J. Robert Oppenheimer

Few lives hold as much light and shadow as that of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist remembered as the father of the atomic bomb. His Sun is in Taurus, the earthy, patient bull, the pillar and foundation of the chart, the connoisseur of solid values and deep expertise; and it shines from the eleventh house, the house of the tribe and the network, where the solar hero is meant to lead a whole community. There he sits perfectly, the director who gathered the finest minds of a generation to Los Alamos and led them, a lion-king among Aquarian collaborators. His Moon in Cancer is a double whammy Moon, the mother goddess at home in her own sign, notoriously psychic, deeply feeling, patriotic; it fell in the second house of values and self-worth, and one senses in it the tender, morally torn man who watched the Trinity flash and reached for the Bhagavad Gita: now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Gemini rises as his quicksilver mask, the versatile messenger, ranging from black holes and quantum tunnelling to Sanskrit verse. After the war he lobbied against the arms race, lost his clearance in 1954, and was rehabilitated only long after. His work in physics endures: a Taurean foundation that reshaped the century.