Facts about Robert Oppenheimer

• Robert Oppenheimer once tried to kill his own tutor by poisoning an apple.
• He had a talent for learning languages. He was once invited to give a lecture in Netherlands. He gave the lecture in Dutch, surprising everyone. He wrote his Phd thesis in German.
• He completed the third and fourth grade in one year, and also skipped half of the eight grade.
• He loved poetry and mysticism, and also had the habit of reading texts in their original language. It is to him that Paul Dirac said , “ In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew. In poetry it’s the opposite.”
• By the age of twelve, Robert was using the family typewriter to correspond with well-known local geologists about rock formations in Central Park, who invited him to give a lecture in the New York Mineralogical Club , which he did.
• He liked to be in his own world. He learned of the Wall street crash of 1929 ,6months after the event.
• He visited Einstein about the issue regarding his security credential. Einstein suggested that he leave them and he has nothing to prove. Oppenheimer replied — You don’t understand, and he left. Einstein told his secretary — “There goes a nar” ( ‘fool’ in Yiddish).
• He once said that Einstein is “completely cuckoo.”
• Harry Truman said that Oppenheimer is a ‘crybaby scientist’.
• His brother Frank once wrote to him that — “he had been distracted from his studies by a member of the opposite sex.” Robert wrote back to him that the young woman’s “profession is to make you waste your time with her, it is your profession to keep clear.”
• About dating, he said that Dating was , “Only important for people who have time to waste.”
• His friend, France Ferguson visited him and told him that he was about to get engaged. Upon hearing this news, he snapped ( ‘how is this guy doing better than me?’ ) and launched on Ferguson , knocked him to the ground and tried to choke him. Ferguson, being physically bigger and stronger, flicked him off and told him to grow up.
• He once wrote to his brother , “It is not easy for me, to be quite free of the desire to brow beat somebody.”
• He once wrote a letter of recommendation for Richard Feynman to get him employed.
• Freeman Dyson said of him — “He was a very good friend. On the other hand, he could be unreasonably brutal on scientific questions. He was very quick to judge and decide that somebody was no good, and then that was final.”
• One such person was Leon Cooper who had this idea that superconductivity had something to do with pairs of electrons and Oppenheimer said that was total rubbish.
• Whenever Cooper tried to give a talk about his theory of superconductivity, Oppenheimer would just interrupt all the time and tell him why it was nonsense.
• He decided Cooper was no good, so Cooper left the Institute and went to Illinois, where he teamed up with 2 other physicists and produced the correct theory of superconductivity, They all got the Noble prize and Cooper got his revenge.
• Max Born wrote of Oppenheimer , “ He is doubtless very gifted, but completely without mental discipline. He is outwardly very modest, but inwardly very arrogant.”
• Pauli wrote about him , “His strength is that he is always full of ideas and he has a great imagination . But his calculations are always wrong.”
• After listening to Robert’s lecture and listening to him murmur with “nim-nim” sounds, Pauli called him the “ nim- nim-nim” man.
• Oppenheimer loved to interact with his students , more than his colleagues. Sooner, his students started to catch his quirks and eccentricities, and they were called ‘Nim-nim’ boys because they mimicked his nim-nim hummings. They also started chain smoking.
• Oppenheimer’s security credentials were revoked, as he was considered a security risk. It was not until 2022 , that he got his security clearance.

In conclusion, he was a complex, multifaceted individual, and these list of facts in know way provides the full picture of who he was , nor should it be used to make any fixed judgements about his character and personality, without adequate research on this enigmatic individual. This much can be said that he is the ‘Father of the atom bomb’ and since the Nuclear crisis which is an existential threat to humanity can be traced to his work in Los Alamos, he is one of the most significant individual in human history.

Sources-
- Book — American Prometheus
- Documentaries about Oppenheimer