I have to start by saying that the
chain reaction was in the nineteen forties,
and Fermi sometimes said, and I think deeply
meant,
that that was the thing that he was
proudest of.
This
strikes
people who have contempt for
practice as a
rather odd thing for a physicist to say,
but it was very much in character.
Hello, and welcome to the Physics World Stories
podcast. I'm Andrei Blestner. And in September
1962,
at the dedication of the American Institute of
Physics Library,
Jane Robert Oppenheimer
spoke of the discoveries of science as great
epics.
Stories that belong to the human tradition
and must be preserved for those who follow.
Today, we're stepping inside those epics.
Thanks to a historic gift from the Oppenheimer
family, the American Institute of Physics has released
a series of digitized oral histories
recorded with the man himself in the nineteen
sixties.
Sixties. These tapes capture Oppenheimer not as a
cinematic icon, but as a living voice
reflecting
on his primitive
mathematical beginnings at Harvard,
the shifting paradigms of quantum mechanics
and the bumpy contingent nature of scientific discovery.
Joining us to discuss the detective work behind
these tapes is Alison Buje,
the archivist of the AIP's Niels Law Laboratory
and Archives who helped bring these recordings
out of the vault and into the public
ear. An archivist, it's our role to preserve,
documents
of the past. So,
this can be a multitude of collections that
doesn't have to be paper documents. In fact,
most of what I do is digital work.
That is the forthcoming,
frontier of,
archival work since
mostly what we we produce these days is
in a digital format. That's going to be
what documents our current society and the state
of physics today going forward. But you've not
always been a physics archivist, have you? Actually,
I worked in rare books before this at
the Library of Congress. I, was a reference
assistant there.
The opposite of digital and not always relating
to
the history of science, let alone contemporary science.
Is physics always interested you, or is it
more just the, you know, the the archiving
of things that that's drawn you to this?
I think it's a little bit of both.
What has interested me
is the way that information systems work.
I've always been fascinated historically
how people,
trade information back and forth,
in a variety of information systems, you know,
be that
back in the days of,
you know,
predigital
and exchanging letters and, you know, how they
get important information to each other.
And I'll kind of go into my history
interests. I was,
I studied
the history of nineteenth century American science, but
particularly
from the lens of building information institutions. So
I, did my master's
work studying
the Smithsonian in its early years,
particularly
the Smithsonian meteorological
project, which was the first major research in
initiative
at the institution.
And what I was really fascinated by was
this network of science that was happening,
and it wasn't a network of professionals necessarily,
but just what drew people into
that network, what made them
feel the need to dedicate their time to
providing scientific
data to the institution. And it was like
a major
commitment
by these,
people across The United States to
write down meteorological
data four times a day and send that
back monthly,
in the eighteen fifties.
And it was just fascinating to see how
that operated.
Mhmm. Yeah. No. It is. And this, this
the reason we're talking today is because of
this,
what can you tell us about it, the
the release of the Oppenheimer
interview, if somebody called? Yeah. So,
I started at
AIP about a year and a half ago,
and,
you know, you're still kind of getting a
feel for the landscape of the archive that
you're working with and
what the legacy of the collections are and,
you know, how they collect and,
how they work with their donors. And AIP
has a very, very strong dedication
to good relationships with its donors.
And, I was doing some reference work and,
got a question from a researcher that they
were interested in using one of these Oppenheimer
transcripts. And most of our oral history transcripts
are in our repository, they're open access, and
this one wasn't. And so I, you you
know, went to my colleagues and I was
like, oh, you know, why is this one
not open access?
And they explained that the history was that
there was an informal agreement that the family
didn't want the Oppenheimer family
didn't want these to be open access. They
wanted to regulate,
researcher use of these materials a little more.
And so we'd always respected that. And,
traditionally,
you had to write a letter as a
researcher to Peter Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer's son,
and get that permission first to access the
transcript. And then when you were ready to
publish using materials from that transcript, you had
to write again and, like, specifically say which
quotes you were interested in. So it was
kind of a double barrier to access. I
mean, it it made sense, and we were
very
willing to,
you know, have researchers go,
and direct them through this process.
But,
we reached out
to the Oppenheimer estate to kind of, you
know, ask for this on behalf of this
researcher. And we got an email back and
it was from, one of the Oppenheimer grandchildren
rather than Peter.
And she was kind of questioning. I don't
think she knew this whole process and she
was like, oh, do you know why you're
asking us?
And that I
kind of explained my knowledge of the situation.
And,
we both kind of have being new to
this environment and new to this archival material,
we were like, oh, well, you know, maybe
maybe it's time to kind of rethink
this relationship.
And,
we were both,
like, the Oppenheimer state were
very enthusiastic
about opening access and, like, really encouraging history
of science work. And,
that was incredibly encouraging,
that support we got from them.
And so over several months, we kind of
talked about various options of, like, formal,
you know, copyright
agreements,
and, like, what permissions they were comfortable with
going forward.
And,
essentially, they just wanted to ensure that there
was open, non commercial access to this work
so that researchers and it wasn't just that
one transcript. It was,
three,
interviews that we had in our collections transcripts,
and,
two of them have accompanying audio, which is
just fantastic. And,
they agreed, yeah, to allow
noncommercial open access. We could put them in
the repository for anyone
to read or listen to and,
really just see a new
perspective
of Robert Oppenheimer
in his own words. It's extremely meaningful
to have that,
stream of consciousness from him and even hear
his voice.
I found Bridgeman a wonderful teacher
because
he
never really was quite reconciled
to things being the way they were, and
he always thought them out. And his exercises
were
a very good way to learn where the
bones were in
these these two beautiful parts of physics.
I think as far as science goes,
they were the
the great point of my time at Harvard.
But I can't
I can't emphasize
strongly enough
how much I read
and more really just in exploration.
You see, it's a very odd picture. I've
never had an elementary course
in physics except for a very elementary
school course.
And to this day, I get panicky when
I think about a smoke ring or elastic
vibration.
There's nothing there. It's just
a little skim over over over a hole.
And, in the same way, my my mathematical
formation
was even for those days very primitive.
And this is more than evident
in the way I went about some of
the things I did later.
And very eclectic. I mean, I
I
took a course with Littlewood
on number theory. Well, that was nice,
but
that wasn't really how to go about learning
mathematics
for the professional pursuit of civility. This was
when you were in Cambridge. That's right.
Would you always, as an archivist, dive into
what you're archiving? Or do you always read
everything and listen to everything? Not always. There,
of course, is just too much material out
there
to
get to dive into everything. But, of course,
my background
in studying history as well as an archivist,
Sometimes you just latch on to something and
you you can't help but dig deeper into
it. This project definitely took up more
of my time than maybe a typical,
kind of reference,
request or other
project with, some of our other collections. But,
I think that that when you have the
opportunity
to,
you know, dig deep into material that you
know is going to be so meaningful to
so many people, like, you really have to,
take that extra time.
I I mean, I you'd be totally excused
for not being someone who's kind of watched
the Oppenheimer film, read the book, and all
that kind of thing. Right? As many people
who were listening will have done. Have you
watched that film, read that book, and what
does,
even if you haven't, what does your own
appreciation of listening to him in his own
words, reading him in his own words, what
what's that brought to your understanding of of
as a character?
I have read, the book, and I have
seen the movie. I saw the movie during
the initial Barb and Heimer.
And I I think, I then I watched
it more recently after going through the oral
histories, and it was a very different experience.
I do think
I you just connect to him
more as a person,
and it puts so much of I've read,
Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's
book as well, and
it just provides, like, an extra layer of
depth underneath all of it, but maybe also
an appreciation
for
how
primary source
can be transformed first into biography
and then into a film. Like, you can
see the thread going through, and you can
feel what rings true.
Like, there are some direct quotes, and
it's really neat to see those quotes in
each, you know, format.
But then you also can appreciate
how
delicate it is to communicate both person and
science
and how well done that can be, like,
explaining,
you know, Oppenheimer's,
you know, state of mind during his graduate
studies, but then also
the difficulties and triumphs of, like, coming to,
you know, his research. Like, it's a struggle,
but then they explain the science as well
that he's, like, struggling through in a way
that I think it's it's, it's quite impressive
to,
explain to a wider audience.
I have a twelve month head start. Eighteen.
How could you possibly know that?
We've got one hope.
All America's industrial minded scientific innovation connected here,
secret laboratory.
Keep everyone there until it's done. Does Cillian
Murphy's representation of him ring true for what
you're reading and seeing in these and and
hearing in these? I do think that Cillian
Murphy did an impressive job of the way
I mean, no one can exactly replicate the
way that Oppenheimer Robert Oppenheimer,
his voice and his, like, very careful
and,
you know, steady mannerism
comes across in the oral history interviews.
But I think that Kellyanne Murphy does kind
of have, like, this gravity and this, you
know,
measuredness
to his performance that I think, you know,
it's it's an it's a good adaptation
of, you know, the reality.
Because you've made this archive accessible to people,
everybody can now do that. Right? They can
go and listen to Oppenheimer in his own
words. They can read Oppenheimer in his own
words. They can read the book. They can
watch the film. They can they can all
go and do that.
What they can't do is be behind the
scenes of of everything that you've done to
to make this happen. And and I in
the archive, do you have to
are these tapes in a specially controlled room?
Are they the physical
tapes,
are they as important, really, as this digital
artifact?
We consider them as important. We,
store the tapes in,
climate controlled environments.
Unfortunately,
tapes are a, an endangered
format, and there is degradation to tapes.
That is an especially urgent man matter in
archiving right now, which is why we reformat
when we can.
So we have reformatted to the digital so
that we never have to
reach unnecessarily
for the tape format.
We actually already had digitized
the
third interview which was actually originally
a film interview conducted
for Harvard Project Physics, a film, on Enrico
Fermi.
His impact during his lifetime was very great
in the professional community
among physicists.
He was deeply loved,
imitated
as far as it lay in people's power
to do so by very many.
He
changed the style in which a whole
set of problems were thought about and the
language that was used.
He
had an experimental style as well as a
theoretical one
among physicists. This was
something that was felt very soon, and
the world is full of physicists.
Unfortunately, not full enough.
So we had that one already digitized. We
are, you know, preserving
the original audio tape and the original film.
And then
the second interview is a very interesting story.
It was collected for the
project for the history of quantum physics,
sources for the history of quantum physics project.
And that audio,
we
both store it AIP,
but one of the partners of that project
was the American Philosophical
Society in Philadelphia,
and they had
reformatted tapes several years ago
that
were,
you know,
better for digitization than
anything that we have on our site. And
so often we will,
send researchers
to Philadelphia
if they are looking for,
archive for the history of quantum physics audio.
And so we reached out to them when
we were revising this agreement with the Oppenheimer
family,
and they were, very enthusiastic
and,
generously provided
a digitized copy of their audio tapes to
us.
And this this, archive for the history of
quantum physics project has always been
about inter institutional
cooperation.
And during this time, we kind of reopened
looking at the archive for the history of
quantum physics historically.
And
there's always also been a case of,
kind of ambiguous
permissions
around how institutions can govern
the
HQP
materials and their collections, and this has reopened
a conversation about how we do that. And
we're looking to open up that relationship even
more and possibly make more of that available
online in the future. So Oh, that's interesting.
One conversation about open access just opens doors
to others. It's kind of like everyone ends
up being very enthusiastic
about sharing
what they can.
Yeah. No. That's lovely. I I when you're
doing something like this with the audio
that's been recorded a long time ago and,
you know, it's not it's not the audio
that we we're used to hearing today in
podcasts and films, etcetera,
do do you do anything to it in
terms of improving it for a today's audience,
or do you leave it as it is?
There's there's a decision to make there.
You don't want to intervene too much.
You wanna remain a trusted source.
And,
by not editing things, you provide people with,
like, the raw
copy
of,
you know, as true to the original as
you can.
And then from there, you know, if they
have tools
to improve audio, they can download it and,
you know, make improvements.
And, unfortunately,
some of the tapes
have
degraded a bit, and you will hear that
in
the 1963
tapes. At the beginning of them, there's
there's a little bit of distortion, and we
believe that that's from
the beginning of the tapes, which is exposed
more to open air
degrading faster.
And for the stuff on,
on molecular
structure.
Well, that paper is born and up Yeah.
Now and their physique and it's probably 27.
But do you know I think I was
do you have a
I thought that it was missing this quarter
and with
And so we are actually supporting
the American Philosophical Society in a, a grant
to fully digitize all of the AHQP
audio
so that we will then have that digital
copy in case the tape further degrades in
the future. Do you feel like people would
feel less that they trust it less if
you
improved it at source, if you see what
I mean?
I think if we if we improved
the audio
using, you know, various tools,
we would have to, you know, we would
include a disclaimer
that it had been altered and, you know,
where it had been altered, how and why
to maintain that trust.
Okay. Fair enough. Because in in this day
of, you know, AI,
you know,
generated videos,
you really don't wanna be presenting something that's
been altered too deeply. No. Fair enough. Fair
enough. How do you feel about AI as
a,
as an archivist and someone who's interested in
this sort of thing? As an archivist, I
think there's a lot of opportunity
for AI
to act as a helpmate in doing
routine archival work.
But I am
I think AI can just as much help
as it can create a an environment of
distrust in,
presenting
archival materials that,
you know, will live on the Internet alongside
less trustworthy sources.
This is for noncommercial
use. How do you police that, or is
that not your job to police that?
At the end of the day, it is
on our users to ultimately,
you
know, understand if they are using these materials,
for noncommercial
fair use.
What we do,
request in our policy is that if anyone
is going to,
use this material in their
scholarly work and publications that they submit a
request
through our request form, and, we ask that
they include all of the quotes that they
will be using.
And
then that
approval of those requests, we that generally happens
very quickly, within a day or two. And
then, you know, they have our endorsement to
go forward and publish.
And,
otherwise, you know, we don't wanna be we
don't wanna create more barriers to
access to this material.
So the whole point of this was to
bring down those barriers and let people do
their research as
easy a manner as possible.
And there there is a difficulty and a
sacrifice, I think, in putting something online
to achieve that.
At the same time, you're opening
up these materials to potentially being used in
a way that is not governed by the
policy.
I guess you'd know though, wouldn't you? If
if somebody made a lot of money out
of it, you'd become aware of the fact,
you know, if there's,
some incredibly
brilliant dance tracks with, Oppenheimer
on it. I don't know how closely I
would, be following that
culture to be aware of it.
Fair enough. I guess that would be I
don't know. That would just be really cool.
I don't. We would have to consider Yeah.
Yeah. If someone wants to get in touch
and ask, then they know where you are.
Right? So they can,
get that to work. But it it there's
there's that side of it, but I'm assuming
that there's there'll be interest from educators
and,
historians and other oral historians. And and how
do you hope that people will use it?
I hope that people will use it to,
again, get that deep connection with the the
personal elements of history. I think
Kibert and Martin Sherwin had a
quote at the beginning of American Prometheus where
they said you cannot separate
the personal from the scientific. They go hand
in hand.
And
understanding
the legacy of Robert Oppenheimer
cannot be
removed from understanding him
as a person.
We've actually already even had someone reach out
and tell us that they were an educator,
and they told us, oh, I got so
excited when I heard that about these interviews
that I played
the audio in the classroom for my students,
and they were
just really amazed. And it, like, it really
was a meaningful experience for them. I mean,
Robert Oppenheimer's voice holds, like, so much gravity.
He's very interesting to listen to, and I
encourage everyone to,
give these interviews a listen. There's some
really just, like,
like, heavy quotes, but also, you know, quotes
that contextualize
him as a person.
Yes. I think you saw that most strongly
when Fermi
lectured about or took an interest in a
subject on which he never worked.
He didn't do what most mortals do, which
is read the literature
and say, yes, he understood it, controlling a
calculation
here or
making a connection there.
He would essentially tear up the literature and
do it over again,
often,
in a way that wasn't quite as good
as what he tore up,
but surprisingly
often in a better way than had ever
been done before.
And,
we owed
the accessibility
of quantum electrodynamics
and a great deal that flowed from
that to Fermi. He didn't make it. It
was made by Dirac and by
some other people,
Heisenberg and Pavley and others.
But
it was made in a very awkward way
and put off
all students,
and
the family made it so that ordinary mortals
could
understand and deal with it.
That was because he wanted to understand and
deal with
And the do it yourself quality
applied not so much to the things he
did himself, because that's true of any good
scientist,
but to the things that he learned from
others.
There was very little he learned by the
book.
Is that where would you start? Like, if
you're a listener to the Physics World Stories
podcast, which, of course, you are. But if
if, if you were one and you only
had, let's say, twenty minutes spare and you
thought, I wanna dive into this, where would
you personally start?
I would start with the 1963
interview,
especially if you are a fan of, the
Oppenheimer movie or American Prometheus. This was the
interview that was
utilized by,
the authors of American Prometheus,
especially in understanding Robert Oppenheimer in his early
life.
I would say that apart from this quirk
about mineralogy
and the abnormality of of Greek,
I probably had what was then a good
high school grounding
and damn little more as far as knowing
anything.
I knew what the calculus was. I knew
what analytic geometry was.
But I had had no formal training in
it. I probably looked at some texts.
About physics, I
had read, but in
a completely
unenlightened
way,
about physical chemistry, I should say, a good
deal more
than one normally would, but again, with no
discipline
and no
coherence.
So that I think you could say that
when I went to Harvard,
I was
as well formed as the high schools of
the time. Formed people, but not any better.
So I think that one that one is
the longest, but it is a good starting
point if you are already a little bit
familiar.
And then reading the 1960
interview
that was, conducted
for a more popular magazine is also just
fascinating. It's about the Trinity test.
And
while it doesn't present anything, you know, extraordinarily
new, it does present some
personal sentiments
of Oppenheimer's that kind of throw a new
light on his perspective.
The the purpose of archiving things is
to make the future better. Right? Isn't it?
Isn't that the case? So what do you
hope we could learn from this that would
inform physics, inform,
the way we do physics, and and the
way we
manage the world and politics and physics because,
certainly, that comes into Oppenheimer's world as well.
I think science gets transformed
in ways that are outside of the control
of the individual
scientists
who, you know, pursue knowledge
often for the sake of knowledge.
But the the science and physics that they
do and they create,
it kind of falls out of their control
and out of their hands at various points
in time.
So by, you know, conducting this work in
the history of science and connecting it
more to the personal.
You can kind of trace the science back
to, you know, its creation and and its
the intent of
those who are originally conducting the research.
And I think that
it's more inspiring than maybe what the ultimate
the ultimate use of that science can be.
Is there anything else that you sort of
come out of it that you just like
to share? I've just gained an appreciation for
the history of science community and for
the,
donors to the Niels Bohr Library and Archives
at AIP.
There's just such an enthusiasm
for
encouraging history of science research and supporting each
other.
I've deepened relationships with all of these groups
through this process, and,
it's just been very exciting and,
really meaningful to me.
Okay. Is there is there more Oppenheimer to
come, or are you moving on to other
people now? Not more Oppenheimer at the moment,
but Oppenheimer existed in
a vast network of scientists in The United
States and abroad.
I think
starting with Oppenheimer,
but branching out to various other parts of
this network
and opening up more material from,
his contemporaries
will maybe be next.
Okay. And people or what if people want
to find out, be the first to know
where would they go for that.
I would encourage them to subscribe to AIP's
history newsletter, the Niels Bohr Library and Archives
blog,
or just AIP's general social media.
Okay. We'll post links to all of that
on the Physics World website, physicsworld.com.
And thank you very much for talking to
me. Yeah. Thank you very much, Andrew.
You will, of course, find all that on
physicsworld.com
where you'll also find the interview that I
did with Kai Bird
just after the film was released, Oppenheimer,
starring Cillian Murphy,
based on the book American Prometheus, the triumph
and tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer,
written by Kai Bird and Martin j Sherwin.
Thank you very much for listening to this
episode of the physics world stories podcast. I
wanted to make it a little bit shorter
because I'm really hoping that like me what
you're now going to do is dive into
those recordings and I didn't want to take
up too much of your time before you
get on with that. We'll be back next
month with
I'm pretty sure we'll be looking back at
the Artemis two mission and thank you very
much for listening.