Jun

14

To give you another example of Oppenheimer and the way he acted, and also which illustrates that his bark was worse than his bite, is when I took my prelims, they came in two parts - one in physics and one in astronomy - and he was the sole administrator of the physics prelim, which was an oral. This was probably in the spring of 1941. I am not sure exactly when it was.

He called me into his office and started asking me questions in physics and it was a disconcerting procedure, because he would ask you a question and if you started to answer it and he could see that you did know the answer, he would cut you off without allowing you to answer it as soon as he saw that you knew it or knew enough about it, and move on to something else. Well, pretty soon he found something I did not know and he listened to me flounder for a while and then he said, "Well, you should know that and this is the answer," and he even wrote it down on the board and then he said, "You passed and did very well," which sort of left me gasping.

But it turned out that I do not think my treatment from him was different from other people, in that he really did give a damn about his students and when he found out that I was going to leave Berkeley in 1941 (because the war was on and the draft was on), he wrote letters around to find me employment without my even asking him for it. I mean he assessed me and assessed other students and did things for them.

Another thing which other students pointed out to me was that Oppenheimer really made his contribution through his students. That the number of papers which came out from Berkeley, especially theoretical papers (but others too, in experiments and interpretation) rarely had his name on them, but if you looked at the bottom line at the end you would always see an acknowledgement or very often that great help was provided by, or the problem was suggested by Dr. Oppenheimer, and that is the way he operated.

From his daughter, Melita Osborne's biographical document available here [MS word .docx file, approx 300 Kb].


Comments

Name

Email

Website

Speak your mind

Archives

Resources & Links

Search