"I found him excellent. We got along very well. We were friends until his last day. I enjoyed things about him that some people disliked. It's true you carried on a charade with him. He lived a charade, and you went along with it. It was fine — matching wits and so on — and I took him for what he was. I understood his problem. [What was his problem?] Identity. He reminded me of a boyhood friend about whom someone said that he couldn't make up his mind whether to be president of the B'nai B'rith or the Knights of Columbus. Perhaps he wanted to be both simultaneously. Oppenheimer wanted every experience. In that sense he never focused. My own feeling is that if he had studied the Talmud and Hebrew, rather than Sanskrit, he would have been a much greater physicist."
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Anti-fascistsEngineers from the United StatesAcademics from the United StatesAgnostics from the United StatesCalifornia Institute of Technology faculty
Original Language: English
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Sources
I.I. Rabi, interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, quoted in Bernstein, Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (Ivar R. Dee, 2004).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer
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Robert Oppenheimer
Julius Robert Oppenheimer (22 April 1904 – 18 February 1967) was an American physicist and the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.
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