The Story of How J. Robert Oppenheimer Poisoned His Tutor's Apple

As Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer dazzles with its first-week reviews, the movie did an excellent job of illustrating the theoretical physicist's complicated entanglements, state service, and time in Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom and Germany.

In Cambridge in the United Kingdom, J. Robert Oppenheimer was far from his New York City home. He was admittedly depressed, as he wrote to a friend in 1925, “I am having a pretty bad time. The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything…. The lectures are vile.”

This was the first time he had been learning about quantum physics. Suffice it to say, it wasn't going smoothly. In the film, we can see the young Oppenheimer struggling with lab work. He's much more of a theories guy, he says. What made matters worse was the fact that his tutor and mentor, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Blackett, was pretty hard on him. Oppenheimer didn't take the jabs lightly.

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So much so that he decided that he was to poison the professor's apple. As he was clearing shop and fixing his supplies, the physicist was said to have injected cyanide (which we see in the film) into the apple on Blackett's table. The young Oppenheimer was so frustrated that he couldn't attend the lecture given by visiting scholar Niels Bohr at the time because of lab work. How petty. It's something straight out of fairytales.

“Robert did something so stupid that it seemed calculated to prove that his emotional distress was overwhelming him,” wrote Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin in American Prometheus, the book about the man himself. It was allegedly an act of jealousy in many ways.

When Cambridge officials got wind of the attempted murder, they called Oppenheimer into their offices. Of course, talks of suspension and, even worse, expulsion ensued. His parents, who were incredibly influential in New York (his dad was a wealthy textile importer), would intervene. The young physicist would stay on the program. He'd be off to Germany and then California soon enough.

Interestingly, the movie dramatized this whole thing a little bit. In Nolan's film, Bohr, who Oppenheimer highly admired, was almost going to eat the poisoned apple. There is absolutely no truth to this but it was nevertheless a fun watch.