The father of the atomic bomb was a clumsy experimenter who hated lab work
At Cambridge, J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote that lab work bored him and he was hopeless at it. He switched to theory, helped predict neutron stars and black holes, and then led the Los Alamos laboratory that built the first nuclear weapons. Less than a decade later his own government stripped his security clearance.
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904, to a painter, Ella Friedman, and Julius Oppenheimer, a German immigrant who had arrived penniless and without English and became a wealthy textile executive. At the Ethical Culture school he raced through grades, loved literature and minerals, and later took flute lessons from Georges Barrère. A bout of colitis delayed university, and he recovered in New Mexico, beginning a lifelong love of horses and the Southwest.
At Harvard from 1922 he majored in chemistry, took six courses a term instead of four, and graduated in 1925. Cambridge went badly; he felt miserable and inept in Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory. In 1926 he moved to Göttingen, a centre of theoretical physics, and earned his doctorate under Max Born in 1927 at 23. The examiner, James Franck, reportedly said he was glad it was over, since Oppenheimer had been close to questioning him. Born and Oppenheimer's approximation for molecular wave functions remains standard.
At Berkeley, a full professor by 1936, he built a school of theoretical physics whose work ranged from positrons and quantum field theory to cosmic ray showers and collapsing stars. The Australian physicist Mark Oliphant briefed him on nuclear weapon design in 1941; he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942 and in 1943 took charge of the new Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. He watched the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. In August the bombs were used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, still the only wartime uses of nuclear weapons.
Afterwards he led the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and chaired the advisory committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. He argued for international control of atomic energy to head off an arms race with the Soviet Union and opposed the hydrogen bomb, partly on moral grounds. During the Second Red Scare, those positions and his past Communist associations led to a 1954 hearing that revoked his clearance. He died on February 18, 1967.
Source: J. Robert Oppenheimer
