1. He tried to poison his professor with an apple.
– Oppenheimer faced intense emotional issues and depression while studying Physics at Cambridge because of feeling inferior to his adviser, Patrick Blackett who was a gifted physicist.
– Out of jealousy he laced an apple with toxic chemicals and left it on Patrick’s desk, which he fortunately didn’t eat.
– Later he was expelled from the school and faced criminal charges, before his father intervened and negotiated that his son be put on academic probation instead.
2. He was the first to prove the existence of Black Holes.
– In 1939, Oppenheimer and his student published a paper in the journal Physical Review, outlining the key foundations of black holes.
– This was the only time in which Oppenheimer worked on black holes, but this brief research is often considered to be his greatest contribution to physics.
– However he did not pursue this groundbreaking experiment into black holes because he just wasn’t interested. The creator of the modern concept of black holes didn’t think they were that important!
3. He Unintentionally became The “Father of the Atomic Bomb”
– After the invasion of Poland by Nazi in 1939, Einstein warned the U.S. government of the Dangers if the Nazis became the first to make a nuclear bomb.
– In 1942 the U.S. Army began seeking a way to harness nuclear energy for military purposes, an effort that became known as the Manhattan Project which was led by Oppenheimer.
– He gathered a team of brilliant scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico and their work resulted in the successful Trinity test in 1945, bringing to life the very first Atomic Bomb.
4. President Truman called him a crybaby for feeling Guilty.
– Just two months after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer met with President Truman to discuss his concerns about a possible future nuclear war with the USSR.
– Maddened by the president’s ignorance, Oppenheimer said,”Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands” after which Truman was enraged and Kicked him out of the Office.
– Truman wrote in 1946 that the father of the atomic bomb was “a cry-baby scientist, Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have.”
5. The FBI monitored his every move.
– Oppenheimer’s romance with Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party attracted the attention of the FBI as a communist sympathizer. Tatlock was later found dead in her apartment from an apparent drug overdose.
– The FBI monitoring escalated to a point where the only privacy afforded to him were the conversations within his own home, stating that they needed to know if he might flee the country.
– These accusations only intensified the ongoing scrutiny and suspicion surrounding Oppenheimer’s loyalties. Atomic Energy Commission’s later claimed that he was potentially working as a Soviet spy.
6. His Students were obsessed with him.
– Oppenheimer was so gifted at crafting beautiful sentences that Some of these students became so obsessed with Oppenheimer that they began to dress and act like him.
– His students started donning his gray suit, chain-smoking his favorite Chesterfield cigarettes and mimicking his peculiar mannerisms.
– The starstruck students were nicknamed the “nim nim boys” because they carefully imitated Oppenheimer’s eccentric “nim nim” humming.
7. His was quite the Casanova.
– He married Kitty Harrison in 1940, but the two met and got together at the party of a fellow scientist while Kitty was still married.
– Oppenheimer had multiple affairs after having children with Kitty, not only with Tatlock but also with Ruth Sherman Tolman, a psychologist who was married to a good friend of Oppenheimer, who died of a broken heart.
– However his personal life was marked by tragedy. His first love, Jean Tatlock, suffered from mental health issues and was allegedly murdered by FBI while his son Peter struggled with undiagnosed schizophrenia.
8. His security clearance was restored 55 years after his Death.
– After Trinity, Oppenheimer opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, which the United States tested for the first time in 1952, as it was 1,000 times more powerful than the Atomic Bomb.
– The Atomic Energy Commission, revoked his security clearance in 1954 for his opposition of Hydrogen Bomb and his alleged left-wing connections, using Security Hearings in a way that were against regulations.
– The Biden Administration repealed the decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 2022, 55 years after his death, recognizing that the investigation that damaged his career was biased and unfair.
9. He could speak many languages, including ancient Sanskrit.
– He spoke six languages – Greek, Latin, French, German, Dutch (which he learned in six weeks to deliver a lecture in the Netherlands) and the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit.
– He famously recited a line quoted from the Bhagavad Gita after the Trinity test, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
– He had a passion for Poetry as well. One of his poems, a somber meditation titled “Crossing” even appeared in an issue of the Harvard literary magazine.
Oppenheimer’s life offer a glimpse into the complexities of this man, who, in his pursuit of scientific truth, ended up transforming the world forever.
