Dan Snow's History Hit - Oppenheimer

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

On a summer morning in 1945, a device known simply as 'Gadget' was detonated. An enormous explosion tore a crater into the New Mexico desert, melting sand into radioactive green glass and sending a mushroom cloud 7.5 miles into the sky. This was the first controlled detonation of a nuclear weapon, and its mastermind was the American theoretical physicist, J Robert Oppenheimer.In this episode, Dan is joined by writer and artist Ben Platts-Mills to hear about the man who orchestrated one of the most extraordinary scientific developments in human history. What kind of person was he? How did he go from a shy, studious child to a charismatic celebrity scientist? And what did he think about the perils of the weapons he worked so hard to create?Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. At 5.29am on the 16th of July 1945, in a patch of desert, 35 miles southeast of Socorro in New Mexico, the first test took place of the most devastating weapon in the history of the human race. Known simply as the gadget, the device exploded with the equivalent of nearly 25 kilotons of TNT. That's over 10,000 times more powerful than the biggest available conventional bomb

in the world at that point. For 300 meters around the base of the explosion, the desert sand melted. It became a mildly radioactive green glass, which was named Trinitite. It created the crater, a metre and a half deep, around 80 metres wide. At the moment of detonation, witnesses say the surrounding mountains were illuminated brighter than daytime for a second or two. Even from a considerable distance away, it was reported as being as hot as an oven. The blast was felt over a hundred miles away, and a mushroom cloud reached seven

and a half miles into the sky. That test was watched by 425 people. Among them was the man who'd assigned the code name of that test, Trinity. He was a fan of the poetry of John Donne and inspired by Donne's musings about the nature of the Trinity to name the first atomic test in his honour. That poetry fan was the senior physicist, the director of the Los Alamos laboratory, one of the most senior figures of the Manhattan Project. His name was Julius Robert Oppenheimer. In years later, he said that as he watched that explosion, he thought of a line from medieval Hindu scripture, Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

That technology was deployed on the battlefield within a month. In August 1945, atomic bombs were used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They certainly brought death and destruction. Inspired by the major new motion picture, Oppenheimer, I've decided to do a podcast on the man himself. I've got Ben Platts Mills back. He's a polymath himself. He's a science writer, but he's also an artist and he thinks and writes about the way science is presented in the popular media. He's going to tell me all about Oppenheimer and his role in the Manhattan Project. A physicist working with Oppenheimer described him, I could see firsthand the tremendous intellectual power of Oppenheimer, who was the unquestioned leader of our group.

The intellectual experience was unforgettable. And General Leslie R. Groves, a military man, an engineer who directed the Manhattan Project, he said he could see that Oppenheimer had an overweening sense of ambition that he knew would drive the project forward at all costs. He had found his man. Well, let's hear from Ben Platts Mills now, all about the making of the Oppenheimer legend. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Ben, good to have you back on the pod, buddy. Good to see you again, Dan. Right, let's go. Oppenheimer. Everyone's talking about him at the moment. Is that or Barbie? What's his family history? What's his story? Where does it begin?

So he was born in 1904 in New York City. His parents were first-generation German-Jewish migrants, and they'd made a fortune in the textile trade. So his upbringing was quite luxurious by the sound of it. They had this big, beautiful apartment that covered the whole floor of a block on the Upper West Side overlooking the Hudson River. They had three live-in maids. They had a chauffeur. They had Van Gogh paintings on the walls. They had at least a couple of Picassos they had a Rembrandt drawing and these were collected by his mum so they were a really really cultured family and it sounds as though

they quite early on recognized that they had a a bit of a genius for a son that was their conviction and they very much cosseted and protected and encouraged him his intellectual development some of those three kids how do you recognize that you have a genius for a child? Just checking. Apparently, the story goes that by the age of nine, he was reading Homer in Greek. Okay, okay. How does that do?

That's fine. I'm just, okay, I know where the bar is. Apparently, at school one day day he told her school friend ask me a question in latin and i'll reply in greek yeah okay well that's good to know so he wasn't just brainy he was quite smug yeah clearly clearly speaking of school friends he didn't really uh care about them he's a bit of a loner yeah i think he struggled socially i guess probably partly being such an intellectual and having such a kind of extraordinary capacity for languages

and for learning and poetry and, you know, all of these things from such an early age, maybe that makes a person... He struggled, I think, with connecting with friends. He was also, interestingly, from descriptions of relatives, he wasn't interested in performing stereotype gender behaviour. He kind of... He wasn't interested in performing stereotype gender behavior. He kind of, he wasn't interested in rough and tumble. He blushed very readily.

He was quite a shy person and quite sensitive and got teased, I think, by quite a lot for not being very boyish. And his parents protected him, I think, from a lot of that. It's interesting, the story of the Manhattan Project and nuclear physics. We think of the Jewish physicists being chased out of Germany in the 1930s, coming to Britain and then to America. It's a story of these other people as well, but a remarkable core of Jewish scientists. I didn't realize Oppenheimer, his father was a Jewish refugee from persecution, but this time in the 19th century from Prussia, from the area we now know as Germany. So there's a strain as well that runs through him in this story. Yeah, and I think that definitely plays through to his motives in terms of what he did at Los Alamos.

There's a quote from him after the war where he says, Beginning in 1936, my interests began to change. I had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of the Jews in Germany. And he had relatives there. So, I mean, how could you help that feeding into your motives around this, the project that you've been asked to do by the government and, you know, that you're under this tremendous pressure. So let's get back to his childhood. He was invited into the mineralogical club of New York at the age of 11, because he had such a extensive collection of minerals. Again, I'm now thinking about my own son's pathetic collection of pebbles and shells on a shelf, uncurated. No, no, come on now. There aren't even little index cards for them. I mean, we got no hope. We got no hope.

There's no need for this. He's just a different person. I'm sure he's got his own talents. That's all I can say. This podcast is just burning up. So he goes to Harvard, where he ended up doing physics, right? No, he didn't actually. He started with chemistry at Harvard and he got his degree, but it sounds like he really struggled. It looks like when he left for college, that's when his mental health started to deteriorate.

It was almost like his brain kind of ran away with him. He started to really struggle with sexuality and sexual identity and kind of figuring out relationships and experiencing a lot of anxiety by the sound of things. And almost like his mind outside the protection and kind of constraint of his family, his mind sort of started to overrun. And he was, yeah, it's almost like he was overthinking and going a bit mad really by the sound of things from his letters. And he wrote quite extensively to his family throughout college he did his four-year course in three years obviously and it seems like he was doing a lot else besides at Harvard he was kind of studying the classics and doing all sorts of things

he then goes to Cambridge in the UK by this stage he is doing physics yes he was doing physics but he was still struggling he was studying under someone called blackett patrick blackett who was primarily an experimentalist and oppenheim was quite weak on the experimental side it sounds like he wasn't very manual very practical and he was really really struggling with that aspect in 19 1925, he wrote to his mentor, I'm having a pretty bad time. The lab work is a terrible bore and I'm so bad at it, it's impossible to feel I'm learning anything. Despite climbing the greasy pole, despite establishing his reputation, he's personally not having a great time. It's funny because he consistently graded incredibly highly. He was super successful and well thought of academically.

But it seems like personally, kind of on the level of his own feeling of his understanding, he felt like he was failing. He got into real trouble a bit later that same year in Cambridge, almost like this sense of inadequacy, this sort of sense of being put under pressure to do things that he was bad at, drove him to this kind of moment of disaster, really, where he left an apple. He poisoned an apple with lab chemicals and left it on his tutor's desk. Whoa. And yeah. And luckily, the tutor didn't eat it, but it was discovered. And his place at Cambridge was under threat. His dad intervened. So his privilege coming in again, and it was agreed

that he could stay at Cambridge on condition that he went to see a psychiatrist. Crikey. So attempted murder, he doesn't get sent down from Cambridge. What can I say? You know, if you're the right person at the right time, these things don't affect you in some way. And that privilege, that's really important to remember. That's a kind of mark of a privilege that followed him through his life, really. And by the way, you talk about the right time. Is this a time when the field that he was in was regarded as exciting as perhaps AI would be today? Is he becoming famous? Is he becoming influential in this world? Or is it just regarded as a narrow academic silo of limited interest to the wider population? So I guess that maybe it's the following year 1926 when things started to really happen he was still pretty young you know he's in his early 20s and it wasn't until that

year that he met Max Born who was an influential figure in theoretical physics at the time and who was a director at Gottingen, University of Gottingen. And they met at Cambridge and Max Born immediately identified Oppenheimer as someone who he felt he could work with. And he said, you're asking many of the same questions as people like Schrodinger, people that I'm working with right now. So you should come and work for me. Come to Gottingen. You could count on two hands the number of people working in the field at that time, and particularly in quantum and atomic physics. And he kind of met all of them at Gottingen over the course of that year. He describes that as being the year of his coming into physics.

You know, that's when he really started to feel he was among people that understood him, where he could have conversations that made sense, where he felt he could make a contribution. And it seemed like a turning point from there. His mental health started to improve. His letters home, his letter to his brother, take this much more positive tone, a much more kind of compassionate, self-compassionate tone. He's much more steady after that. And it seems like things started to turn around and he found his place.

Is the vibe exciting? Are they all realizing that they're working on something that within the next 20 years is going to change all life on this planet? I do think there was a sense of real excitement around quantum physics. It was very, very new at that point. People like Heisenberg and Born and Oppenheimer to an extent were really making their very earliest inroads into quantum mechanics and Niels Bohr, for example. So I think within the academic community, there was a sense of excitement about it. But I don't think it went outside.

At that point, it wasn't, no one was aware of it outside physics. You know, it wasn't until a good couple of decades later that people started to really take the idea of nuclear power and atomic power and atomic physics seriously and started to become aware of it as both a kind of a promise and a danger. So where was he on the outbreak of war in, well, we should say in 1941 for the Americans?

And why was he eventually chosen, not just brought into the war effort, but given one of the key positions in the American war effort? So after Cambridge and Göttingen, he went back to the US. He spent a few months at Harvard. And then he got a job at California Institute of Technology and then at Berkeley he sort of started dividing his time between the two where he gradually moved into teaching and sort of started setting up a department because there wasn't at Berkeley at the time there wasn't the department of theoretical physics so that's where

he was he'd spent you know a good 10 years there developing his own academic research, but also developing his teaching skills and his communication skills. And by all accounts, that was the time when he started to develop his social confidence really more significantly. His former students talk about how influential he was. He was so charismatic. I think once he kind of figured himself out, it started to really show how charismatic he was and these kind of leadership qualities. Some of his former students talk about how desperately they wanted to emulate him. They emulated his mannerisms, the way he walked, the things he wore. So he had this kind of magnetism personally. So he was still at Berkeley and Caltech when the war broke out in 41. So this is before the Manhattan Project, right? But the US government and military had started to take seriously the threat of the nuclear weapon, the possibility that Germany might

develop one. So in 41, they started appointing academics, academic leaders to start looking more seriously within their own departments to start looking more seriously at the various aspects that would be required to figure out if a bomb was possible, whether or not to take the project seriously. And so he was put in charge of one of these aspects of research. And then a year later, partly based on his team's research, the government became convinced, yeah, this is a reality, we have to pursue this. That's when Project Y, the scientific and technical wing of the Manhattan Project was initiated. And when they started looking for a scientific lead for that. So actually, he was part of the process that led to the setting up of the Manhattan Project as well.

And is that spurred by the famous letter to Roosevelt, a sign which he regretted years later by Einstein? Yeah, so this is really interesting and I think really important. In 1939, it was the physicists, it was the academics that were worried about nuclear power. Politicians, not so much, weren't taking it seriously, weren't really aware of it. Actually, it's because of that very tight community. If you think about Oppenheimer, you know, just a few years before back in Europe, the people he was meeting, as you say, a lot of them Jewish scientists who subsequently emigrated to the US and other places. It was all the same people. It was this small, tight-knit community of physicists

who were developing these ideas, a lot of them in Germany. So when the war broke out, you had this split. All of these people knew each other. Half of them were in Europe, the rest were in the US. And because that research had continued on these two fronts, and with this continued communication, when the war broke out, the scientists were suddenly made enemies, right? These friends suddenly became political enemies. And they were the ones who were afraid. They knew in their minds, so people like Otto Frisch and Leo Szilard, right, who was a Hungarian Jew who went to the UK first. And Leo Szilard had escaped the Nazis by arguably one train journey later he'd have been captured. He comes up with the idea of fishing, doesn't he, standing outside the British Museum,

looking at a traffic light. Anyway, then he and Einstein write this letter to Roosevelt to try and get the US to take this seriously. Yeah, so it's important to note that we still don't really know what would have happened if they hadn't taken that line, if the scientists themselves had not been pushing for this. We don't know. Certainly Germany had a nuclear weapons program. And I guess they were afraid, people like Oppenheimer and Szilard and Einstein knew that Werner Heisenberg, for example, was still in Germany, and that they'd been chatting all this time. They knew the same stuff.

So even if they didn't know for sure what they were up to in Germany, they absolutely knew that Werner Heisenberg and their other friends knew the same stuff that they did. So that was the fear, I think. That's why Szilard and Einstein wrote to Roosevelt, to warn him, I guess. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, talking about Oppenheimer. More after this. Hey, I'm Oppenheimer. More after this. ladies. From stitching the star-spangled banner to striking gold in California, to shooting for the moon with Apollo, we've got you covered. Catch new episodes of American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit, every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. So Oppenheimer helps to make the case for the Manhattan Project. He's then asked to lead it. How did that process work?

Was he the obvious choice? So he was already influential. He was already one of a handful of senior scientists at that point. I guess who knew the stuff, who knew the science, right? There weren't that many of them. Leslie Groves, General Leslie Groves, who's played by Matt Damon in the film, who was the military commander of the Manhattan

Project. He'd already met Oppenheimer and most of the other scientists involved. In 42, he was asked, look, we've got to pick a scientific leader here. My impression is that as much as anything, he went on character. He was recruiting on the basis of a conviction that Oppenheimer had the charisma and the leadership qualities and the drive and what he called an overweening ambition, a sense of kind of, I guess, purpose and hunger for this project that would carry it through. It wasn't on grounds of purely academic qualification or scientific knowledge. It was, I suspect, it was as much as anything about the fact that Oppenheimer did know the science, but Groves could see that this guy will carry these people through. He will do every aspect

of this project and he'll lead it. And that proved to be the case. So he was a leader as well as a brilliant scientist. Yeah. So Serber, Robert Serber, one of Oppenheimer's students from California, who then went to work at Los Alamos. He recruited a lot of the people at Los Alamos were people that had studied under Oppenheimer. And many of them were people he'd known during his own college time. You know, people like Enrico Fermi, for example. They're all mates. They're all friends. So Robert Serber described him as a really great teacher.

He kind of gushed about him, his capacity as a physicist, his wide intellectual interest, his astonishing quickness of mind, his great gift for expression, his sensitive perception, but also this social presence, which made him the center of every gathering. He finished by saying, I would more or less follow him to the ends of the earth. And we should say Fermi had created the first nuclear reaction in the University of Chicago. Yeah, so the chain reaction. Yeah, very recently. Yeah, the chain reaction in the sports stadium or something. And there was some concern it might blow up the whole city, but they did it anyway.

There were a number of moments where the scientists had these little wobbles about what they were doing as to whether it would blow up a building or a city or possibly the entire Earth's atmosphere. Like at the Trinity test, there were moments where they're like, are we sure this is okay? Yeah, we're going to come on to that. But that was Chicago pile one, and they've still got the bottle of wine that they drunk after. It's one of my favorite historical objects. I've been to see that. The fascinating thing about the Manhattan Project is the extent to which American industry and scientific networks

were mobilized. There were something like like 130 000 people employed by it up to the end of the war and spent more than more than two billion dollars at the time which is just an astonishing i mean that would be a huge project today in 1940s dollars that is an astonishing amount of money nothing like that had ever been done before or since and in some ways i feel like this project the manhattan project it was a really significant moment in the kind of development of the 20th century and how things still work. The sort of drawing together of the state and of universities and of private industry. So, so many organizations were kind of roped into manufacturing, mining. You know, they had to get uranium ore. There were so many resources they had to find and pull in.

It was really a nationwide effort and an international effort, actually. I've been to the mine in the Congo where they got the necessary uranium. So as you said, gigantic, complex international effort and international scientists taking part in it as well. How did he run it? How did he characterize his style? How did he get it done? So this is Hans hans bertha another colleague long-standing colleague who was at los alamos his uncanny speed in grasping the main points of any subject was a decisive factor he could acquaint himself with the essential details of every part of the work he did not direct from the head office he was intellectually and even physically present at each decisive step. It was his continuous and

intense presence which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us. It created a unique atmosphere. So he was super hands-on by the sound of it. And again, he was using that, both this intense passion and drive for the science and for the development of knowledge, but also, I think, like a really, really significant love of people. I think he actually really loved people and was really compelled by them and made quite deep connections with them, with his colleagues and with his friends at the time. And it helped, obviously, that a lot of the people who were working for him were existing friends who really admired him. So it was a charismatic effort as much as a scientific one. It's such an impressive coincidence of talents.

It's such an impressive coincidence of talents, you know, extraordinary leader, charismatic, energetic, whilst also having the mental firepower to understand what was going on in this unbelievably advanced physics. and that's really interesting to listen to that series there's one available on the bbci player where he talks a lot about how most of us will never know very much and even specialists can only really know a small amount about one thing it's very strange because you're right you know from the outside he appears to be this extraordinary polymath but i have this sense that from his own perspective he regretted almost like not having enough time or enough bandwidth to really look into everything that he loved and was interested in. He was obsessed with poetry. He read poetry really widely. In the Reith lectures, he talks about antinomies a lot, the kind of contradictions and the impossibility of being more than one thing at a time.

He links that to both physics and to the life of the individual, which is really interesting. So there's this strong sense with him of, I think of a kind of like a stretched identity of someone who's so interested in so many things, he can never really find the time to properly focus on one thing or another. And that's borne out, you know, in quotes from friends, again, from colleagues. Isidore Rabi said that he lived a charade. I took him for what he was. I understood his problem. And that, he said, was identity. Well, he did pretty well for somebody who was wrestling with identity

and feeling like a complete failure and superficial in a monologue. The Manhattan Project was an astonishing success. And on the 16th of July, 1945, the Trinity test took place. Is there truth to the myth that there was a small chance they worried they might actually set the atmosphere of the Earth on fire? They did run that. What did they say? They ran the numbers on that possibility. Yeah, I think Enrico Fermi was concerned about that. It was something to do with the effect of the bomb on the hydrogen content of the atmosphere, I think. I think by the time they did it, they'd reassured themselves through mathematics that it wasn't going to happen. Near zero. I think it was near zero was the description of the risk. detonate the so-called The Gadget in New Mexico. Then the most famous quote that everyone thinks they know about Oppenheimer is when he said that he was reminded of a piece of Hindu scripture at

that point, now I am become death, the destroyer of the world. What's the context for that story? The context for that story, he said that much later. So there's a lovely YouTube video you can watch of him being interviewed for television in the 60s, where he quotes that, where he says, that's what came to my mind, I am become death. It's a beautiful piece of video. He's so somber and so kind of grave in reflecting on this. Whether or not he did think of it at that time, of course, you know, because he didn't say it at the time, he just thought it. Some of his friends reflected on that as being perhaps an exaggeration or a kind of romantic flourish on his part. One of his friends called it a priestly exaggeration. But where it came from is the Bhagavad Gita. So this is a medieval Hindu scripture in the form of poetry, which Oppenheimer discovered during his

time in California in the 30s. Along with developing and running a theoretical physics department, he was learning Sanskrit and studying Sanskrit texts, one of which was the Bhagavad Gita. And it seems like it came to form quite an important philosophical underpinning for him that he went back to again and again, particularly during the Manhattan Project, because it has these key moments where it talks about duty, where it talks about the fact that doubts or fears about consequences are not a good enough reason not to act.

Of course, it's in the context of the caste system. And it talks a great deal about, I suppose, duty or dharma, right? So faithfulness to your caste, so your kind of life's purpose as being the overriding moral frame. So even though to commit crimes, to commit murder, for example, is ethically unacceptable, still dharma might override that. There's a key moment in the text where the god Krishna is talking to a prince called Prince Arjuna. For context, the story is about an epic war between two arms of an aristocratic family. And the character Prince Arjuna is vacillating about whether he should go to war, whether he should fight, because he feels he doesn't want to be responsible for the murder of his kinspeople. And he's visited by Krishna. Krishna basically relieves him of that burden, that moral burden. And he says to him,

view in me the active slayer of these men. Arise on fame, on victory, on kingly joy's intent. They are already slain by me. Be you the instrument. So the point being, even if you're firing your bow and arrow, it's me that's killing these people. And it seems like Oppenheimer, as we've established, he was a super anxious person, someone that struggled with mental health, struggled with almost decision paralysis at times. And it seems like the Bhagavad Gita offered him this kind of bedrock of a philosophical position that allowed him to stop worrying, right? Almost to put aside his ethical concerns, which were there,

but a way to at least assuage them enough of the time that he could pursue the work, he could carry on doing the job. So later that summer, in August, two nuclear bombs were dropped, more than 200,000 people killed, and with all the shocking after effects of ones that we've talked about on this podcast before and people won't know well. How did his relationship with nuclear weapons change after the war? So many of those men involved in Manhattan Project became either campaigners for disarmament or certainly arms control? How did he end up feeling into the 40s and 50s

as he saw the proliferation and the massively increasing power of these weapons that he'd done so much to bring about? Yeah, I mean, it's important to say that he was conflicted even throughout the project. He continually expressed fears about what it might do. But definitely after the war, he very, very quickly turned towards arguing against the further development of the weapons. So one of the things that had been in the pipeline, really ever since the beginning of the bomb project was this idea of a super hydrogen bomb, which was a much more significant, much more dangerous weapon. So that idea had been proposed quite early on and then sort of shelved.

And pretty much as soon as the war was over, people started pushing for the development of that much more dangerous weapon. Oppenheimer was still on the Atomic Energy Commission. He had a place in this advisory commission to the US government, and he immediately started arguing against it. He talked in quite regretful terms about the bomb, or at least he described the weapons development industry as the devil's work. He took quite a strong stand against it, whilst still remaining in an influential position within the policy advisory. And even Oppenheimer himself wasn't above the red scare, the anti-communist scare that gripped America in the Cold War, and he actually fell foul of that.

Yeah. I don't think he was ever a member of the Communist Party, but he'd certainly had contact with people who were. His wife, Kitty, had been involved in communism and had links with the pro-Republican side in Spain, the anti-fascists. The person that he dated before he got married, Jean Tatlock, again had communist sympathies. He got introduced to some radical politics through her. So even at the point of being recruited by General Groves, there were worries about his, quote unquote, extreme liberal background. But it was only really after the war, once the job was done, that that was turned against him. And I suspect it was really his oppositionality, the fact that he was saying, look, we shouldn't be developing these weapons further. That's what annoyed the government.

Certainly he'd already annoyed President Truman. Just after the war, there was a famous meeting where he said to President Truman, I feel like I have blood on my hands. And by all accounts, Truman was thoroughly enraged by this and called him a crybaby. And essentially, I think Truman felt that that was a stupid U-turn. Like, that doesn't make any sense. Look what you've done. I don't want to talk about that. He continued to advocate for disarmament or for a much tighter international controls on the technology.

And my suspicion is that, yeah, when the kind of McCarthyism came in, that was a part of that whole culture. He came under scrutiny and ultimately in 54, he was, there was a sort of, not a legal proceeding exactly, a sort of internal governmental hearing where he was hauled over the coals for what they were calling red sympathies, and ultimately had his security clearing stripped, which by all accounts did have a

quite profound effect on him, on his mental health. Where does this story end? So he spent about 20 years in the post-war period. He went to Princeton. He was invited to become the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies, which he did. And he remained there after the end of his policy work. He spent a lot of his time doing things other than physics. He did a lot of public speaking. So he continued to speak about science and public understanding. He spoke a lot about ethics and the role that that should play in science. And at Princeton, as well as physicists, he also recruited T.S. Eliot, the poet,

Jerome Brunner, the psychologist, and several psychologists. He was very interested in psychology. And so he continued this kind of polymathic, contrarian approach to academic life. I think there's something interesting to be done around Oppenheimer, which I might try and do, looking at him through a kind of queer theory lens, because he was very anti-categorical to a lot of people's dismay. He constantly tried to break down academic barriers barriers and he wanted to view physics through the light of the humanities as much as he did through a scientific frame that sort of speaks to what he was doing the whole time really this restless interest that continually ranged outside

of his primary discipline and that's where he ended his days in Princeton working alongside people like Einstein and Dirac his old friend from Gottingen, in what sounds like quite a peculiar, nutty, quite lovely community in New Jersey. A safe space for some of the world's most intelligent and eccentric people. Yes. I love it. And he died in early 1967, having been diagnosed with throat cancer a year and a half or so earlier. The disease progressed rapidly. Yeah, he did.

He was a chain smoker since adolescence, which no doubt contributed to his illness. He'd always been sick, actually. He was quite a sick person, per se. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about Oppenheimer's extraordinary life and career. Thank you for having me.