J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life - Softcover

Pais, The Late Abraham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195327128 ISBN 13: 9780195327120

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

The late Abraham Pais, author of the award winning biography of Albert Einstein, Subtle is the Lord, here offers an illuminating portrait of another of his eminent colleagues, J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the most charismatic and enigmatic figures of modern physics.
Pais introduces us to a precocious youth who sped through Harvard in three years, made signal contributions to quantum mechanics while in his twenties, and was instrumental in the growth of American physics in the decade before the Second World War, almost single-handedly bringing it to a state of prominence. He paints a revealing portrait of Oppenheimer's life in Los Alamos, where in twenty remarkable, feverish months, and under his inspired guidance, the first atomic bomb was designed and built, a success that made Oppenheimer America's most famous scientist. Pais describes Oppenheimer's long tenure as Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, where the two men worked together closely. He shows not only Oppenheimer's brilliance and leadership, but also how his displays of intensity and arrogance won him powerful enemies, ones who would ultimately make him one of the principal victims of the Red Scare of the 1950s.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is Abraham Pais's final work, completed after his death by Robert P. Crease, an acclaimed historian of science in his own right. Told with compassion and deep insight, it is the most comprehensive biography of the great physicist available. Anyone seeking an insider's portrait of this enigmatic man will find it indispensable.

About this title

About the Author:

Abraham Pais was Detlev W. Bronk Professor Emeritus at The Rockefeller University in New York City. A leading theoretical physicist, he was also an esteemed science writer, the author of 'Subtle is the Lord...' for which he won the American Book Award, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Niels Bohr's Times, and several other books.

Robert P. Crease is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His most recent book is The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* "We pursue him, and he eludes us." So John Leonard remarked about the maddeningly elusive physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. And now the controversial scientist has slipped beyond the grasp of Pais, the much-acclaimed biographer of Einstein and Bohr. Pais, a longtime colleague of Oppenheimer, long postponed the writing of this life study because of deep personal ambivalence toward the man who presided over the making of America's first atomic bomb only to fall victim to McCarthy-era hysteria. As a consequence of that delay, Pais died before finishing his book. Surprisingly, readers may find that an unintentionally truncated book actually highlights the troubling incompleteness that Pais perceives in Oppenheimer's character. For although Pais details Oppenheimer's rare achievements as a researcher, teacher, and administrator, the portrait he finally delivers is that of a brilliant but arrogant mind falling short of lofty expectations. To the end of his life, Oppenheimer harbored a bitter consciousness of having himself failed to achieve any epoch-making discovery in the science he tirelessly promulgated. Pais' account of the personal contradictions within the man makes an excellent counterpoint to Bird and Sherwin's American Prometheus (2005), the award-winning, full-dress biography of Oppenheimer in which the emphasis falls on the more public side of his life, the Manhattan Project and its aftermath. In context with Bird and Sherwin, Pais offers an indispensable new look at the ever-enigmatic private Oppenheimer. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0195327128
• ISBN 13: 9780195327120
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 353