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J. Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904 to an affluent, Jewish New York family, and he grew up in a world of moderate luxury on the Upper West Side. He attended the New York School for Ethical Culture, where he gained a lifelong love for art, literature, philosophy, and the classics.
Read a comprehensive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life, including major events, key people and terms, and important achievements.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York on April 22, 1904. It was the perfect time and place for the future physicist to have entered the world: the turn of the century ushered in a golden age of technological advances, and the power of science seemed infinite.
Summary J. Robert Oppenheimer Destroyer of Worlds Previous Next In mid-1944, Oppenheimer shifted the focus of work at Los Alamos from research to the design of the two bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy.
Read a comprehensive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life, including major events, key people and terms, and important achievements.
Oppenheimer was assigned to work under J. J. Thompson, the renowned British physicist who, in 1897, had discovered the electron. Oppenheimer had achieved everything he could have hoped for, and he was miserable. Oppenheimer quickly realized that experimental physics was not his calling.
Oppenheimer had originally argued that the United States should tell its Soviet allies about the bomb project during the war, partly in the hopes of avoiding a future arms race. But the government rejected this idea, choosing instead to keep the bomb program a secret and eventually relishing their nuclear superiority.
Oppenheimer never lost sight of his goal, however, which was to establish some form of peaceful, international control over nuclear weaponry or, barring that, to ensure that the United States government acted responsibly when it came to the American nuclear arsenal.
But the core of the project was the design and creation of the bomb itself, a task which was entrusted to a secret laboratory in an isolated location, directed by an untested administrator: Robert Oppenheimer.
Perhaps the most difficult and most crucial problem that Oppenheimer and his team faced was the design of the bomb mechanism itself. How could they create a mechanism that would release the immense power of nuclear fission on command?
