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“It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
Bohr was different in another regard as well; he was easily the most talented of all Rutherford’s many students—and Rutherford trained no fewer than eleven Nobel Prize winners during his life, an unsurpassed record.
Von Neumann found a friend in Wigner. They walked and talked mathematics. Wigner’s mathematical talent was exceptional, but he felt less than first-rate beside the prodigious banker’s son. Von Neumann’s brilliance impressed colleagues throughout his life. Teller recalls a truncated syllogism someone proposed to the effect that (a) Johnny can prove anything and (b) anything Johnny proves is correct.402 At Princeton, where in 1933 von Neumann at twenty-nine became the youngest member of the newly established Institute for Advanced Study, the saying gained currency that the Hungarian
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His elegant physics, so far as an outsider can tell—his scientific papers are nearly impenetrable to the nonmathematician and deliberately so—is a physics of bank shots. It works the sides and the corners and uses the full court but prefers not to drive relentlessly for the goal.
Out of curiosity in 1940, while visiting Berkeley to deliver a lecture, Enrico Fermi attended a seminar one of Oppenheimer’s protégés led in the master’s style. “Emilio,” Fermi joked afterward with Segrè, “I am getting rusty and old. I cannot follow the highbrow theory developed by Oppenheimer’s pupils anymore. I went to their seminar and was depressed by my inability to understand them. Only the last sentence cheered me up; it was: ‘and this is Fermi’s theory of beta decay.’ ”
No essence was ever expressed more expensively from the substance of the world with the possible exception of the human soul. *
