BioGraph



Connecting Plato and J. Robert Oppenheimer



Plato Classical Athenian philosopher, founder of Platonism
Albert Einstein suggested that the scientist who takes philosophy seriously would have to avoid systematization and take on many different roles, and possibly appear as a Platonist or Pythagorean, in that such a one would have "the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research.

Albert Einstein
In a memorial lecture delivered on 13 December 1965 at UNESCO headquarters, nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of Einstein as a person: "He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness ...


Plato Classical Athenian philosopher, founder of Platonism
* Harold F. Cherniss, major Plato scholar

Harold F. Cherniss American historian
Before and after World War II, various circumstances intertwined the careers of Cherniss and his friend Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Anti-semitism was still widespread at this time in America even at universities like Princeton, but the Institute "employed scholars with absolutely no regard to religious persuasion or ethnicity." Cherniss was appointed by his old friend Robert Oppenheimer who is sometimes known as the "father of the atomic bomb."


Plato Classical Athenian philosopher, founder of Platonism
Noam Chomsky dubbed the problem of knowledge Plato's problem.

Noam Chomsky
Both Quine and a visiting philosopher, J. L. Austin of the University of Oxford, strongly influenced Chomsky. In 1952 Chomsky published his first academic article, ''Systems of Syntactic Analysis'', which appeared not in a journal of linguistics but in '' The Journal of Symbolic Logic''. Highly critical of the established behaviorist currents in linguistics, in 1954 he presented his ideas at lectures at the University of Chicago and Yale University. He had not been registered as a student at Pennsylvania for four years, but in 1955 he submitted a thesis setting out his ideas on transformational grammar; he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree for it, and it was privately distributed among specialists on microfilm before being published in 1975 as part of '' The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory''.{{sfnm|1a1=Barsky|1y=1997|1pp=83–85|2a1=Sperlich|2y=2006|2p=36|3a1=McGilvray|3y=2014|3pp=4–5}} Harvard professor George Armitage Miller was impressed by Chomsky's thesis and collaborated with him on several technical papers in mathematical linguistics. Chomsky's doctorate exempted him from compulsory military service, which was otherwise due to begin in 1955.

George Armitage Miller
Miller befriended J. Robert Oppenheimer, with whom he played squash.


Plato Classical Athenian philosopher, founder of Platonism
" Werner Heisenberg stated that “My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing".

Werner Heisenberg German theoretical physicist
In 1928, the British mathematical physicistPaul Dirac had derived his relativistic wave equation of quantum mechanics, which implied the existence of positive electrons, later to be named positrons.

Paul Dirac
When Niels Bohr complained that he did not know how to finish a sentence in a scientific article he was writing, Dirac replied, "I was taught at school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it." He criticised the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's interest in poetry: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way.
He received the inaugural J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1969.





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