"The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer"

Coming Monday, January 26th on PBS's American Experience..."The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer".

PBS:

The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2 hours)

Robert Oppenheimer's life and legacy are inextricably linked to America's most famous top-secret initiative -- the Manhattan Project. But after World War II, this brilliant and intense scientist, tasked with the development of the atomic bomb and widely considered one of the most important minds of the twentieth century, fell from the innermost circles of American scientific policy. At the height of the Red Scare, the veil of suspicion fell over J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was accused of having communist sympathies and was pressed to explain his relationships with known communists.

This biography will present a complex and revealing portrait of one of the most influential American scientists. Interweaving interviews with family members, scholars and colleagues with dramatic recreations featuring Academy Award-nominated actor David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck, and The Bourne Ultimatum), this film follows J. Robert Oppenheimer on a fascinating arc from the heady world of international physics to the top-secret Manhattan Project, and finally to the dark days of the Red Scare and McCarthyism.

David Grubin, Producer
Filmmaker David Grubin has won every major award in his field, including three George Foster Peabody awards, two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University awards, and nine Emmys. Mr. Grubin has produced over 100 films on subjects ranging from history to art, from poetry to science.

Grubin's five-part series for PBS, Healing And The Mind with Bill Moyers, has won many awards, and the companion book, for which he was executive editor, rose to number one on The New York Times Best Sellers List. He won a Writers Guild Award for his biography of Marie Antoinette, which aired on PBS in September 2006. His most recent work is a six-hour series, The Jewish Americans, which aired on PBS in 2008.

A member of the executive committee of the Society of American Historians, Grubin has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Hamilton College.

Air date: January 26, 2009


Deceased--Robert Furman

"Doctor Atomic"

"Doctor Atomic"--Great Performances at the Met

George Koval...Soviet spy

Hans Bethe...physicist's physicist

Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls: Correspondence

Just a reminder...July 16th, 1945

Philip Morrison...physicist

Tickling the dragon's tail

John Heilbron--"Baroque" physics

UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures

"Physics and History: Links Between Two Cultures Forged in the Baroque"

John Heilbron

March 10th, 2008

"Experimental physical science and modern universal history came into the world about the same time, around 1550, and developed symbiotically for 250 years or more. Berkeley professor John Heilbron explores their origin, parallel development, and subsequent separation."



John Heilbron [left]

"American Institute of Physics: John Heilbron Recipient of Pais Prize"

The 2006 Pais Prize for History of Physics, awarded jointly by the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics, has gone to John L. Heilbron, Professor Emeritus of History and History of Science at the University of California at Berkeley and a Member of the Modern History Faculty of the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow in the Oxford Museum for History of Science and Worcester College, Oxford. He receives this award "For his ground-breaking and broad historical studies, ranging from the use of renaissance churches for astronomy, through 17th and 18th century electrical science, to modern quantum mechanics."

Heilbron was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received A.B. and M.A. degrees in physics in 1955 and 1958 and a Ph.D. degree in history in 1964 under Thomas S. Kuhn. After a term as Assistant Director of the Sources for History of Quantum Physics Project, he began his academic career as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania (1964-1967) and then returned to Berkeley, rising through the academic ranks to become Professor and Director of the Office for the History of Science and Technology in 1973; among his post-doctoral students there was Spencer Weart, current Director of the AIP Center for History of Physics. Heilbron became Class of 1936 Professor of History and History of Science in 1985, and Professor Emeritus in 1994. He also served as Vice Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley from 1990 to 1994. Since 1996 he has been a Member of the Modern History Faculty of the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow in the Oxford Museum for History of Science and Worcester College, Oxford.

Heilbron's publications on the history of physics have been groundbreaking and of astonishing breadth. As one writer said, "his major books deal with a stunning variety of subjects including electricity in the 17th and 18th centuries, Max Planck and his moral dilemmas, the use of churches in early modern Europe as solar observatories, the development of geometry, Henry Moseley, and Ernest Lawrence and his laboratory." These works, and the large number of papers he has published, are uniformly of outstanding quality and display an ability to deal with the technical aspects of science as well as the social, political, and institutional contexts in which science has been pursued in the past. His book, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories, (Harvard University Press, 1999), was awarded the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society, its highest book award, in 2001.

Simultaneously with producing this splendid body of work, Heilbron has enthusiastically and effectively taught many undergraduate and graduate courses and has directed a variety of doctoral dissertations. He also has edited, for the past 25 years, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (which he expanded in 1986 to include the biological sciences), one of the leading journals in the history of science. As an editor he has had an enormous and beneficial influence on work done in the history of physics, both because he has published only work that meets his own exacting standards, and because of his legendary critical and clarifying editorial comments and revisions of the papers he has published in HSPS.

John Heilbron--"Modernity" physics

Thanks to POSP's West coast stringer Tim.

Fermi neutron physics--British nuclear programs

The history of physics is fascinating and many times more understandable than the physics. Such was the attempted goal of the United States...to dominate post war nuclear physics...and it didn't work.

S. Espositi's paper...

Abstract:

A novel recovery of some important documents related to the Fermi course on neutron physics, held at Los Alamos in 1945, is announced. Its relevance for the effective launch of a British nuclear programme in the early postwar period, independently of the U.S. technical cooperation (precluded by the American authorities) and warmly supported by Chadwick, is discussed.

FERMI AT LOS ALAMOS AND THE EARLY BRITAIN’S WAY TO NUCLEAR ENERGY

Physics history--appreciation

You cannot appreciate the richness of physics or understand the implications and complexity of modern physics without some sort of historical perspective. To indulge in strictly current trends without an historical approach is doomed to an incomplete description and understanding of physics. Thus, I believe it would be important to cite several links to the history of physics from the ancients to modern and the interaction of physics/mathematics and the philosophy of science. Way too many times I see current terms thrown about without any sound definition or historical usage and development of such terms.

Further reading:

American Institute Of Physics

"Early Greek Science: Thales to Plato"

Google Directory

HISTORY OF PHYSICS

"Physics before Galileo"

PhysLink.com

"Preserving the Heritage of Discovery"

"Was Aristotle the first physicist?"