Inside the Centre: The Life of J Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk

J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life

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J. Robert Oppenheimer: Life and Work

In the late s he began to associate with communists, unaware that they were under surveillance, and Oppenheimer himself popped up on the FBI's radar. And in General Leslie Groves , the man tasked by Roosevelt with building an atomic bomb in America, chose him to be the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.

At the specially created laboratory at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer revealed extraordinary gifts of leadership, nursing a huge team of scientific prima donnas with passion, tact and skill. With the dropping of the bomb, Oppenheimer became America's most famous scientist, but he was appalled by the human suffering at Hiroshima and made confused attempts to avoid an atomic arms race, which put him increasingly at odds with the hawkish mood in Washington. When he told Harry Truman that he felt he had blood on his hands, the president warned his aides to keep this "cry-baby scientist" away from him.

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Matters came to a head when Oppenheimer initially opposed the building of the " Super ", or hydrogen bomb. His many powerful enemies — notably Edward Teller , the scientific advocate of the H bomb, the US air force and the Washington power broker Lewis Strauss — finally struck at him in , using as their main weapon FBI records of his contacts with communists. They failed to prove that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy, but they destroyed his character. He retreated to Princeton, where he ran the Institute for Advanced Study, before dying of throat cancer in Monk retells this great 20th-century tragedy magnificently, in measured English prose, not Time journalese.

Oppenheimer: The Man Behind the Bomb

He brings off the set pieces, such as the Trinity test, but he also explores Oppenheimer the physicist with a thoroughness some readers may find arduous. He is, though, surprisingly lacking in low curiosity, declining to speculate, for example as the scientific writer Jeremy Bernstein does , on whether Oppenheimer's much disliked wife, Kitty, was the first woman with whom he had a full sexual relationship.

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Inside the Centre shows how the passage of time has shifted perspectives. The FBI's obsession with Soviet atomic spies is more understandable now that we know how many of them there were. Equally, the scientists were right to foresee that the US could never hold the "nuclear secret" and that nuclear weapons would usher in a new age of mutually assured destruction.

And yet they were naive to think that one could deal with Stalin.

As Truman's secretary of state Dean Acheson said, "How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm 'by example'? Oppenheimer himself has become less heroic and more fallible over time — a man who betrayed friends to hang on to his special position and lied in tight situations though it was his misfortune to have his every human failing recorded and picked over for decades by security men, journalists and historians.

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Life and Work

It was inevitable, in the hysterical climate of McCarthyism, that Oppenheimer would be edged out; but his special facility in making enemies, the casual arrogance with which he had humiliated the powerful, guaranteed their revenge should take such a horrible form. Oppenheimer's Early Years as Institute Director Oppenheimer and the World of Physics: Further on Oppenheimer the Man Atomic Politics in the Early Postwar Years Of the Superbomb and of Spy Stories The New Super Atomic Politics in the Early s In Which the Excrement Hits the Ventilator The Hearing in the Matter of J.

No Final Judgement Abraham Pais was Detlev W. A leading theoretical physicist, he was also an esteemed science writer, the author of 'Subtle is the Lord His most recent book is The Prism and the Pendulum: Read this book and find out why.

Faithfully supplemented by historian Robert P. Crease, the result is a personal recollection as tormented as the atomic father's own soul. Robert Oppenheimer was an extraordinarily brilliant and complex man.

Early Life

Crease, the result is a personal recollection as tormented as the atomic father's own soul. However, Oppenheimer had extensive ties to leftist organizations such as the Teacher's Union and American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, two organizations that fell under heavy scrutiny for having Communist ties. His father was a German immigrant and textile distributer, and a very successful one. An Atomic Scientist's Credo Appointed to lead the scientific work of the Manhattan Project in , Oppenheimer was considered a bizarre choice. Lagu rated it liked it Oct 29,

In this book Abraham Pais and Robert Crease take a kaleidoscopic approach to his life, shedding insightful light on the personality and the times of the scientist who played such an important role in the future destiny of mankind. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Academic Skip to main content.

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To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider. Crease Pais introduces us to a precocious youth who sped through Harvard in three years, made signal contributions to quantum mechanics while in his twenties, and was instrumental in the growth of American physics in the decade before the Second World War.