Impressions of Oppenheimer

How do Americans think about J. Robert Oppenheimer today? How do people in Los Alamos think about him?

My personal impression is that most Americans who know about him hold him in awe. I think most see him as a brilliant scientist. Fewer are aware that he served the country as an amazing administrator who came to Los Alamos on E. O. Lawrence's recommendation without a big reputation or even much experience managing. I think people who now think the atomic bombs should not have been used might feel ambivalent about Oppenheimer, but many of them still respect his scientific abilities. People also see him as a tragic victim of McCarthyism, if they know that story.

In Los Alamos he is revered. Some older people here remember him, and he enjoyed the respect and personal affection of many people at the laboratory in his day and in his later years. There are strong feelings about the security hearings, and most people here see the outcome as terribly unjust and even cruel. I don't think anyone here believes Robert Oppenheimer was ever a security threat.

If he didn't oppose it, Oppenheimer was not enthusiastic about the hydrogen bomb. He probably dragged his feet. Edward Teller was a proponent, impatient with Oppenheimer's views, a founder of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and testified against Oppenheimer. Although he was a pretty colorful character, Teller is not fondly remembered here.  As is true with so many aspects of our history, this is a very complicated topic. To what extent Oppenheimer's communist connections played a role, vs. power struggles within the physics community and even in Congress and the military, as well as other factors that were involved, historians will never untangle the security hearings.

As to why the museum is named for Oppenheimer's successor, I will suggest two reasons.

Oppenheimer's name is all around Los Alamos. An award, a lecture series, a street, and several buildings all pay tribute to him. (Wouldn't you expect the Oppenheimer Science Museum to be found in the Oppenheimer Center?)

Norris Bradbury is credited with keeping Los Alamos Scientific (later National) Laboratory alive at a time when it is very possible the US government might have closed it. Many scientists, including Oppie, left shortly after the war to return to their university roles. Bradbury was director for 25 years, an extraordinary tenure, and was director when the original version of this museum opened. Bradbury as a person is also very fondly remembered by those who knew him.

Thorium Nuclear Power questions

We were pleased to get this question because we had just read an article about it. One of the challenges with thorium for reactor fuel is that it has been historically very expensive, monetarily and environmentally, to process. There is a project at LANL that has taken on thorium chemistry. It is called Th-ING, Thorium Is Now Green. This team has developed a much cleaner and much cheaper way to process thorium that avoids exotic chemistry, high temperatures, etc. It sounds very promising. There is a technical article about Th-ING at: http://www.lanl.gov/science/NSS/issue2_2011/story6full.shtml .

By the way, another development happening here is a program experimenting with sandwiches of materials with atom-thick layers of, for example, copper and niobium, that results in a sheet with not only extraordinary strength, but an ability to repair itself, or heal, from radiation damage. These materials may one day serve to shield or replace materials used in nuclear reactors today that become brittle with continued exposure to radiation.

Several questions from a class we visited.

What is it like working in your museum?

          The Bradbury Science Museum is a very fun place to work. There are interesting people to work with, and we spend a lot of our time teaching each other interesting things.  The museum is full of fascinating objects and information, and visitors come here from all over the world. The museum is part of one of the top science laboratories in the world, and we get to hear about amazing things the scientists are doing here.

          We teachers do research, schedule visits, give presentations, and plan future activities and projects. Sometimes we have to catch up on our paperwork. We stay pretty busy. Several times each week, when we are lucky, we even get to go out of the museum in the Science On Wheels van to visit students in their classrooms as we did at your school!

Do you enjoy working with science activities with kids?

          There are two of us who are "museum educators." We started out as teachers, and we love working with kids. We also all agree that science is not only very important to learn about, but that it is really cool stuff. We try hard to make our programs as fun and as interesting as we can, and it is all for you students. The big payoff in a job like this is when we get to actually see kids learning from and enjoying what we do.

After a demonstration comparing falling paper and falling books during which we placed the paper on top of the book.

I just got your question asking what would happen if the paper was not entirely on top of the book when we dropped them.

This is a great question, and I am happy to say that I don't know.

Now that you have identified the problem, I suggest you design some experiments, write some hypotheses, follow your procedures, record your observations, and report your results. I would like to see what you discover.

Other questions: Does it matter how big the book is compared to the paper? Does it matter how heavy the book is? Would it work with tissue paper? What happens if you use cardboard in place of either the paper or the book, or both? Would it work if you crumpled up the paper? I don't remember if we tried putting the paper below the book in your class. What if you hold the paper a little bit above the book when you drop them?

One of the best things about science is that the more we find out, the more there is to wonder about.

Where did we get the security gate that is part of an exhibit in our defense gallery?

I asked the exhibit people about it, and this is what I found out.

            As you can imagine, the Safety and Security Division as Los Alamos National Laboratory is a large and important part of our work. There are gates all around the lab, both indoors and outdoors very much like this one. With normal usage, some of this equipment wears out and is collected for repair. When this exhibit was prepared, the safety and security people collected the parts from materials they had left over from refurbishing gates all over the lab, and put together our gate and hand scanner for us. So our gate doesn’t have its own story until it was assembled for us.

            This was several years ago, and some facilities have more modern equipment, but this gate represents a feature that many workers at LANL use every day to get into and out of their work places.