American Experience

Herbert York, physicist: Quantum physics is the basic physics behind electrons and atoms. It turns out that classical ideas about Newtonian mechanics and particle motion and so on, do not apply to things of-to things of atomic scale. You needed a new kind of physics.

Richard Rhodes, writer: So if you’re going to change on a different scale the-the whole structure of the physics, everything has to be redone if you will, and that means there are enormous opportunities available for a young graduate student with talent to come in and make various aspects of this his own.

Narrator: Oppenheimer immersed himself in the mysteries of the subatomic universe, where nothing was certain, and probability the only rule. He found the work exhilarating. “There was terror,” he wrote, “as well as exaltation.”

Freeman Dyson, physicist: Oppenheimer really flourished there. He annoyed everybody, of course, by talking too much and pretending he knew everything.

Marvin Goldberger, physicist: He always considered very carefully what he said as though he was speaking for the ages. And he expected everybody to be seduced by his Renaissance man knowledge of everything.

Narrator: In Göttingen, Oppenheimer came into his own as a theoretical physicist, publishing 16 papers in three years. By the time he was ready to return to America, he was focused and confident, an ambitious young man with an international reputation.