Inside the Centre: The Life and Work of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Physics Colloquium 21st November 2014 delivered by Prof Ray Monk This lecture attempts to tell the story of Oppenheimer’s life in the context of the momentous developments - social, political and scientific - in which he played a leading part. It begins with an account of the German Jewish community in New York in which he was brought up in the first decades of the twentieth century and then describes his progress as a student, his development as a physicist, his involvement in the left-wing politics in the 1930s, and his unlikely choice as director of the laboratory in Los Alamos that produced the world’s first atomic bomb. The lecture then describes his attempts after the war to secure international control over atomic energy, his opposition to the hydrogen bomb and the security hearing of 1954 that stripped him of his security clearance, after which he was a broken man. As the lecture will show, however, by the time he died in 1967 his reputation - as a scientist, a statesman and a loyal US citizen - had been well and truly re-established. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Om Podcasten

The Department of Physics public lecture series. An exciting series of lectures about the research at Oxford Physics take place throughout the academic year. Looking at topics diverse as the creation of the universe to the science of climate change. Features episodes previously published as: (1) 'Oxford Physics Alumni': "Informal interviews with physics alumni at events, lectures and other alumni related activities." (2) 'Physics and Philosophy: Arguments, Experiments and a Few Things in Between': "A series which explores some of the links between physics and philosophy, two of the most fundamental ways with which we try to answer our questions about the world around us. A number of the most pertinent topics which bridge the disciplines are discussed - the nature of space and time, the unpredictable results of quantum mechanics and their surprising consequences and perhaps most fundamentally, the nature of the mind and how far science can go towards explaining and understanding it. Featuring interviews with Dr. Christopher Palmer, Prof. Frank Arntzenius, Prof. Vlatko Vedral, Dr. David Wallace and Prof. Roger Penrose."