Volume 2, Issue 14 September 2005
Berkeley's Scientific Legacy
J. Robert Oppenheimer, Doctor Atomic
In October, UC Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer will be immortalized as Doctor Atomic in a new production of the San Francisco Opera. To his Berkeley students in the 1930s though, he was known affectionately as Oppie. That was decades before Oppenheimer would go down in history as the leader of the Manhattan Project.
Robert Oppenheimer, Glenn T. Seaborg, and Ernest O. Lawrence (L to R) in early 1946 at the controls to the magnet of Lawrence's 184-inch cyclotron, which was at the time being reconverted from wartime use as a mass spectrometer to its original purpose as a cyclotron. (Courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Oppenheimer was born in 1904, the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany. In 1925, he completed his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Harvard and immersed himself in theoretical physics at the University of Gottingen in Germany, a leader in the then-nascent field called quantum mechanics. After earning his Ph.D., Oppenheimer returned to the United States where he began a fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. Two years later, in 1929, he joined UC Berkeley's physics department. Oppenheimer called the University a "desert," but was dedicated to spreading the new theoretical physics he had brought from Germany.
"I didn't start to make a school," he later said. "I didn't start to look for students. I started really as a propagator of the theory which I loved, about which I continued to learn more, and which was not well understood and which was very rich. The pattern was not that of someone who takes on a course and teaches students preparing for a variety of careers but of explaining first to faculty, staff, and colleagues and then to anyone who would listen, what this was about, what had been learned, what the unsolved problems were."
Working alongside another new hire, experimentalist and eventual Nobel Laureate Ernest O. Lawrence, Oppenheimer quickly brought Berkeley to the forefront of theoretical physics. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer raised FBI eyebrows with his involvement in radical politics. This suspicion would later explode into a tragic witch-hunt.
In 1942, Oppenheimer's theories were brought to bear on a new application. With encouragement from Lawrence, the U.S. Army put Oppenheimer in charge of their Manhattan Engineer District project, an effort to build an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer organized a team of the brightest physics minds of the time — Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, and others — and set up shop on a mesa near Santa Fe, New Mexico. On July 16, 1945, at the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Oppenheimer observed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.
Trinity: July 16, 1945
Words from the Bhagavad Gita later came into his mind: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." A month later, atomic bombs annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The atomic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an end to the war. Oppenheimer became the chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the new Atomic Energy Commission. On the Commission, he lobbied against developing a hydrogen bomb, having previously said, "If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of the a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
"The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand."
In 1947, Oppenheimer left UC Berkeley for the position of director of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey. Six years later, he was accused of Communist affiliations and un-American activities, stemming from his years at Berkeley and later disapproval of the hydrogen bomb research. His security clearance was denied and he was removed from his advisory position at the Atomic Energy Commission.
Robert Oppenheimer and brother Frank back at Berkeley in 1966.
Oppenheimer continued to lecture and, in 1963 as the political tides shifted, received the Fermi Award from President Lyndon Johnson. In 1967, he died of throat cancer. While the tension and tragedy of Oppenheimer's life is well-suited for an opera, it is his scientific legacy that keeps his name alive at UC Berkeley.
"The fact that Oppenheimer was here attracted other people who wanted to be around him, though they were a bit afraid of him," University Professor of Physics Marvin Cohen has said. "He was a star."
On Monday, September 26, the College of Letters & Science will present Science and the Soul: J. Robert Oppenheimer and Doctor Atomic. The free symposium will feature a dialogue with composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars, celebrating the opening of the San Francisco Opera's world premiere of Doctor Atomic. Panelists include Dean of Physical Sciences Mark Richards and University Professor of Physics Marvin Cohen.