J. Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Julius Robert Oppenheimerwas an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. As the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, Oppenheimer is among those who are called the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first nuclear weapons used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhysicist
Date of Birth22 April 1904
CountryUnited States of America
Optimists think that this is the best of all possible worlds; pessimists fear they are right.
Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.
The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.
Maybe General Groves was right. Maybe we should just banish thinking forever.
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
To the confusion of our enemies.
[About the great synthesis of atomic physics in the 1920s:] It was a heroic time. It was not the doing of any one man; it involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands. But from the first to last the deeply creative, subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened and finally transmuted the enterprise.
Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.
I can't think that it would be terrible of me to say — and it is occasionally true — that I need physics more than friends.
We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy, error undetected will flourish and subvert.
The powerful notion of entropy, which comes from a very special branch of physics … is certainly useful in the study of communication and quite helpful when applied in the theory of language.
I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.
The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.