Inside The Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer, as head of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico — the Manhattan Project — oversaw the Allies’ successful effort to beat the Nazis in developing the first atomic bomb in World War 2. Dig deeper, though, and Oppenheimer’s is a strange life; exotic and incomprehensible, like the subatomic world he studied.
A remarkable intelligence, and a leading figure in physics in the 1930s and 1940s, he was also a fragile personality — he had an unconventional upbringing, including a desire to downplay his Jewish heritage — and was ill-equipped emotionally to deal with accusations of disloyalty during the communist ‘red scare’ witch-hunts conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.
