with considerable understatement that Dirac’s work “was not easily understood [and he was] not concerned to be understood. I thought he was absolutely grand.” On the other hand, his first impression of Dirac may not have been so favorable. Robert told Jeffries Wyman that “he didn’t think he [Dirac] amounted to anything.” Dirac was himself an extremely eccentric young man, and notoriously single-minded in his devotion to science. One day some years later, when Oppenheimer offered his friend several books, Dirac politely declined the gift, remarking that “reading books interfered with thought.”
It was about this same time that Oppenheimer met the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, whose lectures he had attended at Harvard. Here was a role model finely attuned to Robert’s sensibilities. Nineteen years older than Oppenheimer, Bohr was born—like Oppenheimer—into an upper-class family surrounded by books, music and learning. Bohr’s father was a professor of physiology, and his mother came from a Jewish banking family. Bohr obtained his doctorate in physics at the University of Copenhagen in 1911. Two years later, he achieved the key theoretical breakthrough in early quantum mechanics by postulating “quantum jumps” in the orbital momentum of an electron around the nucleus of an atom. In 1922, he won the Nobel Prize for this theoretical model of atomic structure.
Tall and athletic, a warm and gentle soul with a wry sense of humor, Bohr was universally admired. He always spoke in a self-effacing near-whisper. “Not often in life,” Albert Einstein wrote to Bohr in the spring of 1920, “has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did.” Einstein was charmed by Bohr’s manner of “uttering his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who [believed himself to be] in the possession of definite truth.” Oppenheimer came to speak of Bohr as “his God.”
“At that point I forgot about beryllium and films and decided to try to learn the trade of being a theoretical physicist. By that time I was fully aware that it was an unusual time, that great things were afoot.” That spring, with his mental health on the mend, Oppenheimer worked steadily on what would become his first major paper in theoretical physics, a study of the “collision” or “continuous spectrum” problem. It was hard work. One day he walked into Ernest Rutherford’s office and saw Bohr sitting in a chair. Rutherford rose from behind his desk and introduced his student to Bohr. The renowned Danish physicist then asked politely, “How is it going?” Robert replied bluntly, “I’m in difficulties.” Bohr asked, “Are the difficulties mathematical or physical?” When Robert replied, “I don’t know,” Bohr said, “That’s bad.”
Bohr vividly remembered the encounter—Oppenheimer had looked uncommonly youthful, and after he left the room, Rutherford had turned to Bohr and remarked that he had high expectations for the young man.
Years later, Robert reflected that Bohr’s question—“Are the problems mathematical or physical?”—was a very good one. “I thought it put a rather useful glare on the extent to which I became embroiled in formal questions without stepping back to see what they really had to do with the physics of the problem.” Later he realized that some physicists rely almost exclusively on mathematical language to describe the reality of nature; any verbal description is “only a concession to intelligibility; it’s only pedagogical. I think this is largely true of [Paul] Dirac; I think that his invention is never initially verbal but initially algebraic.” By contrast, he realized that a physicist like Bohr “regarded mathematics as Dirac regards words, namely, as a way to make himself intelligible to other people. . . . So there’s a very wide spectrum. [At Cambridge] I was simply learning and hadn’t learned very much.” By temperament and talent, Robert
It was about this same time that Oppenheimer met the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, whose lectures he had attended at Harvard. Here was a role model finely attuned to Robert’s sensibilities. Nineteen years older than Oppenheimer, Bohr was born—like Oppenheimer—into an upper-class family surrounded by books, music and learning. Bohr’s father was a professor of physiology, and his mother came from a Jewish banking family. Bohr obtained his doctorate in physics at the University of Copenhagen in 1911. Two years later, he achieved the key theoretical breakthrough in early quantum mechanics by postulating “quantum jumps” in the orbital momentum of an electron around the nucleus of an atom. In 1922, he won the Nobel Prize for this theoretical model of atomic structure.
Tall and athletic, a warm and gentle soul with a wry sense of humor, Bohr was universally admired. He always spoke in a self-effacing near-whisper. “Not often in life,” Albert Einstein wrote to Bohr in the spring of 1920, “has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did.” Einstein was charmed by Bohr’s manner of “uttering his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who [believed himself to be] in the possession of definite truth.” Oppenheimer came to speak of Bohr as “his God.”
“At that point I forgot about beryllium and films and decided to try to learn the trade of being a theoretical physicist. By that time I was fully aware that it was an unusual time, that great things were afoot.” That spring, with his mental health on the mend, Oppenheimer worked steadily on what would become his first major paper in theoretical physics, a study of the “collision” or “continuous spectrum” problem. It was hard work. One day he walked into Ernest Rutherford’s office and saw Bohr sitting in a chair. Rutherford rose from behind his desk and introduced his student to Bohr. The renowned Danish physicist then asked politely, “How is it going?” Robert replied bluntly, “I’m in difficulties.” Bohr asked, “Are the difficulties mathematical or physical?” When Robert replied, “I don’t know,” Bohr said, “That’s bad.”
Bohr vividly remembered the encounter—Oppenheimer had looked uncommonly youthful, and after he left the room, Rutherford had turned to Bohr and remarked that he had high expectations for the young man.
Years later, Robert reflected that Bohr’s question—“Are the problems mathematical or physical?”—was a very good one. “I thought it put a rather useful glare on the extent to which I became embroiled in formal questions without stepping back to see what they really had to do with the physics of the problem.” Later he realized that some physicists rely almost exclusively on mathematical language to describe the reality of nature; any verbal description is “only a concession to intelligibility; it’s only pedagogical. I think this is largely true of [Paul] Dirac; I think that his invention is never initially verbal but initially algebraic.” By contrast, he realized that a physicist like Bohr “regarded mathematics as Dirac regards words, namely, as a way to make himself intelligible to other people. . . . So there’s a very wide spectrum. [At Cambridge] I was simply learning and hadn’t learned very much.” By temperament and talent, Robert
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