Oppy's Retreat

When the war ended, J. Robert Oppenheimer was worn out. He said that he wished he could go some place and run a lunchroom. For 2 1/2 years he had bossed the 4,500 scientists and technicians of the Los Alamos atom-bomb labs. After that, he thought, short-order cooking would seem like a restful vacation.

Instead, Oppy went back to his twin professorships in theoretical physics at the University of California and Cal Tech. On the side, he helped draft the Lilien-thal-Acheson report, since January has headed the committee of distinguished scientists advising the Atomic Energy Commission.

Last week, at 42, Oppy thought he had found the retreat he was looking for. He resigned his California professorships to become director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J. Said he: "At a time when universities are so overcrowded and overwhelmed, I feel an institute that can provide a little more privacy and a little more leisure may be extremely important to our intellectual life."

The Institute, which has no connection with Princeton University but is always confused with it, was founded 17 years ago with a $5,000,000 gift by the department store Bambergers. A school for post-postgraduates, it demands a Ph.D. as a ticket of admission, charges no tuition, grants no degrees.

Every year, from all over the world, some 50 to 60 "members" come to the Institute. Most of their work there is individual research--in mathematics and physics, economics and history, or the humanities. Institute members have tea and talk together every day in Fuld Hall's "common room." Albert Einstein is the best-known faculty member (though emeritus), and the other 17 are also eminent in their fields.

Physicist Oppenheimer, who reads eight languages including Sanskrit, will be the Institute for Advanced Study's third director (his predecessors: Abraham Flexner and Frank Aydelotte). Oppy favors porkpie hats and good horses. During the war he and his wife traveled by horseback from their Pecos Valley ranch to Los Alamos, to the considerable mortification of a tenderfoot FBI agent who had to ride along. Oppy's pet peeve: anybody who underestimates the Bomb ("Its limitations? The limitations lie in the fact that you don't want to be on the receiving end").

Elected to the New York Mineralogical Club when he was eleven, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in three years, used to contribute poetry to the little magazines, has been a professor at California since he was 25. He expects to continue his own theoretical physics at the Institute, "on paper and at the blackboard," hopes to avoid "those horrifying problems that university presidents have to worry about."

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