physics, he listed fifteen books he claimed to have read. Years later, he heard that when the faculty committee met to consider his petition, one professor, George Washington Pierce, quipped, “Obviously, if he [Oppenheimer] says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a Ph.D. for knowing their titles.”
His primary tutor in physics became Percy Bridgman (1882–1961), who later won a Nobel Prize. “I found Bridgman a wonderful teacher,” Oppenheimer remembered, “because he never really was quite reconciled to things being the way they were and he always thought them out.” “A very intelligent student,” Bridgman later said of Oppenheimer. “He knew enough to ask questions.” But when Bridgman assigned him a lab experiment that required making a copper-nickel alloy in a self-built furnace, Oppenheimer “didn’t know one end of the soldering iron from the other.” Oppenheimer was so clumsy with the lab’s galvanometer that its delicate suspensions had to be replaced every time he used the apparatus. Robert nevertheless showed persistence and Bridgman found the results interesting enough to publish them in a scientific journal. Robert was both precocious and, on occasion, irritatingly brash. One evening Bridgman invited him to his home for tea. In the course of the evening, the professor showed his student a photograph of a temple built, he said, about 400 B.C. in Segesta, Sicily. Oppenheimer quickly disagreed: “I judge from the capitals on the columns that it was built about fifty years earlier.”
When the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr gave two lectures at Harvard in October 1923, Robert made a point of attending both. Bohr had just won the Nobel the previous year for “his investigations of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them.” Oppenheimer would later say that “it would be hard to exaggerate how much I venerate Bohr.” Even on this occasion, his first glimpse of the man, he was deeply moved. Afterwards, Professor Bridgman noted that “[t]he impression he [Bohr] made on everyone who met him was a singularly pleasant one personally. I have seldom met a man with such evident singleness of purpose and so apparently free from guile . . . he is now idolized as a scientific god through most of Europe.”
Oppenheimer’s approach to learning physics was eclectic, even haphazard. He focused on the most interesting, abstract problems in the field, bypassing the dreary basics. Years later, he confessed to feeling insecure about the gaps in his knowledge. “To this day,” he told an interviewer in 1963, “I get panicky when I think about a smoke ring or elastic vibrations. There’s nothing there—just a little skin over a hole. In the same way my mathematical formation was, even for those days, very primitive. . . . I took a course from [J. E.] Littlewood on number theory—well, that was nice, but that wasn’t really how to go about learning mathematics for the professional pursuit of physics.”
When Alfred North Whitehead arrived on campus, only Robert and one other undergraduate had the courage to sign up for a course with the philosopher and mathematician. They painstakingly worked their way through the three volumes of Principia Mathematica, coauthored by Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. “I had a very exciting time,” Oppenheimer recalled, “reading the Principia with Whitehead, who had forgotten it, so that he was both teacher and student.” Despite this experience, Oppenheimer always thought he was deficient in mathematics. “I never did learn very much. I probably learned a good deal by a method that is never given enough credit, that is, by being with people. . . . I should have learned more mathematics. I think I would have enjoyed it, but it was a part of my impatience that I was careless about it.”
But if there were gaps in his education, he could admit to his friend Paul Horgan that Harvard was good for him. In the autumn of 1923,
His primary tutor in physics became Percy Bridgman (1882–1961), who later won a Nobel Prize. “I found Bridgman a wonderful teacher,” Oppenheimer remembered, “because he never really was quite reconciled to things being the way they were and he always thought them out.” “A very intelligent student,” Bridgman later said of Oppenheimer. “He knew enough to ask questions.” But when Bridgman assigned him a lab experiment that required making a copper-nickel alloy in a self-built furnace, Oppenheimer “didn’t know one end of the soldering iron from the other.” Oppenheimer was so clumsy with the lab’s galvanometer that its delicate suspensions had to be replaced every time he used the apparatus. Robert nevertheless showed persistence and Bridgman found the results interesting enough to publish them in a scientific journal. Robert was both precocious and, on occasion, irritatingly brash. One evening Bridgman invited him to his home for tea. In the course of the evening, the professor showed his student a photograph of a temple built, he said, about 400 B.C. in Segesta, Sicily. Oppenheimer quickly disagreed: “I judge from the capitals on the columns that it was built about fifty years earlier.”
When the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr gave two lectures at Harvard in October 1923, Robert made a point of attending both. Bohr had just won the Nobel the previous year for “his investigations of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them.” Oppenheimer would later say that “it would be hard to exaggerate how much I venerate Bohr.” Even on this occasion, his first glimpse of the man, he was deeply moved. Afterwards, Professor Bridgman noted that “[t]he impression he [Bohr] made on everyone who met him was a singularly pleasant one personally. I have seldom met a man with such evident singleness of purpose and so apparently free from guile . . . he is now idolized as a scientific god through most of Europe.”
Oppenheimer’s approach to learning physics was eclectic, even haphazard. He focused on the most interesting, abstract problems in the field, bypassing the dreary basics. Years later, he confessed to feeling insecure about the gaps in his knowledge. “To this day,” he told an interviewer in 1963, “I get panicky when I think about a smoke ring or elastic vibrations. There’s nothing there—just a little skin over a hole. In the same way my mathematical formation was, even for those days, very primitive. . . . I took a course from [J. E.] Littlewood on number theory—well, that was nice, but that wasn’t really how to go about learning mathematics for the professional pursuit of physics.”
When Alfred North Whitehead arrived on campus, only Robert and one other undergraduate had the courage to sign up for a course with the philosopher and mathematician. They painstakingly worked their way through the three volumes of Principia Mathematica, coauthored by Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. “I had a very exciting time,” Oppenheimer recalled, “reading the Principia with Whitehead, who had forgotten it, so that he was both teacher and student.” Despite this experience, Oppenheimer always thought he was deficient in mathematics. “I never did learn very much. I probably learned a good deal by a method that is never given enough credit, that is, by being with people. . . . I should have learned more mathematics. I think I would have enjoyed it, but it was a part of my impatience that I was careless about it.”
But if there were gaps in his education, he could admit to his friend Paul Horgan that Harvard was good for him. In the autumn of 1923,
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