Talk:J. Robert Oppenheimer

Re the NHK story about Oppenheimer and the 1964 physicist/translator recollections
Regarding the addition that has now been reverted four times, the original source is this piece from a few days ago from NHK, the Japanese public broadcasting company (akin to the BBC). A machine translation of the piece can be seen here. The story is that during the Hiroshima Nagasaki World Peace Pilgrimage that took place in 1964, atomic bomb survivors came to the United States. One of them was Naomi Shono, a theoretical physicist who desired a meeting, official or otherwise, with Oppenheimer. The NHK piece presents some documentary evidence that such a meeting was requested and was on a printed schedule. Shono subsequently said in a school alumni newsletter, date not given, that during the meeting Oppenheimer said he did not want to talk about Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The interpreter for the meeting, Yoko Teichler, said in a video statement recorded in 2015 that Oppenheimer had cried and repeatedly said "I'm sorry" during the meeting. NHK interviews a DePaul University professor who seems to give the translator's statement some credence.

NHK has a shorter version of the story in English. It's also been picked up here by Kyodo News and reproduced in several other Japanese or other foreign-language media outlets.

Of course, recollections given five decades after an event are fallible. It is worth watching to see if the NHK story gets picked up in the U.S. press or whether there is reaction to it from any Oppenheimer biographers. Wasted Time R (talk) 17:04, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 16 July 2024
change " In August of that year, he met Katherine ("Kitty") Puening, a radical Berkeley student and former Communist Party member." to "In August of that year, he met Katherine ("Kitty") Puening, a former Communist Party member."

Reason: Kitty was at the time attending the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for a post graduate fellowship, as is explained later in the article. She was never a student at UC Berkeley, nor was she considered a "radical" figure at the time of their meeting in 1939. Source: American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, page 161. Wikiwannabeexpert (talk) 23:26, 16 July 2024 (UTC)


 * ✅ Changed as suggested. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  00:41, 17 July 2024 (UTC)