Robert Oppenheimer grew …show more content…
Instead, his father hired him a tutor and sent him to the West to New Mexico. It wasn’t until the following fall of 1922 that Robert was able to return and enroll at Harvard. He became part of an intense program where he took several math and science classes, as well as Eastern religions, philosophy, English and French literature. Oppenheimer actually preferred chemistry among all the science classes he took because it "starts right at the heart of things." He was also under the privilege of working with Percy Bridgeman, an experimental physicist. Furthermore, Oppenheimer was able to graduate summa cum laude in 1925. However, despite his achievements, Oppenheimer remained with a lot of doubt, he confessed feeling "a very great sense of revulsion and wrong." Therefore in his last semester at Harvard, he decided to leave to England and apply to study with Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Rutherford, however, turned him down because he believed Oppenheimer’s credentials were inadequate. Afterwards, Oppenheimer applied to Joseph John Thomson at the Cavendish to conduct research but felt he wasn’t learning much. This conflict then alluded him to focus on theoretical physics. In 1926, Robert Oppenheimer attended the University of Göttingen and studied under Max Born. He obtained his Ph.D. at age 22 on March