Julius Robert Oppenheimer is once more in the news, thanks to the highly publicized film “Oppenheimer.” As a physics graduate student at Princeton University in the early 1960s, I had occasional interactions with Oppenheimer, who was then the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies. He was not very friendly to students at this stage of his career. But having suffered more than his share from “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” he remained a sympathetic figure to most students.
Although Oppenheimer was an outstanding theoretical physicist, it is not easy to be outstanding when your peers are the likes
