into the sea. I now did so without too much trouble, and waited for the sun to rise.
Back in Gottingen Max Born recognized Heisenberg's strange mathematics as matrix algebra, a mathematical system for representing and manipulating arrays of numbers on matrices — grids — that had been devised in the 1850s and that Bora's teacher David Hilbert had extended in 1904. In three months of intensive work Born, Heisenberg and their colleague Pascual Jordan then developed what Heisenberg calls “a coherent mathematical framework, one that promised to embrace all the multifarious aspects of atomic physics.” Quantum mechanics, the new system was called. It fit the experimental evidence to a high degree of accuracy. Pauli managed with heroic effort to apply it to the hydrogen atom and derive in a consistent way the same results — the Balmer formula, Rydberg's constant — that Bohr had derived from inconsistent assumptions in 1913. Bohr was delighted. At Copenhagen, at Gottingen, at Munich, at Cambridge, the work of development went on.
The bow of the Carpathians as they curve around northwestward begins to define the northern border of Czechoslovakia. Long before it can complete that service the bow bends down toward the Austrian Alps, but a border region of mountainous uplift, the Sudetes, continues across Czechoslovakia. Some sixty miles beyond Prague it turns southwest to form a low range between Czechoslovakia and Germany that is called, in German, the Erz- gebirge: the Ore Mountains. The Erzgebirge began to be mined for iron in medieval days. In 1516 a rich silver lode was discovered in Joachimsthal (St. Joachim's dale), in the territory of the Count von Schlick, who immediately appropriated the mine. In 1519 coins were first struck from its silver at his command.
The Joachimsthal mines, ancient and cavernous, shored with smoky timbers, offered up other unusual ores, including a black, pitchy, heavy, nodular mineral descriptively named pitchblende. A German apothecary and self- taught chemist, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who became the first professor of chemistry at the University of Berlin when it opened its doors in 1810, succeeded in 1789 in extracting a grayish metallic material from a sample of Joachimsthal pitchblende. He sought an appropriate name. Eight years previously Sir William Herschel, the German-born English astronomer, had discovered a new planet and named it Uranus after the earliest supreme god of Greek mythology, son and husband of Gaea, father of Titans and Cyclopes, whose son Chronus with Gaea's help castrated him and from whose wounded blood, falling then on Earth, the three vengeful Furies sprang. To honor Herschel's discovery Klaproth named his new metal
In the summer of 1921 a wealthy seventeen-year-old American student, a recent graduate of the Ethical Culture School of New York, made his way to Joachimsthal on an amateur prospecting trip. Young Robert Oppenheimer had begun collecting minerals when his grandfather, who lived in Hanau, Germany, had given him a modest starter collection on a visit there when Robert was a small boy, before the Great War. He dated his interest in science from that time. “This was certainly at first a collector's interest,” he told an interviewer late in life, “but it began to be also a bit of a scientist's interest, not in historical problems of how rocks and minerals came to be, but really a fascination with crystals, their structure, birefringence, what you saw in polarized light, and all the canonical business.” The grandfather was “an unsuccessful businessman, born himself in a hovel, really, in an almost medieval German village, with a taste for scholarship.” Oppenheimer's father had left Hanau for America at seventeen, in 1898, worked his way to ownership of a textile-importing company and prospered importing lining fabrics for men's suits at a time when ready-made suits were replacing hand tailoring in the United States. The Oppenheimers — Julius; his beautiful and delicate wife Ella, artistically trained, from Baltimore; Robert, born April 22, 1904; and Frank, Robert's sidekick brother, eight years younger — could afford to summer in Europe and frequently did so.
Julius and Ella Oppenheimer were people of dignity and some caution, nonpracticing Jews. They lived in a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive near 88th Street overlooking the Hudson River and kept a summer house at Bay Shore on Long Island. They dressed with tailored care, practiced cultivation, sheltered themselves and their children from real and imagined harm. Ella Oppenheimer's congenitally unformed right hand, hidden always in a prosthetic glove, was not discussed, not even by the boys out of earshot among their friends. She was loving but formal: in her presence only her husband presumed to raise his voice. Julius Oppenheimer, according to one of Robert's friends a great talker and social ar-guer, according to another was “desperately amiable, anxious to be agreeable,” but also essentially kind. He belonged to Columbia University educator Felix Adler's Society for Ethical Culture, of which Robert's school was an extension, which declared that “man must assume responsibility for the direction of his life and destiny”: man, as opposed to God. Robert Oppenheimer remembered himself as “an unctuous, repulsively good little boy.” His childhood, he said, “did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things. It gave me no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.” He was a frail child, frequently ill. For that reason, or because she had lost a middle son shortly after birth, his mother did not encourage him to run in the streets. He stayed home, collected minerals and at ten years of age wrote poems but still played with blocks.
He was already working up to science. A professional microscope was a childhood toy. He did laboratory experiments in the third grade, began keeping scientific notebooks in the fourth, began studying physics in the fifth, though for many years chemistry would interest him more. The curator of crystals at the American Museum of Natural History took him as a pupil. He lectured to the surprised and then delighted members of the New York Mineralogical Club when he was twelve — from the quality of his correspondence the membership had assumed he was an adult.
When he was fourteen, to get him out of doors and perhaps to help him find friends, his parents sent him to camp. He walked the trails of Camp Koenig looking for rocks and discoursing with the only friend he found on George Eliot, emboldened by Eliot's conviction that cause and effect ruled human affairs. He was shy, awkward, unbearably precious and condescending and he did not fight back. He wrote his parents that he was glad to be at camp because he was learning the facts of life. The Oppenheimers came running. When the camp director cracked down on dirty jokes, the other boys, the ones who called Robert “Cutie,” traced the censorship to him and hauled him off to the camp icehouse, stripped him bare, beat him up — “tortured him,” his friend says — painted his genitals and buttocks green and locked him away naked for the night. Responsibly he held out to the end of camp but never went back. “Still a little boy,” another childhood friend, a girl he liked more than she knew, remembers him at fifteen; “… very frail, very pink-cheeked, very shy, and very brilliant of course. Very quickly everybody admitted that he was different from all the others and very superior. As far as studies were concerned he was good in everything… Aside from that he was physically — you can't say clumsy exactly — he was rather undeveloped, not in the way he behaved but the way he went about, the way he walked, the way he sat. There was something strangely childish about him.”
He graduated as Ethical Culture's valedictorian in February 1921. In April he underwent surgery for appendicitis. Recovered from that, he traveled with his family to Europe and off on his side trip to Joachimsthal. Somewhere along the way he “came down with a heavy, almost fatal case of trench dysentery.” He was supposed to enter Harvard in September, but “I was sick abed — in Europe, actually, at the time.” Severe colitis following the bout of dysentery laid him low for months. He spent the winter in the family apartment in New York.
To round off Robert's convalescence and toughen him up, his father arranged for a favorite English teacher at Ethical Culture, a warm, supportive Harvard graduate named Herbert Smith, to take him out West for the summer. Robert was then eighteen, his face still boyish but steadied by arresting blue-gray eyes. He was six feet tall, on an extremely narrow frame; he never in his life weighed more than 125 pounds and at times of illness or stress could waste to 115. Smith guided his charge to a dude ranch, Los Pifios, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains northeast of Santa Fe, and Robert chowed down, chopped wood, learned to ride horses and live in rain and weather.
A highlight of the summer was a pack trip. It started in Frijoles, a village within sheer, pueblo-carved Canon de los Frijoles across the Rio Grande from the Sangre de Cristos, and ascended the canyons and mesas of the
