Interview with Frank Oppenheimer - Caltech Oral Histories

Oppenheimer–28OPPENHEIMER: He commanded respect, very much. And he loved the subject and the beauty ofit, and the logical coherence of it.GOODSTEIN: Did you have him for statistical mechanics or cosmology or relativity?OPPENHEIMER: Relativity, special and general relativity. I don’t know whether I had anystatistical mechanics.GOODSTEIN: That might have been Epstein. So you learned your relativity from Tolman.OPPENHEIMER: Both special and general, which was wonderful. I don’t think I did terribly wellin the course.GOODSTEIN: Did you go to the course that your brother taught? Carl Anderson took it.OPPENHEIMER: I listened to many of his lectures, but I don’t think I took anything for credit. ButI think I listened fairly regularly to his lectures. But the course work at Caltech was nice becauseit came not as something you had to do before you could do any physics. I was really glad thatI’d been to the Cavendish.GOODSTEIN: You had an advantage there.OPPENHEIMER: Yes, that’s right.GOODSTEIN: You’d really been in two other laboratories before you came. Now, at theCavendish, had you followed any courses?OPPENHEIMER: No, I took one course in electrical theory, and one other one—I can’t rememberwhat it was. And then I listened to a lot of lectures of a physiologist there.http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Oppenheimer_F