Coordinates	28°36′36″N77°13′48″N
name	Lawrence Bender
birthname	Lawrence Bender
birth date	October 17, 1957
birth place	The Bronx, New York City U.S.
occupation	Film producer }}

Lawrence Bender (born October 17, 1957) is an American film producer. He rose to fame by producing ''Reservoir Dogs'' in 1992 and has since produced all of Quentin Tarantino's films with the exception of ''Death Proof''. Bender is Jewish.

In the 1980s, he worked as a grip on the syndicated anthology series ''Tales from the Darkside''. In 1989, he produced the film ''Intruder'', in which leading roles are Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell. In addition, he has been the producer on many other successful movies including ''Good Will Hunting'', ''The Mexican'', the 2007 Academy Award winning film ''An Inconvenient Truth'', ''Kill Bill'', ''Pulp Fiction'', and the ''From Dusk Till Dawn'' trilogy. He was an executive producer of the ''Legend of Earthsea'' TV miniseries.

Bender makes cameo appearance in many of the films he produces: he was a police officer chasing Mr. Pink in ''Reservoir Dogs'', a guest billed as a "long-haired yuppie scum" in both ''Pulp Fiction'' and ''Four Rooms'' and a hotel clerk in ''Kill Bill Volume 2''.

Since May 2005 Bender has been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post. He now works in Hollywood running the day-to-day operations of his own production company, Lawrence Bender Productions. Bender has been working with Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor to create a television TV series based on the 2007 album ''Year Zero''.

Filmography

''Tale of Two Sisters'' (1989) (producer)

''Intruder'' (1989) (producer)

''Reservoir Dogs'' (1992) (producer)

''Fresh'' (1994) (producer)

''Pulp Fiction'' (1994) (producer)

''Killing Zoe'' (1994) (producer)

''Four Rooms'' (1995) (producer)

''White Man's Burden'' (1995) (producer)

''Snakeland'' (1996) (executive producer)

''From Dusk till Dawn'' (1996) (executive producer)

''Good Will Hunting'' (1997) (producer)

''Jackie Brown'' (1997) (producer)

''A Price Above Rubies'' (1998) (producer)

''From Dusk till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money'' (1999) (executive producer)

''Anna and the King'' (1999) (producer)

''From Dusk till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter'' (2000) (executive producer)

''Anatomy of a Hate Crime'' (TV) (2001) (executive producer)

''The Mexican'' (2001) (producer)

''Knockaround Guys'' (2001) (producer)

''Lost in Oz'' (TV) (2002) (executive producer)

''Stark Raving Mad'' (2002) (executive producer)

''Nancy Drew'' (TV) (2002) (executive producer)

''Kill Bill'' (2003, 2004) (producer)

''Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights'' (2004) (producer)

''The Survivors Club'' (TV) (2004) (executive producer)

''Voces inocentes'' (2004) (producer)

''Dr. Vegas'' (TV) (2004) (executive producer, "Pilot", "Limits")

''Earthsea'' (2004) (exeuctive producer)

''The Chumscrubber'' (2005) (producer)

''Build or Bust'' (TV) (2005) (executive producer)

''The Great Raid'' (2005) (producer)

''Goal!'' (2005) (executive producer)

''Flirt'' (TV) (2006) (executive producer)

''An Inconvenient Truth'' (2006) (producer)

''The Line-Up'' (TV) (2007) (executive producer)

''88 Minutes'' (2007) (executive producer)

''Long Island Confidential'' (TV) (2008) (executive producer)

''The Youngest Candidate'' (2008) (producer)

''Inglourious Basterds'' (2009) (producer)

''Countdown to Zero'' (2010) (producer)

References

External links

Lawrence Bender

HuffPo">Lawrence Bender at HuffPo

Category:1957 births Category:American bloggers Category:American businesspeople Category:American film producers Category:American people of Romanian descent Category:Living people Category:People from the Bronx Category:American Jews

cy:Lawrence Bender de:Lawrence Bender es:Lawrence Bender fr:Lawrence Bender it:Lawrence Bender nl:Lawrence Bender ja:ローレンス・ベンダー pt:Lawrence Bender ru:Бендер, Лоренс fi:Lawrence Bender tr:Lawrence Bender

Coordinates	28°36′36″N77°13′48″N
Name	J. Robert Oppenheimer
Alt	Head and shoulders portrait
Birth date	April 22, 1904
Birth place	New York City, New York, United States
Death date	February 18, 1967
Death place	Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Residence	United States
Religion	driud
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Theoretical physics
Workplaces	Manhattan ProjectUniversity of California, BerkeleyCalifornia Institute of Technology Institute for Advanced Study
Alma mater	Harvard UniversityUniversity of CambridgeUniversity of Göttingen
Doctoral advisor	Max Born
Notable students	Samuel W. AldersonDavid BohmRobert ChristyStan FrankelWillis Eugene LambGiovanni Rossi LomanitzPhilip MorrisonMelba PhillipsHartland SnyderGeorge Volkoff
Known for	Nuclear weapons developmentTolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limitOppenheimer-Phillips processBorn–Oppenheimer approximation
Awards	Enrico Fermi Award
Signature	J Robert Oppenheimer signature.svg
Footnotes	Brother of physicist Frank Oppenheimer }}

Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. 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." In the literature, the quote normally appears in the form ''shatterer'' of worlds, because this was the form in which it first appeared in print, in ''Time'' magazine on November 8, 1948. It later appeared in Robert Jungk's ''Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists'' (1958), which was based on an interview with Oppenheimer.|name="quote" |group="note"}}

After the war he became a chief adviser 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. Though 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.

Early life

Childhood and education

Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904, to Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish textile importer who had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1888, and Ella Friedman, a painter. In 1912 the family moved to an apartment on the eleventh floor of 155 Riverside Drive, near West 88th Street, Manhattan, an area known for luxurious mansions and town houses. Their art collection included works by Pablo Picasso and Édouard Vuillard, and at least three original paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Robert had a younger brother, Frank, who also became a physicist.

Oppenheimer was initially schooled at Alcuin Preparatory School, and in 1911 entered the Ethical Culture Society School. This had been founded by Felix Adler to promote a form of ethical training based on the Ethical Culture movement, whose motto was "Deed before Creed". His father had been a member of the Society for many years, serving on its board of trustees from 1907 to 1915. Oppenheimer was a versatile scholar, interested in English and French literature, and particularly in mineralogy. He completed the third and fourth grades in one year, and skipped half the eighth grade. During his final year, he became interested in chemistry. He entered Harvard College a year late, at age 18, because he suffered an attack of colitis while prospecting in Joachimstal during a family summer vacation in Europe. To help him recover from the illness, his father enlisted the help of his English teacher Herbert Smith who took him to New Mexico, where Oppenheimer fell in love with horseback riding and the southwestern United States.

In addition to majoring in chemistry, he was also required by Harvard's rules to study history, literature, and philosophy or mathematics. He made up for his late start by taking six courses each term and was admitted to the undergraduate honor society Phi Beta Kappa. In his first year he was admitted to graduate standing in physics on the basis of independent study, which meant he was not required to take the basic classes and could enroll instead in advanced ones. A course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman attracted him to experimental physics. He graduated summa cum laude in three years.

Studies in Europe

In 1924, Oppenheimer was informed that he had been accepted into Christ's College, Cambridge. He wrote to Ernest Rutherford requesting permission to work at the Cavendish Laboratory. Bridgman provided Oppenheimer with a recommendation, which conceded that Oppenheimer's clumsiness in the laboratory made it apparent his forte was not experimental but rather theoretical physics. Rutherford was unimpressed, but Oppenheimer went to Cambridge in the hope of landing another offer. He was ultimately accepted by J. J. Thomson on condition that he complete a basic laboratory course. He developed an antagonistic relationship with his tutor, Patrick Blackett, who was only a few years his senior. While on vacation, as recalled by his friend Francis Ferguson, Oppenheimer once confessed that he had left an apple doused with noxious chemicals on Blackett's desk. While Ferguson's account is the only detailed version of this event, Oppenheimer's parents were alerted by the university authorities who considered placing him on probation, a fate prevented by his parents successfully lobbying the authorities.

A tall, thin chain smoker, who often neglected to eat during periods of intense thought and concentration, Oppenheimer was marked by many of his friends as having self-destructive tendencies. A disturbing event occurred when he took a vacation from his studies in Cambridge to meet up with his friend Francis Ferguson in Paris. During a conversation in which Oppenheimer was explaining his frustration with experimental physics, he suddenly leapt up and tried to strangle Ferguson. Although Ferguson easily fended off the attack, the episode convinced him of Oppenheimer's deep psychological troubles. Plagued throughout his life by periods of depression, Oppenheimer once told his brother, "I need physics more than friends".

In 1926 he left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born. Göttingen was one of the world's leading centers for theoretical physics. Oppenheimer made friends who would go on to great success, including Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. He was known for being too enthusiastic in discussion, sometimes to the point of taking over seminar sessions. This irritated some of Born's other students so much that Maria Goeppert presented Born with a petition signed by herself and others threatening a boycott of the class unless he made Oppenheimer quiet down. Born left it out on his desk where Oppenheimer could read it, and it was effective without a word being said.

He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in March 1927 at age 23, supervised by Born. After the oral exam, James Franck, the professor administering, reportedly said, "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning ''me''." Oppenheimer published more than a dozen papers at Göttingen, including many important contributions to the new field of quantum mechanics. He and Born published a famous paper on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules, allowing nuclear motion to be neglected to simplify calculations. It remains his most cited work.

Early professional work

Educational work

Oppenheimer was awarded a United States National Research Council fellowship to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in September 1927. Bridgman also wanted him at Harvard, so a compromise was reached whereby he split his fellowship for the 1927–28 academic year between Harvard in 1927 and Caltech in 1928. At Caltech he struck up a close friendship with Linus Pauling, and they planned to mount a joint attack on the nature of the chemical bond, a field in which Pauling was a pioneer, with Oppenheimer supplying the mathematics and Pauling interpreting the results. Both the collaboration and their friendship were nipped in the bud when Pauling began to suspect Oppenheimer of becoming too close to his wife, Ava Helen Pauling. Once, when Pauling was at work, Oppenheimer had arrived at their home and invited Ava Helen to join him on a tryst in Mexico, though she refused and reported the incident to her husband. The invitation, and her apparent nonchalance about it, disquieted Pauling, and he ended his relationship with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer later invited him to become head of the Chemistry Division of the Manhattan Project, but Pauling refused, saying he was a pacifist.

In the autumn of 1928, Oppenheimer visited Paul Ehrenfest's institute at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, where he impressed them by giving lectures in Dutch, despite having little experience with the language. There he was given the nickname of ''Opje'', later Anglicized by his students as "Oppie". From Leiden he continued on to the ETH in Zurich to work with Wolfgang Pauli on quantum mechanics and the continuous spectrum. Oppenheimer respected and liked Pauli, who may have inspired some of Oppenheimer's own style and his critical approach to problems.

On returning to the United States, Oppenheimer accepted an associate professorship from the University of California, Berkeley, where Raymond T. Birge wanted him badly enough to offer to share him with Caltech. Later he used to say that "physics and desert country" were his "two great loves". He recovered from the tuberculosis and returned to Berkeley, where he prospered as an adviser and collaborator to a generation of physicists who admired him for his intellectual virtuosity and broad interests. His students and colleagues saw him as mesmerizing: hypnotic in private interaction, but often frigid in more public settings. His associates fell into two camps: one that saw him as an aloof and impressive genius and aesthete, the other that saw him as a pretentious and insecure poseur. His students almost always fell into the former category, adopting his walk, speech, and other mannerisms, and even his inclination for reading entire texts in their original languages. Hans Bethe said of him:

; reprinted as }}

He worked closely with Nobel Prize-winning experimental physicist Ernest O. Lawrence and his cyclotron pioneers, helping them understand the data their machines were producing at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 1936 Berkeley promoted him to full professor at a salary of $3,300 per annum. In return he was asked to curtail his teaching at Caltech, so a compromise was reached whereby Berkeley released him for six weeks each year, enough to teach one term at Caltech.

Scientific work

Oppenheimer did important research in theoretical astronomy (especially as related to general relativity and nuclear theory), nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum field theory, including its extension into quantum electrodynamics. The formal mathematics of relativistic quantum mechanics also attracted his attention, although he doubted its validity. His work predicted many later finds, which include the neutron, meson and neutron star.

Initially, his major interest was the theory of the continuous spectrum and his first published paper, in 1926, concerned the quantum theory of molecular band spectra. He developed a method to carry out calculations of its transition probabilities. He calculated the photoelectric effect for hydrogen and X-rays, obtaining the absorption coefficient at the K-edge. His calculations accorded with observations of the X-ray absorption of the sun, but not hydrogen. Years later it was realized that the sun was largely composed of hydrogen and that his calculations were indeed correct.

Oppenheimer also made important contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers and started work that eventually led to descriptions of quantum tunneling. In 1931 he co-wrote a paper on the "Relativistic Theory of the Photoelectric Effect" with his student Harvey Hall, in which, based on empirical evidence, he correctly disputed Dirac's assertion that two of the energy levels of the hydrogen atom have the same energy. Subsequently, one of his doctoral students, Willis Lamb, determined that this was a consequence of the Lamb shift, for which Lamb was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955.

As early as 1930, Oppenheimer wrote a paper essentially predicting the existence of the positron, after a paper by Paul Dirac proposed that electrons could have both a positive charge and negative energy. The paper introduced the Dirac equation, a unification of quantum mechanics, special relativity and the then-new concept of electron spin, to explain the Zeeman effect. Oppenheimer, drawing on the body of experimental evidence, rejected the idea that the predicted positively charged electrons were protons. He argued that they would have to have the same mass as an electron, whereas experiments showed that protons were much heavier than electrons. Two years later, Carl David Anderson discovered the positron, for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the late 1930s, Oppenheimer became interested in astrophysics, probably through his friendship with Richard Tolman, resulting in a series of papers. In the first of these, a 1938 paper co-written with Robert Serber entitled "On the Stability of Stellar Neutron Cores", Oppenheimer explored the properties of white dwarves. This was followed by a paper co-written with one of his students, George Volkoff, "On Massive Neutron Cores", in which they demonstrated that there was a limit, the so-called Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, to the mass of stars beyond which they would not remain stable as neutron stars and would undergo gravitational collapse. Finally, in 1939, Oppenheimer and another of his students, Hartland Snyder, produced a paper "On Continued Gravitational Attraction", which predicted the existence of what are today known as black holes. After the Born-Oppenheimer approximation paper, these papers remain his most cited and were key factors in the rejuvenation of astrophysical research in the United States in the 1950s, mainly by John A. Wheeler.

Oppenheimer's papers were considered difficult to understand even by the standards of the abstract topics he was expert in. He was fond of using elegant, if extremely complex, mathematical techniques to demonstrate physical principles, though he was sometimes criticized for making mathematical mistakes, presumably out of haste. "His physics was good", said his student Snyder, "but his arithmetic awful."}}

Oppenheimer's diverse interests sometimes interrupted his focus on projects. In 1933, he learned Sanskrit and met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley. He read the Bhagavad Gita in the original language and later he cited it as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life. His close confidant and colleague, Nobel Prize winner Isidor Rabi, later gave his own interpretation: and }}

In spite of this, observers such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez have suggested that if he had lived long enough to see his predictions substantiated by experiment, Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapse, concerning neutron stars and black holes. In retrospect, some physicists and historians consider this to be his most important contribution, though it was not taken up by other scientists in his own lifetime. When the physicist and historian Abraham Pais once asked Oppenheimer what he considered to be his most important scientific contributions, Oppenheimer cited his work on electrons and positrons, not his work on gravitational contraction. Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for physics three times, in 1945, 1951 and 1967, but never won.

Private and political life

During the 1920s, Oppenheimer remained aloof from worldly matters. He claimed that he did not read newspapers or listen to the radio, and had only learned of the Wall Street crash of 1929 some time after it occurred. He once remarked that he never cast a vote until the 1936 election. However, from 1934 on, he became increasingly concerned about politics and international affairs. In 1934, he earmarked three percent of his salary—about $100 a year—for two years to support German physicists fleeing from Nazi Germany. During the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, he and some of his students, including Melba Phillips and Bob Serber, attended a longshoremen's rally. Oppenheimer repeatedly attempted to get Serber a position at Berkeley but was blocked by Birge, who felt that "one Jew in the department was enough".

Oppenheimer's mother died in 1931, and he became closer to his father who, although still living in New York, became a frequent visitor in California. When his father died in 1937 leaving $392,602 to be divided between Oppenheimer and his brother Frank, Oppenheimer immediately wrote out a will leaving his estate to the University of California for graduate scholarships. Like many young intellectuals in the 1930s, he was a supporter of social reforms that were later alleged to be communist ideas. He donated to many progressive efforts which were later branded as "left-wing" during the McCarthy era. The majority of his allegedly radical work consisted of hosting fund raisers for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and other anti-fascist activity. He never openly joined the Communist Party, though he did pass money to liberal causes by way of acquaintances who were alleged to be Party members. In 1936, Oppenheimer became involved with Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a Berkeley literature professor and a student at Stanford University School of Medicine. The two had similar political views; she wrote for the ''Western Worker'', a Communist Party newspaper.

Oppenheimer broke up with Tatlock in 1939. In August that year he met Katherine ("Kitty") Puening Harrison, a radical Berkeley student and former Communist Party member. Harrison had been married three times previously. Her first marriage lasted only a few months. Her second husband was Joe Dallet, an active member of the Communist party, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Kitty returned to the United States where she obtained a bachelor of arts degree in botany from the University of Pennsylvania. There she married Richard Harrison, a physician and medical researcher, in 1938. In June 1939 Kitty and Harrison moved to Pasadena, California, where he became chief of radiology at a local hospital and she enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Oppenheimer and Kitty created a minor scandal by sleeping together after one of Tolman's parties. In the summer of 1940 she stayed with Oppenheimer at his ranch in New Mexico. She finally asked Harrison for a divorce when she found out she was pregnant. When he refused, she obtained an instant divorce in Reno, Nevada, and married Oppenheimer on November 1, 1940.

Their first child Peter was born in May 1941, and their second child, Katherine ("Toni"), was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on December 7, 1944. Later their continued contact became an issue in his security clearance hearings because of Tatlock's Communist associations. Many of Oppenheimer's closest associates were active in the Communist Party in the '30s or '40s. They included his brother Frank, Frank's wife Jackie, Kitty, Jean Tatlock, his landlady Mary Ellen Washburn, and several of his graduate students at Berkeley.

When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he [Oppenheimer] had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast". Years later he claimed that he did not remember saying this, that it was not true, and that if he had said anything along those lines, it was "a half-jocular overstatement". He was a subscriber to the ''People's World'', a Communist Party organ, and he testified in 1954, "I was associated with the Communist movement." From 1937 to 1942, in the midst of the Great Purge and Hitler-Stalin pact, Oppenheimer was a member at Berkeley of what he called a "discussion group", which was later identified by fellow members, Haakon Chevalier and Gordon Griffiths, as a "closed" (secret) unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recorded that J. Robert Oppenheimer attended a meeting in the home of self-proclaimed Communist Haakon Chevalier, that the Communist Party's California state chairman William Schneiderman, and Isaac Folkoff, West Coast liaison between the Communist Party and NKVD, attended in Fall 1940, during the Hitler-Stalin pact. Shortly thereafter, the FBI added Oppenheimer to its Custodial Detention Index, for arrest in case of national emergency, and listed him as "Nationalistic Tendency: Communist". Debates over Oppenheimer's Party membership or lack thereof have turned on very fine points; almost all historians agree he had strong socialist sympathies during this time and interacted with Party members, though there is considerable dispute over whether he was officially a member of the Party. At his 1954 security clearance hearings, he denied being a member of the Communist Party, but identified himself as a fellow traveler, which he defined as someone who agrees with many of the goals of Communism, but without being willing to blindly follow orders from any Communist party apparatus.

Throughout the development of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was under investigation by both the FBI and the Manhattan Project's internal security arm for his past left-wing associations. He was followed by Army security agents during a trip to California in June 1943 to visit his former girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, who was suffering from depression. Oppenheimer spent the night in her apartment. Jean committed suicide on January 4, 1944, which left Oppenheimer deeply grieved. In August 1943, he volunteered to Manhattan Project security agents that George Eltenton, whom he did not know, had solicited three men at Los Alamos for nuclear secrets on behalf of the Soviet Union. When pressed on the issue in later interviews, Oppenheimer admitted that the only person who had approached him was his friend Haakon Chevalier, a Berkeley professor of French literature, who had mentioned the matter privately at a dinner at Oppenheimer's house. Groves thought Oppenheimer was too important to the project to oust him over this suspicious behavior. On July 20, 1943, he wrote to the Manhattan Engineer District: }}

Manhattan Project

Los Alamos

On October 9, 1941, shortly before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a crash program to develop an atomic bomb. In May 1942, National Defense Research Committee Chairman James B. Conant, who had been one of Oppenheimer's lecturers at Harvard, invited Oppenheimer to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task that Oppenheimer threw himself into with full vigor. He was given the title "Coordinator of Rapid Rupture", specifically referring to the propagation of a fast neutron chain reaction in an atomic bomb. One of his first acts was to host a summer school for bomb theory at his building in Berkeley. The mix of European physicists and his own students—a group including Robert Serber, Emil Konopinski, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller—busied themselves calculating what needed to be done, and in what order, to make the bomb.

In June 1942, the US Army established the Manhattan Engineer District to handle its part in the atom bomb project, beginning the process of transferring responsibility from the Office of Scientific Research and Development to the military. In September, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., was appointed director of what became known as the Manhattan Project. Groves, in turn, selected Oppenheimer to head the project's secret weapons laboratory. Groves' choice surprised many, as Oppenheimer was not known to be politically aligned with the conservative military, nor to be an efficient leader of large projects. The fact that he did not have a Nobel Prize, and might not have the prestige to direct fellow scientists, did concern Groves. However, he was impressed by Oppenheimer's singular grasp of the practical aspects of designing and constructing an atomic bomb, and by the breadth of his knowledge. As a military engineer, Groves knew that this would be vital in an interdisciplinary project that would involve not just physics, but chemistry, metallurgy, ordnance and engineering. Groves also detected in Oppenheimer something that many others did not, an "overweening ambition" that Groves reckoned would supply the drive necessary to push the project to a successful conclusion. Isidor Rabi considered the appointment "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius".

Oppenheimer and Groves decided that for security and cohesion they needed a centralized, secret research laboratory in a remote location. Scouting for a site in late 1942, Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico, not far from his ranch. On November 16, 1942, Oppenheimer, Groves and others toured a prospective site. Oppenheimer feared that the high cliffs surrounding the site would make his people feel claustrophobic, while the engineers were concerned with the possibility of flooding. He then suggested and championed a site that he knew well: a flat mesa near Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was the site of a private boys' school called the Los Alamos Ranch School. The engineers were concerned about the poor access road and the water supply, but otherwise felt that it was ideal. The Los Alamos laboratory was built on the site of the school, taking over some of its buildings, while many others were erected in great haste. There Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top physicists of the time, which he referred to as the "luminaries".

Initially Los Alamos was supposed to be a military laboratory, and Oppenheimer and other researchers were to be commissioned into the Army. He went so far as to order himself a lieutenant colonel's uniform and take the Army physical test, which he failed. Army doctors considered him underweight at , diagnosed his chronic cough as tuberculosis and were concerned about his chronic lumbosacral joint pain. The plan to commission scientists fell through when Robert Bacher and Isidor Rabi balked at the idea. Conant, Groves and Oppenheimer devised a compromise whereby the laboratory was operated by the University of California under contract to the War Department. It soon turned out that Oppenheimer's estimates of the size of the project were extraordinarily optimistic. Los Alamos grew from a few hundred people in 1943 to over 6,000 in 1945.}}

In 1943, development efforts were directed to a plutonium gun-type fission weapon called "Thin Man". Initial research on the properties of plutonium was done using cyclotron-generated plutonium-239, which was extremely pure, but could only be created in tiny amounts. When Los Alamos received the first sample of plutonium from the X-10 Graphite Reactor in April 1944 a problem was discovered: reactor-bred plutonium had a higher concentration of plutonium-240, making it unsuitable for use in a gun-type weapon. In July 1944, Oppenheimer abandoned the gun design in favor of an implosion-type weapon. Using chemical explosive lenses, a sub-critical sphere of fissile material could be squeezed into a smaller and denser form. The metal needed to travel only very short distances, so the critical mass would be assembled in much less time. In August 1944, Oppenheimer implemented a sweeping reorganization of the Los Alamos laboratory to focus on implosion. He concentrated the development efforts on the gun-type device, a simpler design that only had to work with uranium-235, in a single group, and this device became Little Boy in February 1945. After a mammoth research effort, the more complex design of the implosion device, known as the "Christy gadget" after Robert Christy, another student of Oppenheimer's, was finalized in a meeting in Oppenheimer's office on February 28, 1945.

In May 1945, an Interim Committee was created to advise and report on wartime and postwar policies regarding the use of nuclear energy. The Interim Committee in turn established a scientific panel consisting of Compton, Fermi, Lawrence and Oppenheimer to advise it on scientific issues. In its presentation to the Interim Committee, the scientific panel offered its opinion not just on the likely physical effects of an atomic bomb, but on its likely military and political impact. This included opinions on such sensitive issues as whether or not the Soviet Union should be advised of the weapon in advance of its use against Japan.

Trinity

right|thumb|300px|The fireball at the Trinity nuclear test|alt=A bright red and orange fireball lights up the skyThe joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the first artificial nuclear explosion near Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, on a site that Oppenheimer codenamed "Trinity" in mid-1944. He later said this name was from one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. According to the historian Gregg Herken, this naming could have been an allusion to Jean Tatlock, who had committed suicide a few months previously and had in the 1930s introduced Oppenheimer to Donne's work. Oppenheimer later recalled that, while witnessing the explosion, he thought of a verse from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita: Years later he would explain that another verse had also entered his head at that time: namely, the famous verse: "", which he translated as "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

In 1965, he was persuaded to quote again for a television broadcast: According to his brother, at the time Oppenheimer simply exclaimed, "It worked." A contemporary account by Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, who was present in the control bunker at the site with Oppenheimer, summarized his reaction as follows: }}

For his services as director of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was awarded the Presidential Medal for Merit in 1946.

Postwar activities

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Manhattan Project became public knowledge and Oppenheimer became a national spokesman for science, emblematic of a new type of technocratic power. Nuclear physics became a powerful force as all governments of the world began to realize the strategic and political power that came with nuclear weapons and their horrific implications. Like many scientists of his generation, he felt that security from atomic bombs would come only from a transnational organization such as the newly formed United Nations, which could institute a program to stifle a nuclear arms race.

Institute for Advanced Study

In November 1945, Oppenheimer left Los Alamos to return to Caltech, but he soon found that his heart was no longer in teaching. In 1947, he accepted an offer from Lewis Strauss to take up the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. This meant moving back east and leaving Ruth Tolman, the wife of his friend Richard Tolman, with whom he had begun an affair after leaving Los Alamos. The job came with a salary of $20,000 per annum, plus rent-free accommodation in the director's house, a 17th century manor with a cook and groundskeeper, surrounded by of woodlands.

thumb|300px|left|Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ|alt=Four storey red brick building with a white clock tower.Oppenheimer brought together intellectuals at the height of their powers and from a variety of disciplines to solve the most pertinent questions of the age. He directed and encouraged the research of many well-known scientists, including Freeman Dyson, and the duo of Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, who won a Nobel Prize for their discovery of parity non-conservation. He also instituted temporary memberships for scholars from the humanities, such as T. S. Eliot and George F. Kennan. Some of these activities were resented by a few members of the mathematics faculty, who wanted the institute to stay a bastion of pure scientific research. Abraham Pais said that Oppenheimer himself thought that one of his failures at the institute was being unable to bring together scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities.

A series of conferences in New York from 1947 through 1949 saw physicists switch back from war work to theoretical issues. Under Oppenheimer's direction, physicists tackled the greatest outstanding problem of the pre-war years: infinite, divergent, and non-sensical expressions in the quantum electrodynamics of elementary particles. Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga tackled the problem of regularization, and developed techniques which became known as renormalization. Freeman Dyson was able to prove that their procedures gave similar results. The problem of meson absorption and Hideki Yukawa's theory of mesons as the carrier particles of the strong nuclear force were also tackled. Probing questions from Oppenheimer prompted Robert Marshak's innovative two-meson hypothesis: that there were actually two types of mesons, pions and muons. This led to Cecil Frank Powell's breakthrough and subsequent Nobel Prize for the discovery of the pion.

Atomic Energy Commission

As a member of the Board of Consultants to a committee appointed by President Harry S. Truman, Oppenheimer strongly influenced the Acheson–Lilienthal Report. In this report, the committee advocated creation of an international Atomic Development Authority, which would own all fissionable material and the means of its production, such as mines and laboratories, and atomic power plants where it could be used for peaceful energy production. Bernard Baruch was appointed to translate this report into a proposal to the United Nations, resulting in the Baruch Plan of 1946. The Baruch Plan introduced many additional provisions regarding enforcement, in particular requiring inspection of the Soviet Union's uranium resources. The Baruch Plan was seen as an attempt to maintain the United States' nuclear monopoly and was rejected by the Soviets. With this, it became clear to Oppenheimer that an arms race was unavoidable, due to the mutual suspicion of the United States and the Soviet Union, which even Oppenheimer was starting to distrust.

After the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) came into being in 1947 as a civilian agency in control of nuclear research and weapons issues, Oppenheimer was appointed as the Chairman of its General Advisory Committee (GAC). From this position he advised on a number of nuclear-related issues, including project funding, laboratory construction and even international policy—though the GAC's advice was not always heeded. As Chairman of the GAC, Oppenheimer lobbied vigorously for international arms control and funding for basic science, and attempted to influence policy away from a heated arms race. When the government questioned whether to pursue a crash program to develop an atomic weapon based on nuclear fusion—the hydrogen bomb—Oppenheimer initially recommended against it, though he had been in favor of developing such a weapon during the Manhattan Project. He was motivated partly by ethical concerns, feeling that such a weapon could only be used strategically against civilian targets, resulting in millions of deaths. He was also motivated by practical concerns, however, as at the time there was no workable design for a hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer felt that resources would be better spent creating a large force of fission weapons. He and others were especially concerned about nuclear reactors being diverted from plutonium to tritium production. They were overridden by Truman, who announced a crash program after the Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. Oppenheimer and other GAC opponents of the project, especially James Conant, felt personally shunned and considered retiring from the committee. They stayed on, though their views on the hydrogen bomb were well known.

In 1951, however, Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed what became known as the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb. This new design seemed technically feasible and Oppenheimer changed his opinion about developing the weapon. As he later recalled: }}

Security hearing

The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had been following Oppenheimer since before the war, when he showed Communist sympathies as a professor at Berkeley and had been close to members of the Communist Party, including his wife and brother. He had been under close surveillance since the early 1940s, his home and office bugged, his phone tapped and his mail opened. The FBI furnished Oppenheimer's political enemies with incriminating evidence about his Communist ties. These enemies included Lewis Strauss, an AEC commissioner who had long harbored resentment against Oppenheimer both for his activity in opposing the hydrogen bomb and for his humiliation of Strauss before Congress some years earlier; regarding Strauss's opposition to the export of radioactive isotopes to other nations, Oppenheimer had memorably categorized these as "less important than electronic devices but more important than, let us say, vitamins."

On June 7, 1949, Oppenheimer testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he admitted that he had associations with the Communist Party in the 1930s. He testified that some of his students, including David Bohm, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Philip Morrison, Bernard Peters and Joseph Weinberg, had been Communists at the time they had worked with him at Berkeley. Frank Oppenheimer and his wife Jackie testified before the HUAC and admitted that they had been members of the Communist Party. Frank was subsequently fired from his University of Michigan position. Unable to find work in physics for many years, he became instead a cattle rancher in Colorado. He later taught high school physics and was the founder of the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Oppenheimer had found himself in the middle of more than one controversy and power struggle in the years from 1949 to 1953. Edward Teller, who had been so uninterested in work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war that Oppenheimer had given him time instead to work on his own project of the hydrogen bomb, had eventually left Los Alamos to help found, in 1951, a second laboratory at what would become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, he could be free of Los Alamos control to develop the hydrogen bomb. Long-range thermonuclear "strategic" weapons delivered by jet bombers would necessarily be under control of the new United States Air Force (USAF). Oppenheimer had for some years pushed for smaller "tactical" nuclear weapons which would be more useful in a limited theater against enemy troops and which would be under control of the Army. The two services fought for control of nuclear weapons, often allied with different political parties. The USAF, with Teller pushing its program, gained ascendance in the Republican-controlled administration following the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president in 1952.

In 1950, Paul Crouch, Communist Party organizer for Alameda County from April 1941 to early January 1942, was the first person to accuse Oppenheimer of Communist Party ties. He testified before a Congressional committee that Oppenheimer had hosted a Communist Party meeting at his Berkeley home. The charges were widely publicized at the time. However, Oppenheimer was able to prove that he was in New Mexico at the time and Crouch over time was shown to be an unreliable informant. In November 1953, J. Edgar Hoover was sent a letter concerning Oppenheimer by William Liscum Borden, former executive director of Congress' Joint Atomic Energy Committee. In the letter, Borden stated his opinion "based upon years of study, of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union."

Strauss and Senator Brien McMahon, author of the 1946 McMahon Act, pushed Eisenhower to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. On December 21, 1953, Lewis Strauss told Oppenheimer that his security clearance had been suspended, pending resolution of a series of charges outlined in a letter, and discussed his resigning. Oppenheimer chose not to resign and requested a hearing instead. The charges were outlined in a letter from Kenneth D. Nichols, General Manager of the AEC. The hearing that followed in April–May 1954, which was initially confidential and not made public, focused on Oppenheimer's past Communist ties and his association during the Manhattan Project with suspected disloyal or Communist scientists. One of the key elements in this hearing was Oppenheimer's earliest testimony about George Eltenton's approach to various Los Alamos scientists, a story that Oppenheimer confessed he had fabricated to protect his friend Haakon Chevalier. Unknown to Oppenheimer, both versions were recorded during his interrogations of a decade before. He was surprised on the witness stand with transcripts of these, which he had not been given a chance to review. In fact, Oppenheimer had never told Chevalier that he had finally named him, and the testimony had cost Chevalier his job. Both Chevalier and Eltenton confirmed mentioning that they had a way to get information to the Soviets, Eltenton admitting he said this to Chevalier and Chevalier admitting he mentioned it to Oppenheimer, but both put the matter in terms of gossip and denied any thought or suggestion of treason or thoughts of espionage, either in planning or in deed. Neither was ever convicted of any crime.

Teller testified against Oppenheimer, saying that he considered him loyal, but of such questionable judgment that he should be relieved of clearance on the basis of bad decision-making. This led to outrage by the scientific community and Teller's virtual expulsion from academic science. Groves, threatened by the FBI as having been potentially part of a coverup about the Chevalier contact in 1943, likewise testified against Oppenheimer. Many top scientists, as well as government and military figures, testified on Oppenheimer's behalf. Inconsistencies in his testimony and his erratic behavior on the stand, at one point saying he had given a "cock and bull story" and that this was because he "was an idiot", convinced some that he was unstable, unreliable and a possible security risk. Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked one day before it was slated to lapse anyway. Isidor Rabi's comment was that Oppenheimer was merely a government consultant at the time anyway and that if the government "didn't want to consult the guy, then don't consult him."

During his hearing, Oppenheimer testified willingly on the left-wing behavior of many of his scientific colleagues. Had Oppenheimer's clearance not been stripped then he might have been remembered as someone who had "named names" to save his own reputation. As it happened, Oppenheimer was seen by most of the scientific community as a martyr to McCarthyism, an eclectic liberal who was unjustly attacked by warmongering enemies, symbolic of the shift of scientific creativity from academia into the military. Wernher von Braun summed up his opinion about the matter with a quip to a Congressional committee: "In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."

In a seminar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute on May 20, 2009, based on an extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks taken from the KGB archives, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev confirmed that Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union. The KGB tried repeatedly to recruit him, but was never successful; Oppenheimer did not betray the United States. In addition, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union.

Final years

Starting in 1954, Oppenheimer spent several months of the year living on the island of St. John in the Virgin Islands. In 1957, he purchased a tract of land on Gibney Beach, where he built a spartan home on the beach. He spent a considerable amount of time sailing with his daughter Toni and wife Kitty.

Increasingly concerned about the potential danger to humanity arising from scientific discoveries, Oppenheimer joined with Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Rotblat and other eminent scientists and academics to establish what would eventually become the World Academy of Art and Science in 1960. Significantly, after his public humiliation, he did not sign the major open protests against nuclear weapons of the 1950s, including the Russell–Einstein Manifesto of 1955, nor, though invited, did he attend the first Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957. In 1955 Oppenheimer published ''The Open Mind'', a collection of eight lectures that he had given since 1946 on the subject of nuclear weapons and popular culture. Oppenheimer rejected the idea of nuclear gunboat diplomacy. "The purposes of this country in the field of foreign policy," he wrote, "cannot in any real or enduring way be achieved by coercion." In 1957 the philosophy and psychology departments at Harvard invited Oppenheimer to deliver the William James Lectures. An influential group of Harvard alumni led by Edwin Ginn that included Archibald Roosevelt protested the decision. Some 1,200 people packed into Sanders Theatre to hear Oppenheimer's six lectures, entitled "The Hope of Order". Oppenheimer delivered the Whidden Lectures at McMaster University in 1962, and these were published in 1964 as ''The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for Physicists''.

Deprived of political power, Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write and work on physics. He toured Europe and Japan, giving talks about the history of science, the role of science in society, and the nature of the universe. In September 1957, France made him an Officer of the Legion of Honor, and on May 3, 1962, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in Britain. At the urging of many of Oppenheimer's political friends who had ascended to power, President John F. Kennedy awarded Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award in 1963 as a gesture of political rehabilitation. Edward Teller, the winner of the previous year's award, had also recommended Oppenheimer receive it, in the hope that it would heal the rift between them. A little over a week after Kennedy's assassination, his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, presented Oppenheimer with the award, "for contributions to theoretical physics as a teacher and originator of ideas, and for leadership of the Los Alamos Laboratory and the atomic energy program during critical years." Oppenheimer told Johnson: "I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today." The rehabilitation implied by the award was partly symbolic, as Oppenheimer still lacked a security clearance and could have no effect on official policy, but the award came with a $50,000 tax-free stipend, and its award outraged many prominent Republicans in Congress. The late President Kennedy's widow Jacqueline, still living in the White House, made it a point to meet with Oppenheimer to tell him how much her husband had wanted him to have the medal. While still a senator in 1959, Kennedy had been instrumental in voting to narrowly deny Oppenheimer's enemy Lewis Strauss a coveted government position as Secretary of Commerce, effectively ending Strauss' political career. This was partly due to lobbying by the scientific community on behalf of Oppenheimer.

A chain smoker since early adulthood, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with throat cancer in late 1965 and, after inconclusive surgery, underwent unsuccessful radiation treatment and chemotherapy late in 1966. He fell into a coma on February 15, 1967, and died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on February 18, aged 62. A memorial service was held at Alexander Hall at Princeton University a week later, which was attended by 600 of his scientific, political and military associates, including Bethe, Groves, Kennan, Lilienthal, Rabi, Smyth and Wigner. His brother Frank and the rest of his family were there, as was the historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., the novelist John O'Hara, and George Balanchine, the director of the New York City Ballet. Bethe, Kennan and Smyth gave brief eulogies. Oppenheimer was cremated and his ashes were placed in an urn. Kitty took his ashes to St. John and dropped the urn into the sea off the coast, within sight of the beach house.

Upon the death of Kitty Oppenheimer, who died of an intestinal infection complicated by pulmonary embolism in October 1972, Oppenheimer's ranch in New Mexico was inherited by their son Peter, and the beach property was inherited by their daughter Toni. Toni was refused security clearance for her chosen vocation as a United Nations translator after the FBI brought up the old charges against her father. Three months following the end of her second marriage, she committed suicide by hanging in the beach house in January 1977 and left it in her will to "the people of St. John for a public park and recreation area." The original house, built too close to the coast, succumbed to a hurricane, but today, the Virgin Islands Government maintains a Community Center in the area.

Legacy

When Oppenheimer was ejected from his position of political influence in 1954, he symbolized for many the folly of scientists thinking they could control how others would use their research. He has also been seen as symbolizing the dilemmas involving the moral responsibility of the scientist in the nuclear world. The hearings were motivated both by politics, as Oppenheimer was seen as a representative of the previous administration, and by personal considerations stemming from his enmity with Lewis Strauss. The ostensible reason for the hearing and the issue that aligned Oppenheimer with the liberal intellectuals, Oppenheimer's opposition to hydrogen bomb development, was based as much on technical grounds as on moral ones. Once the technical considerations were resolved, he supported Teller's hydrogen bomb because he believed that the Soviet Union would inevitably construct one too. Rather than consistently oppose the "Red-baiting" of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Oppenheimer testified against some of his former colleagues and students, both before and during his hearing. In one incident, his damning testimony against former student Bernard Peters was selectively leaked to the press. Historians have interpreted this as an attempt by Oppenheimer to please his colleagues in the government and perhaps to divert attention from his own previous left-wing ties and those of his brother. In the end it became a liability when it became clear that if Oppenheimer had really doubted Peters' loyalty, his recommending him for the Manhattan Project was reckless, or at least contradictory.

Popular depictions of Oppenheimer view his security struggles as a confrontation between right-wing militarists (symbolized by Teller) and left-wing intellectuals (symbolized by Oppenheimer) over the moral question of weapons of mass destruction. The question of the scientists' responsibility toward humanity inspired Bertolt Brecht's drama ''Galileo'' (1955), left its imprint on Friedrich Dürrenmatt's ''Die Physiker'', and is the basis of the opera ''Doctor Atomic'' by John Adams (2005), which was commissioned to portray Oppenheimer as a modern-day Faust. Heinar Kipphardt's play ''In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer'', after appearing on West German television, had its theatrical release in Berlin and Munich in October 1964. Oppenheimer's objections resulted in an exchange of correspondence with Kipphardt, in which the playwright offered to make corrections but defended the play. It premiered in New York in June 1968, with Joseph Wiseman in the Oppenheimer role. ''New York Times'' theater critic Clive Barnes called it an "angry play and a partisan play" that sided with Oppenheimer but portrayed the scientist as a "tragic fool and genius". Oppenheimer had difficulty with this portrayal. After reading a transcript of Kipphardt's play soon after it began to be performed, Oppenheimer threatened to sue the playwright, decrying "improvisations which were contrary to history and to the nature of the people involved." Later Oppenheimer told an interviewer:

The 1980 BBC TV serial ''Oppenheimer'', starring Sam Waterston, won three BAFTA Television Awards. ''The Day After Trinity'', a 1980 documentary about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the building of the atomic bomb, was nominated for an Academy Award and received a Peabody Award. In addition to his use by authors of fiction, Oppenheimer's life has been explored in numerous biographies, including ''American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer'' (2005) by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for 2006. A centennial conference and exhibit were held in 2004 at Berkeley, with the proceedings of the conference published in 2005 as ''Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections''. His papers are in the Library of Congress.

As a scientist, Oppenheimer is remembered by his students and colleagues as being a brilliant researcher and engaging teacher, the founder of modern theoretical physics in the United States. Because his scientific attentions often changed rapidly, he never worked long enough on any one topic to merit the Nobel Prize, although his investigations contributing to the theory of black holes may have warranted the prize had he lived long enough to see them brought into fruition by later astrophysicists. An asteroid, 67085 Oppenheimer, was named in his honor, as was the lunar crater Oppenheimer.

As a military and public policy advisor, Oppenheimer was a technocratic leader in a shift in the interactions between science and the military and the emergence of "Big Science". During World War II, scientists became involved in military research to an unprecedented degree. Because of the threat fascism posed to Western civilization, they volunteered in great numbers both for technological and organizational assistance to the Allied effort, resulting in such powerful tools as radar, the proximity fuse and operations research. As a cultured, intellectual, theoretical physicist who became a disciplined military organizer, Oppenheimer represented the shift away from the idea that scientists had their "head in the clouds" and that knowledge on such previously esoteric subjects as the composition of the atomic nucleus had no "real-world" applications.

Two days before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer expressed his hopes and fears in a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita: }}

Works

Books

(''posthumous'') (''posthumous'') (''posthumous'') (''posthumous'')

References

;Notes

;Citations

Bibliography

External links

Biography and online exhibit created for the centennial of his birth

PBS American Experience / ''The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer''

Was Oppenheimer a member of the Communist Party? documents on the question

On Atomic Energy, Problems to Civilization audio file of UC Berkeley talk, November 1946

Oppenheimer talking about the experience of the first bomb test (video file, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.")

Scanned and declassified government documents relating to the Oppenheimer Hearings and H-Bomb decision

Category:1904 births Category:1967 deaths Category:American Jews Category:Academics of the University of Cambridge Category:Alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge Category:American nuclear physicists Category:American people of German-Jewish descent Category:California Institute of Technology faculty Category:Cancer deaths in New Jersey Category:Enrico Fermi Award recipients Category:Ethical Culture Fieldston School alumni Category:Foreign Members of the Royal Society Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Institute for Advanced Study faculty Category:Jewish American scientists Category:Manhattan Project people Category:McCarthyism Category:People from New York City Category:Presidential Medal for Merit recipients Category:Theoretical physicists Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:University of Göttingen alumni Category:Weapons scientists and engineers Category:Officiers of the Légion d'honneur

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Coordinates	28°36′36″N77°13′48″N
Name	Rachel Maddow
birthname	Rachel Anne Maddow
birth date	April 01, 1973
birth place	Castro Valley, California, U.S.
education	B.A., Stanford UniversityD.Phil, Oxford University
occupation	News anchorPolitical commentatorTelevision host
credits	''The Rachel Maddow Show'' (MSNBC)''The Rachel Maddow Show'' (Air America Radio)
url	http://www.rachelmaddow.com/ }}

Rachel Anne Maddow (; born April 1, 1973) is an American television host and political commentator. Her syndicated talk radio program, ''The Rachel Maddow Show'', aired on Air America Radio. Maddow hosts a nightly television show, ''The Rachel Maddow Show'', on MSNBC. She was a guest host of ''Countdown with Keith Olbermann'' and ''Race for the White House''. Maddow is the first openly gay anchor to host a prime-time news program in the United States.

Asked about her political views by the ''Valley Advocate'', Maddow replied, "I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform."

Early life and education

Maddow was born in Castro Valley, California. She is the daughter of Robert B. "Bob" Maddow, a former United States Air Force captain and a lawyer for the East Bay Municipal Utility District, and Elaine Maddow (née Gosse), a school program administrator from Newfoundland, Canada. She has one older brother, David. Her father is of Russian and Dutch descent and her mother is of English and Irish ancestry. Maddow's mother was raised a strict Roman Catholic, and Maddow herself grew up in a community that her mother has described as "very conservative." Maddow was a competitive athlete and played three sports in high school. Referencing John Hughes films, she describes herself in high school as "a cross between the jock and the antisocial girl."

A graduate of Castro Valley High School in Castro Valley, California, Maddow earned a degree in public policy from Stanford University in 1994. At graduation she was awarded the John Gardner Fellowship. She was also the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and began her postgraduate study in 1995 at Lincoln College, Oxford. In 2001, she earned a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in politics from Oxford University. Her thesis is titled ''HIV/AIDS and Health Care Reform in British and American Prisons'' (supervisor: Dr Lucia Zedner). She was the first openly gay American to win a Rhodes scholarship.

Radio career

Maddow's first radio hosting job was at WRNX (100.9 FM) in Holyoke, Massachusetts, after she entered and won a contest the station held to find a new on-air personality. She was hired to co-host WRNX's morning show, ''The Dave in the Morning Show''. She went on to host ''Big Breakfast'' on WRSI, in Northampton, Massachusetts, for two years. She left the show in March 2004 to join the new Air America. There she hosted ''Unfiltered'' along with Chuck D (of the hip hop group Public Enemy) and Lizz Winstead (co-creator of ''The Daily Show''), until its cancellation in March 2005. Two weeks after the cancellation of ''Unfiltered'' in April 2005, Maddow's weekday two-hour radio program, ''The Rachel Maddow Show'', began airing; in March 2008 it gained an hour, broadcasting from 6 to 9 p.m. EST with David Bender filling in the third hour for the call-in section, when Maddow was on TV assignment. In September 2008, the show's length returned to two hours when Maddow began a nightly MSNBC television program. In February 2009, after renewing her contract with Air America, Maddow returned to the 5 am hourlong slot. Her last Air America show was on January 21, 2010, two weeks before its owners filed bankruptcy.

Television career

In June 2005, Maddow became a regular panelist on MSNBC's ''Tucker.'' During and after the November 2006 election, she was a frequent guest on CNN's ''Paula Zahn Now.'' In January 2008, Maddow was given the position of MSNBC political analyst and was a regular panelist on MSNBC's ''Race for the White House'' with David Gregory and MSNBC's election coverage, as well as a frequent contributor on ''Countdown with Keith Olbermann.''

In April 2008, Maddow was the substitute host for ''Countdown with Keith Olbermann'', her first time hosting a program on MSNBC. Maddow described herself on air as "nervous." Keith Olbermann complimented her work and she was brought back to host "Countdown" in May 2008. The day she hosted was the highest rated news program among people 25 to 54 years of age, a demographic key to ratings. For her success, the next Monday Olbermann ranked Maddow third in his show's segment "World's Best Persons". Maddow filled in again on ''Countdown'' for eight and a half broadcasts while Olbermann was on vacation in July 2008 and the second half of the show on July 21. Maddow also filled in for David Gregory as host of ''Race for the White House''.

''The Rachel Maddow Show''

MSNBC announced in August 2008 ''The Rachel Maddow Show'' would replace ''Verdict with Dan Abrams'' in the channel's 9 p.m. slot the next month. Since its debut, the show has topped ''Countdown'' as the highest rated show on MSNBC on several occasions. After being on air for more than a month, Maddow's program doubled the audience that hour.

Early reviews for her show were mostly positive. ''Los Angeles Times'' writer Matea Gold stated Maddow "finds the right formula on MSNBC," and ''The Guardian'' writes Maddow has become the "star of America's cable news." ''Associated Press'' columnist David Bauder said she's "[Keith] Olbermann's political soul mate" and the Olbermann-Maddow shows are a "liberal two-hour block."

Distinguishing herself from others on the left, Maddow said she's a "national security liberal" and in a different interview that she's not "a partisan." ''The New York Times'' called her a "defense policy wonk" who is writing a book on the role of the military in postwar American politics. During the 2008 presidential election, Maddow did not formally support any candidate. Concerning Barack Obama's candidacy, Maddow said during the primaries, "I have never and still don't think of myself as an Obama supporter, either professionally or actually."

Personal life

Maddow lives in Manhattan and western Massachusetts with her partner, artist Susan Mikula. The couple met in 1999, when Mikula hired Maddow to do yard work at her home. Maddow was working on her doctoral dissertation at the time. Their first date was at a National Rifle Association "Ladies' Day on the Range" event. Although Massachusetts recognizes same-sex marriage, as of 2009 Maddow and Mikula had no plans to marry.

As of 2008 Maddow did not own a television set, but was committed to getting one so that Mikula can watch her show.

2012 Massachusetts Senate race

In March 2010, Republican Scott Brown, the junior United States Senator from Massachusetts, speculated that Maddow was going to run against him for his seat in 2012. He used this premise for a fundraising email that read "...The Massachusetts political machine is looking for someone to run against me. And you're not going to believe who they are supposedly trying to recruit — liberal MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow." Maddow said Brown's speculation was false. On her March 23, 2010, TV program, Maddow said, "I have the best job in the world. I am not running for office. Scott Brown didn't ask me if I was running or planning to run for office, before he wrote a fundraising letter with my name. No, it's completely made up by him." Despite her comments, the next day Brown continued along the same line, telling a Boston radio station, "Bring her on." To help put an end to the matter, Maddow ran a full-page advertisement in the ''Boston Globe'' confirming she was not running, and separately demanded Brown's apology. She added that despite repeated invitations over the months, Brown had refused to appear on her TV program.

Honors and awards

Maddow was named in ''Out'' magazine's "Out 100" list of the "gay men and women who moved culture" in 2008. Maddow was voted "Lesbian/Bi Woman of the Year (American)" in AfterEllen's 2008 Visibility Awards. Maddow won a Gracie Award in 2009, presented by the American Women in Radio and Television. In 2009, Maddow was nominated for GLAAD's 20th Annual Media Awards for a segment of her MSNBC show, "Rick Warren, Change To Believe In?", in the Outstanding TV Journalism Segment category. On March 28, 2009, Maddow received a Proclamation of Honor from the California State Senate, presented in San Francisco by California State Senator Mark Leno. In April 2009, she was listed at number four in ''Out'' magazine's Annual Power 50 List. Maddow placed sixth in the "2009 AfterEllen.com Hot 100" list (May 11, 2009) and third in its "2009 Hot 100: Out Women" version. Maddow was included on a list of openly gay media professionals in The Advocate's "Forty under 40" issue of June/July 2009. In 1994, Maddow was an Honorable Mention in the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Prize in Ethics. In June 2009, Maddow's MSNBC show was the only cable news show nominated for a Television Critics Association award in the ''Outstanding Achievement in News and Information'' category. In March 2010, Maddow won at the 21st Annual GLAAD Media Awards in the category, ''Outstanding TV Journalism- Newsmagazine'' for her segment, "Uganda Be Kidding Me". Maddow was the 2010 commencement speaker and was given an honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) degree at Smith College in Northampton, MA in May 2010. In July 2010, Maddow was presented with a ''Maggie Award'' for her ongoing reporting of healthcare reform, the murder of Dr. George Tiller, and the anti-abortion movement. In August 2010, Maddow won the ''Walter Cronkite Faith & Freedom Award'', which was presented by The Interfaith Alliance. Past honorees included Larry King, Tom Brokaw, and the late Peter Jennings.

References

External links

Profile and show at MSNBC

Category:1973 births Category:Alumni of Lincoln College, Oxford Category:American anti–Iraq War activists Category:American people of Canadian descent Category:American political pundits Category:American Rhodes scholars Category:American talk radio hosts Category:American television personalities Category:American women journalists Category:LGBT journalists Category:LGBT people from the United States Category:LGBT radio personalities Category:LGBT rights activists from the United States Category:LGBT television personalities Category:Living people Category:MSNBC Category:NBC News Category:People from the San Francisco Bay Area Category:Stanford University alumni

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