The Man Who Gave us the Power To Destroy Ourselves (Oppenheimer)

Jay Robert Oppenheimer might be the most important physicist to have ever lived he never won a Nobel Prize but he changed the world more than most Nobel Prize winners under his leadership the best physicists of the 20th century built the atomic bomb forever changing the course of history if there is another world war this civilization may go under he has affected every war waged and every peace settled since the end of World War II he also created a way for Humanity to destroy itself now I am become death the destroyer of worlds this video is about how to build an atomic bomb the life of Oppenheimer and why serious scientists were worried about the explosion setting fire to the atmosphere ending all life on Earth part of this video is brought to you by Ren when Jay Robert Oppenheimer was 21 he placed an apple laced with toxic chemicals on the desk of his physics tutor the tutor Patrick blackett was an experimentalist and he had hounded Robert to do more of what he thought Robert wasn't very good at experimental work Oppenheimer had already been spending his days in a corner of JJ Thompson's basement laboratory attempting to make thin films of burum which were used to study electrons but Oppenheimer was clumsy and not good at this work he was soon avoiding his duties in the lab spending his time listening to lectures and reading physics journals it was 1925 and the 21-year-old Oppenheimer was becoming fascinated by the new field of quantum mechanics despite being surrounded by brilliant physicists like Rutherford and Chadwick Oppenheimer was deeply unhappy he wrote I'm having a pretty bad time the lab work is a terrible boy and I'm so bad at it that it's impossible to feel that I'm learning anything a friend walked in on him lying on the floor of his room which he called a miserable hole groaning and rolling from side to side in emotional anguish it was in this state that Robert attempted to poison blackett the specifics are lost to history there are conflicting reports if Oppenheimer used cyanite or something he found in the lab which would have just made blacket sick this story sounds unbelievable but Oppenheimer himself confirmed it luckily blackett did not eat the apple but the attempted poisoning became known to the Cambridge University authorities ...