J. Robert Oppenheimer

Julius Oppenheimer reached New York from Hanau in 1888 with no money, no English and no schooling past childhood, and inside a decade was an executive in textiles. His son grew up on Riverside Drive with Van Goghs on the walls and the Ethical Culture School's motto, deed before creed, in his ears. Robert skipped a year and a half of grades, lost another year to colitis picked up prospecting for minerals in Czechoslovakia, and made it up at Harvard by taking six courses a term. He finished in three years, summa cum laude. Cambridge went badly. He was hopeless at the bench, saw a Harley Street psychiatrist, and once, when a friend told him about proposing to his girlfriend, jumped on him and tried to strangle him.

Göttingen and Max Born gave him a doctorate at 23. Berkeley gave him the first American school of theoretical physics. In 1939, working with Hartland Snyder, he described what happens when a heavy star keeps collapsing — black holes, three decades before the name. Then Los Alamos, Trinity, the 1954 hearing that took his clearance and the order that vacated it in 2022, all of which BriefHistory sets out at length. This page is about the household the work was run out of, and what happened to the people in it.

Army doctors at Los Alamos found him underweight at 128 pounds, diagnosed his chronic cough as tuberculosis, worried about his back, and cleared him. The heavier cost fell on the people nearest him. Jean Tatlock, the Berkeley psychiatrist he had loved and kept seeing after marrying Kitty, was followed by Army security agents on the June 1943 night he stayed at her apartment, and killed herself seven months later. In August 1943 he told counterintelligence a version of a Soviet approach he later admitted was false, and then under pressure named his friend Haakon Chevalier. Both halves came back at him in 1954. He denied Communist Party membership and called himself a fellow traveler. Historians still divide over whether that was the whole truth.

The throat cancer was diagnosed in late 1965 and put down to the cigarettes. He died in his sleep at Princeton on February 18, 1967, at 62, and 600 people came to Alexander Hall — Groves, Bethe, Kennan, Balanchine. Kitty dropped the urn into the sea within sight of their beach house on Saint John and was dead herself by October 1972. Their daughter Toni inherited the house, lost a translating job at the United Nations because the FBI would not clear her over the old charges against her father, and hanged herself there in 1977, leaving the land to the people of Saint John. The house had been built too close to the water. A hurricane took it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Born-Oppenheimer approximation article
  Written with Max Born and still the standard method in molecular physics 1927
• Oppenheimer-Phillips process discovery
  With Melba Phillips, on deuteron stripping 1935
• On Massive Neutron Cores article
  With George Volkoff — the mass limit above which a neutron star cannot hold 1939
• On Continued Gravitational Contraction article
  With Hartland Snyder — black holes, published the month Germany invaded Poland 1939
• Los Alamos Laboratory company
  He picked the mesa and ran it until the end of 1945 1943
• Prospects in the Arts and Sciences speech
  His first public appearance after the clearance was taken 1954

• 1921 aged ~17 Colitis from a prospecting trip delays college and sends him to New Mexico He later said physics and desert country were his two great loves, and bought the ranch he called Perro Caliente.
• 1925 aged ~21 Leaves Harvard summa cum laude after three years
• March 1927 aged 22 Takes his doctorate at Göttingen at 23
• November 1, 1940 aged 36 Marries Katherine Puening the day she obtained a divorce in Reno
• January 4, 1944 aged 39 Jean Tatlock kills herself Security agents had tailed him to her apartment seven months earlier.
• 1947 aged ~43 Takes the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study The offer came from Lewis Strauss. It included a 17th-century manor, a cook and 265 acres.
• 1954 aged ~50 The Atomic Energy Commission takes his security clearance Henry D. Smyth was the lone dissenter in a 4 to 1 decision.
• December 2, 1963 aged 59 Receives the Enrico Fermi Award, 10 days after Kennedy was killed Kennedy had wanted him to have it. Edward Teller had recommended him. Several congressmen boycotted the ceremony.
• February 18, 1967 aged 62 Dies in his sleep at Princeton

• Edward Teller 1908–2003
  Physicist and advocate of the hydrogen bomb whose work and policy influence shaped Cold War science and defense. testified against him in 1954
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. colleague at the Institute
• Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957
  Senator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties. ordered the hearing's political weather
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. wanted him to have the medal
• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. presented the Fermi Award
• Richard Feynman 1918–1988
  Theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics and his accessible teaching style. hired him at Los Alamos