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Comment by rudiger | Hacker News Reader

I interpreted "extremely normal in all respects" as meaning he's someone you wouldn't mind working with. You see, a lot of theoretical physicists are brilliant but have very difficult personalities.

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Yes, that could easily have been what he meant, but then again, a university would be more likely to care about the "gay, communist, whatever" thing much more than how easy he was to work with. Therefore, I think that the former was more important for Oppenheimer to communicate. Any university would want an Einstein. Only a few, or maybe even none, would want a gay Einstein or a communist Einstein.

Communism is different from socialism, but an interesting aside: Einstein was an ideological socialist. He went so far as to publish an article called (iirc) "Why Socialism" in the Monthly Review.

It's not particularly enlightening or anything, just lending his name to the movement.

Apparently Einstein had an FBI file: http://www.fbi-most-wanted.com/albert-einstein.php

So did everyone particularly interesting at the time.

If you look at the letter as a whole, I think it is safe to say that he was alluding to the fact that Feynman had a great personality, unlike many renowned intellectuals.

To me, the quote from Wigner clears up the author's meaning. Wigner stated, "He is a second Dirac, only this time human." Dirac was brilliant, but he may have had a high functioning form of autism which left him socially crippled. He was painfully shy, he didn't have many friends, and social interactions with him were extremely awkward.

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