Oppenheimer - The Tragic Intellect

"Oppenheimer "reveals its subject as an expert for the state with broad cultural and moral authority. But Oppenheimer also played a crucial role in integrating the scientific community and defining the task of the physicist as nuclear weaponeer. The controversy over the hydrogen bomb and Oppenheimer's public fall from grace in the 1954 loyalty-security hearings revealed fundamental tensions at the heart of the modern technoscientific state, raising questions about the responsibility scientists should take for the technologies of death they produce. A stylish intellectual biography, "Oppenheimer" maps out changes in the roles of scientists and intellectuals in twentieth-century America, ultimately revealing transformations in Oppenheimer's persona that coincided with the changing attitudes toward science in society. Zusammenfassung At a time when the Manhattan Project was synonymous with large-scale science, physicist J Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67) represented the new sociocultural power of the American intellectual. This title traces the making - and unmaking - of Oppenheimer's wartime and postwar scientific identity.

Product details

• Authors: Charles Thorpe, Thorpe Charles
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.11.2006
• EAN: 9780226798455
• ISBN: 978-0-226-79845-5
• No. of pages: 384
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Nature, technology > Astronomy: general, reference works; SCIENCE / History, SCIENCE / Physics / General, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Science & Technology, History of Science, Physics, Biography: science, technology & medicine, Biography: science, technology and medicine