American Experience

Narrator: Oppenheimer graduated in just three years, and in 1925 headed for Cambridge, England and an advanced degree at the celebrated Cavendish laboratory. Academic success had always come easily. Ambitious, determined to succeed, in England he would learn what it was like to struggle, and fail.

Richard Rhodes, writer: Oppenheimer, like so many theoretical physicists, it turns out that if he walks through a lab the instruments all break. And he’s trying to do a rather delicate physical experiment and he’s not getting anywhere, and he’s sinking deeper and deeper into that special despair that comes along when prodigies grow up and have-and realize they can’t just do it by being a prodigy anymore.

Martin Sherwin, historian: His eyes and his hands and his mind are not coordinated, he can’t do what all of the other young people are able to do. And he finds himself one day standing at a blackboard, staring into space, saying, “The point is. The point is. The point is. There is no point.”

Richard Rhodes, writer: He fell into despair, he fell into depression. Here was a point where he was suddenly doubting his intellect, his ability to do science, so it’s not surprising that at that point the whole thing would go collapsing down for him. At the same time, he had never really learned how to approach women, how to close the sale, if I may call it that, and he was dealing with that as well.

Narrator: Wrestling with inner demons that threatened to overwhelm him, he was, he later said, “at the point of bumping myself off.” In 1926, Oppenheimer would save himself. He cut free from the English experimental laboratory and headed for Göttingen, Germany to study theoretical physics with some of the greatest scientific minds of the century. “I had very great misgivings about myself on all fronts,” he said. “I hadn’t been good, I hadn’t done anybody any good, and here was something I felt just driven to try.” In Gottingen, Oppenheimer would make his mark in a new science, which explored a world that ran counter to everyday experience – quantum physics.