Nautilus

Freeman Dyson on How Robert Oppenheimer Ran Hot and Cold

Robert Oppenheimer could be extremely generous and friendly or he could be very harsh. He was very quick to judge and decide that somebody was no good, and then that was final.Photograph by Ed Westcott (U.S. Government photographer) / Wikicommons

ai Bird is miffed. His 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning book was exhaustively researched, but not quite to his satisfaction. Bird’s co-author, Michael J. Sherwin, had hit up Freeman Dyson, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, to open up about his time working with and under Oppenheimer, who, after having given birth to the, Bird couldn’t help but twinge.

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus8 min read
What Counts as Consciousness
Some years ago, when he was still living in southern California, neuroscientist Christof Koch drank a bottle of Barolo wine while watching The Highlander, and then, at midnight, ran up to the summit of Mount Wilson, the 5,710-foot peak that looms ove
Nautilus7 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
The Soviet Rebel of Music
On a summer evening in 1959, as the sun dipped below the horizon of the Moscow skyline, Rudolf Zaripov was ensconced in a modest dormitory at Moscow State University. Zaripov had just defended his Ph.D. in physics at Rostov University in southern Rus
Nautilus3 min read
Sardines Are Feeling the Squeeze
Sardines are never solitary. Even in death they are squeezed into a can, three or five to a tin, their flattened forms perfectly parallel. This slick congruity makes sense. In life, sardines are evolved for synchronicity: To avoid and confuse predato

Related Books & Audiobooks