Unknown author · Public domain

Directed the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project, assembling and leading the scientists who built the first nuclear weapons — a technical achievement that also made him, by his own account, someone who felt he had "become death, the destroyer of worlds." Before the war he had already contributed real physics, including the Born–Oppenheimer approximation and early theoretical work on neutron stars and black holes. In 1954, at the height of Cold War anti-communist suspicion, a security hearing stripped him of his clearance over past left-wing associations; the government formally vacated that decision in 2022.