The young Oppenheimer: letters and recollections
DOI: 10.1063/1.2914017
A prominent physicist before World War II, J. Robert Oppenheimer became the wartime director of the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory. After the war he became an influential adviser to the government on atomic energy, but fell from favor during the McCarthy era. This story has become the stuff of myth and drama. Here we would like to present glimpses of the less familiar Oppenheimer—learning, playing, making friends, doing physics, winning recognition—as yet unburdened by the actuality of the bomb, by fame and by public responsibilities.
References
1. Interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer by Thomas S. Kuhn, 18 November 1963, Archive for History of Quantum Physics, AIP Niels Bohr Library, and other repositories.
2. Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, Alice Kimball Smith, Charles Wiener, eds., Harvard U.P., Cambridge, Mass. (1980).
3. Interview with Robert Serber by Charles Weiner, 25 May 1978, AIP Niels Bohr Library.
4. Born to Stratton, 13 February 1927, Institute Archives and Special Collections: MIT Libraries. Quoted in K. Sopka, “Quantum Physics in America,” PhD thesis, Harvard, 1976.
5. Kemble to Lyman, 9 June 1929, Harvard University Archives. Quoted in K. Sopka, ref. 4.
6. G. T. Seaborg, in I. I. Rabi et al. Oppenheimer, Scribner’s, New York (1969), page 48.
7. P. H. Abelson, in All in Our Time: The Reminiscences of Twelve Nuclear Pioneers, J. Wilson, ed., Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Chicago (1975), page 28.
8. H. Bethe, Science 155, 1081 (1967).https://doi.org/SCIEAS
More about the Authors
Alice Kimball Smith. Radcliffe College.
Charles Weiner. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
