![]() ![]() Oppenheimer had a tense relationship with his supervisor Patrick Blackett. “The tense relationship with his supervisor formed a pivotal part of his Cambridge experience” ![]() Fergusson recounted the “poisoned apple” episode which Oppenheimer confessed to at the end of the Corsica trip, suddenly announcing that he had to return to England because he’d done a “terrible thing”. Oppenheimer jumped on Fergusson and tried to suffocate him. Oppenheimer developed close friends in Cambridge: in one incident, Francis Fergusson tried to “distract” Oppenheimer from his depression, telling him he was about to marry his girlfriend. That holiday he was especially agitated, unusually so for what his friends described as an already “fidgety” man. He told his friends that he strongly identified with the unhappy protagonist of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, who was tormented by guilt which drove him to confess to an unsolved murder: “He gets to the soul and torment of man.” “Dostoyevsky is superior,” Oppenheimer insisted one night, as they got caught up in a storm ducking into an inn after days spent indulging in decadent food and wine. In March 1926, he took a holiday in Corsica with three friends from Harvard for 10 days. My credentials were peculiar and not impressive.” The rejection set the tone for Oppenheimer’s tumultuous stint in Cambridge. Rutherford was suspicious of Oppenheimer and refused to work with him: “Rutherford wouldn’t have me. He spent only a year in the University after graduating from Harvard. He was accepted by the man who discovered the electron, JJ Thomson, on the precondition that he completed an introductory lab course. ![]() His clumsiness in the lab did not impress Rutherford. Oppenheimer was given an offer to study at Christ’s College in 1924, aged 21, and wrote to “the father of nuclear physics”, Ernest Rutherford, to request to work at the Cavendish. The lab work here is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything … the lectures are vile.” It refers to a letter that Oppenheimer wrote to his close friend Francis Fergusson about his time in the Cavendish, where he said: “I’m having a pretty bad time. Robert Oppenheimer, which Nolan’s film is based on. “I am having a pretty bad time”, begins the third chapter of Bird & Sherwin’s (2005) biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. In light of the release of Christopher Nolan’s biographical thriller of the enigmatic scientist (in what some cinemagoers have dubbed “Barbenheimer”, a consequence of the simultaneously screening Barbie film), the true story of Oppenheimer’s time in Cambridge was much bleaker than you’d perhaps expect. This young student was Robert Oppenheimer, the hat-wearing, chain-smoking Manhattan Project scientist behind the atomic bomb. In 1925, a depressed American physicist completing a year of graduate study in Cambridge dosed an apple with poisonous chemicals and placed it on his supervisor’s desk. ![]()
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