He could be engaging and considerate one moment and in the next rudely cut someone off. At the dinner table, he was polite and formal to an extreme. But he seemed incapable of tolerating banalities. “The trouble is that Oppie is so quick on the trigger intellectually,” complained one of his fellow students, Edward U. Condon, “that he puts the other guy at a disadvantage. And, dammit, he is always right, or at least right enough.”
