Video Summary

238 words Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22nd, 1904 in New York City. He was the son of a wealthy textile importer and a painter. His parents were non-observant Jews. Oppenheimer attended the Ethical Culture Society School, an experimental school founded by social reformer Felix Adler. He then went to Harvard University, where he studied physics. After graduating from Harvard, Oppenheimer went to the University of Cambridge to study under Max Born. He earned his doctorate in physics from Cambridge in 1927. Oppenheimer returned to the United States in 1929 and began working as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He also became involved in left-wing politics and was a member of the Communist Party USA. In 1942, Oppenheimer was recruited by the U.S. government to lead the Manhattan Project, the secret project to develop the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer oversaw the development of the atomic bomb at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. The first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity test site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The bombs were then dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively. After the war, Oppenheimer became a leading advocate for international control of nuclear weapons. He also served as the first director of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). However, he was forced to resign from the AEC in 1954 after being accused of being a communist sympathizer. Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in 1967. He is considered one of the most important physicists of the 20th century and is often called the "father of the atomic bomb."