and insisted on making tea from a charcoal-fired Russian samovar. Bernheim was more amused than annoyed by his friend’s eccentricities: “He wasn’t a comfortable person to be around, in a way, because he always gave the impression that he was thinking very deeply about things. When we roomed together he would spend evenings locked in his room, trying to do something with Planck’s constant or something like that. I had visions of him suddenly bursting forth as a great physicist, and here I was just trying to get through Harvard.”
Bernheim thought Robert was something of a hypochondriac. “He went to bed with an electric pad every night, and one day it started to smoke.” Robert woke up and ran to the bathroom with the burning pad. He then went back to sleep, unaware that the pad was still burning. Bernheim recalled having to put the thing out before it burned the house down. Living with Robert was always “a little bit of a strain,” Bernheim noted, “because you had to more or less adjust to his standards or moods—he was really the dominant one.” Difficult or not, Bernheim roomed with Robert for their two remaining years at Harvard and credited him with inspiring his later career in medical research.
Only one other Harvard student dropped by their Mt. Auburn Street quarters with any regularity. William Clouser Boyd had met Robert in chemistry class one day and took an instant liking to him. “We had lots of interests in common aside from science,” he recalled. They both tried to write poetry, sometimes in French, and short stories imitative of Chekhov. Robert always called him “Clowser,” purposely misspelling his middle name. “Clowser” often joined Robert and Fred Bernheim on occasional weekend expeditions to Cape Ann, an hour’s drive northeast of Boston. Robert didn’t yet know how to drive, so the boys would go in Bernheim’s Willys Overland and spend the night at an inn in Folly Cove outside of Gloucester where the food was particularly good. Boyd would finish Harvard in three years, and, like Robert, he worked hard to do it. But while Robert obviously spent many long hours in his room studying, Boyd remembers that “he was pretty careful not to let you catch him at it.” He thought Robert could run circles around him intellectually. “He had a very quick mind. For instance, when someone would propose a problem, he would give two or three wrong answers, followed by the right one, before I could think of a single answer.”
The one thing Boyd and Oppenheimer did not have in common was music. “I was very fond of music,” Boyd recalled, “but once a year he would go to an opera, with me and Bernheim usually, and he’d leave after the first act. He just couldn’t take any more.” Herbert Smith had also noticed this peculiarity, and once said to Robert, “You’re the only physicist I’ve ever known who wasn’t also musical.”
INITIALLY, ROBERT WAS NOT SURE which academic path he should choose. He took a variety of unrelated courses, including philosophy, French literature, English, introductory calculus, history and three chemistry courses (qualitative analysis, gas analysis and organic chemistry). He briefly considered architecture, but because he had loved Greek in high school he also toyed with the thought of becoming a classicist or even a poet or painter. “The notion that I was traveling down a clear track,” he recalled, “would be wrong.” But within months he settled on his first passion, chemistry, as a major. Determined to graduate in three years, he took the maximum number of allowed courses, six. But each semester he also managed to audit two or three others. With virtually no social life, he studied long hours—though he made an effort to hide the fact because somehow it was important to him that his brilliance appear effortless. He read all three thousand pages of Gibbon’s classic history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He also read widely in
Bernheim thought Robert was something of a hypochondriac. “He went to bed with an electric pad every night, and one day it started to smoke.” Robert woke up and ran to the bathroom with the burning pad. He then went back to sleep, unaware that the pad was still burning. Bernheim recalled having to put the thing out before it burned the house down. Living with Robert was always “a little bit of a strain,” Bernheim noted, “because you had to more or less adjust to his standards or moods—he was really the dominant one.” Difficult or not, Bernheim roomed with Robert for their two remaining years at Harvard and credited him with inspiring his later career in medical research.
Only one other Harvard student dropped by their Mt. Auburn Street quarters with any regularity. William Clouser Boyd had met Robert in chemistry class one day and took an instant liking to him. “We had lots of interests in common aside from science,” he recalled. They both tried to write poetry, sometimes in French, and short stories imitative of Chekhov. Robert always called him “Clowser,” purposely misspelling his middle name. “Clowser” often joined Robert and Fred Bernheim on occasional weekend expeditions to Cape Ann, an hour’s drive northeast of Boston. Robert didn’t yet know how to drive, so the boys would go in Bernheim’s Willys Overland and spend the night at an inn in Folly Cove outside of Gloucester where the food was particularly good. Boyd would finish Harvard in three years, and, like Robert, he worked hard to do it. But while Robert obviously spent many long hours in his room studying, Boyd remembers that “he was pretty careful not to let you catch him at it.” He thought Robert could run circles around him intellectually. “He had a very quick mind. For instance, when someone would propose a problem, he would give two or three wrong answers, followed by the right one, before I could think of a single answer.”
The one thing Boyd and Oppenheimer did not have in common was music. “I was very fond of music,” Boyd recalled, “but once a year he would go to an opera, with me and Bernheim usually, and he’d leave after the first act. He just couldn’t take any more.” Herbert Smith had also noticed this peculiarity, and once said to Robert, “You’re the only physicist I’ve ever known who wasn’t also musical.”
INITIALLY, ROBERT WAS NOT SURE which academic path he should choose. He took a variety of unrelated courses, including philosophy, French literature, English, introductory calculus, history and three chemistry courses (qualitative analysis, gas analysis and organic chemistry). He briefly considered architecture, but because he had loved Greek in high school he also toyed with the thought of becoming a classicist or even a poet or painter. “The notion that I was traveling down a clear track,” he recalled, “would be wrong.” But within months he settled on his first passion, chemistry, as a major. Determined to graduate in three years, he took the maximum number of allowed courses, six. But each semester he also managed to audit two or three others. With virtually no social life, he studied long hours—though he made an effort to hide the fact because somehow it was important to him that his brilliance appear effortless. He read all three thousand pages of Gibbon’s classic history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He also read widely in
Similar Books
