The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Einstein first met Bohr in Berlin in the spring of 1920. “Not often in life,” he wrote to Bohr afterward, “has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did,”

Oppenheimer looked into the subtleties of the invisible cosmic margins, modeled the imploding collapse of dying suns and described theoretical stellar objects that would not be discovered for thirty and forty years—neutron stars, black holes—because the instruments required to detect them, radio telescopes and X-ray satellites, had not been invented yet.