Volume 50, Number 19 · December 4, 2003
The Strange Case of Robert Oppenheimer
By Daniel J. Kevles
Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller
by Gregg Herken
Henry Holt, 448 pp., $30.00
Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb
by Brian VanDeMark
Little, Brown, 339 pp. (withdrawn)
April next year will mark the centenary of the birth of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the generation that built the atomic bomb. He had been a Wunderkind, the son of well-to-do German Jews in New York City, a brilliant student of physics at Harvard and Göttingen. In the 1930s, teaching at both the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, he trained the United States' first vital school of theoretical physicists. Together with his students, he provided the theoretical analysis of the nuclear data that came pouring out of the cyclotrons at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. They were the product of the driving inventiveness and entrepreneurship of Ernest O. Lawrence, a midwesterner of uncomplicated ambitiousness whose work on big accelerator physics earned him a Nobel Prize in 1939.
Review, 5323 words
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