Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904, into a wealthy Jewish family in New York City, U.S. Throughout his early years, Robert’s parents encouraged his intellectual development. When, at age 5, he expressed an interest in architecture, his father gave him books featuring some of the greatest structures in the world. Robert was also engaged in rock collection and classification while also taking piano lessons from private tutors. Although he spent his childhood in a intellectually-rich environment, Robert’s life was insular. He and his younger brother, Frank, had no childhood friends and little opportunity to develop the social skills that are acquired through play with other children.
When he reached 7 years of age, Robert’s parents enrolled him in Grade 2 at the Ethical Culture School–a private school in New York City known for its high quality education. Robert progressed easily through his academic work, but his greatest challenge was in social relationships. At age 14, he attended summer camp where his interest in poetry, his psychological distance from others and his introverted nature made him a victim of cruel bullying and humiliation. Biographer Ray Monk writes, “One evening, while taking a walk Oppenheimer was captured and dragged to the icehouse, [by the other boys at the camp] where he was stripped, his buttocks and genitals were painted green and he was tied up and left alone.” This humiliation further contributed to his social awkwardness and increased his psychological distance from most people.
By the time he completed his senior year of high school in 1921, Robert had developed a passion for chemistry, and on graduation planned to enter Harvard. However, in the summer of 1921, during a holiday with his parents in Europe, Robert was afflicted with a near-fatal case of dysentery and colitis, forcing a postponement of his plans. He spent the academic year 2021-22 at home, but became increasingly reclusive and irritable, so his parents arranged for him to visit the Southwest US in the spring and summer of 1922, with Herbert Smith a teacher at the Ethical Culture School. It was on that trip that J. Robert Oppenheimer fell in love with the free open expanse and desert flora and fauna of New Mexico.
In the fall of 1922, at age 18, Robert entered Harvard University, majoring in chemistry. Three years later, he graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts. In 1924, he was accepted at Cambridge to study experimental physics with J. J. Thomson. However, he found laboratory work tedious and boring, prompting stern criticism from his lab tutor, Patrick Blackett. Apparently, Robert later confessed to leaving an apple laced with cyanide on Blackett’s desk to avenge the verbal assault, although some historians claim the story is apocryphal.
In 1926, after 2 years at Cambridge, Oppenheimer went to the University of Göttingen, in Germany, to study theoretical physics under the supervision of Max Born. There he met several of the superstars of theoretical physics including Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Jordan, Teller and Fermi. It was in this environment that J. Robert Oppenheimer flourished, sometimes dominating conversations to an extent that sent his fellow physicists running for the exit. In March, 1927 after less than a year at Göttingen, he was awarded his Ph.D. a month before his 24th birthday. His 25-page thesis, written in German, was titled, On the Quantum Theory of Continuous Spectra, and was hailed as a significant contribution to quantum physics. In the next decade, Oppenheimer published more than a dozen papers of sufficient quality to place him among the new wunderkinds of quantum physics, and his name became etched in the history of quantum physics through his paper containing the famous Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
In the fall of 1927, Oppenheimer returned to the U.S. to teach at Caltech and followed this with the 1928 spring semester at Harvard. A year later, he accepted an appointment as Associate Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and by 1936, he had been promoted to Full Professor of Physics at a salary of $3300 (about $74,000 in today’s currency). A few months after the U.S. entered World War II at the end of 1941, Oppenheimer was recruited by Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves Jr. to lead the Manhattan Project, with the objective to create an atomic bomb before Germany.
In spite of his limited social skills in dealing with people on an individual basis, Oppenheimer demonstrated remarkable leadership skills in coordinating a group of brilliant physicists, with strong egos and discordant opinions, toward the achievement of a common goal. He oversaw the construction of a large secret facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico that ultimately yielded the bomb that many believed would end all wars. This successful production of the atomic bomb was considered J. Robert Oppenheimer’s greatest achievement, until people began to realize the inhumane horrors of atomic war.
After the end of World War II Oppenheimer returned to Caltech, but moved to New Jersey in 1947 when Lewis Strauss appointed him Director of the Institute for Advanced Study. This was the most prestigious site in US physics where Einstein had a lifelong appointment. During his time at the Institute, J. Robert Oppenheimer recruited Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, Nobel Laureates in physics and Freeman Dyson, a mathematician. He also sought to expand the institute to include illustrious scholars from the humanities, but received opposition from those members who felt the Institute should be restricted to those in mathematics and science.
In the early years after the end of World War II, there was a growing public ambivalence about the use of nuclear power for destruction. This fear was exacerbated by the emerging threat posed by the Soviet Union and communism. In what is now referred to as the McCarthy era in the 1950’s, the US government began interrogating American citizens who were thought to be Communist sympathizers or spies. J. Robert Oppenheimer came under investigation for his early connections with socialism and in 1954, his security clearance was revoked by the US Atomic Energy Commission. The man who was proclaimed by most as a hero for ending World War II in the Pacific, was vilified a decade later by those who lamented their support for the use of nuclear weapons as well as those who feared becoming victims of nuclear weapons by the emergence of a new enemy among U.S. citizens. In spite of Oppenheimer’s public speeches urging international cooperation in keeping the nuclear genie in the bottle, many thought he was a war monger and others thought he was a Communist. In spite of his controversial persona, J. Robert Oppenheimer is respected in the science community and received many honors including the Enrico Fermi Award presented to him by President Lyndon Johnson for “contributions to theoretical physics as a teacher and originator of ideas, [and] leadership of the Los Alamos Laboratory and the atomic energy program during critical years.” In 2024 a movie titled Oppenheimer, that profiled the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his personal struggle, won the Academy Award for “best picture” and Cillian Murphy who portrayed Oppenheimer won the “best actor” award.
Throughout his academic and political struggles, Oppenheimer smoked incessantly, and in late 1965, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. Radiation treatment and chemotherapy failed to put him into remission and on February 18, 1967 he died in his sleep in Princeton at 62 years of age.
Although J. Robert Oppenheimer displayed remarkable leadership skills during his role as leader of the Manhattan Project, he was a solitary person, once stating, “I need physics more than friends.”
