Oppenheimer, the scientist who never got the Nobel Prize

There were concerns at Oppenheimer being made the director of the Manhattan Project as several Nobel Prize winning scientists working at the project would be reporting to him, while Oppenheimer did not enjoy the status of being a Nobel Prize winner.

- KAMAL JYOTI

The brilliant scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer was an avid student of Eastern religions—Hinduism and Confucianism. He was a brilliant physicist, but wasn’t satisfied with a physics dominant world view, and had an intrinsic urge to understand the cosmos in its entirety, including the origin of physics itself. In his diligence to understand the fundamentals of existence, he met with their philosophical underpinning in the Bhagavad Gita. To read and study Bhagavad Gita in its original form, he learned Sanskrit. With such diligence in his karmas, it is no wonder that he was singularly successful in his pursuits, including the daunting Manhattan Project. It was a project of nuclear physics that changed the world forever. Yet, Oppenheimer was not awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, despite being nominated thrice, in 1946, 1951 and 1967. Nomination for the prize notwithstanding, Oppenheimer’s scientific status eminently deserved it.

RECRUITING OPPENHEIMER