Annotation on 2023-09-10T14:35:46.000
“One would listen patiently to an argument beginning, and finally Oppenheimer would summarize, and he would do it in such a way that there was no disagreement. It was a kind of magical trick that brought respect from all those people, some of them superiors in terms of their scientific record. . . .
Annotation on 2023-09-10T15:16:07.000
. Raised as a Quaker, Condon once told a friend, “I join every organization that seems to have noble goals. I don’t ask whether it contains Communists.”
Annotation on 2023-09-06T19:38:25.000
There was a rhythm now to his life: intense intellectual work, at times to the point of near exhaustion, followed by a month or more of renewal on horseback in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico.
Annotation on 2023-09-06T20:07:59.000
different from any mental picture of how things should behave in the universe.”
Annotation on 2023-09-13T23:30:29.000
On this occasion he had had the opportunity to impress the one man who possessed the power to help him return the nuclear genie to the bottle—and he utterly failed to take advantage of the opportunity.
Annotation on 2023-09-06T19:46:32.000
. He had the extraordinary ability to speak in complete, grammatically correct English sentences, without notes, pausing on occasion, as if between paragraphs, to stutter his oddly lilting
Annotation on 2023-09-09T15:33:15.000
Pash had little patience for bureaucracy; he considered himself a man of action.
Annotation on 2023-09-06T01:53:32.000
The Hungarian-born mathematician John Von Neumann would later work for Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project.
Annotation on 2023-09-11T22:58:25.000
. Over the next seven weeks, father and son were thoroughly briefed about “Tube Alloys”—the British code name for the bomb project.
Annotation on 2023-09-09T17:32:09.000
Exactly what each man said is lost to history; neither made contemporaneous notes of the conversation.
Annotation on 2023-09-06T12:28:09.000
That summer of 1928, Robert was also reading the 1922 novel The
Annotation on 2023-09-07T12:11:52.000
During the years 1936–39, the defense of the Spanish Republic was the cause célèbre in liberal circles everywhere. Over these years, some 2,800 Americans volunteered to fight the fascists by joining the communist-sponsored Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In
Annotation on 2023-09-06T20:07:49.000
“It was hard for people of that era to understand the paper because the things that were being smoked out of the mathematics were so
Annotation on 2023-09-10T11:35:58.000
He always looked at the person he was talking to; he always gave everything he could to the person he was talking to.”
Annotation on 2023-09-06T10:36:27.000
Unfortunately, Born tells me that he has the same difficulty about expressing himself clearly in writing which we observed at Harvard.
Annotation on 2023-09-06T10:24:47.000
One had intellectual indigestion most of the time that year,
Annotation on 2023-09-19T11:03:56.000
would like you to know that I and everybody who feels as I do are fully aware that you are fighting here our own fight. Somehow Fate has chosen you as the one who has to bear the heaviest load in this struggle. . . . Who else in this country could represent better than you the spirit and the philosophy of all that for which we are living. Please think of us when you are low. . . . I beg you to remain what you always have been, and things will end well.” It
Annotation on 2023-08-31T01:46:14.000
I do so want you to be able to enjoy life in its best and fullest sense, and you will help me take care of you? To take care of someone whom one really loves has an indescribable sweetness of which a whole lifetime cannot rob me. Good-night, dearest.” On
Annotation on 2023-09-20T22:58:37.000
I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
Annotation on 2023-09-15T00:53:13.000
, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism. MacLeish
Annotation on 2023-09-20T02:27:01.000
The Oppenheimer hearing thus represented a significant step in the narrowing of the public forum during the early Cold War.
Annotation on 2023-09-20T02:11:40.000
Lewis, the difference between you and me is that you see everything as either black or white and to me everything looks gray.
Annotation on 2023-09-10T14:32:29.000
.” He rarely gave orders, and instead managed to communicate his desires, as the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled, “very easily and naturally, with just his eyes, his two hands, and a half-lighted pipe.
Annotation on 2023-09-19T23:01:25.000
I would accept a considerable amount of political immaturity in return for this rather esoteric, this rather indefinite, theoretical thinking that I believe we are going to be dependent on for the next generation.”
Annotation on 2023-09-06T12:35:19.000
. He is doubtless very gifted but completely without mental discipline. He’s outwardly very modest, but inwardly very arrogant.”
Annotation on 2023-09-06T19:48:02.000
. Once, when questioned about a particular equation on the blackboard, Oppenheimer replied, “No, not that one; the one underneath.” But when perplexed students pointed out that there was no equation underneath, Robert said, “Not below, underneath. I have written over it.” Glenn
Annotation on 2023-09-09T14:59:27.000
“He combines a penetrating insight of the theoretical aspects of the whole program with solid common sense, which sometimes in certain directions seems to be lacking. . . .
Annotation on 2023-09-10T11:36:29.000
, “he’d say ‘Gee’ and it was just lovely to hear him say ‘Gee.’
Annotation on 2023-09-06T20:02:03.000
He worked “fast and dirty, like the American way of building a machine.” In
Annotation on 2023-09-06T10:33:14.000
the context and the academic window dressing were clutter that disturbed his acute aesthetic sense.
Annotation on 2023-09-20T02:22:51.000
. The term ‘security risk’ is such a broad one that you can start out accusing a fellow of treason and end up by convicting him of fibbing,
Annotation on 2023-09-08T01:04:15.000
last. The bottom line is that Robert always wished to be, and was, free to think for himself and to make his own political choices.
Annotation on 2023-09-20T02:17:46.000
He [Oppenheimer] will no longer have access to secrets in government files, and government, presumably, will no longer have access to secrets that may be born in Oppenheimer’s brain.”
Annotation on 2023-09-15T20:51:27.000
strange.
Annotation on 2023-09-19T00:40:24.000
, “We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.” It
Annotation on 2023-09-02T08:21:41.000
He christened it the Trimethy, a name derived from the chemical compound trimethylene dioxide.
Annotation on 2023-09-10T11:34:15.000
McKibbin and Oppenheimer were to become lifelong friends. Robert called her by her nickname, “Dink,” and quickly learned to rely on her good judgment and her ability to get things done.
Annotation on 2023-09-08T01:04:49.000
. The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left.
Annotation on 2023-09-20T23:00:13.000
Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, and then came the Bhagavad-Gita . . . and last was Shakespeare’s Hamlet. IN
Annotation on 2023-09-06T12:37:08.000
by this spirited delivery that they began calling him “Opje”—an affectionate contraction of his last name—and he would bear the new nickname for