A Physicist for All Seasons: Part I

Abstract

The second part of this interview covers Frank Oppenheimer’s move to the University of California at Berkeley and wartime work at the Westinghouse Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the electromagnetic-separation plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and at Los Alamos, New Mexico (1941–1945); his postwar research at Berkeley (1945–1947); his appointment at the University of Minnesota in 1947 and firing two years later after being required to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee; his decade as a rancher in Colorado (1949–1959) and high-school science teacher toward the end of this period; his research at the University of Colorado in Boulder after 1959; his year as a Guggenheim Fellow at University College London in 1965; and his founding of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. California, in 1969. He also discusses his wartime relations with his older brother Robert and postwar events in Robert’s life, including his Hearings before the Personnel Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954.