> A good counterexample is the Manhattan Program. Sure, Oppenheimer was a great physicist. But was he as good as, e.g. Teller, Fermi, Feynman, Szilard, Von Neum

> A good counterexample is the Manhattan Program. Sure, Oppenheimer was a great physicist. But was he as good as, e.g. Teller, Fermi, Feynman, Szilard, Von Neumann, etc? No, he was not. All I know about this is what I read in Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb but....the impression I got from the book was that Oppenheimer was probably as good as most of those but that he never achieved quite the same level of academic fame due to a combination of continually shifting interests (i.e. never staying on thing long enough to go deep enough to become "the guy" for that thing) and losing a huge chunk of his most productive years focusing on being a manager. Luis Alvarez said of Oppenheimer "It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked, and he came to the right conclusions" Alvarez also "believes Oppenheimer would have won a Nobel Prize for his astrophysical work if he had lived long enough to see his predictions concerning exotic stellar objects—neutron stars, black holes—confirmed, as they have been, by discovery." Segre called him "the fastest thinker I’ve ever met,” with “an iron memory . . . brilliance and solid merits" Bethe compared Teller and Oppenheimer "fundamentally . . . very similar. Teller had an extremely quick understanding of things, so did Oppenheimer. . . . They were also somewhat alike in that their actual production, their scientific publications, did not measure up in any way to their capacity. I think Teller’s mental capacity is very high, and so was Oppenheimer’s but, on the other hand, their papers, while they included some very good ones, never reached really the top standards. Neither of them ever came up to the Nobel Prize level. I think you just cannot get to that level unless you are somewhat introverted" I also have a vague understanding of an anecdote from the book of someone saying that whenever anyone talked about their work on the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer always showed an astonishing depth of understanding but I can't find a reference to it.