Einstein and Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer’s relationship with the Institute’s most famous resident was always tentative: “We were close colleagues,” he later wrote of Einstein, “and something of friends.” But he thought of Einstein as a living patron saint of physics, not a working scientist. (Some in the Institute suspected that Oppenheimer was the source of a statement in ‘Time” magazine that “Einstein is a landmark, not a beacon.”) Einstein harbored a similar ambivalence about Oppenheimer. When Oppenheimer was first suggested in 1945 as a candidate for a permanent professorship at the Institute, Einstein and the mathematician Hermann Weyl wrote a memo to the faculty recommending the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli over Oppenheimer. At the time, Einstein knew Pauli well, and Oppenheimer only in passing. Ironically, Weyl had tried hard in 1934 to recruit Oppenheimer to the Institute; but Oppenheimer had adamentally refused, saying, “I could be of absolutely no use at such a place.” Now, however, Oppenheimer’s credentials as a physicist just didn’t measure up to Pauli’s” “Certainly Oppenheimer has made no contributions to physics of such a fundamental nature Pauli’s exclusion principle and analysis of electronic spin…..” Einstein and Weyl conceded that Oppenheimer had “founded the largest school of theoretical physics in this country.” But after nothing that his students universally praised him as a teacher, they cautioned, “It may be that he is somewhat too dominant and [that] his students tend to be smaller editions of Oppenheimer.” On the basis of this recommendations, the Institute offered the job of Pauli – who turned it down. ~ Page 380

The older man clearly didn’t understand why Oppenheimer seemed to care so much about maintaining his access to the Washington establishment. Einstein didn’t play that game. He would never have dreamed of asking government to give him a security clearance. Einstein instinctively disliked meeting politicians, generals or figures of authority. As Oppenheimer observed, “he did not have that convenient and natural converse with statesmen and men of power……” and wqhile Oppie seemed to relish his fame and the opportunity to mix with the powerful, Einstein was always uncomfortable with adulation. One evening in March 1950, on the occasion of Einstein’s seventy-first birthday, Oppenheimer walked him hack to his house on Mercer Street. “You know,” Einstein remarked, “when it’s once been given to a man to do something sensible, afterward life is a little strange.” More than most men ever could, Oppenheimer understood exactly what he meant. ~ Page 382