"Robert" of "Brighter Than A Thousand Suns"

ABandOn

.:The Final Frontier:.
While I was listening to Brighter Than A Thousand Suns, the line "whatever would Robert have said to his God about he made war with the Sun" kept my attention, so I tried to discover who was this "Robert" that appears in the lyrics, and I found out that he could be J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist better known as "the father of the A-bomb".

I'll report some excerpts from an article about him that I found here and here:

In 1941 Oppenheimer was brought into the atomic bomb project; he gathered together at Berkeley a small group of some of the best theoretical physicists in the country to talk about the actual bomb design.
General Leslie Groves, the army officer in charge of the bomb project wanted Oppenheimer to be the scientific director of the program. Together the two men picked out a site for a new laboratory for the project. It had to be isolated, but it needed to be easily accessible, it needed an adequate supply of water, and a moderate climate for year-round construction. Oppenheimer took Groves to a boys' school on a mesa in the New Mexico desert, which he had visited as a young man. The site became the location for the top secret Los Alamos weapons laboratory.
By July 1945, Los Alamos was ready to test its bomb. Oppenheimer sent a cryptic telegram to scientists back at Berkeley: "Any time after the 15th would be a good time for our fishing trip...As we do not have enough sleeping bags to go around, we ask you please do not bring anyone with you." The test, code-named "Trinity," took place on July 16. It exploded with a force equivalent of 18,000 tons of TNT. Recalling the scene, Oppenheimer said: "A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from the "Bhagavad-Gita" in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty: "I am become death: the destroyer of worlds."
"In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish," he would say, "the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." He also rose to prominence as a scientific advisor to the Federal Government. He pushed hard for international control of atomic energy, and was appointed Chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission. It was in this role that he voiced strong opposition to the development of the H-bomb.
His resistance to the hydrogen bomb ultimately had devastating consequences for his career. In 1953, the Atomic Energy Commission suspended his security clearance. Despite testimonials from scores of witnesses during the hearings, his clearance was not reinstated. Oppenheimer returned to academic life, but as one colleague would say, the public ordeal had broken his spirit.
In the last years of his life, he thought and wrote much about the problems of intellectual ethics and morality.
He was the symbol of the dilemma facing scientists when the interests of the nation and their own conscience collide.


I hope I didn't bore you all with this unusual post, but I was thinking that the story was worth of mention ;) I discovered many things that otherwise would have been unknown to me  -_-
 
If anybody of you has got Google Earth or something comparable, you can still see the site of the Trinity Test at 33.675° N 106.475° W.
 
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