Today is Julius Robert Oppenheimer's 118th birthday.
The man who is best known by the title "father of the atom bomb" was born on 22 april 1904 in New York.
The picture shows the birthday boy with Albert Einstein. Both Einstein and Oppenheimer played a role in the work that gave "birth" to the atom bomb and both thought later that the bomb was a mistake, so to speak.
Einstein's work as a theoratical physicist, especially the connection between matter and energie expressed in the famous formula E=Mc^2 (Energie equals Mass multiplied by the speed of light to the power of two) revealed that a little mass could be converted into a lot of energy. A relatively small bomb could great a huge devastating explosion, unlike anything the human race had seen before.
By the end of World War II, both the Nazis and tha Allies were trying to build atom bombs. We can all be glad that das Uranprojekt (uranium project) which included such great scientist as Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker wasn't succesfull. Otherwise, the second world war would have gone very, very differently...
Back to our birthday child: Oppenheimer became head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and had an important role in the manhattan project.
He was 41 years old when he witnessed the Trinity Test at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico: the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.
This foto is of the mushroom cloud a few seconds after the explosion.
Oppenheimer was also the one to name the test "Trinity" from the works of the english poet John Donne (1572-1631).
By that time, Nazi Germany had already surrendered and the war was over in europe. Thus, the bomb was never used on germany, though some claim there were plans in the months before the surrendere to use an atomic bomb (once there was one) on Berlin or maybe an important industrial site. However, there was no point in the now.
The war was still going on in the pacific against the japanese. On 6 August 1945, the US dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and three days later another on Nagasaki, together killing between 129,000 and 226,000 people. Japan surrendered on 15 of august (the documents were signed on 2 september).
Oppenheimer later opposed the use of nuclear weapons, a nuclear arms race with the soviet union and the development of the hydrogen bomb. However, the bomb was "out there" and soon we had two superpowers threatening to kill each other (and more or less the human race) instead of having a "proper" war.
How would history have turned out, if the atom bomb hadn't been discovered? I suppose we would have seen a third world war between the soviet union and the US, Britain and others within a few years, during the 1950s or 1960s at the latest. And who knows how the world order would have been after that WWIII. Depending on the outcome, there might have been a World War IV shortly after that and so and so on.
The 20th century was the bloodiest in history (but let us not forget: there ware more people alive then than ever before, so of course more people could die) with two world wars, Mao Tse-Tung, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. But without the atom bomb and the fact that people were to affraid of a "proper" war and so chose a Cold War, I think it would have been much, much bloodier...
Oppenheimer died on 18 february 1967, aged 62. Did his life lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of people or did he bring a certain kind of peace to the world, although be it a peace based on fear? Or both?
Of course, he did a lot more in his life as a theoretical physicist and there is a lot of interesting things about him that I can't go into right now. But his name is and always will be linked to the atom bomb, so I focused on that in this little article.