J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist best known as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that developed the first nuclear weapons. Born on April 22, 1904, in New York City to a wealthy Jewish family, he was a brilliant student who studied at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge before earning his doctorate in physics from the University of Göttingen in Germany.
Oppenheimer became a prominent professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he contributed to quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. In 1942, he was chosen to lead the top-secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Under his guidance, the team built the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, helping to end the war.
Afterward, Oppenheimer became a public figure and an advocate for controlling nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, he opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, which led to political controversy. In 1954, amid the Red Scare, he was accused of communist sympathies and stripped of his security clearance in a widely publicized hearing.
Despite this, Oppenheimer continued to lecture and write on science and philosophy. He died of throat cancer on February 18, 1967. He is often remembered as the “father of the atomic bomb,” a brilliant yet conflicted figure who famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita after the first nuclear test:
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”