The Philosopher
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The face
The background
- Nationality:
- American
- Period:
- 20th century
The synopsis
J. Robert Oppenheimer (born Julius Robert Oppenheimer; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist who served as the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. He is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in overseeing the development of the first nuclear weapons.
Born in New York City, Oppenheimer obtained a degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1925 and a doctorate in physics from the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1927, studying under Max Born. After research at other institutions, he joined the physics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was made a full professor in 1936.
Oppenheimer made significant contributions to physics in the fields of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, including the Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions; work on the theory of positrons, quantum electrodynamics, and quantum field theory; and the Oppenheimer–Phillips process in nuclear fusion. With his students, he also made major contributions to astrophysics, including the theory of cosmic ray showers, and the theory of neutron stars and black holes.
In 1941, Oppenheimer was briefed about nuclear weapon design by Australian physicist Mark Oliphant. In 1942, Oppenheimer was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, and in 1943 was appointed director of the project's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, tasked with developing the first nuclear weapons. His leadership and scientific expertise were instrumental in the project's success, and on July 16, 1945, he was present at the first test of the atomic bomb, Trinity. In August, the weapons were used on Japan in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to date the only uses of nuclear weapons in conflict.
In 1947, Oppenheimer was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the new United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). He lobbied for international control of nuclear power and weapons in order to avert an arms race with the Soviet Union, and later opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, partly on ethical grounds. During the Second Red Scare, his stances, together with his past associations with the Communist Party USA, led to an AEC security hearing in 1954 and the revocation of his security clearance. He continued to lecture, write, and work in physics, and in 1963 received the Enrico Fermi Award for contributions to theoretical physics. The 1954 decision was vacated in 2022.
The works
The quotes
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.
My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. In the autumn, I began to court her. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.
I was born in New York in 1904.
My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.
I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.
To recruit staff, I traveled all over the country talking with people who had been working on one or another aspect of the atomic-energy enterprise and people in radar work, for example, and underwater sound, telling them about the job, the place that we are going to, and enlisting their enthusiasm.
I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.
No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
I need physics more than friends.
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.
There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.
To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.
I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation.
The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.