J R Oppenheimer--1904-4-22--1967-2-18

Atomic bomb father Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer was sometimes called the father of the atomic bomb, but at UCB (University of California, Berkeley), he was also nicknamed Oppenheim by students. Oppenheimer’s life is full of emotions. When thinking about Oppenheimer’s life, the first point to look at is that he also has Jewish blood. The reality that Hitler focused on and persecuted the Jews as an ethnic group and was hostile to them is an immovable fact. The Jews must have felt a great sense of crisis in the world of being taken to concentration camps. In that sense of crisis, the history of the early 20th century may have been that geniuses grew up and united to create new things. The act of manufacturing weapons is not affirmed in such an era, but the debaters at that time also started talking about the persecution of Jews and introduced the flow to the Manhattan Project, and assembled a story that is easy for the public to understand. Probably.

Jewish physicists

Almost 100 years have passed since then, and I suspect that many people have developed this idea, but I would like to emphasize it again. The characters in the concrete world of physics are Einstein, Stern, Max Born, DJ Baume, E. Pauli, Landau, Feynman,

And this is Oppenheimer. (I can only think of it here now, but I will add it later whenever I come up with it.) The progress of physics at the beginning of this century brought about by such members was rapid. Its progress went beyond physics to engineering, industry, and even the political system. It can be said that it was in sync with the changes in the social system that began in the Russian Revolution in 1917. It seems that the feeling of obstruction at the beginning of this century was greatly changed by various efforts to overcome it. And it seems that the world, where dissatisfaction with Corona has increased and US-China relations have become tense these days, is approaching a dangerous world. Let’s make rational judgments and remarks by each person. Direction is important now.

Oppenheimer’s interest

Well, in fact, Oppanheimer finally manipulates six words. As a boy, he became interested in mineralogy, mathematics, geology and chemistry, finishing Harvard in three years and studying abroad in Cambridge. From there he goes to the University of Göttingen in theoretical physics and meets Born. Oppenheimer conducts research under the guidance of Born and jointly achieves achievements such as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. He then returned to the United States to teach at the California Institute of Technology and UCB, but with the outbreak of World War II, Oppenheimer was appointed as the first director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. So he developed the atomic bomb. This work changed the power balance of the world and changed the world later.

Oppenheimer in his later years

In his later years, Oppenheimer asked himself what the work he had accomplished and even left a word of regret. It was judged that the development and use of the atomic bomb during the war was necessary in the United States as a country, but in the subsequent era, even if each country did not use the atomic bomb, it would be the target of attack, and diplomacy. The atomic bomb is used as a threatening tool. Oppenheimer saw the invention that led to that as a “sin,” and he even opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb.

Oppenheimer also has another sin (?). Since Oppenheimer’s era was the Cold War era, he was pointed out that he had a connection with the Communist Party since he was a student, and eventually continued to be the target of the Red Scare. He was always under the supervision of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation under the Department of Justice). In 1965, he quietly ended his life at his home in New Jersey because of cancer. Gassho.