science

Born on April 22, 1904 into a wealthy, New York, Jewish family with German decent, Oppenheimer quickly began to show signs of his ingeniousness. He attended Harvard as a 17 year old, graduating in 1925 after “intellectually looting the place”. Oppenheimer then studied abroad at England’s Cambridge University, studying under Ernest Rutherford at the worlds’ finest center for atomic research. Spending a total of four years in Europe, Oppenheimer made his mark in quantum theory, published multiple articles and papers, and established a reputation as a leading theoretical physicist. In 1929 Oppenheimer returned to the United States taking an appointment at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkley. There he researched subatomic parti

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In 1967 Oppenheimer died of throat cancer and the world lost one of the greatest minds it had even known. It was then that the US government took action in assembling a research program to produce such a weapon. Once the task was finally complete, victory in Europe was extremely close, therefore, the target became Japan. Often credited as the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was also a symbol for the scientist faced with multiple dilemmas involving intellectual ethics and morality.

In the 1930s, Oppenheimer became drawn into left-wing politics which may have been a reaction to the rise of Nazism in Germany where his relatives were suffering under increasingly severe anti-Semitic laws. On August 6, 1945 the first uranium bomb the world had ever seen detonated over Hiroshima and three days later was followed by a plutonium bomb in Nagasaki. Although his career as an influential scientist ended, Oppenheimer still held a distinguished academic position as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. The notion that Germany might be the first to develope such a weapon of mass destruction struck fear into the hearts of Oppenheimer and President Roosevelt. On July 16, 1945 20,000 tons of TNT exploded in the New Mexico desert, exceeding all expectations. Due to his opposition of the bomb, Oppenheimer had his security clearance revoked and was accused of obtaining Communist sympathies as a result of his anti-fascism. In 1963 Oppenheimer was honored with the Fermi Award of the Atomic Energy Commission by President Lyndon B Johnson. In 1942 the program was created with its director, J Robert Oppenheimer, leading the top American and British physicists in “Project Y”.

The war was won and over and Oppenheimer went on to become the chairman of the advisory committee to the US Atomic Energy Commission, opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon more atrocious. Facing immense challenges, the group continued research in Los Alamos, New Mexico where they encountered difficulties in obtaining a sufficient amount of uranium-235 and plutonium-239.

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