On April 22, 1904, a great theoretical physicist who would be later called the father of the atomic bomb was born in New York City. Julius Robert Oppenheimer was the son of Julius Oppenheimer, a wealthy textile importer, and Ella Friedman, a painter. Oppenheimer grew up in a Manhattan apartment that contained paintings of artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gaughin, and Paul Cezanne. In school he expressed keen interest in the sciences, but he also enthusiastically studied Greek, Latin, French, and German. His favorite subject of all was chemistry, however, because it "starts right at the heart of things." In 1921, he graduated from the Ethnical Culture School of New York at the top of his class. However, he contracted dysentery on a trip to Europe which prevented him from entering Harvard that fall.
In 1922, Oppenheimer enrolled into Harvard, where his studies ranged from science to philosophy and Eastern religions. During his final semester at Harvard, he applied to study under Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. He was turned down because Rutherford thought Oppenheimer's credentials were inadequate. However, Joseph John Tohomson accepted Oppenheimer as a research student but he was dissatisfied. He regarded the work as "a terrible bore" and he said it was "so bad that it is impossible to feel that I'm learning anything." He finally caught a break when he started to study under Max Born in Germany in 1926 and he received his doctoral degree in March 1927. Working closely with Born, Oppenheimer concluded that "the vibration and spin of protons could be ignored in theoretical calculations because the mass of the proton was incomparably greater than and essentially unaffected by the electron." This concept became known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. He also published a paper in 1939 entitled "On Continued Gravatational Contraction" that predicted black holes, which are dying stars whose gravitational pull exceeds their energy production. In the same year, Oppenheimer fell in love with Katharine "Kitty" Puening Harrsion, a biologist and widow of a Communist killed during the Spanish civil war. They married in 1940 and had two children.
In August 1942, the U.S. army was given charge of the entire atomic bomb mission, which became known as the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer was appointed as the project's director. He set up a new research station in Los Alamos, New Mexico and brought the best minds in physics to work on the project. On July, 1945, after three years of research, problem solving, and original ideas, Oppenheimer witnessed the first explosion of the atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. Less than a month later, atomic bombs were dropped on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war and causing mass destruction to the Japanese. He had been so caught up in creating the ultimate weapon that he had not considered the loss of human lives that resulted from his work. Oppenheimer began to oppose creating more atomic bombs and specifically was against developing a more powerful bomb using hydrogen. He stated to President Harry Truman "I feel we have blood on our hands," but Truman simply said "Never mind. It'll all come out in the wash." Unfortunately his opposition causes suspicion of his loyalty and questioned his ties to the Communist Party in the 1930's. The United States Atomic Energy Commission decided to revoke his security clearance in 1954. However, the commission also gave him the Enrico Fermi Award for his role in the development of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer spent the last years of his life writing about the problems of intellectual ethics and morality. He died of throat cancer in 1967.
Quotes:
"Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man."
"The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, The pessimist fears it is true."
"If the radiance of a thousands suns were to burst at once into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One... I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds."
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/ai/aboutopp.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/baoppe.html
http://history1900s.about.com/cs/robertopp.../oppenheimer_p.ht
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAoppenheimer.htm
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/J._Robert_Oppenheimer/
http://www.namebase.org/main2/Jonathan-Robert-Oppenheimer.html
The Harper Encyclopedia of
Science, Volume 2