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
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.
We know too much for one man to know too much.
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
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.
Maybe General Groves was right. Maybe we should just banish thinking forever.
When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it.
A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.
There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. 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.
The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.
Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.
The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely.
The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.