Ray Monk, professor of philosophy at Southampton University, is the acclaimed biographer of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The origins of this book on Oppenheimer lie in a review written by Monk of a reissued edition of Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (1995), edited by Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner, a work which revealed a diverse and complex man. Oppenheimer wrote poetry, was steeped in French literature, and was sufficiently inspired by Hindu scriptures to teach himself Sanskrit. Monk discovered a complicated and fragile personality, whose relations with family, lovers and students were intense. At that point, no full biography of Oppenheimer had been written, but a few have appeared since, notably Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's monumental American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), which Monk admits never left his side following publication. While that book is an exhaustive exploration of Oppenheimer's life and political activities, it pays little attention to his contributions to physics. It is one of the great merits of Monk's biography that he does a masterly job in redressing this imbalance.

Born in 1904 to a prosperous Jewish family, Oppenheimer cannot be understood, Monk argues, without an appreciation of his prolonged attempts to distance himself from his background. He was accepted by Harvard to study chemistry, but had to defer entry due to a bout of dysentery, and recuperated in New Mexico, a place he came to adore. Oppenheimer was a precocious student, taking a graduate course in thermodynamics as well as French literature and philosophy. Having gained a first-class degree, he was accepted by Christ's College, Cambridge, hoping to work with Ernest Rutherford, but the latter rejected him as he was not an experimentalist. During his year in the Cavendish a bizarre event occurred, in that Oppenheimer, suffering severe psychiatric problems, tried to poison the physicist Patrick Blackett. He was not sent down, however, but was instead referred to a psychiatrist. Oppenheimer was deeply influenced by Paul Dirac, producing his first paper on Dirac's quantum mechanical description of vibrational and rotational states of H₂ and O₂; this was a remarkable achievement for someone who was essentially a non-physicist. He met Niels Bohr, producing a second paper on the two-body problem, and then moved to Göttingen to work under Max Born, gaining a PhD on a paper that Born examined. Oppenheimer worked on the quantum theory of molecules, arriving at the now totally familiar Born–Oppenheimer approximation. He spent a short time at Harvard, producing a paper which was the earliest discussion of ‘tunnelling’, then was briefly at Caltech, before deciding to study at Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest and at Zurich under Wolfgang Pauli. Oppenheimer returned to America, feeling patronized by European physicists, with a passionate desire to establish an American school of theoretical physics. Occupying a post split between the University of California and Caltech, he taught only graduate students and produced his most significant physics, work describing the formation of neutron stars and predicting what we now know as black holes.

Surprisingly, Oppenheimer was appointed in 1942 to lead the scientific work of the Manhattan Project despite never having run anything and, still more surprisingly, not having been granted security clearance. Throughout his career, Oppenheimer was considered to be a card-carrying communist or, at best, a sympathizer. However, he was an inspired choice and brilliant facilitator, managing to focus the efforts of many independently minded, talented scientists, collating and encouraging ideas, their development and their implementation. Clearly the Manhattan Project was a success in that, following the first explosion, the Trinity test, it was clear that a plutonium-fuelled bomb would work, the design of the uranium-fuelled bomb being complete and awaiting the production of sufficient quantities of uranium-235. But following the elation at the Trinity test, Oppenheimer quickly realized the horror resulting from the deployment of the bomb, recalling the Hindu text, ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’.

Oppenheimer left Los Alamos following the completion of his task, and not long afterwards was appointed director of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, where he attracted some of the world's leading theoretical physicists. He also became an outspoken critic of US policy, arguing against secrecy, weapons stockpiling, and the need for the H-bomb. In 1954 his security clearance was removed, with no question of disloyalty, but as a result of lies about Haakan Chevalier, a friend who asked him to pass on secrets to the Soviets. Lies concerning his involvement with Chevalier destroyed his career. Oppenheimer spent ten years researching the properties of mesons, publishing his final paper in 1949, then became a highly popular speaker and popularizer of science, speaking in some cases to audiences of twenty thousand.

Monk does a magnificent job in describing Oppenheimer's contributions to physics. Arguably these were not of the same degree of significance as those of Bohr or Werner Heisenberg, being thought to be deficient in mathematics. But, had he lived longer, he could well have won the Nobel Prize when the significance of his work on neutron stars and black holes was fully appreciated. Perhaps Monk could have said more about his personal problems: his difficulties with women, his alcoholic wife, the daughter who later committed suicide and the estranged son. But overall he does an impressive job of exploring the life and work of a brilliant and complex scientist and man. Reading the book was simply a joy.