J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City to Ella and Julius Oppenheimer on April 22, 1904. He was educated at the private Ethical Culture School. This institution had been founded by Felix Adler, a strong advocate of modern liberal humanism, who argued in the disastrous wake of World War I that the only way to avoid such catastrophes in the future was to create a single world government. These ideas deeply influenced Oppenheimer’s later political thought. In 1925 Oppenheimer completed an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Harvard in just three years. He also developed an intense interest in experimental physics and decided to pursue further study in that field. Since there was at that time no world-class department of physics in the United States, he enrolled at Cambridge University in England. After a year, however, it became obvious that he did not have the painstaking technique necessary to become a great laboratory experimenter, and he switched to the study of theoretical physics at Göttingen in Germany, completing his PhD in 1927. He took his advanced degree in German and lectured the following year in Dutch (a language he learned in only a few weeks) during an academic appointment in the Netherlands. Oppenheimer had a remarkable facility with language; he not only was proficient in Greek, Latin, and French (all commonly taught in the universities of the time) but also learned Sanskrit simply for his own reading interests.