Interview with Frank Oppenheimer - Caltech Oral Histories

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Oppenheimer–33GOODSTEIN: Well, in fact it doesn’t seem to have held you back. You seemed to have taken yourPh.D. in about the right amount of time.OPPENHEIMER: Right. But I think I could have done better work if I’d spent more time at it. Atthe Cavendish Lab, they closed the place down at night unless there was some kind of apparatusor experiment that had to be looked after. And Rutherford—at least I never heard him say it, butthe law was that if you haven’t done enough in the day to think about it at night it is not worthcoming back at night.GOODSTEIN: Well, what do you think? Now, there you have a study in contrasts, because inKellogg it was the opposite.OPPENHEIMER: Yes, it was just the opposite. In most places, it was just the opposite. Well, Ithink Rutherford’s idea came from doing somewhat more straightforward experiments withradioactivity. I thought Rutherford was never really interested in theory. But when you read hisworks, he really was always trying to think, “What does this mean?”GOODSTEIN: So he was more subtle than he appeared.OPPENHEIMER: That’s right.GOODSTEIN: What about Lauritsen? Was he also interested in theory?OPPENHEIMER: Not so much, I don’t think. I think he wanted to think about what washappening, but the theory had gotten—well, there was lousy theory in those days. And I think heknew it. I wasn’t much help.GOODSTEIN: What did they do in Italy? Did they run late at night there?OPPENHEIMER: No, not especially. When we were fairly late, maybe six or seven o’clock, agroup of us would walk to some place where everybody had to go in different directions, andhttp://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Oppenheimer_F
Oppenheimer–34they’d stop and sing for a while.GOODSTEIN: Did you participate?OPPENHEIMER: No. [Laughter]GOODSTEIN: Were they traditional songs or were they political songs?OPPENHEIMER: They were traditional song, I think.http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Oppenheimer_F
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Page 25 and 26: Oppenheimer-22OPPENHEIMER: Oh, yes.
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Interview with Frank Oppenheimer - Caltech Oral Histories

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