Oppenheimer's theory. Robert Oppenheimer - biography, information, personal life. Security clearance hearings

American physicist, "father atomic bomb"Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904 in New York into a Jewish family. His father, Julius Oppenheimer, was engaged in the textile trade. His mother, Ella Friedman, was an artist and taught painting Robert also had a younger brother, Frank.

Oppenheimer's publications in English and German journals were already known in the United States by that time, and many American universities invited him to give lectures on physics.

From 1929 to 1947, Robert Oppenheimer taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.

In 1931, together with physicist Paul Ehrenfest, the scientist formulated a theorem called the Ehrenfest-Oppenheimer theorem.

Robert Oppenheimer developed the cascade theory of cosmic showers (1937), made the first calculation of the neutron star model (1938), predicted the existence of “black holes” (1939), etc.

Since the discovery of uranium fission in 1939, Oppenheimer has been constantly interested in studying this process and the related problem of creating atomic weapons.

Since the fall of 1941, he participated in the work of a special commission of the US National Academy of Sciences, which discussed the problems of using atomic energy for military purposes. At the same time, Oppenheimer led a theoretical physics group that was studying ways to create an atomic bomb. He was largely responsible for the idea of uniting the efforts of all physicists working on atomic weapons in the United States into a single scientific center. And when this idea received government support, Oppenheimer was entrusted with leading such a center.

From 1939 to 1945, Robert Oppenheimer actively participated in the work on creating an atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, heading the Los Alamos laboratory specially created for this purpose.

On July 16, 1945, the first American atomic bomb was tested.

In October 1945, Oppenheimer resigned as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory.

From 1947 to 1952, he chaired the General Advisory Committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission. The scientist advocated the use of atomic energy only for peaceful purposes, and was also against the creation of a hydrogen bomb. However, on January 31, 1950, President Harry Truman signed an order to begin work on its creation. On November 1, 1952, the US Atomic Energy Commission conducted a secret test of a hydrogen device.

From 1947 to 1966, Robert Oppenheimer served as director of the Institute for Basic Research at Princeton.

On April 12, 1954, the investigation into the Oppenheimer case began. The purpose of the trial was to prove the scientist's disloyalty and political unreliability. Oppenheimer was removed from all posts related to secret work.

Concerned about the potential dangers of scientific discovery to humanity, Oppenheimer joined Albert Einstein and other prominent scientists and teachers to found the World Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960.
Robert Oppenheimer died on February 18, 1967 in Princeton from laryngeal cancer.

Oppenheimer wrote works on quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, elementary particle physics, and theoretical astrophysics.

He wrote a number of popular science books, including Science and the Common Understanding (1954), The Open Mind (1955), and Some Reflections on Science and Culture, 1960).

Oppenheimer's awards include the Presidential Medal of Merit.

On 3 May 1962 he was elected a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

In 1963, he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize, established by the US Atomic Energy Commission, "in recognition of his outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, as well as for the scientific and administrative leadership of the work on the creation of the atomic bomb and for his active work in the field of applications of atomic energy in peaceful purposes."

Many of the scientist's supporters perceived his awarding of the Fermi Prize as political rehabilitation.

Many books have been written about the life of the scientist and the “Oppenheimer Affair”, several plays have been staged, including the play “The Oppenheimer Affair” (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1964), a television series called “Oppenheimer” (Oppenheimer, 1980), and also documentaries and feature films, the opera "Doctor Atomic" (Doctor Atomic, 2005) was staged.

Robert Oppenheimer was married to biologist Katharine Puening Harrison. The couple had two children - a son, Peter, and a daughter, Katherine.

The material was prepared based on information from open sources

Julius Robert Oppenheimer. Born April 22, 1904 - died February 18, 1967. American theoretical physicist, professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, member of the US National Academy of Sciences (since 1941). Widely known as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons during World War II, Oppenheimer is often called the “father of the atomic bomb.”

The atomic bomb was first tested in New Mexico in July 1945. Oppenheimer later recalled that at that moment the words from the Bhagavad Gita came to his mind: “If the radiance of a thousand suns flashed in the sky, it would be like the splendor of the Almighty... I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.”

After World War II, he became director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He also became chief advisor to the newly formed US Atomic Energy Commission and used his position to advocate for international control of nuclear energy to prevent the proliferation of atomic weapons and the nuclear race. This anti-war stance angered some politicians during the second wave of the Red Scare. Ultimately, after a highly publicized politicized hearing in 1954, he was stripped of his security clearance. Having no direct political influence since then, he continued to lecture, write and work in the field of physics. Ten years later, the president awarded the scientist the Enrico Fermi Prize as a sign of political rehabilitation. The award was presented after Kennedy's death.

Together with his students, he made important contributions to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to the solution of certain problems in quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and cosmic ray physics.

Oppenheimer was a teacher and propagandist of science, the founding father of the American school of theoretical physics, which gained worldwide fame in the 30s of the 20th century.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904, into a Jewish family. His father, wealthy textile importer Julius S. Oppenheimer (1865-1948), immigrated to the United States from Hanau, Germany, in 1888. The mother's family—the Paris-educated artist Ella Friedman (d. 1948)—also immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1840s. Robert had a younger brother, Frank, who also became a physicist.

In 1912, the Oppenheimers moved to Manhattan, to an apartment on the eleventh floor of 155 Riverside Drive, near West 88th Street. This area is known for its luxurious mansions and townhouses. The family's collection of paintings included originals by Pablo Picasso and Jean Vuillard and at least three originals by Vincent van Gogh.

Oppenheimer studied briefly at the Alcuin Preparatory School, then, in 1911, he entered the School of the Society for Ethical Culture. It was founded by Felix Adler to promote the education promoted by the Ethical Culture Movement, whose slogan was “Deed before Creed.” Robert's father was a member of this society for many years, serving on its board of trustees from 1907 to 1915.

Oppenheimer was a versatile student, interested in English and French literature and especially mineralogy. He completed the third and fourth grade program in one year and completed the eighth grade in six months and moved on to the ninth, and in the last grade he became interested in chemistry. Robert entered Harvard College a year later, at age 18, after suffering a bout of ulcerative colitis while prospecting for minerals in Jáchymov during a family vacation in Europe. For treatment, he traveled to New Mexico, where he became fascinated by horseback riding and the nature of the southwestern United States.

In addition to their major subjects, students were required to study history, literature and philosophy or mathematics. Oppenheimer compensated for his late start by taking six courses a semester and was inducted into the student honor society Phi Beta Kappa. As a freshman, Oppenheimer was allowed to take a master's program in physics on an independent study basis; this meant that he was exempt from elementary subjects and could immediately take advanced courses. After taking a thermodynamics course taught by Percy Bridgman, Robert became seriously interested in experimental physics. He graduated with honors (Latin: summa cum laude) after just three years.

In 1926, Oppenheimer left Cambridge to study at the University of Göttingen under Max Born.

Robert Oppenheimer defended his PhD thesis in March 1927, at the age of 23, under the supervision of Born. At the end of the oral exam on May 11, James Frank, the presiding professor, reportedly said, “I'm glad it's over. He almost started asking me questions himself.”

In September 1927, Oppenheimer applied for and received a fellowship from the National Research Council to work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). However, Bridgman also wanted Oppenheimer to work at Harvard, and as a compromise, he split his 1927-28 academic year so that he would work at Harvard in 1927 and at Caltech in 1928.

In the fall of 1928, Oppenheimer visited the Paul Ehrenfest Institute at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he shocked those present by lecturing in Dutch, although he had little experience communicating in this language. There he was given the nickname "Opje" (Dutch. Opje), which his students later remade in English into "Oppie" (English: Oppie). After Leiden, he went to ETH Zurich to work with Wolfgang Pauli on problems in quantum mechanics and, in particular, the description of the continuum. Oppenheimer deeply respected and liked Pauli, who may have had a strong influence on the scientist's own style and critical approach to problems.

In 1936, the University of Berkeley awarded the scientist a professorship with a salary of $3,300 per year. In exchange, he was asked to stop teaching at Caltech. As a result, the parties agreed that Oppenheimer was freed from work for 6 weeks every year - this was enough to conduct classes for one trimester at Caltech.

Oppenheimer's scientific research relates to theoretical astrophysics, closely related to the general theory of relativity and the theory of the atomic nucleus, nuclear physics, theoretical spectroscopy, quantum field theory, including quantum electrodynamics. He was attracted by the formal rigor of relativistic quantum mechanics, although he doubted its correctness. His work predicted several later discoveries, including the discovery of the neutron, meson, and neutron stars.

In 1931, together with Paul Ehrenfest, he proved the theorem according to which nuclei consisting of an odd number of fermion particles should obey Fermi-Dirac statistics, and those consisting of an even number should obey Bose-Einstein statistics. This statement is known as Ehrenfest-Oppenheimer theorem, made it possible to show the insufficiency of the proton-electron hypothesis of the structure of the atomic nucleus.

In 1930, Oppenheimer wrote a paper that essentially predicted the existence of the positron.

After the discovery of the positron, Oppenheimer, together with his students Milton Plesset and Leo Nedelsky, carried out calculations of the cross sections for the production of new particles during the scattering of energetic gamma rays in the field of an atomic nucleus. Later, he applied his results concerning the production of electron-positron pairs to the theory of cosmic ray showers, to which he paid great attention in subsequent years (in 1937, together with Franklin Carlson, he developed the cascade theory of showers).

In 1934, Oppenheimer, together with Wendell Furry, generalized Dirac's theory of the electron, including positrons in it and obtaining as one of the consequences the effect of vacuum polarization (similar ideas were simultaneously expressed by other scientists). However, this theory was also not free from divergences, which gave rise to Oppenheimer’s skeptical attitude towards the future of quantum electrodynamics. In 1937, after the discovery of mesons, Oppenheimer suggested that the new particle was identical to the one proposed several years earlier by Hideki Yukawa, and together with his students he calculated some of its properties.

With his first graduate student, Melba Phillips, Oppenheimer worked on calculating the artificial radioactivity of elements bombarded by deuterons. Previously, when irradiating the nuclei of atoms with deuterons, Ernest Lawrence and Edwin MacMillan found that the results were well described by the calculations of George Gamow, but when more massive nuclei and particles with higher energies were involved in the experiment, the result began to diverge from the theory.

Oppenheimer and Phillips developed a new theory to explain these results in 1935. She gained fame as Oppenheimer-Phillips process and is still in use today. The essence of this process is that a deuteron, when colliding with a heavy nucleus, decays into a proton and a neutron, and one of these particles is captured by the nucleus, while the other leaves it. Other results of Oppenheimer in the field of nuclear physics include calculations of the density of nuclear energy levels, the nuclear photoelectric effect, the properties of nuclear resonances, an explanation of the birth of electron pairs when fluorine is irradiated with protons, the development of the meson theory of nuclear forces and some others.

In the late 1930s, Oppenheimer, probably influenced by his friend Richard Tolman, became interested in astrophysics, which resulted in a series of papers.

In 1933, he learned Sanskrit and met Indologist Arthur Ryder in Berkeley. Oppenheimer read the Bhagavad Gita in the original. He later spoke of it as one of the books that had a strong influence on him and shaped his philosophy of life.

Experts such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez have speculated that if Oppenheimer had lived long enough to see his predictions confirmed by experiments, he might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapse related to the theory of neutron stars and black holes. In retrospect, some physicists and historians view it as his most significant achievement, although not picked up by his contemporaries. When the physicist and science historian Abraham Pais once asked Oppenheimer what he considered his most important contribution to science, he named his work on electrons and positrons, but did not say a word about his work on gravitational compression. Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times - in 1945, 1951 and 1967 - but was never awarded it..

The title of his position - "Coordinator of Rapid Rupture" - definitely hinted at the use of a chain reaction using fast neutrons in an atomic bomb. One of Oppenheimer's first acts in his new position was to organize a summer school on bomb theory at his Berkeley campus. His group, which included both European physicists and his own students, including Robert Serber, Emil Konopinsky, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, studied what needed to be done and in what order to make a bomb.

To manage its part of the atomic project, the US Army founded the Manhattan Engineer District in June 1942, better known later as Manhattan Project, thereby initiating a transfer of responsibility from the Office of Scientific Research and Development to the military. In September, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr. was named project manager. Groves, in turn, appointed Oppenheimer as head of the secret weapons laboratory.

On November 16, 1942, Oppenheimer, Groves and others inspected the proposed site. Oppenheimer feared that the high cliffs surrounding the site would make his men feel confined, while engineers saw the possibility of flooding. Then Oppenheimer suggested a place that he knew well - a mesa near Santa Fe, where a private educational institution for boys was located - the Los Alamos Farm School. The engineers were concerned about the lack of good road access and water supply, but otherwise considered the site ideal. Los Alamos National Laboratory was hastily built on the site of the school. The builders occupied several of the latter's buildings for it and erected many others in the shortest possible time. There Oppenheimer assembled a group of outstanding physicists of the time, which he called "luminaries".

Oppenheimer directed these studies, theoretical and experimental, in the true sense of the words. Here his uncanny speed of grasping the main points on any subject was the decisive factor; he could familiarize himself with all the important details of each part of the work.

When Los Alamos received the first sample of plutonium from the X-10 graphite reactor in April 1944, a new problem was discovered: the reactor plutonium had a higher concentration of the 240Pu isotope, making it unsuitable for gun-type bombs.

In July 1944, Oppenheimer abandoned the development of cannon bombs, directing his efforts to creating implosion-type weapons. Using a chemical explosive lens, a subcritical sphere of fissile material could be compressed to a smaller size and thus to a greater density. The substance in this case would have to travel a very short distance, so the critical mass would be reached in much less time.

In August 1944, Oppenheimer completely reorganized the Los Alamos laboratory, focusing efforts on the study of implosion (explosion directed inward). A separate group was tasked with developing a bomb of simple design that would only operate on uranium-235; The project for this bomb was ready in February 1945 - it was given the name “Little Boy”. After a herculean effort, the design of a more complex implosion charge, nicknamed the "Christy gadget" after Robert Christy, was completed on February 28, 1945, at a meeting in Oppenheimer's office.

The result of the coordinated work of scientists at Los Alamos was the first artificial nuclear explosion near Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, in a place that Oppenheimer named in mid-1944 Trinity. He later said that the name was taken from John Donne's "Sacred Sonnets". According to historian Gregg Herken, the title may be a reference to Jean Tatlock (who committed suicide a few months earlier), who introduced Oppenheimer to Donne's work in the 1930s.

For his work as the head of Los Alamos in 1946, Oppenheimer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Merit.

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Manhattan Project became public, and Oppenheimer became a national representative of science, symbolic of a new type of technocratic power[. His face appeared on the covers of Life and Time magazines. Nuclear physics became a powerful force as governments around the world began to understand the strategic and political power that came with nuclear weapons and their dire consequences. Like many scientists of his time, Oppenheimer understood that security regarding nuclear weapons could only be ensured by an international organization, such as the newly formed United Nations, which could introduce a program to curb the arms race.

In November 1945, Oppenheimer left Los Alamos to return to Caltech, but soon found that teaching did not appeal to him as much as before.

In 1947, he accepted an offer from Lewis Strauss to head the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in New Jersey.

As a member of the Board of Advisors to the commission approved by President Harry Truman, Oppenheimer had a strong influence on the Acheson-Lilienthal report. In this report, the committee recommended the creation of an international "Nuclear Industry Development Agency" that would own all nuclear materials and the means of their production, including mines and laboratories, as well as nuclear power plants that would use nuclear materials to produce energy for peaceful purposes. . Bernard Baruch was put in charge of translating this report into proposal form for the UN Council, and completed it in 1946. The Baruch Plan introduced a number of additional provisions relating to law enforcement, in particular the need for inspection of the Soviet Union's uranium resources. The Baruch Plan was perceived as an attempt by the United States to gain a monopoly on nuclear technology and was rejected by the Soviets. After this, it became clear to Oppenheimer that, due to the mutual suspicions of the United States and the Soviet Union, an arms race could not be avoided.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (then under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover) had been monitoring Oppenheimer since before the war, when he, as a professor at Berkeley, showed communist sympathies and was also closely acquainted with members of the Communist Party, including his wife and brother. He had been under close surveillance since the early 1940s: his house was bugged, telephone conversations were recorded, and his mail was scanned. Evidence of his connections with the Communists was eagerly used by Oppenheimer's political enemies, and among them was Lewis Strauss, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had long felt resentment towards Oppenheimer - both because of Robert's speech against the hydrogen bomb, the idea of which Straus defended, and for Lewis's humiliation before Congress several years earlier; in response to Strauss's opposition to the export of radioactive isotopes, Oppenheimer memorably classified them as "less important than electronic devices but more important than, say, vitamins."

On June 7, 1949, Oppenheimer testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he admitted to having ties to the Communist Party in the 1930s. He testified that some of his students, including David Bohm, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Philip Morrison, Bernard Peters, and Joseph Weinberg, were communists while working with him at Berkeley. Frank Oppenheimer and his wife Jackie also testified before the Commission that they were members of the Communist Party. Frank was subsequently fired from his position at the University of Michigan. A physicist by training, he did not find work in his specialty for many years and became a farmer on a cattle ranch in Colorado. He later began teaching high school physics and founded the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

In 1950, Paul Crouch, a Communist Party recruiter in Alameda County from April 1941 until early 1942, became the first person to accuse Oppenheimer of having ties to the party. He testified before a congressional committee that Oppenheimer hosted a meeting of Party members at his home in Berkeley. At that moment the case received wide publicity. However, Oppenheimer was able to prove that he was in New Mexico when the meeting took place, and Crouch was eventually found to be an unreliable informant. In November 1953, J. Edgar Hoover received a letter regarding Oppenheimer written by William Liscum Borden, former executive director of the Congress" Joint Atomic Energy Committee. In the letter, Borden expressed his opinion, " "Based on several years of research, it is believed by classified information that J. Robert Oppenheimer is - with a certain degree of probability - an agent of the Soviet Union."

Oppenheimer's former colleague, physicist Edward Teller, testified against Oppenheimer at his security clearance hearings in 1954.

At the hearing, held in April-May 1954, which was initially closed and did not receive publicity, special attention was paid to Oppenheimer's previous connections with the Communists and his collaboration during the Manhattan Project with unreliable or communist scientists. One of the key points at this hearing was Oppenheimer's early testimony about conversations between George Eltenton and several scientists at Los Alamos - a story that Oppenheimer himself admitted to making up to protect his friend Haakon Chevalier. Oppenheimer was unaware that both versions had been recorded during his interrogations ten years earlier, and he was surprised when a witness produced these recordings, which Oppenheimer had not been given prior access to. In reality, Oppenheimer never told Chevalier that he had named him, and his testimony cost Chevalier his job. Both Chevalier and Eltenton confirmed that they had talked about the possibility of passing information to the Soviets: Eltenton admitted that he told Chevalier about it, and Chevalier admitted that he mentioned it to Oppenheimer; but both did not see anything seditious in idle conversations, completely rejecting the possibility that the transfer of such information as intelligence data could be carried out or even planned for the future. None of them were accused of any crime.

Edward Teller testified in the Oppenheimer case on April 28, 1954. Teller said he did not question Oppenheimer's loyalty to the United States, but "knew him to be a man of extremely active and sophisticated thinking." When asked whether Oppenheimer posed a threat to national security, Teller responded: “On a large number of occasions, I found Dr. Oppenheimer's actions inordinately difficult to understand. I completely disagreed with him on many issues, and his actions seemed to me confusing and complicated. In this sense "I would like to see the vital interests of our country in the hands of a man whom I understand better and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express the feeling that I personally would feel more secure if the public interests were in other hands." .

This position caused outrage in the American scientific community, and Teller was, in fact, subjected to a lifelong boycott.

Groves also testified against Oppenheimer, but his testimony is riddled with speculation and contradictions.

During the trial, Oppenheimer willingly testified about the “leftist” behavior of many of his fellow scientists. According to Richard Polenberg, if Oppenheimer's clearance had not been revoked, he might have gone down in history as one of those who "named names" to save his reputation. But as this happened, he was perceived by much of the scientific community as a “martyr” of “McCarthyism,” an eclectic liberal who was unfairly attacked by militaristic enemies, a symbol of the transfer of scientific creativity from the universities to the military. Wernher von Braun expressed his views on the scientist's trial in a sarcastic remark to a congressional committee: "In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."

P. A. Sudoplatov notes in his book that Oppenheimer, like other scientists, was not recruited, but was “a source associated with proven agents, proxies and operational workers." At a seminar at the Institute. Woodrow Wilson Institute May 20, 2009 John Earl Hines, Harvey Clair, and Alexander Vasiliev, based on a comprehensive analysis of the latter's notes based on materials from the KGB archive, confirmed that Oppenheimer never engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. The USSR intelligence services periodically tried to recruit him, but were unsuccessful - Oppenheimer did not betray the United States. Moreover, he fired several people from the Manhattan Project who sympathized with the Soviet Union.

Beginning in 1954, Oppenheimer spent several months of the year on the island of St. John, one of the Virgin Islands. In 1957, he bought a 2-acre (0.81 ha) plot of land on Gibney Beach, where he built a spartan beach house. Oppenheimer spent a lot of time sailing with his daughter Toni and wife Kitty.

Increasingly concerned about the potential dangers of scientific discoveries to humanity, Oppenheimer joined Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Rotblat and other prominent scientists and teachers to found the World Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960. Following his public humiliation, Oppenheimer did not sign major public protests against nuclear weapons in the 1950s, including the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto. He did not attend the first Pugwash Conference for Peace and Scientific Cooperation in 1957, although he was invited.

Oppenheimer was a heavy smoker since his youth. At the end of 1965 he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and, after unsuccessful surgery, he underwent radiotherapy and chemotherapy at the end of 1966. The treatment had no effect. On February 15, 1967, Oppenheimer fell into a coma and died on February 18 at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of 62.

A memorial service was held in Alexander Hall at Princeton University a week later, attended by 600 of his closest colleagues and friends: scientists, politicians and military men - including Bethe, Groves, Kennan, Lilienthal, Rabi, Smith and Wigner. Also present were Frank and the rest of his relatives, historian Arthur Meyer Schlesinger Jr., writer John O'Hara and New York Ballet director George Balanchine. Bethe, Kennan and Smith gave short speeches in which they paid tribute to the deceased's achievements.

Oppenheimer was cremated and his ashes were placed in an urn. Kitty took her to the island of St. John and threw her off the side of a boat into the sea within sight of their house.

In January 1977, three months after the end of her second marriage, she committed suicide by hanging herself in a house on the coast; She bequeathed her property “to the people of the island of St. John as a public park and recreation area.” The house, originally built too close to the sea, was destroyed by a hurricane; the Government of the Virgin Islands currently maintains a Community Center on the site.

Robert Oppenheimer is widely known as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons during World War II, which is why he is often called the “father of the atomic bomb.”

Today we decided to illustrate for you the biography of the famous scientist.

“If the radiance of a thousand suns flashed in the sky, it would be like the splendor of the Almighty... I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.”

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born into the family of Julius Oppenheimer, a wealthy textile importer, and artist Ella Friedman. His parents were Jews who immigrated from Germany to America in 1888.

Scientist Robert Oppenheimer as a child

The boy receives his primary education at the Preparatory School. Alcuin, and in 1911 he entered the School of the Society of Ethical Culture. Here he received secondary education in a short time, showing a special interest in mineralogy.

Robert Oppenheimer, 1931

In 1922, Robert entered Harvard College to take a course in chemistry, but later would also study literature, history, mathematics, and theoretical and experimental physics. He graduated from the university in 1925.

Photo of young Oppenheimer

Having entered Christ's College at the University of Cambridge, he works at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he soon receives an offer to work for the famous British physicist J. J. Thomson - on the condition that Oppenheimer completes the laboratory's basic training course.

Robert Oppenheimer (with handset)

Since 1926, Robert has been studying at the University of Göttingen, where Max Born becomes his supervisor. At that time, this university was one of the leading institutions of higher education in the field of theoretical physics, and it was here that Oppenheimer met a number of outstanding people whose names would soon become known throughout the world: Enrico Fermi and Wolfgang Pauli.

Oppenheimer , Enrico Fermi and Ernest Lawrence

His dissertation, entitled “The Born-Oppenheimer Approximation,” makes a significant contribution to the study of the nature of molecules. Finally, in 1927, he graduated from the university, receiving the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Young Oppenheimer's hairstyle

In 1927, the US National Research Council awarded Oppenheimer membership in research groups at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology. In 1928, he lectured at the University of Leiden, after which he went to Zurich, where, together with his institute friend, Wolfgang Pauli, he worked on issues of quantum mechanics and the continuous spectrum.

Robert Oppenheimer . "Father" of the American atomic bomb

In 1929, Oppenheimer accepted an offer to become an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he would work for the next twenty years.

He called himself the Destroyer of Worlds Robert Oppenheimer

Since 1934, while continuing his work in the field of physics, he also takes an active part in the political life of the country. Oppenheimer donated part of his salary to help German physicists trying to escape Nazi Germany and showed support for social reforms that would later be called "communist efforts."

Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer

In 1936, Oppenheimer received a position as a full-time professor at the National Laboratory. Lawrence in Berkeley. However, at the same time, his continuation of full-time teaching at the California Technological University becomes impossible. Ultimately, the parties come to an agreement that Oppenheimer will vacate his position at the university after six academic weeks, which corresponded to one semester.

From left to right: Robert Oppenheimer , Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence

In 1942, Oppenheimer took part in the Manhattan Project along with the research group involved in the development of atomic bombs during World War II.

General Leslie Groves (military head of the Manhattan Project) and Robert Oppenheimer (scientific head)

In 1947, Oppenheimer was unanimously elected head of the General Advisory Committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission. In this position, he actively advocates for strict adherence to international rules of engagement and support for fundamental scientific projects.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer

Even before the outbreak of World War II, the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover personally, placed Oppenheimer under surveillance, suspecting him of close ties to the Communist group.

In 1949, before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the scientist admitted that he actually took an active part in the Communist Party in the 1930s. As a result, he will be declared unreliable in the next four years.

Professor Robert Oppenheimer

At the end of his life, Oppenheimer collaborated with Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and Joseph Rotblatt, jointly opening the World Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960.

Robert Oppenheimer, Elsa Einstein, Albert Einstein, Margarita Konenkova, Einstein's adopted daughter, Margot

Oppenheimer had been a heavy smoker since his youth; At the end of 1965 he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and, after an unsuccessful operation, at the end of 1966 he underwent radio- and chemotherapy. The treatment had no effect; On February 15, 1967, Oppenheimer fell into a coma and died on February 18 at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of 62.

The lunar crater and asteroid No. 67085 of the same name are named in his honor.

Interesting Facts

Theoretical physicist Francois Ferguson, a friend of Oppenheimer, recalled how he once left an apple doused with harmful chemicals on the desk of his supervisor Patrick Blackett.

A famous theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer had serious mental problems, was a heavy smoker and often forgot to eat while working.

After World War II, he became director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He also became chief advisor to the newly formed US Atomic Energy Commission and used his position to advocate for international control of nuclear energy to prevent the proliferation of atomic weapons and the nuclear race. This anti-war stance angered a number of political figures during the second wave of the Red Scare. Ultimately, after a highly publicized politicized hearing in 1954, he was stripped of his security clearance. Having no direct political influence since then, he continued to lecture, write and work in the field of physics. Ten years later, President John Kennedy awarded the scientist the Enrico Fermi Prize as a sign of political rehabilitation; The award was presented after Kennedy's death by Lyndon Johnson.

Oppenheimer's most significant achievements in physics include: the Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions, work on the theory of electrons and positrons, the Oppenheimer–Phillips process in nuclear fusion, and the first prediction of quantum tunneling. Together with his students, he made important contributions to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to the solution of certain problems in quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and cosmic ray physics. Oppenheimer was a teacher and propagandist of science, the founding father of the American school of theoretical physics, which gained worldwide fame in the 30s of the 20th century.

Early life

Childhood and education

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904, into a Jewish family. His father, wealthy textile importer Julius S. Oppenheimer (1865-1948), immigrated to the United States from Hanau, Germany, in 1888. The mother's family—the Paris-educated artist Ella Friedman (d. 1948)—also immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1840s. Robert had a younger brother, Frank (B), who also became a physicist.

Oppenheimer studied for some time at the Preparatory School. Alcuin (Alcuin Preparatory School), then, in 1911, he entered the School of the Society of Ethical Culture (). It was founded by Felix Adler () to encourage the education promoted by the Ethical Culture Movement (), whose slogan was “Deed before Creed”. Robert's father was a member of this society for many years, serving on its board of trustees from 1907 to 1915. Oppenheimer was a versatile student, interested in English and French literature and especially mineralogy. He completed the third and fourth grade program in one year and completed the eighth grade in six months and moved on to the ninth, and in the last grade he became interested in chemistry. Robert entered Harvard College () a year later, when he was already 18 years old, having suffered a bout of ulcerative colitis while prospecting for minerals in Jáchymov during a family holiday in Europe. For treatment, he traveled to New Mexico, where he became fascinated by horseback riding and the nature of the southwestern United States.

In addition to major disciplines (specializations, English), students had to study history, literature and philosophy or mathematics. Oppenheimer compensated for his late start by taking six courses a semester and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. As a freshman, Oppenheimer was allowed to take a master's program in physics on an independent study basis; this meant that he was exempt from elementary subjects and could immediately take advanced courses. After taking a thermodynamics course taught by Percy Bridgman, Robert became seriously interested in experimental physics. He graduated with honors (Latin: summa cum laude) after just three years.

Study in Europe

In 1924, Oppenheimer learned that he had been accepted into Christ's College, Cambridge. He wrote a letter to Ernest Rutherford asking permission to work at the Cavendish Laboratory. Bridgman gave his student a recommendation, noting his learning abilities and analytical mind, but concluded by noting that Oppenheimer was not inclined towards experimental physics. Rutherford was not impressed, but Oppenheimer went to Cambridge in the hope of receiving another offer. As a result, J. J. Thomson accepted him on the condition that the young man complete a basic laboratory course. Oppenheimer developed an adversarial relationship with group leader Patrick Blackett, who was only a few years older than him. One day he soaked an apple in a poisonous liquid and placed it on the table for Blackett; Blackett did not eat the apple, but Oppenheimer was placed on probation and told to go to London for a series of appointments with a psychiatrist.

Many friends noted that Oppenheimer, a tall and thin man, a heavy smoker who often even forgot to eat during periods of intense thought and full concentration, had a tendency toward self-destructive behavior. Many times in his life there were periods during which his melancholy and unreliability caused concern among the scientist’s colleagues and acquaintances. The disturbing incident occurred during a vacation he took to meet his friend Francis Fergusson in Paris. While telling Ferguson about his dissatisfaction with experimental physics, Oppenheimer suddenly jumped out of his chair and began to choke him. Although Ferguson easily parried the attack, this incident convinced him that his friend had serious psychological problems. Throughout his life he experienced periods of depression. “I need physics more than friends,” he once told his brother.

In 1926, Oppenheimer left Cambridge to study at the University of Göttingen under Max Born. At that time, Göttingen was one of the leading centers of theoretical physics in the world. Oppenheimer made friends there who later achieved great success: Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and others. Oppenheimer was also known for his tendency to get carried away during discussions; at times he interrupted every speaker at the seminar. This irritated the rest of Born's students so much that one day Maria Goeppert presented the supervisor with a petition, signed by herself and almost all the other participants in the seminar, threatening to organize a boycott of the classes if Born did not force Oppenheimer to calm down. Born placed it on his desk so that Oppenheimer could read it - and it brought the expected result without any words.

Beginning of professional activity

Teaching

In September 1927, Oppenheimer applied for and received a fellowship from the National Research Council to conduct work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). However, Bridgman also wanted Oppenheimer to work at Harvard, and as a compromise, he split his 1927-28 academic year so that he would work at Harvard in 1927 and at Caltech in 1928. At Caltech, Oppenheimer became close friends with Linus Pauling; they planned to mount a joint "offensive" on the nature of chemical bonding, an area in which Pauling had been a pioneer; obviously Oppenheimer would do the math and Pauling would interpret the results. However, this idea (and at the same time their friendship) was nipped in the bud when Pauling began to suspect that Oppenheimer's relationship with his wife, Ava Helen, was becoming too close. One day, while Pauling was at work, Oppenheimer came to their house and suddenly invited Ava Helen to meet him in Mexico. She categorically refused and told her husband about the incident. This incident, as well as the apparent indifference with which his wife spoke about it, alerted Pauling, and he immediately broke off his relationship with the physicist. Oppenheimer subsequently offered Pauling to become head of the Chemistry Division of the Manhattan Project, but he refused, saying that he was a pacifist.

In the fall of 1928, Oppenheimer visited the Paul Ehrenfest Institute at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he shocked those present by lecturing in Dutch, although he had little experience in communicating in this language. There he was given the nickname "Opje" (Dutch. Opje), which his students later remade in English into "Oppie" (English: Oppie). After Leiden, he went to ETH Zurich to work with Wolfgang Pauli on problems in quantum mechanics and, in particular, the description of the continuum. Oppenheimer deeply respected and liked Pauli, who may have had a strong influence on the scientist's own style and critical approach to problems.

Upon returning to the United States, Oppenheimer accepted an invitation to take a position as an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was invited by Raymond Thayer Birge, who wanted Oppenheimer to work for him so much that he allowed him to work simultaneously at Caltech. But before Oppenheimer took office, he was diagnosed with a mild form of tuberculosis; Because of this, he and his brother Frank spent several weeks on a ranch in New Mexico, which he rented and later bought. When he found out the place was available for rent, he exclaimed, “Hot dog!” (English: “Wow!”, literally “Hot Dog”) - and later the name of the ranch became “Perro Caliente”, which is the literal translation of “hot dog” in Spanish. Oppenheimer later liked to say that “physics and desert country” were his “two great passions.” He was cured of tuberculosis and returned to Berkeley, where he excelled as a supervisor for a generation of young physicists who admired him for his intellectual sophistication and wide-ranging interests. Students and colleagues recalled that he was mesmerizing, even hypnotic in private, but often indifferent in public. Those who interacted with him were divided into two camps: some considered him an aloof and expressive genius and esthete, others saw him as an artsy and disturbing poser. His students almost always fell into the first category and adopted "Oppy's" habits, from his gait to his manner of speaking. Hans Bethe later said about him:

Oppenheimer worked closely with Nobel laureate experimental physicist Ernest Lawrence and his fellow cyclotron developers, helping them interpret data obtained from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory instruments. In 1936, the University of Berkeley granted the scientist a professorship () with a salary of $3,300 per year. In exchange, he was asked to stop teaching at Caltech. As a result, the parties agreed that Oppenheimer was freed from work for 6 weeks every year - this was enough to conduct classes for one trimester at Caltech.

Scientific work

During his time in Göttingen, Oppenheimer published more than a dozen scientific papers, including many important works on the newly developed quantum mechanics. In collaboration with Born, the famous article “On the Quantum Motion of Molecules” was published, containing the so-called Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which allows one to separate nuclear and electronic motion within the framework of the quantum mechanical description of the molecule. This allows the motion of nuclei to be neglected when searching for electronic energy levels and thus greatly simplifies calculations. This work remains Oppenheimer's most cited paper.

In the late 1920s, Oppenheimer's main interest was in the theory of the continuum, within which he developed a method that allowed him to calculate the probabilities of quantum transitions. In his thesis in Göttingen, he calculated the parameters of the photoelectric effect for hydrogen under the influence of X-rays, obtaining the attenuation coefficient at the absorption edge for K-shell electrons (“K-boundary”, English). His calculations were correct for the measured X-ray absorption spectra, but did not agree with the opacity of hydrogen in the Sun. Years later, it was discovered that the Sun was mostly made of hydrogen (not heavy elements, as was then believed) and that the young scientist's calculations were in fact correct. In 1928, Oppenheimer completed work that explained the phenomenon of autoionization using the new effect of quantum tunneling, and also wrote several articles on the theory of atomic collisions. In 1931, together with Paul Ehrenfest, he proved the theorem according to which nuclei consisting of an odd number of fermion particles should obey Fermi-Dirac statistics, and those consisting of an even number should obey Bose-Einstein statistics. This statement, known as the Ehrenfest-Oppenheimer theorem, made it possible to show the insufficiency of the proton-electron hypothesis of the structure of the atomic nucleus.

Oppenheimer made significant contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers and other high-energy phenomena, using the then existing formalism of quantum electrodynamics, which was developed in the pioneering work of Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, to describe them. He showed that within the framework of this theory, already in the second order of perturbation theory, quadratic divergences of integrals corresponding to the electron’s own energy are observed. This difficulty was overcome only in the late 1940s, when the renormalization procedure was developed. In 1931, Oppenheimer co-authored with his student Harvey Hall a paper, "The Relativistic Theory of the Photoelectric Effect," in which, based on empirical evidence, they (correctly) questioned the implication of Dirac's equation that two energy levels of the hydrogen atom, differing only in the value of the orbital quantum number, have the same energy. Later, one of Oppenheimer's graduate students, Willis Lamb, proved that this difference in level energy, called the Lamb shift, actually occurs, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955.

In 1930, Oppenheimer wrote a paper that essentially predicted the existence of the positron. This idea was based on Paul Dirac's 1928 work, which suggested that electrons could have a positive charge but also negative energy. To explain the Zeeman effect, this article derived the so-called Dirac equation, which combined quantum mechanics, special relativity and the then new concept of electron spin. Oppenheimer, using reliable experimental evidence, rejected Dirac's original suggestion that positively charged electrons could be protons. For reasons of symmetry, he argued that these particles should have the same mass as electrons, while protons are much heavier. In addition, according to his calculations, if the positively charged electrons were protons, the observed substance would have to annihilate within a very short period of time (less than a nanosecond). The arguments of Oppenheimer, as well as Hermann Weyl and Igor Tamm, forced Dirac to abandon the identification of positive electrons and protons and explicitly postulate the existence of a new particle, which he called the antielectron. In 1932, this particle, commonly called a positron, was discovered in cosmic rays by Carl Anderson, who was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.

After the discovery of the positron, Oppenheimer, together with his students Milton Plesset () and Leo Nedelsky, carried out calculations of the cross sections for the production of new particles during the scattering of energetic gamma rays in the field of the atomic nucleus. Later, he applied his results concerning the production of electron-positron pairs to the theory of cosmic ray showers, to which he paid great attention in subsequent years (in 1937, together with Franklin Carlson, he developed the cascade theory of showers). In 1934, Oppenheimer, together with Wendell Furry (), generalized the Dirac theory of the electron, including positrons in it and obtaining as one of the consequences the effect of vacuum polarization (similar ideas were expressed simultaneously by other scientists). However, this theory was also not free from divergences, which gave rise to Oppenheimer’s skeptical attitude towards the future of quantum electrodynamics. In 1937, after the discovery of mesons, Oppenheimer suggested that the new particle was identical to the one proposed several years earlier by Hideki Yukawa, and together with his students he calculated some of its properties.

With his first graduate student - or rather graduate student, Melba Phillips () - Oppenheimer worked on calculating the artificial radioactivity of elements bombarded by deuterons. Previously, when irradiating the nuclei of atoms with deuterons, Ernest Lawrence and Edwin MacMillan found that the results were well described by the calculations of George Gamow, but when more massive nuclei and particles with higher energies were involved in the experiment, the result began to diverge from the theory. Oppenheimer and Phillips developed a new theory to explain these results in 1935. It became known as the Oppenheimer-Phillips process and is still used today. The essence of this process is that a deuteron, when colliding with a heavy nucleus, decays into a proton and a neutron, and one of these particles is captured by the nucleus, while the other leaves it. Other results of Oppenheimer in the field of nuclear physics include calculations of the density of nuclear energy levels, the nuclear photoelectric effect, the properties of nuclear resonances, an explanation of the birth of electron pairs when fluorine is irradiated with protons, the development of the meson theory of nuclear forces and some others.

In the late 1930s, Oppenheimer, probably influenced by his friend Richard Tolman, became interested in astrophysics, which resulted in a series of papers. In the first of them, co-authored with Robert Serber in 1938 and entitled “On the Stability of the Neutron Cores of Stars,” Oppenheimer examined the properties of white dwarfs, obtaining an estimate of the minimum mass of the neutron core of such a star, taking into account exchange interactions between neutrons. This was followed by another paper, “On Massive Neutron Cores,” co-authored with his student George Volkoff. In this work, the authors, starting from the equation of state for a degenerate gas of fermions under conditions of gravitational interaction described by the general theory of relativity, showed that there is a limit on the masses of stars, now called the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkov limit, above which they lose the stability inherent in neutron stars, and experience gravitational collapse. Finally, in 1939, Oppenheimer and another of his students, Hartland Snyder (), wrote a paper “On Limitless Gravitational Compression,” which predicted the existence of objects that are now called black holes. The authors developed a model for the evolution of a massive star (with a mass exceeding the limit) and found that for an observer moving along with stellar matter, the collapse time will be finite, while for an outside observer the size of the star will asymptotically approach the gravitational radius. Apart from the paper on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, works on astrophysics remain Oppenheimer's most cited publications; they played a key role in the resumption of astrophysical research in the United States in the 1950s, largely through the work of John Wheeler.

Even given the enormous complexity of the areas of science in which Oppenheimer was an expert, his work is considered difficult to understand. Oppenheimer liked to use elegant, if extremely complex, mathematical techniques to demonstrate physical principles, and as a result he was often criticized for the mathematical errors he made, presumably due to haste. “His physics was good,” said his student Snyder, “but his arithmetic was terrible.”

Many believe that, despite his talents, the level of Oppenheimer's discoveries and research does not allow him to be ranked among those theorists who expanded the boundaries of fundamental knowledge. The diversity of his interests sometimes prevented him from fully concentrating on a particular task. One of Oppenheimer's habits that surprised his colleagues and friends was his penchant for reading original foreign literature, especially poetry. In 1933, he learned Sanskrit and met the Indologist Arthur Ryder in Berkeley. Oppenheimer read the original Bhagavad Gita; he later spoke of it as one of the books that had a strong influence on him and shaped his philosophy of life. His close friend and colleague, Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi, later gave his own explanation:

Despite all this, experts such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez speculated that if Oppenheimer had lived long enough to see his predictions confirmed by experiments, he might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapse associated with the theory of neutron stars and black holes. In retrospect, some physicists and historians view it as his most significant achievement, although not picked up by his contemporaries. When the physicist and science historian Abraham Pais once asked Oppenheimer what he considered his most important contribution to science, he named his work on electrons and positrons, but did not say a word about his work on gravitational compression. Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times - in 1945, 1951 and 1967 - but was never awarded it.

Personal and political life

Throughout the 1920s, Oppenheimer was not interested in public affairs. He claimed that he did not read newspapers or listen to the radio, and did not learn about the fall in stock prices on the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 until some time later. He once mentioned that he had never voted before the 1936 presidential election. However, starting in 1934, he became increasingly interested in politics and international relations. In 1934, Oppenheimer agreed to donate 3 percent of his salary, which was about $3,000 a year, to support German physicists leaving Nazi Germany. During the West Coast fishermen's strike of 1934, Oppenheimer and several of his students, including Melba Phillips and Robert Surber, joined the protesters. Oppenheimer periodically tried to obtain a position for Serber at Berkeley, but was stopped by Birge, who believed that “one Jew on the faculty is quite enough.”

Oppenheimer's mother died in 1931, and he became close to his father, who, while living in New York, became a frequent visitor to California. When his father died in 1937, leaving $392,602 to Robert and Frank, Oppenheimer immediately wrote a will leaving his estate to the University of California for graduate student scholarships. Like many young intellectuals, in the 1930s Oppenheimer supported social reforms that were later recognized as pro-communist. He donated to many progressive causes that were later labeled "leftist" during the McCarthy era. Much of his supposedly radical activity involved hosting fundraisers in support of the Republican Movement in the Spanish Civil War or other anti-fascist activities. He never openly joined the Communist Party USA, although he gave money to liberal causes through acquaintances who were believed to be members of the party. In 1936, Oppenheimer became interested in Jean Tatlock, a student at Stanford University School of Medicine and the daughter of a literature professor at Berkeley. They were united by similar political views; Jean wrote notes for the Western Worker newspaper, published by the Communist Party.

Oppenheimer separated from Tatlock in 1939. In August of that year, he met Katherine "Kitty" Puening Harrison, a radical UC Berkeley student and former Communist Party member. Before this, Harrison was married three times. Her first marriage lasted only a few months. Her second husband, Joe Dallet, an active member of the Communist Party, was killed during Civil War in Spain. Kitty returned to the United States, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in botany from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1938, she married Richard Harrison, a physician and medical researcher. In June 1939, Kitty and her husband moved to Pasadena, California, where he became chief of radiology at a local hospital and she began her master's degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. Oppenheimer and Kitty caused a scandal by spending the night alone with each other after one of Tolman's parties. She spent the summer of 1940 with Oppenheimer at his ranch in New Mexico. Finally, when she discovered she was pregnant, she asked Harrison for a divorce. When he refused, she obtained an immediate divorce in Reno, Nevada, and she and Oppenheimer were married on November 1, 1940.

Their first child, Peter, was born in May 1941, and their second, Katherine "Toni", was born on December 7, 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Even after the wedding, Oppenheimer continued his relationship with Jean Tatlock. Later, their unbroken relationship was the subject of a security clearance hearing - due to Tatlock's collaboration with the Communists. Many of Oppenheimer's close friends were Communist Party activists in the 30s or 40s, including his brother Frank, Frank's wife Jackie, Jean Tatlock, his landlady Mary Ellen Washburn, and some of his graduate students at Berkeley. His wife, Kitty, was also related to the Party; moreover, P. A. Sudoplatov in his memoirs calls her an “illegal special agent” of Soviet intelligence assigned to communicate with Oppenheimer.

When Oppenheimer joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, he wrote on his admission form that he had been “a member of almost every Communist front organization on the West Coast.” On December 23, 1953, when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was considering revoking his security clearance, Oppenheimer stated that he did not remember saying anything like that, that it was not true, and that if he had said anything like that, it was a "half-joking exaggeration." He was a subscriber to People's World, the press organ of the Communist Party, and testified in 1954: "I was associated with the Communist movement." From 1937 until 1942, at the height of the Great Terror and after the Molotov Pact, Ribbentrop, Oppenheimer was a member of what he called an "interest group" at Berkeley, which was later described by regular members Haakon Chevalier and Gordon Griffiths as a "closed" (secret) branch of the Communist Party USA on the Berkeley faculty.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) determined that J. Robert Oppenheimer attended a meeting at the home of Haakon Chevalier (an outspoken Communist) hosted by California Communist Party chairman William Schneiderman and a mediator between Communist Party USA and NKVD on the West Coast Isaac Folkoff (). Shortly thereafter, the FBI placed Oppenheimer on the CDI (National Threat Arrest) list with the notation: "Nationalist Inclination: Communist." The debate about Oppenheimer's Party membership or lack thereof gets buried in small details; almost all historians agree that he strongly sympathized with the socialists during this period, and also interacted with members of the Party; but it is currently impossible to unequivocally answer the question of whether Oppenheimer himself was an official member of the Party. Some sources claim that until 1942 he was on its secret staff and even paid membership fees. At his security clearance hearing in 1954, he denied being a member of the Party, but called himself a "fellow traveler" - a word that defined someone who agreed with many of the goals of communism, but who was not obliged to blindly follow the orders of any communist party apparatus.

Throughout the development of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was under close surveillance by both the FBI and internal security of the Manhattan Project due to his past ties to the left wing. He was accompanied by U.S. Army security agents when he went to California in June 1943 to visit his friend Jean Tatlock, who was suffering from depression. Oppenheimer spent the night in her apartment. On January 4, 1944, Jean committed suicide; this deeply upset Oppenheimer. In August 1943, Oppenheimer informed Manhattan Project security that a man he did not know, George Eltenton, was trying to extract secret information about nuclear development for the Soviet Union from three Los Alamos men. During subsequent interrogations, Oppenheimer admitted under pressure that the only person who approached him about this matter was his friend Haakon Chevalier, a professor of French literature at Berkeley, who mentioned it privately over dinner at Oppenheimer's house. Project leader General Leslie Groves believed that Oppenheimer was too important to the project to be removed because of this suspicious incident. On July 20, 1943, he wrote to the Manhattan Engineering District:

Manhattan Project

Los Alamos

On October 9, 1941, shortly before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt approved an accelerated program to build the atomic bomb. In May 1942, the chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, James B. Conant, one of Oppenheimer's Harvard teachers, invited him to head a group at Berkeley that would undertake calculations in the problem of fast neutrons. Robert, concerned about the difficult situation in Europe, enthusiastically took on this work. The title of his position - "Coordinator of Rapid Rupture" - definitely hinted at the use of a chain reaction using fast neutrons in an atomic bomb. One of Oppenheimer's first acts in his new position was to organize a summer school on bomb theory at his Berkeley campus. His group, which included both European physicists and his own students, including Robert Serber, Emil Konopinsky, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, studied what should be done and in what order to obtain bomb.

To manage its part of the atomic project, the US Army founded the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project, in June 1942, thereby initiating a transfer of responsibility from the Office of Scientific Research and Development to the military. In September, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr. was named project manager. Groves, in turn, appointed Oppenheimer as head of the secret weapons laboratory. Oppenheimer was neither a supporter of a conservative military nor a skilled leader of large projects, so the choice of Groves initially surprised both the scientists involved in the development of the bomb and the members of the Military Policy Committee, which oversees the Manhattan Project. The fact that Oppenheimer did not have the Nobel Prize and, perhaps, the corresponding authority to guide scientists like him, of course, worried Groves. However, Groves was impressed by Oppenheimer's theoretical knowledge of the creation of the atomic bomb, although he doubted his ability to apply this knowledge in practice. Groves also discovered one characteristic in Oppenheimer that other people had not noticed - "excessive vanity"; this property, according to the general, should have fueled the impulse necessary to advance the project to a successful conclusion. Isidor Rabi saw in this appointment “a real manifestation of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not usually considered a genius...”.

Oppenheimer and Groves decided that for the sake of security and cohesion, they needed a centralized secret research laboratory in a remote area. The search for a convenient location at the end of 1942 led Oppenheimer to New Mexico, to an area near his ranch. On November 16, 1942, Oppenheimer, Groves and others inspected the proposed site. Oppenheimer feared that the high cliffs surrounding the site would make his men feel confined, while engineers saw the possibility of flooding. Then Oppenheimer suggested a place that he knew well - a flat mesa near Santa Fe, where a private educational institution for boys was located - Los Alamos Farm School (). The engineers were concerned about the lack of good road access and water supply, but otherwise considered the site ideal. "Los Alamos National Laboratory" was hastily built on the site of the school; the builders occupied several of the latter's buildings for it and erected many others in the shortest possible time. There, Oppenheimer gathered a group of outstanding physicists of the time, which he called “luminaries.”

Initially, Los Alamos was planned to be turned into a military laboratory, and Oppenheimer and other researchers were to be accepted into the US Army as officers. Oppenheimer even managed to order himself a lieutenant colonel's uniform and undergo a medical examination, according to the results of which he was declared unfit for service. Military doctors diagnosed him as underweight (he weighed 128 pounds, or 58 kg), recognized tuberculosis in his constant cough, and were also unhappy with his chronic pain in the lumbosacral joint. And Robert Bacher () and Isidor Rabi completely opposed the idea of entering military service. Conant, Groves and Oppenheimer developed a compromise plan under which the laboratory was leased by the University of California from the War Department (). It soon turned out that Oppenheimer's initial estimates of the required labor costs were extremely optimistic. Los Alamos increased its workforce from a few hundred people in 1943 to more than 6,000 in 1945.

At first, Oppenheimer had difficulty organizing the work of large groups, but, having received permanent residence on the mountain, he very soon learned the art of large-scale management. The rest of the staff noted his masterful understanding of all the scientific aspects of the project and his efforts to smooth over the inevitable cultural differences between scientists and military personnel. For his fellow scientists, he was a cult figure, both a scientific leader and a symbol of what they all strived for. Victor Weiskopf put it this way:

In 1943, development efforts focused on a gun-type plutonium nuclear bomb called the Thin Man. The first studies of the properties of plutonium were carried out using cyclotron-derived plutonium-239, which was extremely pure but could only be produced in small quantities. When Los Alamos received the first sample of plutonium from the X-10 graphite reactor in April 1944, a new problem was discovered: the reactor plutonium had a higher concentration of the 240Pu isotope, making it unsuitable for gun-type bombs. In July 1944, Oppenheimer abandoned the development of cannon bombs, directing his efforts to creating implosion-type weapons. Using a chemical explosive lens, a subcritical sphere of fissile material could be compressed to a smaller size and thus a greater density. The substance in this case would have to travel a very short distance, so the critical mass would be reached in much less time. In August 1944, Oppenheimer completely reorganized the Los Alamos laboratory, focusing efforts on the study of implosion (explosion directed inward). A separate group was tasked with developing a bomb of simple design that would only operate on uranium-235; The project for this bomb was ready in February 1945 - it was given the name “Little Boy”. After a herculean effort, the design of a more complex implosion charge, nicknamed the “Christy gadget,” after Robert Christy, was completed on February 28, 1945, at a meeting in Oppenheimer’s office.

In May 1945, the so-called “Provisional Committee” () was created, whose tasks were to advise and provide reports during war and post-war times regarding the use of nuclear energy. The temporary committee in turn organized an expert group, including Arthur Compton, Fermi, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, to advise on scientific matters. In its report to the Committee, this group expressed its conclusions not only about the expected physical consequences of the use of the atomic bomb, but also about its possible military and political significance. Among other things, the report expressed opinions on such sensitive issues as whether the Soviet Union should be informed about the developed weapon before using it against Japan or not.

Trinity

The result of the coordinated work of scientists at Los Alamos was the first artificial nuclear explosion near Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, in a place that Oppenheimer named “Trinity” in mid-1944. He later said that the name was taken from John Donne's "Sacred Sonnets". According to historian Gregg Herken, the title may be a reference to Jean Tatlock (who committed suicide a few months earlier), who introduced Oppenheimer to Donne's work in the 1930s. Oppenheimer later said that as he watched the explosion, he remembered a verse from the holy Hindu book, the Bhagavad Gita:

Years later, he explained that at that moment another phrase came into his head, namely the famous verse: k?lo"smi lokak?ayak?tprav?ddho lok?nsam?hartumiha prav?tta? IAST," which Oppenheimer translated as: “I am Death, the great destroyer of worlds.”

In 1965, Oppenheimer was asked to revisit that moment during a television broadcast:

According to his brother, at that moment Oppenheimer simply said: “It worked.” A contemporary assessment given by Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, who was at the test site in a control bunker with Oppenheimer, sums up his reaction as follows:

For his work as the head of Los Alamos in 1946, Oppenheimer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Merit ().

Post-war activities

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Manhattan Project became public, and Oppenheimer became a national representative of science, symbolic of a new type of technocratic power. His face appeared on the covers of Life and Time magazines. Nuclear physics became a powerful force as governments around the world began to understand the strategic and political power that came with nuclear weapons and their dire consequences. Like many scientists of his time, Oppenheimer understood that security regarding nuclear weapons could only be ensured by an international organization, such as the newly formed United Nations, which could introduce a program to curb the arms race.

Institute for Advanced Study

In November 1945, Oppenheimer left Los Alamos to return to Caltech, but soon found that teaching did not appeal to him as much as before. In 1947, he accepted Lewis Straus's offer to head the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (New Jersey). This meant moving back east and leaving Ruth Tolman, the wife of his friend Richard Tolman, with whom he had begun a relationship after returning from Los Alamos. The salary at the new location was $20,000 a year, plus free accommodation in a private ("director's") house and a 17th-century manor house with a cook and caretaker, surrounded by 265 acres (107 ha) of woodland.

To solve the most significant problems of the time, Oppenheimer brought together intellectuals in their prime from various branches of science. He supported and supervised the research of many well-known scientists, including Freeman Dyson and the duo of Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the law of non-conservation of parity. He also arranged temporary membership of the Institute for humanities scholars such as Thomas Eliot and George Kennan. Some of these initiatives angered certain members of the mathematics department, who wanted the institute to remain a bastion of "purely scientific research." Abraham Pais said that Oppenheimer himself considered one of his failures at the institute to be his failure to reconcile scientists from the natural sciences and the humanities.

A series of conferences in New York in 1947-49 demonstrated that physicists were returning from war work back to theoretical research. Under Oppenheimer's leadership, physicists enthusiastically took on the greatest unsolved problem of the pre-war years - the problem of mathematically incorrect (infinite, divergent or meaningless) expressions in quantum electrodynamics. Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, and Shinichiro Tomonaga investigated regularization schemes and developed a technique that became known as renormalization. Freeman Dyson proved that their methods produce similar results. The problem of meson capture and Hideki Yukawa's theory, which considers mesons as carriers of the strong nuclear force, also came under close scrutiny. Oppenheimer's deep questions helped Robert Marshak formulate a new hypothesis about two types of mesons: pions and muons. The result was a new breakthrough - the discovery of the peony by Cecil Frank Powell in 1947, for which he subsequently received the Nobel Prize.

Atomic Energy Commission

As a member of the Board of Advisors to the commission approved by President Harry Truman, Oppenheimer had a strong influence on the Acheson-Lilienthal report (). In this report, the committee recommended the creation of an international "Nuclear Industry Development Agency" (Agency) that would own all nuclear materials and the means of their production, including mines and laboratories, as well as nuclear power plants that would use nuclear materials to produce energy in for peaceful purposes. Bernard Baruch was put in charge of translating this report into proposal form for the UN Council, and completed it in 1946. The Baruch Plan introduced a number of additional provisions relating to law enforcement, in particular the need for inspection of the Soviet Union's uranium resources. The Baruch Plan was perceived as an attempt by the United States to gain a monopoly on nuclear technology and was rejected by the Soviets. After this, it became clear to Oppenheimer that, due to the mutual suspicions of the United States and the Soviet Union, an arms race could not be avoided. Even Oppenheimer stopped trusting the latter.

Following the establishment of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1947 as the civilian agency for nuclear research and nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer was appointed chairman of its General Advisory Committee (GAC). In this role, he provided advice on a range of issues related to nuclear technology, including project financing, laboratory establishment, and even international policy, although GAC advice was not always taken into account. As chairman of this committee, Oppenheimer vigorously defended the idea of international arms control and the financing of basic science, and also attempted to steer policy away from the hot issue of the arms race. When the government approached him about whether to initiate a program to accelerate the development of an atomic weapon based on the thermonuclear reaction of the hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer initially advised against it, although he had supported the creation of such a weapon when he participated in the Manhattan Project. He was motivated in part by ethical considerations, feeling that such weapons could only be used strategically - against civilian targets - and result in millions of deaths. However, he also took into account practical considerations, since at that time there was no working design for a hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer believed that existing resources could be better spent on expanding the stockpile of nuclear weapons. He and others were especially concerned that nuclear reactors were set up to produce tritium instead of plutonium. His recommendation was not accepted by Truman, who launched a fast-track program after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949. Oppenheimer and other opponents of the project in the GAC, especially James Conant, felt that they were being shunned and were already considering resigning. In the end they remained, although their views regarding the hydrogen bomb were known.

In 1951, however, Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed what became known as the Teller-Ulam scheme for the hydrogen bomb. The new project looked technically feasible, and Oppenheimer changed his mind regarding the development of this weapon. He later recalled:

Security clearance hearings

On June 7, 1949, Oppenheimer testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he admitted to having ties to the Communist Party in the 1930s. He testified that some of his students, including David Bohm, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Philip Morrison, Bernard Peters, and Joseph Weinberg, were communists while working with him at Berkeley . Frank Oppenheimer and his wife Jackie also testified before the Commission that they were members of the Communist Party. Frank was subsequently fired from his position at the University of Michigan. A physicist by training, he did not find work in his specialty for many years and became a farmer on a cattle ranch in Colorado. He later began teaching high school physics and founded the Exploratorium () in San Francisco.

Between 1949 and 1953, Oppenheimer found himself at the center of conflict or power struggles more than once. Edward Teller, who was so uninterested in working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war that Oppenheimer gave him time to pursue his own project, the hydrogen bomb, eventually left Los Alamos and helped found what would become the second laboratory in 1951. Livermore National Laboratory. Lawrence. There he could be free from Los Alamos control over the development of the hydrogen bomb. Thermonuclear "strategic" weapons, which could only be delivered by a long-range jet bomber, would be under the control of the US Air Force. Oppenheimer was forced for several years to develop relatively small "tactical" nuclear charges, which were more useful in limited areas of combat against enemy infantry and which were to belong to the US Army. Two civil services, often on the side of different political parties, competed for possession of nuclear weapons. The US Air Force, whose program Teller promoted, gained the trust of the Republican administration that emerged after Dwight Eisenhower's victory in the 1952 presidential election.

Strauss, along with Senator Brian McMahon, author of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, pressured Eisenhower to reopen the Oppenheimer hearings. On December 21, 1953, Lewis Straus informed Oppenheimer that the clearance hearing had been suspended pending a decision on a number of charges listed in a letter from Kenneth D. Nichols, General Manager of the Atomic Energy Commission, and suggested that the scientist resign. Oppenheimer did not do this and insisted on holding a hearing. At the hearing, which was held in April and May 1954, and was initially closed and did not receive publicity, special attention was paid to Oppenheimer's previous connections with the Communists and his collaboration during the Manhattan Project with unreliable or members of the Communist Party scientists. One of the key points at this hearing was Oppenheimer's early testimony about conversations between George Eltenton and several scientists at Los Alamos - a story that Oppenheimer himself admitted to making up to protect his friend Haakon Chevalier. Oppenheimer was unaware that both versions had been recorded during his interrogations ten years earlier, and he was surprised when a witness produced these recordings, which Oppenheimer had not been given prior access to. In reality, Oppenheimer never told Chevalier that he had named him, and his testimony cost Chevalier his job. Both Chevalier and Eltenton confirmed that they had talked about the possibility of passing information to the Soviets: Eltenton admitted that he told Chevalier about it, and Chevalier admitted that he mentioned it to Oppenheimer; but both did not see anything seditious in idle conversations, completely rejecting the possibility that the transfer of such information as intelligence data could be carried out or even planned for the future. None of them were accused of any crime.

Edward Teller testified in the Oppenheimer case on April 28, 1954. Teller said he did not question Oppenheimer's loyalty to the United States, but "knew him to be a man of extremely active and sophisticated thinking." When asked whether Oppenheimer posed a threat to national security, Teller responded:

This position caused outrage in the American scientific community, and Teller was, in fact, subjected to a lifelong boycott. Groves also testified against Oppenheimer, but his testimony is riddled with speculation and contradictions. Historian Greg Herken has suggested that Groves, frightened by the FBI of the possibility of prosecution for his possible involvement in covering up the Chevalier affair in 1943, fell into a trap, and Straus and Hoover took advantage of this to obtain the necessary testimony. Many prominent scientists, as well as political and military figures, testified in Oppenheimer's defense. Oppenheimer's inconsistent testimony and erratic behavior before the committee (he once stated that he was "talking complete nonsense" because he "was an idiot") convinced some participants that he was unstable, unreliable, and could pose a security risk. As a result, Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked only one day before it expired. Isidor Rabi said on this occasion that at that time Oppenheimer was only a state adviser, and if the government at the present time “does not want to receive consultations from him, then so be it.”

P. A. Sudoplatov notes in his book that Oppenheimer, like other scientists, was not recruited, but was “a source associated with proven agents, trusted persons and operatives.” At a seminar at the Institute. Woodrow Wilson Institute (Woodrow Wilson Institute) May 20, 2009 John Earl Hines (), Harvey Clair () and Alexander Vasiliev, based on a comprehensive analysis of the latter's notes based on materials from the KGB archive, confirmed that Oppenheimer never engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. The USSR intelligence services periodically tried to recruit him, but were unsuccessful - Oppenheimer did not betray the United States. Moreover, he fired several people from the Manhattan Project who sympathized with the Soviet Union.

Last years

However, in his speeches and public articles, Oppenheimer constantly drew attention to the difficulty of managing the power of knowledge in a world where the freedom to exchange ideas inherent in science was increasingly constrained by political relations. In 1953, on BBC radio, he gave a series of Ritov lectures (), which were later published under the title Science and the Common Understanding. In 1955, Oppenheimer published The Open Mind, a collection of eight lectures he gave beginning in 1946 on nuclear weapons and popular culture. Oppenheimer rejected the idea of "nuclear gunboat diplomacy." “The foreign policy objectives of this country,” he wrote, “cannot be truly or lastingly achieved by violence.” In 1957, the departments of psychology and philosophy at Harvard University invited him to give a course of the James Lectures (), although this decision was opposed by an influential group of Harvard alumni, led by Edwin Ginn (), which included Archibald Roosevelt (), the son of the former US president. About 1,200 people gathered to hear Oppenheimer's six lectures, entitled "The Hope of Order," at Sanders Amphitheater, Harvard's main lecture hall. In 1962, Oppenheimer also gave the Whidden Lectures at McMaster University, which were published as a book, The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for Physicists, in 1964.

Deprived of political influence, Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write, and work in the field of physics. He visited Europe and Japan, giving lectures on the history of science, the role of science in society, and the nature of the Universe. In September 1957, France made him an officer of the Legion of Honor, and on May 3, 1962, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. In 1963, at the insistence of Oppenheimer's many friends among politicians who had achieved high positions, US President John Kennedy awarded the scientist the Enrico Fermi Prize as a sign of political rehabilitation. Edward Teller, who had received the prize a year earlier, also recommended Oppenheimer in favor of him, in the hope that this would help bridge the rift between scientists. However, according to Teller himself, this did not soften the situation at all. Less than a week after Kennedy's assassination, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, presented the award to Oppenheimer "for his contributions to theoretical physics as a teacher and originator, and for his leadership of the Los Alamos Laboratory and the atomic energy program during the years of crisis." Oppenheimer told Johnson, "I believe, Mr. President, that it may have required a great deal of grace and courage on your part to present this award today." The rehabilitation implied by this award was partly symbolic, since Oppenheimer still had no security clearance and could not influence official policy; but the bonus came with a tax-free benefit of $50,000, and the very fact of its award displeased many prominent Republicans in Congress. Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline, who was still living in the White House at that time, considered it her duty to meet with Oppenheimer and tell him how much her husband wanted the scientist to receive this prize. In 1959, Kennedy, who was then only a senator, became the turning point in the vote that rejected the candidacy of Oppenheimer's opponent, Lewis Straus, who wanted to become US Secretary of Commerce; it actually ended it political career. This happened partly thanks to the intercession of the scientific community on behalf of Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer had been a heavy smoker since his youth; at the end of 1965 he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and, after an unsuccessful operation, at the end of 1966 he underwent radio- and chemotherapy. The treatment had no effect; On February 15, 1967, Oppenheimer fell into a coma and died on February 18 at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of 62. A memorial service was held in Alexander Hall at Princeton University a week later, attended by 600 of his closest colleagues and friends: scientists, politicians and military men - including Bethe, Groves, Kennan, Lilienthal, Rabi, Smith and Wigner. Also present were Frank and the rest of his relatives, the historian Arthur Meyer Schlesinger Jr., the novelist John O'Hara and the director of the New York City Ballet George Balanchine. Bethe, Kennan and Smith gave short speeches in which they paid tribute to the achievements of the deceased. Oppenheimer was cremated and his ashes were placed in an urn, which Kitty took to the island of St. John and threw from the side of a boat into the sea, within sight of their house.

After the death of Kitty Oppenheimer in October 1972 from an intestinal infection complicated by a pulmonary embolism, the Oppenheimer ranch in New Mexico was inherited by their son Peter, and the property on the island of St. John passed to their daughter Toni. Toni was denied the security clearance required for her chosen profession as a UN translator after the FBI brought up old charges against her father. In January 1977, three months after the end of her second marriage, she committed suicide by hanging herself in a house on the coast; She bequeathed her property “to the people of the island of St. John as a public park and recreation area.” The house, originally built too close to the sea, was destroyed by a hurricane; the Government of the Virgin Islands currently maintains a Community Center on the site.

Heritage

When Oppenheimer was removed from his post in 1954 and lost political influence, to the intelligentsia he symbolized the naivety of scientists' belief that they could control the application of their inventions. It was also seen as a symbol of dilemmas regarding the moral responsibility of a scientist in a nuclear world. According to researchers, the security clearance hearings were initiated for both political reasons (due to Oppenheimer's closeness to the Communists and the previous administration) and personal reasons stemming from his feud with Lewis Strauss. The formal reason for the hearings, and the reason why Oppenheimer was ranked among the liberal intelligentsia, was his opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb; however, it was explained equally by both technical and ethical considerations. Once the technical problems were resolved, Oppenheimer supported Teller's project to create a new bomb, since he believed that the Soviet Union would inevitably create its own. Rather than consistently resist the Red Hunt in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Oppenheimer testified against some of his former colleagues and students both before and during his admission hearings. One day, his evidence incriminating former student Bernard Peters was partially leaked to the press. Historians have seen this as an attempt by Oppenheimer to please his colleagues in the government and perhaps divert attention from his own and his brother's left-wing connections. In the end, this backfired on the scientist himself: if Oppenheimer had actually questioned his student's loyalty, then his own recommendation for Peters to work on the Manhattan Project would have seemed reckless or at least inconsistent.

Popular representations of Oppenheimer view his struggle during the hearings as a clash between the "right-wing" militarists (symbolized by Teller) and the "left-wing" intelligentsia (symbolized by Oppenheimer) over the ethical issue of using weapons of mass destruction. The problem of the responsibility of scientists to humanity inspired Bertolt Brecht to create the drama “The Life of Galileo” (Galileo, 1955), left its mark on the play “The Physicists” (1962) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, based on which a film of the same name was made in the USSR in 1988, and became the basis for the opera “Doctor Atomic” (2005) by John Adams, in which Oppenheimer, according to the idea of the author of the idea, Pamela Rosenberg, is presented as an “American Faust”. The play "The Oppenheimer Case" (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1964) by Heinar Kipphardt, after being shown on East German television, was staged in theaters in Berlin and Munich in October 1964. Oppenheimer's objections to this play resulted in correspondence with Kiphardt, in which the playwright suggested making some amendments, although he defended his work. Its premiere in New York took place in June 1968, with Joseph Wiseman playing the role of Oppenheimer. The New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called it a "violent and partisan play" that defends Oppenheimer's position but portrays the scientist as a "tragic fool and genius." Oppenheimer strongly disagreed with his portrayal. After reading a transcript of Kiphardt's play shortly after it began performances, Oppenheimer threatened to sue the author, criticizing "improvisations that were contrary to the history and character of real people." Later in an interview, Oppenheimer said:

A BBC television series entitled Oppenheimer starring Sam Waterston in 1980 won three BAFTA Television awards. The same year, The Day After Trinity, a documentary about Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb, was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Peabody Award. In 1989, the feature film “Fat Man and the Kid” was released, telling the story of the creation of the first atomic bomb, in which Dwight Schultz played the role of Oppenheimer. In addition to being of interest to writers of fiction, Oppenheimer's life has been chronicled in numerous biographies, including American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005) by Kai Beard and Martin J. Sherwin, which won the Pulitzer Prize in the category "Biography or autobiography." In 2004, the University of Berkeley hosted a conference and exhibition dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the scientist's birth, the proceedings of the conference were published in 2005 in the collection Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and reflections). The scientist's documents are stored in the Library of Congress.

Oppenheimer the scientist was remembered by his students and colleagues as a brilliant researcher and captivating teacher, the founder of modern theoretical physics in the United States. Because his research interests often changed rapidly, he never worked long enough on a single topic to merit a Nobel Prize, although other scientists have suggested, as noted above, that his research on black holes could have earned one. had he lived longer to see the fruits of his theories nurtured by subsequent astrophysicists. The asteroid (67085) Oppenheimer and a crater on the Moon were named in his honor.

As an adviser on public and military policy, Oppenheimer was a technocratic leader who helped change the relationship between science and the military and the emergence of "big science." The participation of scientists in military research during the Second World War was unprecedented. Because of the threat fascism posed to Western civilization, they massively offered technological and organizational assistance to the Allied war effort, leading to the development of such powerful tools as radar, proximity fuse, and operations research. As a cultured and intelligent theoretical physicist and a disciplined military organizer, Oppenheimer represented a rejection of the image of scientists with their head in the clouds and the idea that knowledge in such exotic areas as the structure of the atomic nucleus had no application in the real world.

Two days before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer expressed his hopes and fears in a poem that he translated from Sanskrit and quoted to Vanivare Bush:

Bibliography

Articles in domestic magazines:

Oppenheimer R. On the need for experiments with high-energy particles // Technology - youth. - 1965. - No. 4. - P. 10-12.

Oppenheimer J. Robert Science and the Common Understanding. - New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954.
Oppenheimer J. Robert The Open Mind. - New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955.
Oppenheimer J. Robert The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for Physicists. - London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Russian translation: Oppenheimer R. Flying trapezoid: three crises in physics / Transl. V. V. Krivoshchekov, ed. and with an afterword by V. A. Leshkovtsev. - M.: Atomizdat, 1967. - 79 p. - 100,000 copies.
Oppenheimer J. Robert, Rabi I. I. Oppenheimer. - New York: Scribner, 1969.
Oppenheimer J. Robert, Smith Alice Kimball, Weiner Charles Robert Oppenheimer, Letters and Recollections. - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980. - ISBN 0-674-77605-4
Oppenheimer J. Robert Uncommon Sense. - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Birkhauser Boston, 1984. - ISBN 0-8176-3165-8
Oppenheimer J. Robert Atom and Void: Essays on Science and Community. - Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989. - ISBN 0-691-08547-1

Main scientific articles:

Russian translation: Oppenheimer Yu., Volkov G. On massive neutron cores // Albert Einstein and the theory of gravity: Collection. articles. - M.: Mir, 1979. - P. 337-352.
Russian translation: Oppenheimer Yu., Snyder G. On limitless gravitational compression // Albert Einstein and the theory of gravity: Collection. articles. - M.: Mir, 1979. - P. 353-361.

Oppenheimer Robert

Assistant to US Army Lieutenant General Leslie Groves

The name of Julius Robert Oppenheimer is known not only to physicists. For most, Oppenheimer is first and foremost a man, led the effort to create the atomic bomb in the United States and was subsequently subjected to severe persecution by the notorious Un-American Activities Commission.

Like physicist R. Oppenheimer didn't such outstanding discoveries, which could be placed on a par with the most important works of A. Einstein, M. Planck, E. Rutherford, N. Bohr, W. Heisenberg, E. Schrödinger, L. de Broglie and other luminaries of physics of the 20th century. However, he did a lot of research that aroused the admiration of all physicists and promoted him to the ranks of major scientists.

On April 22, 1904, in New York, a son was born into the family of an influential industrialist, a Jewish emigrant from Germany, Julius Oppenheimer. No one in the family, naturally, suspected that 41 years later Robert Oppenheimer himself would become the father of such a brainchild, which will blow up the world- literally and figuratively. The first atomic bomb test in world history took place on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico. irreversibly changed the course of history. In 1925, he graduated from Harvard University, completing the entire course in three years, and left to continue his education in Europe. He was admitted to the University of Cambridge and began working at the famous Cavendish Laboratory under the direction of E. Rutherford. Here he was extremely successful in theoretical physics, although, according to him, he failed in practical classes in the laboratory. At Cambridge, Oppenheimer met such leading physicists as M. Born, P. Dirac and N. Bohr. At the invitation of Professor M. Born of the University of Göttingen, Oppenheimer moved from Great Britain to Germany. During these years, he listened to lectures by outstanding physicists of the world - E. Schrödinger, W. Heisenberg, J. Frank - and worked with them in the field of quantum mechanics.

In 1929, Oppenheimer, having completed his course at the University of Leiden and the Higher Technical School in Zurich, returned to his homeland. A young, talented, already famous physicist 10 American universities became interested at once. Since his health was deteriorating at this time, doctors, fearing tuberculosis, recommended that he live in the western United States. Oppenheimer settled on a farm located in New Mexico. There was a small town west of the farm Los Alamos, in which subsequently, under the leadership Leslie Groves The secret laboratory of the Manhattan District operated successfully. For 20 years, Oppenheimer simultaneously served as an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the University of California at Berkeley. Here he studied Sanskrit (the eighth language he spoke) from the famous Sanskrit scholar A. Rider. When asked why he chose Berkeley, Oppenheimer replied: “I was drawn there by several old books: the collections of French poets of the 16th and 17th centuries in the university library made all the difference.”

Close communication with outstanding physicists left its mark on Oppenheimer's entire biography. Working in the field of quantum mechanics, the scientist conducted research on new properties of matter and radiation, developed a method for calculating the intensity distribution over the components of radiation spectra, and created a theory of the interaction of free electrons with atoms. In the future, the scope of his scientific interests moved to the field of nuclear physics. Since the discovery of uranium fission in 1939, Oppenheimer has been constantly interested in studying this process and the related problem of creating atomic weapons. Since the fall of 1941, he participated in the work of a special commission of the US National Academy of Sciences, which discussed the problems of using atomic energy for military purposes. At the same time, Oppenheimer led a group of theoretical physics that studied ways to create an atomic bomb. The first American nuclear project was named "Manhattan" or "project Y". His headed by 46-year-old Colonel Leslie Groves, A scientific supervisor became Robert Oppenheimer, who proposed uniting all scientists in one laboratory in the provincial town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, near Santa Fe. About 130 thousand people worked on the creation of the bomb, among whom were outstanding physicists of the 20th century: Fermi, Pontecorvo, Szilard, Bohr and our compatriot Gamow. At the end of 1943, a group of English scientists was sent to Oppenheimer to strengthen the Manhattan Project. Participated in the project at least 12 Nobel laureates, present or future. True, Oppenheimer himself never became a Nobel laureate.

As it turned out later, the decision to invite Oppenheimer to the post of head of the Los Alamos laboratory was made by the US military-administrative elite not without hesitation. It was known that the scientist in the recent past had clearly sympathized with leftist circles and even had personal connections with some members of the American Communist Party. Oppenheimer was a wealthy man and more than once took part in fundraisers, the goals of which were later defined as “communist.” His younger brother Frank and his brother's wife at one time were members of the US Communist Party. Oppenheimer's own wife was previously married to a communist who died during the Spanish Civil War. The crimes of the Hitler regime in Germany deeply shocked Oppenheimer, who had hitherto been an absolutely apolitical person. Wanting to contribute to the fight against fascism, he accepted active participation in the work of a number of anti-fascist organizations and even wrote several propaganda brochures and leaflets and printed them at his own expense. By the time Oppenheimer was invited to the position of head of the laboratory, three years had already passed since he broke off his previous political connections. When starting work on the creation of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer filled out a very detailed questionnaire, listing all his connections with left-wing elements that might be of interest to the police and military authorities. The scientist understood quite well that the police and army should and would be interested in his past, since he was appointed to a very important position from a security and intelligence point of view.

The test site in New Mexico spans 10,000 square kilometers. In its northern part, in the early morning of July 16, 1945, the atomic sun lit up. Two days before, the first atomic bomb, or as it was called the “thing” or “device”, was assembled at the nearby McDonald Ranch from materials delivered from the nuclear laboratory in Los Alam oce, was placed on top of a 33-meter steel tower. Around, at various distances from the tower, seismographic and photographic equipment was placed, as well as instruments recording radioactivity, temperature and pressure. Three observation points were set up within a radius of 9 km, where project leaders took up their posts. Mounted on a steel tower, a new weapon designed to change the nature of war or which could become a means to end all wars, was activated by a slight movement of the hand. The work proceeded amid flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder. Bad weather delayed the explosion, scheduled for 4 a.m., by an hour and a half.

The world's first atomic bomb They called it “Trinity” (“Trinity”). Forty-five seconds before the explosion, the automatic device was turned on, and from that time on, all parts of the complex mechanism operated without human control, and only a scientist was stationed at the reserve switch, ready to try to stop the explosion if the order was given. The order was not given. The actual detonation was entrusted to Dr. Bainbridge from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. General Leslie Groves, along with Doctors Conant and Bush, immediately before the test, joined the scientists gathered at the base camp. According to their orders, all available personnel gathered on a small hill. Everyone present was ordered to lie on the ground, face down, with their feet towards the explosion site. As soon as the explosion occurred, they were allowed to get up and admire it through the smoked glass with which everyone was equipped. The time was believed to be sufficient to protect the eyes of those watching from being burned.

Stunned scientists immediately began assessing the power of America's new weapon. To study the crater, specially equipped tanks were sent to the site of the explosion, one of which carried the famous core researcher Dr. Enrico Fermi. What appeared before his eyes was a dead, scorched earth, on which all living things had been destroyed within a radius of one and a half kilometers. The sand baked into a glassy greenish crust that covered the ground. In a huge crater lay the mangled remains of a steel tower. A mangled steel box, turned on its side, lay to the side. The power of the explosion turned out to be 20 thousand tons of trinitrotoluene. This effect could have been caused by 2 thousand of the largest bombs from the Second World War, which were called "destroyers of neighborhoods." The power of the detonated bomb exceeded all expectations. Just the day before, scientists conducted a kind of betting with a minimum bet of $1, which of them can most correctly guess the strength of the upcoming explosion. Oppenheimer, for example, called 300 tons in terms of conventional explosives. Most other answers were close to this figure. Few people dared to rise to 10 thousand tons, and only Dr. Rabi from Columbia University, as he himself explained later, out of a desire to please the creators of the new weapon, named 18 thousand tons. To his surprise, he turned out to be the winner.

If not for the desolation of the area where the test was carried out, and not for the agreement with the press in the area, the test would have attracted the attention of the general public. However, this did not happen. Only a few eyewitness accounts appeared in the media. So, for example, newspapers wrote that one girl, blind from birth, living near Albuquerque, many miles from the site of the explosion, at the moment when the flash lit up the sky and the roar had not yet been heard, exclaimed: "What is this?"

Robert Oppenheimer was very frank, quoting lines from the Bhagavad Gita in relation to himself: "I am becoming Death, the shatter of worlds" (“I have become Death, shaker of worlds”). After the war, the father of the atomic bomb complained to President Truman that he could feel blood on his hands. His opposition to the hydrogen bomb and his late 1930s association with communist Jane Tatlock led to suspicions of disloyalty to his country. In 1954, court hearings took place, as a result of which Oppenheimer was “excommunicated” from work related to nuclear laboratories. As it turned out later, these suspicions had some basis.

According to the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov, who during the war years led the Fourth Directorate of the NKVD, Comintern documents were discovered in the archives of the CPSU Central Committee in 1992, confirming Oppenheimer’s connections with members of the secret cell of the US Communist Party. Sudoplatov believes that in the traditional sense Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard were not agents of the Soviet Union. However, Oppenheimer's bet on anti-fascist emigrants was probably connected with his far-sighted desire avoid a monopoly on atomic weapons by one country.

The world's first atomic bomb test was successful. The military leadership of the Manhattan Project rejoiced. When the explosion occurred and the smoke that had enveloped the area cleared, his deputy Thomas Farrell said: "The war is over"- General Groves replied: - "Yes, but after we drop bombs on Japan." For him, this was a long-decided matter. The test of the first atomic bomb became the American trump card in a major game against the Soviet Union at the approaching Potsdam Conference. Truman expressed his hopes in his characteristically tough manner: “If it explodes, and I think it will, then I will have a club to hit this country with.”

The Manhattan Project cost the American government $2.5 billion. The Soviet Union received secret materials without such costs. “I would like to immediately note that... our first atomic bomb is a copy of the American one.” This statement was made on August 11, 1992 by the scientific director of VNIIEF, academician Julius Khariton and published in the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper. "This was the fastest and most reliable way to show that we also have nuclear weapons,- he said later. – The more efficient designs we saw could wait."

In October 1945, Oppenheimer resigned as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory and headed the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His fame in the United States and abroad reached its culmination. New York newspapers increasingly wrote about him in the style of reports about Hollywood movie stars. The weekly Time magazine placed his photo on the cover and dedicated a central article to him in the issue. It was from then on that they began to call him "father of the atomic bomb." President Truman awarded him the Medal of Merit, America's highest honor. Popular Medicine magazine ranked him among the “Pantheon of the first half of the century.” Many foreign higher educational institutions and academies sent him membership and honorary diplomas.

However, Oppenheimer's fate was connected with atomic weapons for a long time. In 1946, he became chairman of the advisory committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission, a trusted adviser to politicians and generals. In this position, he took part in the development of the American project for international control of atomic energy, the real goal of which was not to ban and destroy atomic weapons, stop their production and restore the free exchange of scientific information, but to ensure US hegemony in all areas of nuclear science and technology.

Oppenheimer also had to consider the project of creating a hydrogen bomb. At the same time, he actually spoke against the creation of new weapons of mass destruction. He believed that a hydrogen bomb cannot be produced. However, on January 31, 1950, Truman signed an order to begin work on creating a hydrogen bomb: “I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue work on all types of atomic weapons, including hydrogen or superbombs.” He ordered the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense to jointly determine the scope and cost of the program.

On August 8, 1953, the Soviet government reported to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR that the United States was not a monopoly in the production of the hydrogen bomb. And on August 20, a government message was published in the Soviet press, which said: “Recently in the Soviet Union, a type of hydrogen bomb was exploded for test purposes.” Physicists from the US Atomic Energy Commission compiled a report in this regard, which was presented to President D. Eisenhower. The essence of this document was that the Soviet Union produced “at a high technical level, the hydrogen explosion was in some respects ahead.” The authors of the report stated: “The USSR has already accomplished some of what the United States hoped to achieve as a result of the experiments scheduled for the spring of 1954.”

The news that The USSR solved the problem of hydrogen weapons, produced the impression of a bomb exploding in Washington. A number of questions arose before the ruling circles. When will the US have a hydrogen bomb? Should the population of the country be informed that the Soviet Union already has hydrogen weapons? For a whole month, confusion reigned in the White House. Exactly in order to hide failures, was raised and inflated campaign against Oppenheimer. They tried to accuse him of an anti-American way of thinking, of communism and other “deadly sins.” In circles where they did without a diplomatic dictionary, talked openly about espionage. On December 21, 1953, Oppenheimer was briefed on the charges brought against him by the Director General of the US Atomic Energy Commission, General Nichols. It turns out that Oppenheimer’s owners never forgot about his past “sins.” All these years he was closely monitored by military intelligence. And now “his hour has struck.” In the early 50s, spy mania spread in the United States; The fear of leaking government secrets seemed to become an obsession among members of Congress, the government, and parts of the American public. It was during this period that L. Borden, who was the administrative director for personnel issues of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, sent a letter to the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Hoover, in which, in particular, he noted that, but in his opinion, in 1939–1942 . Oppenheimer "most likely" spied for the Russians. On December 21, 1953, Oppenheimer, who had just returned from a trip to Europe, went with a report to Strauss, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Oppenheimer could not be convicted either criminally or even disciplinaryly, since by this time he was no longer an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission. The proposal of his accusers was that deprive him of access to secret data in the field of atomic research. This was tantamount to condemning the scientist to limit his opportunities for scientific work. The trial was intended as a slap in the face to Oppenheimer and all scientists who supported him, as a warning to scientists. Oppenheimer's conviction also had a broader significance, since, according to the intention of his accusers and in its practical consequences, was directed against all American scientists. He was supposed to be a warning to them against contacts with politically unreliable people, against independence in thinking and expressing their opinions. This is exactly how American scientists, and especially atomic scientists, viewed the trial against Oppenheimer, and this is how they understood the guilty verdict, which caused indignation and protests among them.

The process brought many scientists back to Oppenheimer. Like other representatives of the American intelligentsia, they clearly saw how dangerous it was for science, democracy and progress McCarthyism. The Federation of American Scientists protested to the US government, and the administrative council of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton unanimously approved Oppenheimer as director of the institute.

More than 10 years after the first atomic explosion, the place named after the “Trinity” (Trinity Site) was surrounded by a wire fence. But as radioactivity decreased, it became increasingly accessible. In 1965, from pieces of black volcanic lava, which was abundant around, a low obelisk was built with a laconic inscription: “Trinity Site, where the world’s first nuclear device opened on July 16, 1945.” “Trinity” is still closed to the general public and not due to radioactive safety, but because it is still a missile test site. Every year, on the anniversary of the event, people gather here. Pray for peace in the whole world.

Biography:

Oppenheimer, Robert (Oppenheimer, J. Robert) (1904–1967), American physicist. Born in New York on April 22, 1904. Graduated from Harvard University in 1925. In 1925 he was admitted to the University of Cambridge and worked at the Cavendish Laboratory under the direction of Rutherford. In 1926 he was invited by M. Born to the University of Göttingen, where in 1927 he defended his doctoral dissertation. In 1928 he worked at the Universities of Zurich and Leiden. From 1929 to 1947 he taught at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology. From 1939 to 1945, he actively participated in the work on creating an atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, and headed the Los Alamos Laboratory. Over the next seven years he was an adviser to the US government, and from 1947 to 1952 he chaired the General Advisory Committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission. From 1947 to 1966, Oppenheimer was director of the Institute for Basic Research in Princeton (New Jersey).

Oppenheimer wrote works on quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, elementary particle physics, and theoretical astrophysics. In 1927, the scientist developed a theory of the interaction of free electrons with atoms. Together with Born, he created the theory of the structure of diatomic molecules. In 1931, together with P. Ehrenfest, he formulated a theorem according to which nuclei consisting of an odd number of particles with spin 1/2 should obey Fermi - Dirac statistics, and those of an even number - Bode - Einstein (Ehrenfest - Oppenheimer theorem). The application of this theorem to the nitrogen nucleus showed that the proton-electron hypothesis of the structure of nuclei leads to a number of contradictions with the known properties of nitrogen. Investigated the internal conversion of g-rays. In 1937 he developed the cascade theory of cosmic showers, in 1938 he made the first calculation of a neutron star model, and in 1939 he predicted the existence of “black holes”.

Main works:

Science and Common Knowledge (1954)

Open Mind (1955)

Some Reflections on Science and Culture (1960).

This text is an introductory fragment.

My friends - Einstein, Oppenheimer, Joliot-Curie All honest people, including those who were not at all supporters of socialism, always in one form or another opposed the fact that the monster released from the cage - nuclear weapons - became the cause

Robert Falk was born on October 27, 1886 in Moscow in the family of a lawyer and chess player Rafail Falk. As a child and youth he dreamed of becoming a musician. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. One of his professors was Valentin Serov, who once advised

His name was not Robert. Oleg Strizhenov was born on August 10, 1929 in the city of Blagoveshchensk on the Amur into a military family. His father, Alexander Nikolaevich, fought on the fronts of the Civil War in the Red Army and had several military awards. In the early 20s, as fate would have it, he fell in love

WOOD ROBERT (b. 1868 - d. 1955) American experimental physicist, often called the “father of modern physical optics” and “an experimental genius.” Discovered and investigated the resonant radiation of sodium and mercury vapor, developed spectroscopy methods, founded

Robert Rozhdestvensky What monuments are erected to wizards? From marble? Made of bronze? From glass? We are content with the weak consolation that important matters have called us. It so happened that the evenings are filled with smoke, And nothing can be refuted... During life - Ordinary drinking buddies, And after

Robert Schnakenberg The short (but uncut!) and blatantly scandalous biographical essays collected in this book - from the biography of Shakespeare to the summary of Thomas Pynchon - are designed to answer the harsh questions that school teachers were even afraid to ask: what is there?

LEE ROBERT EDWARD (b. 1807 - d. 1870) General. During the Civil War of 1861–1865. in the United States, the commander-in-chief of the army of the Confederate southern states. He won a number of victories, but was defeated at Gettysburg (1863), and in 1865 he capitulated to federal troops. Robert Edward Lee

FULTON ROBERT (b. 1765 - d. 1815) Inventor. He built the first submarine, the Nautilus (1800), and the first paddle steamer, the Clermont (1807). Many generations of sailors dreamed of a time when they could set sail without waiting for a fair wind. This

Burns Robert (b. 1759 - d. 1796) Scottish poet, whose life was extremely rich in love affairs. “I have often thought that you cannot be a true connoisseur of love stanzas unless you yourself have been once or many times an ardent supporter of this feeling...

Robert Schumann (b. 1810 - d. 1856) German composer, the source of whose musical lyrics was his feeling for his only beloved. Among the great romantics of the 19th century, the name of Robert Schumann is in the first row. The brilliant musician defined the form and style for a long time

ROBERT SCHUMANN JUNE 8, 1810 - JULY 29, 1856ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: TWIN NATIONALITY: GERMAN MUSICAL STYLE: CLASSICISM SIGN WORK: “DREAMS” FROM THE CYCLE “CHILDREN’S SCENES”WHERE YOU COULD HEAR THIS MUSIC: OTHERWISELY “DREAMS” WERE OFTEN SOUNDS IN AMERICAN ANIMATIONS

Robert FISCHER A word about Robert Fischer 20 years have passed since Fischer became the world champion (since then he has not played a single tournament game), and then he left the world of chess. Yes, many of his decisions seemed incomprehensible and unpredictable. Apparently Fischer imagined

71. Robert The Kennedy brothers were never known for their unwavering commitment to moral principles. Talented, energetic, ambitious, they are used to taking from life what they liked. They received practically no refusals from women to their claims. And at the same time both loved their

Robert Hooke Hooke was somewhat older than Newton. He was born in 1635, the son of a priest on the Isle of Wight, located in the English Channel. Hooke was a very weak and sickly child and therefore did not receive a systematic education. In 1648 his father died and the boy moved

Robert In the early spring of 1945, everyone already realized that the war was coming to an end. Day after day, a continuous chain of refugees stretched through our small town. There were both military and civilians, Germans and foreigners, men, women, children. Many were driving old cars or

Oppenheimer's theory. Robert Oppenheimer - biography, information, personal life. Security clearance hearings

What is important to know about the height of railings for stairs and landings Height of stair railings

How to build a fence from corrugated board at your dacha with your own hands

Basics of iodine disinfection techniques

How to make a crossbow with your own hands at home

Review and description of the best types and varieties of peach

Landscaping in front of the house: for yourself and for guests

How to make a playground with your own hands from improvised means and materials