30 books like Robert Oppenheimer

Don’t let the length (over 900 pages) of this biography put you off. Instead, immerse yourself in the slow and powerful current of author Richard Westfall’s superbly written and richly detailed portrait of the skills, achievements, and obsessions of the singular genius that was Isaac Newton. Westfall explains in a masterful way Newton’s mathematics, his physics, his heretical theology, his fixation with alchemy, his activities running the Royal Mint, and his disputes with other scientists. These features, and Westfall’s evocative description of the intellectual and social milieu of Newton’s 17th-century world, make Never at Rest a compelling read.   

For my money, Michael Faraday was the greatest experimental scientist of the nineteenth century. His notebooks detailing his achievements in electrochemistry and electromagnetism should be read by every budding experimentalist as models to emulate. The late Sir John Thomas, a distinguished solid-state chemist, wrote this short biography (only 234 pages) of Faraday during his tenure as the Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.  Thomas’ scientific expertise, his insider status, and his graceful writing style led him to produce a real gem. Enjoy yourself as Thomas recounts Faraday’s ascent at the Royal Institution from laboratory assistant to full professor, his scientific work, his private life, and his unmatched skill as a popularizer of science. 

Skip the documentaries. Lise Meitner’s dramatic story is much better told in this meticulously researched and well-written biography. Meitner became the second woman in the world to earn a PhD in physics and then left her native Vienna for Berlin where she began a thirty-year collaboration with chemist Otto Hahn working on radioactive substances. They discovered nuclear fission in 1938, just when Meitner’s Jewishness forced her to flee Nazi Germany for Sweden. Unjustly, Hahn never acknowledged her equal contribution to the discovery when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945. This sensitive biography helps right a historical wrong. 

This biography brings fully to life the multi-faceted Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Although best known as the co-inventor of quantum mechanics, he later wrote a book called What is Life which inspired many physicists to apply their talents to biology. Moore gives a full account of Schrödinger’s upbringing, his education, his science, and his extensive philosophical writings. You can judge for yourself if Moore is persuasive when he argues that the erotic intensity of several of Schrödinger’s extramarital affairs helped fuel and found expression in some of his specific scientific achievements. 

Ray Monk has, like me, been drawn to the idea of a linear biographical narrative fusing life and work together. My third pick is his biography of the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer. This is a fascinating story parallel to Turing’s. The Second World War brought both of them, hitherto pure researchers, to intense and crucial involvement in the world’s affairs. Nuclear weapons for Oppenheimer were what codebreaking was for Turing. Afterward, both were at odds with the governments they had empowered.

When in 1953 Turing wrote ‘I detest America’ he might well have been reacting to the McCarthy period in which Oppenheimer was attacked. But Ray Monk treats Oppenheimer’s pure scientific work as seriously as the political story. Oppenheimer’s 1939 paper on black holes was the background to Penrose’s 1965 paper cited in the Nobel physics prize of 2020. These dates illustrate the deep and decades-spanning connections that are involved… show more.

It is no surprise this book won a Pulitzer Prize. Particularly compelling is how, through a deeply personal and beautifully crafted story of a complex life and mind, it offers profound insight into the uneasy relationship among politics, science, war, and morality.

Oppenheimer, one of the greatest and most influential physicists of the 20th century, spearheaded not only the invention of the atomic bomb but also the quantum theory that made it possible and the policies governing its use and development. A left-wing thinker and sometimes communist sympathizer in his youth, and driven throughout his life by strong humanistic impulses, his work on the atomic bomb was motivated by a desire to defeat fascism in Europe.

Yet, in his work thereafter – which included opposing the development of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb – he was tragically undone by another authoritarian force: McCarthyism. The multiple Oscar-award winning film based… show more.

Freeman Dyson, who died last year at the age of 96, was one of the world's leading physicists. He was also one of the worlds leading mathematicians. Later in life, he became one of the world’s leading astronomers. He was passionately concerned with the ethics of science and the perils of human politics. He also read a lot of literature and had interesting things to say about it, and could write better than many novelists. In 1979, at the age of 56, he published Disturbing the Universe: part autobiography, part window into the mind of a scientist, part essayistic rumination. There’s no other book like it. Listing the titles of the chapters covering his life until age 23 hints at the book’s richness and unpredictability: “The Magic City,” “The Redemption of Faust,” “The Children’s Crudade,” “The Blood of a Poet.” In the book’s final third, Dyson addresses issues related… show more.

This is a collection of Oppenheimer’s essays and speeches, a good thing to read to get a sense of the man himself, how he thinks, how he handles language.

How he struggles to suggest how civilization might begin to cope with the reality that new weapons now exist capable of annihilating civilization... “unless we show,” he says, ”urged by our own example and conviction, that we regard nuclear armament as a transitory, dangerous and degrading phase of the world’s history.”

He said that forty years ago, and counting.

This Scott O’Dell Award winner is historical fiction for middle grade readers.

Set in the New Mexico desert during World War II, Dewey and Suze become unlikely friends when their parents work on the top secret “gadget.” The gadget’s scheduled test lights up the pre-dawn sky for miles around but is explained away as an explosion at a munitions outpost.

A few weeks later Suze’s family takes Dewey with them to visit the green glass sea of Trinitite, a new mineral created as a result of the atomic bomb’s test. Readers will feel the humanity of how war affects us all. Readers who prefer fiction over nonfiction might find this a gateway to interest them in picking up a nonfiction title on WWII or the atomic bomb. 

Like Stone’s book, this is a book about history, not wokeness. It’s not an easy read, but it’s worth the effort.

It recounts the triumph of scientific reasoning and liberal tolerance over several decades in the mid-twentieth century. That triumph was largely brought about by the “secularization” of American culture, spearheaded by Jewish intellectuals.

I read it long before wokeness was a thing – it was published in 1996 – and found it interesting but not particularly relevant to anything I was thinking about. But when wokeness came along, it suddenly hit me that this new religion was taking us backwards, back to the beginning of Hollinger’s story.

If that trend continues, we are in danger of losing the gains that science and tolerance have produced.