J. Robert Oppenheimer

At Berkeley, he had an affair with Jean Tatlock, a student from Stanford University School of Medicine and the daughter of a literature professor at Berkeley, in 1936.

He met Katherine Puening Harrison, a biologist at Berkeley who had been married thrice earlier. Oppenheimer married her on November 1, 1940 and the couple had two children named Peter and Katherine.

He was diagnosed with throat cancer and despite a successful chemotherapy; he fell into a coma and passed away.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born to Julius Oppenheimer, a rich textile importer and Ella Friedman, a painter by profession. His parents were German-Jews who had immigrated to America in 1888.

He studied at Alcuin Preparatory School initially and in 1911, he enrolled at the Ethical Culture Society School. It was here he completed his schooling in a short span of time and took a great deal of interest in the subject of ‘mineralogy’.

In 1922, he entered Harvard College to learn chemistry but later, studied literature, history, mathematics and theoretical and experimental physics as well. He graduated from the university in 1925.

He joined Christ’s College, Cambridge University and worked at the Cavendish Laboratory and was soon offered work by the famous British physicist, J.J Thomson, who agreed to take him on the condition that he completed a fundamental laboratory course.

In 1926, he joined the University of Gottingen, where he studied under, Max Born. At the time, the university was one of the premier institutions in the field of theoretical physics and it was here, he befriended a number of individuals who went to become famous including Enrico Fermi and Wolfgang Pauli.

In 1927, he was awarded a fellowship for research at the Harvard University and at the California Institute of Technology by the United States National Research Council.

In 1928, he gave lectures at the University of Leiden and then travelled to Zurich to work with his friend, Wolfgang Pauli, on quantum mechanics and the continuous spectrum.

He accepted the associate professorship at the University of California, Berkeley in 1929 and served this position for the next twenty years.

Apart from being a physicist, he started taking an active part in politics in the year 1934. He began donating a part of his salary to help German physicists escape from Nazi Germany and also began supporting social reforms, which were branded as ‘communist efforts’ later on.

In 1935, he worked with Melba Philips, a physicist and came up with the ‘Oppenheimer-Phillips process’, which is still in use even today.

At the University of Gottingen, he published a thesis paper on the ‘Born-Oppenheimer Approximation’, which became a notable paper in the study of quantum chemistry and expounds the wavefunction of molecules. This is considered one of his important early works.

His paper on the ‘Oppenheimer-Philips process’ opened a new dimension in nuclear fusion, which is still valid in the world of science today.

He made notable contributions to nuclear physics, spectroscopy, astrophysics, and quantum field theory. He was the first physicist to point out the existence of black holes.

He had made notable contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers that led to the description of quantum tunneling.