Pandora's Keepers (28 page)

Robert Oppenheimer (wearing hat) and I. I. Rabi (holding sheet), two American postgraduates in Zurich, summer 1930, with Wolfgang Pauli (far right). In Europe, Oppenheimer and Rabi learned the latest physics, witnessed the rise of Nazism, and watched war clouds gather over the Continent. (
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence summering at Oppenheimer’s New Mexico ranch, 1931. They were very different, but they complemented each other professionally and liked each other personally—until political differences after the war sundered their friendship. (
Molly B. Lawrence, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Ernest Lawrence at the Rad Lab, Berkeley, in the summer of 1937. Fermi was visiting America from Italy, which he would leave the following year to escape Fascist persecution of his Jewish wife and children. (
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
, Physics Today
Collection
)

Participants at the Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics, January 1937. The annual conference attracted talented physicists from both sides of the Atlantic. Those attending in 1937 included Hans Bethe (front row, fourth from left), I. I. Rabi (above Bethe’s left shoulder), Niels Bohr (front row, second from right, wearing scarf), and Edward Teller (partially obscured, standing directly behind Bethe, two rows up). (
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Gamow and
Physics Today
Collections
)

THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

Leslie Groves (1896–1970), U.S. army general who directed the Manhattan Project during the war. He oversaw all aspects of the project: scientific, production, security, and planning for use of the bomb. Under his direction, project plants were built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. (©
CORBIS
)

A weekend hiking excursion in the Jemez Mountains near Los Alamos, winter 1944–1945. Such outings offered one of the few opportunities for scientists such as Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe (first and second on left) to relieve the stress of working on the bomb. (
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Segrè Collection
)

Niels Bohr on the ski hill above Los Alamos, January 1945. Bohr used such occasions to listen to other physicists’ anxieties about the bomb and to share his own views about the bomb’s revolutionary implications. (
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Segrè Collection
)

Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves at the Trinity Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, two months after the July 16, 1945, test. Intense heat generated by the world’s first atomic explosion vaporized the hundred-foot steel tower holding the bomb, gouged an enormous crater in the ground, and fused the surrounding sand into jadelike crystals. (©
Bettmann/CORBIS
)

Hiroshima, Japan, after the atomic bomb attack on August 6, 1945. The explosion caused widespread destruction, vividly illustrated by this photograph taken shortly after the attack. Civilians outnumbered soldiers in Hiroshima more than six to one. Over 75,000 inhabitants of the city perished that day, and tens of thousands more afterward due to burns, radiation, and other sicknesses. (©
Bettmann/CORBIS
)

AFTER THE WAR

Robert Oppenheimer’s signature porkpie hat on the cover of the May 1948 issue of
Physics Today
eloquently conveyed his fame after the war. Until his downfall in 1954, Oppenheimer remained America’s most celebrated and influential physicist. (
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
, Physics Today
Collection
)