[Ann Finkbeiner emailed to say she had learned that Oppenheimer died before the phrase "black holes" came to be used. Updates to correct.]
On a single day in 1939, J. Robert Oppenheimer explained how a star implodes when it runs out of fuel; John Archibald Wheeler published the explanation of atomic fission; and Hitler invaded Poland.
Oppenheimer who would go on to head the Manhattan Project to develop an atom bomb. Wheeler would be put in charge of producing the plutonium for the bomb. And the two would spar over research on "gravitationally completely collapsed objects," which Wheeler came to call black holes. Oppenheimer, by some accounts, did the critical research on these objects but he did not return to the work after building the bomb. Neither scientist was comfortable with the other or with the other's research.
Ann Finkbeiner at The Last Word on Nothing dives "down the rabbit hole, where it's dark and lonely but, you know, interesting" to reflect on this war of the gods. Her post grows out of a Twitter conversation prompted by a review by the physicist Freeman Dyson in The New York Review of Books of a new biography of Oppenheimer.
Finkbeiner lists a few of the books and sources you need to follow her on this story, and both she and Dyson illuminate the human side of these brilliant and complex figures, who were men as well as gods. Finkbeiner recounts a story about Wheeler and Oppenheimer both attending a conference around 1959, where Wheeler spoke enthusiastically about Oppenheimer's early research. Oppenheimer refused to go in, choosing instead to sit outside the room and chat with friends.
Dyson's touching review (and reminiscence) ends with an episode late in Oppenheimer's life, when he was "sick and depressed," and his wife, Kitty, came to Dyson with a "cry for help":
She said Robert was desperate because he was no longer doing science, and he needed a collaborator to get him started. I agreed with Kitty’s diagnosis, but I had to tell her that it was too late. I told her that I would like to sit quietly with Robert and hold his hand. His days as a scientist were over. It was too late to cure his anguish with equations.
-Paul Raeburn
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