Robert oppenheimer thesis

Robert Oppenheimer. Born Julius Robert Oppenheimer on April 22, 1904, in New York City, Oppenheimer grew up in a Manhattan apartment adorned with paintings by van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin. His father, Julius Oppenheimer, was a German immigrant who worked in his family's textile importing business.

The physicist and historian Abraham Pais once asked Oppenheimer what he considered to be his most important scientific contributions; Oppenheimer cited his work on electrons and positrons, not his work on gravitational contraction. Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for physics three times, in 1946, 1951 and 1967, but never won.

In 1927, Oppenheimer received his doctorate, and in the same year, he worked with Born on the structure of molecules, producing the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation. Subsequently, he traveled from one prominent center of physics to another: Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Leyden, and Zurich.

From left to right, seated are: J. Robert Oppenheimer (holding pipe), Abraham Pais, Richard P. Feynman (seated, with pen in hand), and Herman Feshbach “His lectures were a great experience, for experimental as well as theoretical physicists,” commented the late physicist Hans Bethe (1906–2005), who would later work with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.