Learning about Robert Oppenheimer
The young grad student in physics, J. Robert Oppenheimer, is angry. He’s been held back by his professor, relegated to cleaning up the glassware he’s broken in the lab and therefore prevented from attending the lecture he’s been anticipating, a lecture by scientific luminary Niels Bohr. His reaction? Inject lethal potassium chloride into the shiny green apple that sits on his professor’s desk.
From there, the 2023 magnum opus film by Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer traverses four decades, hopscotching between classroom discussions about quantum mechanics with students at Cal Tech and Berkeley, work that transforms scientific theory into actual, threatening reality at the desert compound in Los Alamos, NM, fierce interrogation and damning witness testimonies gathered by an investigator in a narrow, windowless room, episodes of consuming passion and shattering grief, and all the while intensely focusing on the eyes, face, and profile of its subject: the Father of the Atomic Bomb.
Watch: Oppenheimer — on Directors' Library (directorslibrary.com)
The film is a welcome alternative to flash and dazzle film adventures that move from fight scene to fight scene with little or no storyline in between or set up mindless (for this audience of one, anyway) scenarios. That’s not to say these types of films are not enjoyable or at times flat-out LOL funny.
But Oppenheimer engages the mind, presenting complex philosophical and political historical realities as well as multi-layered relationships. Instead of leaving the theatre remembering snippets of filmed stunts, viewers leave Oppenheimer with questions about the man, the times, the science, the ramifications, the truths, and the lies.
While massive in scope and an often visual and auditory assault, Oppenheimer pays deeply personal, almost claustrophobic attention to Oppenheimer and his stoicism. He appears impassive while he watches the towering mushroom cloud, uncertain or confused by thunderous applause from Los Alamos Project colleagues days later, composed and almost quizzical while former friends provide damning testimony against him.
The historical novel Trinity takes the opposite approach. It presents seven different views of Oppenheimer through the eyes of seven different narrators:
An Army intelligence officer who trails Oppenheimer as he slips away from Los Alamos to San Francisco, where he meets, dines, dances, and spends the night with a dark-haired young woman.
A WAC at the Trinity test site who stands with Oppenheimer and sees the sky go completely white before “the earth under our feet lurched toward the mountains and the mountains tilted a foot to the right, and the trees leaped off the sides of the mountains.”
A friend who relives past memories with Oppenheimer only to learn later that he’s forgotten the unpleasant and painful ones.
A secretary at the Institute for Advanced Study who walks behind and takes dictation from Oppenheimer as he walks across campus and one day hears him tell what he considers to be his whole story.
A one-time neighbor who orders and reviews transcripts of the security hearings that asked witness after witness whether Oppenheimer could be trusted.
A student who hears Oppenheimer lecture about the connection between power and privilege and wonders what he has not yet comprehended.
A journalist who comes to believe that, in the days before his death, Oppenheimer still does not understand what little power he had over the processes he unleashed. ( Amazon.com: TRINITY: 9780062851970: Hall, Louisa: Books. For this author’s review of Trinity and other books, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviewer/k-m-sandrick/
The film and the novel lead to the same place: the desire to find out more about Oppenheimer and his times.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer is based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 2006 NY Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner.
The biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin explores Oppenheimer and his role during the Cold War. It has been praised for its scholarship and insights, “unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature.... It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior.” —The New York Times
The film has been vetted on its own for accuracy, by Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear technology and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Wellerstein notes, for example, that Oppenheimer did indeed try to poison his professor by injecting chemicals into the man’s apple while attending Cambridge in the 1920s, but Niels Bohr was not there or fingering the fruit at the time. (After the incident, Oppenheimer was placed on probation and required to meet with a psychiatrist.)
Other facts: a thunder storm did delay the first test of an atom bomb in the New Mexico desert, and the explosion was at first silent--an intense blast of light, fierce wind and mushroom cloud appeared before any sound was heard. (For more about fact vs. fiction in the movie, see: 'Oppenheimer' fact v. fiction: A nuclear historian breaks down what the movie got right and wrong, Story by jmcgrath@insider.com (Jenny McGrath).
Also true: the setting and nature of the hearings held in 1954 related to Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The FBI had, indeed, been tapping Oppenheimer’s phone yet refused to share tape recordings with him or his attorney, called him out repeatedly and humiliated him during the questioning, and revealed details about his affair with a former girlfriend while his wife was in the room, according to the hearing’s transcripts. (slate.com/culture/2023/07/oppenheimer-movie-historical-accuracy-communist-manhattan-project.html)
Louisa Hall’s Trinity
Author Louis Hall also was drawn to Oppenheimer by American Prometheus. In an interview with journalist Jennifer Croft in January, 2019, Hall notes that she “wanted to write a book about the difficulty of knowing other people, especially when the stakes are high: when we feel we have to understand someone ...but I was still looking for a form that would allow me to explore that difficulty…”
While reading about the hearings related to Oppenheimer’s security clearance, Hall was struck: “when his colleagues and friends and family members were called to testify on his behalf, or against him, and almost universally ended up admitting that they didn’t entirely understand the decisions he’d made, that despite years of friendship, even years of intimacy, they couldn’t be sure that they’d ever known him — I started to think that perhaps this was my form: a series of testimonials on the nature of a man who seemed to hold the keys to the most frightening new technology on the planet.” (On Oppenheimer: A Conversation with Louisa Hall on Her Novel, “Trinity” (lareviewofbooks.org)
A Journey of Discovery
With both film and novel leading to more questions than answers about Oppenheimer the man and the scientist, this author has begun a literary search, and the first few explorations reveal, certainly not surprisingly, complexity.
Biographies have characterized Oppenheimer as:
“A man who was put together of many bright shining splinters…[one who] never got to be an integrated personality." (Robert Oppenheimer. A Life Inside the Center)
“A dilettante [who] would not take his coat off and really get stuck in. He’d got the ability, but he hadn’t got the staying power.” (Robert Oppenheimer. Dark Prince)
A left-wanderer, if not a full-blown member of the Communist party (several sources)
Perhaps the only physicist who could have led the Los Alamos Project: “Oppie knew [what the staff’s] relationships with one another were and what made them tick. He knew how to organize, cajole, humor, smoothe feelings--how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so.” (Dark Prince)
And then there are Oppenheimer’s own words. Two books gathered a number of Oppenheimer’s addresses and lectures. Uncommon Sense presented material written by Oppenheimer between 1948 and 1966, some of which had not been published before. Atom and Void includes two sets of lectures, one series given in 1953, the other, nine years later. In them, Oppenheimer writes about:
The wealth and variety of physics, the natural sciences, and the life of the human spirit: “they are the elements of man’s sorrow and his splendor, his frailty and his power, his death, his passing, and his undying deeds.” (Atom and Void)
Science and scientists: “We understand, as we hope others understand, that … there is a harmony between knowledge in the sense of science, that specialized and general knowledge which it is our purpose to uncover, and the community of man. We, like all men, are among those who bring a little light to the vast unending darkness of man’s life and world. For us as for all men, change and eternity, specialization and unity, instrument and final purpose, community and individual man alone, complementary each to the other, both require and define our bonds and our freedom. (Uncommon Sense)
Scientific advancements: “we think the future will be only more radical and not less, only more strange and not more familiar, and that it will have its own new insights for the inquiring human spirit.” (Atom and Void)
The overall intellectual community: “We need to be open to other and complementary lives, not intimidated by them and not contemptuous of them (as so many are today of the natural and mathematical sciences). As a start, we must learn again, without contempt and with great patience, to talk to one another; and we must learn.” (Uncommon Sense)
If you’ve begun your own journey, please get in touch: kmsandrick@kmsandrick.com.
For this author, the journey precipitated by Oppenheimer and Trinity continues.
Sources:
Atom and Void, Essays on Science and Community, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Princeton University Press, 1989.
Uncommon Sense, J. Robert Oppenheimer. N. Metropolis, Gian-Carlo Rota, and David Sharp, Editors, Birkhauser, 1984.
Robert Oppenheimer Dark Prince, Jack Rummel, Facts On File, 1992.
Robert Oppenheimer, A Life Inside the Center. Ray Monk, Doubleday, 2012.