(5 of 10)
Perro Caliente (Hot Dog), near the headwaters of the Pecos River, 9,500 feet up, was just a corral and a crude ranch house in the middle of nowhere. With a Stetson on his head and a bar of chocolate in his pocket, Oppenheimer liked to ride his horse Chico 40 rugged miles in a day, exploring the Sangre de Cristo Mountains up to the peaks. In the evenings, he would nibble on canned artichoke hearts, drink fine Kirschwasser, and read Baudelaire by the light of an oil lamp. He invented an abstruse variety of tiddlywinks, played on the geometric designs of a Mexican rug. Perro Caliente was "the kind of place one reads about in dreams."
It was Oppenheimer's good fortune that in 1928 a center of the world's ablest and most vigorous physicists was also in the west — at the California Institute of Technology, to which they had been pulled by such powerful magnets as Robert Millikan and Richard Tolman. Oppenheimer recognized that CalTech had a great deal to offer. At that time, by contrast, the University of California seemed to have "a hick school of science." Both wanted him ; he arranged to oscillate between the two'.
The newcomer's scientific standing and what admirers call his "genius look" won him an instant audience on both campuses. But the theater almost emptied after the first act. Professor Tolman wryly congratulated Oppenheimer on his first lecture: "Well, Robert, I didn't understand a damn word." He had lectured at a breakneck pace, in abstract prose punctuated by a dozen distracting mannerisms.
Answers Before Questions. Oppenheimer was tolerated only because his brilliance was as evident as his impatience. (Says CalTech's Professor Charles Lauritsen: "The man was unbelievable! He always gave you the right answer before you formulated the question.") Gradually and painfully, coached by colleagues and profiting by errors, Oppenheimer learned to put a checkrein on his galloping mind, to raise his voice, and to save, his sarcasms for showoffs and frauds.* In time, Cal and CalTech realized that Oppenheimer (like Whitehead and Bridgman) was "a man to whom you could be an apprentice." By 1939, "Oppie" (as his apprentices called him) had 25 full-time graduate students working under him. In the spring, when he headed south from Berkeley for the CalTech term, many of his students went with him. Driving down to Pasadena, they stopped for "roadside seminars."
What made him so good a teacher was that he was still a student—and always would be. In seminars he was forever reading aloud the latest letter from a top physicist friend in Denmark or England, reporting a hot tip just telephoned from Harvard, or commenting on a physical journal fresh from a Japanese press. Privy to this latest scientific,gossip ("the lifeblood of physics," Oppenheimer calls it), his students felt themselves in the vanguard of advancing knowledge.
They also found themselves imitating their master's mannerisms. They scribbled furiously on the nearest blackboard, talked in soft, deep tones, combed agitated fingers through tousled hair, grunted an excited "Ja, Ja" or a nervous "Hunh, Hunh." They learned to careen along with a perpetual, preoccupied stoop; some even took up chain-smoking and blue shirts.