Book Review: American Prometheus by Kai Bird

With the Oppenheimer movie coming out next week, I had wanted to read the source material, Kai Bird's American Prometheus, to get a leg up on what's going to be in the movie. After reading this book, my question is: what can they possibly cut out of this man's life to make it fit into a movie?

I mean, as a kid Robert Oppenheimer vacationed in, of all places...Los Alamos! Are they going to have time to put that in there?

As a graduate student in England he suffered from mental illness (undiagnosed since it was 100 years ago) and actually tried to KILL HIS PROFESSOR!!! If his father hadn't been a millionaire (he ran a department store, which, for those of us from the Northeast, I believe turned into Sterns) and able to donate lots of money to the school, he would have gone to jail. Are they going to have time to put that in there?

He and his wife Kitty had a difficult relationship with their children. A few months after his son Peter was born, Kitty said they needed a little time away...and they ended up spending months apart from their newborn son so they could vacation. After their daughter Toni was born, Robert was called away for a while on government business, so he left newborn Toni with a friend. When he came back a few weeks later, he asked the friend if SHE WANTED TO KEEP TONI!!!! Are they going to have time to put that in there?

Again, HE TRIED TO KILL HIS PROFESSOR IN COLLEGE!!!! Are they going to have time to put that in there?

The likely answer for all of the above is no, because the story of his association with communism in the 1930s, his leadership of the Manhattan project, his frustration with the atom bomb's usage and the direction the government wanted to take it, and then his ultimate shunning by a conservative Republican government is just too compelling!

There's a ton I learned about this section of Oppenheimer's life here, and how it all hinged on one fateful conversation with a friend, but we're going to have a movie about that and I don't want this to turn into a book report. Let me just say that this is a long book full of lots and lots of stuff...but due to the excellent writing it is also extremely compelling to read! It also includes a lot of insights into the era, such as:

• "Fellow travelers" were people who associated with the American Communist party but did not join the party. The reason you would be a fellow traveler in the 30s is because the communists were the ones at the time doing things like integrating public spaces, unionizing, feeding the poor, and supporting the rebels in the Spanish Civil War. Oppenheimer was indeed a fellow traveler...although it is a bit murky if he was ever something more....

• There's a difference between experimental and theoretical physics, which sounds intuitive, yet I assumed all physicists had to cover both areas. During Oppenheimer's first post-grad position in England, at the school where he TRIED TO KILL HIS PROFESSOR, he was at a school for experimental physics, where physicists were trying to prove how far light will travel through objects, how fast electricity would travel through materials, etc. As a post-grad Oppenheimer was doing mindless grunt work like cutting things, filing things, cleaning things, etc. that exacerbated his mental illness. His second post-grad position was at a university in Germany (!) where he got to do theoretical physics with fellow scholars like Werner Heisenberg (!!!) - those are the physicists that do complex math equations that may or may not ever be able to be proven concretely. This is the type of physics that Oppenheimer pursued and later taught.

• Speaking of kinds of physics, Albert Einstein, while older than Oppenheimer, was a contemporary of his - in fact, Oppenheimer was technically his boss at Princeton. Einstein was thought even then to be the smartest physicist of all time, but if you ever wondered like I did why Einstein was never asked to join the Manhattan project...it's because he didn't believe in quantum physics! I figured it was a natural progression from Newtonian physics to quantum physics, but Einstein could never buy into it - as he put it, he wanted to believe that God had a plan and didn't leave it up to chance (since quantum physics was best defined by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - again with that guy!). I don't remember if this was covered or not in this book, but Einstein's hesitation with quantum physics was the reason for the Schrodinger's Cat argument.

• In the movie they will definitely cover the government's investigations into Oppenheimer's past after the war's end that ended with his security clearance being revoked. What I don't know if they'll cover (although they may since it looks like Matt Damon is playing General Groves) is that the father of the atomic bomb was constantly in danger of losing his security clearance even while leading the Manhattan Project. It was pretty much a miracle that they gave him clearance in the first place!

So, as you can see, there's a lot going on in this book - it was such an awesome read I can't shut up about it! Definitely recommended - TEN OUT OF TEN HOT DOGS!!!