“It was amazing,” recalled one Berkeley colleague, “that Oppenheimer and his group essentially got something on all these problems, about the same time as the competition.” The result might not be elegant or even particularly accurate in all the details—others would have to come along and clean up his work. But Oppenheimer invariably had the essence. “Oppie was extremely good at seeing the physics and doing the calculation on the back of the envelope and getting all the main factors. . . . As far as finishing and doing an elegant job like Dirac would do, that wasn’t Oppie’s style.” He worked
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