J.R. Oppenheimer

“We all knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, few people cried, most were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” -J.R. Oppenheimer

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist that was known for his many contributions to modern science and most famously for his involvement as the head of the Manhattan project. Many people also credit him as the “father of the atomic bomb” although his contributions to science were not trivial either. Some of his notable contributions include predicting the existence of black holes, positrons, and the Born-Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions.

Early Life

Oppenheimer was born in New York City in April 22, 1904 to Julius Oppenheimer and Ella Friedman. Their family had no money or an understanding of the English language, but his father got a job in a textile company and quickly became an executive.

Oppenheimer initially majored in chemistry at Harvard but after a bout of colitis he came back to school. He made up for lost time by studying physics independently and was admitted to graduate standing in his first year. He graduated summa cum laude in three years.

During his stay in Europe, he was known for being a chainsmoker who often neglected to eat during times of intense focus. He also had some self destructive tendencies. In one disturbing instance when his friend Paris Fergusson tried to distract him from his depression and told him that he would marry his own girlfriend. Oppenheimer jumped on Fergusson and tried to strangle him. He apparently once told his brother ” [He] needed physics more than friends.”

In 1926, he studied in the University of Gottingen under Max Born, which was one of the leading centers of theoretical  physics. Oppenheimer made friends with many great physicist including Enrico Fermi. During his stay, he was known for being too enthusiastic during discussion and even caused his peers to sign a petition threatening to boycott the class unless Born made him calm down. It was here at Gottingen that he made many important contributions such as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, his most cited work.

Early Works

Oppenheimer began a split fellowship between Harvard and Caltech in September 1927. At Caltech, he became friends with Linus Pauling and began researching  the nature of the chemical bond, with Oppenheimer supplying the mathematics and Pauling interpreting the results. This was short lived, however, when Pauling discovered that Oppenheimer was making moves on his wife Ava Pauling.

After briefly visiting the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, Oppenheimer accepted a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. Most of students were engrossed by him and adopted his walk, speech, and other mannerisms, and even the fact that he likes to read books in their original languages.

Manhattan Project

In May 1942, James B. Conant, the National Defense Research Committee, invited Oppenheimer to take over work on fast neutron calculations. One his first acts working there  was to host a summer school for the bomb theory/ With a group of physicists and his own students, they calculated what would be needed and how to make a bomb.

Many were surprised when Oppenheimer was selected to be the head of the lab because he had some communist ties and was never involved in a large scale project. Groves, the director of the Manhattan project, chose Oppenheimer based on the fact that he had an end to end grasp on the construction of the atomic bomb, and because of his wide knowledge base.

Initially, the project only employed a few hundred people, but by 1945 there was over 6000 people working on the Manhattan project. Oppenheimer was an iconic figure to his peers because he could “acquaint himself with the essential details of every part of the work” “He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and physically present at each decisive step”.

Trinity was the site of the first artificial nuclear explosion .

After Trinity, Oppenheimer was granted an interview with  President Harry S Truman. The meeting went badly after Oppenheimer said that he felt like he had “blood on [his] hands”, which infuriated Truman and caused him to end the meeting. He later told his secretary “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”

For his work as director of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was awarded the Medal of merit from President Truman in 1946.

Later Years and Death

Later in his life, Oppenheimer struggled politically and was accused of being too sympathetic to communist causes, which caused to lose his security clearance a day before it was to expire. During his hearing, he testified willingly on the left-wing and is seen by many in the scientific community as a martyr  to McCarthyism. Later after extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks from the KGB archives, Oppenheimer was never involved in espionage with the Russians.

Oppenheimer was diagnosed with throat cancer and after an unsuccessful surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation treatment, fell into a coma and died in February 18, 1967 at age 62. His funeral was held in Princeton and attended by 600 of his scientific, political, and military associates.

 

Sources:

“J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 5 Oct. 2015, www.biography.com/people/j-robert-oppenheimer-9429168.

“J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Jan. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer.