One day Robert caught himself staring at an empty blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand, muttering over and over, “The point is, the point is . . . the point is.” His Harvard friend Jeffries Wyman, who was also at Cambridge that year, detected signs of distress. Walking into his room one day, Wyman found Robert lying on the floor, groaning and rolling from side to side. In another account of this incident, Wyman reported Oppenheimer as telling him “that he felt so miserable in Cambridge, so unhappy, that he used sometimes to get down on the floor and roll from side to side—he told me
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