Image Credit: IMDb
Today, July 21, marks the release of Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated historical drama, Oppenheimer. The film is a biopic following the life of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his part in the development of the atomic bomb. Here we’ve collected some historical accounts relating to the events and characters from Nolan’s film, such as Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), and of course Oppenheimer himself. Whether you’re wanting to get familiar before watching the movie or you’re interested in diving deeper after seeing it, we’ve got you covered!
*Book descriptions provided by the publishers via the library catalog unless otherwise indicated.
The first full-scale biography of the “father of the atomic bomb,” the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the fire of the sun for his country in time of war. After Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation–an icon of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress. He created a radical proposal to place international controls over atomic materials, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb and criticized the Air Force’s plans to fight a nuclear war. In the hysteria of the early 1950s, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup, and people such as Edward Teller and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover worked behind the scenes to obtain a finding that he could not be trusted with America’s nuclear secrets. This book is both biography and history, significant to our understanding of our recent past–and of our choices for the future.
Brotherhood of the Bomb is the fascinating story of the men who founded the nuclear age, fully told for the first time. The story of the twentieth century is largely the story of the power of science and technology. Within that story is the incredible tale of the human conflict between Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller—the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction. How did science—and its practitioners—enlisted in the service of the state during the Second World War, become a slave to its patron during the Cold War? The story of these three men, builders of the bombs, is fundamentally about loyalty—to country, to science, and to each other—and about the wrenching choices that had to be made when these allegiances came into conflict.
Describes how Leslie Richard Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers enlisted the help of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer on a three-year collaboration that resulted in the U.S. beating the Nazis to the invention of the atomic bomb.
A scholarly biography of Lewis L. Strauss who shaped American atomic policy as member and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission between 1946 and 1958.
Edward Teller was one of the giants of the nuclear age. Born in 1908, he spent the best part of the Twentieth Century at the forefront of national and international defense strategies, becoming one of its most controversial and powerful scientific figures. Seen by some as a champion of freedom and democracy and by others as an enemy of humanity, few have had as profound an impact on the shape of the post-war world.
The story of Edward Teller is the story of the twentieth century. Born in Hungary in 1908, Teller witnessed the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism, two world wars, the McCarthy era, and the changing face of big science. A brilliant and controversial figure, Teller brings to these events a perspective that is at once surprising and insightful. In clear and compelling prose, Teller chronicles the people and events that shaped him as a scientist, beginning with his early love of music and math, and continuing with his study of quantum physics under Werner Heisenberg. Present at many of the pivotal moments in modern science, Teller also describes his relationships with some of the century’s greatest minds—Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Szilard, von Neumann—and offers an honest assessment of the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the founding of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and his complicated relationship with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Writing about those aspects of his life that have had important public consequences—from his conservative politics to his relationships with scientists and presidents—Teller reveals himself to be a man with deep beliefs about liberty, security, and the moral responsibility of science.
Revered biographer Ray Monk solves the enigma of Robert Oppenheimer’s life and personality and brilliantly illuminates his contribution to the revolution in twentieth-century physics. In Robert Oppenheimer, Ray Monk delves into the rich and complex intellectual life of America’s most fascinating and elusive scientist, the father of the atomic bomb. As a young professor at Berkeley, the wealthy, cultured Oppenheimer finally came into his own as a physicist and also began a period of support for Communist activities. At the high point of his life, he was chosen to lead the Manhattan Project and develop the deadliest weapon on earth: the atomic bomb. Upon its creation, Oppenheimer feared he had brought mankind to the precipice of self-annihilation and refused to help create the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, bringing the wrath of McCarthyite suspicion upon him. In the course of famously dramatic public hearings, he was stripped of his security clearance. Drawing on original research and interviews, Monk traces the wide range of influences on Oppenheimer’s development–his Jewishness, his social isolation at Harvard, his love of Sanskrit, his radical politics. This definitive portrait finally solves the enigma of the extraordinary, charming, tortured man whose beautiful mind fundamentally reshaped the world.
If Richard Feynman had not existed it would not be possible to create him. The most extraordinary scientist of his time, a unique combination of dazzling intellect and touching simplicity, Feynman had a passion for physics that was merely the Nobel Prize-winning part of an immense love of life and everything it could offer. He was hugely irreverent and always completely honest – with himself, with his colleagues, and with nature.
This intimate, moving, and funny book traces Feynman’s remarkable adventures inside and outside science, in words and in more than one hundred photographs, many of them supplied by his family and close friends. It gives vivid insight into the mind of a great creative scientist at work and at play, and it challenges the popular myth of the scientist as a cold reductionist dedicated to stripping romance and mystery from the natural world. Feynman’s enthusiasm is wonderfully infectious. It shines forth in these photographs and in his tales – how he learned science from his father and the Encyclopedia Britannica, working at Los Alamos on the first atomic bomb, reflecting on the marvels of electromagnetism, unraveling the mysteries of liquid helium, probing the causes of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, or simply trying to find a way through Russian bureaucracy to visit the mysterious central Asian country of Tannu Tuva. Feynman’s story will fascinate nonscientists who would like to share something of the joys of scientific discovery, and it will delight those scientists who use Feynman’s work but who never had a chance to meet him.
On the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, Nobel-winning physicist Hans Bethe called on his fellow scientists to stop working on weapons of mass destruction. What drove Bethe, the head of Theoretical Physics at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, to renounce the weaponry he had once worked so tirelessly to create? That is one of the questions answered by Nuclear Forces, a riveting biography of Bethe’s early life and development as both a scientist and a man of principle.
Student, collaborator and lifelong friend of Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segrè presents a rich, well-rounded portrait of the scientist, his methods, intellectual history, and achievements. Explaining in nontechnical terms the scientific problems Fermi faced or solved. Enrico Fermi: Physicist contains illuminating material concerning Fermi’s youth in Italy and the development of his scientific style. Emilio Segre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1959.
Mrs. Fermi tells of her life with her famous husband who produced the first chain reaction that led to the atom bomb, and was winner of the Nobel Prize and the Congressional Medal for Merit. This memoir has become a classic.
Recounts the scientific discoveries that enabled atom splitting, the military intelligence operations that occurred in rival countries, and the work of brilliant scientists hidden at Los Alamos.
In this book the author traces the story of the unsung World War II workers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee through interviews with dozens of surviving women and other Oak Ridge residents. This is the story of the young women of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who unwittingly played a crucial role in one of the most significant moments in U.S. history. The Tennessee town of Oak Ridge was created from scratch in 1942. One of the Manhattan Project’s secret cities, it did not appear on any maps until 1949, and yet at the height of World War II it was using more electricity than New York City and was home to more than 75,000 people, many of them young women recruited from small towns across the South. Their jobs were shrouded in mystery, but they were buoyed by a sense of shared purpose, close friendships, and a surplus of handsome scientists and Army men. But against this wartime backdrop, a darker story was unfolding. The penalty for talking about their work, even the most innocuous details, was job loss and eviction. One woman was recruited to spy on her coworkers. They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb “Little Boy” was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents of Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. Though the young women originally believed they would leave Oak Ridge after the war, many met husbands there, made lifelong friends, and still call the seventy-year-old town home. The reverberations from their work there, work they did not fully understand at the time, are still being felt today.
Union University Library Blog 