I Am Become Death Essay Research Paper

I Am Become Death Essay, Research Paper

It.s strange how the thousands of events that made up one man.s life eventually had a role in the fate of almost 200 thousand Japanese people and later the entire world. Here is the life of the one man. The man is J. Robert Oppenheimer. So little had an impact on so much. He was the man who was in charge of the Manhattan Project. It was the U.S. project to make an atomic bomb. A bomb with, at the time, unimaginable power. A bomb so powerful it could single-handedly destroy an entire city.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born to well to do Jewish parents on the twenty-second of April 1904. His father, Julius, ran a textile business and his mother, Ella, was a painter. He was born Robert Oppenheimer but his father felt this name wasn.t good enough so he added his initial J. in front. Relations of J. Robert.s grandfather came to New York in the later 1870.s to start up a business of importing cloth. Julius came to America in 1888 at the age of 17. He didn.t even speak English. He was to specialize in the importing of men.s clothing. He felt this was a growing area of interest and that he could make money. Robert visited Germany at age 5 and his grandfather introduced him to the hobby of mineralogy, which he kept up with for years to come. He even joined the New York Mineralogy Club at just eleven years old.

Robert was good in school and did particularly well. By the time he was eleven years old he was able to speak much Greek. He was said to try to soak up as much knowledge as possible. He didn.t like sports. He tried to play tennis but because he was bad at it, he didn.t want to continue. He spoke many different languages including Latin, Greek, French, and German. He often learned a language just so he could read a book in its original language. In just six weeks, he learned Dutch just so he could give a presentation in the Netherlands.

After his last year of school, he went to Germany with his parents but contracted trench dysentery, which also gave rise to colitis. He had problems with digestion from then on. When he returned to New York he was too sick to attend Harvard so he waited until the following year. He completed a four-year chemistry program in just three years and he also graduated summa cum laude in 1925. He also studied eastern philosophy and physics at Harvard. He continued his post-graduate work in physics at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge. He didn.t do to well at Cambridge at first. It may have been to much stress from all the studying at Harvard. He saw a psychiatrist who said that he had dementia praecox, now discarded and thought to be something with symptoms like schizophrenia. He eventually took a vacation to Corsica. He and some friends hiked around the island. The break was just what he needed and it helped him to .heal.. He became a little more stable mentally. He had recovered from his depression. On his way back to Cambridge, he meet his first love, Katherine Page. He also decided not to stay much longer at Cambridge. He continued his work at the University of Gottingen. It was more of a theoretical center than Cambridge. Here he and Max Born developed the .Born-Oppenheimer Method., their contribution to molecular quantum theory. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1927. He went to Harvard as a research fellow and this took him to the California Institute of Technology. He taught and did research. He later accepted an academic position at the University of California-Berkley. He investigated electron-positron pairs, cosmic ray theory, and deuteron reactions. In the 30.s he allied with Communist students to side with the republic during the Spanish Civil War. He was; however, never a member of the Communist Party. He protested the mistreatment of scientist under Stalin.s rule.

On November first Robert married Kitty Puening. She was a German and claimed to be a German princess. He parents had come to the United States when she was two. Robert was her fourth husband. In May of 1941 she gave birth to their first child, Peter.

In 1939 Niels Bohr brought news that the Germans had split the Atom. Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard told the U.S. that it was dangerous to allow the Nazi.s to have the power of the atom. The United States started the Manhattan Project, and American led-military effort to make the bomb for wartime use. Oppenheimer soon became involved and in 1942 Gen. Groves chose him to direct the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer later suggested that instead of the scientists working on the project in several areas, they should all be located at one facility. Groves approved the idea and the Manhattan Project moved to Los Alamos. Robert believed that it would be better to concentrate everybody in one area for reasons of making it easier to accomplish work and share ideas and Groves liked the idea because it increased security.

In early research of the bomb scientist knew very little. They worked on the basis that nuclear fission provided an incredible amount of energy for just a little bit of matter. It would only take a fraction of the amount of nuclear fragments to produce the same amount of energy as a large amount of TNT. There was a theory that if you bombarded a large nucleus with a neutron you could split the atom and this fission would create a large amount of energy. Also the splitting of the nucleuses would cause a chain reaction sending neutrons outward to sp