Even Robert Oppenheimer Felt Envy

Envy arises because the desired things in life come unequally distributed—with consequences following from relative position. If we are less physically attractive than a romantic rival, we will probably lose in this round of the mating game. Thus, we envy the more attractive rival. Our chances of getting into a coveted school decrease if our test scores compare poorly to other applicants. Thus, we will envy those with higher scores. So it usually goes.

This obstinate, repeating feature of everyday life would suggest that those who enjoy high standing on valued domains would be less plagued by envy. After all, they will suffer a smaller proportion of people ahead of them on these distributions. Indeed, they will also have many more opportunities to feel grateful, even proud at times, because so many people are below them.

However, local comparisons impinge most strongly on our emotions. Generally, we don’t care so very much about how we compare with people outside our local comparison "pond." The comparisons affecting our emotions typically thrive in the many smaller, narrower distributions of people that make up our day-to-day experience. This should mean that even among people who usually experience life at the upper regions of talent and accomplishment, the uppermost groups, envy exerts itself and finds a natural home.

Take the early career of Robert Oppenheimer, the renowned physicist whose discoveries earned him the Nobel Prize and who lead the development of the atomic bomb for the Allied cause during WWII. In the perception of most people today, Oppenheimer is a name synonymous with rarefied brilliance and achievement, a name mentioned in the same breath as Einstein—and deservedly so. Would someone like Oppenheimer have ever felt strong envy? Hardly, he would have been the target of other people’s envy.

But there was at least one period in his life when he likely felt envy with a murderous passion.

After graduating in three years, summa cum laude, from Harvard, he began graduate study at Cambridge University where he worked in the Cavendish Laboratory, already famous for producing a string of Nobel Prize-winning physicists, and at that time, the ultimate place for an aspiring physicist.

Yet, among the exceptionally talented group of students in the Cavendish Laboratory, he did not compare well. For one thing, the lab had a dual emphasis on both laboratory and theoretical work—lab members were, as Oppenheimer told a friend, “uncommonly skillful at blowing glass and solve differential equations.” (p. 97) Unfortunately, laboratory work was not Oppenheimer’s forte; in fact, he was terrible at it. And, even more unfortunately for Oppenheimer’s self-confidence at the time, he was assigned a tutor to get him up to speed, another lab member named Patrick Blackett, who was extraordinarily gifted in both areas “thinking most deeply when he was working with his hands” (p. 47). Blackett, a few years older than Oppenheimer, had served in the British Navy during the war, which had seasoned him in practical matters. Unlike Oppenheimer, Blackett’s progress in the lab had been quick and extraordinary. (Blackett would also go on to win a Nobel Prize and would play a hugely important role in the existential challenges associated with fighting the Nazis during WWII).

Worse still for Oppenheimer, Blackett was both off the charts handsome and uniquely assured in his way of being. As one of Blackett’s friends described first meeting him: “…a young Oedipus. Tall, slim, beautifully balanced and looking better dressed than anyone…” with a face “alive with indeed with intelligence, modesty and friendliness.” (p. 45) Oppenheimer was comparatively less handsome and, at the time, lacking in the self-assurance he would later feel.

Finally, in what might have been the emotional coup de grâce, Blackett had recently married a beautiful, vivacious woman, brilliant in her own right, and together they were the “handsomest, gayest, happiest pair in Cambridge.” (p.99)

Oppenheimer’s relationships with women had been highly troubled.

In a word, Oppenheim envied Blackett. And this was no garden variety envy.

Near the end of Oppenheimer’s first term at Cambridge, in an act paralleling the Evil Queen’s envious behavior toward Snow White, Oppenheimer apparently placed an apple containing poison on Blackett’s desk—evidently expecting Blackett to eat it.

The exact details of what happened are unclear because Cambridge authorities kept quiet about the incident. Rather than pressing charges (fortunately, Blackett did not eat the apple) or removing him from the lab, Oppenheimer was placed on probation and received psychiatric treatment. However, even Oppenheimer revealed a version of the incident to friends years later, saying, for example, that “he had actually used cyanide or something somewhere.” (p. 101)

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Regardless of what precisely happened, it seems clear that Oppenheimer felt intense envy toward Blackett. One person, who knew Oppenheimer and who inferred that envy was a big part of the equation, noted:

“Blackett was brilliant and handsome and a man of great social charm, and combining all this with great brilliance as a scientist—and I think he (Oppenheimer) had a sense of his own comparative awkwardness and perhaps a personal sense of being physically unattractive compared to Blackett and so on.” (p. 100)

I don’t find myself thinking less of Oppenheimer upon learning these details. To me, they simply humanize him. The reason why we know or care today about what happened to Oppenheimer in that Cavendish Laboratory in mid-1920s is because Oppenheimer soon hit his stride, began making fundamental theoretical contributions to physics, and ended up leading such an extraordinary, world-altering life. And, because of his contributions to the Allies winning the race to develop the atomic bomb before the Nazis, like others, I feel especially grateful that Cambridge handled the incident as it did.

When it comes to envy, Oppenheimer, though he suffered an unusually extreme case of the emotion, simply joined the club to which most of us, at one time or another, find ourselves members.