Q: Even some of his contemporaries said he was a dilettante. How good he was in terms of raw skill?
A: He had the skill and the brilliance. But he didn’t have the focus. He was not absolutely devoted to physics the way one of the great physicists would be. It was just one of his many passions. At the time he was doing physics, he read a lot of literature and languages. Also, in the U.S., the empirical way of approaching physics was predominant [whereas European theorists were pursuing new concepts]. So the theorists’ job was to help experimentalists understand their data. As the physics and the experiments were shifting, his interest shifted, too.
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