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Index
Preface
1 Beginnings
2 California Days
3 Los Alamos
4 The Trial
5 The Institute
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
When Rabi first met him, Oppenheimer was twenty-five. Rabi was six years older. Both men, as it turn
Upper-middle-class Jews like the Oppenheimers found that the better private schools would not take t
Several people who have written about Oppenheimer have claimed that his years at the Ethical Cultu
Herbert Smith was equally important. He had been educated at Harvard where he had gotten his master'
The FBI must have taken the trouble to look at his birth certificate.)
to-do Jewish boys. It was run by a man named Otto Koenig, who was the principal of Sachs Collegiate
Despite appearances, Oppenheimer always had both physical and mental resilience. In this instance, d
McMillan and his collaborators wanted to irradiate various elements with the beam and so produce new
In the first place, lie was quite well to do. He had an academic income of about $5,000 a year and a
heimer's persona. He later remarked, "Oppenheimer was a dominating personality, but I didn't want to
In California, Oppenheimer was a notoriously dangerous driver. He bought a large Chn'sler which he c
film the steps that led up to the first nuclear test explosion in July 1945. This was a plutonium bo
In the decade before the war, Oppenheimer and his various associates did an astounding variety of wo
that these unwanted solutions could also be interpreted as particles with positive energies, but wit
Take a star about as massive as the Sun. With the contraction of the core, the electrons around the
happen, and the inside observer is cut off from the rest of the universe.*
Frisch and Peierls began investigating the prospects for nuclear weapons on their own. Perhaps they
Frisch made the first steps toward the work that led to the papers he and Peierls would eventually w
Compared to what these scientists were used to, conditions on the mesa were primitive. There were fi
Teller's refusal to do the work of the laboratory became particularly acute in the summer of 1944, w
a neutron from the fission of U(235) is absorbed by a U(238) nucleus to make V(239). This nucleus
It was not only what he said but the way he said it. I was able to study Oppenheimer's behavior for
tritium, a fusible element.] I was inclined to think the super might also be relevant. On the techni
Before giving the conclusion of this letter, I want to comment on the question of "military value."
"We base our recommendations on our belief that the extreme dangers to mankind inherent in this prop
sembly.°
This means that a pure fission bomb can never exceed in yield a certain maximum. The largest puret
put that program on a crash basis.'
Once the hydrogen bomb project started at Los Alamos, Teller decided he could not work with the peop
`"I'his, in the opinion of the chair, is one of the ►nost aggravated cases of contempt that we have
three weeks.'
THE FIRST TIME I actually ►net Oppenheimer was in the spring of 1957. He had come to Harvard to deli
By August 1945, Oppenheimer was making plans for what lie wanted to do after lie left Los Alamos, wh
"... We have been at the ranch some days now, and I'm beginning to recover a little of the sanity th
Dyson was still nominally a graduate student-he never did bother to get his Ph.D.-and far too polite
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