American Prometheus by Kai Bird EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Kai Bird
- Language: English
- Genre: History
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“He Received Every New Idea as Perfectly Beautiful ”
I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy.
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ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
IN THE FIRST DECADE of the twentieth century, science initiated a
second American revolution. A nation on horseback was soon transformed
by the internal combustion engine, manned flight and a multitude of other
inventions. These technological innovations quickly changed the lives of
ordinary men and women. But simultaneously an esoteric band of scientists
was creating an even more fundamental revolution.
Theoretical physicists
across the globe were beginning to alter the way we understand space and
time. Radioactivity was discovered in 1896, by the French physicist Henri
Becquerel. Max Planck, Marie Curie and Pierre Curie and others provided
further insights into the nature of the atom. And then, in 1905, Albert
Einstein published his special theory of relativity. Suddenly, the universe
appeared to have changed.
Around the globe, scientists were soon to be celebrated as a new kind of
hero, promising to usher in a renaissance of rationality, prosperity and
social meritocracy. In America, reform movements were challenging the old
order. Theodore Roosevelt was using the bully pulpit of the White House to
argue that good government in alliance with science and applied technology
could forge an enlightened new Progressive Era.
Into this world of promise was born J. Robert Oppenheimer, on April 22,
1904. He came from a family of first- and second-generation German
immigrants striving to be American. Ethnically and culturally Jewish, the
Oppenheimers of New York belonged to no synagogue. Without rejecting
their Jewishness they chose to shape their identity within a uniquely
American offshoot of Judaism—the Ethical Culture Society—that
celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism. This
was at the same time an innovative approach to the quandaries any
immigrant to America faced—and yet for Robert Oppenheimer it reinforced
a lifelong ambivalence about his Jewish identity.
As its name suggests, Ethical Culture was not a religion but a way of life
that promoted social justice over self-aggrandizement. It was no accident
that the young boy who would become known as the father of the atomic
era was reared in a culture that valued independent inquiry, empirical
exploration and the free-thinking mind—in short, the values of science.
And yet, it was the irony of Robert Oppenheimer’s odyssey that a life
devoted to social justice, rationality and science would become a metaphor
for mass death beneath a mushroom cloud.
ROBERT’S FATHER, Julius Oppenheimer, was born on May 12, 1871, in
the German town of Hanau, just east of Frankfurt. Julius’ father, Benjamin
Pinhas Oppenheimer, was an untutored peasant and grain trader who had
been raised in a hovel in “an almost medieval German village,” Robert later
reported. Julius had two brothers and three sisters.
In 1870, two of
Benjamin’s cousins by marriage emigrated to New York. Within a few years
these two young men—named Sigmund and Solomon Rothfeld—joined
another relative, J. H. Stern, to start a small company to import men’s suit
linings. The company did extremely well serving the city’s flourishing new
trade in ready-made clothing. In the late 1880s, the Rothfelds sent word to
Benjamin Oppenheimer that there was room in the business for his sons.
Julius arrived in New York in the spring of 1888, several years after his
older brother Emil.
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