Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist who served as the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. He is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in overseeing the development of the first nuclear weapons.
"Our own political life is predicated on openness. We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert."
"Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of ones living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly."
"I found him excellent. We got along very well. We were friends until his last day. I enjoyed things about him that some people disliked. Its true you carried on a charade with him. He lived a charade, and you went along with it. It was fine — matching wits and so on — and I took him for what he was. I understood his problem. [What was his problem?] Identity. He reminded me of a boyhood friend about whom someone said that he couldnt make up his mind whether to be president of the Bnai Brith or the Knights of Columbus. Perhaps he wanted to be both simultaneously. Oppenheimer wanted every experience. In that sense he never focused. My own feeling is that if he had studied the Talmud and Hebrew, rather than Sanskrit, he would have been a much greater physicist."
"The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance — these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community."
"There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry … There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress."
"The extreme danger to mankind inherent in the proposal [to develop thermonuclear weapons] wholly outweighs any military advantage."
"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."
"I cant think that it would be terrible of me to say — and it is occasionally true — that I need physics more than friends."
"The Optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, the Pessimist fears it is true."
"The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another."
"There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men."
"It is the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue."
