PHYSICIST NAME: Robert Oppenheimer
STUDENT NAME: Angela Mari Peralta (BS-IT2)
BIOGRAPHY & CONTRIBUTION
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904. His parents, Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy German textile merchant, and Ella Friedman, an artist, were of Jewish descent but did not observe the religious traditions. He studied at the Ethical Culture Society School, whose physics laboratory has since been named for him, and entered Harvard in 1922, intending to become a chemist, but soon switching to physics. He graduated summa cum laude in 1925 and went to England to conduct research at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, working under J.J. Thomson.
In 1926, Oppenheimer went to the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born, obtaining his Ph.D. at the age of 22. There, he published many important contributions to the then newly developed quantum theory, most notably a famous paper on the so-called Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules. In 1927, he returned to Harvard to study mathematical physics and as a National Research Council Fellow, and in early 1928, he studied at the California Institute of Technology. He accepted an assistant professorship in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and maintained a joint appointment with California Institute of Technology. In the ensuing 13 years, he "commuted" between the two universities, and many of his associates and students commuted with him.
Oppenheimer became credited with being a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics. He did important research in astrophysics, nuclear physics, and spectroscopy and quantum field theory. He made important contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers, and did work that eventually led toward descriptions of quantum tunneling.
OBJECT OF INTEREST
I chose Robert Oppenheimer because, for me, he’s like Albert Einstein. He discovered a lot of things that are really useful today. And it was not only his contributions that I admire; I was pretty amazed by him because he was the first one who suggested writing papers about the black hole which, intrigues me a lot.
Source:http://www.atomicarchive.com/Bios/Oppenheimer.shtml
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