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It draws on Oppenheimer’s own massive collection of papers in the Library of Congress,
Look up these records at Library of Congress
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, February 25, 1967:
The Nobelists included such world-renowned physicists as Isidor I. Rabi, Eugene Wigner, Julian Schwinger, Tsung Dao Lee and Edwin McMillan. Albert Einstein’s daughter, Margot, was there to honor the man who had been her father’s boss at the Institute for Advanced Study.
John J. McCloy; the Manhattan Project’s military chief, General Leslie R. Groves; Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze; Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey. To represent the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent his scientific adviser, Donald F. Hornig, a Los Alamos veteran who had been with Oppenheimer at “Trinity,” the test on July 16, 1945, of the first atomic bomb. Sprinkled among the scientists and Washington’s power elite were men of literature and culture: the poet Stephen Spender, the novelist John O’Hara, the composer
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Igor Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles,
‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’
an aesthete who cultivated ambiguities.
His friends compared this public humiliation to the 1633 trial of another scientist, Galileo Galilei, by a medieval-minded church; others saw the ugly spectre of anti-Semitism in the event and recalled the ordeal of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France in the 1890s.
250 West 94th Street.
155 Riverside Drive, overlooking the Hudson River at West 88th Street.
Beethoven’s Eroica symphony
Greatly amused, Julius encouraged his son to accept this honor. On the designated evening, Robert showed up at the club with his parents, who proudly introduced their son as “J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The startled audience
“I think that my father was one of the most tolerant and human of men,” Robert would remark in later years. “His idea of what to do for people was to let them find out what they wanted.”
young teenager. The eight years
at 2 West 64th Street.
Distinguished speakers like W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington,
insisted on making tea from a charcoal-fired Russian samovar.
They both tried to write poetry, sometimes in French, and short stories imitative of Chekhov.
“Obviously, if he [Oppenheimer] says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a Ph.D. for knowing their titles.”
diffidence
Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed
“Tolstoy is the writer I most enjoy.” “No, no, Dostoyevsky is superior,” Oppenheimer said. “He gets to the soul and torment of man.”
Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, a mystical and existential text that spoke to Oppenheimer’s troubled soul.
voluble
Stefan Zweig.
For Oppenheimer, the central new idea was everything; the context and the academic window dressing were clutter that disturbed his acute aesthetic sense.
photoelectric
Frank worshipped his brother. Unlike Robert, he was good with his hands and loved tinkering with things, taking apart electric motors and watches and putting them back together.
poem he had written,
perro caliente!”
Leiden,
Rabi that Oppenheimer “seemed to treat physics as an avocation
nasi goreng,
“Opje,” the Dutch nickname he had acquired in Leiden. Robert himself began signing his letters with “Opje.” Gradually, his Berkeley students anglicized “Opje” into “Oppie.”
Oppenheimer developed a uniquely open teaching style in which he encouraged all of his students to interact with each other.
jodhpurs
Pasadena’s Mt. Wilson Observatory.
Gamaliel,
“Monday Evening Journal Club,”
dipped the rims of the martini glasses in lime juice and honey.
Jack’s Restaurant, one of San Francisco’s most pleasant eating establishments.
Arthur W. Ryder, a professor of Sanskrit at Berkeley. Ryder was a Hoover
left, the radical writer Upton Sinclair stunned the California establishment by decisively winning the Democratic gubernatorial
taken all three volumes of the German-language edition of Das Kapital with him on a three-day train trip to New York City.
so that you understand it, and can use it and contemplate it, and, if you should want, teach it; but do not plan yet to ‘do’
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.
Number One, Eagle Hill, in the hills overlooking Berkeley.
oscilloscope
“Sometimes the elaborate, the learned method, the grown-up method is not as good as the simple and childishly naïve method.”
“It seemed like a dramatic thing to do,” recalled Lomanitz. “It was kind of a thing of youth. . . . It was a ridiculous reason for forming a union.”
