Robert Oppenheimer

Ethical Science

Dilemma Unit

Teacher Background Notes

Overview

• J. Robert Oppenheimer1904 – 1967

• Dilemma of a scientist : security of a nation in war and their own conscience in using advanced science technology for war

Introduction • Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in New

York City on April 22, 1904

• Father Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy German textile merchant, and Mother Ella Friedman, an artist, were of Jewish descent but did not observe the religious traditions

• Robert lived a sheltered, comfortable early life

Early Education

• Early education was at the Ethical Culture School in New York.

• Studied math and science classes, but also enthusiastically studied Greek, Latin, French, and German.

• A talent for languages and often learned another language quickly just to read something in its original language.

Young Man

• Taking a year off before starting college at Harvard due to an attack of colitis, Robert traveled with a former English teacher to New Mexico, where he fell in love with horseback riding and the mountains and plateaus of the American Southwest. He returned reinvigorated

University• Robert learned Dutch in six weeks in order to

give a technical talk in the Netherlands

• He maintained an interest in classics and eastern philosophy throughout his life

• Studied at Harvard in 1922, started as a chemist, but switched to physics

• Graduated summa cum laude (Degrees summa cum laude used to be quite rare ---- top one percent of students) in 1925

Research Life

• Studied further in England to conduct research at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, working under Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Prize Chemistry – Atomic structure 1908)

• He obtained his PhD at the age of 22 in Germany from the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born (Nobel Prize Physics – Quantum Theory 1954)

The Scientist

• Robert published many important contributions to the newly developed quantum theory, most notably a famous paper on the so-called Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules.

The Scientist II

• Robert was an intense person, tall, thin, contemplative, and probing.

• After the oral exam for his PhD, the professor administering it said, "Phew, I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."

The Leader

• In 1927, return to Harvard to study mathematical physics as a National Research Council Fellow

• Early 1928, he studied at the California Institute of Technology. He accepted an assistant professorship in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and maintained a joint appointment with California Institute of Technology.

• In the ensuing 13 years, he "commuted" between the two universities, and many of his associates and students commuted with him.

The Leader II• He was an extraordinary teacher and an

excellent theoretician.

• Credited with being a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics.

• Important research in astrophysics, nuclear physics, spectroscopy and quantum field theory.

The Leader III

• Important contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers, and led toward descriptions of quantum tunneling

• His analyses predicted the neutron, positron, meson, and neutron stars.

• In the 1930s, he was the first to write papers suggesting the existence of what we today call black holes

The Real World• Absorbed in his studies and the theoretical world of

physics, he was often somewhat distracted from the "real world."

• The rise of fascism in the 1930s caught his attention, and he took a strong stand against it.

• By 1939, Niels Bohr (Nobel Prize Physics – Electron Configuration 1922) brought news to the U.S. that Germans had split the atom.

• The implication that the Nazis could develop extremely powerful weapons prompted President Roosevelt to establish the Manhattan Project in 1941

• In November 1940, Oppenheimer married Katherine Peuning Harrison, a radical Berkeley student

Reaction

• But his political activity did not reach much further than donations, occasional discussion groups, and benefits and parties that he hosted for causes.

• Meanwhile, he watched the mistreatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany with what he later described as "continuous, smoldering fury."

First steps

• May 1941 they had their first child, Peter. • World War II began, Oppenheimer eagerly

became involved in the efforts to develop an atomic bomb, which were already taking up much of the time and facilities of Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley.

• He was invited to take over work on neutron calculations, and in June 1942 General Leslie Groves appointed Oppenheimer as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.

Los Alamos• Under Oppenheimer's guidance, the

laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico were constructed.

• He brought the best minds in physics to work on the problem of creating an atomic bomb.

• He was managing more than 3,000 people, as well as tackling theoretical and mechanical problems that arose.

• The "father" of the atomic bomb. (In 1944, the second child, Katherine (called Toni), was born at Los Alamos.)

The Atomic Age

• The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the first nuclear explosion at Alamagordo on July 16, 1945, which Oppenheimer named "Trinity."

• "We knew the world would not be the same," he said.

• Within a month, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities. Japan surrendered on August 10, 1945.

Outcome• "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

• Some of the lab's scientists were unsure of their ethical standing in producing such a weapon to be used against civilians.

• Oppenheimer, however, agreed with those who urged the first use of the bomb against an actual target – and not as a demonstration.

• In particular, his arguments against staging a demonstration were that the bomb was not certain to work (and a failed weapon might even be used against its builders by the enemy), that POWs might be moved to any target area for which advance warning was given, and that a demonstration would never be as effective as use against what the military had termed "built-up areas" – populated cities.

Application

• This was the policy implemented by President Truman on August 6, 1945, when the uranium bomb, "Little Boy," destroyed Hiroshima with the explosive force of 15,000 tons of TNT.

• Three days later, a plutonium bomb, "Fat Man," was set loose on Nagasaki. Either immediately or through injuries sustained in the blasts, the two bombs killed an estimated 210,000 people, ninety-five percent of them civilians.

• Six days after the second bomb, Japan surrendered.

Reflection• After initial euphoria stemming from the success of a

job well done, Oppenheimer slumped into despair as casualty reports streamed in from Japan

• "If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of the a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand."

Change

• In the next few years, Oppenheimer would lobby vigorously for international control of atomic energy, in the framework of which the Soviet Union and the United States would submit to a supranational organization designed to allow sharing of peaceful atomic energy information while keeping weapons development to a monitored minimum

The End of the War• After the war, Oppenheimer chaired the U.S.

Atomic Energy Commission (1947 - 1952)• He opposed developing an even more powerful

hydrogen bomb. • President Truman approved it, Oppenheimer

did not argue, but his initial reluctance and the political climate turned against him.

The End of the War II

• In 1953, at the height of U.S. anticommunist feeling, Oppenheimer was accused of having communist sympathies,

• His security clearance was taken away. • He had friends who were communists,

mostly people involved in the antifascist movement of the thirties.

• This loss of security clearance ended Oppenheimer's influence on science policy

Final Impact

• The scientific community, with few exceptions, was deeply shocked by the decision of the AEC.

• In 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to redress these injustices by honoring Oppenheimer with the Atomic Energy Commission's prestigious Enrico Fermi Award

Personal Summary

• "Up until now and even more in the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took any action, hardly did anything, or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper on physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. It turned out to be impossible . . . for me to live with anybody else, without understanding that what I saw was only one part of the truth . . . and in an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did. And I needed what they saw, needed them."

Conclusion• Final position of Director of the Institute of

Advanced Study at Princeton (1947 – 1966)

• In the final years of his life, he discussed the problems of intellectual ethics and morality

• He died of throat cancer in February 18 1967

• “Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful”