Quotes About Oppenheimer

My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer securities. They managed to finagle me a job.

Oppenheimer had, in his own mind at least, exaggerated his role in the making of the atomic bomb and, correspondingly, exaggerated his guilt, seeing himself as, in the Bhagavad-Gita, Death the destroyer of worlds. Von Neumann agreed. "Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin," von Neumann liked to tell Ulam.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.

Robert Oppenheimer moved to Santa Fe with a small team of aides on March 15, 1943, brisk early spring. Scientists and their families arrived by automobile and train during the next four weeks. Not much was ready on the mesa, which they began to call the Hill.

So the arguments progressed across the pleasant Berkeley summer. "We were forever inventing new tricks," Bethe says, "finding ways to calculate, and rejecting most of the tricks on the basis of the calculations. Now I could see at first-hand the tremendous intellectual power of Oppenheimer who was the unquestioned leader of our group. . . . The intellectual experience was unforgettable.

That I was named to head the [Theoretical] division," Bethe comments, "was a severe blow to Teller, who had worked on the bomb project almost from the day of its inception and considered himself, quite rightly, as having seniority over everyone then at Los Alamos, including Oppenheimer.

as the bomb for Bohr and Oppenheimer was a weapon of death that might also end war and redeem mankind—is one way the poem expresses the paradox.

Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.2154 He cherished the complementary compensation of knowing that the hard riddle the bomb would pose had two answers, two outcomes, one of them transcendent.

One of Oppenheimer's students, the American theoretical physicist Philip Morrison, recalls that "when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.

When Groves called, Oppenheimer chatted happily about the Bethe results. The general interrupted: "What about the weather?" "The weather is whimsical," the whimsical physicist said.2399 The Gulf air mass had stagnated over the test site. But change was coming. Jack Hubbard, the meteorologist, predicted light and variable winds the next day.

Oppenheimer was surprised and impressed. When Roosevelt died, he told an audience late in life, he had felt "a terrible bereavement . . . partly because we were not sure that anyone in Washington would be thinking of what needed to be done in the future." Now he saw that "Colonel Stimson was thinking hard and seriously about the implications for mankind of the thing we had created and the wall into the future that we had breached.

Robert Oppenheimer thus acquired for Los Alamos what Leo Szilard had not been able to organize in Chicago: scientific freedom of speech. The price the new community paid, a social but more profoundly a political price, was a guarded barbed-wire fence around the town and a second guarded barbed-wire fence around the laboratory itself, emphasizing that the scientists and their families were walled off where knowledge of their work was concerned not only from the world but even from each other.

El Premio Nobel de la paz, para terminar todos los premios de la paz, deberían habérselo dado a Robert Oppenheimer y a sus colegas artífices de la bomba atómica. Las armas nucleares han convertido la guerra entre superpotencias en suicidio colectivo, y han hecho imposible pretender dominar el mundo por la fuerza de las armas.

Close on the heels of Leclerc's armored spearhead was an American intelligence unit code-named ALSOS, carrying secret instructions from the physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Luis W. Alvarez on clues to look for in investigating "the Y program"—the German atomic bomb effort. Evidence discovered in Paris and at the Philips factory in Eindhoven pointed to the University of Strasbourg as a key atomic research center.

There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.

Robert Oppenheimer infamously equated the nuclear bomb with Krishna's cosmic form.

When the first atomic bomb was exploded successfully, Oppenheimer and Fermi flashed the code word: Baby satisfactorily born. A most befitting yell o triumph for the coming of age of technological civilization and for the death of culture. Since then hundreds of thousands of babies were satisfactorily born with defective genes or died of leukemia brought on by radiation. Compulsive creation, genius, what the hell do you want, clap censorship on science?

At our production company, the trademark dish - and this sounds particularly revolting - is curried pickled herring.

I don't drink in the cinema because I have a bladder the size of a hummingbird.

Some of the information in those binders was even manipulated to appear more damaging to Oppenheimer.

In his speeches about the Institute, Oppenheimer continually emphasized that science needed the humanities to better understand its own character and consequences.

The task of getting rid of Oppenheimer was far too important to leave to the clownish, sensation-seeking senator from Wisconsin. It would require careful planning and skillful maneuvering. After leaving Hoover, Strauss returned to his office and wrote to Senator Robert Taft, urging him to block McCarthy if he attempted to launch an investigation of Oppenheimer. It would be "a mistake," he wrote. "In the first place some of the evidence will not stand up.

Oppenheimer's work with Snyder is, in retrospect, remarkably complete and an accurate mathematical description of the collapse of a black hole