J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century

New York, NY: Pi Press, 2005. Reprint. Second printing. Hardcover. Very good in very good dust jacket. DJ has slight wear and siling.. xviii, 462 p. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. The unexplored secret of the American Century, the last 100 years of UShistory, is the rise of American science, specifically physics. At the heart of thatstory is J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project that built theatomic bomb. He was a man of contradictions: a scientist who discovered blackholes and then turned his back on cutting edge research; a gentle liberalhumanist responsible for the creation of the first real weapon of massdestruction; a genius who founded "scientific militarism" and then let it destroyhim. His life story embodies the great conflicts of American society, its genius, its weaknesses, and even its essential morality. How did an aesthete man uninterested in the acquisition of power become theleader of American science, the most powerful research community in theworld? And how did he, with all his intellectual and social advantages, lose hispower and become regarded by many as an unfulfilled if not failed scientist. While it is biography of a physicist, it is also a history of the 20th centuryoffering insights into the "scientific militarism" behind events on the worldstage today. "Dr. David C. Cassidy is a Professor in the Natural Science Program at Hofstra University, and has been Chair of the Section for History and Philosophy of Science of the New York Academy of Sciences. He served for seven years as Associate Editor of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein and has been an editorial consultant for the collected works of Heisenberg, Bohr and Pauli. His book, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg has been widely acclaimed and translated into five foreign languages. He has been awarded the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award and the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society. He is also the author of Einstein and our World and wrote the introduction to Scientists at War: The Farm Hall Transcripts edited by J. Bernstein. He lives on Long Island in New York."--from rear DJ flap. From Wikipedia: "Julius Robert Oppenheimer[note 1] (April 22, 1904 February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with Enrico Fermi, he is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico; Oppenheimer remarked later that it brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." After the war he became a chief advisor to the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission and used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation and an arms race with the Soviet Union. After provoking the ire of many politicians with his outspoken opinions during the Second Red Scare, he had his security clearance revoked in a much-publicized hearing in 1954, and was effectively stripped of his direct political influence; he continued to lecture, write and work in physics. A decade later President John F. Kennedy awarded (and Lyndon B. Johnson presented) him with the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation. Oppenheimer's notable achievements in physics include the Born Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wavefunctions, work on the theory of electrons and positrons, the Oppenheimer Phillips process in nuclear fusion, and the first prediction of quantum tunneling. With his students he also made important contributions to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and the interactions of cosmic rays. As a teacher and promoter of science, he is remembered as a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics that gained world prominence in the 1930s. After World War II, he became director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton."