J Robert Oppenheimer

J Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was a US theoretical physicist. He was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is often credited as the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project—the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. He was among those who observed the Trinity test in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945. He later remarked that the explosion brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Wisdom & Quotes

• I am become Death, the chatterer of worlds.

- quoting a line from the Bhagavad Gita that came to his mind at the test of the first atom bomb, July 16, 1945; cited in N.P. Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer

Lionel Trilling