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Julius Robert Oppenheimer war ein amerikanischer theoretischer Physiker deutsch-jüdischer Abstammung. Oppenheimer wurde vor allem während des Zweiten Weltkriegs für seine Rolle als wissenschaftlicher Leiter des Manhattan-Projekts bekannt. Julius Robert Oppenheimer (* April in New York City; † Februar in Princeton, New Jersey) war ein amerikanischer theoretischer Physiker. „In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer“ ist ein Schauspiel von Heinar Kipphardt, das sich kritisch mit den Untersuchungen gegen amerikanische Wissenschaftler. Julius Robert Oppenheimer gilt als einer der Väter der amerikanischen Atombombe. Doch nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg warnte er vor der. J. Robert Oppenheimer leitete das geheime militärische Forschungsunternehmen in Los Alamos und gilt daher als der "Vater der Atombombe". Wie kam ein. Julius Robert Oppenheimer - auch bekannt als,,Vater der Atombombe", zählt zu einem der bedeutendsten Physiker die es je gab. Die Biografie Oppenheimers. J. Robert Oppenheimer: Die Biographie | Bird, Kai, Sherwin, Martin J., Binder, Klaus | ISBN: | Kostenloser Versand für alle Bücher mit Versand.

Oppenheimer's papers were considered difficult to understand even by the standards of the abstract topics he was expert in. He was fond of using elegant, if extremely complex, mathematical techniques to demonstrate physical principles, though he was sometimes criticized for making mathematical mistakes, presumably out of haste.
After World War II , Oppenheimer published only five scientific papers, one of which was in biophysics, and none after Murray Gell-Mann , a later Nobelist who, as a visiting scientist, worked with him at the Institute for Advanced Study in , offered this opinion:.
He didn't have Sitzfleisch , 'sitting flesh,' when you sit on a chair. As far as I know, he never wrote a long paper or did a long calculation, anything of that kind.
But he inspired other people to do things, and his influence was fantastic. Oppenheimer's diverse interests sometimes interrupted his focus on science.
In , he learned Sanskrit and met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley. He read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit, and later he cited it as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life.
Oppenheimer was overeducated in those fields, which lie outside the scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular, which resulted in a feeling of mystery of the universe that surrounded him like a fog.
He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had already been done, but at the border he tended to feel there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was In spite of this, observers such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez have suggested that if he had lived long enough to see his predictions substantiated by experiment, Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapse , concerning neutron stars and black holes.
During the s, Oppenheimer remained uninformed on worldly matters. He claimed that he did not read newspapers or listen to the radio and had only learned of the Wall Street crash of while he was on a walk with Ernest Lawrence some six months after the crash occurred.
However, from on, he became increasingly concerned about politics and international affairs. Oppenheimer repeatedly attempted to get Serber a position at Berkeley but was blocked by Birge , who felt that "one Jew in the department was enough".
Oppenheimer's mother died in , and he became closer to his father who, although still living in New York, became a frequent visitor in California. He donated to many progressive causes that were later branded as left-wing during the McCarthy era.
The majority of his allegedly radical work consisted of hosting fundraisers for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and other anti-fascist activity.
The two had similar political views; she wrote for the Western Worker , a Communist Party newspaper. Tatlock broke up with Oppenheimer in , after a tempestuous relationship.
Kitty had been married before. Her first marriage lasted only a few months. Her second, common-law marriage husband was Joe Dallet, an active member of the Communist party, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War.
There she married Richard Harrison, a physician and medical researcher, in In June Kitty and Harrison moved to Pasadena, California , where he became chief of radiology at a local hospital and she enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Oppenheimer and Kitty created a minor scandal by sleeping together after one of Tolman's parties. In the summer of she stayed with Oppenheimer at his ranch in New Mexico.
She finally asked Harrison for a divorce when she found out she was pregnant. When he refused, she obtained an instant divorce in Reno, Nevada , and took Oppenheimer as her fourth husband on November 1, When he joined the Manhattan Project in , Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast".
It recorded that he attended a meeting in December at Chevalier's home that was also attended by the Communist Party's California state secretary William Schneiderman , and its treasurer Isaac Folkoff.
At his security clearance hearings, he denied being a member of the Communist Party, but identified himself as a fellow traveler , which he defined as someone who agrees with many of the goals of Communism, but without being willing to blindly follow orders from any Communist party apparatus.
Throughout the development of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was under investigation by both the FBI and the Manhattan Project's internal security arm for his past left-wing associations.
He was followed by Army security agents during a trip to California in June to visit his former girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, who was suffering from depression.
Oppenheimer spent the night in her apartment. When pressed on the issue in later interviews, Oppenheimer admitted that the only person who had approached him was his friend Haakon Chevalier, a Berkeley professor of French literature, who had mentioned the matter privately at a dinner at Oppenheimer's house.
Groves, Jr. On July 20, , he wrote to the Manhattan Engineer District:. In accordance with my verbal directions of July 15, it is desired that clearance be issued to Julius Robert Oppenheimer without delay irrespective of the information which you have concerning Mr Oppenheimer.
He is absolutely essential to the project. Roosevelt approved a crash program to develop an atomic bomb. Conant , who had been one of Oppenheimer's lecturers at Harvard, invited Oppenheimer to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task that Oppenheimer threw himself into with full vigor.
He was given the title "Coordinator of Rapid Rupture", which specifically referred to the propagation of a fast neutron chain reaction in an atomic bomb.
One of his first acts was to host a summer school for bomb theory at his building in Berkeley.
The mix of European physicists and his own students—a group including Robert Serber, Emil Konopinski , Felix Bloch , Hans Bethe and Edward Teller —kept themselves busy by calculating what needed to be done, and in what order, to make the bomb.
In June , the US Army established the Manhattan Project to handle its part in the atom bomb project and began the process of transferring responsibility from the Office of Scientific Research and Development to the military.
This was a choice that surprised many because Oppenheimer had left-wing political views and no record as a leader of large projects.
Groves was concerned by the fact that Oppenheimer did not have a Nobel Prize and might not have had the prestige to direct fellow scientists.
As a military engineer , Groves knew that this would be vital in an interdisciplinary project that would involve not just physics, but chemistry, metallurgy , ordnance and engineering.
Groves also detected in Oppenheimer something that many others did not, an "overweening ambition" that Groves reckoned would supply the drive necessary to push the project to a successful conclusion.
Isidor Rabi considered the appointment "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius".
Oppenheimer and Groves decided that for security and cohesion they needed a centralized, secret research laboratory in a remote location.
Scouting for a site in late , Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico, not far from his ranch. On November 16, , Oppenheimer, Groves and others toured a prospective site.
Oppenheimer feared that the high cliffs surrounding the site would make his people feel claustrophobic , while the engineers were concerned with the possibility of flooding.
He then suggested and championed a site that he knew well: a flat mesa near Santa Fe, New Mexico , which was the site of a private boys' school called the Los Alamos Ranch School.
The engineers were concerned about the poor access road and the water supply, but otherwise felt that it was ideal.
At the laboratory, Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top physicists of the time, which he referred to as the "luminaries". Los Alamos was initially supposed to be a military laboratory, and Oppenheimer and other researchers were to be commissioned into the Army.
He went so far as to order himself a lieutenant colonel's uniform and take the Army physical test, which he failed. Conant, Groves, and Oppenheimer devised a compromise whereby the laboratory was operated by the University of California under contract to the War Department.
Oppenheimer at first had difficulty with the organizational division of large groups, but rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence on the mesa.
He was noted for his mastery of all scientific aspects of the project and for his efforts to control the inevitable cultural conflicts between scientists and the military.
He was an iconic figure to his fellow scientists, as much a symbol of what they were working toward as a scientific director. Victor Weisskopf put it thus:.
Oppenheimer directed these studies, theoretical and experimental, in the real sense of the words. Here his uncanny speed in grasping the main points of any subject was a decisive factor; he could acquaint himself with the essential details of every part of the work.
He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and physically present at each decisive step. He was present in the laboratory or in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived.
It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from something else.
It was his continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us; it created that unique atmosphere of enthusiasm and challenge that pervaded the place throughout its time.
In development efforts were directed to a plutonium gun-type fission weapon called " Thin Man ". Initial research on the properties of plutonium was done using cyclotron -generated plutonium , which was extremely pure but could only be created in tiny amounts.
When Los Alamos received the first sample of plutonium from the X Graphite Reactor in April a problem was discovered: reactor-bred plutonium had a higher concentration of plutonium , making it unsuitable for use in a gun-type weapon.
Using chemical explosive lenses , a sub-critical sphere of fissile material could be squeezed into a smaller and denser form.
The metal needed to travel only very short distances, so the critical mass would be assembled in much less time. In May an Interim Committee was created to advise and report on wartime and postwar policies regarding the use of nuclear energy.
The Interim Committee in turn established a scientific panel consisting of Arthur Compton , Fermi, Lawrence and Oppenheimer to advise it on scientific issues.
In its presentation to the Interim Committee the scientific panel offered its opinion not just on the likely physical effects of an atomic bomb, but on its likely military and political impact.
The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the world's first nuclear explosion , near Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, Oppenheimer had given the site the codename " Trinity " in mid and said later that it was from one of John Donne 's Holy Sonnets.
According to the historian Gregg Herken, this naming could have been an allusion to Jean Tatlock, who had committed suicide a few months previously and had in the s introduced Oppenheimer to Donne's work.
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one We knew the world would not be the same.
A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita ; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
Brigadier General Thomas Farrell , who was present in the control bunker at the site with Oppenheimer, summarized his reaction as follows:. Oppenheimer, on whom had rested a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off.
He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted "Now!
Physicist Isidor Rabi noticed Oppenheimer's disconcerting triumphalism: "I'll never forget his walk; I'll never forget the way he stepped out of the car He had done it.
He noted his regret the weapon had not been available in time to use against Nazi Germany. Stimson expressing his revulsion and his wish to see nuclear weapons banned.
The meeting, however, went badly, after Oppenheimer remarked he felt he had "blood on my hands". The remark infuriated Truman and put an end to the meeting.
Truman later told his Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again. The Manhattan Project was top secret and did not become public knowledge until after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer became a national spokesman for science who was emblematic of a new type of technocratic power.
Like many scientists of his generation, he felt that security from atomic bombs would come only from a transnational organization such as the newly formed United Nations , which could institute a program to stifle a nuclear arms race.
In November , Oppenheimer left Los Alamos to return to Caltech, [] but he soon found that his heart was no longer in teaching.
This meant moving back east and leaving Ruth Tolman, the wife of his friend Richard Tolman, with whom he had begun an affair after leaving Los Alamos.
Oppenheimer brought together intellectuals at the height of their powers and from a variety of disciplines to answer the most pertinent questions of the age.
He directed and encouraged the research of many well-known scientists, including Freeman Dyson , and the duo of Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee , who won a Nobel Prize for their discovery of parity non-conservation.
He also instituted temporary memberships for scholars from the humanities, such as T. Eliot and George F.
Some of these activities were resented by a few members of the mathematics faculty, who wanted the institute to stay a bastion of pure scientific research.
Abraham Pais said that Oppenheimer himself thought that one of his failures at the institute was being unable to bring together scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities.
During a series of conferences in New York from through , physicists switched back from war work to theoretical issues. Under Oppenheimer's direction, physicists tackled the greatest outstanding problem of the pre-war years: infinite, divergent, and non-sensical expressions in the quantum electrodynamics of elementary particles.
Julian Schwinger , Richard Feynman and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga tackled the problem of regularization , and developed techniques which became known as renormalization.
Freeman Dyson was able to prove that their procedures gave similar results. The problem of meson absorption and Hideki Yukawa 's theory of mesons as the carrier particles of the strong nuclear force were also tackled.
Probing questions from Oppenheimer prompted Robert Marshak 's innovative two- meson hypothesis : that there were actually two types of mesons, pions and muons.
This led to Cecil Frank Powell 's breakthrough and subsequent Nobel Prize for the discovery of the pion. As a member of the Board of Consultants to a committee appointed by Truman, Oppenheimer strongly influenced the Acheson—Lilienthal Report.
In this report, the committee advocated creation of an international Atomic Development Authority, which would own all fissionable material and the means of its production, such as mines and laboratories, and atomic power plants where it could be used for peaceful energy production.
Bernard Baruch was appointed to translate this report into a proposal to the United Nations, resulting in the Baruch Plan of The Baruch Plan introduced many additional provisions regarding enforcement, in particular requiring inspection of the Soviet Union's uranium resources.
The Baruch Plan was seen as an attempt to maintain the United States' nuclear monopoly and was rejected by the Soviets.
With this, it became clear to Oppenheimer that an arms race was unavoidable, due to the mutual suspicion of the United States and the Soviet Union, [] which even Oppenheimer was starting to distrust.
From this position he advised on a number of nuclear-related issues, including project funding, laboratory construction and even international policy—though the GAC's advice was not always heeded.
The first atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union in August came earlier than expected by Americans, and over the next several months there was an intense debate within the U.
A majority of the AEC subsequently endorsed the GAC recommendation — and Oppenheimer thought that the fight against the Super would triumph — but proponents of the weapon lobbied the White House vigorously.
In , Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed what became known as the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb.
The program we had in was a tortured thing that you could well argue did not make a great deal of technical sense. It was therefore possible to argue also that you did not want it even if you could have it.
The program in was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that. The issues became purely the military, the political and the humane problem of what you were going to do about it once you had it.
Oppenheimer played a role on a number of government panels and study projects during the late s and early s, some of which found him in the middle of controversies and power struggles.
In Oppenheimer chaired the Department of Defense's Long-Range Objectives Panel, which looked at the military utility of nuclear weapons including how they might be delivered.
Oppenheimer participated in Project Charles during , which examined the possibility of creating an effective air defense of the United States against atomic attack, and in the follow-on Project East River in , which, with Oppenheimer's input, recommended building a warning system that would provide one-hour notice to atomic attacks against American cities.
Edward Teller, who had been so uninterested in work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war that Oppenheimer had given him time instead to work on his own project of the hydrogen bomb, [] had eventually left Los Alamos in to help found, in , a second laboratory at what would become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Project Vista looked at improving U. Air Force, whereas the Vista conclusions recommended an increased role for the U. Army and U. Navy as well.
During Oppenheimer chaired the five-member State Department Panel of Consultants on Disarmament , [] which first urged that the United States postpone its planned first test of the hydrogen bomb and seek a thermonuclear test ban with the Soviet Union, on the grounds that avoiding a test might forestall development of a catastrophic new weapon and open the way for new arms agreements between the two nations.
Thus by , Oppenheimer had reached another peak of influence, being involved in multiple different government posts and projects and having access to crucial strategic plans and force levels.
The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had been following Oppenheimer since before the war, when he showed Communist sympathies as a professor at Berkeley and had been close to members of the Communist Party, including his wife and brother.
He had been under close surveillance since the early s, his home and office bugged, his phone tapped and his mail opened.
These enemies included Strauss, an AEC commissioner who had long harbored resentment against Oppenheimer both for his activity in opposing the hydrogen bomb and for his humiliation of Strauss before Congress some years earlier; regarding Strauss's opposition to the export of radioactive isotopes to other nations, Oppenheimer had memorably categorized these as "less important than electronic devices but more important than, let us say, vitamins".
On June 7, , Oppenheimer testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee , where he admitted that he had associations with the Communist Party in the s.
Frank was subsequently fired from his University of Minnesota position. Unable to find work in physics for many years, he became instead a cattle rancher in Colorado.
He later taught high school physics and was the founder of the San Francisco Exploratorium. The triggering event for the security hearing happened on November 7, , [] when William Liscum Borden , who until earlier in the year had been the executive director of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy , sent a letter to Hoover which said that "more probably than not J.
Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union. One of the key elements in this hearing was Oppenheimer's earliest testimony about George Eltenton's approach to various Los Alamos scientists, a story that Oppenheimer confessed he had fabricated to protect his friend Haakon Chevalier.
Unknown to Oppenheimer, both versions were recorded during his interrogations of a decade before. He was surprised on the witness stand with transcripts of these, which he had not been given a chance to review.
In fact, Oppenheimer had never told Chevalier that he had finally named him, and the testimony had cost Chevalier his job. Both Chevalier and Eltenton confirmed mentioning that they had a way to get information to the Soviets, Eltenton admitting he said this to Chevalier and Chevalier admitting he mentioned it to Oppenheimer, but both put the matter in terms of gossip and denied any thought or suggestion of treason or thoughts of espionage, either in planning or in deed.
Neither was ever convicted of any crime. In a great number of cases, I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understand that Dr.
Oppenheimer acted—in a way which was for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated.
To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.
In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.
This led to outrage by the scientific community and Teller's virtual expulsion from academic science. Inconsistencies in his testimony and his erratic behavior on the stand, at one point saying he had given a "cock and bull story" and that this was because he "was an idiot", convinced some that he was unstable, unreliable and a possible security risk.
Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked one day before it was due to lapse anyway. During his hearing, Oppenheimer testified willingly on the left-wing behavior of many of his scientific colleagues.
Had Oppenheimer's clearance not been stripped then he might have been remembered as someone who had "named names" to save his own reputation.
Soviet intelligence tried repeatedly to recruit him, but was never successful; Oppenheimer did not betray the United States.
In addition, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan Project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union. Moreover, in terms of the time, effort and money spent on Party activities, he was a very committed supporter".
Starting in , Oppenheimer lived for several months of the year on the island of Saint John in the U.
Virgin Islands. In , he purchased a 2-acre 0. Oppenheimer was increasingly concerned about the potential danger that scientific inventions could pose to humanity.
He joined with Albert Einstein , Bertrand Russell , Joseph Rotblat and other eminent scientists and academics to establish what would eventually, in , become the World Academy of Art and Science.
Significantly, after his public humiliation, he did not sign the major open protests against nuclear weapons of the s, including the Russell—Einstein Manifesto of , nor, though invited, did he attend the first Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in In his speeches and public writings, Oppenheimer continually stressed the difficulty of managing the power of knowledge in a world in which the freedom of science to exchange ideas was more and more hobbled by political concerns.
Oppenheimer rejected the idea of nuclear gunboat diplomacy. In the philosophy and psychology departments at Harvard invited Oppenheimer to deliver the William James Lectures.
An influential group of Harvard alumni led by Edwin Ginn that included Archibald Roosevelt protested against the decision. Deprived of political power, Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write and work on physics.
He toured Europe and Japan, giving talks about the history of science, the role of science in society, and the nature of the universe.
Kennedy awarded Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award in as a gesture of political rehabilitation. Edward Teller, the winner of the previous year's award, had also recommended Oppenheimer receive it, in the hope that it would heal the rift between them.
President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. The late President Kennedy's widow Jacqueline , still living in the White House, made it a point to meet with Oppenheimer to tell him how much her husband had wanted him to have the medal.
This was partly due to lobbying by the scientific community on behalf of Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was a chain smoker who was diagnosed with throat cancer in late After inconclusive surgery, he underwent unsuccessful radiation treatment and chemotherapy late in A memorial service was held a week later at Alexander Hall on the campus of Princeton University.
The service was attended by of his scientific, political and military associates that included Bethe, Groves, Kennan, Lilienthal, Rabi, Smyth and Wigner.
His brother Frank and the rest of his family were also there, as was the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Bethe, Kennan and Smyth gave brief eulogies. His wife Kitty took the ashes to St. John and dropped the urn into the sea, within sight of the beach house.
In October , Kitty died at age 62 from an intestinal infection that was complicated by a pulmonary embolism.
Oppenheimer's ranch in New Mexico was then inherited by their son Peter, and the beach property was inherited by their daughter Katherine "Toni" Oppenheimer Silber.
Toni was refused security clearance for her chosen vocation as a United Nations translator after the FBI brought up the old charges against her father.
In January three months after the end of her second marriage , she committed suicide at age 32; her ex-husband found her hanging from a beam in her family beach house.
John for a public park and recreation area". When Oppenheimer was stripped from his position of political influence in , he symbolized for many the folly of scientists thinking they could control how others would use their research.
He has also been seen as symbolizing the dilemmas involving the moral responsibility of the scientist in the nuclear world. One group viewed with passionate fear the Soviet Union as a mortal enemy and believed having the most powerful weaponry capable of providing the most massive retaliation was the best strategy for combating that threat.
The other group felt that developing the H-bomb would not in fact improve the Western security position and that using the weapon against large civilian populations would be an act of genocide, and advocated instead a more flexible response to the Soviets involving tactical nuclear weapons, strengthened conventional forces, and arms control agreements.
The first of these groups was the more powerful in political terms and Oppenheimer became its target. In one incident, his damning testimony against former student Bernard Peters was selectively leaked to the press.
Historians have interpreted this as an attempt by Oppenheimer to please his colleagues in the government and perhaps to divert attention from his own previous left-wing ties and those of his brother.
In the end it became a liability when it became clear that if Oppenheimer had really doubted Peters' loyalty, his recommending him for the Manhattan Project was reckless, or at least contradictory.
Popular depictions of Oppenheimer view his security struggles as a confrontation between right-wing militarists symbolized by Teller and left-wing intellectuals symbolized by Oppenheimer over the moral question of weapons of mass destruction.
Heinar Kipphardt's play In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer , after appearing on West German television, had its theatrical release in Berlin and Munich in October Oppenheimer's objections resulted in an exchange of correspondence with Kipphardt, in which the playwright offered to make corrections but defended the play.
New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called it an "angry play and a partisan play" that sided with Oppenheimer but portrayed the scientist as a "tragic fool and genius".
After reading a transcript of Kipphardt's play soon after it began to be performed, Oppenheimer threatened to sue the playwright, decrying "improvisations which were contrary to history and to the nature of the people involved".
The whole damn thing [his security hearing] was a farce, and these people are trying to make a tragedy out of it.
I had never said that I had regretted participating in a responsible way in the making of the bomb. I said that perhaps he [Kipphardt] had forgotten Guernica , Coventry , Hamburg , Dresden , Dachau , Warsaw , and Tokyo ; but I had not, and that if he found it so difficult to understand, he should write a play about something else.
Robert Oppenheimer and the building of the atomic bomb, was nominated for an Academy Award and received a Peabody Award. In addition to his use by authors of fiction, there are numerous biographies, including American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J.
Sherwin which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for All these, in different ways, were turned against him in the hearings.
A centennial conference and exhibit were held in at Berkeley, [] with the proceedings of the conference published in as Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections.
As a scientist, Oppenheimer is remembered by his students and colleagues as being a brilliant researcher and engaging teacher who was the founder of modern theoretical physics in the United States.
Because his scientific attentions often changed rapidly, he never worked long enough on any one topic and carried it to fruition to merit the Nobel Prize, [] although his investigations contributing to the theory of black holes may have warranted the prize had he lived long enough to see them brought into fruition by later astrophysicists.
As a military and public policy advisor, Oppenheimer was a technocratic leader in a shift in the interactions between science and the military and the emergence of " Big Science ".
Because of the threat fascism posed to Western civilization, they volunteered in great numbers both for technological and organizational assistance to the Allied effort, resulting in such powerful tools as radar , the proximity fuse and operations research.
As a cultured, intellectual, theoretical physicist who became a disciplined military organizer, Oppenheimer represented the shift away from the idea that scientists had their "head in the clouds" and that knowledge on such previously esoteric subjects as the composition of the atomic nucleus had no "real-world" applications.
Two days before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer expressed his hopes and fears in a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita :. In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains, On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. American theoretical physicist, known as "father of the atomic bomb".
Princeton, New Jersey , U. Katherine "Kitty" Puening. Brother of physicist Frank Oppenheimer. Main article: Los Alamos Laboratory.
Main article: Trinity nuclear test. Main article: Oppenheimer security hearing. Robert Oppenheimer has been a source of confusion.
Historians Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner sum up the general historical opinion in their volume Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and recollections , on page 1: "Whether the 'J' in Robert's name stood for Julius or, as Robert himself once said, 'for nothing' may never be fully resolved.
His brother Frank surmised that the 'J' was symbolic, a gesture in the direction of naming the eldest son after the father but at the same time a signal that his parents did not want Robert to be a 'junior.
In Peter Goodchild 's J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds , it is said that Robert's father, Julius, added the empty initial to give Robert's name additional distinction, but Goodchild's book has no footnotes, so the source of this assertion is unclear.
Robert's claim that the 'J' stood "for nothing" is taken from an interview conducted by Thomas S. Kuhn on November 18, , which currently resides in the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics.
On the other hand, Oppenheimer's birth certificate reads "Julius Robert Oppenheimer". Robert Oppenheimer on the Trinity test ". Atomic Archive.
Retrieved May 23, November 8, University of California, Berkeley. Archived from the original on October 15, Physical Review Submitted manuscript.
Bibcode : PhRv Physical Review. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A. Retrieved January 15, Nobel Media AB.
Retrieved July 16, June 27, Retrieved May 22, Federal Bureau of Investigation. May 23, Retrieved December 16, Rigden, pubblicato su "Le Scienze" Scientific American , n.
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J. Robert Oppenheimer Navigatiemenu Video
What was Oppenheimer Thinking? Body Language - Behind the Facade #2
Am Oppenheimer veröffentlichte innerhalb von vier Jahren, sechszehn essentielle Beiträge zur Quantenmechanik. Nachdem Kipphardts Stück am Diese Atombomben bewirkten drastische Folgen und kosteten rund Tanja Schildknecht Robert Oppenheimer. Sie sind praktisch. Während Oppenheimer Zweifel plagten, zeigte Teller kaum Bedenken. Februar starb Robert Oppenheimer an Kehlkopfkrebs. Es endete damit, dass Oppenheimer die erforderliche Sicherheitsgarantie für die weitere Arbeit an Regierungsprojekten Die Anstalt September 2019 wurde.
Unable to find work in physics for many years, he became instead a cattle rancher Hendrik Duryn Colorado. De Universiteit Göttingen gold als een topinstituut voor theoretische natuurkunde in Europa en Oppenheimer sloot er een aantal vriendschappen Foxcatcher Stream mensen die Tv 19 Zoll grootse toekomst tegemoet zouden gaan — bijvoorbeeld Paul Dirac — voordat hij op jarige leeftijd promoveerde. Cassidy, David C. Library of Congress. Oppenheimers eigen opstelling met J. Robert Oppenheimer tot kernwapens was te wisselend om Junge Lehrerin als pacifist aan Herbie Käfer kunnen merken. Robert's claim that the 'J' stood "for nothing" is taken from an interview conducted by Thomas S. Archived from the original on June 11, Abraham Pais said that Oppenheimer himself thought Casino Undercover Film one of his failures at the institute was Tabea Bettin unable to bring together scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities. In August the U. Army was given the responsibility of organizing the efforts of British and U. Oppenheimer was instructed to establish and administer a laboratory to carry out this assignment.
For reasons that have not been made clear, Oppenheimer in initiated discussions with military security agents that culminated with the implication that some of his friends and acquaintances were agents of the Soviet government.
This led to the dismissal of a personal friend on the faculty at the University of California. The joint effort of outstanding scientists at Los Alamos culminated in the first nuclear explosion on July 16, , at the Trinity Site near Alamogordo , New Mexico, after the surrender of Germany.
In October of the same year, Oppenheimer resigned his post. In he became head of the Institute for Advanced Study and served from until as chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission , which in October opposed development of the hydrogen bomb.
On December 21, , he was notified of a military security report unfavourable to him and was accused of having associated with communists in the past, of delaying the naming of Soviet agents, and of opposing the building of the hydrogen bomb.
A security hearing declared him not guilty of treason but ruled that he should not have access to military secrets. As a result, his contract as adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission was cancelled.
The Federation of American Scientists immediately came to his defense with a protest against the trial. Oppenheimer was made the worldwide symbol of the scientist, who, while trying to resolve the moral problems that arise from scientific discovery, becomes the victim of a witch hunt.
He spent the last years of his life working out ideas on the relationship between science and society.
In President Lyndon B. Oppenheimer retired from the Institute for Advanced Study in and died of throat cancer the following year. Home Science Physics Physicists.
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The Baruch Plan introduced many additional provisions regarding enforcement, in particular requiring inspection of the Soviet Union's uranium resources.
The Baruch Plan was seen as an attempt to maintain the United States' nuclear monopoly and was rejected by the Soviets. With this, it became clear to Oppenheimer that an arms race was unavoidable, due to the mutual suspicion of the United States and the Soviet Union, [] which even Oppenheimer was starting to distrust.
From this position he advised on a number of nuclear-related issues, including project funding, laboratory construction and even international policy—though the GAC's advice was not always heeded.
The first atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union in August came earlier than expected by Americans, and over the next several months there was an intense debate within the U.
A majority of the AEC subsequently endorsed the GAC recommendation — and Oppenheimer thought that the fight against the Super would triumph — but proponents of the weapon lobbied the White House vigorously.
In , Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed what became known as the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb. The program we had in was a tortured thing that you could well argue did not make a great deal of technical sense.
It was therefore possible to argue also that you did not want it even if you could have it. The program in was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that.
The issues became purely the military, the political and the humane problem of what you were going to do about it once you had it.
Oppenheimer played a role on a number of government panels and study projects during the late s and early s, some of which found him in the middle of controversies and power struggles.
In Oppenheimer chaired the Department of Defense's Long-Range Objectives Panel, which looked at the military utility of nuclear weapons including how they might be delivered.
Oppenheimer participated in Project Charles during , which examined the possibility of creating an effective air defense of the United States against atomic attack, and in the follow-on Project East River in , which, with Oppenheimer's input, recommended building a warning system that would provide one-hour notice to atomic attacks against American cities.
Edward Teller, who had been so uninterested in work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war that Oppenheimer had given him time instead to work on his own project of the hydrogen bomb, [] had eventually left Los Alamos in to help found, in , a second laboratory at what would become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Project Vista looked at improving U. Air Force, whereas the Vista conclusions recommended an increased role for the U. Army and U. Navy as well.
During Oppenheimer chaired the five-member State Department Panel of Consultants on Disarmament , [] which first urged that the United States postpone its planned first test of the hydrogen bomb and seek a thermonuclear test ban with the Soviet Union, on the grounds that avoiding a test might forestall development of a catastrophic new weapon and open the way for new arms agreements between the two nations.
Thus by , Oppenheimer had reached another peak of influence, being involved in multiple different government posts and projects and having access to crucial strategic plans and force levels.
The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had been following Oppenheimer since before the war, when he showed Communist sympathies as a professor at Berkeley and had been close to members of the Communist Party, including his wife and brother.
He had been under close surveillance since the early s, his home and office bugged, his phone tapped and his mail opened.
These enemies included Strauss, an AEC commissioner who had long harbored resentment against Oppenheimer both for his activity in opposing the hydrogen bomb and for his humiliation of Strauss before Congress some years earlier; regarding Strauss's opposition to the export of radioactive isotopes to other nations, Oppenheimer had memorably categorized these as "less important than electronic devices but more important than, let us say, vitamins".
On June 7, , Oppenheimer testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee , where he admitted that he had associations with the Communist Party in the s.
Frank was subsequently fired from his University of Minnesota position. Unable to find work in physics for many years, he became instead a cattle rancher in Colorado.
He later taught high school physics and was the founder of the San Francisco Exploratorium. The triggering event for the security hearing happened on November 7, , [] when William Liscum Borden , who until earlier in the year had been the executive director of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy , sent a letter to Hoover which said that "more probably than not J.
Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union. One of the key elements in this hearing was Oppenheimer's earliest testimony about George Eltenton's approach to various Los Alamos scientists, a story that Oppenheimer confessed he had fabricated to protect his friend Haakon Chevalier.
Unknown to Oppenheimer, both versions were recorded during his interrogations of a decade before. He was surprised on the witness stand with transcripts of these, which he had not been given a chance to review.
In fact, Oppenheimer had never told Chevalier that he had finally named him, and the testimony had cost Chevalier his job.
Both Chevalier and Eltenton confirmed mentioning that they had a way to get information to the Soviets, Eltenton admitting he said this to Chevalier and Chevalier admitting he mentioned it to Oppenheimer, but both put the matter in terms of gossip and denied any thought or suggestion of treason or thoughts of espionage, either in planning or in deed.
Neither was ever convicted of any crime. In a great number of cases, I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understand that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which was for me was exceedingly hard to understand.
I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.
In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.
This led to outrage by the scientific community and Teller's virtual expulsion from academic science. Inconsistencies in his testimony and his erratic behavior on the stand, at one point saying he had given a "cock and bull story" and that this was because he "was an idiot", convinced some that he was unstable, unreliable and a possible security risk.
Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked one day before it was due to lapse anyway. During his hearing, Oppenheimer testified willingly on the left-wing behavior of many of his scientific colleagues.
Had Oppenheimer's clearance not been stripped then he might have been remembered as someone who had "named names" to save his own reputation.
Soviet intelligence tried repeatedly to recruit him, but was never successful; Oppenheimer did not betray the United States. In addition, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan Project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union.
Moreover, in terms of the time, effort and money spent on Party activities, he was a very committed supporter".
Starting in , Oppenheimer lived for several months of the year on the island of Saint John in the U.
Virgin Islands. In , he purchased a 2-acre 0. Oppenheimer was increasingly concerned about the potential danger that scientific inventions could pose to humanity.
He joined with Albert Einstein , Bertrand Russell , Joseph Rotblat and other eminent scientists and academics to establish what would eventually, in , become the World Academy of Art and Science.
Significantly, after his public humiliation, he did not sign the major open protests against nuclear weapons of the s, including the Russell—Einstein Manifesto of , nor, though invited, did he attend the first Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in In his speeches and public writings, Oppenheimer continually stressed the difficulty of managing the power of knowledge in a world in which the freedom of science to exchange ideas was more and more hobbled by political concerns.
Oppenheimer rejected the idea of nuclear gunboat diplomacy. In the philosophy and psychology departments at Harvard invited Oppenheimer to deliver the William James Lectures.
An influential group of Harvard alumni led by Edwin Ginn that included Archibald Roosevelt protested against the decision.
Deprived of political power, Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write and work on physics. He toured Europe and Japan, giving talks about the history of science, the role of science in society, and the nature of the universe.
Kennedy awarded Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award in as a gesture of political rehabilitation. Edward Teller, the winner of the previous year's award, had also recommended Oppenheimer receive it, in the hope that it would heal the rift between them.
President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. The late President Kennedy's widow Jacqueline , still living in the White House, made it a point to meet with Oppenheimer to tell him how much her husband had wanted him to have the medal.
This was partly due to lobbying by the scientific community on behalf of Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was a chain smoker who was diagnosed with throat cancer in late After inconclusive surgery, he underwent unsuccessful radiation treatment and chemotherapy late in A memorial service was held a week later at Alexander Hall on the campus of Princeton University.
The service was attended by of his scientific, political and military associates that included Bethe, Groves, Kennan, Lilienthal, Rabi, Smyth and Wigner.
His brother Frank and the rest of his family were also there, as was the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Bethe, Kennan and Smyth gave brief eulogies.
His wife Kitty took the ashes to St. John and dropped the urn into the sea, within sight of the beach house. In October , Kitty died at age 62 from an intestinal infection that was complicated by a pulmonary embolism.
Oppenheimer's ranch in New Mexico was then inherited by their son Peter, and the beach property was inherited by their daughter Katherine "Toni" Oppenheimer Silber.
Toni was refused security clearance for her chosen vocation as a United Nations translator after the FBI brought up the old charges against her father.
In January three months after the end of her second marriage , she committed suicide at age 32; her ex-husband found her hanging from a beam in her family beach house.
John for a public park and recreation area". When Oppenheimer was stripped from his position of political influence in , he symbolized for many the folly of scientists thinking they could control how others would use their research.
He has also been seen as symbolizing the dilemmas involving the moral responsibility of the scientist in the nuclear world. One group viewed with passionate fear the Soviet Union as a mortal enemy and believed having the most powerful weaponry capable of providing the most massive retaliation was the best strategy for combating that threat.
The other group felt that developing the H-bomb would not in fact improve the Western security position and that using the weapon against large civilian populations would be an act of genocide, and advocated instead a more flexible response to the Soviets involving tactical nuclear weapons, strengthened conventional forces, and arms control agreements.
The first of these groups was the more powerful in political terms and Oppenheimer became its target. In one incident, his damning testimony against former student Bernard Peters was selectively leaked to the press.
Historians have interpreted this as an attempt by Oppenheimer to please his colleagues in the government and perhaps to divert attention from his own previous left-wing ties and those of his brother.
In the end it became a liability when it became clear that if Oppenheimer had really doubted Peters' loyalty, his recommending him for the Manhattan Project was reckless, or at least contradictory.
Popular depictions of Oppenheimer view his security struggles as a confrontation between right-wing militarists symbolized by Teller and left-wing intellectuals symbolized by Oppenheimer over the moral question of weapons of mass destruction.
Heinar Kipphardt's play In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer , after appearing on West German television, had its theatrical release in Berlin and Munich in October Oppenheimer's objections resulted in an exchange of correspondence with Kipphardt, in which the playwright offered to make corrections but defended the play.
New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called it an "angry play and a partisan play" that sided with Oppenheimer but portrayed the scientist as a "tragic fool and genius".
After reading a transcript of Kipphardt's play soon after it began to be performed, Oppenheimer threatened to sue the playwright, decrying "improvisations which were contrary to history and to the nature of the people involved".
The whole damn thing [his security hearing] was a farce, and these people are trying to make a tragedy out of it. I had never said that I had regretted participating in a responsible way in the making of the bomb.
I said that perhaps he [Kipphardt] had forgotten Guernica , Coventry , Hamburg , Dresden , Dachau , Warsaw , and Tokyo ; but I had not, and that if he found it so difficult to understand, he should write a play about something else.
Robert Oppenheimer and the building of the atomic bomb, was nominated for an Academy Award and received a Peabody Award.
In addition to his use by authors of fiction, there are numerous biographies, including American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J.
Sherwin which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for All these, in different ways, were turned against him in the hearings.
A centennial conference and exhibit were held in at Berkeley, [] with the proceedings of the conference published in as Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections.
As a scientist, Oppenheimer is remembered by his students and colleagues as being a brilliant researcher and engaging teacher who was the founder of modern theoretical physics in the United States.
Because his scientific attentions often changed rapidly, he never worked long enough on any one topic and carried it to fruition to merit the Nobel Prize, [] although his investigations contributing to the theory of black holes may have warranted the prize had he lived long enough to see them brought into fruition by later astrophysicists.
As a military and public policy advisor, Oppenheimer was a technocratic leader in a shift in the interactions between science and the military and the emergence of " Big Science ".
Because of the threat fascism posed to Western civilization, they volunteered in great numbers both for technological and organizational assistance to the Allied effort, resulting in such powerful tools as radar , the proximity fuse and operations research.
As a cultured, intellectual, theoretical physicist who became a disciplined military organizer, Oppenheimer represented the shift away from the idea that scientists had their "head in the clouds" and that knowledge on such previously esoteric subjects as the composition of the atomic nucleus had no "real-world" applications.
Two days before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer expressed his hopes and fears in a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita :.
In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains, On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. American theoretical physicist, known as "father of the atomic bomb". Princeton, New Jersey , U. Katherine "Kitty" Puening.
Brother of physicist Frank Oppenheimer. Main article: Los Alamos Laboratory. Main article: Trinity nuclear test.
Main article: Oppenheimer security hearing. Robert Oppenheimer has been a source of confusion. Historians Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner sum up the general historical opinion in their volume Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and recollections , on page 1: "Whether the 'J' in Robert's name stood for Julius or, as Robert himself once said, 'for nothing' may never be fully resolved.
His brother Frank surmised that the 'J' was symbolic, a gesture in the direction of naming the eldest son after the father but at the same time a signal that his parents did not want Robert to be a 'junior.
In Peter Goodchild 's J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds , it is said that Robert's father, Julius, added the empty initial to give Robert's name additional distinction, but Goodchild's book has no footnotes, so the source of this assertion is unclear.
Robert's claim that the 'J' stood "for nothing" is taken from an interview conducted by Thomas S. Kuhn on November 18, , which currently resides in the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics.
On the other hand, Oppenheimer's birth certificate reads "Julius Robert Oppenheimer". Robert Oppenheimer on the Trinity test ".
Atomic Archive. Retrieved May 23, November 8, University of California, Berkeley. Archived from the original on October 15, Physical Review Submitted manuscript.
Bibcode : PhRv Physical Review. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A. Retrieved January 15, Nobel Media AB.
Retrieved July 16, June 27, Retrieved May 22, Federal Bureau of Investigation. May 23, Retrieved December 16, Archived from the original on November 27, Berkeley Science Review.
Archived from the original PDF on September 1, March 4, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Archived from the original on Retrieved February 24, Retrieved March 8, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.
Retrieved July 19, The Universal Form, text 32". Bhagavad As It Is. Retrieved 24 October New York Times. February 19, Retrieved March 1, Dutch Australian Weekly.
New South Wales, Australia. Retrieved August 24, — via National Library of Australia. Robert Oppenheimer".
Retrieved December 11, Robert, ". Archives Directory for the History of Collecting. Retrieved August 24, August Air Force Magazine.
October 11, The New York Times. Retrieved 17 January Robert Oppenheimer Personnel Hearings Transcripts". Retrieved 22 March Institute for Advanced Study.
Retrieved March 11, Nach dem Krieg arbeitete Robert Oppenheimer als Berater der neu gegründeten US-amerikanischen Atomenergiebehörde und nutzte diese Position dazu, sich für eine internationale Kontrolle der Kernenergie und gegen ein nukleares Wettrüsten zwischen der Sowjetunion und den Vereinigten Staaten einzusetzen.
Nachdem er sich mit seinen politischen Ansichten das Missfallen vieler Politiker während der McCarthy-Ära zugezogen hatte, wurde ihm die Sicherheitsberechtigung entzogen.
Von direkter politischer Einflussnahme ausgeschlossen, setzte er seine Arbeit als Physiker in Forschung und Lehre fort. Robert Oppenheimers Vater Julius S.
Oppenheimer, ein in die USA eingewanderter Textilimporteur, kam ursprünglich aus Hanau und die Vorfahren gehörten zum jüdischen Patriziergeschlecht Oppenheimer.
Roberts Mutter, Ella Friedman, war Kunsterzieherin. Oppenheimer hatte einen Bruder, Frank Oppenheimer — , der ebenfalls Physiker war.
Ab der dritten Schulklasse erhielt er Unterricht von einem privaten Chemielehrer. Es kam dort auch zu einer persönlichen Krise, die eine psychologische Behandlung erforderlich machte.
Er lernte auch Fritz Houtermans und Charlotte Riefenstahl kennen, die er verehrte und umwarb. He was starting to ask questions that James Franck could not answer.
I was amazed over his knowledge. Von bis veröffentlichte er sechzehn bedeutende Beiträge zur Quantenphysik.
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