Albert Einstein vs J. Robert Oppenheimer

This interesting chess game was played between Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1933 at Princeton University in New Jersey. Einstein won with Oppenheimer's resignation on move 24.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He is best known to the general public for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory.

J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons.

Here is the game attributed to Albert Einstein. The game was first published in Freude am Schach (The Pleasure of Chess) by Gerhard Henschel in 1959.

Some (Dennis Holding and Andy Soltis) have attributed the above game to Albert Einstein's son, Hans Albert (1904-1969), and played at Berkeley in 1945 where Hans taught. But Hans Albert did not play chess. There is no indication that J. Robert Oppenheimer was in Berkeley in 1945. He was either at Los Alamos, New Mexico or Princeton, New Jersey in 1945. He was at Berkeley from 1929 to 1933.

Andy Soltis, writing in the July, 1979 issue of Chess Life on page 372 in an article called "Science at Play" says this game was apparently played in the late 1940s when Hans Albert Einstein, son of Albert Einstein, and Robert Oppenheimer were both on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.

Another source says that Black was not Robert Oppenheimer the physicist, but Max Oppenheimer (1885-1954), the European artist.

Regardless, this game is an interesting one, and one worth playing through.