He had a little cup of hemlock and he counted up to nine

[sovay]

My father just sent me the news that the AEC's 1954 decision to revoke the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer has been vacated by the Department of Energy. I seem to have much the same reaction as to the posthumous pardon of Alan Turing in 2013: good for the relevant government, better to have done it in his lifetime, better not to have needed to reverse the judgment at all. That said, the statement by U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm is worth reading in full:

The reconsideration of an order of the AEC concerning an individual long-deceased is not something this Department has ever done and not something that would ordinarily be considered. And yet, the Oppenheimer matter was extraordinary in several respects that merit its reconsideration [. . .] These failures warrant vacating the AEC's order and, in the case of an active clearance seeker, would warrant a new adjudication conducted in accordance with the applicable rules. In the case of Dr. Oppenheimer there will of course be no new adjudication.

Look, I read An-sky. You just need a beit din. Give him back his security clearance; he won't be worse than some of the nuclear ghosts we've got haunting this country. Besides, I doubt this one was exorcised to begin with. I am desperately hoping the upcoming film by Christopher Nolan is any good.

(I know that the popular synonymy of scientist and mad makes my objections a lost cause, but I can't help side-eyeing the NYTimes description of Oppenheimer as "an eccentric genius fond of pipes and porkpie hats." I don't just mean that the man never chained a tea-mug to a radiator; I mean there were far weirder figures roaming the landscape of theoretical physics in those days, even agreed on as such by their colleagues. Paul Dirac once declined the loan of a couple of books from Oppenheimer on the grounds that reading interfered with thought. (Egon Spengler resembles that remark.) Oppenheimer could be nervy, self-sabotaging, and tactless—as a grad student at Göttingen, which he had gladly exchanged for the depressions and failures of Cambridge, he was notoriously the subject of an ultimatum by his fellow students to stop talking over the rest of the class before they boycotted it—and lay himself open to charges of pretentiousness and conceit, but I am unconvinced that any of this behavior qualifies as eccentricity. It is true that by 1948, the inaugural issue of Physics Today could use a photograph of his signature, now internationally recognizable pork-pie hat as a symbol of its contents and concerns. Everyone who has a favorite item of clothing, you are all weirdos.)

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

NOt connected to this, so apologies, but, this appears to be a terrible week for 1970s/80s excellent Brit TV script editors, because I am in informed by reliable sources that Michael Chapman has also died, possibly yesterday. I'm hoping someone will do an obit, because he remains impossible to google, but in the meantime the family have put out this (I think via a Bill Facebook page or something like that?):





And I thought that you (and your father) would also like to know.

[mrissa]

Thank you for this link, I really appreciate it.

But also yeah, yeah, like...I feel like the pipe-and-porkpie-hat thing is imposing our own standards on the previous decades, because there are LOADS of people, especially men people, smoking pipes in those decades. My grandpa smoked a pipe back then. Not in my memory, but in 1954? absolutely. And men wore more hats back then, so "Oooooh he wore a haaaaat" was not nearly the specific affectation it is now. So he liked the same hat and not different hats. Okay, fine.

I am also desperately hoping about the upcoming film. We can desperately hope together.

[julian]

"better not to have needed to reverse the judgment at all."

Preeeeeeeeeeeecisely.

Christopher Nolan? Hm. Might work. This'll be interesting!

[starlady]

I nearly walked into them shooting B-roll for the film on the Berkeley campus a couple months back, they didn't have all the pathways properly roped off. I also hope the movie is good.