Oppenheimer Would Not have Been Selected to Head the Manhattan Project Today
Recently, readers might have seen “Oppenheimer” - a biopic based on the 2005 book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. While I would recommend you to read the book this movie is based on , that is not the focus of this post. Instead, let us ask another interesting question- would somebody like Oppenheimer have ever been selected to lead any such large scientific program in 2023. As you will see, the answers to that question has a lot of relevance to my oft repeated observation about the lack of significant technological progress in West for past 2-3 decades.
1] Let us start with a non-obvious, but very relevant, part of Oppenheimer’s persona. As some of you might have guessed from his last name, he was a Jewish, albeit a non-practicing one. While being Jewish is advantageous to one’s career in 2023, this was not always the case in this country. As late as the 1950s, many universities in USA had quotas to keep the percentage of Jewish students below certain “acceptable” levels. The era in which Oppenheimer grew up 1910s and 1920s had even more serious anti-Jewish discrimination in everything from education, jobs, marriage to the ability to buy houses in certain posh neighborhoods. In 2023, somebody with a problematic ethnicity like Oppenheimer in 1930s would never have been hired for an academic job.
2] Even before he entered university, Oppenheimer was a heterodox thinker. While his first American academic job at Berkley and Caltech might seen perfectly natural given his political views, that was not always the case. As late the 1960s, cities in much of the LA metro area and Orange County were republican strongholds. Being Leftist, even in academia, was the minority heterodox position- especially before the 1950s. The fact that Oppenheimer never hid his political and social views in an era where those views were actively persecuted tells you a lot about his personality and worldview. His being openly leftist in the 1930s at Berkeley is therefore the equivalent of being openly conservative and Republican in that same university in 2023. Oppenheimer rising to head the Manhattan project in the early 1940s is as unlikely as a conservative Asian becoming the head of a major scientific enterprise in 2023.
3] Oppenheimer also had an interesting relationship with women- to put it mildly. While he started being awkward and unsuccessful with women, this changed over the years as he became established and well known in his profession. He certainly had a curious preference for troubled and emotionally damaged women- including the two most well known women in his life, namely Jean Tatlock and his future wife Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer. Read a bit about them to understand what I am talking about- suffice to say that the first had mental issues in addition to being bisexual and Kitty was a high functioning alcoholic. And there were more. In 2023, Oppenheimer would have been the target of multiple “MeToo” accusations and prosecutions.
4] Oppenheimer was born in 1904 and started at Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in 1929- which is a nice way of saying that he was 25 or 26 when be got a tenure track position. Today the average researcher gets his first independent NIH or NSF grant in their early to mid 40s. Yes.. you read that right. We are not even going into how few academics reach that point. Oppenheimer was hired to head the Manhattan Project when he was 38, in spite of the fact that he had no experience running anything larger than his research group. He was 41 when the first atomic test was successful. Did I mention that Oppenheimer ran the bomb project as he saw fit and often in conflict to what was expected of him. Do you really think that somebody like him would ever be allowed to run even a research group at some small university in 2023.
In summary, though Oppenheimer (with his wide ranging interests and abilities to understand a range of areas) was almost certainly the best person to head and manage the Manhattan Project, somebody like him would almost certainly never be hired by a university today- let alone head an important project. What is true for Oppenheimer is also true for many other important people in the that project. Instead, we now elevate theater kids, clever charlatans and thoroughly unimaginative sclerotic yes-men (and women) to positions of power and influence. Then we wonder why all that money being spent on scientific research no longer yields significant advances.
What do you think? Comments?