Oppenheimer's Apple

                                  Oppenheimer’s Apple

I partly grew up in The Big Apple, Manhattan, New York, New York. I lived there during The Cold War, from about 1985 through 1991, and I spent a lot of time there after that. The Big Apple is the center of our human universe. Certainly, The Big Apple is only slightly less the actual center now because of the internet and so many forms of media, but back then and still now The Big Apple is epicenter of humanity. If you can make there you can make it anywhere – may be true. But it is certainly true that what happens in New York City happens later everywhere else.

You might feel part of something amazing living in The Big Apple. So much so that it might go to your head. One might develop a certain arrogance of being a part of the center of the human universe. I saw that. I felt it. And I lived in a ghetto underside of the apple. I can only imagine if I grew up as anything, but a poor kid in a single parent home awaiting trickledown economics to kick in – like Oppenheimer who lived in one of the finest neighborhoods with all the luxury imaginable.

During this time period, as ignorant teens, my peers and I spoke about how New York City was target number one or two next to Washington, D.C. of a would be nuclear war. We implicitly understood and spoke on the fact that New York City would be among the first to go if The Cold War were to ever go hot. Discussion on overt total annihilation was certainly not a healthy environmental predicament. And yet there were many other more immediate dangers in the city during the cold war like the crack epidemic and all its ripples.

The term Big Apple comes from a sports reporter who was describing the potential winnings of horse track betting at all the race tracks around The Five Boroughs and that any day any random Joe could win high stakes prize, The Big Apple. So, New York City, the place where ‘if you can make it here you can make it anywhere’, had the big prize, The Big Apple.

The Big Apple is the big prize of making it. Another trope, though not as well-known, describes how people all over think and how people in New York and from New York might think – “if you are not in New York or Los Angeles describe to me the moment you gave up.”

By no means do I mean to criticize The Big Apple but there are some human extremes there that result in very wild behavior and reactionary confrontations even. For me it is still the center of the universe and for me it was the very best training ground for hurricane human. After living in New York City nothing surprises me and fewer things are challenging.

The wealthy and prominent of The Big Apple might be as vividly tough as anyone there, but I really can only imagine how wealth and access might shape the character and psyche. I can only imagine how such might have molded Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer was raised in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in The Big Apple, before it was even known as The Big Apple, on Riverside Drive overlooking The Hudson River and New Jersey. His family afforded the apartment Picassos so surely no expense was ever problematic.

Oppenheimer went on to attend Harvard and Cambridge. At Cambridge he and his physics professor apparently had some friction. And as the story goes Oppenheimer attempted to poison said professor by injecting some toxic substance from the laboratory into an apple for his professor.

Luckily, for Oppenheimer, the professor never ate the apple. However somehow the university found out about the incident, but Oppenheimer’s parents used their influence and he was not expelled, though he was put on probation and made to attend psychiatric counseling.

That Oppenheimer poisoned his professor’s apple is perhaps the most symbolic microcosmic event in his life reflective of the biggest feat of his life – the creation of the atomic bomb, the allegorical poison apple, the Pandora metaphorical opening birthed into the real by way of chain reaction. Oppenheimer, from The Big Apple, the head scientist of The Manhattan Project, gave his professor a poisoned apple and put together the poisoned apple of nuclear experimentation.

From out of The Manhattan Project Oppenheimer brought to the world a poisoned knowledge. And many were theorizing and ‘applying the science’ all around the world in its pursuit. The Manhattan Project was named so because of the engineering company that focused on the work and not for the most famous Manhattanite from The Big Apple.