One Path Through Los Alamos

摘要

Physicist Robert Oppenheimer would have been 100 years old last April—had he not died prematurely at age 62, a victim of throat cancer. Any centenary is traditionally a celebratory occasion, and "Oppie" has been the subject of several previous near-hagiographies. David Cassidy, a Hofstra University historian of 20th-century physics and the author of a well-received biography of Werner Heisenberg, has written a book that neither praises Oppenheimer nor buries his reputation but, rather, puts some tarnish upon the icon.