After the bomb was used, Oppenheimer said, “No simplification, humor, or flattery can overshadow that feeling. Physicists know their sins. It is in no way possible to forget this”.
Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who developed the atomic bomb, was born on April 22, 1904, in New York. His father, a wealthy businessman, immigrated to the United States at a young age and is from a German Jewish family. His mother is an educated woman with artistic tendencies.
Their home on Riverside Drive in Manhattan was filled with works, including paintings by Van Gogh and Picasso. Oppenheimer wrote poems and stories when he was very young. He will tell you that because of his father's enormous wealth and his mother's overprotective attitude, he was brought up to be the perfect, smug good little boy with no preparation whatsoever for the fact that cruel and disgusting things happen. At the age of 5-6, he started to take an interest in mineralogy while visiting his grandfather in Germany. Some collect mineralogical specimens belonging to his grandfather. At the age of 11, he was accepted to the New York Mineralogical Club with his collection and knowledge.
J. Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist. He was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, and is often credited as the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project, the research and development undertaking that created the first nuclear weapons.
He entered the Oppenheimer School of Ethical Culture in 1911. During these years, he is shy, and interested in literature, chemistry, and physics, but is not very good with mathematics. After graduation, his family sent him to Czechoslovakia as a reward. There he goes to Joachimsthal, where minerals containing uranium are mined. However, he suffers from severe dysentery. Then he experiences a deep psychological breakdown. This creates a shock that leaves deep scars in his soul until he dies. Although he initially wanted to study chemistry at Harvard, which he entered in 1922, he preferred physics. However, knowledge of chemistry will be very useful in the future.
For his Harvard years, “I had the opportunity to really learn. I loved learning things. I was almost alive. I took more classes than I should have, live among piles of books in the library, and embarked on an intellectual offensive there.” Apart from physics and chemistry, he learns Latin and Greek. He completed four years of education in three years and graduated summa cum laude (highest honors) in 1925. In those years, when he went to Paris on New Year's Day, his mental depression increased again. When Francis Fergusson, his student and friend, told Oppenheimer that he was going to marry his girlfriend; Oppenheimer jumps on Fergusson and tries to strangle him.
After graduating from Harvard, he spent the 1925-26 academic year at Christ's College, Cambridge. At school, he develops a hostile relationship with his teacher, the experimental physicist Patrick Blackett, who is a few years older than he is and who will later be awarded the Nobel Prize. A day consumed by feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy; He poisons an apple with chemicals in the lab and leaves it on Blackett's desk. Fortunately, Blackett doesn't eat the apple. His father, Julius, was in Cambridge and successfully lobbied at the university to avoid criminal charges; Oppenheimer gets out of this troublesome situation.
Instead, Oppenheimer is placed on probation and is asked to see a psychiatrist in London regularly. The Freudian psychoanalyst who treated him later diagnosed him with dementia praecox (schizophrenia) for the symptoms most closely associated with schizophrenia, writing in his records that he was "a hopeless case in which further analysis would do more harm than good." Oppenheimer decides to self-medicate. He will leave the experimental physics he has failed and move on to theoretical physics; He will try to get rid of his mental problems by working in an area where he can be successful. However, according to some writers who wrote about his life, the reason for this depression is the sadness of his unsuccessful sexual relationships.
He went to Göttingen University to study with physicist Max Born in 1926 for his doctoral study. He received his doctorate in 1927 at the age of 22. He publishes many articles in Göttingen, especially on quantum theory. After completing his doctorate, he returns to the United States and begins working at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology. In 1936, at the age of 32, he will become a professor at both institutions.
According to his friend, the famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli, he was interested in physics as a side hobby in those years. His main interest was psychoanalysis, probably due to the effect of his depression. When Oppenheimer started to give his first lessons, he impresses students with his unique way of thinking and speaking, with his cigarette constantly flashing on the blackboard. At one point, students complain about his teaching because he thinks too fast, talks fast, and doesn't look at the students' faces. After that, everything works out.
Since 1926, he has been doing research on atomic physics. His first published article is about the energy level of molecules. In 1930, physicist Paul Adrien worked on Maurice Dirac's theory. He is interested in almost every subject, particularly in quantum field theory, cosmic rays, and nuclear physics. In 1933, he worked with Melba Phillips on atomic nuclei bombarded with deutrons (deutron = proton + neutron).
In those years, Oppenheimer never read newspapers, magazines and did not listen to the radio. However, he is fond of fast cars and loves racing trains, especially when he goes along the train line. He speaks eight languages, spent six weeks in the Netherlands as a teenager, and learned Dutch at a level to give technical seminars. After the 1930s, he began to be interested in politics. In those years, he became interested in communism, which was common among American intellectuals. Oppenheimer does not want to marry a girl named Jean Tatlock, who has a doctorate in psychology in 1937, even though his relatives want them to get married. However, in 1944, Tatlock's suicide by taking an overdose of drugs must have affected Oppenheimer.
Extremely generous, Oppenheimer takes his students to concerts, dinners, and other social events. In 1939, he met Katherine (Kitty) Harrison, the wife of a British doctor, and they got married in 1940 after he broke up with his wife. They have a son named Peter and a daughter named Katherine.
In those years, great strides were made in the field of nuclear physics, but the usability of the great energy thought to be contained in the atomic nucleus is still unclear. Meanwhile, World War II breaks out. Upon reports that Germany was developing an atomic bomb, US President Franklin D Roosevelt initiates the Manhattan Project in 1941. Although it is known that Oppenheimer's involvement with communism and his brother and sister-in-law are members of the Communist Party, he is brought in charge of the project a year later.
He assembles a team of qualified scientists and establishes a research center in Los Alamos (New Mexico). On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and his team witnessed the first atomic explosion (known as the Trinity Experiment). The explosion had the equivalent of an explosion of 18,000 tons of TNT. Oppenheimer watches the explosion by quoting a passage from the Hindu holy epic Bhagavad Gita: "I am death, the one who shatters worlds." “We were conscious that the world would not go on as before,” said Oppenheimer for the moment. Within a month, American planes dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 140,000 people die. Within a week, Japan surrendered to the Allies, and World War II ends.
Oppenheimer plays a willing and active role as a scientist in the making of the atomic bomb. His responsibility is to ensure that the bomb is made and to specify where and according to what technical determinations the bomb will be used for full effect. It is not a given authority to evaluate whether the bomb will be used or not. This is the responsibility and authority of other experts at other levels of government. However, Oppenheimer was impressed by the use of the atomic bomb not by the limited understanding of an expert, but as a multi-faceted and sensitive person who made a significant contribution to this work.
After the bomb was used, Oppenheimer said, “No simplification, humor, or flattery can overshadow that feeling. Physicists know their sins. It is in no way possible to forget this”.
After the war, Oppenheimer was appointed head of the US Atomic Energy Advisory Committee from 1947 to 1952. Then came the Cold War years. Meanwhile, Soviet Russia also makes the atomic bomb. America is after a new weapon monopoly with the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer is hesitant to make this tool of terror and hand it over to the states, for technical reasons and because of his concerns for humanity. He tries to use his position to oppose the development of the hydrogen bomb and the nuclear arms race against the Soviets. However, Soviet Russia makes the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer is investigated for delaying the construction of the hydrogen bomb, distrusting the American state with regard to the hydrogen bomb, and having ties to communists in the past. His official duties were terminated in 1954.
When asked about his role in the use of the atomic bomb during the investigation, Oppenheimer replied: "We were physicists, not soldiers or politicians." Oppenheimer arrives at a broader understanding of responsibility only after the use of the atomic bomb. But then too Oppenheimer was not only a physicist but also a government official. Therefore, he has the dilemma of acting as a physicist or government official. As a government official, he can also say: “We have come to the conclusion, undisputedly, but sadly, that the commission has to provide atomic weapons, good atomic weapons, and very atomic weapons.” On the other hand, he says: “If atomic weapons are to be added to the arsenals of a warring world or nations preparing for war, there will come a time when humanity will curse the names Los Alamos (Headquarters of the Manhattan Project) and Hiroshima. The nations of the world must unite or they will perish.”
Although Oppenheimer studied as a physicist, he has a deep knowledge of literature and philosophy. He reads from Dante, from Baudelaire. He even learns Italian to be able to read Dante, becomes interested in Indian philosophy, and finds himself close enough to religious sentiment and poetry to express his feelings by reciting verses from the sacred Indian scriptures in front of the first experimental nuclear explosion.
There were irregularities in this trial and investigation, which concluded that Oppenheimer, as a government official, was unreliable. For the first time, hearing methods such as the presence of a criminal lawyer and questioning of witnesses were used in an investigation, but the defense was not allowed to see the documents that were the basis of the accusation, as a trial would require.
At the end of this investigation, Oppenheimer was refused a certificate of credibility in government affairs. However, Oppenheimer was also president of the Princeton Institute for Higher Studies at that time, and his position remains untouched. Nine years after this investigation, while the Democratic Party was in power, the Kennedy administration decided to award Oppenheimer for his contributions to the study of atomic energy. After Kennedy's assassination, President Johnson gives Oppenheimer the Fermi Prize in 1963. This is also a formal apology. Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in 1967.