After high school, Oppenheimer enrolled in Harvard University, where
he studied literature, ancient Greek, and, of course, science. Unsure
about what he wanted to do with his life, Oppenheimer hesitated
when it came time to choose a major. Wavering between mineralogy
and chemistry, he eventually settled upon the latter, taking the
advice of a friend who had pointed out that a career in chemistry carried
with it the promise of summer vacations.
Then, in his junior year, Oppenheimer discovered physics.
And everything changed. Studying under the famous experimentalist Percy
Bridgman, Oppenheimer immediately fell in love with the field.
This, he decided, was what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
Having taken ten courses per semester, Oppenheimer was
able to graduate from Harvard in three years, and in 1926 he headed
for England, in the hopes of pursuing a graduate degree in physics.
Most promising young physics students of this period tended
to go abroad to complete their educations–the physics departments
of the United States were no match for the powerhouse European
laboratories. The 1920s was a particularly exciting time to practice physics,
and Europe was the place to practice it.
Only a decade before, Einstein had
overthrown the Newtonian conception of the universe that had reigned
for centuries. His famous equation, E = mc2,
was taking the world of physics–and beyond–by storm. Meanwhile,
another revolutionary shift had taken place in the way scientists
understood the structure of matter. A series of discoveries in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century established once and
for all that all matter was made up of atoms–and that those atoms
were themselves made up of a number of bizarrely acting subatomic
particles. The discovery that the behavior of these subatomic particles
couldn't be explained using existing models led to the formation
of a new system of physics for describing the behavior of particles
on this tiny scale: quantum physics. It seemed that new discoveries
were being made every day, and it was understood among American
physics students that the best and most exciting of these discoveries
were taking place in European labs.
Oppenheimer applied for a position in the Cavendish Laboratory
at Cambridge University, one of the best nuclear physics labs in the
world. It was directed by Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel Prize winner
who had only recently proved the existence of the nucleus of an atom
and thus of an atom itself. Although Oppenheimer, with his degree
in chemistry, was ill-prepared for a rigorous course of graduate
study in experimental physics, Rutherford took a chance on the
young scholar and admitted him to the lab.
