Oppenheimer, J. Robert | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

J(ulius) Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) was born in New York City on April 22 of a privileged, assimilated German-Jewish family. Known widely as the "father of the atomic bomb," Oppenheimer also thought that physicists had special responsibilities as a result of their contributions to this development. He argued forinternational control of nuclear weapons and against the U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb. He died of throat cancer in Princeton, New Jersey, on February 18.

Oppenheimer received a liberal and wide-ranging education in New York City, at Harvard University, and at several leading scientific centers in Europe, receiving his Ph.D. under Max Born in 1927. His most creative scientific work was performed in the period 1927–1942, first at Göttingen, Germany, with Born, and then at the California Institute of Technology and, primarily, at the University of California Berkeley. His first major contribution was the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, a seminal recipe for dealing with molecular interactions. He subsequently published important papers on nuclear and particle physics. He also studied astrophysical phenomena, involving general relativity, neutron stars, and gravitational collapse.

At Berkeley Oppenheimer became arguably the most important and certainly the most charismatic American-born physics theorist. His close association with Ernest O. Lawrence helped spread his fame as a theoretical physicist capable of understanding and working with the most advanced high energy experiments. In 1942 he became scientific director of the Los Alamos center of the Manhattan Project, where the atomic weapons of World War II were designed, built, and finally delivered for use over Japan in August 1945. Resigning from Los Alamos after the war, he became director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, where he once again demonstrated his talents as an organizer and scientific leader.

As a result of his spectacular accomplishment with the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was elevated to a position of extraordinary prestige and power in both the scientific and the political worlds. He became an international celebrity and governmental adviser, raising questions of conscience for the scientific community and arguing for United Nations (UN) control of nuclear weapons. In 1947, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he gave a talk in which he made the comment that as a result of their development of the atomic bomb physicists had known sin and thus had a responsibility to help educate other scientists, politicians, and the public about the devastating power of these new weapons.

Early in his Berkeley years Oppenheimer became involved in political activities. He supported many organizations and interest groups that could be identified as leftist. Such activities and associations later caused Oppenheimer difficulty during the period of intense anti-communist sentiments that gripped the United States in the early days of the Cold War, and an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) hearing resulted in the removal of his secret security clearance in 1954.

The denial of Oppenheimer's clearance was based on several factors. One was his unswerving opposition to the efforts of the U.S. government to develop a hydrogen bomb. Another was his past associations with left wing and pro-Soviet groups, and also the fact that at one time in 1943 he did not reveal a discussion with Haakon Chevalier, a friend and French professor at Berkeley, about the possibility of personal contacts between American and Soviet scientists outside official channels. The reason for not reporting this incident may have been his unwillingness to betray a friend, whom he felt was innocent of venal motive. As for his opposition to the hydrogen bomb, in retrospect Oppenheimer appears to have been punished for a dissenting view on a controversial topic, a state of affairs that is part of the normal democratic decision making process. In any case President John F Kennedy ordered what amounted to his rehabilitation in 1963 by awarding him the Enrico Fermi prize, the highest honor granted by the AEC.

Oppenheimer was an aesthete; a consummate scholar of languages, ancient cultures, and literature; as well as an accomplished physicist. He had refined tastes, supported by his inherited wealth. He was a self-proclaimed lover of the common man, exemplified in his espousal of liberal and leftist causes. Yet he worked on military weapons and projects. He did not oppose research on the hydrogen bomb, only on its development as a deliverable weapon. In telling testimony before the U.S. Congress, he once commented that such development was so sweet technically that it could not but be tried. Although known for acerbic remarks at scientific presentations, he was admired, even loved, by students and junior colleagues. Although loyal to friends, in the Chevalier case he caused irreparable damage to a career when he did belatedly describe their conversation. While his scientific productivity was outstanding, he missed producing any single contribution that would have placed him in the first ranks. In sum he was a scientist, teacher, scientific administrator, and public figure, whose flaws prevented him from achieving the highest level in the intellectual pantheon, and yet who raised important ethical issues for the scientific community and public.

Atomic Bomb;; Oppenheimer, Frank;; Science Policy.

Herken, Gregg. (2002). Brotherhood of the Bomb. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Schweber, Silvan S. (2000). In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bethe, Hans A. "Biographical Memoirs: J. Robert Oppenheimer." National Academy of Sciences. Available from http://nap.edu/html/biomems/joppenheime r.html.

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