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.
Oppenheimer was assigned to work under J. J. Thompson,
the renowned British physicist who, in 1897, had discovered the
electron. Oppenheimer had achieved everything he could have hoped for,
and he was miserable. Oppenheimer quickly realized that experimental
physics was not his calling. He was frustrated by his work, and
his inabilities in the lab soon drove him to the verge of mental
breakdown.
In desperation, Oppenheimer went to see a psychiatrist,
who diagnosed him with dementia praecox–what we now call schizophrenia.
The disease was believed to be incurable and required lifelong
institutionalization. Refusing to believe the psychiatrist's sentence,
Oppenheimer fled Europe, hoping to find some form of solace. He
found it in the form of a long vacation and a secret love affair–one
of which he refused to speak in later life but which gave him such
peace of mind that he was able to return to Europe and, more importantly,
return to physics.
Oppenheimer left Cambridge for Germany, taking a position
at the University of Göttingen,which at the time was the European center
of theoretical physics. Recent discoveries in the field of quantum
physics had thrown the world of theoretical physics into a period
of upheaval. The revolutionary "new" physics constituted an exciting
frontier of science that the world's best and brightest were eager
to explore, and Göttingen lay at the center of it. Oppenheimer
had the opportunity to meet, study under, and work with almost all
of the leading lights of the quantum physics revolution, including
Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and Enrico Fermi.
Oppenheimer shined in his new surroundings. His colleagues
all agreed that he was one of the brightest scientists in the laboratory. His
easy grasp of the new physics, paired with his insatiable curiosity
and his encyclopedic knowledge of literature, philosophy, and world
religions, impressed everyone he met.
The Göttingen years were a triumph. Oppenheimer received
his Ph.D. in physics in 1927 and by 1929 had published sixteen
papers on quantum physics. By this point a prominent member of
the physics community, Oppenheimer returned to the United States,
intent on bringing the quantum revolution back to his own country.
