Aug+5+,1937

August 5 1937

Dear Diary Today’s weather was great. Sunshine shining through my window, birds were singing as usual. Yesterday, I read on the newspaper that my college, California Institute of Technology, is becoming more famous throughout the world. This was a great news for me because it showed my how my hard work paid me back. Today I was following my usual routine: Waking up at 6:30, washing myself, attending physics 106, and studying in my dorm. Suddenly, someone knocked on my door while I was studying physics. I opened the door, and the mailman gave me an envelope that had University of Berkeley on the top left corner. I opened the envelope and there was a request letter for me to teach at UC Berkeley. I had gotten these types of requests many times from many different colleges; however, this one felt different. I was very excited about this request and I decided to accept and teach there. I just sent a letter to my lovely brother, telling this great news had happened to me. After deciding to teach at UC Berkeley, I went down to the cafe to read some newspaper. I read about Japan’s invasion of China. I was shocked when I read this article. I thought China was a powerful country that would never be invaded by other countries. Japan is surely becoming more and more dominantly powerful. This made me think about what would happen if Japan invades over the United States. I think my nation, United States, needs to get ready to fight back to the Japanese army. While I was thinking about a war between US and Japan, I was thinking about weapons that would be used in the war. Weapons are all about physics, which is my field of studying. If we do go on a war with Japan, my daily life would be very depressing because I would always have to be in a laboratory, working on creating better weapons for the war. I was thinking about how I should be creating a weapon that would give Japan an enormous impact. I just got of the phone with my little brother, Dennis Frank Oppenheimer, and he told me about how I should help the US by creating a great impact giving bomb. This made me think a lot and now I will be going back to work on physics. I will be researching about bombs and I should start thinking about how I would create such harmful weapons to defeat the Japanese. Good bye

-Robert Oppenheimer