American Prometheus (143 page)

The Oppenheimers.
Julius Oppenheimer (above, left) arrived in New York City from Germany in 1888. In 1903 he married Ella Friedman (above, right), a German-American painter born in Baltimore. Robert, born in 1904, sits (right) in his father’s lap.

As a young child, Robert (seated on the right with a friend) had a passion for blocks and collecting rock specimens.

Ella and Robert.

“I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy,” Oppenheimer later said. “My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.”

Oppenheimer (right) riding in Central Park.

Robert attended the Ethical Culture School where he was taught to develop his “ethical imagination,” to see “things not as they are, but as they might be.”

Robert and his younger brother Frank.

Oppenheimer studied at Göttingen University, where he received his doctorate in quantum physics under Max Born (right). There he was befriended by physicists Paul Dirac (center, right) and the German physicist Hendrik Kramers (below, left). Later he studied briefly in Zurich with I. I. Rabi, H. M. Mott-Smith and Wolfgang Pauli (bottom, right, sailing with Robert on Lake Zurich).

Professor Oppenheimer (above, left) in 1929 at Caltech, where he had accepted a dual appointment with the University of California, Berkeley, and where he quickly became an apostle for the new quantum physics. “I need physics more than friends,” Robert confessed. Oppenheimer (above, right) between physicists William A. Fowler and Luis Alvarez. “I started really as a propagator of the theory which I loved, about which I continued to learn more, and which was not well understood but which was very rich.” Robert Serber (below, right) was one of his students and then a lifelong friend.

“My two great loves are physics and New Mexico,” Oppenheimer wrote. “It’s a pity they can’t be combined.” Oppenheimer spent his summers at Perro Caliente, his 154 acre ranch (above) with a view of the Sangre de Christo mountains. Robert and his horse, Crisis (right), went for long rides with his brother Frank and other friends, including Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence (below).

Oppenheimer with the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Ernest Lawrence.

Joe Weinberg, Rossi Lomanitz, David Bohm and Max Friedman were some of Oppie’s acolytes at Berkeley. “They copied his gestures, his mannerisms, his intonations,” recalled Bob Serber.