137 Facts About Robert Oppenheimer

Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist.

Robert Oppenheimer used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation and a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.

Robert Oppenheimer was hired by a textile company and within a decade was an executive there, eventually becoming wealthy.

Robert Oppenheimer had a younger brother, Frank, who became a physicist.

Robert Oppenheimer was initially educated at Alcuin Preparatory School; in 1911, he entered the Ethical Culture Society School.

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Robert Oppenheimer's father had been a member of the Society for many years, serving on its board of trustees from 1907 to 1915.

Robert Oppenheimer was a versatile scholar, interested in English and French literature, and particularly in mineralogy.

Robert Oppenheimer completed the third and fourth grades in one year and skipped half of the eighth grade.

Robert Oppenheimer entered Harvard College one year after graduation, at age 18, because he suffered an attack of colitis while prospecting in Joachimstal during a family summer vacation in Europe.

Robert Oppenheimer majored in chemistry, but Harvard required science students to study history, literature, and philosophy or mathematics.

Robert Oppenheimer compensated for his late start by taking six courses each term and was admitted to the undergraduate honor society Phi Beta Kappa.

Robert Oppenheimer was attracted to experimental physics by a course on thermodynamics that was taught by Percy Bridgman.

In 1924, Robert Oppenheimer was informed that he had been accepted into Christ's College, Cambridge.

Robert Oppenheimer wrote to Ernest Rutherford requesting permission to work at the Cavendish Laboratory.

Rutherford was unimpressed, but Robert Oppenheimer went to Cambridge in the hope of landing another offer.

Robert Oppenheimer developed an antagonistic relationship with his tutor, Patrick Blackett, who was only a few years his senior.

Robert Oppenheimer was a tall, thin chain smoker, who often neglected to eat during periods of intense thought and concentration.

In 1926, Robert Oppenheimer left Cambridge for the University of Gottingen to study under Max Born.

Robert Oppenheimer made friends who went on to great success, including Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller.

Robert Oppenheimer was known for being too enthusiastic in discussion, sometimes to the point of taking over seminar sessions.

Robert Oppenheimer obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in March 1927 at age 23, supervised by Born.

Robert Oppenheimer 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 to simplify calculations.

Robert Oppenheimer was awarded a United States National Research Council fellowship to the California Institute of Technology in September 1927.

At Caltech he 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, with Robert Oppenheimer supplying the mathematics and Pauling interpreting the results.

Once, when Pauling was at work, Robert Oppenheimer had arrived at their home and invited Ava Helen to join him on a tryst in Mexico.

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Robert Oppenheimer later invited him to become head of the Chemistry Division of the Manhattan Project, but Pauling refused, saying he was a pacifist.

On returning to the United States, Oppenheimer accepted an associate professorship from the University of California, Berkeley, where Raymond T Birge wanted him so badly that he expressed a willingness to share him with Caltech.

Robert Oppenheimer recovered from 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.

Robert Oppenheimer's associates fell into two camps: one that saw him as an aloof and impressive genius and aesthete, the other that saw him as a pretentious and insecure poseur.

Robert Oppenheimer always knew what were the important problems, as shown by his choice of subjects.

Robert Oppenheimer truly lived with those problems, struggling for a solution, and he communicated his concern to the group.

Robert Oppenheimer met this group once a day in his office and discussed with one after another the status of the student's research problem.

Robert Oppenheimer was interested in everything, and in one afternoon they might discuss quantum electrodynamics, cosmic rays, electron pair production and nuclear physics.

Robert Oppenheimer worked closely with Nobel Prize-winning experimental physicist Ernest O Lawrence and his cyclotron pioneers, helping them understand the data their machines were producing at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Robert Oppenheimer did important research in theoretical astronomy, nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum field theory, including its extension into quantum electrodynamics.

Robert Oppenheimer's work predicted many later finds, which include the neutron, meson and neutron star.

Robert Oppenheimer developed a method to carry out calculations of its transition probabilities.

Robert Oppenheimer calculated the photoelectric effect for hydrogen and X-rays, obtaining the absorption coefficient at the K-edge.

Robert Oppenheimer's calculations accorded with observations of the X-ray absorption of the sun, but not helium.

Robert Oppenheimer made important contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers and started work that eventually led to descriptions of quantum tunneling.

Robert Oppenheimer, drawing on the body of experimental evidence, rejected the idea that the predicted positively charged electrons were protons.

Robert Oppenheimer argued that they would have to have the same mass as an electron, whereas experiments showed that protons were much heavier than electrons.

Robert Oppenheimer's papers were considered difficult to understand even by the standards of the abstract topics he was expert in.

Robert Oppenheimer was 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.

Robert Oppenheimer didn't have Sitzfleisch, 'sitting flesh, ' when you sit on a chair.

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Robert Oppenheimer didn't have patience for that; his own work consisted of little apercus, but quite brilliant ones.

Robert Oppenheimer liked things that were difficult, and since much of the scientific work appeared easy for him, he developed an interest in the mystical and the cryptic.

Robert Oppenheimer eventually read the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads in the original Sanskrit, and deeply pondered over them.

Robert Oppenheimer later cited the Gita as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life.

Robert 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.

Robert Oppenheimer 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.

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, Robert Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapse, concerning neutron stars and black holes.

Robert Oppenheimer claimed that he did not read newspapers or listen to the radio and had only learned of the Wall Street crash of 1929 while he was on a walk with Ernest Lawrence some six months after the crash occurred.

Robert Oppenheimer once remarked that he never cast a vote until the 1936 presidential election.

Robert Oppenheimer repeatedly attempted to get Serber a position at Berkeley but was blocked by Birge, who felt that "one Jew in the department was enough".

Robert Oppenheimer's mother died in 1931, and he became closer to his father who, although still living in New York, became a frequent visitor in California.

Robert Oppenheimer donated to many progressive causes that were later branded as left-wing during the McCarthy era.

In 1936, Robert Oppenheimer became involved with Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a Berkeley literature professor and a student at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Robert Oppenheimer's finally asked Harrison for a divorce when she found out she was pregnant.

When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, Robert Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast".

The FBI noted that Robert Oppenheimer was on the Executive Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, which it considered a communist front organization.

Robert Oppenheimer 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.

When pressed on the issue in later interviews, Robert 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 Robert Oppenheimer's house.

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.

Robert Oppenheimer was given the title "Coordinator of Rapid Rupture", which specifically referred to the propagation of a fast neutron chain reaction in an atomic bomb.

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Robert Oppenheimer selected Oppenheimer to head the project's secret weapons laboratory.

Groves was concerned by the fact that Robert Oppenheimer did not have a Nobel Prize and might not have had the prestige to direct fellow scientists.

Robert 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.

Robert Oppenheimer then suggested and championed 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.

At the laboratory, Robert Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top physicists of the time, which he referred to as the "luminaries".

Robert Oppenheimer went so far as to order himself a lieutenant colonel's uniform and take the Army physical test, which he failed.

Conant, Groves, and Robert Oppenheimer devised a compromise whereby the laboratory was operated by the University of California under contract to the War Department.

Robert 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.

Robert Oppenheimer was an iconic figure to his fellow scientists, as much a symbol of what they were working toward as a scientific director.

Robert Oppenheimer directed these studies, theoretical and experimental, in the real sense of the words.

Robert Oppenheimer was intellectually and physically present at each decisive step.

Robert Oppenheimer was present in the laboratory or in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived.

Robert Oppenheimer asked Fermi whether he could produce enough strontium without letting too many in on the secret.

In July 1944, Robert Oppenheimer abandoned the gun design in favor of an implosion-type weapon.

Robert Oppenheimer concentrated the development efforts on the gun-type device, a simpler design that only had to work with uranium-235, in a single group, and this device became Little Boy in February 1945.

Robert Oppenheimer had given the site the codename "Trinity" in mid-1944 and said later that it was from one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets.

Robert Oppenheimer later recalled that, while witnessing the explosion, he thought of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita :.

Robert Oppenheimer noted his regret the weapon had not been available in time to use against Nazi Germany.

In October 1945 Oppenheimer was granted an interview with President Harry S Truman.

Manhattan Project was top secret and did not become public knowledge until after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Robert Oppenheimer became a national spokesman for science who was emblematic of a new type of technocratic power.

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Robert Oppenheimer became a household name and his portrait appeared on the covers of Life and Time.

In November 1945, Robert Oppenheimer left Los Alamos to return to Caltech, but he soon found that his heart was no longer in teaching.

Robert Oppenheimer collected European furniture, and French post-impressionist and Fauvist artworks.

Robert Oppenheimer brought together intellectuals at the height of their powers and from a variety of disciplines to answer the most pertinent questions of the age.

Robert Oppenheimer 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.

Robert Oppenheimer instituted temporary memberships for scholars from the humanities, such as T S Eliot and George F Kennan.

Abraham Pais said that Robert 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.

Robert Oppenheimer had been aware of the possibility of a thermonuclear weapon since the days of the Manhattan Project and had allocated a limited amount of theoretical research work toward the possibility at the time but nothing more than that given the pressing need to develop a fission weapon.

Immediately following the end of the war, Robert Oppenheimer argued against continuing work on the Super at that time, due both to lack of need and to the enormous human casualties that would result from its use.

The majority of the AEC subsequently endorsed the GAC recommendation – and Robert Oppenheimer thought that the fight against the Super would triumph – but proponents of the weapon lobbied the White House vigorously.

Robert Oppenheimer played a role on a number of government panels and study projects during the late 1940s and early 1950s, some of which found him in the middle of controversies and power struggles.

In 1948 Robert Oppenheimer chaired the Department of Defense's Long-Range Objectives Panel, which looked at the military utility of nuclear weapons including how they might be delivered.

Robert Oppenheimer was a member of the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization.

Robert Oppenheimer participated in Project Charles during 1951, which examined the possibility of creating an effective air defense of the United States against atomic attack, and in the follow-on Project East River in 1952, which, with Robert Oppenheimer's input, recommended building a warning system that would provide one-hour notice to atomic attacks against American cities.

Edward Teller, who had been so uninterested in work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war that Robert Oppenheimer had given him time instead to work on his own project of the hydrogen bomb, had eventually left Los Alamos in 1951 to help found, in 1952, a second laboratory at what would become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Robert Oppenheimer had defended the history of work done at Los Alamos and had opposed the creation of the second laboratory.

Robert Oppenheimer was a late addition to the project in 1951 but wrote a key chapter of the report that challenged the doctrine of strategic bombardment and advocated for smaller tactical nuclear weapons which would be more useful in a limited theater conflict against enemy forces.

The panel then issued a final report in January 1953, which, influenced by many of Robert Oppenheimer's deeply felt beliefs, presented a pessimistic vision of the future in which neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could establish an effective nuclear superiority but both sides could effect terrible damage on the other.

One of the panel's recommendations, which Oppenheimer felt was especially important, was that the U S government practice less secrecy and more openness towards the American people about the realities of the nuclear balance and the dangers of nuclear warfare.

Robert Oppenheimer subsequently presented his view on the lack of utility of ever-larger nuclear arsenals to the American public with an article in Foreign Affairs in June 1953, and it received attention in major American newspapers.

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Robert Oppenheimer had been under close surveillance since the early 1940s, his home and office bugged, his phone tapped and his mail opened.

Robert Oppenheimer 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.

Robert Oppenheimer later taught high school physics and was the founder of the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Robert Oppenheimer chose not to resign and requested a hearing instead.

Robert Oppenheimer was surprised on the witness stand with transcripts of these, which he had not been given a chance to review.

Robert Oppenheimer had never told Chevalier that he had finally named him, and the testimony had cost Chevalier his job.

Robert Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked one day before it was due to lapse anyway.

Isidor Rabi's comment was that Robert 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".

Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev state Robert Oppenheimer "was, in fact, a concealed member of the CPUSA in the late 1930s".

Robert Oppenheimer spent a considerable amount of time sailing with his daughter Toni and wife Kitty.

Robert Oppenheimer's first public appearance following the stripping of his security clearance was a lecture titled "Prospects in the Arts and Sciences" for the Columbia University Bicentennial radio show Man's Right to Knowledge, in which he outlined his philosophy and his thoughts on the role of science in the modern world.

Robert Oppenheimer had been selected for the final episode of the lecture series two years prior to the security hearing, though the university remained adamant that he stay on even after the controversy.

Robert Oppenheimer stopped briefly in Seattle to change planes on a trip to Oregon, and was joined for coffee during his layover by several University of Washington faculty, but Robert Oppenheimer never lectured there.

Robert Oppenheimer was increasingly concerned about the potential danger that scientific inventions could pose to humanity.

Robert Oppenheimer joined with Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Rotblat and other eminent scientists and academics to establish what would eventually, in 1960, become the World Academy of Art and Science.

Robert Oppenheimer delivered the Reith Lectures on the BBC in 1953, which were subsequently published as Science and the Common Understanding.

In 1955 Robert Oppenheimer published The Open Mind, a collection of eight lectures that he had given since 1946 on the subject of nuclear weapons and popular culture.

Robert Oppenheimer toured Europe and Japan, giving talks about the history of science, the role of science in society, and the nature of the universe.

Edward Teller, the winner of the previous year's award, had recommended Robert Oppenheimer receive it, in the hope that it would heal the rift between them.

The late President Kennedy's widow Jacqueline, still living in the White House, made it a point to meet with Robert Oppenheimer to tell him how much her husband had wanted him to have the medal.

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Robert Oppenheimer was a chain smoker who was diagnosed with throat cancer in late 1965.

Robert Oppenheimer's body was cremated and his ashes were placed into an urn.

Robert Oppenheimer's left the property to "the people of St John for a public park and recreation area".

When Robert Oppenheimer was stripped of his position of political influence in 1954, he symbolized for many the folly of scientists who believed they could control the use of their research, and the dilemmas of moral responsibility presented by science in the nuclear age.

Rather than consistently oppose the "Red-baiting" of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Robert Oppenheimer testified against some of his former colleagues and students, both before and during his hearing.

Robert Oppenheimer'storians 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.

The Robert Oppenheimer story has often been viewed by biographers and historians as a modern tragedy.

Robert Oppenheimer's objections resulted in an exchange of correspondence with Kipphardt, in which the playwright offered to make corrections but defended the play.

New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called it an "angry play and a partisan play" that sided with Robert Oppenheimer but portrayed the scientist as a "tragic fool and genius".

The 1980 BBC TV serial Robert Oppenheimer, starring Sam Waterston, won three BAFTA Television Awards.

Robert Oppenheimer's life has been explored in the 2015 play Robert Oppenheimer by Tom Morton-Smith, and in the 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy, where he was portrayed by Dwight Schultz.

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