Introduction : charisma, self, and sociological biography -- Struggling for self -- Confronting the world -- King of the hill -- Against time -- Power and vocation -- "I was an idiot" -- The last intellectual?
Summary
At a time when the Manhattan Project was synonymous with large-scale science, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67) represented the new sociocultural power of the American intellectual. Catapulted to fame as director of the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory, Oppenheimer occupied a key position in the compact between science and the state that developed out of World War II. By tracing the making - and unmaking - of Oppenheimer's wartime and postwar scientific identity, Charles Thorpe illustrates the struggles over the role of the scientist in relation to nuclear weapons and the state
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 371-396) and index
