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In those days he wrote poems and stories ("an attempt to make peace with the world"), wore his hair long, liked to debate hours with highbrow friends, and took solitary walks. Says Oppenheimer, who discusses his own life as dispassionately as he does Archimedes' Law: "My feeling about myself was always one of extreme discontent. I had very little sensitiveness to human beings, very little humility before the realities of this world." He was, in fact, an intellectual snob.
He graduated summa cum laude in three years. On his 21st birthday Julius gave him a sizable sum of money. But not before Robert had told his father that "I might turn out a little different from what he wanted. He wasn't concerned."
Robert sailed for England and another apprenticeship, this time under Lord Rutherford and Sir J. J. Thomson at Cambridge University. Before he left, Bridgman told him: "You cannot be satisfied with just measuring up with other people. You can consider yourself a failure unless you stand out in front."
Science & Soul-Wrestle. At Cambridge, he was "a complete failure in the lab" but a success at theory: "Quantum mechanics had just begun to come into existence. It was a very exciting time in physics. Anyone could just get in there and have fun." At Cambridge, Oppenheimer met some of the leaders in the fellowship of physics—such men as Max Born, Paul Dirac, and Niels Bohr ("It would be hard to exaggerate how much I venerate Bohr").
But without the friendships he had painfully made at Harvard, Oppenheimer was soon deep in depression and doubt. He convinced himself that he could no longer postpone "the problem of growing up." He read Dostoevsky, Proust and Aquinas and explored the defects in his own character. At Christmas time, walking by the shore near Cancale in Brittany, "I was on the point of bumping myself off. This was chronic." He came out of this period of self-examination, he now feels, "much kinder and more tolerant—able to form satisfactory, sensible attachments."
Max Born invited him to Göttingen, where he earned his Ph.D. (at 23) three weeks after enrolling. Oppenheimer's Ph.D. thesis was a brilliant paper on quantum mechanics: Zur Quantentheorie kontinuierlicher Spektren. After the oral exam, a colleague asked Physicist James Franck (now at the University of Chicago) how it had gone with Oppenheimer. Replied
Franck: "I got out of there just in time. He was beginning to ask me questions."
Go West, Young Man. Oppenheimer came back from Europe (after further study at Leiden and Zurich) with a racking cough. The doctors feared T.B., and advised the young man to go west. In New Mexico, near the spot where he had vacationed with Herbert Smith, Oppenheimer leased a ranch 35 miles from Santa Fe.