Abstract
We assess the scientific value of Oppenheimer’s research on black holes in order to explain its neglect by the scientific community, and even by Oppenheimer himself. Looking closely at the scientific culture and conceptual belief system of the 1930s, the present article seeks to supplement the existing literature by enriching the explanations and complicating the guiding questions. We suggest a rereading of Oppenheimer as a figure both more intriguing for the history of astrophysics and further ahead of his time than is commonly supposed.
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References
Freeman Dyson, Oppenheimer: The Shape of Genius, New York Times, August 15, 2013, accessed July 30, 2016, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/oppenheimer-shape-genius/.
Abraham Pais, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33.
This version of the paper can be read without having technical knowledge of general relativity.
This idea appears in Dyson, Oppenheimer (ref. 1), 18. Many German Jews were liberal idealists who failed to achieve their dreams of social reform in Germany and came to the United States with an intense commitment to the American dream of a free society and a patriotic, poetic vision of the United States, and idea going back to Goethe.
According to Dyson, Oppenheimer (ref. 1), 19, and literally meaning “sit still,” this term refers to Oppenheimer’s inability to sit still and work quietly to finish a difficult calculation.
Karl Hufbauer, “J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Path to Black Holes,” in Reappraising Oppenheimer, Centennial Studies and Reflections, ed. Cathryn Carson and David A. Hollinger (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 2005), 31–47.
Jeremy Bernstein, Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004); David Cassidy, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century (New York: Pi Press, 2005).
Kip Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (New York: Norton, 1994), 209; details of the confrontation can be found in Werner Israel, “Dark Stars: the Evolution of an Idea,” in 300 Years of Gravitation, ed. Stephen Hawking and Werner Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 229, and citations therein.
Dyson, Oppenheimer (ref. 1); Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: His Life and Mind (New York: Doubleday, 2013).
J. Robert Oppenheimer and Robert Serber, “On the Stability of Stellar Neutron Cores,” Physical Review 54 (1938), 540; J. Robert Oppenheimer and George M. Volkoff, “On Massive Neutron Cores,” Physical Review 55 (1939), 374–81; J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder, “On Continued Gravitational Contraction,” Physical Review 56 (1939), 455–59.
Landau’s ideas appear on the following two papers: Lev Landau, “On the Theory of Stars,” Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion 1 (1932), 285; Lev Landau, “Origin of Stellar Energy,” Nature 141 (1938), 333–34.
Oppenheimer and Serber, Stability (ref. 10).
Thorne, Black Holes (ref. 8), 187–97, 209–19.
Yoshitsugu Nakagawa, “Chushiro Hayashi (1920–2010),” American Astronomical Society, accessed September 15, 2016, https://aas.org/obituaries/chushiro-hayashi-1920-2010.
Chushiro Hayashi, Reun Hoshi and Daiichiro Sugimoto, “Evolution of the Stars,” Progress of Theoretical Physics 22, supplement (1962), 95. See also ref. 17.
Albert Einstein, “On a Stationary System with Spherical Symmetry Consisting of Many Gravitating Masses,” Annals of Mathematics 40 (1939), 922–36. This paper was received by the journal on May 10, 1939.
By 1962, Chushiro Hayashi was already forty-two years old and a prestigious scholar who had received a professorship at Kyoto University five years before. This strongly reduces the probability of him having paid lip service to Oppenheimer.
Explained in Hufbauer, Oppenheimer’s Path (ref. 6), 46, n. 77; Thorne, Black Holes (ref. 8), 219.
Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, Statisticheskaya Fizika (Moscow: Fizmatgiz, 1951).
Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, Statistical Physics (Oxford: Pergamon, 1958). A few earlier papers cite Oppenheimer’s work with Snyder, but they do so in passing and refer not to star collapse but to more conventional stellar dynamics. See Martin Johnson, “Atomic Possibilities Underlying Stellar Catastrophe,” The Observatory 66 (1946), 248–54; Lyle B. Borst, “Supernovae,” Physical Review 78 (1950), 807–08; Prahalad Vaidya, “Nonstatic Solutions of Einstein’s Field Equations for Spheres of Fluids Radiating Energy,” Physical Review 83 (1951), 10–17.
Landau and Lifshitz, Statistical Physics (ref. 20), 343. Emphasis added.
Tullio Regge and John A. Wheeler, “Stability of a Schwarzschild Singularity,” Physical Review 108 (1957), 1063–69.
Amalkumar Raychaudhuri, “Arbitrary Concentrations of Matter and the Schwarzschild Singularity,” Physical Review 89 (1953), 417–21.
David Finkelstein, “Past-Future Asymmetry of the Gravitational Field of a Point Particle,” Physical Review 110 (1958), 965–67.
Martin Kruskal, “Maximal Extension of Schwarzschild Metric,” Physical Review 119 (1960), 1743–45.
John A. Wheeler and Kenneth W. Ford, Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: Norton, 2000), 745.
Thorne, Black Holes (ref. 8), 197, 240.
Part of the conundrum’s answer is clearly extra-scientific. To give but one example, take Oppenheimer and (his Caltech colleague) Zwicky’s refusal even to acknowledge each other’s papers. Oppenheimer never used the word “neutron star.” See Thorne, Black Holes (ref. 8), 206.
A general reference for the statements made in this section of the paper is Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
We are grateful to Prof. James Bjorken (Stanford) for his comments on this particular issue and for his interest in this paper’s discussion. He recalls how, as late as 1950, the multi-galaxy idea was still hard to accept in general.
Wheeler proposed the term “black hole” in 1967. See John A. Wheeler, “Our Universe: The Known and the Unknown,” American Scholar 37 (1968), 248–74. It is important to note also that the term had appeared in print as early as 1964. See Ann Ewing, “‘Black Holes’ in Space,” Science News Letter 85 (1964), 39.
Cassidy, Oppenheimer (ref. 7), 176.
Kragh, Quantum Generations (ref. 29), 218–29. More directly, see the section “Defense of Mysticism” in Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 162. Even though this edition is from 1948, his peculiar ideas were already present by the time Oppenheimer was working on black holes in the late 1930s.
Quoted in Kragh, Quantum Generations (ref. 29), 362.
Thorne, Black Holes (ref. 8), 209; Israel, Dark Stars (ref. 8), 229.
Cassidy, Oppenheimer (ref. 7), 179.
We are grateful to Prof. Robert Wagoner (Stanford) for his comment on this particular issue and for his interest in this paper’s discussion. He mentioned that a similar opinion of special-case irrelevance surfaced with Kerr’s solution for black holes. Prof. Robert Wald (University of Chicago), to whom we are also grateful, offered further the case of big bang cosmology as an example along these lines of special cases.
Israel, Dark Stars (ref. 8), 217.
Hans Bethe and Enrico Fermi, “Über die Wechselwirkung von Zwei Elektronen,” Zeitschrift für Physik 77 (1932), 296–306.
Max Born and J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Zur Quantentheorie der Molekeln,” Annalen der Physik 389 (1927), 457–84; J. Robert Oppenheimer and Melba Phillips, “Note on the Transmutation Function for Deuterons,” Physical Review 48 (1935), 500–502; the citation data is from Google Scholar Citations.
The contents of this section have been inspired by the work of philosopher Michel Foucault on epistemes (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random/Vintage, 1970)), especially as expounded by David Hess for a more modern, English-speaking readership (David J. Hess, Science and Technology in a Multicultural World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 87). Foucault uses the term “episteme” to refer to the implicit assumptions about how we know the world. More precisely, it refers to “the assumptions about knowledge, method, and theory which at any given time period are shared across “discursive formations” (which as a first approximation can be translated as ‘disciplines’)” (ibid., 88). An episteme differs from a Kuhnian paradigm in part because it is transdisciplinary.
Ibid., 94.
Einstein, Stationary System (ref. 16); In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild found a solution of Einstein’s equations which were not well behaved at certain points. See Karl Schwarzschild, “Über das Gravitationsfeld eines Massenpunktes nach der Einsteinschen Theorie,” Sitzungsberichte Königlich Preus, Akad. Wiss. Berlin, Phys.-Math. Klasse (1916), 189–96.
Israel, Dark Stars (ref. 8), 219. Emphasis added.
Quoted in Thorne, Black Holes (ref. 8), 208. Emphasis added.
We are in debt to Profs. Robert Wald (University of Chicago) and Randall Espinoza (University of Illinois at Chicago) for this particular point.
John A. Wheeler, “On the Nature of Quantum Geometrodynamics,” Annals of Physics 2 (1957), 604–14.
Michel Janssen, “What Did Einstein Know and When Did He Know It?,” in The Genesis of General Relativity, vol. 2, ed. Jürgen Renn (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 787–837, on 825.
Benjamin Abbott et al., “Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger,” Physical Review Letters 116 (2016), 061102-1–16.
Cassidy, Oppenheimer (ref. 7), 177. Emphasis added.
This discussion actually originated in lively fashion during the January 2014 Stanford meeting. Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?,” Physical Review 47 (1935), 777–80; Fritz Zwicky, “Die Rotverschiebung von Extragalaktischen Nebeln,” Helvetica Physica Acta 6 (1933), 110–27.
Israel, Dark Stars (ref. 8), 226.
Thorne, Black Holes (ref. 8), 178.
Acknowledgments
We have greatly benefited from discussions with Barton Bernstein, which led to the organization of a multidisciplinary conversation with historians, philosophers, and physicists, among others, at Stanford University’s Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory on January 31, 2014, with a follow-up on January 30, 2015, in the History Department. These Stanford sessions were themselves continuations of earlier conversations at Universidad de Costa Rica. This work was supported by grant 805-A4-125 of the Universidad de Costa Rica’s Vicerrectoría de Investigación and the CIGEFI, and by grant FI-0204-2012 of the MICITT and the CONICIT.
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The authors are based at the Escuela de Física and the Escuela de Biología, Universidad de Costa Rica, 11501-2060 San José, Costa Rica.
Appendix: Timeline of Events
Appendix: Timeline of Events
Main events relevant to the discussion. Note the gap between 1939 and 1957.
Year | Event |
|---|---|
1930s | Heyday of nuclear physics, but not of astrophysics, or cosmology (which did not yet exist) |
1930s | Bethe solves the stellar energy production problem |
1932 | Discovery of the neutron. Zwicky and Landau ask: Are there neutron stars (or neutron cores inside stars)? |
1938 | Oppenheimer and Serber criticize Landau and argue for the inclusion of nuclear forces in models of stellar cores |
1939 | Oppenheimer and Volkoff incorporate general relativity into the study of stellar cores |
1939 | Oppenheimer and Snyder show that a large enough star will contract indefinitely (at least under some simplifying assumptions) |
1939 | Einstein tries to show that black holes are not feasible, but what he actually proves is that very compact objects are unstable |
1939 | Landau allegedly adds Oppenheimer and Snyder paper in his Golden List of classic papers |
1957 | Wheeler invents wormholes to explain away black holes; he does not reference Oppenheimer (The term “wormhole” appears thus many years before the term “black hole”) |
1950s | In the late 1950s, Wheeler and (independently) Zel′dovich theoretically consider black holes using computers, but neither of them publishes anything |
1958 | Finkelstein establishes the “no return” character of horizon; he does not reference Oppenheimer |
1958 | Brussels confrontation between Oppenheimer and Wheeler |
1958 | Oppenheimer’s work appears referenced by Landau in the English edition of Statistical Physics |
1960 | Kruskal paper (which is actually written by Wheeler) finally acknowledges black holes; Oppenheimer is not referenced |
1962 | Authoritative review by Hayashi et al. on stellar physics references Oppenheimer’s work |
1963 | Wheeler becomes a supporter of black holes, lectures on them at the First Texas Symposium (an international astrophysics conference) on December 1963, but Oppenheimer, who had lost all interest on the subject, does not even attend the talk even though he is present at the conference |
1967 | The term “black hole” is made popular by Wheeler (even though it had been in print since 1964) |
1967 | Oppenheimer dies at 62 (on 18 February) |
1967 | First observation of pulsars (in November) by Hewish & Bell group at Cambridge |
1968 | First observation of pulsars published (February), which resulted in the first Nobel Prize given to astronomers (1974) |
1969 | First observation of millisecond pulsars (published in February), making plausible the existence of compact objects such as black holes |
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Ortega-Rodríguez, M., Solís-Sánchez, H., Boza-Oviedo, E. et al. The Early Scientific Contributions of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Why Did the Scientific Community Miss the Black Hole Opportunity?. Phys. Perspect. 19, 60–75 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-017-0195-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-017-0195-6