another genius and his baggage

A biography on Oppenheimer won one of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes. I hope to read it, but for now, I was reading a bit about him here:

Despite his evident success as a scholar, he was plagued with doubts. In a letter to a friend, Oppenheimer concluded a listing of his feverish academic pursuits with the abrupt phrase "and wish I were dead." As an adult he recalled that, during his adolescent and college years, nearly everything about him aroused "a very great sense of revulsion and wrong."

Thomson accepted Oppenheimer as a research student and gave him the task of preparing thin films of beryllium. Oppenheimer regarded the work as "a terrible bore" and pronounced himself "so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything."

Oppenheimer celebrated the end of the war and the success of the Manhattan Project, but the death toll and chilling descriptions of radiation sickness had a sobering effect. He informed government officials that most scientists in the project would not continue to pursue such work. "I feel we have blood on our hands," he told President Harry S. Truman. "Never mind. It'll all come out in the wash," Truman replied.

The only genius that I can think of off-hand who was not disturbed was Richard Feynman…