J. Robert Oppenheimer teemed with contradictions. He was shy and bold, naive and brilliant, a loyal husband who cheated, a gentle man whose bomb could kill millions.

That he loved quantum physics may be no accident. The field holds that some basic phenomena of the material world have opposing features that cannot be observed simultaneously, such as wave and particle behaviour. Oppenheimer had a deep affection for these irreconcilable pairs, calling them “the nature of the surprise, of the miracle, of something that you could not figure out”.