Sorry about a lack of posting, but I’ve been writing a long review of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer for Taki’s Magazine.
Here’s a question I haven’t seen widely discussed. J. Robert Oppenheimer fell in love with the Los Alamos area as a teenager, saying that if he could combine physics and New Mexico, he’d be happy. So he recommended to General Leslie Groves that the military build a secret city at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project.
Los Alamos is, by the standards of everywhere other than Tibet, the Altiplano, and Ethiopia, extremely high in elevation: downtown is at 7,300 feet elevation (2,230 meters) and the Los Alamos laboratory at 7,500 feet.
Did anybody involved with the Manhattan Project have trouble dealing with that elevation? Did anybody complain that they weren’t as smart at Los Alamos as they were closer to sea level?
I can recall a third of a century ago talking to a New Mexico software entrepreneur who had, like Bill Gates, founded a firm in Albuquerque (elevation about 5,000 feet or 1,500 meters). I asked him why he hadn’t located in Santa Fe, which back then was extremely fashionable in business magazines. He said that at elevation 7,000 feet (2130 meters), Santa Fe was too high for programmers to concentrate. On the other hand, lots of people say that newcomers acclimate to the thin air in two days to two months.
Oppenheimer was a famously skinny and restless guy, so his metabolism no doubt thrived at high altitude despite his massive tobacco consumption. But what about chubbier guys like von Neumann, who only worked as part time consultants? Did Einstein ever visit Los Alamos?
The movie mentions the large number of babies born at Los Alamos. Indeed, I worked with a guy in the 1990s who was born there around 1944-1945 while his father was employed on the Manhattan Project. But at higher altitudes, white women have problems carrying babies to term.
Another guy I worked with was from Leadville, Colorado, the highest town in America at 10,158 feet (3100 m). He had been on Leadville’s dominant cross-country running team, which won most of their away matches and all their home meets. But pregnant women in Leadville are advised to relocate to a lower altitude.
Similarly, in La Paz, Bolivia, white families need to live in the expensive district at the bottom of the canyon in order to have children.
