By Donald Schell
“It was so amazing being in church with people my own age.”
I’m reading K.C. Cole’s Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up .
Would “something incredibly wonderful happens” be our first description of Sunday gatherings in our church? Not so often, I think. Cole’s heart-breaking, inspiring, book raises questions of how we live into vision, how we work together, who gets to share authority, and how traditions renew themselves in generations learning together side by side, but K.C. Cole isn’t writing about church. Something Incredibly Wonderful is about a young scientist who was denied the opportunity to make his contribution. It’s about his discovering vocation through loss, and it’s about the genesis of a science museum.
Cole’s story of atheist Frank Oppenheimer’s vocation and learning and community in a setting wholly outside the church keeps reminding me of my friend Lizzie’s reflection on her visit to St. Lydia’s, a new church start in Manhattan, “It was so amazing being in church with people my own age.” I’ll come back to Lydia’s and other places where something incredibly wonderful is happening in church, but first Cole’s book.
Frank Oppenheimer was a gifted theoretical physicist. He went directly from graduate school to working in the Manhattan Project alongside his brother Robert Oppenheimer, so as a young scientist Frank helped develop the first atom bomb. Yes, that troubled me too. With all the optimism and idealism of youth Frank was convinced that the bomb’s very existence (not dropping it on a civilian target) would force the end of all war. When President Truman made a different choice and bombed Hiroshima, Frank began arguing publicly (joining other scientists who’d worked making the bomb) that the U.S. should immediately make our nuclear discoveries available to the whole world.
I certainly didn’t know that some of our pioneers in making the first real weapon of mass destruction were advocating for open source technology. What were they thinking?
As a scientist Frank Oppenheimer knew the ‘secrets’ of the atom bomb would fairly quickly be available to patient physics researchers across the globe. So, Frank knew the U.S. would only for a moment in history own the only atom bombs. What would we do with that advantage? Frank believed that by simply sharing everything we’d learned making the first bomb (and our subsequent discoveries in nuclear fusion), we could avert a dangerous arms race and catalyze a global consciousness that war was untenable. He believed that telling the truths all would soon discover would engender the political will to work for peace. Frank said he thought the strength of democracy was precisely that citizens talking openly about what we faced in any situation would prove wiser than experts, if everyone know the facts. The U.S. military and the F.B.I. decided that everything Frank said proved this smart scientist was a dangerous incompetent (or worse) in matters of national security.
For a little while after World War II ended, Frank managed to continue his work as a research physicist, and while keeping his mouth shut about ‘secrets’ but noisily lobbying to share broadly everything the Manhattan project had learned, his new physics research demonstrated that the cosmic radiation bombarding the earth was broken nuclei from what we would learn to call the Big Bang. His peers in physics expected Frank would lead his generation’s discoveries in particle physics and the bridge between particles and astrophysics.
But while he was still in graduate school Frank had joined the Communist Party. As an atheist, somewhere in the progressive to radical range politically, and an inveterate optimist, Frank thought Communism made sense, at least it did until he’d experienced a year of party membership in Pasadena. He found the Party unimaginatively rigid, doctrinaire, and humorless, so he quit. Despite his one time party membership, as long as he was working developing the bomb, our president and military made the F.B.I. leave him alone, but after the war, after we’d defeated fascism, as we embraced our new national identity as the bulwark against Communism, Frank’s brief pre-war Communist Party membership and his noisy advocacy that America share what our politicians imagined were ‘secrets’ with ‘our enemies’ marked him for the dogged FBI scrutiny and investigation.
Eventually (despite a huge outcry from his faculty colleagues and physicists around the country) Frank was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted from any other research or university teaching job. He was too good-natured and optimistic to grasp the full dimensions of what had happened. It only gradually dawned on him as university after university offered him a research post and then mysteriously revoked the offer. Each time the F.B.I. would contact him and ask if he was finally ready to name others who’d been in the party with him. “You know the names as well as I do,” Frank said. “Ask the people themselves what they thought of the party then and now.” When a university in India offered him a research position, our government revoked his passport. When his research earned him a Scandinavian science award and an invitation to lecture to an international gathering of the world’s best physicists, his request to have his passport renewed was turned down. He was judged a security risk.
With the work he loved closed to him wherever he looked, Frank moved his wife and two children to southern Colorado to an old ranch they’d bought a couple of summers earlier, thinking to make it a great summer place for the kids and eventually somewhere the two of them would retire. Now with all other work options closed, Jackie and Frank Oppenheimer became ranchers, sending their children to Pagosa Spring’s rural elementary school. When Frank and Jackie’s children reached high school age, this ex-communist, big-hearted, wildly imaginative, Socratic, curious, compassionate atheist became a high school science teacher teaching ranch kids who (like his own two) traveled long distances to school and could only do homework after dark when their ranch chores were done.
Because Frank believed questions were the heart of good science, he welcomed all questions. Frank’s class students’ experiments were real experiments. When something “didn’t work” Frank and his students were as interested in what actually happened in their “failure” as they were when they could duplicate other scientists’ successful results. The big schools in Denver wondered what was going on when Pagosa Springs students won the state science fair. And then they came to expect it.
Teaching high school science Frank became as passionate about teaching and learning with his students as he’d been passionate about finding the atom’s smallest particles and studying the debris of the Big Bang. Frank Oppenheimer was committed to learning with his students rather than teaching them what he knew. “Invariably, as I build these experiments,” he said, “I observe some phenomena which I have not observed before and which I do not understand, or I find some deviation from the expected result which requires further investigation.” As Cole says, “The attempt to teach something almost always teaches the teacher something new. Sometimes these new things are new not just to the teacher; they have never been thoroughly explored by anyone.”
Reading about Frank Oppenheimer, I’m thinking about the pictures give us of Jesus as a teacher. In the face of later, theologically conceived ‘know-it-all’ interpretations of him, the Gospel writers (particularly the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke) offer a Jesus who is intensely curious and full of wonder and sometimes as surprised as he is surprising.
Frank’s students went on to become distinguished scientists, teachers, and artists around the country. A Nobel Laureate in physics credits Frank’s class as the beginning of that lifetime work.
With the waning of McCarthyism, Oppenheimer got a university post, but both the man and academia had changed. As he saw it research physicists had become superstars not collaborators and fellow learners, and the secretiveness of the military had taught them to be proprietary about discoveries. Frank felt crowded and uninspired. Frank felt academia had lost its nerve and killed the joy in learning. He ached for the unfettered curiosity and shared surprise at constant discoveries he’d once known. Missing his high school students fired a new passion to keep learning and to provoke people of all ages to discover and joy in learning.
How would he do it?
(Find out tomorrow.)
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.