ability to show him about should be exercised with great tact, rather than in royal profusion. Your [two] years' start and social adaptivity are likely to make him despair. And instead of flying at your throat… I'm afraid he'd merely cease to think his own life worth living.” Oppenheimer wrote Smith in December that he had not been busy “making a career for myself… Really I have been engaged in the far more difficult business of making myself for a career.” It was worse than that. He was in fact, as he later said, “on the point of bumping myself off. This was chronic.” He saw Fergusson at Christmastime in Paris and reported despair at his lab work and frustration with sexual ventures. Then, contradicting Smith's prediction, he flew at Fergusson's throat and tried to strangle him. Fergusson easily set him aside. Back at Cambridge Oppenheimer tried a letter of explanation. He wrote that he was sending Fergusson a “noisy” poem. “I have left out, and that is probably where the fun came in, just as I did in Paris, the awful fact of excellence; but as you know, it is that fact now, combined with my inability to solder two copper wires together, which is probably succeeding in getting me crazy.”
The awful fact of excellence did not continue to elude him. As he approached a point of psychological crisis he also drove hard to extend himself, understanding deeply that his mind must pull him through. He was “doing a tremendous amount of work,” a friend said, “thinking, reading, discussing things, but obviously with a sense of great inner anxiety and alarm.” A crucial change that year was his first meeting with Bohr. “When Rutherford introduced me to Bohr he asked me what I was working on. I told him and he said, ‘How is it going?’ I said, ‘I'm in difficulties.’ He said, ‘Are the difficulties mathematical or physical?’ I said, ‘I don't know.’ He said, ‘That's bad.’” But something about Bohr — his avuncular warmth at least, what C. P. Snow calls his simple and genuine kindness, his uninsipid “sweetness” — helped release Oppenheimer to commitment: “At that point I forgot about beryllium and films and decided to try to learn the trade of being a theoretical physicist.”
Whether the decision precipitated the crisis or began to relieve it is not clear from the record. Oppenheimer visited a Cambridge psychiatrist. Someone wrote his parents about his problems and they hurried over as they had hurried to Camp Koenig years before. They pushed their son to see a new psychiatrist. He found one in London on Harley Street. After a few sessions the man diagnosed dementia praecox, the older term for what is now called schizophrenia, a condition characterized by early adult onset, faulty thought processes, bizarre actions, a tendency to live in an inner world, incapacity to maintain normal interpersonal relationships and an extremely poor prognosis. Given the vagueness of the symptomatology and Oppenheimer's intellectual dazzle and profound distress, the psychiatrist's mistake is easy enough to understand. Fergusson met Oppenheimer in Harley Street one day and asked him how it had gone. “He said… that the guy was too stupid to follow him and that he knew more about his troubles than the [doctor] did, which was probably true.”
Resolution began before the consultations on Harley Street, in the spring, on a ten-day visit to Corsica with two American friends. What happened to bring Oppenheimer through is a mystery, but a mystery important enough to him that he deliberately emphasized it — tantalizingly and incompletely — to one of the more sensitive of his profilers, Nuel Pharr Davis. Corsica, Oppenheimer wrote his brother Frank soon after his visit, was “a great place, with every virtue from wine to glaciers, and from langouste to brigantines.” To Davis, late in life, he emphasized that although the United States Government had assembled hundreds of pages of information about him across the years, so that some people said his entire life was recorded there, the record in fact contained almost nothing of real importance. To prove his point, he said, he would mention Corsica. “The [Cambridge] psychiatrist was a prelude to what began for me in Corsica. You ask whether I will tell you the full story or whether you must dig it out. But it is known to few and they won't tell. You can't dig it out. What you need to know is that it was not a mere love affair, not a love affair at all, but love.” It was, he said, “a great thing in my life, a great and lasting part of it.”
Whether a love affair or love, Oppenheimer found his vocation in Cambridge that year: that was the certain healing. Science saved him from emotional disaster as science was saving Teller from social disaster. He moved to Gottingen, the old medieval town in Lower Saxony in central Germany with the university established by George II of England, in the autumn of 1926, late Weimar years. Max Born headed the university physics department, newly installed in institute buildings on Bunsenstrasse funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Eugene Wigner traveled to Gottingen to work with Born, as had Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli and, less happily, the Italian Enrico Fermi, all future Nobel laureates. James Franck, having moved over from Haber's institute at the KWI, a Nobelist as of 1925, supervised laboratory classes. The mathematicians Richard Courant, Herman Weyl and John von Neumann collaborated. Edward Teller would show up later on an assistantship.
The town was pleasant, for visiting Americans at least. They could drink
The townspeople still suffered from the disaster of the war and the inflation. Oppenheimer and other American students lodged at the walled mansion of a Gottingen physician who had lost everything and was forced to take in boarders. “Although this society [at the university] was extremely rich and warm and helpful to me,” Oppenheimer says, “it was parked there in a very miserable German mood.. bitter, sullen, and, I would say, discontent and angry and with all those ingredients which were later to produce a major disaster. And this I felt very much.” At Gottingen he first measured the depth of German ruin. Teller generalized it later from his own experience of lost wars and their aftermaths: “Not only do wars create incredible suffering, but they engender deep hatreds that can last for generations.”
Two of Oppenheimer's papers, “On the quantum theory of vibration-rotation bands” and “On the quantum theory of the problem of the two bodies,” had already been accepted for publication in the
He came home a far more confident man. Harvard offered him a job; so did the young, vigorous California Institute of Technology at Pasadena. The University of California at Berkeley especially interested him because it was, as he said later, “a desert,” meaning it taught no theoretical physics yet at all. He decided to take Berkeley and Caltech both, arranging to lecture on the Bay Area campus in the autumn and winter and shift to Pasadena in the spring. But first he went back to Europe on a National Research Council fellowship to tighten up his mathematics with Paul Ehrenfest at Leiden and then with Pauli, now at Zurich, a mind more analytical and critical even than Oppenheimer's, a taste in physics more refined. After Ehrenfest Oppenheimer had wanted to work in Copenhagen with Bohr. Ehrenfest thought not: Bohr's “largeness and vagueness,” in Oppenheimer's words, were not the proper astringent. “I did see a copy of the letter [Ehrenfest] wrote Pauli. It was clear that he was sending me there to be fixed up.”
Before he left the United States for Leiden Oppenheimer visited the Sangre de Cristos with Frank. The two brothers found a cabin and a piece of land they liked — “house and six acres and stream,” in Robert's terse description — up high on a mountain meadow. The house was rough-hewn timber chinked with caulk; it lacked even a privy. While Robert was in Europe his father arranged a long-term lease and set aside three hundred dollars for what Oppenheimer calls “restoration.” A summer in the mountains was restoration for the celebrated young theoretician as well.
At the end of that summer of 1927 the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini convened an International Physical Congress at Como on the southwestern end of fjord-like Lake Como in the lake district of northern Italy. The congress commemorated the centennial of the death in 1827 of Ales-sandro Volta, the Como-born Italian physicist who invented the electric battery and after whom the standard unit of electrical potential, the volt, is
