New Oppenheimer files

[pines-demon]

I already posted an article by Physics World in the Biography, history, philosophy of physics sources on the recently found interview of J. Robert Oppenheimer that was restored. Here is another article by Physics Today:

• R. Dahn, "Oppenheimer reflects on his early career" (May 2026) https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/oppenheimer-reflects-on-his-early-career

I found two interesting sections. The first is Oppenheimer talking about the Born–Oppenheimer paper and calling it dull:

He produced this thing which must be thirty pages long but which has nothing else in it except a few theorems which are fairly obvious, the mean of the average or the average of the mean are sometimes equal, and so on. I didn’t like it, but it was obviously not possible for me to protest to a senior author...
That’s the origin of the dull opus. I think I probably had nothing to do with the writing of the long paper; I may have changed a few things, put in a sentence or taken out a sentence, but certainly very minor, and it was certainly not something that was comfortable between us. It was obviously a rather deep difference of taste which was not something you could argue about.

There is also an extended explanation of Oppenheimer's "I am become death" quote:

Vishnu was trying to convince Arjuna who started out as a pacifist that a man must do his duty and that his soul is good, it is affected by whether he does his duty but not by whether he does harm. Real harm cannot be done by man. And this goes on for 30 chapters. And at one point he assumes his most awful form and says to Argina,

I am become death the destroyer of worlds.

And this is the line that came to mind. And when he is all through with that, he then goes back and says,

Now I have resumed my normal four-armed form.

And I remember it always because I read it with a student at Berkeley who said to me the first time,

I suppose that’s how a young man feels when he is behind the wheel of a powerful car.

This came to my mind (the line from Bhagavad-Gita) when I saw the light of the bomb. I was turned away from it, at the left of the door, looking out toward Mockingbird Gap. It was much brighter than sunlight, it had a golden quality. The first evidence that I had that something had happened was that the whole desert lighted up in the most brilliant golden light, and that’s all.