible weapon
and the fact that afterwards, he spends essentially the rest
of his life not apologizing or regretting what he did,
but trying to warn humanity about the
consequences and the fact that they need to take control
of this technology and regulate it.
And essentially, he was making the argument
for banning the bomb
and, uh, creating an international atomic inter, uh,
authority that would have sovereign rights to inspect
and control any factory, any laboratory,
and make sure that people were not building these weapons.
Well, his advice was ignored,
and instead the, what happened was his worst nightmare.
We had a, an arms race, uh, an atomic
weapons arms race for decades
during the Cold War, and we're still living with this bomb.
No, Oppenheimer is very complicated.
And, uh, I like to tell the story.
I found at one point, you know, I did very little,
very few interviews for this book.
Marty did most of the research,
but in about 2003, I did discover
that Oppenheimer's last secretary at Los Alamos
and Wilson Marks was still alive
and was living just two miles from me in Washington dc.
And so I went and interviewed her,
and at one point she told me the story of
how she was walking to work one day in the summer of 1945,
and it was after the Trinity test.
And, uh, she was walking to work with Oppenheimer,
and suddenly she hears him muttering to himself,
those poor little people, those poor little people.
And she stops and,
and she says, you know, Robert, what are you talking about?
And he says, well, you know, we now know the gadget works,
and now it's gonna be used on a target in Japan,
and there is no military target large enough other
than a whole city.
And so the victims are gonna be those poor little people,
largely civilians, women and children, and old men,
and, you know, not an army.
And, uh, so he's painfully aware about of
what is about to happen.
So I came back from this interview
and told Marty, Sherwin this story,
and he pointed out very quickly that
that must have been the same week that Oppenheimer
was actually meeting with the Bombardiers who were going
to be on the You gay and dropping the first atomic bomb.
And he was instructing them exactly at
what altitude it should be released
and detonated to have the most maximum destructive
impact, kill the most people.
So here he is doing his duty as such,
providing the weapon to the military,
and at the same time he's, you know, painfully personally
worrying about the victims.
So that, that's , that's the contradiction.
- . So you have studied poetry for No physics for
- Poets , right. So
- , the, the start of the film, Oppenheimer, um,
Christopher Nolan has in quite a poetic way, gone about
representing Oppenheimer's, understanding beginnings
of understanding of quantum physics.
What was your reaction to that when you saw it?
- Nolan, I think, again, there's,
there's no heavy quantum physics in the film,
but he tries to convey the music as he calls it,
of quantum.
And, uh, you know, the film starts with raindrops
dropping in a puddle and, uh,
op the young Oppenheimer staring at the puddle.
And, uh, then you see the young Oppenheimer walking
through a, a art gallery
and standing in front of a Picasso image
of a cubist from the cubist period of, of a portrait, uh,
of a woman who's like a,
a jigsaw p puzzle.
It's Nolan's attempt to convey the music of quantum,
the mystery of, uh, that
the smallness of the universe.
And, uh,
and I think he succeeds in, in, uh, it's, it's, it's
of course just an analogy
and it flashes by in a, in a moment,
but, uh, it conveys the mysteriousness of
the quantum world,
and that's what, uh, actually attracted Oppenheimer to,
uh, the new science.
And, uh,
so I think the film succeeds in that way.
- Do you find yourself wanting
to know more about quantum physics, uh,
reading about Oppenheimer?
- Sure, I do. I, you know, I'm a layman as such,
but, uh, when I read the newspaper, I, uh,
I always read whatever news reports I see about, uh,
new discoveries with, uh, for instance, these
new pictures that we're seeing of the universe
because of the new telescope.
And, uh, uh,
and I'm, I'm, you know, I'm curious,
but, uh, in a very,
uh, common citizens fashion, I pay attention,
but I, I can't claim to understand the science. Yeah,
- No, fair enough.
Can I recommend physics world.com, by the way,
excellent resource for this kind of thing in the film.
The conversations between
Oppenheimer and Einstein are quite pivotal.
How close is that to the reality?
- The film both begins
and ends with the conversations between Oppenheimer
and, and Einstein.
And of course, those are imagined conversations,
but they're not, you know, improbable.
Um, they could have happened.
And, uh, it is true that Oppenheimer,
at a certain point in Los Alamos was confronted with, um,
some math that suggested that there was a, a possibility
that the Trinity test could ignite the atmosphere.
And he did get on a train and come back east
and consult a physicist about these calculations
because he was worried enough to
investigate the possibility.
But he did not ask this question of Einstein.
He, in fact, was consulting another physicist who, and,
and Nolan was perfectly aware of what he was doing here.
This is a conscious decision on his part to not introduce
yet another character into the film that already had
dozens of characters.
Um, and so he was trying to simplify the story a bit,
and I, I think that was perfectly
legitimate artistic license.
And instead he had Oppenheimer having that conversation
with o with Einstein, a well-known, you know,
obviously a very well-known, um, scientist who
there Nolan wouldn't have to spend any time in the film
to introduce him.
Um, but
otherwise, you know, there, there is another conversation
and that between Oppenheimer
and Einstein that is based on, uh, reality, where
Einstein, if you recall, comes up to Oppenheimer
and asks them, why are you going down to Washington to,
to subject yourself to this witch hunt of a trial?
You know, if they don't want your advice anymore, walk away.
And that conversation actually did take place,
and it comes straight out of the book.
And that's another example to my mind of how
brilliantly Nolan was able to capture in the film,
sort of the key he emotional moments
of the biography.
And, uh, so I, I, I,
I applaud his achievement that, you know,
he's transformed the book into something,
into a different artistic medium,
but he's been able to do it faithfully, um, without
introducing any egregious historical errors.
- Brilliant. Thank you so much.
Um, well, are you going to write a book about RNA
v Braun for me, please? That
- Would be , no, .
Someone else is doing it.
Um, and no, I'm, I'm,
I'm working on another book, another biography,
but it's an entirely different figure.
A man named Roy Cone, who, uh, was a lawyer
who was Chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy in 1954.
And, uh, was really a major architect
of the whole McCarthy Witch Hunt era as a young lawyer.
And then he moved back to New York,
and in 1973, he met a young
real estate developer named Donald Trump .
And he taught Trump everything he knew about how to deal
with the press and the law and courts.
And he made Donald Trump.
He gave Donald Trump a roadmap to his political career.
He explains the Trump phenomenon.
- Well, that certainly sounds like another fascinating
book from Kai Bird.
And if you are interested in this sort of intersection
between physics and politics,
you might enjoy Bob Creases article on physics world.com.
What the movie Oppenheimer Can Teach Today's Politicians
about scientific advice.
Also on physics world.com, you'll find reviews
of the film from the physics world editors,
and also my review of the film,
which is entitled Beyond the Bomb, the Life
and Times of Jay Robert Oppenheimer.
I'd like to thank Kai Bird for not only writing the book,
but also for joining me for this episode
of the Physics World Stories Podcast.
And I'd like to thank you very much for listening,
- Physics World.