Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius , Silvan S. Schweber
Harvard U. Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008. $29.95 (412 pp.). ISBN 978-0-674-02828-9
Before immigrating to the US in 1933, Albert Einstein spent three winter semesters at Caltech. In a talk he gave to students there in 1931, he addressed the question of the scientist’s responsibility in society and concluded, “Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors … in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to all mankind.” His prophetic statement would come to haunt many scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, the most prominent of those American academics who fashioned a working arrangement with the political establishment in the 1940s.
As wartime scientific director of the Manhattan Project and chairman of the general advisory committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer had a relationship with the military and civilian bureaucracy that was in striking contrast to Einstein’s. The younger physicist threw himself into directing the project with a disregard of its potential for compromising scientific independence. Einstein, on the other hand, kept his distance from the bureaucracy in general and the Manhattan Project in particular. That decision was made easier for him by the fact that, already in his 60s, he had no career ambitions, was considered a security risk, and possessed no expertise in the fields of physics required for the effort that went into developing a nuclear weapon. Still, Einstein had a wariness of political entanglement that was rooted in the assumption that only someone who is truly independent can remain free enough to act morally. Oppenheimer’s career traced a very different trajectory, and his deference to the establishment is emblematic of what Einstein contemptuously called Autoritdtsdusel (stupor in the face of authority).
The fascination with those two giants of 20th-century physics seems boundless, and so the public should find irresistible the allure of a volume that presents the juxtaposition of their lives. Silvan Schweber, a well-known physicist and historian of science, has undertaken the task in writing Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius. In his unique study, he touches on Oppenheimer’s and Einstein’s differing attitudes toward power. In his preface, however, Schweber offers a different guiding thread for his dual biography: “How did Einstein and Oppenheimer try to remain relevant after they had made their singular contributions?”
As an organizing principle, that question leaves something to be desired, and indeed Schweber picks up the theme only fitfully throughout the book. In the first four chapters, he explores two aspects of each of his subjects’ careers. In Einstein’s case, they are his stance on nuclear weapons and the founding of Brandeis University; in Oppenheimer’s, they are his calling as physicist and science organizer and his relationship with the philosophical school of American pragmatism. Schweber’s reconstructions in those chapters are masterful, but they seem more like feints than contributions to resolving the question posed in the preface. For example, rather than chapter four’s detailed account of milestones in the history of the Institute for Advanced Study, an emphasis on Oppenheimer’s long-term objectives as its director would have better served to address the question of relevance.
Perhaps Schweber has asked the wrong question. Remaining relevant may have been a decisive factor in Oppenheimer’s career path, but it certainly was not in Einstein’s. The reason for that difference is based on their distinct personalities or, as Schweber correctly describes it, on their different senses of self worth and their relationship with their peers. But it is really only in the final chapter, “Einstein, Oppenheimer, and the Meaning of Community,” that the author grapples with the question of identity in his protagonists’ lives, and he grapples with it in far greater detail for Oppenheimer. Moreover, in the case of Einstein, the chapter contains such jarring misinterpretations as referring to Einstein as a socialist in his later life, because of the social-democratic worldview of two mentors in his youth; repeating the false claim that Einstein was an “ardent Zionist” (page 107); attributing far too much to anti-Semitism as an influence on Einstein’s early career in Switzerland; and, perhaps most awkwardly, viewing the physicist’s grasp of index finger and thumb while posing for photographs (illustrations on pages 288–91) as an indication of his affinity for Vishnu and the Buddha. It is far more plausible that the pose, rather than a religious gesture, is a reflex of longing for the Swiss cheroots that Einstein’s doctors had forbidden him.
Unfortunately, the volume is marred by egregious typographical errors, particularly—but not exclusively—in German concepts and names including Weltbilt (page 6), Motive der Forschens (page 384), and Habitch (page 267). Dan Kennefick is scarcely recognizable as “Dennefink” and Michael Polanyi’s last name repeatedly becomes “Polyani” (page 42 and the index, for example). And what is a reader to make of the “Kaiser Leopold German Academy of Scientists” (page 300)?
The best and most original part of Einstein and Oppenheimer comes in the epilogue to the last chapter and in Schweber’s concluding remarks. In those passages, Schweber wrestles with the concepts of exile, marginality, relationship to the Jewish tradition, and the contrasting eras of physics and politics in which each man made his mark. Indeed, the themes in the book are often brilliantly executed, but they seem at one and the same time too random and too self-contained. Many sections of Schweber’s dual biography are a genuine pleasure to read, but I fear that taken as a whole, the various themes do not cohere.
Robert Schulmann directed the Einstein Papers Project from 1988 to 2000 and edited six volumes of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (Princeton University Press). He is now a senior research scholar at ETH Zurich, Albert Einstein’s alma mater, and is finishing a book on the physicist’s years in Switzerland.
