![]() “In addition to a superb literary style, he brought to them a degree of sophistication in physics previously unknown in the United States. “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. Feynman (seated, with pen in hand), and Herman Feshbach Robert Oppenheimer (holding pipe), Abraham Pais, Richard P. Marshak, Julian Schwinger, and David Bohm. Oppenheimer in 1947 at the Shelter Island conference where theoretical physicists gathered to discuss the state of their field in the aftermath of World War II. Accepting both, he divided his time between Pasadena and Berkeley, attracting his own circle of brilliant young physics students. In 1929, he received offers to teach at Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley. Subsequently, he traveled from one prominent center of physics to another: Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Leyden, and Zürich. 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. Oppenheimer met and studied with some of the day's most prominent figures, including Max Born and Niels Bohr. Uninspired by routine laboratory work, he went to the University of Göttingen, in Germany, to study quantum physics. He graduated summa cum laude in 1925 and afterwards went to Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory as research assistant to J. ![]() During a course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman, Higgins University Professor of Physics at Harvard, Oppenheimer was introduced to experimental physics, which quickly caught his attention. He was admitted to graduate standing in physics in his first year as an undergraduate on the basis of independent study. At Harvard, Oppenheimer studied mathematics and science, philosophy and Eastern religion, and French and English literature. In 1921, Oppenheimer graduated from the Ethical Culture School of New York at the top of his class. His younger brother, Frank, would also become a physicist. His mother, Ella Friedman, was a painter whose family had been in New York for generations. His father, Julius Oppenheimer, was a German immigrant who worked in his family's textile importing business. 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.
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