Oppenheimer : the tragic intellect / Charles Thorpe.
Material type:
Item type | Current location | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | University of Texas At Tyler Stacks - 3rd Floor | QC16 .O62 T56 2006 (Browse shelf) | Available | 0000001907542 |
Includes bibliographical references (p. [371]-396) and index.
Introduction : charisma, self, and sociological biography -- Struggling for self -- Confronting the world -- King of the hill -- Against time -- Power and vocation -- "I was an idiot" -- The last intellectual?
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. Catapulted to fame as director of the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory, Oppenheimer occupied a key position in the compact between science and the state that developed out of World War II. By tracing the making - and unmaking - of Oppenheimer's wartime and postwar scientific identity, Charles Thorpe illustrates the struggles over the role of the scientist in relation to nuclear weapons, the state, and culture. 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 changing attitudes toward science in society.
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