J. Robert Oppenheimer
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is remembered as a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics that gained world prominence in the 1930s. His achievements in physics included the Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions and work on the theory of electrons and positrons. He died of cancer at the age of 80 in 1987.
About J. Robert Oppenheimer in brief
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the \”father of the atomic bomb\” He is remembered as a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics that gained world prominence in the 1930s. His achievements in physics included the Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions and work on the theory of electrons and positrons. He also made important contributions to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and the interactions of cosmic rays. After the war ended, he became chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission. He used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation and a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb during a 1949–50 governmental debate on the question and subsequently took stances on defense-related issues that provoked the ire of some factions in the U.S. government and military. During the Second Red Scare, his associations with people and organizations affiliated with the Communist Party led to him suffering the revocation of his security clearance in a much-written-about hearing in 1954. After World War II, he was director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
He died of cancer at the age of 80 in 1987. He is survived by his wife, Barbara, and two sons, Robert and Frank, who also became a physicist. He had a younger brother, Frank, and a stepson, Robert Jr., who also was a physicist and served in the Air Force during the Second World War. The Oppenheimers were non-observant Ashkenazi Jews. His father was a wealthy Jewish textile importer who had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1888, and Ella Friedman, a painter. The family moved to an apartment on the 11th floor of 155 Riverside Drive, near West 88th Street, Manhattan, an area known for luxurious mansions and townhouses. Their art collection included works by Pablo Picasso and Édouard Vuillard, and at least three original paintings by Vincent van Gogh. He completed the third and fourth grades in one year, and skipped half the eighth grade. At age 18, he suffered an attack of colachimitis while prospecting in Joachimstal during a family summer vacation in southwestern New Mexico, where he fell in love with horseback riding and the New Mexico desert. In his first year of graduate school he was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa and was taught by experimental thermodynamics, which meant he could enroll in advanced classes on the basis of independent study, instead of being required to study history, literature, and philosophy or mathematics. He went on to study at Harvard University, where in his final year he became interested in chemistry.
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