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Monday, September 8, 2014

UC History: Oppenheimer

If you want to see an interesting documentary on physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the Manhattan Project, there is none better than the 1980 BBC series on the subject,  Someone has put all 7 episodes up on YouTube.  You will see the linkage to UC-Berkeley, where Oppenheimer was a professor (and, of course, why UC still has a connection to the nuclear labs).  The one oddity of the series is that the episodes start with a picture of an old tape recorder, ostensibly being used to bug Oppenheimer's conversations.  Magnetic recording really entered the US after World War II when German recording technology was imported into the US during the Occupation.  There were other recording techniques before then, of course, but probably not the one shown.  Anyway, you can find the series at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sSOprKCEME&list=PLDbNpJJwV1UEaaNHQGSr0uemsH6sdC8Dj&index=1

Oppenheimer gave a lecture at UCLA in 1964, one of the digitized recordings discussed in an earlier posting on this blog:

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