Their result has proved correct but, at the time, it was believed in contradiction with the evidence from cosmic radiation. In , cosmic radiation yielded the first new particle: Carl Anderson at CalTech discovered the positron which Oppie had almost. Oppie immediately proceeded to calculate the cross section for production of positrons at low energy, with his student Milton Plesset.
His great knowledge of the continuous spectrum wave functions in the Coulomb field was most useful for this purpose. A more thorough theory with Nedelsky followed. A little later, he extended the theory of electron pair production to a theory of the showers which are such a prominent phenomenon in cosmic radiation. It had been pointed out by Nordheim, Heitler and Bhabha that these showers could be explained as follows: electrons emit electromagnetic radiation gamma rays and these gamma rays in turn produce electron pairs in the electric field of atomic nuclei.
Oppenheimer, with his associates Carlson and H. Snyder, developed a most elegant mathematical theory of the multiplicity of air showers, a masterpiece of mathematical treatment of a physical phenomena.
All the time, however, Oppenheimer was worried about the likely breakdown of quantum electrodynamics at energies above mc 2. Indeed, laboratory experiments on the penetration of cosmic ray particles through slabs of lead and similar substances seemed to indicate this breakdown very clearly, provided the particles were electrons. It was only in that it was discovered that the particles were in fact not electrons but mesons.
While most physicists were troubled by the supposed breakdown, it dominated Oppie's thoughts, more than anybody else's and he impressed his worries on his students. A number of his papers deal with this problem. We know now that there is no such breakdown and that in fact quantum electrodynamics holds at least up to about a hundred times this energy, probably higher.
Oppie was also very active in other aspects of fundamental quantum theory. In , he attempted to get a first-. He failed, but in the process recognized the fundamental difference between particles of spin one-half and of integral spin. This was later a basis of Pauli's theory of the relation between spin and statistics.
In , with Furry, he developed a field theory of the Dirac equation, treating electrons and positrons as of equal status. This paper contains essentially the modern form of the electron-positron theory. He was much concerned with other consequences of the existence of the positron.
He and his collaborators found that the observable charge of the electron is not the true charge, foreshadowing charge renormalization. They pointed out the effect of vacuum polarization by virtual pairs of electrons and positrons being formed in strong electric fields. Similar ideas were simultaneously discussed by Dirac and others, but the most explicit calculation of vacuum polarization was made by Oppenheimer's student, Uehling. In Anderson and others discovered the meson which had been predicted two years earlier by Yukawa in an effort to explain nuclear forces.
Making use of Yukawa's theory, Oppie had suggested that the 'hard component' of cosmic rays, i. Now, after Anderson's discovery, he immediately turned his attention to the properties of mesons. Oppenheimer and two of his students, Christy and Kusaka, showed that the meson could not have a spin of 1 or greater, because otherwise it would radiate too fast when penetrating underground.
Oppie carefully discussed why he believed the theory of radiation to be valid in this case. With Serber, he discussed the production of mesons from primary cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. With Christy, he postulated that together with the penetrating, charged mesons, other particles should be produced in the upper atmosphere which have a short life and then decay into gamma rays, thus giving rise to the soft component of cosmic rays. Both at Berkeley under Ernest Lawrence, and at Pasadena under Lauritsen, experimental nuclear physics was developing rapidly.
Oppenheimer and his students turned their attention to this field from on. He calculated the excitation function for collisions between protons and nuclei, thus helping much in the interpretation of experiments. His most important contribution was the 'Oppenheimer-Phillips process' in which a deuteron, entering a heavy nucleus, is split into proton and neutron, one of these particles being retained by the nucleus while the other is re-emitted.
He gave the first quantitative description of this very prominent process which after the war became an important tool in the study of nucleon energy levels and their properties.
He also calculated the density of nuclear energy levels, the nuclear photo-effect and the properties of nuclear resonances. When Lauritsen observed that fluorine, bombarded with protons, gave electron pairs, Oppenheimer contributed much to the explanation: the nuclear reaction is.
By selection rules a transition from such a state to the ground. At Pasadena one of the most important activities was astronomy, through the Mount Wilson Observatory. Richard Tolman worked on general relativity. Oppenheimer became interested in neutron stars, and with Snyder, in the gravitational contraction of massive stars until they disappear from observability. In and , Oppenheimer's attention was turned to meson theory and the attempt to explain nuclear forces by mesons.
He attempted to deal with strong coupling, using his own theories as well as that of Wentzel. He predicted the existence of nucleon isobars with an excitation energy slightly below the rest energy of the meson. In addition to this massive scientific work, Oppenheimer created the greatest school of theoretical physics that the United States has ever known.
Before him, theoretical physics in America was a fairly modest enterprise, although there were a few outstanding representatives. Probably the most important ingredient he 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 these problems, struggling for a solution, and he communicated his concern to his group. In its heyday, there were about eight or ten graduate students in his group and about six Post-doctoral Fellows. He met this group once a day in his office, and discussed with one after another the status of the student's research problem.
He was interested in everything, and in one afternoon they might discuss quantum electrodynamics, cosmic rays, electron pair production and nuclear physics. In his classroom teaching he always applied the highest standards.
He was much influenced by Pauli's article in the Handbuch de Physik, which provided the deepest understanding. Among his students was Leonard Schiff who incorporated much of Oppenheimer's spirit into his excellent textbook on quantum mechanics.
New problems were constantly introduced into the quantum mechanics lectures. The lectures were never easy but they gave his students a feeling of the beauty of the subject and conveyed his excitement about its development. Almost every student went through his course more than once.
Oppie saw much of his students and associates after working hours. He would frequently treat them to an exquisite dinner in San Francisco, or to a less ambitious one in a Mexican restaurant in Oakland.
His most constant collaborator of these years, Serber, writes of these excursions: 'One should remember that these were post-depression days when students were poor.
The world of good food, good wines and gracious living was far from the experience of many of them, and Oppie was introducing them to an unfamiliar way of life. We acquired something of his tastes. We went to concerts together and listened to chamber music. Oppie and Arnold Nordsieck read Plato in the original Greek.
During many evening parties we drank, talked and danced until late, and, when Oppie was supplying the food, the novices suffered from the hot chilli that social example required them to eat. The magnetism and force of his personality was such that many of his students copied his gestures and mannerisms. As Oppenheimer himself has written: 'As the number of students increased, so in general did their quality. The men who worked with me during those years held chairs in many of the great centers of physics in the.
United States; they have made important contributions to science, and in many cases to the atomic energy project. During his Berkeley time, Oppie had also many friends in the faculty, scientists, classicists and artists. He studied and read Sanskrit with a colleague, and his private reading ranged over the classics, novels, plays and poetry.
Most of the time he was indifferent to the events around him; he never read a newspaper, he had no radio or telephone, he learned of the stock market crash in only long after the event. His interest in politics began in He had been much disturbed by the treatment of the Jews of Germany, including some of his relatives. He saw the effect of the American depression on his students, and had great compassion with them and others who could not find any jobs.
In these days, Oppie's sympathies were quite left-wing. He contributed to a strike fund of the Longshoremen's Union and to various committees helping the Spanish Loyalists in the Civil War. His brother and his sister-in-law were members of the Communist Party for some time; he himself apparently never joined. As far as I can tell, he moved away from the party in and He was deeply distressed by the fall of France in I saw him shortly thereafter at an evening party when he spoke long and eloquently about the terrible tragedy that the fall of France meant to Western civilization.
Clearly he entirely disagreed with the Communist slogan that this was 'An imperialist war'. In he was promoted to a full professorship at Berkeley and CalTech. In Oppenheimer married Katherine Harrison. They had one son, Peter, and a daughter Katherine.
They lived. In , Oppenheimer felt the deep urge to contribute to the American war effort. The opportunity came soon. He was appointed the leader of a theoretical effort to design the atomic bomb. By the summer of it was very likely that Fermi's atomic pile would work, that Dupont would build a production reactor, and that useful quantities of plutonium would be produced.
The separation of uranium by the electromagnetic method, though extremely expensive, also seemed very likely to succeed; the separation by gaseous diffusion was less certain. In any case, the committee in charge of the uranium project considered it advisable to begin a serious study of the assembly of a weapon.
It proved accurate timing. In , the preparations for the assembly of the weapon were finished just about the same time that the necessary amounts of material became available. Oppenheimer assembled a small group of theoretical physicists: Teller, who had been working on the atomic pile in Chicago, Van Vleck and myself who had been working on radar, Konopinski, Serber who was then associated with Oppenheimer, and three of his own graduate students.
Some members of our group, under the leadership of Serber, did calculations on the actual subject of our study, the neutron diffusion in an atomic bomb and the energy yield obtainable from it.
The rest of us, especially Teller, Oppenheimer and I, indulged ourselves in a far-off project-namely, the question of whether and how an atomic bomb could be used to trigger an H-bomb.
Grim as the subject was, it was a most exciting enterprise. We were forever inventing new. Now I could see at first-hand the tremendous intellectual power of Oppenheimer who was the unquestioned leader of our group. The ideas we had about triggering an H-bomb later turned out to be all wrong, but the intellectual experience was unforgettable. In the fall of plans were started for a more permanent laboratory to investigate the assembly of a nuclear bomb.
Oppenheimer chose its location, together with General Groves who was by then in charge of the 'Manhattan Project'. General Groves wanted a remote place in order to keep the secrecy of the project.
Oppie knew just the place. He had spent many happy summers in the Pecos Valley in New Mexico, on a ranch, owned by him and his brother. He knew about the Los Alamos Ranch School, an expensive boarding school for boys, which was in bad financial condition. The school was bought out and the Government established its laboratory on one of the most beautiful mesas in New Mexico, with a splendid view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range across 30 miles of the Rio Grande Valley.
Pleasant aspen forests rose from Los Alamos to the crest of a minor mountain range, the Jemez, and gave the inhabitants of Los Alamos many opportunities for pleasant hikes, horseback rides and ski expeditions. Oppenheimer searched the country for the best experimental and theoretical nuclear physicists, for general physicists, chemists and engineers. The task was difficult because many of the best people were already deeply engaged in war work, and some were reluctant to leave this work which promised immediate applicability in World War II, for the remote possibility of an atomic bomb.
Nevertheless a magnificent staff was assembled. Oppenheimer had the great desire to identify with the U. Army as was desired by General Groves. The better judgment of some of his colleagues, more experienced in scientific war work, prevented him and the rest of us from becoming integrated into the Army machinery.
Of course the Army had charge of guarding the laboratory, of construction of both laboratory and civilian housing, of the civil administration of the town and essentially of all our lives. But in scientific matters the laboratory remained independent. It was not obvious that Oppenheimer would be its director. He had, after all, no experience in directing a large group of people. The laboratory would be devoted primarily to experiment and to engineering, and Oppenheimer was a theorist.
It is greatly to the credit of General Groves that he overruled all these objections and made Oppenheimer the director. It was a marvellous choice. Los Alamos might have succeeded without him, but certainly only with much greater strain, less enthusiasm, and less speed. As it was, it was an unforgettable experience for all the members of the laboratory.
There were other wartime laboratories of high achievement, like the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago, the Radiation Laboratory at M. But I have never observed in any of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great time of their lives.
The scientific work at Los Alamos has often been described. I will quote the description by Victor Weisskopf in Physics Today:. When the work started at Los Alamos not much more was known than the fundamental ideas of a chain reaction.
What happens in a nuclear explosion had to be theoretically predicted in all details for the design of the. The details of the fission process had to be understood. The slowing down of neutrons in matter and the theory of explosions and implosions under completely novel conditions had to be investigated. Nuclear physicists had to become experts in fields of technology unknown to them such as shock waves and hydrodynamics.
Oppenheimer directed these studies, theoretical and experimental, in the real sense of the words. Here his uncanny speed in grasping the main points of any subject was a decisive factor; he could acquaint himself with the essential details of every part of the work.
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. He was everywhere at all times, and he worked incredibly long hours. Nevertheless, he still had time for some social life; in fact, the Oppenheimer house with his attractive wife was a social centre. He lived, as far as we could see, on his nervous energy. Always quite thin, he lost another twenty pounds and during a bout with measles reportedly got down to lb.
It is remarkable that his health could stand this pace, because he was never physically strong. The one sport he loved was horseback riding.
But in the three years at Los Alamos there was time only for one overnight ride on the two horses his wife fed and groomed for their use. Before Los Alamos, on his ranch, he used to keep five horses for himself and his guests. One of the factors contributing to the success of the laboratory was its democratic organization. The governing board, where questions of general and technical laboratory policy were discussed, consisted of the division leaders about eight of them.
The coordinating council included all the group. All scientists having a B. Each of these three assemblies met once a week. In this manner everybody in the laboratory felt a part of the whole and felt that he should contribute to the success of the programme. Very often a problem discussed in one of these meetings would intrigue a scientist in a completely different branch of the laboratory, and he would come up with an unexpected solution.
This free interchange of ideas was entirely contrary to the organization of the Manhattan District as a whole. As organized by General Groves, the work was strictly compartmentalized, with one laboratory having little or no knowledge of the problems or progress of the other.
Oppenheimer had to fight hard for the free discussion among all qualified members of the Los Alamos Laboratory, but the free flow of information and discussion, together with Oppenheimer's personality, kept morale at its highest throughout the war. Weisskopf says 'One of the most important factors that kept us at work was the common awareness of the great danger of the bomb in the hands of an irresponsible dictator. After his defeat, it turned out that this danger was in fact not so great; still the work and the spirit continued until the task was accomplished, until in the desert of Alamogordo for the first time a nuclear fire was kindled by man.
Every one of us, and Oppenheimer more than anyone, was deeply shaken by this event. For his work at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer received the Medal of Merit from President Truman in , 'for his great scientific experience and ability, his inexhaustible en-.
It was obvious that a community like Los Alamos would be deeply concerned with the ominous implications of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was one of the most concerned, and had many discussions about this problem with Niels Bohr. Bohr had come to the United States in and had been asked to help us at Los Alamos. He was quite interested in our work and gave us some advice.
However, his main interest was in talking to statesmen and trying to persuade them that international control of the atom was the only way to avoid a pernicious arms race or worse, atomic war. Bohr did not succeed with statesmen but he greatly impressed Oppenheimer and through him the rest of us at Los Alamos.
After the war the American scientists exerted much pressure in Washington. One of their wishes was civilian control of atomic energy rather than continued control by the Army. Oppenheimer, although originally in favour of military control because it would provide a smoother transition, was an effective witness before the McMahon Committee.
More urgent still seemed the problem of international control. By the intervention of some far-sighted statesmen, President Truman was persuaded to appoint a committee to study this problem, under David Lilienthal. Oppenheimer was one of the members.
Lilienthal describes the work of the committee impressively in his 'Journal'. All five mem-. But Oppenheimer brought to it the years of experience of creation of the atomic bomb. The work of the committee, although all its members contributed, was primarily that of Oppenheimer.
Lilienthal said of him, 'He was the only authentic genius I have ever met. The Lilienthal Report which was then endorsed by Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson called for the creation of an international authority to control all atomic-energy work.
The plan emphasized the need for a positive task for the international authority. It should develop atomic reactors for power and other peaceful uses, and also atomic weapons if desired; it should not have merely the function of a policeman preventing individual nations from developing atomic energy and weapons on their own.
This wise plan became official U. Its presentation to the United Nations was entrusted to Bernard Baruch, a very respected and very conservative elder statesman. Unfortunately Baruch's advisers and Baruch himself, changed the emphasis: instead of pointing to the great joint task of developing peaceful uses of atomic energy, Baruch placed the main emphasis on the 'condign' punishment of violators of the agreement to be concluded. I do not know whether there was ever any chance of acceptance of the plan by the Soviet Union, that country being at the time exclusively concerned with its own national interest.
But if there ever was a chance it was lost by the manner of Baruch's presentation. Oppenheimer was one of the first to see that the plan would be rejected by the U. Most of the members of the Federation of American Scientists held on to hope beyond hope. His realism, as well as his official duties, kept Oppenheimer rather separate from the Federation and other political organizations of the scientists. This panel was asked, before Hiroshima, whether there was any technically effective alternative to dropping the bomb on Japan; its answer was negative.
Later, an enlarged panel was asked what to do with atomic energy after the war. The members of this enlarged panel were Oppenheimer, members of the other wartime laboratories of the Manhattan District, and several elder-statesmen scientists. One of the committee's meetings took place at Los Alamos, and some other Los Alamos scientists were asked to participate. I remember this meeting very vividly. All of the participants were impressive people who had made great contributions. Nevertheless, whenever Oppenheimer left the room, discussion slid back into fairly routine problems, such as the specific nuclear reactions one should investigate and the kind of research that could be done with a nuclear reactor.
On his return, the level of the discussion immediately rose and we all had the feeling that now the meeting had become really worth while. It advised the Commission not only on scientific matters but also on matters of general policy. It was a hard-working committee, having about six sessions a year, of three days each, mostly over week-ends.
In the words of Seaborg 'At the conclusion of each session, when the AEC Commissioners came in to review our work, Oppie presented a masterful summary of the proceedings.
I know that my fellow members of the GAC remember with me that this was pure. Oppenheimer at his very best. I regret that tape-recordings were not made of these eloquent summations of our deliberations, for I believe that these would provide fascinating historical material. The plutonium production plants at Hanford had to be improved and further ones had to be built.
Oppenheimer devoted much time to strengthening the Los Alamos Laboratory after many of its members had left at the end of the war, as well as supporting the other AEC laboratories, Oak Ridge and Argonne. These latter two laboratories were given the specific task of developing nuclear power. Oppenheimer had the great desire to foster peaceful applications but, like most of his colleagues on the GAC, he was overly pessimistic about economic possibilities.
In a talk at this time, he thought that the application of isotopes in research would for a long time remain the most important peaceful application of atomic energy. In a sense he was right; it took about ten years before large-scale power reactors were constructed in the United States and only recently have they become economical. Oppenheimer was deeply devoted to the support of fundamental research in nuclear physics. The Brookhaven National Laboratory was established for this specific purpose, the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley was generously supported, and many university projects for the construction of high energy accelerators and their use were financed.
The AEC was one of the chief contributors to the tremendous expansion in research in physics in the United States, and Oppenheimer and his GAC gave much encouragement to the Commission to do so. Oppenheimer strongly advocated to make fundamental scientific information available. In military applications, Oppenheimer was one of the first advocates of a system to detect foreign nuclear weapons tests.
He proposed this while still at Los Alamos. He then supported strongly the programme to develop techniques for detection in to In addition this committee was concerned with the proper application of atomic weapons in warfare. Its membership was half civilian, half military. His efforts to get a detection system established bore fruit on 29 August when the first Soviet atom bomb was exploded.
A panel of the Committee on Atomic Energy including Oppie himself, scrutinized the evidence presented and concluded that indeed a weapons test had taken place in the Soviet Union. He served the Joint Research and Development Board from to , also in other capacities. Most important of these committees was the Science Advisory Committee More important still, he participated in many summer studies on the effect of nuclear weapons on military tactics and strategy.
In particular, in the Vista project, the study group urged that the U. In , after the U. The GAC wrote a strong recommendation against the crash development of the 'super'.
All members of the Committee agreed on this Seaborg did not attend, after writing a letter stating that he was quite undecided. One important argument of the GAC was that there was, at that time, no sufficient technical basis for this development the crucial invention was made in , by Teller. Another strong argument was that the U. A more radical minority report was written by Fermi and Rabi.
For about three months the issue was hotly debated in Washington. The decision probably came when Acheson, the Secretary of State, endorsed the H-bomb plan. At the end of January President Truman decided to pursue with full vigour the design and manufacture of an H-bomb.
He probably could not have decided any other way at the time. However, it is most deplorable that time and again nations have decided in favour of another step in armament without first trying to obtain mutual agreement with other nations to refrain from new escalation of death. After President Truman had overruled the committee, Oppenheimer tried to resign as Chairman of the Committee, but the resignation was not accepted, probably wrongly.
Senator Joseph McCarthy charged nearly anyone he could think of with being a Communist, and hence a traitor to the United States. Since McCarthy's charges had contributed much to the defeat of the Democrats in the Presidential elections of , the new Republican government let him have free rein for a long time.
That Robert Oppenheimer would be one of the victims was foreshadowed in a scurrilous article in Fortune in The author had collected much material from disgruntled officers of the Air Force who were opposed to Oppenheimer's defense policy. Although they had won the battle for massive retaliation they wanted to defeat the 'enemy' completely. A former employee of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy in a nearly paranoic letter, accused Oppenheimer of being a Communist and working against the interest of the U.
Oppie had also made some personal enemies, and on the basis of all this, in December , President Eisenhower ordered that Oppenheimer's clearance for secret government work be terminated. This was communicated to him by the AEC in December Oppenheimer answered the charges in a long letter, and both charges and answer were published in the New York Times, on 13 April, Oppenheimer chose to have a security investigation which was organized essentially like a Court of Law with a Board of three judges, and lawyers both for the government and.
He chose to face this investigation in spite of the fact that he was quite convinced from the beginning that he would lose his case.
The ensuing, long-protracted security investigations became a cause celebre. Many of his scientist friends came out in his defense, a few against him. Government on defense policy between and They have been avidly read by friend and foe, at home and abroad. Both the Security Hearing Board, by a vote of 2 to 1, and the AEC, by a vote of 4 to 1 decided to withhold security clearance from Oppenheimer.
In the final majority opinion by the Commission the only real argument against granting him clearance was the grotesque story involving Haakon Chevalier in Intrinsically this 'espionage attempt' was of no importance whatever; the counter-intelligence corps did not even bother to investigate the lead until May But apparently Oppenheimer, in an effort to shield his friend Chevalier, and at the same time not to endanger his position as Head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, had first invented a very foolish 'cock-and-bull-story' and then later denied it.
The importance attached to this incident is the more astonishing as 1 these facts had all been known to General Groves who had cleared him for wartime work; 2 the same facts were scrutinized by the whole AEC in and again clearance was granted for the most delicate atomic energy work. It is hard to imagine that this old story could have attained so much greater importance between and An eloquent discussion was given by Bush, the wartime leader of the U.
Personally I felt that the AEC which I had always regarded as our, the scientists', agency in the government, had become a hostile body. The AEC soon made efforts to reconcile the scientific community. Perhaps most important was the appointment of John Von Neumann, the noted mathematician, as a second scientific member of the Commission. He was universally respected, by the friends of Oppenheimer as well as those of Teller. He was presented with the award by President Lyndon B.
Johnson in December of that year. After graduating from Harvard University, Oppenheimer sailed to England and enrolled at the University of Cambridge, where he began his atomic research at the Cavendish Laboratory in Oppenheimer became politically active in the s and agreed with Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard that the Nazis could develop a nuclear weapon. Following the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Oppenheimer was selected to administer a laboratory to carry out the Manhattan Project, a U.
Army experiment aimed at harnessing atomic energy for military purposes. The project was populated by many scientists who had escaped fascist regimes in Europe, and their mission was to explore a newly documented fission process involving uranium, with which they hoped to make a nuclear bomb before Adolf Hitler could develop it.
That year marked the first test of the bomb, and with its success, two more bombs were deployed in the following month: one in Nagasaki, Japan and the other in Hiroshima. These actions essentially ended WW II. After seeing the bomb's devastation, however, Oppenheimer argued against its further development, and he resigned from his post that same year.
Oppenheimer went on to become chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, which, in October , opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb.
This shocking opposition led to accusations that Oppenheimer was a Communist supporter. Thusly, in , he was suspended from secret nuclear research, stripped of his security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission. In , President John F. Kennedy announced Oppenheimer would receive the Enrico Fermi Award. After Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented the award to him in December of that year.
Oppenheimer continued to support international control of atomic energy in his later years. He died of throat cancer on February 18, , in Princeton, New Jersey. Thomson, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting the electron, agreed to take on Oppenheimer as a student. Oppenheimer had the good fortune to be in Europe during a pivotal time in the world of physics, as European physicists were then developing the groundbreaking theory of quantum mechanics.
Oppenheimer received his doctorate in and accepted professorships at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology. Lawrence named his second son after Robert. After the war Oppenheimer became an advisor of the Atomic Energy Commission, lobbying for international arms control.
His security clearance was revoked in in a hearing during the Second Red Scare. Oppenheimer's old Communist sympathies were dredged up and his clearance was revoked a mere 32 hours before it was set to expire. Oppenheimer had made political enemies by arguing against the development of the hydrogen bomb, and revoking his clearance stripped him of political power. The scientific community was outraged at the treatment of Oppenheimer, and reviled Edward Teller, who testified against him at the hearing.
For more information, please see Oppenheimer Security Hearing. He continued lecturing around the world, and was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award in He died of throat cancer in Browse our collection of oral histories with workers, families, service members, and more about their experiences in the Manhattan Project.
Sense of Place. Skip to main content. Robert Oppenheimer. Early Life Oppenheimer was born on April 22, Later Years After the war Oppenheimer became an advisor of the Atomic Energy Commission, lobbying for international arms control. Load more.
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