Biography of Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 67)

Julius Robert Oppenheimer directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory for Manhattan Project during Word War II.

He over saw the production of the atomic bomb dropped in Japan in August 1945.

Robert was born into a life of wealthy Jewish and attended excellent private schools in New York. He educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and Gottingen, where he gained his PhD in 1927.

In 1929 Oppenheimer accepted academic positions at both University of California, Berkeley and California Institute of Technology. Throughout the 1930s Oppenheimer built up a reputation as a theoretical physicist, making several important contributions to quantum theory. Outside science his interests included literature and politics.

Oppenheimer’s early research was devoted in a particular to energy processes of subatomic particles, including electrons, positrons and cosmic rays.

He trained a whole generations of US physicist, who were greatly affected by his qualities of leadership and intellectual dependent.
When in 1942, the United States government decided to build atom bomb. Oppenheimer was chosen to direct the project. He helped to select the site for the laboratory in Los Alamos and proved to be a director with sufficient intellectual authority to command the support of several hundred scientists and sufficient diplomatic skill to deal with the politicians and general.

Oppenheimer was undoubtedly successful, for on 16 July 1945 and atom bomb was exploded in nearby New Mexico desert. Oppenheimer was involved in and supported the decision to drop the first bomb in Japanese town rather than on an uninhabited area as a threat.

After the war, Oppenheimer served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Prince University.

Oppenheimer retired to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, where he had been appointed director in 1947.

In 1963 he was given the Enrico Fermi Award by the AEC and in 1964 he was invited to Los Alamos to lecture to a packed audience. He died of cancer of the throat on February 18, 1967.
Biography of Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 67)