The Many Enigmas of 'Oppenheimer'

J. Robert Oppenheimer made his greatest contribution to physics in 1939. It was three years before he met Gen. Leslie Groves, three years before they built a town in the New Mexico desert, and three years before they recruited thousands of scientists and their families to live in that desert town where they worked toward a single-minded goal: a weapon of such destructive power that it would end World War II, perhaps even all wars. Hitler had just invaded Poland, and Oppenheimer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was working on a paper that used Einstein’s theory of relativity to identify what we now call black holes.