“I became death, the destroyer of worlds” – the debate surrounding Oppenheimer’s personality and statements continues to this day

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born into a rich and educated New York family, his father emigrated from Germany. In addition to chemistry, he studied physics, literature and philosophy at Harvard College, and graduated with honors in three years.

His interest turned to atomic physics, and from 1924 he studied and worked at the Cavendish Institute in Cambridge, England, under the guidance of Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford. Two years later he went to Göttingen to study with Max Born, where he met Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Ede Teller. He received his doctorate in 1927, and that same year – together with Born – he proved one of the important theorems of modern quantum chemistry:

the Born–Oppenheimer approximation made it possible to separate the motion of the nucleus and electrons.

Upon returning home, he taught physics at Berkeley and continued his research in the field of quantum physics and relativity theory, mainly investigating the energy processes of elementary particles.

The chain-smoking scientist nicknamed Oppie created the American school of theoretical physics.

He showed that, contrary to Dirac’s assumption, the proton cannot be the antiparticle of the electron, the real “antielectron”, the positron, was discovered in 1932 by Carl David Anderson.

Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist, university professor, academician, one of the pioneers of molecular physics and nuclear physics, was born on April 22, 1904 in New York (Photo: MTI/KÜ)

In the 1930s, he became interested in politics because of the depressing social consequences of the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism. He held left-wing views, he came into contact with the communist movement through one of his loves, but he never joined the party. During the Spanish Civil War, he supported republicans and anti-fascist organizations. He broke with the communists due to Stalin’s purges, which were also fatal for Soviet scientists, but during his later deportation, this phase of his life was brought up as an accusation against him.

In August 1939, on the eve of World War II, Albert Einstein, Leó Szilárd and Jenő Wigner warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a letter that Germany might soon be able to produce nuclear weapons. The President immediately approved the creation of the “Uranium Advisory Committee”. The committee held its first meeting on October 21. Lyman James Briggs, a National Bureau of Standardsthat is, under the chairmanship of the director of the National Bureau of Standards, and budgeted six thousand dollars for Fermi’s neutron experiments at the University of Chicago.

In 1942, the US military took control of the top-secret program, codenamed the Manhattan Plan.

Oppenheimer was entrusted with the scientific leadership of the research group of more than five thousand people and the creation of the research center. He suggested Los Alamos near Santa Fé, New Mexico, where he spent part of his childhood, as the location. Every step of the participants was monitored by the army and the FBI, and due to his previous political activities, Oppenheimer was under particularly strict surveillance. His situation became even more difficult when a former friend with communist connections surrounded three of his students regarding the release of nuclear secrets.

The program, whose budget grew from an initial six thousand dollars in 1945 to two billion, was a success. The first experimental atomic explosion was carried out at the Alamogordo air base on July 16, already after the German capitulation. The effect was shocking, the buildings in the epicenter of the plutonium bomb were completely destroyed, the resulting mushroom cloud could reach a height of 15-20 kilometers, the radioactive fallout reached almost all federal states, and even Mexico and Canada. According to recollections, seeing this, Oppenheimer quoted from one of his favorite readings, the holy book of the Hindu religion, the Bhagavad-gita:

“Said the Exalted Lord: Now I am Death, destroyer of worlds”.

The atomic bomb was detonated in August 1945 against Japan, which was still holding out, over Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and has not been used since then. Oppenheimer, struggling with his conscience, resigned from his position in October 1945 after seeing the terrible destruction, and from 1947 he headed the Advisory Board of the Atomic Energy Commission. He saw the creation of the atomic weapon as an irreparable development and fought to bring the atomic bomb under international control, and opposed the development of the hydrogen weapon.

The American nuclear monopoly ended in 1949, with the detonation of the Soviet atomic bomb.

At the height of the Cold War, in the midst of McCarthy’s anti-communist hysteria, Oppenheimer was also targeted. In 1953, he was classified as a security risk, accused of having previous communist ties, and summoned before the Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities. His fellow scientists stood by him at the hearings. The investigation finally cleared him up, but he was stripped of his state positions and pushed to the fringes of academic life. He then led a research center in Princeton, and after 1950 he did not publish any new studies. He was already seriously ill when he received the Atomic Energy Commission’s highest award, the Enrico Fermi Award, in 1963, essentially rehabilitating him. He retired in 1966, and died of throat cancer not long after, on February 18, 1967, in Princeton.

His statements about the responsibility of scientists and the moral issues related to great discoveries started debates that continue to this day. The film Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan, was released last year and received numerous accolades and received Oscars in seven categories.