Historical Figure
J. Robert Oppenheimer
1904–1967
American theoretical physicist (1904–1967)
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Biography
J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist who served as the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. He is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in overseeing the development of the first nuclear weapons.
In Their Own Words (5)
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.
As quoted in "Why Curiosity Driven Research?" by Robert V. Moody (17 February 1995) , 1995
Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
Letter to his brother Frank (14 October 1929), published in Robert Oppenheimer : Letters and Recollections (1995) edited by Alice Kimball Smith, p. 136 , 1995
It's not that I don't feel bad about it. It's just that I don't feel worse today than what I felt yesterday.
Response to question on his feelings about the atomic bombings, while visiting Japan in 1960. , 1960
It's 20 years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.
Oppenheimer's reply to a question on Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's efforts to urge President Lyndon Johnson to initiate talks to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, in an interview from the early 1960s. Shown in The Day After Trinity (1981) , 1981
The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.
Science and the Common Understanding (1954); based on 1953 Reith lectures. , 1954
Timeline
The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, told in moments.
Appointed director of the Manhattan Project at 38. He picks Los Alamos, a remote mesa in New Mexico, as the secret lab. He recruits every genius he can find. Fermi. Bethe. Feynman. Teller. He manages their egos. Nobody thinks a theoretical physicist can run anything.
Watches the Trinity test at 5:29 a.m. in the Jornada del Muerto desert. The fireball is visible from 200 miles. He later says he thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' His project director, Kenneth Bainbridge, says something simpler: 'Now we are all sons of bitches.'
The Atomic Energy Commission revokes his security clearance after a four-week hearing. He'd opposed the hydrogen bomb. Edward Teller testifies against him. Lewis Strauss orchestrates the case. Twenty years of public service end in humiliation.
President Kennedy approves the Enrico Fermi Award for Oppenheimer. Kennedy is assassinated before the ceremony. Johnson presents it instead. Oppenheimer accepts quietly. It's not an apology, but it's something.
Dies of throat cancer in Princeton at 62. A lifelong chain smoker. His wife Kitty scatters his ashes in the sea off St. John in the Virgin Islands.
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