When TIME'S Education editor, Allan B. Ecker, and Researcher Ruth Brine faced atomic-physicist Robert Oppenheimer for the first time, they were understandably apprehensive. In preparation for the Oppenheimer cover story (TIME, Nov. 8) they had looked over enough morgue material on him to know that his agile mind would be impatient with journalism's question & answer methods. Sure enough, at the first interview's end he remarked: "You know, if you were physicists, I'd fire you. I'm the murderer and you are lousy detectives."

Knowing that the "murderer" often enjoys such a secure feeling during the preliminary grilling--and that the ways of journalism are not the ways of science--Ecker and Brine took this friendly admonition in stride and proceeded to exploit the clues that Oppenheimer had given them about the forces that had shaped his life. Accepting his theory that "education is apprenticeship," they set TIME'S world-wide network of correspondents to work seeking out the men he had apprenticed himself to-- from San Francisco to Copenhagen--and cross-checking Oppenheimer's impressions with them.

In Minneapolis, TIME "stringer" Jay Edgerton buttonholed Frank Oppenheimer, University of Minnesota physicist, whose near-hero worship for his older brother blossomed after hours of conversation. It was a rewarding interview, out of which came a warm picture of the Oppenheimer family life and many a revealing anecdote about Robert.

In Chicago, Correspondent Serrell Hillman got in touch with schoolmaster Herbert Winslow Smith, who had taught Robert at the Ethical Culture School in Manhattan. At 15, he said, it was immediately obvious that this thin, gangling boy was a genius and, in fact, "his mind is so tremendous that it makes you really uneasy."

Correspondents Martin O'Neill and Jim Murray talked to scores of Oppenheimer's former associates and students on the Pacific Coast.

In Washington, Correspondent Louis Banks turned out 24 pages of research gathered from David Lilienthal and members of his Atomic Energy Commission. Banks also had a session with Oppenheimer, from which he came away reeling to insert the following sentence in his account: "Oppenheimer was up before 8 o'clock on Sunday for an 8:30 breakfast date with Dr. Louis Banks, bewildered, lowbrowed, short-haired representative of TIME."

In Boston, Correspondent Jeff Wylie talked to Physicist Percy Williams Bridgman and other Harvard professors who had taught Oppenheimer there. One thing Wylie noticed was that the 1926 class album has nothing more to say about Oppenheimer at Harvard than "in college, three years as undergraduate."

Niels Bohr, one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, whom Oppenheimer affectionately refers to as "my father," was interviewed in his native Denmark by TIME "stringer," Kai Schou. A Nobel prize winner and one of the leaders in the fellowship of physics whom Oppenheimer first met at Cambridge University, Bohr had escaped from Nazi-occupied Denmark to collaborate with Oppenheimer and the other scientists in the research and development of the atomic bomb.

While this voluminous dossier was being assembled, Ecker and Mrs. Brine spent several days at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, of which Oppenheimer is the head. They came away with enough information to fill a 57-Page report. At lunch in the Institute cafeteria a staff member told them that although the staff, the economists, the humanists, the mathematicians, etc. usually ate at their respective tables, Oppenheimer was at home with all of them. As for herself she added: "There's just no use trying to eat lunch with a mathematician. They won't leave it (mathematics) for a minute."

The Oppenheimer cover story turned out to be one of the most complicated stories TIME has yet had to do, and TIME extends its thanks to everyone who contributed his time and knowledge to it. In its way, it serves to illustrate the fact that education can be one of the world's most exciting subjects.

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