epiphany.
The book was Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, a mystical and existential text that spoke to Oppenheimer’s troubled soul. Reading it in the evening by flashlight during his walking tour of Corsica, he later claimed to his Berkeley friend Haakon Chevalier, was one of the great experiences of his life. It snapped him out of his depression. Proust’s work is a classic novel of introspection, and it left a deep and lasting impression on Oppenheimer. More than a decade after he first read Proust, Oppenheimer startled Chevalier by quoting from memory a passage in Volume One that discusses cruelty:
Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a state, to which it was so restful to emigrate, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone, that indifference to the sufferings one causes, an indifference which, whatever other names one may give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.
As a young man in Corsica, Robert no doubt memorized these words precisely because he saw in himself an indifference to the sufferings he caused others. It was a painful insight. One can only speculate about a man’s inner life, but perhaps seeing an expression of his own dark and guilt-laden thoughts in print somehow lightened Robert’s psychological burden. It had to be comforting to know that he was not alone, that this was part of the human condition. He no longer need despise himself; he could love. And perhaps it was also reassuring, particularly for an intellectual, that Robert could tell himself that it was a book—and not a psychiatrist—which had helped to wrench him from the black hole of his depression.
OPPENHEIMER RETURNED TO CAMBRIDGE with a lighter, more forgiving attitude about life. “I felt much kinder and more tolerant,” he recalled. “I could now relate to others. . . .” By June 1926, he decided to end his sessions with the Cambridge psychiatrist. It also lifted his spirits that spring to leave the “miserable hole” he had till then occupied in Cambridge and move into “less miserable” quarters along the river Cam, halfway to Grantchester, a quaint village one mile south of Cambridge.
As he despised laboratory work, and clearly was inept as an experimental physicist, he now wisely turned to the abstractions of theoretical physics. Even in the midst of his long winter depression, he had managed to read enough to realize that the entire field was in a state of ferment. One day in a Cavendish seminar, Robert watched as James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron, opened a copy of Physical Review to a new paper by Robert A. Millikan and quipped, “Another cackle. Will there ever be an egg?”
Sometime in early 1926, after reading a paper by the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg, he realized that there was emerging a wholly new way of thinking about how electrons behaved. About the same time, an Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, published a radical new theory about the structure of the atom. Schrödinger proposed that electrons behaved more precisely as a wave curving around the nucleus of the atom. Like Heisenberg, he crafted a mathematical portrait of his fluid atom and called it quantum mechanics. After reading both papers, Oppenheimer suspected that there had to be a connection between Schrödinger’s wave mechanics and Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. They were, in fact, two versions of the same theory. Here was an egg, and not merely another cackle.
Quantum mechanics now became the hot topic at the Kapitza Club, an informal physics discussion group named for its founder, Peter Kapitza, a young Russian physicist. “In a rudimentary way,” recalled Oppenheimer, “I began to get pretty interested.” That spring he also met another young physicist, Paul Dirac, who would earn his doctorate that May from Cambridge. By then, Dirac had already done some groundbreaking work on quantum mechanics. Robert remarked
The book was Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, a mystical and existential text that spoke to Oppenheimer’s troubled soul. Reading it in the evening by flashlight during his walking tour of Corsica, he later claimed to his Berkeley friend Haakon Chevalier, was one of the great experiences of his life. It snapped him out of his depression. Proust’s work is a classic novel of introspection, and it left a deep and lasting impression on Oppenheimer. More than a decade after he first read Proust, Oppenheimer startled Chevalier by quoting from memory a passage in Volume One that discusses cruelty:
Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a state, to which it was so restful to emigrate, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone, that indifference to the sufferings one causes, an indifference which, whatever other names one may give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.
As a young man in Corsica, Robert no doubt memorized these words precisely because he saw in himself an indifference to the sufferings he caused others. It was a painful insight. One can only speculate about a man’s inner life, but perhaps seeing an expression of his own dark and guilt-laden thoughts in print somehow lightened Robert’s psychological burden. It had to be comforting to know that he was not alone, that this was part of the human condition. He no longer need despise himself; he could love. And perhaps it was also reassuring, particularly for an intellectual, that Robert could tell himself that it was a book—and not a psychiatrist—which had helped to wrench him from the black hole of his depression.
OPPENHEIMER RETURNED TO CAMBRIDGE with a lighter, more forgiving attitude about life. “I felt much kinder and more tolerant,” he recalled. “I could now relate to others. . . .” By June 1926, he decided to end his sessions with the Cambridge psychiatrist. It also lifted his spirits that spring to leave the “miserable hole” he had till then occupied in Cambridge and move into “less miserable” quarters along the river Cam, halfway to Grantchester, a quaint village one mile south of Cambridge.
As he despised laboratory work, and clearly was inept as an experimental physicist, he now wisely turned to the abstractions of theoretical physics. Even in the midst of his long winter depression, he had managed to read enough to realize that the entire field was in a state of ferment. One day in a Cavendish seminar, Robert watched as James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron, opened a copy of Physical Review to a new paper by Robert A. Millikan and quipped, “Another cackle. Will there ever be an egg?”
Sometime in early 1926, after reading a paper by the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg, he realized that there was emerging a wholly new way of thinking about how electrons behaved. About the same time, an Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, published a radical new theory about the structure of the atom. Schrödinger proposed that electrons behaved more precisely as a wave curving around the nucleus of the atom. Like Heisenberg, he crafted a mathematical portrait of his fluid atom and called it quantum mechanics. After reading both papers, Oppenheimer suspected that there had to be a connection between Schrödinger’s wave mechanics and Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. They were, in fact, two versions of the same theory. Here was an egg, and not merely another cackle.
Quantum mechanics now became the hot topic at the Kapitza Club, an informal physics discussion group named for its founder, Peter Kapitza, a young Russian physicist. “In a rudimentary way,” recalled Oppenheimer, “I began to get pretty interested.” That spring he also met another young physicist, Paul Dirac, who would earn his doctorate that May from Cambridge. By then, Dirac had already done some groundbreaking work on quantum mechanics. Robert remarked
Similar Books
