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Testifying before a Senate committee in 1945, Oppenheimer pleaded for continued free trade in information and ideas. Wartime's fettered physics, he argued, was not really science at all: "The real things were learned in 1890 and 1905 and 1920 . . . and we took this tree with a lot of ripe fruit on it and shook it hard and out came radar and atomic bombs. [The] whole [wartime] spirit was one of frantic and rather ruthless exploitation of the known."
Oppenheimer feared that postwar science would be organized to death, and scientists reduced to subservient government functionaries. He pleaded for the freedom and the future of "the small institutions in which scientists . . will have the leisure and privacy to think those essential, dangerous thoughts which are the true substance of science."
Then, accepting the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study, he went off to Princeton in search of leisure for some dangerous thoughts of his own.
Wrap It Up. His attitude toward his new job was characteristic: "I regard it as a very open question whether the Institute is an important place, and whether my coming will be of benefit." By last week, he had answered the first half of the question to his own satisfaction.
His first visit to Europe in 20 years had helped do the trick. Attending scientific conferences in Brussels and Birmingham, Oppenheimer had learned how despairing the life of the intellect had become in postwar Europe. Viewed from Princeton, the Institute might have its shortcomings; viewed from Europe, it had something of the special glow of a monastery in the Dark Ages.
Director Oppenheimer preferred to think of the Institute as an "intellectual hotel"—a place for transient thinkers to rest, recover and refresh themselves before continuing on their way. He wanted an international clientele at his Grand Hotel. Expatriate and exiled scholars have always been welcome at the Institute, but Oppenheimer had something different in mind: a continuous world traffic in ideas. For such foreign scholars as Denmark's Bohr and Britain's Dirac and Toynbee, Oppenheimer hoped to work out periodic repeat performances, so that they would never wholly lose touch either with the U.S. or with home base. Said Oppenheimer: "The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person."
Wrapped up in the persons of Max von Laue and Hideki Yukawa, some of the best German and Japanese physical ideas were on hand at the Institute last week. The two were the first German and Japanese physicists to visit the U.S. as free agents since the war's end. (Several years ago the Institute invited two Russian mathematicians, but one regretfully declined and the other neglected to R.S.V.P.)
The guest list at Oppie's hotel this year will also include Historian Arnold Toynbee, Poet T. S. Eliot, Legal Philosopher Max Radin—and a literary critic, a bureaucrat and an airlines executive. There was no telling who might turn up next: maybe a psychologist, a Prime Minister, a composer or a painter. Oppenheimer was just working up courage: "If a man is a full professor at Harvard, he may be a fool, but he's a respectable fool. In the world of action, criteria for acceptability are more confused."