On April 22, 1904, (Julius) Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City. His parents, Ella Friedman, an artist, and Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy German textile merchant, had Jewish ancestry but did not practise Judaism. He attended the Ethical Culture Society School, whose physics lab is now named in his honour. He then enrolled at Harvard in 1922 with the intention of becoming a chemist but quickly changed his major to physics. After receiving his summa cum laude in 1925, he travelled to England to work with J.J. Thomson as a researcher at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory.
Oppenheimer enrolled in Max Born’s classes at the University of Göttingen in 1926, where he graduated with a Ph.D. at the age of 22. His most well-known work on the so-called Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which distinguishes between nuclear motion and electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules, was one of many significant contributions he made to the then-evolving field of quantum theory that were published there. He attended the California Institute of Technology in the early part of 1928 after returning to Harvard in 1927 to study mathematical physics and as a National Research.
Council Fellow. In addition to holding a joint position at the California Institute of Technology, he took an assistant professorship in physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He “commuted” between the two campuses over the following 13 years, attending many of his classes at one.
The American school of theoretical physics now gives Oppenheimer the distinction of being one of its founding fathers. He conducted significant studies in the fields of spectroscopy, quantum field theory, nuclear physics, and astrophysics. He undertook work that eventually led to descriptions of quantum tunnelling and made significant contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers. He was the first to publish articles in the 1930s that suggested the presence of what we now refer to as black holes.
Oppenheimer wed radical Berkeley student Katherine Peuning Harrison in November 1940, and the couple welcomed their first child, Peter, in May 1941. When World War II broke out, Oppenheimer gladly joined the work being done to create an atomic weapon, which was already using up a lot of time and resources at Berkeley’s Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. In June 1942, General Leslie Groves named Oppenheimer as the scientific head of the Manhattan Project after inviting him to take over the work on neutron calculations.
The Los Alamos laboratories were built with Oppenheimer’s help. He assembled the top physicists there to work on the issue of building an atomic bomb. In the end, he was overseeing more than 3,000 employees in addition to solving emerging theoretical and mechanical issues. He is frequently referred to as the atomic bomb’s “father.” (At Los Alamos, Katherine (named Toni), the Oppenheimers’ second child, was born in 1944.) The first nuclear explosion, called “Trinity” by Oppenheimer, took place in Alamagordo on July 16, 1945, as a result of the collaborative efforts of the scientists at Los Alamos
Oppenheimer held the position of Chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) from 1947 to 1952 following the end of the war. He strongly objected to the creation of the hydrogen bomb in this capacity. Oppenheimer’s security clearance was revoked in 1953, at the height of American anticommunist sentiment, after he was accused of harbouring communist sympathies. With very few exceptions, the scientific community was appalled by the AEC’s decision. In an effort to right these wrongs, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Oppenheimer with the coveted Enrico Fermi Award from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1963.
Oppenheimer also held the position of Director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study from 1947 until 1966. He sparked debate and investigation into quantum and relativistic physics in the School of Natural Sciences there. Oppenheimer left the Institute in 1966 and passed away on February 18, 1967, from throat cancer.