The Mind-Wandering of Oppenheimer

Why we should be promiscuous in our love of ideas.

One of the ironies of Robert Oppenheimer’s life is that his legacy rests on a single scientific achievement while his route to that achievement – directed and redirected by his eclectic curiosity along the way – was anything but narrow. “The notion,” he once recalled, “that I was travelling down a clear track would be wrong.”

We know Oppenheimer now as the father of the atom bomb, a titan of physics – but physics was the last thing he mastered in his education. He was so far behind in his knowledge of the field that when he enrolled at Harvard University he’d never even taken an elementary physics course. His biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, in American Prometheus, describe his approach to learning physics as “haphazard”, with Oppenheimer focusing on advanced “interesting” problems and “bypassing the dreary basics”.

In fact, the young Oppenheimer didn’t decide to pursue physics until the end of his freshman year. Up to that point, his interests indicated that he might become …