Interview with Frank Oppenheimer - Caltech Oral Histories

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Oppenheimer–11GOODSTEIN: Did you go to any of those discussion groups?OPPENHEIMER: No.GOODSTEIN: Did he?OPPENHEIMER: No, I don’t think so.GOODSTEIN: Did they ever discuss with you the fact that they had to belong to the party to risein the academic world?OPPENHEIMER: No, I think they didn’t mind. They didn’t see any terrible implications from that.But then the next year, of course, there was Abyssinia.GOODSTEIN: Did you detect, then, within the year that you were there, a change in people’sattitude toward Mussolini?OPPENHEIMER: No, because it didn’t happen until after that.GOODSTEIN: Because it happened in ’36. Did you feel threatened by fascism at all?OPPENHEIMER: No. Although I had been close to this, I wasn’t terribly knowledgeable aboutwhat was happening.GOODSTEIN: So it didn’t feel like a menace.OPPENHEIMER: It did when I was in Germany, very much, where I had been the year before. Ihad seen people marching down the streets, and really sort of lots of this behavior in the bars,and the whole society seemed corrupt. And then I had some relatives there who could tell mesome of the terrible things. But in Italy, the soldiers didn’t seem especially aggressive. I neversaw any of them marching. The policemen weren’t any different, and were probably gentler, thanhttp://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Oppenheimer_F
Oppenheimer–12New York policemen. The towns seemed very relaxed to me.GOODSTEIN: Did you go to Rome while you were there?OPPENHEIMER: No, I loved Tuscany so much, I walked all around it and went to Pisa andclimbed in the mountains. One time I was climbing and I went to a house up in the hills towardPisa. And they had a room which was sort of sacrosanct, but they opened the door and I lookedin, and it was full of load ropes and climbing gear, and they told me it belonged to the professorat the university; it was Occhialini’s gear. But the awe with which the rural population held theacademic world really struck me.GOODSTEIN: Did you find other instances of that?OPPENHEIMER: Yes.GOODSTEIN: I think that’s still true today. The Italian professor is still somewhat to be respected.Did you ever see any of the Rome physicists in Florence?OPPENHEIMER: Not then, no. So I never met Fermi until many years later. Occhialini and I got tobe very good friends. When I left, he gave me a farewell party in a cave. We walked way back inand came to a huge room and had the party. But Bernardini said something to me at that time thatwas really surprising. He was twenty-nine and I was twenty-three. And he said, “You know,Frank, I thought I’d reached the age beyond which it was possible to make friends. Now I’velearned differently.” It was really scary to think you might—at twenty-nine—have reached thatend.GOODSTEIN: Was there any choice of where you might have gone after that?OPPENHEIMER: Yes, I had a terrible time deciding whether to leave there or not, whether to go toCaltech. I don’t know, I think I must have written them about my wanting to come there. Andmy brother probably did something. But I don’t remember any elaborate applications to go tohttp://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Oppenheimer_F
Page 1 and 2: FRANK OPPENHEIMER(1912-1985)INTERVI
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Page 5 and 6: Oppenheimer-2make a beta-ray spectr
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Interview with Frank Oppenheimer - Caltech Oral Histories

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