Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling was an assistant professor of theoretical chemistry at Caltech and a friend of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The surviving episodes place him in Oppenheimer’s academic and social world, where his advice about lecturing and his assessment of Thomas Addis reveal two distinct facets of his presence: a colleague willing to comment on teaching, and a scientist who admired an unconventional physician-scientist.

Advice on Oppenheimer’s Lectures

In 1928, Oppenheimer’s early lectures were difficult for many students to follow. He moved rapidly through quantum mechanics and, when asked to slow down, complained that he was going so slowly he was getting nowhere. Pauling, then an assistant professor of theoretical chemistry at Caltech, offered him deliberately unhelpful advice: to decide on a lecture topic, find an agreeable subject of contemplation unrelated to it, and interrupt that contemplation occasionally to say a few words. Oppenheimer later recalled the exchange as evidence of how poor his lecturing must have been.

The anecdote places Pauling among the colleagues who witnessed Oppenheimer’s awkward beginnings as a teacher. Oppenheimer’s lectures could sound more like a liturgy than a physics lesson: he spoke softly, sometimes stammered, and often advanced material at a pace that left students behind. Pauling’s joke turns that difficulty into a comic image of a lecture almost disconnected from its subject, while Oppenheimer’s later recollection supplies the self-deprecating judgment.

A Place in the California Circle

Pauling also belonged to the circle that gathered around the Oppenheimers and their friends in California. In the evenings, Richard Tolman hosted informal dinners attended by Pauling alongside Frank Oppenheimer, Charles Lauritsen, Robert and Charlotte Serber, and Edwin and Ruth Uehling. The dinners formed part of the social life surrounding Oppenheimer’s work between Berkeley and Caltech, bringing scientific colleagues together outside the classroom and laboratory.

His Regard for Thomas Addis

Pauling’s most explicit personal judgment in these episodes concerns Thomas Addis. Addis was a physician-scientist whose political activism and admiration for Soviet public-health programs made some Stanford colleagues regard his beliefs as an act of faith. Pauling instead called him “a great man, of a rare sort—a combination of scientist and clinician. . . .” The remark emphasizes the unusual union of scientific and clinical work that Pauling valued in Addis; the evidence records his admiration, without establishing a closer relationship between the two men.