7 Facts You Did Not Know About The Father of the Atomic Bomb

J. Robert Oppenheimer was more than just a physicist

Physicist and ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’, J. Robert Oppenheimer

1. Robert Oppenheimer was a scholar and quite a genius. He skipped three grades from his elementary school and graduated at quite a young age with distinction. He joined Harvard College after 18 and was exceptionally good at English and French literature. Reportedly, he was also the youngest member of the New York Mineralogical Society.
2. He faced depression throughout the later years of his life and had several psychological issues. Oppenheimer was sort of an unusual character. Throughout his life, he would often fall into depression and faced extreme psychological problems. His friend Francis Fergusson once shared an incident when Oppenheimer tried to strangle him when he shared his will to marry his girlfriend. He mentioned that Oppenheimer was under great depression and trauma.
3. He was a chain smoker. Oppenheimer was an avid smoker. He was often seen smoking cigars and cigarettes even while teaching. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1965 and 1967 at the age of 62 he died of the complications caused due to over-consumption of cigarettes.

Robert Oppenheimer at CERN, 1965. Wikimedia Commons Image

4. He regretted his decision on the Manhattan Project and the development of atomic bombs. After witnessing the Trinity Test in July 1945, and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings in August 1945, Oppenheimer was in a state of total internal chaos. He went on to resign from his post on the Manhattan Project and opposed the use of nuclear weapons in wars. In a 1965 interview, he stated,

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

The full video of Oppenheimer’s statement can be watched on Atomic Heritage’s official YouTube Channel:

5. He donated a certain percentage of his salary to support fleeing physicists. In 1934, Robert Oppenheimer donated three percent of his yearly salary that would be around $100 to support the families of physicists who were fleeing Germany from the German Reich. The amount for that time would be more than $2000 in 2022.

6. Robert Oppenheimer never had a stable love life. He met Jean Tatlock in 1936. Tatlock was an American physician and also a member of the Communist Party of the USA. They broke up in 1939. In the August of the same year, Oppenheimer fell in love with and started his affair with Katherine Puening who was already married to Richard Tolman. She divorced Tolman when she got pregnant and married Oppenheimer in 1940. He was her fourth husband. He continued his affair with Tatlock, who in 1944, committed suicide due to severe depression.

7. He never won a Nobel Prize. Oppenheimer was a prolific physicist and theoretician. He had significant contributions to theoretical astronomy, quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, and many other fields of science. He is also known for the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in quantum mechanics. He also worked on the gravitational collapse of black holes and neutron stars. However, he never won the Nobel Prize for his works. He was nominated three times for the prize in the years 1946, 1951, and 1967.

Colorized Image of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer at the IAS, 1947. Image source.

Thank you so much for reading. If you like my work and want to support me then you can become a medium member by using this link or buy me a coffee ☕️. Keep following for more such stories.