Oppenheimer

The Tragic Intellect

Charles Thorpe

414 pages, parution le 07/02/2007

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Résumé

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, the state, and culture.

Oppenheimer reveals its subject as an expert for the state with broad cultural and moral authority. But Oppenheimer also played a crucial role in integrating the scientific community and defining the task of the physicist as nuclear weaponeer. The controversy over the hydrogen bomb and Oppenheimer's public fall from grace in the 1954 loyalty-security hearings revealed fundamental tensions at the heart of the modern technoscientific state, raising questions about the responsibility scientists should take for the technologies of death they produce.

A stylish intellectual biography, Oppenheimer maps out changes in the roles of scientists and intellectuals in twentieth-century America, ultimately revealing transformations in Oppenheimer's persona that coincided with the changing attitudes toward science in society.

L'auteur - Charles Thorpe

Charles Thorpe is lecturer in science and technology studies at University College London.

Sommaire

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?

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Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	The University of Chicago Press
Auteur(s)	Charles Thorpe
Parution	07/02/2007
Nb. de pages	414
Format	16,5 x 23,5
Couverture	Relié
Poids	740g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780226798455
ISBN13	978-0-226-79845-5