It's Robert Oppenheimer's 100th birthday.

[NNadir]

"LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 27 - Too bad J. Robert Oppenheimer did not live to attend his 100th-birthday party here over the weekend.

The "father of the atomic bomb," who died in 1967, might have enjoyed mingling with the octogenarians who helped build the bomb...

...More than half a century before Sept. 11, 2001, Oppenheimer foresaw the threat of terrorists' possessing nuclear bombs and hiding them for detonation on American shores. Along with Niels Bohr and others, he said the only ways to forestall such threats were to open every shipping container with screwdrivers or, alternatively, to give away nuclear technology, free, to every nation.

Any system based on outlawing military development of atomic energy or relying solely on inspection will not work, they said. Rather, nations need to collectively take control of uranium resources and make their uses transparent so that every country can keep an eye on every other..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/science/29alam.html?pagewanted=2

[bobbieinok]

1. wasn't he investigated for communist sympathies in the 50s???

[NNadir]

2. Yes and his security clearance was revoked in 1954.

Like many, though not all, of the Manhattan project scientists, Oppenheimer had strong leftist sympathies.

Oppenheimer probably had never been a communist himself, but his wife had been previously married to a communist who was killed in the Spanish Civil War. His brother Frank, not as famous as his brother, but also a world class physicist, also had been a communist in the early thirties.

The 1950's were, with the exception of the current era, the most dangerous time after the Civil War in which the basic freedoms and rights of the American people were seriously threatened. Many outrageous acts, both petty and serious were committed by governmental and extra governmental bodies in this time of the "Red Scare." Many people lost their jobs and homes based merely on suspicion.

Robert Oppenheimer kept his job at the Institute of Advanced Studies, though he worked under a cloud of extreme suspicion. Frank was fired from his job and could not find any work except as a high school physics teacher in rural Colorado. This of course was a huge benefit for the high school students. It also partially made up for what the world lost when Frank was unable to do serious science because of politics. During his tenure as a teacher, Frank developed many simple hands on demonstrations for his students. Inspired by these, after the Red Scarre was over, Frank put them together on some empty space in San Francisco, thus founding one of the world's first premier "hands on" science museums, the famous Exploratorium that survives until this day.

[bobbieinok]

3. wow - I didn't know that about the origin of the Exploratorium