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Possibly, funnily enough his daughter mentions in her book that in hindsight one of the first signs of cancer was that he started sleeping for 7 or 8 hours a day!

Maybe it had to do with the radiation exposure in Manhattan project.

Let's reverse that: if he had not only slept 4 hours every night he would have gotten a lot less done in his life.

If sleeping 8h/day would grant him, say, ten more years, that would more than paid those extra 4h of awake time over his entire adult life, as 34x(1/6) < 10x(2/3).

Y’all know he died of cancer, right?

It's possible a lack of sleep reduced his immune response to the cancer. The body has some natural cancer fighting mechanisms, and it's only the mutations that escape these that become malignant tumors.

It’s possible. But what’s more possible is spending the latter half of his life working on nuclear weapons and observing bomb tests took their toll.

It’s interesting how you guys are latching onto this man’s lack of sleep to speculate why he died young instead of the more obvious possibility, given his background.