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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

> childhoods

20 year olds shouldn't be considered culpable for attempted murder now? Madness.

This is an important biographical detail not only because attempted murder is always relevant, but also because it is relevant to his involvement in an idea to poison Germany's food supply with radioactive strontium.

Edit for correction: it happened in 1926, he was 22 years old.

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There's no proof that there was an attempted murder, just hearsay that Oppenheimer said he put noxious chemicals in his tutor's apple.

He confessed to his friends who turned him in. Technically that's hearsay but it's pretty damn convincing.

Yes. The person whom the alleged noxious apple was left for was his tutor. Children have tutors. Adults far more rarely.

He was *22 years old, at Cambridge. He should have been expelled for it (not to mention criminally charged) but his father was wealthy so normal rules didn't apply.

You can't rewrite history just because you don't know what a word means. A tutor is a teacher at a university.

You're absolutely right. I was wrong here.

The real point I should've addressed is not this tangential one but that the fact of the omission doesn't reduce the value of Rhode's telling of story of the atomic bomb at all. This HN post's existence is due to the book covering Oppenheimer which is currently a hot topic but the book is so much more than that.

In Oxbridge tutors are usually either PhD students or post-docs. You're an undergrad if you have a strong opinion about yours, since for them the ratio of tutor per student is quite low (usually 1:3).

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