![]() Julius arrived in New York in the spring of 1888, several years after his older brother Emil. In the late 1880s, the Rothfelds sent word to Benjamin Oppenheimer that there was room in the business for his sons. The company did extremely well serving the city's flourishing new trade in ready-made clothing. Stern, to start a small company to import men's suit linings. Within a few years these two young men-named Sigmund and Solomon Rothfeld-joined another relative, J. ![]() In 1870, two of Benjamin's cousins by marriage emigrated to New York. Julius had two brothers and three sisters. Julius' father, Benjamin Pinhas Oppenheimer, was an untutored peasant and grain trader who had been raised in a hovel in "an almost medieval German village," Robert later reported. Robert's father, Julius Oppenheimer, was born on May 12, 1871, in the German town of Hanau, just east of Frankfurt. And yet, it was the irony of Robert Oppenheimer's odyssey that a life devoted to social justice, rationality and science would become a metaphor for mass death beneath a mushroom cloud. It was no accident that the young boy who would become known as the father of the atomic era was reared in a culture that valued independent inquiry, empirical exploration and the free-thinking mind-in short, the values of science. This was at the same time an innovative approach to the quandaries any immigrant to America faced-and yet for Robert Oppenheimer it reinforced a lifelong ambivalence about his Jewish identity.Īs its name suggests, Ethical Culture was not a religion but a way of life that promoted social justice over self-aggrandizement. Without rejecting their Jewishness they chose to shape their identity within a uniquely American offshoot of Judaism-the Ethical Culture Society-that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism. Ethnically and culturally Jewish, the Oppenheimers of New York belonged to no synagogue. He came from a family of first- and second-generation German immigrants striving to be American. Theodore Roosevelt was using the bully pulpit of the White House to argue that good government in alliance with science and applied technology could forge an enlightened new Progressive Era. In America, reform movements were challenging the old order. ![]() Suddenly, the universe appeared to have changed.Īround the globe, scientists were soon to be celebrated as a new kind of hero, promising to usher in a renaissance of rationality, prosperity and social meritocracy. And then, in 1905, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity. Max Planck, Marie Curie and Pierre Curie and others provided further insights into the nature of the atom. Radioactivity was discovered on March 1, 1896, by the French physicist Henri Becquerel. Theoretical physicists across the globe were beginning to alter the way we understand space and time. But simultaneously an esoteric band of scientists was creating an even more fundamental revolution. These technological innovations quickly changed the lives of ordinary men and women. A nation on horseback was soon transformed by the internal combustion engine, manned flight and a multitude of other inventions. In the first decade of the twentieth century, science initiated a second American revolution. Sherwin, authors of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. A new biography describes a complex, contradictory and at times mystical genius who defies easy labels. Robert Oppenheimer is more than how the world's most destructive weapon came to be. He is remembered as the father of the bomb. Robert Oppenheimer hide caption toggle caption ![]() Detail from the cover of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. ![]()
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