p7r

Oppenheimer: I took a girl out to the hills last night to make out

Friend: Oh yeah? Did you get far eh? Eh Frank?

Oppenheimer: Yeah, I did actually - I had a thought that if we just change some of the calibrations on the equipment...

Friend: Errr.... ?

I'm sure /r/personalfinance and /r/investing might be a better place to deal with this, but the general rule is this:

All loans are bad, except mortgages which are very cheap

Let's suppose you decide you have a choice: spend £400k on a house for cash, or invest that £400k.

Option 1: But the house cash

Super simple: you spend the £400k, it leaves your account and you're done. How much is that house going to be worth in 25 years? Hard to say, but we know that for it to beat inflation since 1988 (25 years ago), it would need to be worth more than £884k for it actually to be a gain - a 121% rise.

Option 2: Buy the house with a mortgage

This gets more complex.

Let's suppose you are going to take out a 25-year term mortgage at 6%, and there's a £1k arrangement fee. You'll pay £2577 per month and a total of £774,157 including interest and fees.

Wait, what? That's actually less than what we would need with inflation factored in - the £400k house, thanks to inflation has actually cost you the equivalent of £350,297.29 in 1988 money. Somehow thanks to the magic of inflation, you've saved £50k in real terms. This isn't voodoo, it's just that inflation eats cash.

But wait, there's more - the £400k you didn't spend on day one? Well you invested it, right? Let's suppose you had put it in an ordinary index tracker in 1988. An index tracker basically rises and falls perfectly in line with the index it tracks - let's choose the FTSE All Share index. £400k in 1988 would be worth £1.3m today. You would actually have doubled your money by 1995, and so could have paid off your mortgage in full and still have £400k and the house.

Mortgaging the house means you keep the money and the house, wheras buying it cash means you just have the house

And that's why most advisers say mortgages - providing they're cheap - are not terrible ways to buy homes.

Of course your capital would decrease as you took the earnings and used it to pay off your mortgage, but an average rate of 8% returns, you'd get the equivalent of £32k/year, which would pay off the mortgage and leave you £1k/year after paying your mortgage. You'd have to deal with bad years (2000-2002 were three consecutive loss years for the FT All Share, for example), but the example goes to show that sometimes buying a house cash isn't the best move.

So, whilst the maths says you shouldn't, if I won the lottery tomorrow, having the peace of mind that comes with owning a home outright with no mortgage or rent to worry about is a nice thought.

It would lead to perhaps more adventurous career choices and reduce stress - especially when the market tanks. I'd just try to buy a good "doer-upper" that is likely to increase in value considerably over 25+ years.

In an environment like that, they may need to monitor everything going in and out of the lab, including on phone lines and to make sure nothing inappropriate was said. If the line tap guy didn't speak Italian, he couldn't be sure Top Secret info wasn't being passed on the line, so: pull the plug.

The Russians knew that Fermi was involved in nuclear research in the US, so you can bet everybody else knew. They famously mistranslated his work pre-Los Alamos in a converted squash court under Stagg Field in Chicago as being in "a converted pumpkin field".

By the time she met Lawrence, he was already a star: he'd got a Nobel prize, he had invented the cyclotron, he was considered a world leader in physics: did that come across? Was he aloof? Did the people around him care about his status much?

After the war Oppenheimer and others from the Manhattan project lobbied heavily to prevent nuclear weapon proliferation, and as a result had security clearances revoked, etc. - a sort of political persecution of sorts.

How did your grandmother feel about the political and philosophical arguments the people she worked with got involved with? Did Oppenheimer's treatment shock her, or did she think he kind of had it coming? Did his treatment affect her own views at all?