Do a google search for "will the real mr oppenheimer" and you will get the article that Design News Magazine did on me last year. I had submitted an entry to their 'Gadget Freak' contest for engineers that use their talents in a home project and the chief editor asked to do a human interest piece. The article I submitted can be seen at
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as case #42. Whimsical picture they had taken of me and I hated the caption line they used but all in all it was fun.
Oppie
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Here is the text minus the rather good picture: What would it be like to go through life as an engineer with a name that carries powerful associations with the era of nuclear weapons, McCarthyism, and mutual assured destruction? Ask Robert Oppenheimer, an electrical engineer in Hawthorne, NY. No relation to the J. Robert Oppenheimer, he's had to put up with the usual raised eyebrows, wisecracks, and outright disbelief over his name for much of his life. Probably more than his share, given his choice of engineering as a career. "In college I took a course in relativistic physics, and when I signed my name on the exam the professor assumed some student was having fun at his expense," he recalls. "Luckily, he still passed me." These days Robert, who is good humored about it all, says that he gets more questions about the Oppenheimer Funds (no relation there, either) than the A-bomb. Guess the Cold War really is over.