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J. Robert Oppenheimer Facts

J. Robert Oppenheimer Facts
Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 to February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is among the persons who are often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project. When the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945 Oppenheimer remarked later that it brought to mind "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Interesting J. Robert Oppenheimer Facts:
Oppenheimer was born in New York City and was the eldest son of a wealthy Jewish textile importer.
His father, Julius Oppenheimer, was a member of the Ethical Culture Society and Robert was educated at the Ethical Cultural School in New York where he studied Greek, Latin, French and German and discovered that he had a gift for foreign languages.
In 1925 he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude with a degree in chemistry and was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society.
He studied theoretical physics at Cambridge University for one year and left in 1926 for the University of Gottingen.
Oppenheimer made friends with many important physicists which he was in Gottingen, including Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Maria Goeppert.
In March 1927 he received his PhD.
His most famous paper was co-authored by Max Born and explained the separation of nuclear motion from electric motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules.
This calculation is now known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
In September 1927 he was awarded a United States National Research Council fellowship to the California Institute of Technology.
In 1929 he accepted an associate professorship at the University of California, Berkeley.
Oppenheimer made important contributions to many fields of physics.
In 1930 he wrote a paper predicting the existence of the positron and in 1936 Carl David Anderson received a Nobel Prize for its discovery.
In 1931 he co-wrote a paper on the "Relativistic Theory of the Photoelectric Effect" which challenged the idea that two of the energy levels of hydrogen are the same.
In 1939 he and his student, Hartland Snyder, predicted the existence of black holes.
President Franklin Roosevelt established the Manhattan Project in 1941 and Oppenheimer was appointed its director in 1942.
He set up the research station at Los Alamos, New Mexico and the first atomic bomb test occurred on July 16, 1945 and in August two bombs were dropped on Japan.
After the war he was the chief advisor to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
He became an outspoken opponent of nuclear proliferation and the arms race of the Cold War.
His opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb led to his loss of his security clearance in 1954 which effectively barred him from further nuclear research.


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