I Am Become Death
Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his role as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project: the World War II effort to develop the first nuclear weapons at the secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
For this reason he is remembered as "the father of the atomic bomb". In reference to the Trinity test in New Mexico, where his Los Alamos team first tested the bomb, Oppenheimer famously recalled the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
After the war Oppenheimer was a chief advisor to the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission and used that position to lobby for international control of atomic energy and to avert the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. After provoking the ire of many politicians with his outspoken political opinions during the Red Scare, he had his security clearance revoked in a much-publicized and politicized hearing in 1954.
Johnson presented him) the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation.
As a scientist Oppenheimer is remembered most for being the chief founder of the American school of theoretical physics while at the University of California, Berkeley. As director of the Institute for Advanced Study he would hold Einstein's old position of Senior Professor of Theoretical Physics.
Oppenheimer's notable achievements in physics include the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, work on electron-positron theory, the Oppenheimer-Phillips process, quantum tunneling, relativistic quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, black holes, and cosmic rays.
Childhood and education
Robert Oppenheimer was born to Julius S. He had one brother, Frank, eight years younger, who also became a physicist.
Oppenheimer studied at the Ethical Culture Society School.
It was founded by Felix Adler to promote a form of ethical training based on the Ethical Culture movement. He entered Harvard College one year late because he had suffered an attack of colitis.
To recuperate he went with a former English teacher to New Mexico. There he fell in love with horseback riding, the mountains, and the plateau of the Southwest.
He also continued his studies of Greek architecture, classics, art, and literature. He made up for the delay caused by his illness by taking six courses each term and graduating summa cum laude in just three years.
In his first year as an undergraduate at Harvard Oppenheimer was admitted to graduate standing in physics on the basis of independent study.
During a course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman Oppenheimer found himself drawn to experimental physics. Later he cited it as one of the most influential books to shape his philosophy of life.
Europe
After graduating from Harvard, Oppenheimer was encouraged to go to Europe for future study as a world-class education in modern physics was not then available in the United States.
He was accepted for postgraduate work at Ernest Rutherford's famed Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge under the eminent but aging J.J. Thomson.
Oppenheimer's clumsiness in the laboratory made it apparent that his forte was not experimental but rather theoretical physics.
Göttingen was one of the top centers for theoretical physics in the world. He was on the point of questioning me." At Göttingen, Oppenheimer published more than a dozen articles, including many important contributions to the then newly-developed quantum theory.
Most notably he and Born published a famous paper on the so-called "Born-Oppenheimer approximation," which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules, an action which allows nuclear motion to be neglected in order to simplify calculations.
Early professional work
In September 1927, Oppenheimer returned to Harvard as a young maven of mathematical physics and a National Research Council Fellow, and in early 1928 he studied at the California Institute of Technology.
While at Caltech he received numerous invitations for teaching positions, and accepted an assistant professorship in physics at the University of California, Berkeley. At Caltech, Oppenheimer struck a close friendship with Linus Pauling and they planned to mount a joint attack on the nature of the chemical bond, a field in which Pauling was a pioneer—apparently Oppenheimer would supply the mathematics and Pauling would interpret the results.
However, this collaboration, and their friendship, was nipped in the bud when Pauling began to suspect that the theorist was becoming too close to his wife, Ava Helen. Once when Pauling was at work, Oppenheimer had come to their place and blurted out an invitation to Ava Helen to join him on a tryst in Mexico. This, and her apparent nonchalance about the incident, disquieted him, and he immediately cut off his relationship with the professor.
Oppenheimer later invited Pauling to be the head of the Chemistry Division of the atomic bomb project but Pauling refused, saying that he was a pacifist.
In the autumn of 1928, Oppenheimer visited Paul Ehrenfest's institute at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, where he impressed those there by giving lectures in Dutch despite having little experience with the language. During his time with Ehrenfest and Pauli, Oppenheimer polished his mathematical skills.
Before his Berkeley professorship began, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with a mild case of tuberculosis and, with his brother Frank, spent some weeks at a ranch in New Mexico, which he leased and eventually purchased.
When he heard the ranch was available for lease, he exclaimed, "Hot dog!"—and later on the name of the ranch became "Perro Caliente," which is the translation of "hot dog" into Spanish. Later, Oppenheimer used to say that "physics and desert country" were his "two great loves", loves that would be combined when he directed the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
He recovered from his tuberculosis and returned to Berkeley where he prospered as an advisor and collaborator to a generation of physicists who admired him for his intellectual virtuosity and broad interests. Lawrence and his cyclotron pioneers, helping the experimentalists understand the data their machines were producing at the Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory.
Oppenheimer became known as a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics, and developed a reputation for his erudition in physics, his eclecticism, his quick mind, his interest in languages and Eastern philosophy, and the eloquence and clarity with which he thought.
But he was also emotionally troubled throughout his life, and professed to experiencing periods of depression. When he was studying in Cambridge and had taken a vacation to meet up with his friend Francis Ferguson in Paris, a disturbing event had taken place.
His students almost always fell into the former category, adopting "Oppie's" affectations, from his way of walking to talking and beyond—even trying to replicate his inclination for reading entire texts in their originally transcribed languages.
Oppenheimer's intelligence and charisma attracted students from across the country to Berkeley to study theoretical physics.
Scientific work
Oppenheimer did important research in theoretical astronomy (especially as it relates to general relativity and nuclear theory), nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum field theory (including its extension into quantum electrodynamics). The formalism of relativistic quantum mechanics also attracted his attention, although because of the then existing well-known problem of the self-energy of the electron, he doubted the validity of quantum electrodynamics at high energies.
His best-known contribution, made as a graduate student, is the Born-Oppenheimer approximation mentioned above. After the Born-Oppenheimer approximation paper, these papers remain his most cited ones, and they were key in the rejuvenation of astrophysical research in the United States in the 1950s, mainly by John Wheeler.
As evidenced above, his work predicts many later finds, which include, further, the neutron, meson, and neutron star. They still considered him an outstanding physicist, but they did not place him at the very top rank of theorists who fundamentally challenged the frontiers of knowledge. One reason for this could have been his diverse interests, which kept him from completely focusing on any individual topic for long enough to bring it to full fruition.
His close confidant and colleague, Nobel Prize winner Isidor Rabi, later gave his own interpretation:
In spite of this, some people (such as the Nobel Prize winner physicist Luis Alvarez) have suggested that if he had lived long enough to see his predictions substantiated by experiment, Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapse, concerning neutron stars and black holes. In retrospect, some physicists and historians consider this to be his most important contribution, though it was not taken up by other scientists in his own lifetime. Interestingly, when the physicist and historian Abraham Pais once asked Oppenheimer about what he considered to be his most important scientific contributions, Oppenheimer cited his work on electrons and positrons, but did not mention anything about his work on gravitational contraction.
Radical politics
During the 1920s, Oppenheimer kept himself aloof of worldly matters, and claimed not to have learned of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 until some time after the fact. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER and his brother FRANK OPPENHEIMER."
In a 1944 letter to Soviet Commissar for Internal Affairs Lavrenty Beria, NKVD chief Boris Merkulov reported:
Merkulov added:
Many debates over Oppenheimer's Party membership or lack thereof have turned on very fine points; almost all historians agree he had strong socialist sympathies during this time, and interacted with Party members, though there is considerable dispute over whether he was officially a member of the Party or not. Oppenheimer himself at his 1954 security clearance hearings denied being a member of the Communist Party, but identified himself as a fellow traveler, which he defined as someone who agrees with many of the goals of Communism, but without being willing to blindly follow orders from any Communist party apparatus.
Marriage and family life
In November 1940, Oppenheimer married Katherine ("Kitty") Puening Harrison, a radical Berkeley student and former Communist Party member.
In 1941, Lawrence, Vannevar Bush, Arthur Compton, and James Conant worked to wrest the bomb project from the S-1 Uranium Committee, because they felt it was proceeding too slowly. At this time he renounced what he called his "left-wing wanderings" to concentrate on his responsibilities, though he continued to maintain friendships with many who were quite radical.
In 1942, the U.S.
Groves knew Oppenheimer would be viewed as a security risk, but thought that Oppenheimer was the best man to direct a diverse team of scientists and would be unaffected by his past political leanings.
Los Alamos
One of Oppenheimer's first acts was to host a summer school for bomb theory at his building in Berkeley. Teller put forward the remote possibility that the bomb would generate enough heat to ignite the atmosphere.
The Los Alamos laboratory was thus hastily built on the site of the school, taking over some of its buildings, but building many others in great haste. In the front row are Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi, and J.M.B.
However, when pressed on the issue in later interviews with General Groves, who ordered him to give the name of these men and promised to keep their identity from the FBI, he finally identified the only contact who had approached him, as his friend Haakon Chevalier, a Berkeley professor of French literature who he said had mentioned the matter privately at a dinner at Oppenheimer's house. General Groves during the war had thought Oppenheimer too important to the ultimate Allied goals to oust him over this suspicious behavior; he was, Groves reported, "absolutely essential to the project". However, by 1947, Oppenheimer had now told two conflicting versions of this story, had both of them taped without his knowledge and importantly was taped in a later interview as admitting to have made up a deliberate lie in this first report.
All of this would remain suppressed by the US government for another seven years.
According to the historian Gregg Herken, this naming could have been an allusion to Jean Tatlock, who had committed suicide a few months previously, and had in the 1930s introduced Oppenheimer to Donne's work. Oppenheimer later recalled that while witnessing the explosion he thought of a verse from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita:
Years later he would explain that another verse had also entered his head at that time: It is the famous verse, which begins as "Kalo Asmi" and was quoted by Oppenheimer after the successful detonation of the first nuclear weapon. He translated it as "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Oppenheimer later would be persuaded to quote again in 1965 for a television broadcast:
Gen.
Groves, Oppenheimer, and others at remains of the Trinity shot tower a few weeks later.
According to his brother, at the time Oppenheimer simply exclaimed, "It worked." A contemporary account by Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, who was present in the control bunker at the site with Oppenheimer, summarized his reaction as follows:
News of the successful test was rushed to President Harry S. Nuclear physics became a powerful force as all governments of the world began to realize the strategic and political power that came with nuclear weapons and their horrific implications.
Like many scientists of his generation, he felt that security from atomic bombs would come only from some form of transnational organization (such as the newly formed United Nations), which could institute a program to stifle a nuclear arms race.
Atomic Energy Commission
After the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was created in 1946, as a civilian agency in control of nuclear research and weapons issues, Oppenheimer was immediately appointed as the Chairman of its General Advisory Committee (GAC) and left the directorship of Los Alamos. He was overridden by President Truman, who announced a crash program after the Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb in 1949.
They were willing to furnish Oppenheimer's political enemies with incriminating evidence about Communist ties. These enemies included Lewis Strauss, an AEC commissioner who had long harbored resentment against Oppenheimer both for his activity in opposing the hydrogen bomb and for his humiliation of Strauss before Congress some years earlier, regarding Strauss's opposition to the export of radioactive isotopes to other nations.
This led to outrage by the scientific community and Teller's virtual expulsion from academic science. General Groves, threatened by the FBI as having been potentially part of a coverup about the Chevalier contact in 1943, testified against Oppenheimer also.
Many top scientists, as well as government and military figures, testified on Oppenheimer's behalf. As it happened, Oppenheimer was seen by most of the scientific community as a martyr to McCarthyism, an eclectic liberal who was unjustly attacked by warmongering enemies, symbolic of the shift of scientific creativity from academia into the military. Wernher von Braun summed up his opinion about the matter with a quip to a Congressional committee: "In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."
Institute for Advanced Study
Oppenheimer eventually took over Einstein's position at the Institute for Advanced Study.
In 1947, Oppenheimer left Berkeley, citing difficulties with the administration during the war, and took up the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey.
A little over a week after Kennedy's assassination, his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, presented Oppenheimer with the award, "for contributions to theoretical physics as a teacher and originator of ideas, and for leadership of the Los Alamos Laboratory and the atomic energy program during critical years". Still, he thought the effort had little effect on actual policy.
Final years
Oppenheimer Beach, in St John, U.S.
Oppenheimer also spent a considerable amount of time sailing with his wife.
Increasingly concerned about the potential danger to humanity arising from scientific discoveries, Oppenheimer joined with Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Rotblat and other eminent scientists and academics to establish what would eventually become the World Academy of Art and Science in 1960. Some scientists and historians have speculated that his investigations towards black holes may have warranted the Nobel, had he lived long enough to see them brought into fruition by later astrophysicists.
Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves, shortly after the war.
As a military and public policy advisor, Oppenheimer was a technocratic leader in a shift in the interactions between science and the military and the emergence of "Big Science." During World War II, scientists became involved in military research to an unprecedented degree (some research of this sort had occurred during World War I, but it was far smaller in scope).
Nevertheless, the trope of Oppenheimer as a martyr has proven indelible, and to speak of Oppenheimer has often been to speak of the limits of science and politics; however, more complicated is the actual history.
One particular example of the view of Oppenheimer as martyr is found in German playwright Heinar Kipphardt's 1964 play, In the Matter J.