American Prometheus is an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary scientist. Its comprehensiveness is truly something to marvel at.
As I was reading the book, I often wondered how students walking the halls of schools like Berkeley and Princeton contended with the legacy of the work and seminal researchers that came before them. Berkeley, after all, is where modern particle and nuclear physics was born. Even where I myself go to university, it’s a tough question to stomach — the same halls I have lectures are where modern deep learning and computational complexity theory was dreamt up, some of the most influential contributions to computer science.
Science is built on foundations laid by people often several centuries ago, in more ways than one, standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before you. Reading American Prometheus is remarkable precisely because of how many almost household names did their finest work at the same time as Oppenheimer. We’re not quite at the time of Newton or Maxwell anymore in the biography, but we are in the time of luminaries like Einstein, Dirac, Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger, Feynman, Hahn, von Neumann, Chadwick, and those that dragged physics into the 20th century. Every page references a new influential physicist that worked with Oppenheimer. Truly remarkable.
Like many of those superstar physicists, Oppenheimer was an extraordinarily talented researcher, able to break open many sub-fields like it was nothing. We are now past the age of academics that were just as interdisciplinary or well-read in literature or polyglots. To see physicists like Feynman or Oppenheimer do just about everything, I think reinforces the sheer leaps physics went through in the early 20th century. Feynman, for instance, devoted some of his time to quantum electrodynamics. This in itself is a field that many would devote their entire careers to. The perfect scientist is in many ways a relic of the past.
The book also delivers a scathing indictment of McCarthyism and anti-communism, and indeed the kangaroo court Oppenheimer was forced to endure. There is almost nothing more clear than the injustice of post-war McCarthyism — of researchers who had their careers destroyed before they even began, or of perceived disloyalty where there was only simple dissent. What contributions to modern science were missed by these witch hunts? What damage was done to academic freedom?
We live in an age of remarkable tension between the United States and China — it is not difficult to draw parallels between the McCarthy-era witch hunts of academics with suspected communist ties, and the modern 21st century hunts of academics suspected of ties with Chinese academia. We read, in the biography, the stories of universities insistent on turning a blind eye to the political persecution of their faculty, and we ask, “how could this ever happen?” But the same is happening again, and university administrators do little once again to defend the innocent.
Oppenheimer’s story offers us a glimpse at what we could allow happen again in our universities and our communities, if we allow the same political persecution to take root. It certainly paints a portrait of a country run by the delusional — those that persecuted some of the greatest minds to ever touch physics.
4.5/5
Written on 24 December 2023
Adapted from my review on Goodreads.