I later came to understand that this heckling was a sign of respect from these people, that the ability to handle it was a test of a person's worth, and that polite silence from them was an extremely bad sign, amounting to Pauli's famous criticism that the speaker was "not even wrong."
The most interesting thing I learned during this time was how small a nuclear warhead was.
Real understanding of a thing comes from taking it apart oneself, not reading about it in a book or hearing about it in a classroom.