Inside The Centre

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• J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, his friend Isidor Rabi once remarked, was ‘a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters’, who ‘never got to be an integrated personality’. What prevented Oppenheimer from being fully integrated, Rabi thought, was his denial of a centrally important part of himself: his Jewishness. No such thought could have entered Oppenheimer’s mind, no matter who he was looking at. There was no group to whom he could point and say, ‘These are my people’, and not just because of his ambivalence about his Jewish background. It was also because that background itself, regardless of Oppenheimer’s feelings about it, could not have provided him with the sense of belonging and, therefore, the sense of identity that Rabi thought was missing in him. Rabi, despite his lack of ... (查看原文)

  . 2014-11-20 20:15:01

• Unlike Karl Compton, Dirac was not impressed by Oppenheimer’s knowledge of and interest in literature. On the contrary, he rather disapproved of it. Once he remarked to Oppenheimer: ‘I don’t see how you can work on physics and write poetry at the same time. In science, you want to say something nobody knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand.’ Talking about the time just after the initial formulation of quantum mechanics, he remarked: ‘It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work.’ What he meant, he explained, was that, once the mathematical techniques of quantum mechanics had been developed: It was then an interesting game people could play... (查看原文)

  . 2015-01-22 11:40:06

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