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Dear Diary,
So I was reading about this guy called Oppenheimer...He's pretty famous,....Father of the American atom bomb...He was the main guy behind the Manhattan project and hence somewhat responsible for the hiroshima and Nagasaki events...You know, Feynman worked under him...Under him.
Funnily, all this time I thought he was the author of the signals and Systems text book of my 2nd year engineeringš ..But it turned out to be an Alan Oppenheim...No wonder, I'm sure robert would not have had time to write textbooks when he was busy making bombs..
Anyway,let's get to his story.
So he was born in a rich Jewish family in newyork. Went to Harvard and everything. Was very studious , his parents were so concerned about him, they put him with a roomie in college hoping he'd learn to socialise. But in the end, he converted his roomy also into a science geek. He went to england ti study chem and physics under famous scientists. ...A long list of scientists....It's crazy, I could remember each and everyone of them from my science textbook, Enrico Fermi ,paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli,. Heisenberg....He surpassed them all, ....Finally the us govt chose him to head the Manhattan project.
And he did,....When they did the test bombing in new mexico, he realised he'd created something so unimaginable and monstrous at the same time....I think he regretted it that moment...When he saw the mushroom clouds for the first time..
Them.he said the famous words from gita..."I'm become death, the destroyer of worlds"...
In the gita, it's krishna to Arjuna, and offcourse,it meant that in the course of universe, time would engulf anything and everything... That death becomes time...But here offcourse it becomes something so different and macabre at once..
Rest of his life, he spent trying to stop nuclear proliferation,...The us govt got wary of him later on, mainly because of his commie ties...Well not exactly, his wife and lover,..Both were heavy left-leaning so...They had their doubts....
Later on pres . Kennedy tried to placate him with an Enrico Fermi medal ....But by that time, he didn't care about any consolation prize. ..
He died a while later....From incurable throat cancer...It was in 67 I think...Or was he 67?...
A while later,his wife died,...His daughter suicided..Uggh...What an ugly theme for story telling....
It just shows u can't have everything in life....He had bouts of depression throughout life...He said, 'i need physics more than I need friends'...Physics was his escape from insanity in a way...And finally he died with the guilt of having killer thousands of people with his magnum opus of a work in physics.
..Ah well, history is fascinating isn't it?