Robert Oppenheimer. Life in the center. Monk R.

Robert Oppenheimer is one of the most controversial and important figures of the 20th century. Appointed by the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he was among those who led a successful project, which allowed the Nazis to get the first atomic bomb: this breakthrough entailed enormous and irreversible consequences for mankind and made Oppenheimer the “father of the atomic bomb”.

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< P> He possessed phenomenal intellectual qualities and had many different interests. Talent and determination allowed the young scientist to join the community of the greatest physicists - Bor, Born, Dirac, Einstein and others - to play his role in those days when the world changed forever in laboratories and educational audiences. The biography of Oppenheimer is a difficult consistent story of successful assimilation and scientific achievements leading to universal fame. A complex and subtle nature, he felt the consequences of discoveries made in Los Alamos, like a heavy load on his shoulders. Oppenheimer's attempts to confront the escalations of the arms race on time of the Cold War, taking into account its political sympathies and connections in the 1930s, forced many to doubt his loyalty-and inevitably led him to clashes with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his “witch hunters.”

As in the case of unsurpassed biographies of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, “Life in the Center” of Ray Monka is an outstanding research work. The history of discoveries, espionage, unthinkable decisions and unimaginable destruction, it reveals the deeper than other life descriptions of Oppenheimer, which moved this brilliant and contradictory person and what difficulties he faced.