While Oppenheimer will always be recognized as the father of the atomic bomb, his early contributions to quantum mechanics form the bedrock of modern quantum chemistry. The Born-Oppenheimer approximation offers a way to simplify the complex problem of describing molecules at the atomic level. This field, known as computational quantum chemistry, has grown exponentially with the widespread availability of faster, more powerful high-end computational resources. Nevertheless, the application of quantum chemistry made possible by the Born-Oppenheimer approximation will continue to expand and improve. In the future, a new era of quantum computers could make computational quantum chemistry even more robust by performing faster computations on increasingly large molecular systems.

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Persons: Robert Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer, J, Robert Oppenheimer's, Werner Heisenberg, Ernest Lawrence, Max Born, ₂ Organizations: Service Locations: United States, Wall, Silicon