a scientist, Oppenheimer is remembered by his students and colleagues as being a brilliant researcher and engaging teacher who was the founder of modern theoretical physics in the United States. Because his scientific attentions often changed rapidly, he never worked long enough on any one topic and carried it to fruition to merit the Nobel Prize, although his investigations contributing to the theory of black holes may have warranted the prize had he lived long enough to see them brought into fruition by later astrophysicists. An asteroid, 67085 Oppenheimer, was named in his honor, as was the lunar crater Oppenheimer. As a military and public policy advisor, Oppenheimer was a technocratic leader in a shift in the interactions between science and the military and the emergence of "Big Science". During World War II, scientists became involved in military research to an unprecedented degree. Because of the threat fascism posed to Western civilization, they volunteered in great numbers both for technological and organizational assistance to the Allied effort, resulting in such powerful tools as radar, the proximity fuse and operations research. As a cultured, intellectual, theoretical physicist who became a disciplined military organizer, Oppenheimer represented the shift away from the idea that scientists had their "head in the clouds" and that knowledge on such previously esoteric subjects as the composition of the atomic nucleus had no "real-world" applications. Two days before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer expressed his hopes and fears in a quotation from Bhartṛhari's Śatakatraya: Bibliography } } } (posthumous) (posthumous) (posthumous) (posthumous) Notes References Citations Sources External links Biography and online exhibit created for the centennial of his birth 1965 Audio Interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer by Stephane Groueff Voices of the Manhattan Project Was Oppenheimer a member of the Communist Party? documents on the question On Atomic Energy, Problems to Civilization audio file of UC Berkeley talk, November 1946 Oppenheimer talking about the experience of the first bomb test (video file, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.") "Freedom and Necessity in the Sciences" audio and documents from a lecture at Dartmouth College, April 1959 American nuclear physicists Quantum physicists Nuclear weapons scientists and engineers 1904 births 1967 deaths Academics of the University of Cambridge Alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge American agnostics American anti-fascists American people of World War II American people of German-Jewish descent California Institute of Technology faculty Deaths from cancer in New Jersey Directors