Robert oppenheimer biography summary organizer

His first published paper, inconcerned the quantum theory of molecular band spectra. He developed a method to carry out calculations of its transition probabilities. He calculated the photoelectric effect for hydrogen and X-raysobtaining the absorption coefficient at the K-edge. His calculations accorded with observations of the X-ray absorption of the Sun, but not helium.

Years later, it was realized that the Sun was largely composed of hydrogen and that his calculations were correct. Oppenheimer made important contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers. He also worked on the problem of field electron emission. Subsequently, one of his doctoral students, Willis Lambdetermined that this was a consequence of what became known as the Lamb shiftfor which Lamb was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in With Melba Phillipsthe first graduate student to begin her PhD under Oppenheimer's supervision, [ note 2 ] Oppenheimer worked on calculations of artificial radioactivity under bombardment by deuterons.

When Ernest Lawrence and Edwin McMillan bombarded nuclei with deuterons they found the results agreed closely with the predictions of George Gamowbut when higher energies and heavier nuclei were involved, the results did not conform to the predictions. InOppenheimer and Phillips worked out a theory—subsequently known as the Oppenheimer—Phillips process —to explain the results.

This theory is still in use today. As early asOppenheimer wrote a paper that essentially predicted the existence of the positron. This was after a paper by Dirac proposed that electrons could have both a positive charge and negative energy. Dirac's paper introduced an equation, later known as the Dirac equationthat unified quantum mechanics, special relativity and the then-new concept of electron spinto explain the Zeeman effect.

He argued that they would have to have the same mass as an electron, whereas experiments showed that protons were much heavier than electrons. In the late s, Oppenheimer became interested in astrophysicsmost likely through his friendship with Richard Tolmanresulting in a series of papers. In the first of these, "On the Stability of Stellar Neutron Cores"[ 59 ] co-written with Serber, Oppenheimer explored the properties of white dwarfs.

This was followed by a paper co-written with one of his students, George Volkoff"On Massive Neutron Cores," [ 60 ] which demonstrated that there was a limit, known as the Tolman—Oppenheimer—Volkoff limitto the mass of stars beyond which they would not remain stable as neutron stars and would undergo gravitational collapse. InOppenheimer and another of his students, Hartland Snyderproduced the paper " On Continued Gravitational Contraction ", [ 61 ] which predicted the existence of what later became termed black holes.

After the Born—Oppenheimer approximation paper, these papers remain his most cited, and were key factors in the rejuvenation of astrophysical research in the United States in the s, mainly by John A. Oppenheimer's papers were considered difficult to understand even by the standards of the abstract topics he was expert in. He 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.

After World War IIOppenheimer published only five scientific papers, one of them in biophysics, and none after Murray Gell-Manna later Nobelist who, as a visiting scientist, worked with him at the Institute for Advanced Study inoffered this opinion:. He didn't have Sitzfleisch"sitting flesh," when you sit on a chair. As far as I know, he never wrote a long paper or did a long calculation, anything of that kind.

But he inspired other people to do things, and his influence was fantastic. Oppenheimer's mother died inand he became closer to his father who, although still living in New York, became a frequent visitor in California. During the s, Oppenheimer remained uninformed about world affairs. He claimed that he did not read newspapers or popular magazines and only learned of the Wall Street crash of while he was on a walk with Ernest Lawrence six months after the crash occurred.

From on, he became increasingly concerned about politics and international affairs. Inhe joined the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, which campaigned against the persecution of Jewish scientists in Nazi Germany. Like most liberal groups of the era, the committee was later branded a communist front. Many of Oppenheimer's closest associates were active in the Communist Party in the s or s, including his robert oppenheimer biography summary organizer Frank, Frank's wife Jackie, [ 69 ] Kitty, [ 70 ] Jean Tatlockhis landlady Mary Ellen Washburn, [ 71 ] and several of his graduate students at Berkeley.

It recorded that he attended a meeting in December at Chevalier's home that was also attended by the Communist Party's California state secretary, William Schneidermanand its treasurer, Isaac Folkoff. The FBI noted that Oppenheimer was on the executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Unionwhich it considered a communist front organization.

When he joined the Manhattan Project inOppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast. InOppenheimer was on the sponsoring committee for a conference on "Science and Freedom" organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedoman anti-communist cultural organization.

At his security clearance hearings, Oppenheimer denied being a member of the Communist Party but identified himself as a fellow travelerwhich he defined as someone who agrees with many of communism's goals but is not willing to blindly follow orders from any Communist Party apparatus. Moreover, in terms of the time, effort and money spent on party activities, he was a very committed supporter.

InOppenheimer became involved with Jean Tatlockthe daughter of a Berkeley literature professor and a student at Stanford University School of Medicine. The two had similar political views; she wrote for the Western Workera Communist Party newspaper. Kitty's first marriage had lasted only a few months. Her second, common-lawhusband from to was Joe Dalletan active member of the Communist Party killed in in the Spanish Civil War.

Kitty returned from Europe to the U. In she married Richard Harrison, a physician and medical researcher, and in June moved with him to Pasadena, Californiawhere he became chief of radiology at a local hospital and she enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She and Oppenheimer created a minor scandal by sleeping together after one of Tolman's parties, and in the summer of she stayed with Oppenheimer at his ranch in New Mexico.

When she became pregnant, Kitty asked Harrison for a divorce and he agreed to it. On November 1,she obtained a quick divorce in Reno, Nevadaand married Oppenheimer. Throughout the development of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was under investigation by both the FBI and the Manhattan Project's internal security arm for his past left-wing associations.

He was followed by Army security agents during a trip to California in June to visit Tatlock, who was suffering from depression. Oppenheimer spent the night in her apartment. The affair ended after Oppenheimer returned east to become director of the Institute for Advanced Study but, after Richard's death in Augustthey reconnected and saw each other occasionally until Ruth's death in Few of their letters survive, but those that do reflect a close and affectionate relationship, with Oppenheimer calling her "My Love".

Oppenheimer worked very hard [in the spring of ] but had a gift of concealing his assiduous application with an air of easy nonchalance. Actually, he was engaged in a very difficult calculation of the opacity of surfaces of stars to their internal radiation, an important constant in the theoretical construction of stellar models. He spoke little of these problems and seemed to be much more interested in literature, especially the Hindu classics and the more esoteric Western writers.

Pauli once remarked to me that Oppenheimer seemed to treat physics as an avocation and psychoanalysis as a vocation. Oppenheimer's diverse interests sometimes interrupted his focus on science. He 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.

Ryder at Berkeley in He later cited the Gita as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life. He later called it "the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue", and gave copies of it as presents to his friends and kept a personal, worn-out copy on the bookshelf by his desk. He kept referring to it while directing the Los Alamos Laboratory, and quoted a passage from the Gita at the memorial service of President Franklin Roosevelt in Los Alamos.

Oppenheimer never became a Hindu in the traditional sense; he did not join any temple nor pray to any god. Both Bohr and Oppenheimer had been very analytical and critical about the ancient Hindu mythological stories and the metaphysics embedded in them. In one conversation with David Hawkins before the robert oppenheimer biography summary organizer, while talking about the literature of ancient GreeceOppenheimer remarked, "I have read the Greeks; I find the Hindus deeper.

His close confidant and colleague Isidor Isaac Rabiwho had seen Oppenheimer throughout his Berkeley, Los Alamos, and Princeton years, wondering "why men of Oppenheimer's gifts do not discover everything worth discovering", [ ] reflected that:. 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 for the mystery of the universe that surrounded him almost 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 In Oppenheimer the element of earthiness was feeble. Yet it was essentially this spiritual quality, this refinement as expressed in speech and manner, that was the basis of his charisma.

He never expressed himself completely. He always left a feeling that there were depths of sensibility and insight not yet revealed. These may be the qualities of the born leader who seems to have reserves of uncommitted strength. In spite of this, observers such as physicists Luis Alvarez and Jeremy Bernstein have suggested that if Oppenheimer had lived long enough to see his predictions substantiated by experiment, he might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapseconcerning neutron stars and black holes.

Roosevelt approved a crash program to develop an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was assigned to take over the project's specific bomb-design research by Arthur Compton at the Metallurgical Laboratory. Conantwho had been one of Oppenheimer's lecturers at Harvard, asked Oppenheimer to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task Oppenheimer threw himself into with full vigor.

He was given the title "Coordinator of Rapid Rupture"; "rapid rupture" is a technical term that refers to the propagation of a fast neutron chain reaction in an atomic bomb. One of his first acts was to host a summer school for atomic bomb theory in Berkeley. The mix of European physicists and his own students—a group including Serber, Emil KonopinskiFelix BlochHans Bethe, and Edward Teller—kept themselves busy by calculating what needed to be done, and in what order, to make the bomb.

In Junethe U. Army established the Manhattan Engineer District to handle its part in the atom bomb project, beginning the process of transferring responsibility from the Office of Scientific Research and Development to the military. Groves Jr. Groves selected Oppenheimer to head the project's secret weapons laboratory, although it is not known precisely when.

Groves worried that because Oppenheimer did not have a Nobel Prize, he might not have had the prestige to direct fellow scientists, [ ] but Groves was impressed by Oppenheimer's singular grasp of the practical aspects of the project and by the breadth of his knowledge. As a military engineerGroves knew that this would be vital in an interdisciplinary project that would involve not just physics but also chemistry, metallurgyordnanceand engineering.

Groves also detected in Oppenheimer something that many others did not, an "overweening ambition", [ ] which Groves reckoned would supply the drive necessary to push the project to a successful conclusion. He is absolutely essential to the project. Oppenheimer favored a location for the laboratory in New Mexico, not far from his ranch. On November 16,he, Groves and others toured a prospective site.

Oppenheimer feared that the high cliffs surrounding it would feel claustrophobic, and there was concern about possible flooding. He then suggested a site he knew well: a flat mesa near Santa Fe, New Mexicowhich was the site of a private boys' school, the Los Alamos Ranch School. The engineers were concerned about the robert oppenheimer biography summary organizer access road and the water supply but otherwise felt that it was ideal.

At the laboratory, Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top physicists of the time, whom he called the "luminaries". Los Alamos was initially supposed to be a military laboratory, and Oppenheimer and other researchers were to be commissioned into the Army. He went so far as to order himself a lieutenant colonel's uniform and take the Army physical test, which he failed.

Army doctors considered him underweight at pounds 58 kgdiagnosed his chronic cough as tuberculosis, and were concerned about his chronic lumbosacral joint pain. Conant, Groves, and Oppenheimer devised a compromise whereby the University of California operated the laboratory under contract to the War Department. Oppenheimer at first had difficulty with the organizational division of large groups but rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence at Los Alamos.

He was noted for his mastery of all scientific aspects of the project and for his efforts to control the inevitable cultural conflicts between scientists and the military. Victor Weisskopf wrote:. 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 did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and 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. At this point in the war, there was considerable anxiety among the scientists that the German nuclear weapons program might be progressing faster than the Manhattan Project.

Oppenheimer asked Fermi whether he could produce enough strontium without letting too many in on the secret. Oppenheimer continued, "I think we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men. Indevelopment efforts were directed to a plutonium gun-type fission weapon called " Thin Man ". Initial research on the properties of plutonium was done using cyclotron-generated plutoniumwhich was extremely pure but could be created only in tiny amounts.

When Los Alamos received the first sample of plutonium from the X Graphite Reactor in Aprila problem was discovered: reactor-bred plutonium had a higher concentration of plutonium five times that of "cyclotron" plutoniummaking it unsuitable for use in a gun-type weapon. Using chemical explosive lensesa sub-critical sphere of fissile material could be squeezed into a smaller and denser form.

The metal needed to travel only very short distances, so the critical mass would be assembled in much less time. This device became Little Boy in February In Mayan Interim Committee was created to advise and report on wartime and postwar policies regarding the use of nuclear energy. The Interim Committee established a scientific panel consisting of Oppenheimer, Arthur ComptonFermi, and Lawrence to advise it on scientific issues.

In its presentation to the Interim Committee, the panel offered its opinion not just on an atomic bomb's likely physical effects but also on its likely military and political impact. In the early morning hours of July 16,near Alamogordo, New Mexicothe work at Los Alamos culminated in the test of the world's first nuclear weapon. Oppenheimer had code-named the site " Trinity " in mid, saying later that the name came from John Donne 's Holy Sonnets ; he had been introduced to Donne's work in the s by Jean Tatlock, who killed herself in January Brigadier General Thomas Farrellwho was present in the control bunker with Oppenheimer, recalled:.

Oppenheimer, on whom had rested a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself.

Robert oppenheimer biography summary organizer

For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted "Now! Oppenheimer's brother Frank recalled Oppenheimer's first words as "I guess it worked. According to a magazine profile, while witnessing the explosion Oppenheimer thought of verses from the Bhagavad Gita : "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

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.

Rabi described seeing Oppenheimer somewhat later: "I'll never forget his walk He had done it. He expressed regret that the weapon was ready too late for use against Nazi Germany. Stimson expressing his revulsion and his wish to see nuclear weapons banned. Trumanwho dismissed Oppenheimer's concern about an arms race with the Soviet Union and belief that atomic energy should be under international control.

Truman became infuriated when Oppenheimer said, "Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands", responding that he Truman bore sole responsibility for the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan, and later said, "I don't want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again. Once the public learned of the Manhattan Project after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer—suddenly a household name as the "father of the atomic bomb"—became a national spokesman for science, emblematic of a new type of technocratic power; [ 93 ] [ ] [ ] he appeared on the covers of Life and Time.

Like many scientists of his generation, Oppenheimer felt that security from atomic bombs could come only from a transnational organization such as the newly formed United Nationswhich could institute a program to stifle a nuclear arms race. In NovemberOppenheimer left Los Alamos to return to Caltech, [ ] but soon found that his heart was no longer in teaching.

This meant moving back east and leaving Ruth Tolmanthe wife of his friend Richard Tolman, with whom he had begun an affair after leaving Los Alamos. 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. He directed and encouraged the research of many well-known scientists, including Freeman Dysonand the duo of Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Leewho won a Nobel Prize for their discovery of parity non-conservation.

He also instituted temporary memberships for scholars from the humanities, such as T. Eliot and George F. Some of these activities were resented by a few members of the mathematics faculty, who wanted the institute to stay a bastion of pure scientific research. Abraham Pais said that Oppenheimer himself thought that one of his failures at the institute was being unable to bring together scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities.

During a series of conferences in New York from throughphysicists transitioned from war work back to theoretical issues. Under Oppenheimer's direction, physicists tackled the greatest outstanding problem of the pre-war years: infinite, divergent, and seemingly nonsensical expressions in the quantum electrodynamics of elementary particles. Julian SchwingerRichard Feynman and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga tackled the problem of regularizationand developed techniques that became known as renormalization.

Freeman Dyson was able to prove that their procedures gave similar results. The problem of meson absorption and Hideki Yukawa 's theory of mesons as the carrier particles of the strong nuclear force were also tackled. It's formatted to be effortlessly integrated into our curriculum. Add To Collection. About This Product This J. Product Clipart: Prince Padania.

Resource Tags J. Prior to John F. President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him the award that December. Both were immigrants. After graduating from Harvard University, Oppenheimer sailed to England and enrolled at the University of Cambridge, robert oppenheimer biography summary organizer he began his atomic research at the Cavendish Laboratory in Oppenheimer was miserable at Cambridge and found laboratory work uninteresting, preferring theoretical physics rather than experimental, according to American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J.

Oppenheimer held teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology, and did important research in such fields at theoretical astronomy, nuclear physics, quantum electrodynamics, and more, according to A Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists and Inventors in American Film and TV Since by A.

Bowdoin Van Riper. 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 choice of Oppenheimer surprised some due to his left-wing politics, lack of leadership experience, and the fact he had never won a Nobel Prize. However, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves Jr. The project, which grew from a few hundred people to more than 6, bywas populated by many scientists who had escaped fascist regimes in Europe, according to American Prometheus.

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 one. Art history. Graphic arts. Visual arts. Performing arts. Instrumental music. Music composition. Vocal music. Special education. Speech therapy. Social emotional. Character education.

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