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| Jan-20-06 | | morphyvsfischer: The American Museum of Science in Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is truly phenomenal. The building of the bomb and the formation of the city is quite interesting. |
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| Jun-29-06 | | ismetov: That is very open info about chess,chess player, education and intelligent.maybe Alechin was right. Chess player is born. on the world some Ph. inventor engineer so high intelligent people know chess only middle intermediate . here Oppenheimer |
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| Jan-09-07 | | karnak64: Some new biographies of Oppenheimer have been published. Reviews in The New Atlantis: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archi... |
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| Jan-10-07 | | M.D. Wilson: Paul Nemenyi worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago as a fluid dynamics specialist hand picked by his friend and associate from the 20's, Oppenheimer. He worked on the mechanism which triggered the bomb. Small world huh? |
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Jan-23-07
 | | BishopBerkeley: Physicist Freeman Dyson's statement on the psychology of nuclear weapons developers is somewhat Oppenheimeresque in its eloquence: "I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds." from the documentary film, "The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb" (1980). |
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Jul-02-07
| | BishopBerkeley: Who coined the term "atomic bomb"? Strangely, it appears to have been H. G. Wells in his 1914 book "The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind". Consider this strangely prescient passage from this 1914 publication [subject to the vagaries of my limited typing skills]: "I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army, nor had we any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact about us. Our mental setting had far more the effect of a huge natural catastrophe. The atomic bomb had dwarfed the international issues to complete insignificance. When our minds wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use of these frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed. For to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors might easily shatter every relationship and institution of mankind. " 'What will they be doing," asked Mylius, 'what will they be doing? It's plain we've got to put an end to war. It's plain things have to be run some other way. This -- all this -- is impossible...." from pages 145-6 of "The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind" by Herbert George Wells, 1914. Source:
http://books.google.com/books?id=dg... If you use the Google Books search tool at the lower right with the phrases "atomic bomb" or "atomic bombs," you will find many references. (I haven't read them all yet and am not likely to in the next few day -- if anyone turns up some especially interesting passages, please consider posting them here -- thanks in advance.) It would not be until 1933 that Hungarian physicist and polymath Leó Szilárd would first imagine a nuclear chain reaction that would result in an atomic bomb. (The thought is said to have popped into his mind while he was waiting for a traffic light on Southampton Row.) A recent review of a new book on Leó Szilárd and others (including the real "Dr. Strangelove," Edward Teller) in the London Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/mai... Curious, curious....
♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗
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| Jul-02-07 | | beenthere240: Stanislaw Ulam, who is widely credited as being the "co-father of the H-Bomb," was probably an expert class chess player (I think he placed at a New Mexico State Championship). He wrote a fascinating book call "Adventures of a Mathematician." |
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Sep-26-07
| | BishopBerkeley: Professor Oppenheimer's Top Ten Books
"In 1963, Christian Century magazine asked [J. Robert Oppenheimer] to list the ten books that 'did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life.' Along with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Eliot’s Waste Land, Oppenheimer listed the [Bhagavad] Gita. [Here is his complete "Top Ten Books" list. It is not clear if the order of listing is significant]: Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
Eliot's "Waste Land"
The Bhagavad-Gita
Baudlaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal"
Bhartrihari's "The Three Centuries (Satakatrayam)"
Dante's "The Divine Comedy"
Michael Faraday's "Notebooks"
Flaubert's "L'Education sentimentale"
Plato's "Theaetetus"
G. F. Bernhard Riemann's collected works
From a very interesting article titled "The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer" worthwhile (by James Hijiya, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth; published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 2000 -- in PDF format) http://alsos.wlu.edu/information.as...
The "Gita" (Sanskrit "Song") referred to here is the "Bhagavad-Gita," the sublime Hindu scripture that Oppenheimer when recalling the fiery mushroom cloud of the first atomic bomb, "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds" |
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| Sep-26-07 | | noendgame: Clay Jenkinson is a scholar/actor who portreys historical figures. He is best known for his Thomas Jefferson but he also does a terrific Oppenheimer: http://www.jeffersonhour.org/?id=20... He researches each character so thoroughly that he virtually becomes them on stage. |
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Aug-05-08
 | | Benzol: August 6th, Hiroshima Day. |
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| Jan-18-09 | | M.D. Wilson: Paul Dirac, who many consider to be the preeminent physicist of the 20th Century, said Oppenheimer should have focused less on poetry and classics and more on physics. His view of physics was a bit mystical and lacked the objective realism of Heisenberg or Pauli, for example, but his genius is unquestionable. He also moved from topic to topic, so he never really focused on any one problem long enough to make Nobel-winning discoveries. However his postulates regarding neutron stars and black holes come pretty close; but, alas, throat cancer claimed his life. |
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| Jan-18-09 | | Calli: The Dirac quote on Oppenheimer's interest in poetry is "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible." |
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Jan-18-09
 | | Sneaky: "I am become death, and all your base are belong to us." -- Oppenheimer |
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| Jan-19-09 | | M.D. Wilson: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Some say that after witnessing the Trinity explosion in July 1945, Oppenheimer simply said "It works!" |
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| Feb-04-09 | | laskereshevsky: In the video Oppenheimer say:
"...I REMEMBERED the line from the Hindu scripture..." Maybe the <physicist> said "It works!" happily thinking to all the efforts made it during years of work.... and the <man> had in mind fears and morals doubts about what they did, what they created.... |
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| Feb-05-09 | | M.D. Wilson: Do you have a link for that video, laskereshevsky? I remember an interview where Oppenheimer eloquently shared his views on the matter; he seemed sullen and deeply affected by it. |
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| Feb-05-09 | | laskereshevsky: <M.D. Wilson> Sorry, I forgot to mention that the video is here on this page..... If U scroll up the page till the post wrote the Aug-23-05 by: <BishopBerkeley:> the video is there.... and by your description of the Oppenheimer's feeling, i think the mine and the your reffered interview's video is the same one |
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| Feb-06-09 | | M.D. Wilson: Thanks laskereshevsky, you're a scholar and a gentleman. Yes, it's the same video. |
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| Mar-11-09 | | Dredge Rivers: Oppenheimer was no Communist, he was just a fool. It's sad that a barely educated Missouri farmer (Truman) understood more about the way the world works that this guy, but it's all too true. |
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| Mar-17-09 | | M.D. Wilson: Oppenheimer had communist sympathies. For most of his life, however, he was apolitical. |
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| Apr-01-09 | | whiteshark: Actually Robert was the marketing man. He invented of the famous German <white wine <Oppenheimer Krötenbrunnen>> when travelling through Rhineland-Palatinate. Look what it means: http://www.oppenheim-tourismus.de/b... It is sweet wine from late picked extra ripe grapes. Quite full fruit flavours. Appealing, easy to drink for those who prefer a sweeter wine which is less heavy and more delicate than from other parts of the world. Chin-chin! |
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| Apr-30-09 | | WhiteRook48: he got his queen pinned down a black hole |
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| Apr-30-09 | | parisattack: <beenthere240: Stanislaw Ulam, who is widely credited as being the "co-father of the H-Bomb," was probably an expert class chess player (I think he placed at a New Mexico State Championship). He wrote a fascinating book call "Adventures of a Mathematician."> Professor Ulam lectured each semester for Eugene Salome's Honors course, "The Chess Tradition in Man's Culture" at the University of Colorado. I was Prof Salome's student assistant and still have the tapes of Prof Ulam (and all the others - including Vladimir Nabokov who spoke on Luzhin's Defense). My recollection is Ulam played expert-level chess...but it has been 40 years. |
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| Jan-11-10 | | black.pr0jekt: a classical example that ability in chess and mathematics are not related |
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| Aug-14-11 | | sfm: <black.pr0jekt: a classical example that ability in chess and mathematics are not related>
No. Nothing can be concluded from a single game of chess, unless you know the players history and how many games he played.
As for the game given: If he'd been taught the rules the day earlier he'd have to be one of the most brilliant chess minds ever born. |
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