August 2023 Thinking Beyond - Oppenheimer: Beyond the Bomb

The “Thinking Beyond” webinar series features renowned physicists Paul Davies, Sara Walker and Maulik Parikh from the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University and will address a big question/topic in science with the audience participating by asking questions during the webinar or in advance.

Oppenheimer: Beyond the Bomb
Before Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, he was already known as an extraordinary theoretical physicist. Oppenheimer had discovered a key equation in quantum chemistry and he had also determined the death-states of massive stars. But most controversially, he correctly predicted that the process of gravitational collapse would create a region of spacetime whose gravity was so strong that it was unable to communicate to the outside universe… a region that we would now call a black hole.