Quotes from Kai Bird

Having preached the necessity of international control and openness in 1946, Oppenheimer by 1947 was beginning to accept the idea of a defense posture supported by a multitude of nuclear weapons.

Physicists today agree that Oppenheimer's most stunning and original work was done in the late 1930s on neutron stars—a phenomenon astronomers would not actually be able to observe until 1967.

Oppenheimer—and surely many others in the room—understood that they could not rush to "stay ahead" in atomic weapons without pushing the Russians into an arms race with the United States.

MacLeish wrote. He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.

house at Otowi Bridge.

The bottom line is that Robert always wished to be, and was, free to think for himself and to make his own political choices. Commitments have to be put in perspective to be understood, and the failure to do that was the most damaging characteristic of the McCarthy period. The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left.

with such delicate euphemisms, did the president of Harvard University select civilians as the target of the world's first atomic bomb.

He reminded MacLeish of the "profound part that culture and society play in the very definition of human values, human salvation and liberation." Therefore, "I think that what is needed is something far subtler than the emancipation of the individual from society; it involves, with an awareness that the past one hundred and fifty years have rendered progressively more acute, the basic dependence of man on his fellows.

Teller would pay dearly for what he had said. Later that summer, on a visit to Los Alamos, Teller spotted an old friend, Bob Christy, in the dining hall. Walking over to greet him with outstretched hand, Teller was stunned when Christy refused to shake hands and abruptly turned his back. Standing close by was a furious Rabi, who said, "I won't shake your hand, either, Edward." Stunned, Teller went back to his hotel room and packed his bags.

street, but he had forgotten the number of the house. He remembered only that it was a multiple of seven. "So we drove up and down the street," Kamen recalled, "and finally found Number 3528, a multiple of seven, all right. Thinking about it now, I wonder sometimes whether he wasn't pulling everybody's leg a little bit. . . . He had this overwhelming temptation just to snow you.

His coughing was incessant and his weight was down to 115 pounds, skin-and-bones for a man 5 feet 10 inches tall. His energy level never flagged, but he seemed to be literally disappearing little by little, day after day.

Albert Einstein's daughter, Margot, was there to honor the man who had been her father's boss at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Trinity," the test on July 16, 1945, of the first atomic bomb.

No one can be certain of Oppenheimer's reaction had he learned that on the eve of the Hiroshima bombing, the president knew the Japanese were "looking for peace," and that the military use of atomic bombs on cities was an option rather than a necessity for ending the war in August

When I got to Cambridge," Robert said, "I was faced with the problem of looking at a question to which no one knew the answer—but I wasn't willing to face it. When I left Cambridge, I didn't know how to face it very well, but I understood that this was my job; this was the change that occurred that year.

my own conviction is that one should use moods, but not be greatly deflected by them; thus one should try to use the gay times to do those things one wants to do which require gaiety, and the sober moods for the work one wants, and the low moods for giving oneself hell.

And only through discipline is it possible "to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror.

As the physicist Richard Feynman once observed, "[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is— absurd.

periodic bouts of depression. Some of these episodes were brought on by his family's

In less than fifteen minutes he not only agreed that the reaction was authentic but also speculated that in the process extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs. It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked. .

My feeling about myself," Oppenheimer later said of this period in his life, "was always one of extreme discontent. I had very little sensitiveness to human beings, very little humility before the realities of this world.

Edsall insisted, "Tolstoy is the writer I most enjoy." "No, no, Dostoyevsky is superior," Oppenheimer said. "He gets to the soul and torment of man.

indifference to the sufferings one causes . . . is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.

His physics was good, but his arithmetic awful.