At the age of 5 Oppenheimer went on a trip to visit his family home in Germany, where his grandfather lives. His grandfather Ben gave him a small bag of minerals, which triggered a hobby that was to last for years "Mineralogy." Oppenheimer was to spend hours-collecting samples, and cataloguing and polishing them. By the age of 11 he had been elected a member of the New York Mineralogical Club. About a year later he delivered his first paper there. His parents said that there was no doubt that he was clever, and at school a star.

Although both his parents were Jewish, they rejected orthodox Jewish society and culture. They sent Robert, and later his brother Frank (who was 8) to the school run by the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The school's founder was another German immigrant, Felix Adler. He believed that human values did

In 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard warned the US government about the danger of attacking. The Nazis could be the first to create an atomic bomb, and if they do all of humanity could be destroyed. Oppenheimer then began to find a way to split uranium-235, from natural uranium. Also to determine the critical mass of uranium to make such a bomb. August 1942 the US army was given the responsibility of organizing a way to harness nuclear energy for military purposes. This became know as the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer was told to establish and administer a laboratory to carry out the assignment. In 1943 he chose the plateau of Los Alamos, near Santa Fe, New Mexico. This was where he spent part of his childhood in boarding school.

By the time he was eighteen his father had given him a twenty-eight-foot sloop, which he called Trimethy. Came from the name of a chemical compound, trimethylene dioxide. Oppenheimer and his brother sailed all over the area. As a teenager he developed a sense for danger. He liked to find some sort of weakness within himself, and over power, or overcome it. When a storm would come up he liked to go sailing out across the bay. He would ride the tide through the inlet at Fire Island, and take it rite out into the Atlantic.

Oppenheimer's last year of school was spent learning, and with nonstop studying. That year he ended up graduating with ten straight A's. That summer his parents took again on a trip to Germany, where he went on a mineralogical field trip in the Harz Mountains. He came back extremely ill with trench dysentery. He would have problems digesting for the rest of his life. His parents and doctors decided that he was to ill to go to Harvard that year. He had to stay home in their apartment for the year with his books and thoughts. He was so bored he started rebelling against his parents, and locking himself in his room. Next spring his father sent him west with Herbert Smith (English teacher at the Ethical Culture School) to Colorado, into the mountains to recuperate.

Now he was taking second thoughts about chemistry and even having a career in science. A lot of his friends thought that he would give up science soon, and turn to writing. But his physicist teacher by the name of Percy Bridgman really got him interested. The subjected really caught his eye, and knew he was very interested. He says it was much more fundamental that chemistry. He considered it as the study that made everything work.

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One of the first machines Lawrence had built had an eleven-inch cyclotron chamber. The magnet required for it weighed 2 tons. Within no time at all they became larger and more powerful. The size went from an eleven-inch cyclotron to a sixty-inch cyclotron in a year, as they got bigger so did the magnets. At the time these were some of the most expensive pieces of scientific equipment built. It was Lawrence's enthusiasm and energy that made the funding possible. He was in so many ways like the exact opposite of Oppenheimer. Lawrence liked sports and going to the mo

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