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Talk:J. Robert Oppenheimer

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Featured articleJ. Robert Oppenheimer is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.
Main Page trophyThis article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on April 22, 2005.
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June 12, 2004Featured article candidateNot promoted
February 1, 2005Featured article candidatePromoted
April 5, 2007Featured article reviewDemoted
January 17, 2011Good article nomineeListed
March 19, 2011Featured article candidatePromoted
On this day... Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on February 18, 2017, and February 18, 2024.
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Re the NHK story about Oppenheimer and the 1964 physicist/translator recollections

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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)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 16 July 2024

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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)[reply]

checkY Changed as suggested. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:41, 17 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reference to cigarette brand

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I thought I ought to drop a note here; I'm not sure if this will be controversial or not, and I don't mean to imply that it was added originally to promote a particular brand, but the specific reference to Oppenheimer's preferred cigarettes in the section on his death by throat cancer felt unconnected from the overall topic of both the section and the topic. If I'm misreading the notability guidelines, please do correct me. Ejl389 (talk) 00:56, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article... These guidelines only outline how suitable a topic is for its own article or list. They do not limit the content of an article (WP:Notability) The relevant essay is Wikipedia:Content removal: content may be removed if it is unsourced, inaccurate, irrelevant or inappropriate. The content in question is sourced and accurate. In this case, its relevance stems from Oppenheimer's death by cancer, and the fact that his students consciously emulated him by smoking his brand. Back to you. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:42, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have no question that it's accurate for the record, I did notice you made quite a few other contributions to the article! That's why I had confidence this wasn't in poor faith and I wanted to drop a mention on the talk page. It feels incidental to the cancer since any cigarette (or indeed the pipe tobacco) would eventually have that effect, unless Chesterfields were unusually cancerous, so as strange as this may sound it almost read like product placement somehow. Would it maybe be enough to mention something about how his students emulated the behaviour somewhere in the Teaching section? Really just asking questions, of course, and if you think that it was fine where it was I'll defer to your judgement on the matter since I have the impression you're a more seasoned editor. 😅 --Ejl389 (talk) 04:44, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]