American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Robert routinely interrupted whoever was speaking, not excluding Born, and, stepping to the blackboard with chalk in hand, would declare in his American-accented German, “This can be done much better in the following manner. . . .” Though other students complained about these interruptions, Robert was oblivious to his professor’s polite, halfhearted attempts to change his behavior. One day, however, Maria Göppert—a future Nobelist—presented Born with a petition written on thick parchment and signed by her and most of the other members of the seminar: Unless the “child prodigy” was reined in, his fellow students would boycott the class. Still unwilling to confront Oppenheimer, Born decided to leave the document on his desk in a place where Robert could not help but see it when he next came to discuss his thesis. “To make this more certain,” Born later wrote, “I arranged to be called out of the room for a few minutes. This plot worked. When I returned I found him rather pale and not so voluble as usual.” Thereafter his interruptions ceased altogether.