J. Robert Oppenheimer

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Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Oppenheimer served as the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is one of those credited with the "father of the atomic bomb" for their participation in the Manhattan Project, the first nuclear weapons program.

In the Trinity test in New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945.

Later, Oppenheimer commented that it brought to mind Bhagavad Gita's words: "Now I am Death, the destroyer of worlds." The weapons were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki's atomic bombings in August 1945. Oppenheimer became chairman of the newly formed United States Atomic Energy Commission's influential General Advisory Committee after the war ended.

He lobbied for international recognition of nuclear power in order to prevent nuclear proliferation and a nuclear arms battle with the Soviet Union.

He was effectively stripped of his immediate political power after sparking the outrage of several politicians during the Second Red Scare in 1954, and was effectively stripped of his direct political power; he continued to lecture, write, and work in physics.

President John F. Kennedy (and Lyndon B. Johnson) was given the Enrico Fermi Award nine years ago as a mark of political restitution. Oppenheimer's contributions in physics included the Born-Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions, work on the molecular wave theory, the Oppenheimer–Phillips process in nuclear fusion, and the first prediction of quantum tunneling.

He also contributed to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and cosmic ray interactions.

He is remembered as a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics, which gained world prominence in the 1930s. He served as a mentor and promoter of science.

He became the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, following World War II.

Early life

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904, to Ella (née Friedman), a painter, and Julius Seligmann Oppenheimer, a wealthy textile importer. Julius was born in Hanau, Prussia, Germany, but there were no funds, no grants, no baccalaureate studies, and no idea of the English language. He was recruited by a textile company and spent a decade as an executive, eventually becoming wealthy. Both the Oppenheimers were secular Jews; his father, a German Jewish, and his mother, who was from New York, descended from a German Jewish family that had lived in the United States since the 1840s. The family migrated to an apartment on the 11th floor of 155 Riverside Drive in 1912, which is located in a district known for high-end mansions and townhouses. Pablo Picasso and Édouard Vuillard's works were included in their art collection, as well as at least three original paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Frank, Robert's younger brother, was also a physicist, was his mentor.

Oppenheimer was educated at Alcuin Preparatory School, and he attended the Ethical Culture Society School in 1911. Felix Adler's goal was to promote a form of ethical education based on the Ethical Culture movement, whose motto was "Deed before Creed." His father was a member of the Society for many years and served on its board of trustees from 1907 to 1915. Oppenheimer was a versatile scholar, keen on English and French literature, as well as in mineralogy. In one year, he completed the third and fourth grades, skipped half of the eighth grade. He became interested in chemistry during his senior year. He arrived in Harvard College one year after graduating, at the age of 18, because he experienced a bout of colitis while prospecting in Joachimstal during a family summer holiday in Europe. His father enlisted the help of his English teacher Herbert Smith, who brought him to New Mexico, where Oppenheimer fell in love with horseback riding and the southwestern United States to help him recover from the illness.

Oppenheimer was a scientist who concentrated in chemistry, but Harvard required science students to also study history, literature, and mathematics. He compensated for his late start by enrolling six courses each term and was accepted to Phi Beta Kappa, the undergraduate honor society. He was accepted into graduate standing in physics on the basis of independent study, which meant he was not required to enroll in the basic classes and instead in advanced ones. Percy Bridgman's course on thermodynamics drew him to experimental physics. He received his summa cum laude in three years.

Oppenheimer was informed in 1924 that he had been accepted into Christ's College, Cambridge. Ernest Rutherford wrote to Ernest Rutherford, asking that he be allowed to work at the Cavendish Laboratory. Oppenheimer was given a recommendation by Bridgman, who admitted that Oppenheimer's clumsiness in the laboratory made it clear that his forte was not scientific but rather theoretical physics. Rutherford was unimpressed, but Oppenheimer came to Cambridge in the hopes of receiving a new offer. He was eventually accepted by J. J. Thomson on the condition that he completes a basic laboratory course. Patrick Blackett, his tutor, was only a few years his senior, and he had an antagonistic relationship with him. Oppenheimer once confessed to leaving an apple doused with noxious chemicals on Blackett's desk while on vacation, as recalled by his colleague Francis Fermson. Although Fergusson's account is the only complete account of the incident, Oppenheimer's parents were alerted by university authorities who were considering placing him on probation, a fate that was not avoided by his parents' successful lobbying the police.

Oppenheimer, a tall, thin chain smoker, who often skipped to eat during times of intense thought and concentration. Many of his relatives characterized him as having self-destructive tendencies. He took a break from his studies in Cambridge to speak with Fermson in Paris, which was a troubling occurrence. Oppenheimer was not well behaved, according to Fergusson. Ferman told Oppenheimer that he (Fernson) was to marry Frances Keeley in order to distract him from his depression. Oppenheimer did not take the news well. Fergusson charged him with strangling him. Despite Fergusson's quick dismissal of the assault, the episode brought him right to Oppenheimer's profound psychological issues. Oppenheimer suffered with bouts of depression throughout his life, and he once told his brother, "I need physics more than people."

Oppenheimer left Cambridge for Göttingen to study under Max Born in 1926. Göttingen was one of the world's leading centers for theoretical physics. Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller were among Oppenheimer's friends who went on to great success, including Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Manuel Pauli, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. He was known for being too enthusiastic in discussions, sometimes to the point of taking over seminar sessions. This enraged some of Born's classmates so much that Maria Goeppert signed a petition signed by herself and others threatening to boycott the class if Oppenheimer kept quiet down. Born left it out on his desk where Oppenheimer could read it, and it was as effective without a word being defined.

He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in March 1927 at the age of 23, but Born guided him. "I'm glad that's over," the professor who was leading a class said after the oral examination. "He was on the verge of questioning me." Oppenheimer published more than a dozen papers in Göttingen, among many of the field's recent contributions. Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which distinguishes nuclear motion from electronic motion in molecules' mathematical modeling, has been used to simplify calculations. It is his most cited work.

Early professional work

In September 1927, Oppenheimer was granted a National Research Council fellowship to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The British man also wanted him at Harvard, so a deal was struck in 1927 and 1928, whereby he divided his fellowship for the 1927–28 academic year. Linus Pauling's close friendship with him at Caltech culminated into a joint strike on the chemical bond, which Pauling was a pioneer in the field, with Oppenheimer supplying the mathematics and Pauling interpreting the findings. Both the friendship and the friendship came to an end when Pauling began to suspect Oppenheimer of being too close to his wife, Ava Helen Pauling. Oppenheimer had arrived at their house and invited Ava Helen to join him on a tryst in Mexico when Pauling was at work. Despite refusing to and reporting the incident to her husband, the invitation, and her apparent lack of curiosity about it disquiet Pauling and ended his friendship with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer invited him to lead the Chemistry Division of the Manhattan Project later, but Pauling refused, citing a pacifist.

Oppenheimer visited Paul Ehrenfest's Institute in Leiden, the Netherlands, where he impressed by giving Dutch lectures despite having no expertise in the language. Opje was given the name of Opje, which was later anglicized by his students as "Oppie." He went from Leiden to Zurich's Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) to work with Wolfgang Pauli on quantum mechanics and the continuous spectrum. Oppenheimer respected and adored Pauli and may have imitated his personal style as well as his critical approach to problems.

Oppenheimer accepted an associate professorship from the University of California, Berkeley, where Raymond T. Birge so badly that he shared him with Caltech.

Oppenheimer had a mild case of tuberculosis and spent the following weeks with his brother Frank at a New Mexico ranch, which he rented and later purchased before starting his Berkeley professorship. He exclaimed, "Hot dog!" as he learned that the ranch was available for lease. "Perro Caliente," a Spanish word that later became "hot dog." He used to say that "physics and desert country" were his "two great loves" in later life. He recovered from tuberculosis and returned to Berkeley, where he excelled as an advisor and mentor to a generation of physicists who admired him for his intellectual virtuosity and broad interests. His students and colleagues found him hypnotic in private relationships, but in more public settings, he was often cold. His followers fell into two camps: one saw him as an aloof and brilliant genius as well as aesthete, and the other as a pretentious and insecure poseur. His students almost all fell into the former category, adopting his walk, speech, and other mannerisms, as well as his penchant for reading entire texts in their original languages.

Hans Bethe said of him:

He collaborated closely with Nobel Prize-winning experimental physicist Ernest O. Lawrence and his cyclotron pioneers, assisting them in determining the results their machines were generating at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Berkeley promoted him from full professor to full professor at $3,300 a year (equivalent to $64,000 in 2021). He was asked to limit his teaching at Caltech in return, so a deal was reached whereby Berkeley kept him for six weeks a year, enough to teach one term at Caltech.

Oppenheimer made pioneering contributions in theoretical astronomy (particularly as relating to general relativity and nuclear theory), nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum field theory, as well as the extension into quantum electrodynamics. Relativistic quantum mechanics' formal mathematics attracted his attention, but he questioned its legitimacy. His work predicted several years to come, including the neutron, meson, and neutron star.

His first research paper, published in 1926, was concerned with molecular band spectra theory. He invented a device that made it possible to perform transition probabilities. He estimated the photoelectric effect on hydrogen and X-rays by measuring the absorption coefficient at the K-edge. His estimates were consistent with observations of the sun's X-ray absorption but not helium. Years later, it was discovered that the sun was mainly composed of hydrogen and that his calculations were indeed correct.

Oppenheimer contributed to the field of cosmic ray showers as well as started experiments that eventually led to quantum tunneling terms. In 1931, he co-wrote a paper on the "Relativistic Theory of the Photoelectric Effect" with his student Harvey Hall, in which, based on empirical evidence, he backed up Dirac's assertion that two of the hydrogen atom's energy levels have the same energy. Willis Lamb, one of his doctoral students, determined that this was a result of Lamb's emergence, for which Lamb was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955.

Oppenheimer's first doctoral student, Melba Phillips, worked on experiments of artificial radioactivity under bombardment by deuterons. When Ernest Lawrence and Edwin McMillan bombarded nuclei with deuterons, they found that the results were in accordance with George Gamow's predictions, but that higher energies and heavier nuclei were involved, the findings did not match the theory. Oppenheimer and Phillips developed a theory in 1935, which is now known as the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, in order to explain the findings; this theory is still in use today.

Oppenheimer wrote a paper that essentially predicted the existence of the positron as early as 1930. This was after Paul Dirac's paper suggested that electrons have both a positive charge and negative electricity. To explain the Zeeman effect, Dirac's paper introduced an equation referred to as the Dirac equation, which combined quantum mechanics, special relativity, and the then-new concept of electron spin. Oppenheimer debunked the belief that the predicted positively charged electrons were protons on the basis of experimental findings. They would have to have the same mass as an electron, according to his theory, but experiments revealed that protons were much heavier than electrons. Carl David Anderson discovered the positron, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1936.

Oppenheimer became interested in astrophysics in the late 1930s, most likely because of his friendship with Richard Tolman, which culminated in a series of papers. Oppenheimer investigated the properties of white dwarfs in the first of these, a 1938 paper co-written with Robert Serber titled "On the Stability of Stellar Neutron Cores." "On Massive Neutron Cores," was co-written by George Volkoff, one of his students', in which they found that there was a limit, the so-called Tolman–Volkoff ratio, to the number of stars beyond which they would not be able to remain stable as neutron stars and would suffer gravitational decay. Oppenheimer and another of his students, Hartland Snyder, wrote a paper in 1939 that predicted the existence of black holes, which is now known as black holes. These papers, after the Born-Oppenheimer approximation paper, are still his most cited, and they were major contributors in the revival of astrophysical research in the United States in the 1950s, mainly by John A. Wheeler.

Oppenheimer's papers were still difficult to comprehend even by the highest expectations of the abstract fields in which he was specialized. He loved using sophisticated, albeit complicated, mathematical methods to demonstrate physical principles, but he was often chastised for making mathematical errors out of necessity. "His physics was fine," his student Snyder said, "but his arithmetic was awful."

Oppenheimer released only five scientific papers after World War II, one of which was in biochemistry, and none after 1950. Murray Gell-Mann, a later Nobel Laureate who worked with him at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1951, shared this view:

Oppenheimer's whimsy divert sometimes distracted him from focusing on science. He liked things that were difficult, and since so much of the scientific research seemed straightforward for him, he developed a fascination with the mysterious and cryptic. He learned Sanskrit in 1933 and met Indologist Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley. In the original Sanskrit, he eventually read the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads and meditated on them. Later, he cited the Gita as one of the books that most inspired his philosophy of life.

Isidor Rabi, his close confidant and colleague, later gave his own interpretation:

Despite this, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez has argued that Oppenheimer may have been rewarded for his research into neutron stars and black holes if he lived long enough to see his predictions confirmed by experiment. In retrospect, some physicists and historians agree this was his most important contribution, although it was not taken up by other scientists in his lifetime. Abraham Pais asked Oppenheimer what he considered to be his most influential scientific contributions; Oppenheimer cited electrons and positrons rather than gravitational contraction. Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physics three times in 1946, 1951, and 1967, but never won.

Private and political life

Oppenheimer remained uninformed about international affairs during the 1920s. He said he didn't read newspapers or listen to the radio, and he had only heard of the 1929 Wall Street tragedy when he was walking with Ernest Lawrence six months after the incident occurred. He had once stated that he had never run for office until the 1936 presidential election. However, he became more concerned about politics and international affairs from 1934 to 1980. He earned three percent of his annual salary in 1934, relative to $2,026 in 2021) for two years to help German physicists fleeing from Nazi Germany. During the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, he and some of his students, including Melba Phillips and Bob Serber, attended a longshoremen's march. Oppenheimer had been trying to find Serber a Berkeley position, but Birge refused to admit that "one Jew in the department was enough."

Oppenheimer's mother died in 1931, and he became closer to his father, who, despite living in New York, became a frequent visitor to California. Oppenheimer and his brother Frank died in 1937, leaving Oppenheimer and his brother Frank with $392,602 to be divided, and Oppenheimer immediately wrote out a will that would be used for graduate scholarships. He endorsed social reforms that were later thought to be communist concepts, as many young intellectuals in the 1930s. During the McCarthy period, he supported many feminist causes that were later branded as left-wing. The bulk of his apparently radical work consisted of hosting fundraisers for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and other anti-fascist groups. He never explicitly joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), but he did give money to leftist charities by way of acquaintances who were suspected of being party members. Oppenheimer's 1936 involvement with Jean Tatlock, the niece of a Berkeley literature professor and a Stanford University School of Medicine undergraduate, became a member. The two had common political views; she wrote for the Western Worker, a Communist Party newspaper.

After a tempestuous friendship, Tatlock and Oppenheimer broke up in 1939. He encountered Katherine ("Kitty") Puening, a Berkeley undergraduate and former Communist Party activist, in August of this year. Before that, Kitty had been married. Her first marriage lasted only a few months. Joe Dallet, a prominent member of the Communist Party and wounded in the Spanish Civil War, was her second, common-law marriage husband. Kitty earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in botany from the University of Pennsylvania, returning to the United States. Richard Harrison, a physician and medical researcher, was married there in 1938. Kitty and Harrison moved to Pasadena, California, where they became chief of radiology at a local hospital, and she enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Oppenheimer and Kitty created a minor controversies by sleeping together after one of Tolman's parties. She stayed with Oppenheimer at his ranch in New Mexico in the summer of 1940. When she found out she was pregnant, she finally asked Harrison for a divorce. When he refused, she obtained an instant divorce in Reno, Nevada, and married Oppenheimer as her fourth husband on November 1, 1940.

Peter was born in May 1941 and their second child, Katherine ("Toni"), was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on December 7, 1944. Oppenheimer's affair with Jean Tatlock continued throughout his marriage. Because of Tatlock's communist connections, their continued contact became a point in his security clearance hearings later this year. Many of Oppenheimer's closest associates were active in the Communist Party in the 1930s or 1940s. His brother Frank, Frank's wife Jackie, Kitty, Jean Tatlock, his landlady Mary Ellen Washburn, and several of Berkeley's undergraduate students were among his undergraduate students.

Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he had been "a member of just about every Communist Front group on the West Coast" when he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942. He said years later that he didn't remember saying this, that it was inaccurate, and that if he had said anything along those lines, it would have been "a half-jocular overstatement." He was a subscriber to People's World, a Communist Party organ, and he testified in 1954, "I was associated with the communist movement." Oppenheimer was a Berkeley faculty member from 1937 to 1942, and later identified by colleagues, Haakon Chevalier and Gordon Griffiths, as a "closed" (secret) unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty.

In March 1941, the FBI opened an Oppenheimer file. It was revealed that he attended a meeting in Chevalier in December 1940 that was also attended by the Communist Party's California state secretary William Schneiderman and its treasurer Isaac Folkoff. Oppenheimer was on the Executive Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, which was described as a communist front group by the FBI. The FBI added Oppenheimer to its Custodial Detention Index shortly after, for detention in the case of national emergency. Oppenheimer's party membership or lack thereof have forged on some fine details; almost all historians agree he had strong left-wing views at this point and met with party leaders, but there was also considerable disagreement about whether he was officially a member of the party. He denied being a member of the Communist Party at his 1954 security clearance hearings, but described himself as a fellow traveler, which he described as someone who agrees with many of communism's main points, but refused to follow orders from any Communist Party body.

Oppenheimer was under scrutiny by both the FBI and the Manhattan Project's internal security service for left-wing activities he was known to have had in the past. During a trip to California in June 1943 to visit Jean Tatlock, who was suffering from depression, he was followed by Army security agents. Oppenheimer spent the night in her apartment. Tatlock committed suicide on January 4, 1944, leaving Oppenheimer deeply distraught. He volunteered to Manhattan Project security agents that George Eltenton, who did not know, had solicited three men at Los Alamos for Soviet secrets in August 1943. When pressed on the subject in later interviews, Oppenheimer admitted that his only one who had confronted him was his colleague Haakon Chevalier, a Berkeley professor of French literature who had openly discussed the topic at a dinner at Oppenheimer's house. Oppenheimer was too important to the project to be dismissed due to his erratic behavior, according to Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., project's project's chief. He wrote to the Manhattan Engineer District on July 20, 1943: "He wrote to the Manhattan Engineer District."

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