Robert Oppenheimer Research Paper

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J. Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904 in New York City. Oppenheimer was the son of Julius S. Oppenheimer and Ella Friedman. His father, Julius, was a wealthy merchant who fled Europe as a teenager to escape the Jewish persecution by joining a flood of émigrés who were also searching for religious freedom in the United States. Oppenheimer’s mother was Ella Friedman, she was an artist. Ella was also Jewish but her family had been residing in New York for a few generations. Julius and Ella married in 1903 and a year later Robert, their first son, was born. Oppenheimer later became an older brother to Frank Oppenheimer, his one and only brother. They always kept very close relations with each other.

Robert Oppenheimer grew
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Instead, his father hired him a tutor and sent him to the West to New Mexico. It wasn’t until the following fall of 1922 that Robert was able to return and enroll at Harvard. He became part of an intense program where he took several math and science classes, as well as Eastern religions, philosophy, English and French literature. Oppenheimer actually preferred chemistry among all the science classes he took because it "starts right at the heart of things." He was also under the privilege of working with Percy Bridgeman, an experimental physicist. Furthermore, Oppenheimer was able to graduate summa cum laude in 1925. However, despite his achievements, Oppenheimer remained with a lot of doubt, he confessed feeling "a very great sense of revulsion and wrong." Therefore in his last semester at Harvard, he decided to leave to England and apply to study with Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Rutherford, however, turned him down because he believed Oppenheimer’s credentials were inadequate. Afterwards, Oppenheimer applied to Joseph John Thomson at the Cavendish to conduct research but felt he wasn’t learning much. This conflict then alluded him to focus on theoretical physics. In 1926, Robert Oppenheimer attended the University of Göttingen and studied under Max Born. He obtained his Ph.D. at age 22 on March