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Oppie's apprentices also acquired something of his intolerance for shoddy and fuzzy thinking, his intuitive grasp of difficulties, his mathematical precision of speech. Eventually, Oppenheimer products made their debuts on lecture platforms and in seminars all over the U.S.: Harvard's Schwinger, California's Serber, CalTech's Christy, Stanford's Schiff, Columbia's Lamb, Iowa State's Carlson, Illinois' Nordsieck, Washington's Uehling. (Brother Frank, the original Oppie apprentice, is now a physicist at the University of Minnesota.) Says Nobel Prizewinner Robert Millikan: "Oppenheimer developed at Berkeley an outstanding school of theoretical physics, and its products are leaders of modern physics today."
A Tragic Sense. At Berkeley, Oppenheimer also apprenticed himself to the late Professor Arthur Ryder, greatest Sanskrit student of his day. In the long winter evenings, he and a handful of other students visited Ryder's house to share his Sanskrit learning and his Stoic faith.
Ryder taught Oppenheimer to read the Hindu scriptures in Sanskrit, his eighth language. Oppie still reads them, for his "private delight" and sometimes for the public edification of friends (the Bhagavad-Gita, its worn pink cover patched with Scotch tape, occupies a place of honor in his Princeton study). He is particularly fond of one Sanskrit couplet: "Scholarship is less than sense, therefore seek intelligence."
From Ryder, the eternal apprentice also got a new "feeling for the place of ethics." Says Oppenheimer: "Ryder felt and thought and talked as a Stoic ... a special subclass of the people who have a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation. Ryder knew that a man could commit irretrievable error, and that in the face of this fact, all others were secondary." Tartly intolerant of humbug, laziness, stupidity and deceit, Ryder thought that "Any man who does a hard thing well is automatically respectable and worthy of respect."
A Mean Martini. Other evenings Oppie would corral a handful of his favorite students, take them in his big, fast car for a leisurely feast at such San Francisco restaurants as Amelio's and Jack's. Good
conversation was cheap, but dinner was always expensive; it was Oppie who picked up the checks.
A more fluent conversationalist than in the old, shy days, the handsome and unattached Oppie was much sought after as a guest at cocktail and dinner parties. He gave bachelor dinners, serving his own expertly cooked hot Mexican dishes, and mixed a mean Martini with laboratory precision.
After a late party, he would frequently sit up most of the night working on some involved problem ("How much sleep do I need? This is like what Mrs. Lenin said about the meat: 'When we are hungry, we cook it five minutes; when we are not hungry, two hours'"). Once, on a date with a coed in the Berkeley hills, he felt the urge to solve a problem in physics, got out of the car to pace up & down, wandered off into the night. On another occasion, emboldened by his own Martinis, Oppenheimer decided to telephone a girl he "knew," found that he could not remember her name; all he recalled was that her address was a power of seven.