Robert Oppenheimer
Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project and the first head of the U.S.'s Los Alamos National Laboratory. He oversaw the creation of the fission bomb for its use in World War II, and popularized the Bhagvad-Gita quote "I am become death,[1] the destroyer of worlds" upon the successful test of the bomb in New Mexico. The project led to the construction of the bombs which were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is actually much more to Oppenheimer than the Manhattan Project. Earlier in his career, he applied the newly created modern quantum mechanics (1927) to solve a variety of problems, including the physics of molecules and molecular bonding. The Born-Oppenheimer approximation remains very useful in quantum chemistry. He was among the first to take the Dirac equation (1928) seriously and predicted the positron, the antimatter partner of the electron, as well as the anti-proton. Together with Melba Philips, he characterized the Oppenheimer-Philips process (1937) in nuclear physics. Again with another one of his graduate students, Hartland Snyder, he showed that a sufficiently heavy star will collapse to form a black hole (1939). Indeed, he was interested in multiple branches of physics. It is said that he easily switched from one field to another while talking with his graduate students and colleagues. An inspiring lecturer, he is considered to be the founder of the American school of physics. He later became the director of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, where Albert Einstein spent the last twenty years of his life.
Though an undisputed genius, Oppenheimer was a bit lacking in social skills, and therefore was an easy target for political abuse, something which cost him his career at the hands of the better-connected Edward Teller when Oppenheimer opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb (Oppenheimer thought the fission bomb was destructive enough).[2] He was a communist, although he identified himself as a "fellow traveler" and not a member of the official party; one major point of difference was that he declined to follow any orders from Moscow. This being the McCarthy era, it was very easy to turn this against him and claim that he was a Soviet spy; this eventually led to the revocation of his security clearance. To this day, some doctrinaire conservatives consider Oppenheimer to have been a Soviet spy.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the retired head of Red Army counterintelligence (SMERSH) falsely[3] claimed that Oppenheimer had been suckered, partially through exploitation of his fear of nuclear war and his Jewish identity, into cooperating with Soviet intelligence.[4]
Most books written about Oppenheimer tends to focus too much on the Manhattan Project. Abraham Pais, a physicist and historian of science who knew Oppie personally, authored the most well-rounded biography of this complex character.
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[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Not Vishnu, Dan Brown.
- ↑ A true mad scientist if there ever was one as well as a fanatical anti-Communist, Teller pushed hard for the development of the hydrogen bomb ('cause, you know, otherwise the Reds would get it first), though, ironically, Teller needed to borrow designs from others to develop it. Teller would later be one of the strongest promoters of SDI
- ↑ CWIHP Bulletin #4 “Soviet Nuclear History", starting from page 50
- ↑ Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, Special Tasks (London: Little Brown and Company, 1994) ISBN 0316821152, pp. 192, 196, 206-207