Oppenheimer, J. Robert (1904–1967)

The Embodiment of the Nuclear Age

An early account of the development of the atomic bomb, Robert Jungk's Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (1958) portrayed Oppenheimer as a classic tragic figure, a theme that has recurred in subsequent biographies, historical studies, novels, plays, and films. Sociologist Charles Thorpe in his book Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (2006) argued that his subject represented science for the nuclear [Page 555]and mass media age, embodying science for radio, television, and Time and Look magazines.

Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904, in New York, to a wealthy German-Jewish immigrant family. He attended the Ethical Culture School in New York, graduated from Harvard in 1925, and studied at physicist Ernest Rutherford's celebrated Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge University, England. In 1927, he obtained his PhD in Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. In Europe, he worked with several leading physicists of the time, including Max Born, Paul Ehrenfest, and Wolfgang Pauli, making important contributions to the then-emerging quantum theory.

In 1929, he was appointed to academic positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology. An exceptional and productive theorist in the 1930s, his brilliant teaching and research abilities, coupled with the devotion he inspired in students, accounted for the creation of the American school of theoretical physics.

Studies have repeatedly referred to Oppenheimer as a complex and enigmatic figure. He was a pacifist who oversaw the creation of a devastating instrument of war. He was a brilliant scientist who never won a Nobel Prize or made a major signature contribution to science. He was a patriot who was publicly humiliated by his government. Tall, thin, cerebral, cultivated, and charismatic, he was an aesthetic and disciplined intellectual, with a developed interest in languages, literature, art, spirituality, international affairs, food, and drink. Friends, students, and colleagues called him Oppy, Oppie, or Opje and recalled the intense gaze from his blue eyes and his trademark porkpie hat, which appeared in May 1948 on the cover of the first edition of Physics Today.

Oppenheimer had been indifferent to politics before the 1930s, but during that decade he became involved in liberal and left-wing causes, inspired by rising fascism in Europe, the Spanish civil war, personal relationships, and the domestic economic depression that left unemployed several talented young physicists he had trained.

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