“To many of my friends,” he testified in 1954, “my indifference to contemporary affairs seemed bizarre, and they often chided me for being too much of a highbrow. I was interested in man and his experience; I was deeply interested in my science; but I had no understanding of the relations of man to his society.” Years later, Robert Serber observed that this self-portrait of Oppenheimer as “an unworldly, withdrawn un-esthetic person who didn’t know what was going on—all [this was] exactly the opposite of what he was really like.”
