Before he built the world’s first nuclear weapon, J. Robert Oppenheimer was a clumsy, depressed student at Cambridge, rumored to have laced an apple with chemicals and left it on his tutor’s desk. This episode follows how a privileged New York prodigy found his footing in theoretical physics at Göttingen and became one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century.

We cover his Berkeley years, the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, and early predictions of black holes and neutron stars, then General Leslie Groves’s surprising choice to put him in charge of Los Alamos. From the Trinity test to his opposition to the hydrogen bomb, the 1954 security hearing, the Chevalier incident, Edward Teller’s testimony, and the 2022 decision vacating his clearance revocation.

• Why moving from experimental to theoretical physics transformed his career
• How the Born-Oppenheimer approximation simplified the math of molecules
• Why Groves chose a manager who could synthesize chemistry, metallurgy, and physics
• The Chevalier incident and how a fabricated story doomed him in 1954
• The gap between scientific discovery and control over how power is used