Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City in 1904 to a wealthy Jewish family and studied at Harvard, Cambridge, and Göttingen, where he earned his doctorate at twenty-three. By his thirties he had built the leading theoretical-physics group in America at Berkeley. In 1942 General Leslie Groves appointed him scientific director of the ; the bomb he supervised at Los Alamos was tested at Trinity on July 16, 1945. He later said the test brought to mind a line from the Bhagavad Gita: 'now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.' After the war he became a public advocate for international control of atomic weapons and opposed the hydrogen bomb; in 1954 a politically charged security hearing stripped him of his clearance. He was rehabilitated in 1963 with the Enrico Fermi Award and posthumously vindicated in 2022 when the Department of Energy formally vacated the 1954 ruling.
All Figures
Theoretical Physicist · Director of the Manhattan Project
J. Robert Oppenheimer
1,904 CE – 1,967 CE
The Berkeley physicist who led 130,000 people at Los Alamos to build the atomic bomb — and afterward called himself, in Sanskrit, 'death, the destroyer of worlds.'
Lifetime
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