I Met Oppenheimer’s Ghost Last Evening

(Not to be taken as a review of the Kopenhagen play by Junges Theater Göttingen).

I met Oppenheimer’s ghost last evening. “When is it now?” he asked. “January 2025,” I lied.

(If I manifested him, let me have the freedom to stretch time. I feign authority about the frontier—the already done, reviewed, and published. None of it by me. I only start to grasp now what I thought I’d have conquered by last year.)

“I looked for you every time I walked down Oppenheimer Way in Berkeley,” I said. “Why had I never seen you then?”

“…or anyone, living or dead,” I continued. “I had no one to talk sense into me, to help me take the right turns. In courses I took, projects I joined … to get away from my impossible romances. Before she became one of the Others.”

“oh, the Others.”

I forced a smile, “I did turn out to love the impossible, though. I am a dark matter physicist now. Impossibility by construction.”

“I wrote in my thesis acknowledgments that I don’t want to die ignorant—more ignorant—of the universe. Cowardly and conceited words said with courage.”

“How is the afterlife?” I asked. (I had just seen the play where he and Bohr reconcile long after death.)

“I used to imagine you all—the ghosts of physics—gathering to laugh at my struggles. Laughing at how I drift on an island of my own making, clutching a crumbling tag that says Physicist. Laughing at my flimsy connections to Berkeley, to Göttingen, to the status-quo skyscraper of physics. To the dark clouds over physics in your time. To the dark clouds of my own.”

The ghost stood there, barely engaged. I was just another rambling drunk on a Friday midnight path—a resource this country has in no short supply.

“It’s not 2025,” he said. “You lied because you feel you wasted a year.”

He looked at me with the coldness of a vacuum. “I cannot tell you how many productive years you have left. But I remember that line from your unsent love poem—the one you wrote to an Other: ‘Nor is it eternity in your hands.’ You thought you had an eternity to reflect that in your actions. You don’t.”

“Was your time as frustratingly transactional?” I asked. “Was science rigidly measured in h-indices? Were friendships null if they didn’t lead to co-authorship? Were the problems always secondary to the prestige?”

I stopped. The snowy air felt thin.

“Ah, right. Your time made the nukes.”

The clock strikes midnight. I am home.