   #copyright

Robert Oppenheimer

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Astronomers and
physicists

   J. Robert Oppenheimer, "the father of the atomic bomb" served as the
   first director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, beginning in 1943.
   Enlarge
   J. Robert Oppenheimer, "the father of the atomic bomb" served as the
   first director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, beginning in 1943.

   J. Robert Oppenheimer ( April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an
   American theoretical physicist, best 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
   laboratory in New Mexico. Known colloquially as " the father of the
   atomic bomb", Oppenheimer lamented the weapon's killing power after it
   was used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
   After the war, he 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 invoking the ire of many politicians
   and scientists with his outspoken political opinions during the 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 him the
   Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of 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.

Early life and education

   J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904 to
   Julius S. Oppenheimer (a wealthy textile importer who had immigrated to
   the United States from Germany in 1888) and Ella Friedman, a painter.
   Robert had one brother, Frank, eight years younger, who also became a
   physicist. The Oppenheimers were of Jewish descent but they did not
   observe the religious traditions.

   Robert studied at the Ethical Culture Society School, founded by Felix
   Adler to promote a form of ethical training based on the Ethical
   Culture movement. At the school, Robert studied mathematics and
   science, as well as subjects ranging from Greek to French literature.

   Throughout his life, Robert was a versatile scholar, interested in the
   humanities and in psychotherapy, as well as science. He entered Harvard
   University one year late due to an attack of colitis. During the
   interim, he went with a former English teacher to recuperate in New
   Mexico, where he fell in love with horseback riding and the mountains
   and plateau of the Southwest. At Harvard, he majored in chemistry, but
   also studied topics beyond science, including Greek, architecture,
   classics, art, and literature. He made up for the delay caused by his
   illness, taking six courses each term and graduating summa cum laude in
   just three years. When at Harvard, Oppenheimer was admitted to graduate
   standing in physics in his first year as an undergraduate on the basis
   of independent study. During a course on thermodynamics taught by Percy
   Bridgman, Oppenheimer was introduced to experimental physics. In 1933
   he learned Sanskrit and met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley,
   and read the Bhagavad Gita in the original, citing it later 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, working under the eminent but aging J.J. Thomson.

   Oppenheimer's clumsiness in the laboratory made it apparent that his
   forte was theoretical, not experimental, physics, so he left in 1926
   for the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born. Göttingen was
   one of the top centers for theoretical physics in the world, and
   Oppenheimer made a number of friends who would go on to great success,
   such as Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, and Werner Heisenberg. At
   Göttingen, Oppenheimer was known for being a quick study. However, he
   was also known for being too enthusiastic in discussions, sometimes to
   the point of taking over seminar sessions, a fact that used to irritate
   a few of Born's pupils. Oppenheimer obtained his Ph.D. at the young age
   of 22. After the oral exam for his Ph.D., the professor administering
   it is reported to have said, "Phew, I'm glad that's over. 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 a famous paper on the so-called
   Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which separates nuclear motion from
   electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules.

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. In his words, "it was a desert",
   yet paradoxically a fertile place of opportunity. He maintained a joint
   appointment with Caltech, where he spent every spring term in order to
   avoid isolation from mainstream research. 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. 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 the
   Berkeley professor. Later, Oppenheimer 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. There he was given the nickname of "Opje", which was
   later Anglicised by his students as "Oppie". From Leiden he continued
   on to Zurich, Switzerland, to work with Wolfgang Pauli on problems
   relating to quantum theory and the continuous spectrum, before heading
   back to the United States. Oppenheimer highly respected and liked
   Pauli, and some of his own style and his critical approach to problems
   was said to be inspired by Pauli. 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 improbably 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.
   Nobel Prize 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.

   He also worked closely with (and became good friends 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.

   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 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. "I need physics more than friends,"
   he once informed his brother. A tall, thin chain smoker who often
   neglected to eat during periods of intellectual discomfort and
   concentration, Oppenheimer was marked by many of his friends as having
   a self-destructive tendency, and during numerous periods of his life
   worried his colleagues and associates with his melancholy and
   insecurity. 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. During a conversation in which Oppenheimer was
   narrating his frustration with experimental physics to Ferguson, he had
   suddenly leapt up and tried to strangle him. Although Ferguson easily
   fended off the attack, the episode had convinced Ferguson of his
   friend's deep psychological troubles. 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 which saw him as an
   aloof and impressive genius and an aesthete; another which 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 originally transcribed
   languages.

Scientific work

   Oppenheimer's intelligence and charisma attracted students from across
   the country to Berkeley to study theoretical physics.
   Enlarge
   Oppenheimer's intelligence and charisma attracted students from across
   the country to Berkeley to study theoretical physics.

   Oppenheimer did important research in theoretical astrophysics
   (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. He also made important
   contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers, and did work which
   eventually led toward descriptions of quantum tunneling. His work on
   the Oppenheimer-Phillips process, involved in artificial radioactivity
   under bombardment by deuterons, has served as an important step in
   nuclear physics. In the late 1930s, he was the first to write papers
   suggesting the existence of what we today call black holes. In these
   papers, he demonstrated that there was a size limit (the so called
   Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit) to stars beyond which they would not
   remain stable as neutron stars, and would undergo gravitational
   collapse. 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 early as 1930, he also wrote a paper essentially
   predicting the existence of the positron (which had been postulated by
   Paul Dirac), a formulation that he however did not carry to its natural
   outcome, because of his skepticism about the validity of the Dirac
   equation. As evidenced above, his work predicts many later finds which
   include, further, the neutron, meson, and neutron star. Even 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.

   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. 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, 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. 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 to have not learned of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 until
   some time after the fact (Oppenheimer himself had little worry
   regarding financial matters, as his family supported him amply). It was
   not until he became involved with Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a
   Berkeley literature professor, in 1936, that he showed any interest in
   politics. Like many young intellectuals in the 1930s he became a
   supporter of communist ideas. After inheriting over $300,000 upon his
   father's death in 1937, he donated to many left-wing efforts. The
   majority of his 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 Party members. Historian Gregg
   Herken has recently claimed to have evidence that Oppenheimer did
   interact with the Communist Party during the 1930s and early 1940s.

   Robert's brother, Frank, and some of his graduate students were Party
   members at different times.

Marriage and family life

   In November 1940, he married Katherine ("Kitty") Puening Harrison, a
   radical Berkeley student and former Communist Party member. Katherine
   had been married twice previously, first to Joe Dallet, a Communist
   Party and union activist who was killed in the Spanish civil war. She
   divorced her second husband, a southern California doctor, to marry
   Oppenheimer.

   By May 1941 they had their first child, Peter. Their second child,
   Katherine (called Toni), was born in 1944, while Oppenheimer was
   scientific director of the Manhattan Project.

   During his marriage, Oppenheimer continued his involvement with Jean
   Tatlock, though it is not clear if they continued their love affair.
   Later their continued contact became an issue in Oppenheimer's security
   clearance hearings, due to Tatlock's communist associations.

The Manhattan Project

   Oppenheimer's badge photo from Los Alamos.
   Enlarge
   Oppenheimer's badge photo from Los Alamos.

   When World War II started, Oppenheimer became involved in the efforts
   to develop an atomic bomb which were already taking up much of the time
   and facilities of Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. 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. Oppenheimer was invited to take over
   work on fast neutron calculations, a task which he threw himself into
   with full vigor. 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. Army was given jurisdiction over the bomb effort,
   which was renamed as the Manhattan Engineering District, or Manhattan
   Project. General Leslie R. Groves was appointed project director, and
   Groves, in turn, selected Oppenheimer as the project's scientific
   director. Groves knew of 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. 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. When Teller put forward the remote possibility that the bomb
   would generate enough heat to ignite the atmosphere (an event that was
   soon shown to be impossible by Bethe), Oppenheimer nevertheless was
   concerned enough to meet up with Arthur Compton in Michigan to discuss
   the situation. At the time, research for the project was going on at
   many different universities and laboratories across the country,
   presenting a problem for both security and cohesion. Oppenheimer and
   Groves decided that they needed a centralized, secret research
   laboratory. Scouting for a site, Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico,
   not far from his ranch. On a flat mesa near Santa Fe, New Mexico, the
   Los Alamos laboratory was hastily built on the site of a private boys
   school. There Oppenheimer assembled a group of physicists, which he
   referred to as the "luminaries", including Enrico Fermi, Richard
   Feynman, Robert R. Wilson, and Victor Weisskopf, as well as Bethe and
   Teller.
   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.
   Enlarge
   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 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."

   All the while, Oppenheimer was under investigation by both the FBI and
   the Manhattan Project's internal security arm for his past left-wing
   associations. He was also followed by an FBI agent during an
   unannounced trip to California in 1943 to meet his former girlfriend,
   Jean Tatlock. In August 1943, Oppenheimer told Manhattan Project
   security agents that three of his students had been solicited for
   nuclear secrets by a friend of his with Communist connections. When
   pressed on the issue in later interviews with General Groves and
   security agents, he identified the friend as Haakon Chevalier, a
   Berkeley professor of French literature. Oppenheimer would be asked for
   interviews related to the "Chevalier incident", and he often gave
   contradictory and equivocating statements, telling Groves that only one
   person had actually been approached, and that person was his brother
   Frank. But Groves still thought Oppenheimer too important to the
   ultimate Allied goals to oust him over this suspicious behaviour.
   The first nuclear test, which Oppenheimer designated "Trinity".
   Enlarge
   The first nuclear test, which Oppenheimer designated " Trinity".

Trinity

   The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the first
   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 introduced him to Donne when they had dated in the 1930s), who had
   committed suicide a few months previously. He 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:

          "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 he simply exclaimed, "It worked."
   News of the successful test was rushed to President Harry S. Truman,
   who authorized the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
   Oppenheimer later became an important figure in the debates on the
   repercussions of this act.

Postwar activities

   Overnight, Oppenheimer became a national spokesman for science, and
   emblematic of a new type of technocratic power. Nuclear physics became
   a powerful force as all governments of the world began to realize the
   strategic and political power which 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. 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
   implemented.

   As a member of the Board of Consultants to a committee appointed by
   President Truman to advise the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission,
   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 USSR's uranium resources. The
   Baruch Plan was seen as an attempt to maintain the United States'
   nuclear monopoly, and was rejected by the USSR. With this, it became
   clear to Oppenheimer that an arms race was unavoidable, due to the
   mutual distrust of the U.S. and the USSR.

   While still 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 favour of developing such
   a weapon in the early days of 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. But he was also motivated by practical concerns; 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 President Harry 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.

   Oppenheimer's critics have accused him of equivocating between 1949,
   when he opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and 1951, when he
   supported it. Some have made this a case for reinforcing their opinions
   about his moral inconsistency. Historian Priscilla McMillan has argued,
   however, that if Oppenheimer has been accused of being morally
   inconsistent, then so should Rabi and Fermi, who had also opposed the
   program in 1949. Most of the GAC members were against a crash hydrogen
   bomb development program then, and in fact, Conant, Fermi and Rabi had
   submitted even more strongly worded reports against it than
   Oppenheimer. McMillan's argument is that because the hydrogen bomb
   appeared to be well within reach in 1951, everybody had to assume that
   the Russians could also do it, and that was the main reason why they
   changed their stance in favour of developing it. Thus this change in
   opinion should not be viewed as a change in morality, but a change in
   opinions purely based on technical possibilities.

   The first true hydrogen bomb, dubbed " Ivy Mike", was tested in 1952
   with a yield of 10.4 megatons, more than 650 times the strength of the
   weapons developed by Oppenheimer during World War II.

Security hearings

   In his role as a political advisor, Oppenheimer made numerous enemies.
   The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had been following his activities since
   before the war, when he showed Communist sympathies as a radical
   professor. 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. Strauss and Senator Brien
   McMahon, author of the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, pushed President
   Eisenhower to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. This came
   following controversies about whether some of Oppenheimer's students,
   including David Bohm, Joseph Weinberg, and Bernard Peters, had been
   Communists at the time they had worked with him at Berkeley.
   Oppenheimer's brother, Frank Oppenheimer, was forced to testify in
   front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he admitted
   that he had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, but he
   refused to name other members. Frank was subsequently fired from his
   university position, could not find work in physics, and became instead
   a cattle rancher in Colorado, and later the founder of the San
   Francisco Exploratorium.
   Oppenheimer's former colleague, physicist Edward Teller, testified
   against Oppenheimer at his security hearing in 1954.
   Enlarge
   Oppenheimer's former colleague, physicist Edward Teller, testified
   against Oppenheimer at his security hearing in 1954.

   In 1953, Oppenheimer was accused of being a security risk and President
   Dwight D. Eisenhower asked him to resign. Oppenheimer refused and
   requested a hearing to assess his loyalty, and in the meantime his
   security clearance was suspended. The public hearing which followed
   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 earlier
   testimony about his friend Haakon Chevalier, something which he himself
   confessed he had fabricated. In fact, Oppenheimer had never told
   Chevalier about this, and the testimony had led to Chevalier losing his
   job. Edward Teller, with whom Oppenheimer had disagreed on the hydrogen
   bomb, testified against him, leading to outrage by the scientific
   community and Teller's virtual expulsion from academic science. Many
   top scientists, as well as government and military figures, testified
   on Oppenheimer's behalf. Inconsistencies in his testimony and his
   erratic behaviour on the stand convinced some that he was unreliable
   and a possible security risk. Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked.

   During his hearing, Oppenheimer testified willingly on the left-wing
   behaviour of many of his scientific colleagues. Cornell University
   historian Richard Polenberg has speculated that if Oppenheimer's
   clearance had not been stripped (it would have expired in a matter of
   days anyhow), he would 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. Werner von Braun summed up his opinion about the matter by
   saying, "If this were England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted".

Institute for Advanced Study

   Oppenheimer eventually took over Einstein's position at the Institute
   for Advanced Study.
   Enlarge
   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. He later held
   Albert Einstein's old position of senior professor of theoretical
   physics.

   After 1953, 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 3 May 1962 he was elected a Fellow of
   the Royal Society. 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. 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
   only symbolic, as Oppenheimer still lacked a security clearance and
   could have no effect on official policy, but the award came with a
   $50,000 stipend.

   In his final years, Oppenheimer continued his work at the Institute for
   Advanced Study, bringing together intellectuals at the height of their
   powers and from a variety of disciplines to solve the most pertinent
   questions of the current age. He directed and encouraged the research
   of many well-known scientists, including Freeman Dyson, and the duo of
   Yang and 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 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 says that Oppenheimer himself thought that one
   of his failures at the institute was a failure to bring together
   scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities. Oppenheimer's
   lectures in America, Europe, and Canada were published in a number of
   books. Still, he thought the effort had minimal effect on actual
   policy.

Final years

   Oppenheimer Beach, in St John, U.S. Virgin Islands.
   Enlarge
   Oppenheimer Beach, in St John, U.S. Virgin Islands.

   After the 1954 Security hearings, Oppenheimer is reported to have been
   "like a wounded animal", and he started to retreat to a simpler life.
   In 1957, he purchased a piece of land on Gibney Beach in the island of
   St John in the Virgin Islands. He built a spartan vacation home on the
   beach, where he would spend holidays, usually months at a time, with
   his wife Kitty. Oppenheimer also spent a considerable amount of time
   sailing with his wife. Upon their death, the property was inherited by
   their daughter Toni, who then left it to "the people of St. John for a
   public park and recreation area." Today, the Virgin Islands Government
   maintains a Community Centre there, which can be rented out. The
   northern portion of the beach is colloquially known to this day as
   "Oppenheimer Beach".

   Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in Princeton, New Jersey, in
   1967. His funeral was attended by many of his scientific, political,
   and military associates, and eulogies were delivered by Hans Bethe and
   George F. Kennan among others. His ashes were spread over the Virgin
   Islands.

Legacy

   Robert Oppenheimer's life is usually seen to highlight a number of
   cultural and historical trends in the transformation of science from
   the 1920s through the 1950s.

   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. Many have
   asked why Oppenheimer never won a Nobel Prize. Scholars respond that
   his scientific attentions often changed rapidly and he never worked
   long enough on any one topic to achieve enough headway to merit the
   Nobel Prize. His lack of a Prize would not be odd—most scientists do
   not win Nobel Prizes—had not so many of his associates (Einstein,
   Fermi, Bethe, Lawrence, Dirac, Rabi, Feynman, etc.) won them. 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.
   Enlarge
   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). Because of the threat Fascism posed to Western
   civilization, scientists volunteered in great numbers both for
   technological and organizational assistance to the Allied effort,
   resulting in such powerful tools as radar, the proximity fuze, 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.

   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. Oppenheimer has been
   seen as symbolizing the dilemmas involving the moral responsibility of
   the scientist in the nuclear world.

   Most popular depictions of Oppenheimer view his security struggles as a
   confrontation between right-wing militarists (symbolized by Edward
   Teller) and left-wing intellectuals (symbolized by Oppenheimer) over
   the moral question of weapons of mass destruction. Many historians have
   contested this as an over-simplification. The hearings were motivated
   both by politics, as Oppenheimer was seen as a representative of the
   previous administration, and also by personal considerations stemming
   from his enmity with Lewis Strauss. Furthermore, 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 "the Super",
   because he believed that the Soviet Union too would inevitably
   construct one. 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 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. Robert
   Oppenheimer. Even Oppenheimer himself 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.
   Later he 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.

   Oppenheimer, Groves, and others at the site of the Trinity test shortly
   after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
   Enlarge
   Oppenheimer, Groves, and others at the site of the Trinity test shortly
   after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

   Despite Oppenheimer's remorseful, or at least conflicted, attitudes,
   Oppenheimer was a vocal supporter of using the first atomic weapons on
   "built-up areas" in the days before the bombings of Hiroshima and
   Nagasaki. Rather than consistently opposing the "Red-baiting" of the
   late 1940s and early 1950s, he had testified against many of his former
   colleagues and students, both before and during his hearing. In one
   incident, Oppenheimer's 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 avert attention from his own previous
   left-wing ties and especially from those of his brother, who had
   earlier been a target of the anti-Red lobby). In the end it became a
   liability: under cross-examination, it became clear that if Oppenheimer
   had really doubted Peters' loyalty, then his recommending him for the
   Manhattan Project was reckless, or at least contradictory.

   The question of the scientists' responsibility towards humanity, so
   manifest in the dropping of the atomic bombs and Oppenheimer's public
   questioning, in addition to Kipphardt's play, 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, which
   portrays Oppenheimer as a modern Faustus.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
