J.ROBERT OPPENHEIMER (1904 - 1967)
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J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 - 1967)
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904. His
parents, Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy German textile merchant, and Ella
Friedman, an artist, were of Jewish descent but did not observe the religious
traditions. He studied at the Ethical Culture Society School, whose physics
laboratory has since been named for him, and entered Harvard in 1922, intending
to become a chemist, but soon switching to physics. He graduated summa cum
laude in 1925 and went to England to conduct research at Cambridge University's
Cavendish Laboratory, working under J.J. Thomson.
In 1926, Oppenheimer went to the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born, obtaining his Ph.D. at the age of 22. There, he published many important
contributions to the then newly developed quantum theory, most notably a famous
paper on the so-called Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which separates nuclear
motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules. In
1927, he returned to Harvard to study mathematical physics and as a National
Research Council Fellow, and in early 1928, he studied at the California
Institute of Technology. He accepted an assistant professorship in physics at
the University of California, Berkeley, and maintained a joint appointment with
California Institute of Technology. In the ensuing 13 years, he
"commuted" between the two universities, and many of his associates
and students commuted with him.
Oppenheimer became credited with being a founding father of the American
school of theoretical physics. He did important research in astrophysics,
nuclear physics, spectroscopy and quantum field theory. He made important
contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers, and did work that eventually
led toward descriptions of quantum tunneling. In the 1930s, he was the first to
write papers suggesting the existence of what we today call black holes.
In November 1940, Oppenheimer married Katherine Peuning Harrison, a radical
Berkeley student, and by May 1941 they had their first child, Peter. When World
War II began, Oppenheimer eagerly became involved in the efforts to develop an
atomic bomb, which were already taking up much of the time and facilities of
Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. He was invited to take over work
on neutron calculations, and in June 1942 General Leslie Groves appointed
Oppenheimer as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.
Under Oppenheimer's guidance, the laboratories at Los Alamos were
constructed. There, he brought the best minds in physics to work on the problem
of creating an atomic bomb. In the end, he was managing more than 3,000 people,
as well as tackling theoretical and mechanical problems that arose. He is often
referred to as the "father" of the atomic bomb. (In 1944, the
Oppenheimers' second child, Katherine (called Toni), was born at Los Alamos.)
The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the first nuclear
explosion at Alamagordo on July 16, 1945, which Oppenheimer named
"Trinity."
After the war, Oppenheimer was appointed Chairman of the General Advisory
Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), serving from 1947 to 1952. It
was in this role that he voiced strong opposition to the development of the hydrogen
bomb. In 1953, at the height of U.S. anticommunist feeling, Oppenheimer was
accused of having communist sympathies, and his security clearance was taken
away. The scientific community, with few exceptions, was deeply shocked by the
decision of the AEC. In 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to redress
these injustices by honoring Oppenheimer with the Atomic Energy Commission's
prestigious Enrico Fermi Award.
From 1947 to 1966, Oppenheimer also served as the Director of Princeton's
Institute for Advanced Study. There, he stimulated discussion and research on
quantum and relativistic physics. Oppenheimer retired from Princeton in 1966
and died of throat cancer on February 18, 1967.
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