GERALD HOLTON
383
off for the weekend
lO
distill the low-grade energy into laughter and
exhaustion , read Greek, comm it faux pas, search my desk for letters,
and wish I were dead."
The various fragments of Oppenheimer 's soul are evidently wait–
ing for a magnetic field to line them up . The magnet is his encounter
with P.W. Bridgman, the experimentalist who later won the Nobel
Prize for his research on high pressure physics, and who was then also
developing his operationalist philosophy of science. Later Oppenhei–
mer recalled that with regard to science, Bridgman's course represented
" the great point of my time" at college, for Bridgman "didn't articulate
a philosophic point of view, but he lived it. . . . He was a man to whom
one wanted to be an apprentice."
First, however, Oppenheimer was heading for terrible disappoint–
ment. Bridgman later told me with some amusement that young
Oppenheimer had come to work on an experimental problem in his
laboratory, and at the beginning "didn't know one end of the soldering
iron from the other." The delicate suspensions of galvanometers had
to
be replaced constantly when this apprentice was using them. He stuck
with it, measuring the electric conductivity of alloys at high
pressures-a kind of apotheosis of his initial interest in minerals and
crystals.
But in the early 1920s, a lack of sufficient skill in the laboratory
raised serious doubts about the ultimate promise of a would-be
physicist in the U.S.
(It
was still quite unusual for a young American to
think of himself as a
theoretical
physicist.) Oppenheimer had his heart
set on going to Ernest Rutherford's vigorous, renowned laboratory at
Cambridge, England; but he was not accepted for work under Ruther–
ford and had
to
settle for a place with the septuagenarian
J.J.
Thom–
son. That was a major blow, to which was added a bigger one, setting
the stage for a devastating year. As Oppenheimer himself said in a letter
of about that time, he now recognized that "my genre, whatever it is, is
not experimental science." That realization may help explain in part
the depression and identity confusion which overtook the young man
at that point, just when he was engaged in "the difficult business of
making myself for a career" in a place and at a time that accentuated
for him his weaknesses and deficiencies. He still had not made the
central discovery that every young person must make: in Max Weber's
words, to "find and obey the demon that holds the fibers of one's very
life. "
At twenty-one, Oppenheimer was struggling with the terrible
problem of feeling the basic need to look for central scientific ques-
