J. Robert Oppenheimer (/ˈɒpənˌhaɪmər/; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the “father of the atomic bomb” for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico.
Oppenheimer later remarked that it brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In August 1945, the weapons were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Oppenheimer spoke these words in the television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965). Oppenheimer read the original text in Sanskrit, and the translation is his own. In the literature, the quote usually appears in the form shatterer of worlds, because this was the form in which it first appeared in print, in Time magazine on November 8, 1948. It later appeared in Robert Jungk’s Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1958), which was based on an interview with Oppenheimer.
Contributed by
Juan Pablo Macías