Before Oppenheimer was a renowned physicist worthy of a Cillian Murphy-led film, he was a young scientist with a bad revenge plot.
, he’s in a pretty bad way. Enrolled at Cambridge in the UK, far from his family in New York City and his beloved New Mexico, he’s learning for the first time about quantum physics but also enmeshed in a deep depression. As he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1925, “I am having a pretty bad time. The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything…. The lectures are vile.
whom Oppenheimer idolized and really did see deliver a lecture at Harvard . Bohr’s near-miss with the poisoned apple is made up for the film, but it helps emphasize Oppenheimer’s admiration—which becomes important later, when Bohr arrives at Los Alamos—as well as how he moved past his youthful dissatisfaction. Soon after this incident, he’s off to study in Germany and then at Berkeley, ready to change the world—and with the whole poisoned-apple thing safely in the past.
A poisoned apple is, of course, a central element of fairy tales, used by the wicked queen to put Snow White to sleep. But it also played a tragic role in the life of another real scientist, Alan Turing. As Oppenheimer was developing the atomic bomb, Turing was helping decode German transmissions in Britain. Prosecuted for his homosexuality, Turing died in 1952 of cyanide poisoning, with a half-eaten apple found beside his body.
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