On a quite street in New York’s Morningside Heights, amid a stately row of Columbia University apartment buildings, is a fine four bedroom apartment that would be the envy of any faculty member.

What’s not apparent at first glance is that this was the home, decades ago, of physicist Robert Serber and Kitty Oppenheimer. After J Robert Oppenheimer died in 1967 Kitty and Robert Serber, acquainted at the Los Alamos site, became involved.

After Kitty died in 1972, Serber met and married Fiona St.Clair and the two continued to live in the Morningside Heights apartment where their son, Will Serber, was raised. More recently the composer Nico Muhly, who is currently creating a new opera for the Met, rented the apartment.

To the amusement of all, remnants of the old Los Alamos days abound.

“I think Nico got a kick out of the cabinets of curiosity throughout the apartment,” his friend Will Serber recalled by phone. Likewise, as he grew up there, Will was surrounded by evidence of a bygone age.

“There still are some random things of Kitty’s around the house. You would pull a book off the shelf and it would be signed by Kitty Oppenheimer. Or there was this table of integrals signed by Oppenheimer,” Serber explained. “My dad and Oppie had accidently exchanged their copies at a conference. There was tons of this stuff around. I mean, if you opened up a closet, there would be plane parts from Hiroshima.”

Will Serber, as it happens, was up until recently enrolled in the physics PhD program at Princeton University. But he left the study to become a photographer. “I do a lot of commercial stuff,” Serber said. “I just did film stills for an independent movie being filmed in New York.” Serber follows in the photographic footsteps of other descendants of Los Alamos, including shutterbug Rachel Fermi, granddaughter of physicist Enrico Fermi.

“My father and Kitty had been very good friends and also friends with Oppie,” Serber explained. “They ended up getting together, this part of the story is vague to me, but sometime a year or two after Oppie’s death. Then Kitty suggested to my father that they should buy a nice 42 foot sailboat. And so they did and they sailed that around for some years in the Virgin Islands, which was a big physics hang out in those days.”

His father Robert Serber, Will explained, was the third person to arrive in Los Alamos after J Robert Oppenheimer and Kitty. “My father delivered a series of lectures called the Los Alamos Primer” Serber said. “This helped to bring people up to speed on what was going on with the project. Just trainloads of people were pouring into Los Alamos to work. This is what they heard when they got there.” Indeed, the Doctor Atomic libretto draws directly from Serber’s Los Alamos Primer.

In his Pulitzer Prize winning account, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes quotes Robert Serber as he risks blindness to glimpse the test fireball:

“At the instant of the explosion I was looking directly at it, with no eye protection of any kind. I saw first a yellow glow, which grew almost instantly to an overwhelming white flash, so intense that I was completely blinded. . . by twenty or thirty seconds after the explosion I was regaining normal vision. . . the grandeur and magnitude of the phenomenon were completely breathtaking.”

By the time Will got around to studying physics, his name had pretty much slipped under the currents of history. “My dad was part of a previous generation of physicists, retired by the time I was born. Most of the people I was going to class with when I was studying physics did not know the name Serber. But I remember I had one professor who didn’t say anything. Then one day after class, he leaned forward and whispered to me ‘happy birthday’. It turned out that he knew my parents and was around at the time of my birth.”

“There are some weird things about being the son of a physicist, ” Serber continued. “My dad was one of the people to suggest the existence of quarks, the particles that make up atoms. So this was called the Serber Force for a while, until it got reworked into the Strong Force.”

Serber paused.

“I mean, especially if you’re a little kid,” he said. “It’s really cool to think that we had a fundamental force named after us.”

Serber has fond memories of growing up in the apartment that played host to two faces behind the bomb. “The building was put up in 1909. There was a kitchen with a swinging door, a living room and entryway. And then there was a maid’s quarters. We had a button under dining room table for the maid. Of course we never had a maid but, you know, we had the button.” 

Then I asked him the inevitable.

“Yeah, everyone in New York asks about the price of real estate,” Serber laughed. “My dad moved into that apartment in 1951. It’s still pretty cheap today, I think around 1500 dollars a month.”

This entry was posted by Caroline Cooper on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 8:21 am and is filed under Doctor Atomic Blog, 2008-09 Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.