Oppenheimer Review

In 1926, 22-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer grapples with homesickness and anxiety while studying under Patrick Blackett at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Oppenheimer finds Blackett demanding and leaves him a poisoned apple, which visiting scientist Niels Bohr almost eats accidentally. Oppenheimer completes his PhD in physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he meets Werner Heisenberg. He returns to the United States, hoping to expand quantum physics research there, and begins teaching at the University of California, Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology. During this time, he encounters Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party USA with whom he has an intermittent romantic relationship until her eventual suicide; and later his future wife Katherine Puening, a biologist and ex-Communist.