[nwj]

It's really crazy how all these people overlap at Gottingen in the 1920s.

Take Oppenheimer, for instance. He transfers to Göttingen from Cambridge in 1926 (after a relatively miserable time at the Cavendish labs studying under J.J. Thompson). He earns his PhD at Göttingen quickly. By September 1927, he's back in the USA on a teaching fellowship with Caltech.

So, Oppenheimer isn't at Göttingen for very long - not even 2 years! But in that brief time, he meet Max Born, James Franck, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Eugene Wigner who are also all there.

Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi had moved to other institutions by 1926, and Edward Teller doesn't get there until 1930 - but it's plausible that the Göttingen connection (and their relationship to Max Born) are how Oppenheimer meets them.