Reference
- Oppenheimer, J. Robert (1904-1967)An iconic 20th-century scientific intellectual, theoretical physicist J. (Julius) Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in the remote New Mexico desert where the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were designed and assembled in World War II. Biographical studies have placed his life at the crucial point of intersection in modern scientific and American history between managerialist science, technocratic authority, and military power. Scholars, writers, and journalists of science studies have variously interpreted Oppenheimer as embodying core ideas about the modern representation of science and technology, ideas including the role of the scientific statesman, the function of the scientific intellectual, the political authority of science, the morality of science, tensions between science and humanism, and the conflict between a scientist's individual conscience and the national interest.
The Embodiment of the Nuclear Age
An early account of the development of the atomic bomb, Robert Jungk's Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (1958) portrayed Oppenheimer as a classic tragic figure, a theme that has recurred in subsequent biographies, historical studies, novels, plays, and films. Sociologist Charles Thorpe in his book Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (2006) argued that his subject represented science for the nuclear and mass media age, embodying science for radio, television, and Time and Look magazines.
Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904, in New York, to a wealthy German-Jewish immigrant family. He attended the Ethical Culture School in New York, graduated from Harvard in 1925, and studied at physicist Ernest Rutherford's celebrated Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge University, England. In 1927, he obtained his PhD in Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. In Europe, he worked with several leading physicists of the time, including Max Born, Paul Ehrenfest, and Wolfgang Pauli, making important contributions to the then-emerging quantum theory.
In 1929, he was appointed to academic positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology. An exceptional and productive theorist in the 1930s, his brilliant teaching and research abilities, coupled with the devotion he inspired in students, accounted for the creation of the American school of theoretical physics.
Studies have repeatedly referred to Oppenheimer as a complex and enigmatic figure. He was a pacifist who oversaw the creation of a devastating instrument of war. He was a brilliant scientist who never won a Nobel Prize or made a major signature contribution to science. He was a patriot who was publicly humiliated by his government. Tall, thin, cerebral, cultivated, and charismatic, he was an aesthetic and disciplined intellectual, with a developed interest in languages, literature, art, spirituality, international affairs, food, and drink. Friends, students, and colleagues called him Oppy, Oppie, or Opje and recalled the intense gaze from his blue eyes and his trademark porkpie hat, which appeared in May 1948 on the cover of the first edition of Physics Today...
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Perspectives
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The late Abraham Pais wrote the definitive biography of Albert Einstein, "Subtle is the Lord," which won an American Book Award. As a distinguished physicist and Einstein's colleague, Pais combined a sophisticated understanding of physics with first-hand knowledge of this notoriously privateindividual, offering rare insights into both. It is his unique double perspective that makes his work so valuable.Now Abraham Pais offers an illuminating portrait of another eminent colleague, J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the most charismatic and enigmatic figures of modern physics. Pais introduces us to a precocious youth who sped through Harvard in three years, made signal contributions to quantummechanics while in his twenties, and was instrumental in the growth of American physics in the decade before the Second World War, almost single-handedly putting American physics on the map. Pais paints a revealing portrait of Oppenheimer's life in Los Alamos, where in twenty remarkable, feverishmonths, under his inspired leadership, the first atomic bomb was designed and built, a success that made Oppenheimer America's most famous scientist. Pais, who was his next-door neighbor for many years, describes Oppenheimer's long tenure as Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton,but also shows how Oppenheimer's intensity and arrogance won him powerful enemies, who would ultimately make him one of the principal victims of the Red Scare of the 1950s.Told with compassion and deep insight, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most comprehensive biography of the great physicist available. It is Abraham Pais's final work, completed after his death by Robert P. Crease, an acclaimed historian of science in his own right.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Cold War, and the Atomic West
In 1922, the teenage son of a Jewish immigrant ventured from Manhattan to New Mexico for his health. It was the first of many trips to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a western retreat where J. Robert Oppenheimer would eventually hold pathbreaking discussions with world-renowned scientists about atomic physics. Oppenheimer came to feel at home in the American West, and while extensive studies have been made of the man, this is the first book to explicitly link him with the region. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Cold War, and the Atomic West explores how the West influenced Oppenheimer as a scientist and as a person?and the role he played in influencing it. Jon Hunner?s concise account of Oppenheimer?s life and the emergence of an Atomic West distills a vast literature for students and general readers. In this brisk, engaging biography, the author recounts how Oppenheimer helped locate the atomic weapons research lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and helped establish leading physics departments at the University of California?Berkeley and Caltech. By taking part in moving atomic physics west of the Mississippi, Oppenheimer bolstered the establishment of research labs, uranium mines, nuclear reactors, and more, bringing talented people?and billions of dollars in federal contracts?to the region. Interwoven into this atomic tale are insights into the physicist?s troubled growing-up years, his marriage and family life, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer?s eventual downfall. After the first atomic bomb burst over the New Mexican desert in 1945 and as the Cold War developed, the American myth of the Wild West expanded to encompass atomic sheriffs saving the world for democracy?even as powerful opponents began questioning Oppenheimer?s place in that story. Against the backdrop of the physicist?s life twining with the region?s history, Hunner explores the promise and peril of the Atomic Age.
Uncommon Sense
J. Robert Oppenheimer, a leading physicist in the Manhattan Project, recognized that scientific inquiry and discovery could no longer be separated from their effect on political decision-making, social responsibility, and human endeavor in general. He openly addressed issues of common concern and as a scientist accepted the responsibility brought about by nuclear physics and the atom bomb. In this collection of essays and speeches, Oppenheimer discusses the shift in scientific awareness and its impact on education, the question of openness in a society forced to keep secrets, the conflict between individual concerns and public and political necessity, the future of science and its effects on future politics---in short, the common and uncommon sense we find in our modern day reality.
Nuclear Arms Race
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Four weeks after Hahn split the uranium atom, Robert Oppenheimer drew a diagram of a new kind of weapon: the atomic bomb. Britain needed its own bomb to keep up with America and Russia. A BBC Production.
How Black Holes Are Born
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowIn the 1930s, physicists Subramanian Chandrasekhar and Robert Oppenheimer learn that the most massive stars end their lives differently than smaller ones. Princeton physicist John Wheeler popularizes the term “black hole” in the 1960s. Graduate student Jocelyn Bell discovers a neutron star in 1967. Distributed by PBS Distribution.
Robert Oppenheimer
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowIn 1943, the U.S. government asks J. Robert Oppenheimer to head the Los Alamos laboratory where the atomic bomb would be developed. In the McCarthy era Oppenheimer is denounced as a security risk. LBJ later clears his name.
Online Resources
- The Atomic Hero: Robert Oppenheimer and the Making of Scientific Icons in the Early Cold WarHecht explores the nature and meaning of one prominent cluster of Robert Oppenheimer images from the early cold war: those that depict Oppenheimer as a heroic figure. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, is remembered as "the father of the atomic bomb." Hecht says that this multifaceted nature enables Oppenheimer to represent a range of the worries and tensions confronting Americans during the early atomic age.
- Presenting Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer: Science, the Atomic Bomb, and Cold War TelevisionThis article examines the television presence of physicist Robert Oppenheimer. I argue that the aesthetics of those appearances operate ambivalently: they mechanize and instrumentalize Oppenheimer for the military-industrial complex but also provide countervailing aesthetics and oppositional ideologies. Studying these ambivalences reveals the origins and functions of Cold War television.
- Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer? Charisma and Complex OrganizationCharismatic authority flourishes in places where some social scientists evidently do not expect to find it - in late modernity and in highly complex and instrumentally orientated technoscientific organizations. This paper documents and interprets participants' testimony about the workings of wartime Los Alamos in relation to the charisma of its Scientific Director, J. Robert Oppenheimer. We treat charisma as an interactional accomplishment, and examine its role in technoscientific organizations. Los Alamos was a hybrid place, positioned at the intersection of military, industrial and academic forms. Everyday life there was marked by a high degree of normative uncertainty. Structures of authority, communication and the division of labour were contested and unclear. The interactional constitution of Oppenheimer as charismatic enabled him to articulate, vouch for and, finally, come to embody a conception of legitimate organizational order as collegial, egalitarian and communicatively open. We offer concluding speculations about the continuing importance of charismatic authority in contemporary technoscientific organizations. Just as normative uncertainty is endemic in late modernity, so too, we argue, is charisma.
Hiroshima
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowTo end WWII and Japan's continued resistance, Robert Oppenheimer's atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. A BBC Production.