Word: physicist
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...TIME reveres Einstein perhaps as much as Reader Oppenheimer does, would be the last to belittle the great physicist for no longer being able to keep up with a conversation which he alone was able to start...
When TIME'S Education editor, Allan B. Ecker, and Researcher Ruth Brine faced atomic-physicist Robert Oppenheimer for the first time, they were understandably apprehensive. In preparation for the Oppenheimer cover story (TIME, Nov. 8) they had looked over enough morgue material on him to know that his agile mind would be impatient with journalism's question & answer methods. Sure enough, at the first interview's end he remarked: "You know, if you were physicists, I'd fire you. I'm the murderer and you are lousy detectives...
...Born invited him to Göttingen, where he earned his Ph.D. (at 23) three weeks after enrolling. Oppenheimer's Ph.D. thesis was a brilliant paper on quantum mechanics: Zur Quantentheorie kontinuierlicher Spektren. After the oral exam, a colleague asked Physicist James Franck (now at the University of Chicago) how it had gone with Oppenheimer. Replied...
What made him so good a teacher was that he was still a student-and always would be. In seminars he was forever reading aloud the latest letter from a top physicist friend in Denmark or England, reporting a hot tip just telephoned from Harvard, or commenting on a physical journal fresh from a Japanese press. Privy to this latest scientific,gossip ("the lifeblood of physics," Oppenheimer calls it), his students felt themselves in the vanguard of advancing knowledge...
...platforms and in seminars all over the U.S.: Harvard's Schwinger, California's Serber, CalTech's Christy, Stanford's Schiff, Columbia's Lamb, Iowa State's Carlson, Illinois' Nordsieck, Washington's Uehling. (Brother Frank, the original Oppie apprentice, is now a physicist at the University of Minnesota.) Says Nobel Prizewinner Robert Millikan: "Oppenheimer developed at Berkeley an outstanding school of theoretical physics, and its products are leaders of modern physics today...