The Genius Communist

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Science Story

Topics: Maths and Philosophy

Key personalities: Robert Oppenheimer

Country: USA

Time: 20th Century

What makes story captivating?
The life story of a brilliant scientist who made a significant contribution to science but got deeply affected due to allegations of being a communist.

Story:

Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York on April 22, 1904. Son of a wealthy Jewish family, he was a precocious child quickly becoming fluent in eight languages. Early in his life, he also became interested in physics & mathematics - subjects in which he would find his calling. He graduated from Harvard in 1925 and then went to study at the University of Göttingen in Germany where he earned his doctorate.

Oppenheimer returned to the United States in 1927 and started working at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). At Caltech, he worked with some of the most famous physicists of that time, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi.
In 1934 Oppenheimer became the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. It was during this time that Oppenheimer made some of his most significant contributions to physics - especially in the field of quantum mechanics, which explains the behavior of subatomic particles, and helped create the first nuclear reactor as well as the atom bomb.

In 1939, he was appointed head of the famed Manhattan Project, and was tasked with leading the development of the atomic bomb and make a working prototype a before Nazi Germany could do the same. In guiding his team to win one of the most consequential races our world ever faced, he fulfilled his fateful role successfully becoming one of the scientists instrumental in the Allied Powers winning WW2.

And on Jluly 16, 1945, when the light from the explosion of the first ever nuclear bomb filled the sky with a 'light of thousand suns' dazzling the watchers, he made his iconic quote borrowed from Bhagvada Gita, another thing which he is also known for but infamously: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” (He totally misunderstood the line by the way).

After the war, Oppenheimer became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He also served on the Atomic Energy Commission.

In 1954, he was accused of being a communist sympathizer in the infamous witch-hunt conducted by US senator Joseph McCarthy and had his security clearance revoked. He eventually lost his job at Berkeley and moved to Princeton, New Jersey.

Not only that, he was effectively blacklisted from working on any government projects.

The allegations were eventually found to be baseless, but it took many years for Oppenheimer to clear his name. Oppenheimer died of throat cancer (caused by chain smoking) on Feb 18, 1967 after falling into a coma three days earlier. He was 62.

Topics
Maths and philosophy