Most of us have seen “Oppenheimer”, the hit film that described Oppenheimer’s discovery of the atomic bomb. But even after the movie, there is still a lot to learn about his childhood and his motivations to become, as he puts it, “death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904, in New York City. His father, Julius Oppenheimer, had a successful textile-importing business. On the other hand, his mother, Ella Oppenheimer, was a painter. The Oppenheimer family, as they had been a Jewish family, sent Julius to the Ethical Culture School. After graduating from there in 1921, he traveled to Germany for college but fell seriously ill. In order to cure his sickness, he started his journey back to the Americas and began to ride horses throughout New Mexico. During that adventure, Oppenheimer found the location that would later become the epicenter of the Manhattan Project in New Mexico.
In 1922, Oppenheimer joined Harvard University and after initially studying chemistry, later changed to physics. After his graduation, Oppenheimer received a job offer as a physics professor at Caltech in California. However, in 1929, Oppenheimer began to teach at the University of California – Berkeley. At the time, Berkeley became the hotspot for physics because of the significant contributions that Oppenheimer had made up until that point. Students from all over the world wanted to come to Berkeley to learn from Oppenheimer and be taught by him.
After his initial relationship with Jean Tatlock, a medical student and member of the Community Party, Oppenheimer married his wife, Katherine Puening, on November 1, 1940. Their first son, Peter, was born in May of 1941. Katherine was also a member of the Communist Party but Oppenheimer soon asked her to leave the party due to the onset of World War II and the looming threat of nuclear weapons
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