Biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer

It’s strange how the thousands of events that made up one man’s life eventually had a role in the fate of almost 200 thousand Japanese people and later the entire world. Here is the life of the one man. The man is J. Robert Oppenheimer. So little had an impact on so much. He was the man who was in charge of the Manhattan Project. It was the U.S. project to make an atomic bomb. A bomb with, at the time, unimaginable power. A bomb so powerful it could single-handedly destroy an entire city.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born to well to do Jewish parents on the twenty-second of April 1904. His father, Julius, ran a textile business and his mother, Ella, was a painter. He was born Robert Oppenheimer but his father felt this name wasn’t good enough so he added his initial J. in front. Relations of J. Robert’s grandfather came to New York in the later 1870’s to start up a business of importing cloth. Julius came to America in 1888 at the age of 17. He didn’t even speak English. He was to specialize in the importing of men’s clothing. He felt this was a growing area of interest and that he could make money. Robert visited Germany at age 5 and his grandfather introduced him to the hobby of mineralogy, which he kept up with for years to come. He even joined the New York Mineralogy Club at just eleven years old.

Robert was good in school and did particularly well. By the time he was eleven years old he was able to speak much Greek. He was said to try to soak up as much knowledge as possible. He didn’t like sports. He tried to play tennis but because he was bad at it, he didn’t want to continue. He spoke many different languages including Latin, Greek, French, and German. He often learned a langua...

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...c bomb” because he directed the group of scientist at the Los Alamos Laboratory, which developed the bomb. His influence and charisma allowed him to obtain some of the best scientist in the world for the project. He was considered a great teacher by many of his students. He attracted the best and brightest of them to where ever he taught. He was one of the foremost minds in theoretical physics. Despite the destruction that his development caused, it probably saved more lives than it took. He was later persecuted because of his communist dealings early in his career, but before that he was an enormous influence on the policy of nuclear energy.

Bibliography:

Bibliography

1.) Goodchild, Peter. Shatterer of Worlds Fromm International Publishing Corporation New York, 1985