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‫د‬/3 ‫بحث سعد محمد سعد النويران‬

J. Robert Oppenheimer (born April 22, 1904, New York, New York,
U.S.—died February 18, 1967, Princeton, New Jersey) was an
American theoretical physicist and science administrator, noted as
director of the Los Alamos Laboratory (1943–45) during
development of the atomic bomb and as director of the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton (1947–66). Accusations of disloyalty led
to a government hearing that resulted in the loss of his security
clearance and of his position as adviser to the highest echelons of
the U.S. government. The case became a cause célèbre in the world
of science because of its implications concerning political and moral
issues relating to the role of scientists in government.

Early life and education


Oppenheimer was the son of a German immigrant who had made
his fortune by importing textiles in New York City. During his
undergraduate studies at Harvard University, Oppenheimer
excelled in Latin, Greek, physics, and chemistry, published poetry,
and studied Eastern philosophy. After graduating in 1925, he sailed
for England to do research at the Cavendish Laboratory at the
University of Cambridge, which, under the leadership of Lord
Ernest Rutherford, had an international reputation for its
pioneering studies on atomic structure. At the Cavendish,
Oppenheimer had the opportunity to collaborate with the British
scientific community in its efforts to advance the cause of atomic
research.
Max Born invited Oppenheimer to University of Göttingen, where
he met other prominent physicists, such as Niels Bohr and P.A.M.
Dirac, and where, in 1927, he received his doctorate. After short
visits at science centres in Leiden and Zürich, he returned to the
United States to teach physics at the University of California at
Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.
In the 1920s the new quantum and relativity theories were engaging
the attention of science. That mass was equivalent to energy and
that matter could be both wavelike and corpuscular carried
implications seen only dimly at that time. Oppenheimer’s early
research was devoted in particular to energy processes of subatomic
particles, including electrons, positrons, and cosmic rays. He also
did groundbreaking work on neutron stars and black holes. Since
quantum theory had been proposed only a few years before, the
university post provided him an excellent opportunity to devote his
entire career to the exploration and development of its full
significance. In addition, he trained a whole generation of U.S.
physicists, who were greatly affected by his qualities of leadership
and intellectual independence.
Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project
The rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany stirred his first interest in
politics. In 1936 he sided with the republic during the Civil War in
Spain, where he became acquainted with communist students.
Although his father’s death in 1937 left Oppenheimer a fortune that
allowed him to subsidize anti-fascist organizations, the tragic
suffering inflicted by Joseph Stalin on Russian scientists led him to
withdraw his associations with the Communist Party—in fact, he
never joined the party—and at the same time reinforced in him a
liberal democratic philosophy. In 1939, Oppenheimer began an
affair with Katharine Puening, a graduate student in botany at the
University of California, Los Angeles. Puening divorced her
husband and married Oppenheimer in 1940.
After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939, the
physicists Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner warned
the U.S. government of the danger threatening all of humanity if the
Nazis should be the first to make a nuclear bomb. Oppenheimer
then began to seek a process for the separation of uranium-235
from natural uranium and to determine the critical mass of
uranium required to make such a bomb. In August 1942 the U.S.
Army was given the responsibility of organizing the efforts of British
and U.S. physicists to seek a way to harness nuclear energy for
military purposes, an effort that became known as the Manhattan
Project. Oppenheimer was instructed to establish and administer a
laboratory to carry out this assignment. In 1943 he chose the
plateau of Los Alamos, near Santa Fe, New Mexico. For reasons that
have not been made clear, Oppenheimer in 1942 initiated
discussions with military security agents that culminated with the
implication that some of his friends and acquaintances were agents
of the Soviet government. This led to the dismissal of a personal
friend on the faculty at the University of California. In a 1954
security hearing, he described his contribution to those discussions
as “a tissue of lies.”
The joint effort of outstanding scientists at Los Alamos culminated
in the first nuclear explosion, on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity Site
near Alamogordo, New Mexico, after the surrender of Germany. In
October of the same year, Oppenheimer resigned his post. In 1947
he became head of the Institute for Advanced Study and served
from 1947 until 1952 as chairman of the General Advisory
Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, which in October
1949 opposed development of the hydrogen bomb.
Security hearing and later years
On December 21, 1953, he was notified of a military security report
unfavourable to him and was accused of having associated with
communists in the past, of delaying the naming of Soviet agents,
and of opposing the building of the hydrogen bomb. The following
year, a security hearing declared him not guilty of treason but ruled
that he should not have access to military secrets. As a result, his
contract as adviser to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was
canceled. The Federation of American Scientists immediately came
to his defense with a protest against the trial. Oppenheimer was
made the worldwide symbol of the scientist who, while trying to
resolve the moral problems that arise from scientific discovery,
becomes the victim of a witch hunt. He spent the last years of his
life working out ideas on the relationship between science and
society.
Oppenheimer’s legacy
In 1963 U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson presented Oppenheimer with
the Enrico Fermi Award of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Oppenheimer retired from the Institute for Advanced Study in 1966
and died of throat cancer the following year. In 2014, 60 years after
the proceedings that effectively ended Oppenheimer’s career, the
U.S. Department of Energy released the full, declassified transcript
of the hearing. While many of the details were already known, the
newly released material bolstered Oppenheimer’s assertions of
loyalty and reinforced the perception that a brilliant scientist had
been brought low by a bureaucratic cocktail of professional jealousy
and McCarthyism. In 2022 the Department of Energy formally
vacated the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Energy
Secretary Jennifer Granholm claimed that the “bias and unfairness”
of a “flawed process” had led to his exile from the nuclear
establishment. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), cast
Cillian Murphy in the title role of a film that explored
Oppenheimer’s role in the development of the atomic bomb and the
events that led to the 1954 security hearing.

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