J. Robert Oppenheimer

J. Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer, c. 1944
Born	(1904-04-22)April 22, 1904 New York City, New York, United States
Died	February 18, 1967(1967-02-18) (aged 62) Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Harvard University University of Cambridge University of Göttingen
Known for	Nuclear weapons development Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit Oppenheimer-Phillips process Born–Oppenheimer approximation
Awards	Enrico Fermi Award
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical physics
Institutions	Manhattan Project University of California, Berkeley California Institute of Technology Institute for Advanced Study
Doctoral advisor	Max Born
Notable students	Julian Schwinger Stan Frankel Samuel W. Alderson Robert Christy Melba Phillips Philip Morrison
Notes
Brother of physicist Frank Oppenheimer

Julius 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 best known for his role as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first nuclear weapons, for which he is often referred to as the "father of the atomic bomb". In reference to the Trinity test in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, 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 nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation and a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. After provoking the ire of many politicians with his outspoken political opinions during the Second Red Scare, he had his security clearance revoked in a much-publicized and politicized hearing in 1954. Though stripped of his direct political influence Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write and work in physics. A decade later President John F. Kennedy awarded (and Lyndon B. Johnson presented) Oppenheimer with the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation.

Oppenheimer's notable achievements in physics include the Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wavefunctions, work on the theory of electrons and positrons, the Oppenheimer–Phillips process in nuclear fusion and the first prediction of quantum tunneling. With his students he also made important contributions to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as work on the theory of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and the interactions of cosmic rays. As a teacher and promoter of science, Oppenheimer is remembered as the chief founder of the American school of theoretical physics while at the University of California, Berkeley, contributing significantly to the rise of American physics to its first era of world prominence in the 1930s. After World War II, he contributed to American scientific organizations again, as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was the Senior Professor of Theoretical Physics, the position previously held by Albert Einstein.

Early life

Childhood and education

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904 to Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish textile importer who had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1888, and Ella Friedman, a painter. In 1912 the family moved to an apartment on the eleventh floor of 155 Riverside Drive, near West 88th Street, Manhattan, an area known for luxurious mansions and town houses. The family's art collection included works by Pablo Picasso and Édouard Vuillard, and at least three original paintings by Vincent van Gogh. He had a younger brother, Frank Oppenheimer, who also became a physicist.

Oppenheimer was initially schooled at Alcuin Preparatory School. In 1911 he entered the Ethical Culture Society School. It had been founded by Felix Adler to promote a form of ethical training based on the Ethical Culture movement, whose motto was "Deed before Creed". His father had been a member of the Society for Ethical Culture for many years, serving on its board of trustees from 1907 to 1915. Oppenheimer was a versatile scholar, interested in the English and French literature and particularly in mineralogy. He completed the third grade and fourth grade in one year and later skipped half of the eighth grade. During his final year, he became interested in chemistry. He entered Harvard College a year late, at age 18, because he suffered an attack of colitis while prospecting in Joachimstal during a family summer vacation in Europe. To recover he went to New Mexico, where Oppenheimer fell in love with horseback riding and the southwest United States.

In 1922, Oppenheimer entered Harvard where he studied chemistry. In addition to an academic major ("concentration"), undergraduates had to study history, literature and philosophy or mathematics. Oppenheimer made up for his late start by taking six courses each term and graduated summa cum laude in three years. He was admitted to undergraduate honor society Phi Beta Kappa. In his first year at Harvard, Oppenheimer was admitted to graduate standing in physics on the basis of independent study, which meant that he was exempted from taking the basic classes and could enroll in advanced ones. In a course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman, Oppenheimer was attracted to experimental physics.

Studies in Europe

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes' Laboratory in Leiden, Netherlands, 1926. Oppenheimer is in the second row, third from the left.

In 1924, Oppenheimer was informed that he had been accepted into Christ's College, Cambridge. He wrote to Ernest Rutherford requesting permission to work at the Cavendish Laboratory. Bridgman provided Oppenheimer with a recommendation, which conceded that Oppenheimer's clumsiness in the laboratory made it apparent his forte was not experimental but rather theoretical physics. Rutherford was unimpressed, but Oppenheimer went to Cambridge in the hope of landing another offer. He was ultimately accepted by J. J. Thomson on condition that he complete a basic laboratory course. Oppenheimer developed an antagonistic relationship with his tutor, Patrick Blackett, who was only a few years his senior. Oppenheimer once doused an apple with noxious chemicals and put it on Blackett's desk; Blackett did not eat the apple, but Oppenheimer was put on probation and ordered to go to London for regular sessions with a psychiatrist.

A tall, thin chain smoker who often neglected to eat during periods of intense thought and concentration, Oppenheimer was marked by many of his friends as having self-destructive tendencies. During numerous periods of his life, he worried his colleagues and associates with his melancholy and insecurity. A disturbing event occurred when he took a vacation from his studies in Cambridge to meet up with his friend Francis Ferguson in Paris. During a conversation in which Oppenheimer was narrating his frustration with experimental physics to Ferguson, Oppenheimer suddenly leapt up and tried to strangle him. Although Ferguson easily fended off the attack, the episode convinced Ferguson of his friend's deep psychological troubles.

In 1926 he left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born. Göttingen was one of the world's leading centers for theoretical physics. Oppenheimer made friends who would go on to great success, including Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. However, he was also known for being too enthusiastic in discussions, sometimes to the point of taking over seminar sessions. This irritated some of Born's other pupils so much that Maria Goeppert presented Born with a petition signed by herself and others threatening a boycott of the class unless he made Oppenheimer quieten down. Born left it out on his desk where Oppenheimer could read it, and it was effective without a word being said.

Oppenheimer obtained his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in March 1927 at the age of 23 at the University of Göttingen, supervised by Born. After the oral exam for his degree, James Franck, the professor administering, reportedly said, "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me." Oppenheimer published more than a dozen papers at Göttingen, including many important contributions to the then newly developed quantum mechanics. He and Born published a famous paper on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules, allowing nuclear motion to be neglected in order to simplify calculations. It remains his most cited work.

Early professional work

Educational work

Oppenheimer applied for and received a United States National Research Council fellowship to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in September 1927. However Bridgman also wanted Oppenheimer at Harvard and a compromise was reached whereby Oppenheimer split his fellowship for the 1927–1928 academic year between Harvard in 1927 and Caltech in 1928.

At Caltech, Oppenheimer struck up 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 Pauling. 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. She flatly refused and reported this incident to Pauling. This, and her apparent nonchalance about the incident, disquieted him, and he immediately cut off his relationship with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer later invited Pauling to be the head of the Chemistry Division of the Manhattan 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. There he was given the nickname of "Opje", which was later Anglicized by his students as "Oppie". From Leiden he continued on to the ETH in Zurich to work with Wolfgang Pauli on problems relating to quantum theory and the continuous spectrum. Oppenheimer highly respected and liked Pauli, who may have inspired some of Oppenheimer's own style and his critical approach to problems.

On returning to the United States, Oppenheimer accepted an associate professorship from the University of California, Berkeley, where Raymond T. Birge wanted him badly enough to offer to share him with Caltech. 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 a translation of the words "hot" and "dog" into Spanish. Later, Oppenheimer used to say that "physics and desert country" were his "two great loves".

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. Nobel Prize in Physics winner Hans Bethe later said about him:

Probably the most important ingredient Oppenheimer brought to his teaching was his exquisite taste. He always knew what were the important problems, as shown by his choice of subjects. He truly lived with those problems, struggling for a solution, and he communicated his concern to the group.

Oppenheimer worked closely with Nobel Prize winning experimental physicist Ernest O. Lawrence and his cyclotron pioneers, helping the experimentalists understand the data their machines were producing at the Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory. In 1936, Berkeley promoted Oppenheimer to full professor, at a salary of $3,300 per annum. In return, he was asked to curtail his teaching at Caltech. A compromise was reached whereby he was released for six weeks each year, enough to teach one trimester there.

Oppenheimer developed numerous affectations, seemingly in an attempt to convince those around him—or possibly himself—of his self-worth. He was said to be mesmerizing, hypnotic in private interaction but often frigid in more public settings. His associates fell into two camps: one that saw him as an aloof and impressive genius and an aesthete; another that saw him as a pretentious and insecure poseur. 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 original languages. He 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. Throughout his life he experienced periods of depression and was sometimes emotionally troubled. "I need physics more than friends," he once informed his brother.

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 problem of the self-energy of the electron, he doubted the validity of quantum electrodynamics at high energies. His work predicted many later finds, which include the neutron, meson and neutron star.

Oppenheimer also made important contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers and did work that eventually led toward descriptions of quantum tunneling. In 1931 he co-wrote a paper on the "Relativistic Theory of the Photoelectric Effect", in which, based on empirical evidence, he disagreed with Dirac's assertion that the energy levels of the hydrogen atom must have identical energy states. Subsequently, one of his doctoral students, Willis Lamb, determined that this was a consequence of the Lamb shift, for which Lamb was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955.

Oppenheimer worked with his first doctoral student, Melba Phillips, on calculations of artificial radioactivity under bombardment by deuterons. When Ernest Lawrence and Edwin McMillan bombarded nuclei with deuterons they found the results agreed closely with the predictions of George Gamow, but when higher energies and heavier nuclei were involved, the results did not conform to the theory. Oppenheimer and Phillips worked out a new theory to explain the results in 1935. This became known as the Oppenheimer-Phillips process and is still in use today.

As early as 1930, Oppenheimer wrote a paper essentially predicting the existence of the positron. This arose from a paper by Paul Dirac published in 1928, that proposed that electrons could have both a positive charge and negative energy. The paper introduced the Dirac equation, a unification of quantum mechanics, special relativity and the then-new concept of electron spin to explain the Zeeman effect. Oppenheimer, drawing on the body of experimental evidence, rejected the idea of these being protons; he argued that they would have to have the same mass as an electron, but the opposite charge. Two years later, Carl David Anderson discovered the positron in 1932, for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the late 1930s, Oppenheimer became interested in astrophysics, probably through his friendship with Richard Tolman, resulting in a series of papers. In the first of these, a 1938 paper co-written with Robert Serber entitled 'On the Stability of Stellar Neutron Cores', Oppenheimer explored the properties of white dwarves. This was followed by a paper co-written with one of his students, George Volkoff, 'On Massive Neutron Cores', in which they demonstrated that there was a limit, the so-called Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, to the mass of stars beyond which they would not remain stable as neutron stars and would undergo gravitational collapse. Finally, in 1939, Oppenheimer and another of his students, Hartland Snyder, produced a paper 'On Continued Gravitational Attraction', which predicted the existence of what are today known as black holes. After the Born-Oppenheimer approximation paper, these papers remain his most cited and were key factors in the rejuvenation of astrophysical research in the United States in the 1950s, mainly by John A. Wheeler.

Beyond the immense abstruseness of the topics he was expert in, Oppenheimer's papers were considered difficult to understand. Oppenheimer was very fond of using elegant, if extremely complex, mathematical techniques to demonstrate physical principles though he was sometimes criticized for making mathematical mistakes, presumably out of haste. "His physics was good", said his student Snyder, "but his arithmetic awful."

Many people thought that Oppenheimer's discoveries and research were not commensurate with his inherent abilities and talents. 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. In 1933, he learned Sanskrit and met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley. He read the Bhagavad Gita in the original language and later he cited it as one of the most influential books that shaped his philosophy of life. His close confidant and colleague, Nobel Prize winner Isidor Rabi, later gave his own interpretation:

Oppenheimer was overeducated in those fields, which lie outside the scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular, which resulted in a feeling of mystery of the universe that surrounded him like a fog. He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had already been done, but at the border he tended to feel there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was...[he turned] away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition.

In spite of this, observers such as Nobel Prize winning 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. 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. Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, in 1945, 1951 and 1967, but never won.

Private and political life

During the 1920s, Oppenheimer remained aloof from worldly matters. He claimed that he did not read newspapers or listen to the radio, and had only learned of the Wall Street crash of 1929 some time after it occurred. He once remarked that he never cast a vote until the 1936 election. However, from 1934 on, he became increasingly concerned about politics and international affairs. In 1934, Oppenheimer earmarked 3 per cent of his salary—about $100—to support German physicists fleeing from Nazi Germany. During the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, Oppenheimer and some of his students, including Melba Phillips and Bob Serber, attended a longshoremen's rally. Oppenheimer repeatedly attempted to get Serber a position at Berkeley but was blocked by Birge, who felt that one Jewish faculty member was enough.

In 1936, Oppenheimer became involved with Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a Berkeley literature professor, who was a student at Stanford University School of Medicine. Like many young intellectuals in the 1930s, Oppenheimer was a supporter of social reforms that were later alleged to be communist ideas. When his father died in 1937 leaving $392,602 to be divided between Oppenheimer and his brother Frank, Oppenheimer immediately wrote out a will leaving his estate to the University of California for graduate scholarships. He donated to many progressive efforts which were later branded as "left-wing" during the McCarthy era. The majority of his allegedly radical work consisted of hosting fund raisers for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and other anti-fascist activity. He never openly joined the Communist Party, though he did pass money to liberal causes by way of acquaintances who were alleged to be Party members.

Oppenheimer broke up with Tatlock in 1939. In August that year he met Katherine ("Kitty") Puening Harrison, a radical Berkeley student and former Communist Party member. Harrison had been married three times previously. Her first marriage, to a homosexual musician with drug addiction problems, lasted for only a few months. Her second husband, Joe Dallet, an active member of the Communist party, was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Kitty returned to the United States where she obtained a bachelor of arts degree in botany from the University of Pennsylvania. There she married her third husband, Richard Harrison, a physician and medical researcher in 1938. In June 1939 Kitty and Harrison moved to Pasadena, California, where he became chief of radiology at a local hospital and she enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Oppenheimer and Kitty created a minor scandal by sleeping together after one of Tolman's parties. In the summer of 1940 she stayed with Oppenheimer at his ranch in New Mexico. She finally asked Harrison for a divorce when she found out she was pregnant. When he refused, she obtained an instant divorce in Reno, Nevada and married Oppenheimer on 1 November 1940.

Their first child, Peter was born in May 1941. Oppenheimer joked that the 8-pound (4 kg) baby, born 7 months after their marriage, should be named "Pronto". Their second child, Katherine ("Toni"), was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico on 7 December 1944. During his marriage, Oppenheimer continued his affair with Jean Tatlock. Later their continued contact became an issue in Oppenheimer's security clearance hearings, due to Tatlock's Communist associations. Many of Oppenheimer's closest associates were active in the Communist Party in the '30s or '40s. They included his brother Frank, Frank's wife Jackie, Kitty, Jean Tatlock, his landlady Mary Ellen Washburn, and several of his graduate students at Berkeley.

When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he [Oppenheimer] had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast." On December 23, 1953, when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was considering whether to revoke his security clearance, Oppenheimer wrote to AEC Chairman K.D. Nichols that he did not remember saying this, that it was not true, and that if he had said anything along those lines, it was "a half-jocular overstatement." On April 15, 1954, during Oppenheimer's AEC security hearing, Roger Robb, counsel for the AEC's Personnel Security Board, asked Oppenheimer, "If you said that to Colonel Lansdale, were you jocular?" Oppenheimer testified, "I don't think I could have been jocular during this interview." He was a subscriber to the People's World, a Communist Party organ, and he testified in 1954, "I was associated with the Communist movement." From 1937 to 1942, in the midst of the Great Purge and Hitler-Stalin pact, Oppenheimer was a member at Berkeley of what he called a "discussion group", which was later identified by fellow members, Haakon Chevalier and Gordon Griffiths as a "closed" (secret) unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recorded that J. Robert Oppenheimer attended a meeting in the home of self-proclaimed Communist Haakon Chevalier, that Communist Party's California state chairman William Schneiderman, and Isaac Folkoff, West Coast liaison between the Communist Party and NKVD, attended in Fall 1940, during the Hitler-Stalin pact. Shortly thereafter, the FBI added Oppenheimer to its Custodial Detention Index, for arrest in case of national emergency and listed him as "Nationalistic Tendency: Communist." 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. Oppenheimer 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.

Throughout the development of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was under investigation by both the FBI and the Manhattan Project's internal security arm for his past left-wing associations. He was followed by Army security agents during a trip to California in June 1943 to visit his former girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, who was suffering from depression. Oppenheimer spent the night in her apartment. Jean committed suicide on January 4, 1944, which left Oppenheimer deeply grieved. In August 1943, Oppenheimer volunteered to Manhattan Project security agents that three men at Los Alamos had been solicited for nuclear secrets on behalf of the Soviet Union, by a person he did not know called George Eltenton. When pressed on the issue in later interviews, Oppenheimer admitted that the only person who had approached him was his friend Haakon Chevalier, a Berkeley professor of French literature, who had mentioned the matter privately at a dinner at Oppenheimer's house. Groves thought Oppenheimer was too important to the project to oust him over this suspicious behavior. On July 20, 1943, he wrote to the Manhattan Engineer District:

In accordance with my verbal directions of July 15, it is desired that clearance be issued to Julius Robert Oppenheimer without delay irrespective of the information which you have concerning Mr Oppenheimer. He is absolutely essential to the project.

Manhattan Project

Main article: Manhattan Project

Los Alamos

Oppenheimer's badge photo from Los Alamos

On October 9, 1941, shortly before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a crash program to develop an atomic bomb. In May 1942, National Defense Research Committee Chairman James B. Conant, who had been one of Oppenheimer's lecturers at Harvard, invited Oppenheimer to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task that Oppenheimer threw himself into with full vigor. He was given the title "Coordinator of Rapid Rupture", specifically referring to the propagation of a fast neutron chain reaction in an atomic bomb. One of his first acts was to host a summer school for bomb theory at his building in Berkeley. The mix of European physicists and his own students—a group including Robert Serber, Emil Konopinski, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller—busied themselves calculating what needed to be done, and in what order, to make the bomb. Teller put forward the remote possibility that the bomb would generate enough heat to ignite the atmosphere; Bethe soon showed that such an event was of near-zero probability.

In June 1942, the US Army established the Manhattan Engineer District to handle its part in the atom bomb project, beginning the process of transferring responsibility from the Office of Scientific Research and Development to the military. In September, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr. was appointed director of what became known as the Manhattan Project. Groves, in turn, selected Oppenheimer to head the project's secret weapons laboratory. Groves' choice surprised many, as Oppenheimer was not known to be politically aligned with the conservative military, nor to be an efficient leader of large projects. The fact that Oppenheimer did not have a Nobel Prize, and might not have the prestige to direct fellow scientists, did concern Groves. However, he was impressed by Oppenheimer's grasp of the practical aspects of designing and constructing an atomic bomb, and by the breadth of Oppenheimer's knowledge. As a military engineer, Groves knew that this would be vital in an interdisciplinary project that would involve not just physics, but chemistry, metallurgy, ordnance and engineering. These were things that Groves found lacking in other scientists. Groves also detected in Oppenheimer something that many others did not, an "overweening ambition" that Groves reckoned would supply the drive necessary to push the project to a successful conclusion. Isidor Rabi considered the appointment "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius..."

A group of physicists at a wartime Los Alamos colloquium. In the front row are Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J.M.B. Kellogg (L-R). Oppenheimer is in the second row on the left; to the right in the photograph is Richard Feynman.

Oppenheimer and Groves decided that for security and cohesion they needed a centralized, secret research laboratory in a remote location. Scouting for a site in late 1942, Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico, not far from his ranch. On November 16, 1942, Oppenheimer, Groves and others toured a prospective site. Oppenheimer feared that the high cliffs surrounding the site would make his people feel claustrophobic, while the engineers were concerned with the possibility of flooding. Oppenheimer then suggested a site that he knew well: a flat mesa near Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was the site of a private boys' school called The Los Alamos Ranch School. Oppenheimer expressed a strong preference for the site. The engineers were concerned about the poor access road and the water supply, but otherwise felt that it was ideal. The Los Alamos laboratory was hastily built on the site of the school, taking over some of its buildings, but erecting many others in great haste. There Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top physicists of the time, which he referred to as the "luminaries."

Initially Los Alamos was supposed to be a military laboratory with Oppenheimer and other researchers commissioned into the Army. Oppenheimer went so far as to order himself a lieutenant colonel's uniform and took the Army physical test, which he failed. Army doctors considered him underweight at 128 pounds (58 kg), diagnosed his chronic cough as tuberculosis and were concerned about his chronic lumbosacral joint pain. However, Robert Bacher and Isidor Rabi balked at the idea of being commissioned. Conant, Groves and Oppenheimer devised a compromise whereby the laboratory was operated by the University of California under contract to the War Department. It soon turned out that Oppenheimer's initial estimates of the size of the effort required were extraordinarily over-optimistic. Los Alamos grew from a few hundred people in 1943 to over 6,000 in 1945.

Oppenheimer at first had difficulty with the organizational division of large groups, but rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence on the mesa. He was noted for his mastery of all scientific aspects of the project and for his efforts to control the inevitable cultural conflicts between scientists and the military. He was an iconic figure to his fellow scientists, as much a figurehead of what they were working towards as a scientific director. Victor Weisskopf put it thus:

He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and even physically present at each decisive step. He was present in the laboratory or in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from something else. It was his continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us; it created that unique atmosphere of enthusiasm and challenge that pervaded the place throughout its time.

In 1943, development efforts were directed to a plutonium gun-type fission weapon called "Thin Man". Initial research on the properties of plutonium was done using cyclotron-generated plutonium-239, which was extremely pure, but could only be created in tiny amounts. When Los Alamos received the first sample of plutonium from the X-10 Graphite Reactor in April 1944 a problem was discovered: reactor-bred plutonium had a higher concentration of plutonium-240, making it unsuitable for use in a gun-type weapon. In July 1944, Oppenheimer abandoned the gun design and in favor of an implosion-type. Using chemical explosive lenses, a sub-critical sphere of fissile material could be squeezed into a smaller and denser form. The metal needed to travel only very short distances, so the critical mass would be assembled in much less time. In August 1944, Oppenheimer implemented a sweeping reorganization of the Los Alamos laboratory to focus on implosion.

In May 1945, an Interim Committee was created to advise and report on wartime and post-war policies regarding the use of nuclear energy. The Interim Committee in turn established a scientific panel consisting of Compton, Fermi, Lawrence and Oppenheimer to advise it on scientific issues. In its presentation to the Interim Committee, the scientific panel offered its opinion not just on the likely physical effects of an atomic bomb, but on its likely military and political impact. This included opinions on the sensitive issue such as whether or not the Soviet Union should be advised of the weapon in advance of its use against Japan.

Trinity

Groves, Oppenheimer and others at the remains of the Trinity shot tower a few weeks later

Main article: Trinity test

The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the first artificial nuclear explosion near Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, the site of which Oppenheimer named "Trinity". Oppenheimer later said this name was from one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. 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:

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...

Years later he would explain that another verse had also entered his head at that time: namely, the famous verse: "kālo'smi lokakṣayakṛtpravṛddho lokānsamāhartumiha pravṛttaḥ", which Oppenheimer translated as "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

In 1965, Oppenheimer was persuaded to quote again for a television broadcast:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.'

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:

Dr. Oppenheimer, on whom had rested a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted "Now!" and there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief.

For his services as director of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was awarded the Presidential Medal for Merit in 1946.

Postwar activities

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Manhattan Project became public knowledge and Oppenheimer became a national spokesman for science, emblematic of a new type of technocratic power. His face appeared on the covers of Life and Time. 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 a transnational organization such as the newly formed United Nations, which could institute a program to stifle a nuclear arms race.

Institute for Advanced Study

J. Robert Oppenheimer (right) with his successor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Norris Bradbury (left)

In November 1945, Oppenheimer left Los Alamos to return to Caltech, but he soon found that his heart was no longer in teaching. In 1947, he accepted an offer from Lewis Strauss to take up the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. This meant moving back east and leaving Ruth Tolman, the wife of his friend Richard Tolman, with whom he had begun an affair after leaving Los Alamos. The job came with a salary of $20,000 per annum, plus rent-free accommodation in the director's house, a 17th century manor with a cook and groundskeeper surrounded by 265 acres (107 ha) of woodlands.

Oppenheimer brought together intellectuals at the height of their powers and from a variety of disciplines to solve the most pertinent questions of the age. He directed and encouraged the research of many well-known scientists, including Freeman Dyson, and the duo of Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, who won a Nobel Prize for their discovery of parity non-conservation. He also instituted temporary memberships for scholars from the humanities, such as T. S. Eliot and George F. Kennan. Some of these activities were resented by a few members of the mathematics faculty, who wanted the institute to stay a bastion of pure scientific research. Abraham Pais said that Oppenheimer himself thought that one of his failures at the institute was being unable to bring together scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities.

A series of conferences in New York from 1947 through 1949 saw physicists switch back from war work to theoretical issues. Under Oppenheimer's direction, physicists tackled the greatest outstanding problem of the pre-war years: the infinities in the quantum electrodynamics of elementary particles. Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga developed techniques for circumventing this, which became known as renormalization. Freeman Dyson was able to prove that their procedures gave similar results. The problem of meson absorption and Hideki Yukawa's theory of mesons as the carrier particles of the strong nuclear force were also tackled. Probing questions from Oppenheimer prompted Robert Marshak's innovative two-meson hypothesis: that there were actually two types of mesons, pions and muons. This led to Cecil Frank Powell's breakthrough and subsequent Nobel Prize for the discovery of the pion.

Atomic Energy Commission

As a member of the Board of Consultants to a committee appointed by President Harry S. Truman, Oppenheimer strongly influenced the Acheson–Lilienthal Report. In this report, the committee advocated creation of an international Atomic Development Authority, which would own all fissionable material and the means of its production, such as mines and laboratories, and atomic power plants where it could be used for peaceful energy production. Bernard Baruch was appointed to translate this report into a proposal to the United Nations, resulting in the Baruch Plan of 1946. The Baruch Plan introduced many additional provisions regarding enforcement, in particular requiring inspection of the Soviet Union's uranium resources. The Baruch Plan was seen as an attempt to maintain the United States' nuclear monopoly and was rejected by the Soviets. With this, it became clear to Oppenheimer that an arms race was unavoidable, due to the mutual suspicion of the United States and the Soviet Union, which even Oppenheimer was starting to distrust.

Oppenheimer in 1946

After the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) came into being in 1947 as a civilian agency in control of nuclear research and weapons issues, Oppenheimer was appointed as the Chairman of its General Advisory Committee (GAC). From this position he advised on a number of nuclear-related issues, including project funding, laboratory construction and even international policy—though the GAC's advice was not always heeded. As Chairman of the GAC, Oppenheimer lobbied vigorously for international arms control and funding for basic science, and attempted to influence policy away from a heated arms race. When the government questioned whether to pursue a crash program to develop an atomic weapon based on nuclear fusion—the hydrogen bomb—Oppenheimer initially recommended against it, though he had been in favor of developing such a weapon during the Manhattan Project. He was motivated partly by ethical concerns, feeling that such a weapon could only be used strategically against civilian targets, resulting in millions of deaths. He was also motivated by practical concerns, however, as at the time there was no workable design for a hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer felt that resources would be better spent creating a large force of fission weapons. He and others were especially concerned about nuclear reactors being diverted away from producing plutonium to produce tritium. He was overridden by Truman, who announced a crash program after the Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. Oppenheimer and other GAC opponents of the project, especially James Conant, felt personally shunned and considered retiring from the committee. They stayed on, though their views on the hydrogen bomb were well known.

In 1951, however, Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed what became known as the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb. This new design seemed technically feasible and Oppenheimer changed his opinion about developing the weapon. As he later recalled:

The program we had in 1949 was a tortured thing that you could well argue did not make a great deal of technical sense. It was therefore possible to argue that you did not want it even if you could have it. The program in 1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that. The issues became purely the military, the political and the humane problems of what you were going to do about it once you had it.

Security hearing

Main article: Oppenheimer security hearing

The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had been following Oppenheimer since before the war, when he showed Communist sympathies as a professor at Berkeley and had been close to members of the Communist Party, including his wife and brother. He had been under close surveillance since the early 1940s, his home and office bugged, his phone tapped and his mail opened. The FBI furnished Oppenheimer's political enemies with incriminating evidence about his 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, Oppenheimer had memorably categorized these as "less important than electronic devices but more important than, let us say, vitamins."

President Eisenhower (left) receives a report from Lewis L. Strauss (right), Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, on the Operation Castle hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific, March 30, 1954. Strauss pressed for Oppenheimer's security clearance to be revoked.

Oppenheimer testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he admitted that he had associations with the Communist Party in the 1930s. He testified that some of his students, including David Bohm, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Philip Morrison, Bernard Peters and Joseph Weinberg, had been Communists at the time they had worked with him at Berkeley. Frank Oppenheimer and his wife Jackie testified before the HUAC and admitted that they had been members of the Communist Party. Frank was subsequently fired from his University of Michigan position. Unable to find work in physics for many years, he became instead a cattle rancher in Colorado. He later taught high school physics and was the founder of the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Oppenheimer had found himself in the middle of more than one controversy and power struggle in the years from 1949 to 1953. Edward Teller, who had been so uninterested in work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war that Oppenheimer had given him time instead to work on his own project of the hydrogen bomb, had eventually left Los Alamos to help found, in 1951, a second laboratory at what would become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, he could be free of Los Alamos control to develop the hydrogen bomb. Long-range jet-bomber delivered thermonuclear "strategic" weapons would necessarily be under control of the new United States Air Force (USAF). Oppenheimer had for some years pushed for smaller "tactical" nuclear weapons which would be more useful in a limited theater against enemy troops and which would be under control of the Army. The two services fought for control of nuclear weapons, often allied with different political parties. The USAF, with Teller pushing its program, gained ascendance in the Republican-controlled administration following the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president in 1952.

In 1950, Paul Crouch, Communist Party organizer for Alameda County from April 1941 to early January 1942, was the first person to accuse Oppenheimer of Communist Party ties. He testified before a Congressional committee that Oppenheimer had hosted a Communist Party meeting at his Berkeley home. The charges were widely publicized at the time. However, Oppenheimer was able to prove that he was in New Mexico at the time and Crouch over time was shown to be an unreliable informant. In November 1953, J. Edgar Hoover was sent a letter concerning Oppenheimer by William Liscum Borden, former executive director of Congress' Joint Atomic Energy Committee. In the letter, Borden stated his opinion "based upon years of study, of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union."

Oppenheimer's former colleague, physicist Edward Teller, testified against Oppenheimer at his security hearing in 1954

Strauss and Senator Brien McMahon, author of the 1946 McMahon Act, pushed Eisenhower to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. On December 21, 1953, Oppenheimer was told by Lewis Strauss that his security clearance had been suspended, pending resolution of a series of charges outlined in a letter, and discussed his resigning. Oppenheimer chose not to resign and requested a hearing instead. The charges were outlined in a letter from Kenneth D. Nichols, General Manager of the AEC. The hearing that followed in April–May 1954, which was initially confidential and not made public, focused on Oppenheimer's past Communist ties and his association during the Manhattan Project with suspected disloyal or Communist scientists. One of the key elements in this hearing was Oppenheimer's earliest testimony about George Eltenton's approach to various Los Alamos scientists, a story that Oppenheimer confessed he had fabricated to protect his friend Haakon Chevalier. Unknown to Oppenheimer, both versions were recorded during his interrogations of a decade before. He was surprised on the witness stand with transcripts of these, which he had not been given a chance to review. In fact, Oppenheimer had never told Chevalier that he had finally named him, and the testimony had led to Chevalier losing his job. Both Chevalier and Eltenton confirmed mentioning that they had a way to get information to the Soviets, Eltenton admitting he said this to Chevalier and Chevalier admitting he mentioned it to Oppenheimer, but both put the matter in terms of gossip and denying any thought or suggestion of treason or thoughts of espionage, either in planning or in deed. Neither was ever convicted of any crime.

Teller testified against Oppenheimer, saying that he considered him loyal, but of such questionable judgment that he should be relieved of clearance on the basis of bad decision-making. This led to outrage by the scientific community and Teller's virtual expulsion from academic science. Groves, threatened by the FBI as having been potentially part of a coverup about the Chevalier contact in 1943, likewise testified against Oppenheimer. Many top scientists, as well as government and military figures, testified on Oppenheimer's behalf. Inconsistencies in his testimony and his erratic behavior on the stand, at one point saying he had given a "cock and bull story" and that this was because he "was an idiot", convinced some that he was unstable, unreliable and a possible security risk. Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked one day before it was slated to lapse anyway. Isidor Rabi's comment was that Oppenheimer was merely a government consultant at the time anyway and that if the government "didn't want to consult the guy, then don't consult him."

During his hearing, Oppenheimer testified willingly on the left-wing behavior of many of his scientific colleagues. Had Oppenheimer's clearance not been stripped then he might have been remembered as someone who had "named names" to save his own reputation. 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."

In a seminar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute on May 20, 2009, based on an extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks taken from the KGB archives, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev confirmed that Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union. The KGB tried repeatedly to recruit him, but was never successful; Oppenheimer did not betray the United States. In addition, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union.

Final years

Oppenheimer Beach, in St John, US Virgin Islands

Starting in 1954, Oppenheimer spent several months of the year living on the island of St John in the Virgin Islands. In 1957, he purchased a 2-acre (0.81 ha) tract of land on Gibney Beach, where he built a spartan home on the beach. Oppenheimer spent a considerable amount of time sailing with his daughter Toni and wife Kitty.

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. Significantly, after his public humiliation, Oppenheimer did not sign the major open protests against nuclear weapons of the 1950s, including the Russell–Einstein Manifesto of 1955. Though invited, he also did not attend the first Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957. However, in his speeches and public writings, Oppenheimer continually stressed the difficulty of managing the power of knowledge in a world in which the freedom of science to exchange ideas was more and more hobbled by political concerns.

Deprived of political power, Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write and work on physics. He toured Europe and Japan, giving talks about the history of science, the role of science in society, and the nature of the universe. On May 3, 1962 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in Britain. In 1963, at the urging of many of Oppenheimer's political friends who had ascended to power, President John F. Kennedy awarded Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation. Edward Teller, the winner of the previous year's award, had also recommended Oppenheimer receive it, in the hope that it would heal the rift between them. 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." Oppenheimer told Johnson: "I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today." The rehabilitation implied by the award was partly symbolic, as Oppenheimer still lacked a security clearance and could have no effect on official policy, but the award came with a $50,000 tax-free stipend and its award outraged many prominent Republicans in Congress. The late President Kennedy's widow Jacqueline, still living in the White House, made it a point to meet with Oppenheimer to tell him how much her husband had wanted him to have the medal. While still a senator in 1959, Kennedy had been instrumental in voting to narrowly deny Oppenheimer's enemy Lewis Strauss a coveted government position as Secretary of Commerce, effectively ending Strauss' political career. This was partly due to lobbying by the scientific community on behalf of Oppenheimer.

A chain smoker since early adulthood, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with throat cancer in late 1965 and, after inconclusive surgery, underwent radiation treatment and chemotherapy late in 1966. These were not curative and the tumor spread to his palate, affecting his swallowing, hearing and breathing. He fell into a coma on February 15, 1967 and died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on February 18, aged 62. A memorial service was held at Alexander Hall at Princeton University a week later, which was attended by 600 of his closest scientific, political and military associates, including Bethe, Groves, Kennan, Lilienthal, Rabi, Smyth and Wigner. His family, including his brother Frank was there, as was the historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., the novelist John O'Hara and George Balanchine, the director of the New York City Ballet. Bethe, Kennan and Smyth gave brief eulogies. Oppenheimer was cremated and his ashes were placed in an urn. Kitty took his ashes to St John and dropped the urn into the sea off the coast, within sight of the beach house.

Upon the death of Kitty Oppenheimer, who died of an intestinal infection complicated by pulmonary embolism in October 1972, Oppenheimer's ranch in New Mexico was inherited by their son Peter, while the beach property in St. John was inherited by their daughter Toni. Toni was refused security clearance for her chosen vocation as a United Nations translator after the FBI brought up the old charges against her father. Three months following the end of her second marriage, she committed suicide by hanging in the beach house in St. John in January 1977 and left it in her will to "the people of St. John for a public park and recreation area." The original house, built too close to the coast, succumbed to a hurricane, but today, the Virgin Islands Government maintains a Community Center in the area.

Legacy

When Oppenheimer was ejected from his position of political influence in 1954, he symbolized for many the folly of scientists thinking they could control how others would use their research. He has also been seen as symbolizing the dilemmas involving the moral responsibility of the scientist in the nuclear world. The hearings were motivated both by politics, as Oppenheimer was seen as a representative of the previous administration, and by personal considerations stemming from his enmity with Lewis Strauss. The ostensible reason for the hearing and the issue that aligned Oppenheimer with the liberal intellectuals, Oppenheimer's opposition to hydrogen bomb development, was based as much on technical grounds as on moral ones. Once the technical considerations were resolved, he supported Teller's hydrogen bomb because he believed that the Soviet Union would inevitably construct one too. Rather than consistently oppose the "Red-baiting" of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Oppenheimer testified against some of his former colleagues and students, both before and during his hearing. In one incident, his damning testimony against former student Bernard Peters was selectively leaked to the press. Historians have interpreted this as an attempt by Oppenheimer to please his colleagues in the government and perhaps to divert attention from his own previous left-wing ties and those of his brother. In the end it became a liability when it became clear that if Oppenheimer had really doubted Peters' loyalty, his recommending him for the Manhattan Project was reckless, or at least contradictory.

Oppenheimer (left) and Groves (right) at the remains of the Trinity test in September 1945. The white overshoes prevent fallout from sticking to the soles of their shoes.

Popular depictions of Oppenheimer view his security struggles as a confrontation between right-wing militarists (symbolized by Teller) and left-wing intellectuals (symbolized by Oppenheimer) over the moral question of weapons of mass destruction. The question of the scientists' responsibility towards humanity inspired Bertolt Brecht's drama Galileo (from 1955), left its imprint on Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Die Physiker, and is the basis of the opera Doctor Atomic by John Adams (2005), which was commissioned to portray Oppenheimer as a modern-day Faust. Heinar Kipphardt's play In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, after appearing on West German television, had its theatrical release in Berlin and Munich in October 1964. Oppenheimer's objections resulted in an exchange of correspondence with Kipphardt, in which the playwright offered to make corrections but defended the play. It premiered in New York in June 1968, with Joseph Wiseman in the Oppenheimer role. New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called it an "angry play and a partisan play" that sided with Oppenheimer but portrayed the scientist as a "tragic fool and genius." Oppenheimer had difficulty with this portrayal. After reading a transcript of Kipphardt's play soon after it began to be performed, Oppenheimer threatened to sue the playwright, decrying "improvisations which were contrary to history and to the nature of the people involved." Later Oppenheimer told an interviewer:

The whole damn thing [his security hearing] was a farce, and these people are trying to make a tragedy out of it. ... I had never said that I had regretted participating in a responsible way in the making of the bomb. I said that perhaps he [Kipphardt] had forgotten Guernica, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Dachau, Warsaw, and Tokyo; but I had not, and that if he found it so difficult to understand, he should write a play about something else.

The 1980 BBC TV serial Oppenheimer starring Sam Waterston, won three BAFTA Television Awards. The Day After Trinity, a 1980 documentary about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the building of the atomic bomb, was nominated for an Academy Award and received a Peabody Award. In addition to his use by authors of fiction, Oppenheimer's life has been explored in numerous biographies, including such recent titles as American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century by David C. Cassidy.

As a scientist, Oppenheimer is remembered by his students and colleagues as being a brilliant researcher and engaging teacher, the founder of modern theoretical physics in the United States. Because his scientific attentions often changed rapidly, he never worked long enough on any one topic to merit the Nobel Prize, although his investigations towards black holes may have warranted the prize had he lived long enough to see them brought into fruition by later astrophysicists. An asteroid, 67085 Oppenheimer, was named in his honor, as was the lunar crater Oppenheimer.

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. Because of the threat fascism posed to Western civilization, they volunteered in great numbers both for technological and organizational assistance to the Allied effort, resulting in such powerful tools as radar, the proximity fuse and operations research. As a cultured, intellectual, theoretical physicist who became a disciplined military organizer, Oppenheimer represented the shift away from the idea that scientists had their "head in the clouds" and that knowledge on such previously esoteric subjects as the composition of the atomic nucleus had no "real-world" applications.

Two days before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer expressed his hopes and fears in a quote from the Bhagavad Gita:

In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

Works

Books

• Science and the Common Understanding (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954).
• The Open Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).
• The Flying Trapeze: Three crises for physicists (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).
• Robert Oppenheimer, Letters and Recollections (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980) (posthumous)
• Uncommon Sense (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Birkhäuser Boston, 1984). (posthumous)
• Atom and Void: Essays on Science and Community (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989). (posthumous)

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

• Anderson, Leif E.; Whitaker, Ewen A. (1982). NASA Catalogue of Lunar Nomenclature. Springfield, Virginia: National Aeronautics and Space Administration. OCLC 9424347. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bethe, Hans (1991). The Road from Los Alamos. New York, New York: Springer Science+Business Media. ISBN 0883187078. OCLC 22661282. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bird, Kai; Sherwin, Martin J. (2005). American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-41202-6. OCLC 56753298. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Carson, Cathryn (2005). "§Introduction". In Carson, Cathryn; Hollinger, David A. (eds.). Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections. Berkeley, California: Office for History of Science and Technology, Univ. of California. pp. 1–10. ISBN 0-9672617-3-2. OCLC 64385611. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Cassidy, David (2005). J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century. New York, New York: Pi Press. ISBN 0-13-147996-2. OCLC 56503198. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Conant, Jennet (2005). 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0743250079. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Feldman, Burton (2000). The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige. New York, New York: Arcade Publishing. ISBN 155970537X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Groves, Leslie (1962). Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. New York, New York: Harper & Brothers. ISBN 0-306-70738-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Haynes, John Earl (2006). Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521674077. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Herken, Gregg (2002). Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-6588-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hewlett, Richard G.; Anderson, Oscar E. (1962). The New World, 1939–1946. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-520-07186-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hewlett, Richard G.; Duncan, Francis (1969). Atomic Shield, Volume II, 1947–1952. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-520-07187-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade, Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L. (1993). Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44132-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hollinger, David A. (2005). "§Afterward". In Carson, Cathryn; Hollinger, David A. (eds.). Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections. Berkeley, California: Office for History of Science and Technology, Univ. of California. pp. 385–390. ISBN 0-9672617-3-2. OCLC 64385611. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hufbauer, Karl (2005). "J. Robert Oppenheimer's Path to Black Holes". In Carson, Cathryn; Hollinger, David A. (eds.). Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections. Berkeley, California: Office for History of Science and Technology, Univ. of California. pp. 31–47. ISBN 0-9672617-3-2. OCLC 64385611. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Jungk, Robert (1958). Brighter than a Thousand Suns: a Personal History of the Atomic Scientists. New York, New York: Harcourt Brace. ISBN 0156141507. OCLC 181321. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Jones, Vincent (1985). Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb. Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kelly, Cynthia C. (2006). Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project: Insights into J. Robert Oppenheimer, "Father of the Atomic Bomb". Hackensack, New Jersey: World Scientific. ISBN 9812564187. OCLC 65637244. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Pais, Abraham (2006). J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516673-6. OCLC 65637244. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Polenberg, Richard (2002). In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Security Clearance Hearing. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University. ISBN 0-8014-3783-0. OCLC 47767155. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Polenberg, Richard (2005). Carson, Cathryn; Hollinger, David A. (eds.). Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections. Berkeley, California: Office for History of Science and Technology, Univ. of California. pp. 267–272. ISBN 0-9672617-3-2. OCLC 64385611. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Rhodes, Richard (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-44133-7. OCLC 13793436. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Smith, Alice Kimball; Weiner, Charles (1980). Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and recollections. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0804726205. OCLC 5946652. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Stern, Philip M. (1969). "The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial" (Document). New York, New York: Harper & Row. {{cite document}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |oclc= ignored (help)
• Strout, Cushing (1963). "Conscience, Science and Security: The Case of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Document). Chicago, Illinois: Rand McNally. {{cite document}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |url= ignored (help)
• Szasz, Ferenc M. (1984). The Day the Sun Rose Twice. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0826307671. OCLC 10779209. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• United States Atomic Energy Commission (1954). "In the Matter of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Document). Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. {{cite document}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |accessdate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |url= ignored (help)

External links

• Biography and online exhibit created for the centennial of his birth
• PBS American Experience / The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer
• Was Oppenheimer a member of the Communist Party? documents on the question
• On Atomic Energy, Problems to Civilization audio file of UC Berkeley talk, November 1946
• Oppenheimer talking about the experience of the first bomb test (video file, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.")
• Scanned and declassified government documents relating to the Oppenheimer Hearings and H-Bomb decision