You watched Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" and now want to learn more about some of the scientists that were involved and the history of the Manhattan Project? Then I recommend "Pandora's Keepers" by Brian VanDeMark. The book takes a closer look at not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but also Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller. The book is a history book more so than a science book, most of the scientific explanations mentioned around the making of the bomb, aren't too complex to understand for readers who aren't experts on the matter.
The Making of The Most Intelligent Photograph Ever
The history of the world has many instances where certain moments became a turning point for not just our collective future but also photography. For instance, the first X-ray image by Wilhelm Röntgen was a pivotal moment for both image-making and humankind. Similarly, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a spectacular group photograph was captured, likely one that will…
Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is surprisingly authentic, but, explains Dorian Lynskey, there are two key scenes where the film deviates fr
'We are accustomed to hearing historians protest that biopics mangle the truth. And we are used to hearing screenwriters such as Aaron Sorkin and Peter Morgan respond that it is legitimate to scramble chronology, invent composite characters and fabricate incidents in order to tell a deeper truth. But there has been little controversy about the authenticity of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. For the most part, the writer-director has chosen the historian's responsibility over the dramatist's liberty.
It is testament to the inherent drama of Oppenheimer's life, and of the Manhattan Project's three-year effort to design and build an atomic bomb, that the vast majority of the film's most memorable scenes and lines are taken straight from Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin's book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, or from contemporary sources. Still, there are a few fabrications, including two pivotal scenes that elaborate on the same truth: the scientists who built the bomb were genuinely worried that it would accidentally bring about the end of the world.
The first of these scenes comes on the eve of the Trinity test, the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb, after Enrico Fermi (Danny Deferrari) takes bets on whether the blast will destroy the world. Lt Gen Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) asks Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) what Fermi meant, leading to a conversation about apocalyptic possibilities and the impossibility of absolute certainty in theoretical science.
In reality, as head of the Manhattan Project, Groves would have been well aware of the theory that inspired Fermi's dark joke. Back in July 1942, Edward Teller (played by Benny Safdie in the movie) had raised the possibility that the bomb might generate temperatures sufficiently intense to set off a thermonuclear chain reaction in the atmosphere – igniting atoms of nitrogen, hydrogen or both – and "encircle the globe in a sea of fire". When Oppenheimer informed Arthur Compton, who worked on chain reactions at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, Compton was willing to halt the whole project unless the doomsday scenario could be ruled out. "Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!" he theatrically recalled in 1959, making the incident public for the first time. The Americans had no way of knowing that in Germany, where Werner Heisenberg ran the Nazi bomb programme, Hitler was also concerned that his physicists might "set the globe on fire".
The physicist Hans Bethe soon revealed the flaws in Teller's theory and assured Oppenheimer that a chain reaction was "extremely unlikely, to say the least" – less than three in one million, according to Compton. Teller made his own calculations shortly before Trinity and found "no reason to believe that the test shot would touch off the destruction of the world".
When the bomb went off, however, some witnesses were suddenly unsure. The blast of white, silent light lasted for so long before the boom that the Italian physicist Emilio Segrè confessed to fearing that "the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the Earth, even though I knew that this was not possible".
Nolan uses this potent red herring to represent the almost supernatural dread inspired by the bomb. He picks it up again in another imagined scene which gives the movie its chilling finale: a lakeside conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) in Princeton in 1946. The two scientists suggest that the bomb really did threaten the end of the world, just not at Trinity.
A 'hideous power'
The film has been criticised for not depicting the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and not challenging the claim that it was militarily necessary, but that is true to Oppenheimer's perspective. Although he told US President Truman that he felt like he had blood on his hands, his doomed post-war efforts towards international arms control and thwarting the development of the exponentially more destructive hydrogen bomb were less about atoning for what had happened than preventing something much worse.
"It was indeed the bizarre nature of the bomb, and the uncanny sort of future it suggested, rather than its actual results in the war, that impressed people," wrote Vannevar Bush, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, in 1949, observing that the firebombing of Japanese cities had been no less horrific but far less controversial. Even though an overwhelming majority of Americans supported the bombings, many were haunted by premonitions of an American Hiroshima, like the one Murphy's Oppenheimer hallucinates in the film.
The future was Oppenheimer's priority. While the use of the bomb was never his decision, he did seem to believe that, in the long run, it was the lesser of two evils. In 1939, he knew that the achievement of nuclear fission made a bomb inevitable. In 1945, he believed that the bomb made nuclear war inevitable, unless its hideous power could be demonstrated to the world before the current conflict ended. "They won't fear it until they understand it," he says in the film, "and they won't understand it until they've used it". Colleagues including Teller and Niels Bohr (played by Kenneth Branagh) agreed, although for them, this belief that using the bomb could avert future wars did not make it any less terrible.
Nolan's decision to tell the story of the bomb through Oppenheimer's eyes – not just his experiences but also his concerns – gives the film its contemporary urgency. What was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is history, but the existential threat of nuclear weapons is still with us, as Oppenheimer knew it would be.
This awareness is captured in his most famous quotation. The physicist later claimed that at Trinity he had thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita – "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds" – but nobody heard him say it on the day, so Nolan uses voiceover sleight of hand to acknowledge the ambiguity. Perhaps the line was a retrospective bid for gravitas, or a plea for forgiveness, and Oppenheimer was playing screenwriter with his own life. But it carries that deeper truth. Regardless of the globe-of-fire theory, or what Truman decided to do, Oppenheimer knew in that bright white moment that his work had radically changed the world, and might one day end it.'
Asked to select his choice of the greatest modern and future wonders, the electrical wizard refused to accept the popular notion of what is wonderful. His reply led to an onslaught on scientists and the popular science community.
“To the popular mind, any manifestation resulting from any cause will appear wonderful if there is no perceptible connection between cause and effect. For instance, through the means of wireless telephone speech is carried to opposite points of the globe. To the vast majority this must appear miraculous. To the expert who is familiar with the apparatus and sees it in his mind’s eye the result is obvious. It is exactly as though visible means existed to which the impetus is transmitted.
“As I revolve in my mind the thoughts in answer to your question I find the most wonderful thing is the utter aberration of the scientific mind during the last twenty five years. In that time the relativity theory [Albert Einstein], the electron theory [J. J. Thomson], the quantum theory [Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Arthur Compton, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli], the theory of radioactivity [Marie Curie] and others have been worked out and developed to an amazing degree. And yet probably not less than 90 per cent of what is thought today to be demonstrable scientific truth is nothing but unrealizable dreams.
“What is ‘thought’ in relativity, for example, is not science, but some kind of metaphysics based on abstract mathematical principles and conceptions which will be forever incomprehensible to beings like ourselves whose whole knowledge is derived from a three-dimensional world.
“The idea of the atom being formed of electrons and protons which go whirling round each other like a miniature sun and planets is an invention of the imagination, and has no relation to the real nature of matter.
“Virtually all progress has been achieved by physicists, discoverers and inventors; in short, devotees of the science which Newton and his disciples have been and are propounding.
“Personally, it is only efforts in this direction which have claimed my energies. Similar remarks might be made with respect to other modern developments of thought. Take, for example, the electron theory. Perhaps no other has given rise to so many erroneous ideas and chimerical hopes. Everybody speaks of electrons as something entirely definite and real. Still, the fact is that nobody has isolated it and nobody has measured its charge. Nor does anybody know what it really is.
“In order to explain the observed phenomena, atomic structures have been imagined [Quantum Mechanics], none of which can possibly exist. But the worst illusion to which modern thought has led is the idea of ‘indeterminacy’ [ex. Uncertainty Principle/Schrödinger's Cat: W. Heisenberg, E. Schrödinger]. To make this clear, I may remark that heretofore we have in positive science assumed that every effect is the result of a preceding cause.
“As far as I am concerned, I can say that after years of concentrated thought and investigation there is no truth in nature of which I would be more fully convinced. But the new theories of ‘indeterminacy’ state this is not true, that an effect cannot be predicted in advance.
“If two planets collide at certain time and certain place, this is to the student of positive science an inevitable result of preceding interactions between the bodies; and if our knowledge would be adequate, we would be able to foretell the event accurately.
“But in the spirit of the new theories this would simply be an accident. ‘Indeterminacy’ introduces into the world of inert matter a principle which might virtually be compared with the universal illusion of free will.
“Of course, there is no such thing. In years of experimenting I have found that every thought I conceive, every act I perform, is the result of external impressions on my senses.
“It is only because the vast majority of human being are not observant sufficiently that they live in the illusion of perfect choice and freedom in their thoughts and actions. And if this holds true even in the most complex and involved manifestations of human life, it holds true with the same force in all the world of matter.”
With this pessimistic outlook expressed earlier in the interview Dr. Tesla was not satisfied to contemplate the world spinning eternally around on its orbit.
“The earth may explode, a planet may collide with us, yet it has existed a long time.”
His reply had a note of grim humor, indicating that even a scientist who locks himself away from the world may know his homely aphorisms.
“A pitcher may go too often to the well.” –Nikola Tesla
“Great Scientific Discovery Impends.“ By Harry Goldberg. The Sunday Star, Washington D.C., May 17, 1931.
It makes me very happy that NASA not only named a gamma ray observation satellite after Arthur Compton, but when they had to replace it they replaced it with one named after Enrico Fermi.
The movie "Oppenheimer" is less about the bomb and more about the trials — both moral and political — that beset J. Robe
'The movie "Oppenheimer" is less about the bomb and more about the trials — both moral and political — that beset J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was the World War II physicist who spearheaded America's race to beat the Nazis before they could invent an atomic bomb.
But to the extent that this is a war story, it’s about the Cold War and the anti-Communist fever that tore through the U.S. even before Germany and Japan surrendered. The movie doesn’t begin with the development of the bomb at a top secret lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, but in 1954, with Oppenheimer defending his American loyalty before a hostile panel in a cramped Washington, D.C., conference room.
The film shifts back and forth from that conference room to scenes of Oppenheimer’s guiding role in the development of the bomb to a 1959 Senate hearing that reveals the darker forces of Washington. Scriptwriter and director Christopher Nolan drew heavily on the historical record, and in all important ways, he hewed to the facts.
But he did invent a few things, and he simplified others, for the sake of crafting a gripping tale. Fair warning: As we compare what’s in the film with what really happened, we spoil a few surprises.
In the movie: Oppenheimer has a couple of conversations with Albert Einstein about the possibility of the bomb igniting the atmosphere and about the consequences of building it.
In reality: The issues were real, but the conversations are invented.
In one scene, physicist Edward Teller flags the possibility that the bomb will set off a chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere. Oppenheimer asks Einstein to check it out. That discussion never happened. Oppenheimer did consult a fellow physicist, Arthur Compton.
Nolan acknowledged this in an interview with The New York Times, saying he brought in Einstein, because he was "the personality people know in the audience."
The film accurately shows Los Alamos physicist Hans Bethe run the numbers and declare that the scenario couldn’t happen.
The other invented scene with Einstein comes at the very end. The two men stand by a still pond on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. It is set in 1947, when Oppenheimer became institute director, joining Einstein, who had been there for many years.
The conversation is fictional, but the two worked together, and the script tracks with the views they held.
In 1947, Oppenheimer was still riding high, celebrated as the father of the atomic bomb. In the film, Einstein warns Oppenheimer of fame’s fickleness.
"It’s your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievement," Einstein says. "And one day, when they have punished you enough, they’ll … give you a medal. And tell you that all is forgiven."
Einstein had no use for politicians. In 1951, during the years of McCarthyism and anti-Communism run amok, Einstein wrote to an acquaintance, "People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil."
At the end of the scene by the pond, Oppenheimer recalls the worry before the first test that "we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world." Einstein nods, and Oppenheimer adds, "I believe we did."
Both men feared the power that had been unleashed. Oppenheimer pressed President Dwight D. Eisenhower to minimize the threat of a nuclear arms race and to set the American public straight on atomic weapons’ immense destructive capacity. Einstein was a pacifist who championed nuclear disarmament.
In the movie: Los Alamos is said only to contain a boys’ school and to serve as a site for burial rites for local Indians.
In reality: Homesteaders and owners of two properties were driven away from the land, with unequal compensation.
In the film, Oppenheimer expressed a desire to combine physics and New Mexico, and he found a way to do so when it was time to select a location for the central laboratory code-named Project Y. In real life, he had a ranch in Albuquerque and suggested New Mexico as an option, deeming the Sangre de Cristo mountains remote enough for a secret town. Manhattan Project Director Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves chose Los Alamos, which is about 35 miles from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
While inspecting the site in the film, Oppenheimer said Los Alamos had a boys’ school to commandeer and that the local Native Americans come for burial rites, but "after that, nothing." After Groves made the decision to "build the town," Oppenheimer projected the site would open in two months.
This is a simplification. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, most of the 50,000 acres used for the Manhattan Project already belonged to the government, but about 8,900 acres were privately owned. There were two dozen homesteaders and two larger properties — the Los Alamos Ranch School and the Anchor Ranch.
The Los Alamos Ranch School, started in 1917, trained young men through "rigorous outdoor living and classical education." On Dec. 7, 1942, the school’s director received a letter from U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson that said the U.S. Army was taking over the school’s property. Early arrivals to Los Alamos resided in the school’s buildings.
The owners of both properties negotiated sale prices — the school got paid $225 per acre, while the Anchor Ranch was paid $43 per acre. However, the Hispanic homesteaders were paid only $7 an acre, and their heirs later sought reparations. Some landowners did not receive their payments.
Many Hispano — Mexican or Spanish descendants in northern New Mexico — and Native workers returned to Los Alamos to work for the Manhattan Project.
In the movie: U.S. War Secretary Henry Stimson removed Kyoto from the list of possible Japanese targets because he honeymooned there.
In reality: Even though he visited twice, there is no conclusive evidence that Stimson spent his honeymoon in Kyoto.
James Remar, who portrayed Stimson, improvised the dialogue in which Stimson removes Kyoto from the list of targets because that’s where he had his honeymoon.
According to The New York Times’ interview with Nolan, actors came into the shoot with their own research, allowing them to "improvise" the discussion. When Remar mentioned that Stimson and his wife honeymooned in Kyoto, Nolan told him, "Just add that."
Although Stimson went to great lengths to keep Kyoto from being targeted, records don’t support the claim that he honeymooned there. According to historian Alex Wellerstein, none of the serious, scholarly accounts about the Kyoto incident or Stimson’s writings mentioned that he spent his honeymoon in Kyoto. Wellerstein noted that Stimson and his wife visited Kyoto in 1926, more than 30 years after their wedding. He also visited Kyoto for one night in 1929.
In the movie: Lewis Strauss’ role in orchestrating the attack on Oppenheimer plays a pivotal role in sinking Strauss’ Cabinet confirmation.
In reality: There were several reasons the long knives were out for Strauss, and the Oppenheimer affair was just one of them.
In 1959, Lewis Strauss, a staunch Republican, faced a Democratic majority in his Senate confirmation hearing to be commerce secretary. Watching the movie, you could be forgiven for thinking the Oppenheimer affair was the only hurdle Strauss faced. It was more than that.
The opening attack on Strauss came from Sen. Estes Kefauver, D-Tenn. Kefauver focused not on Oppenheimer, but on a 1955 botched power plant contract that took place on Strauss’ watch as head of the Atomic Energy Commission and that cost the government $1.8 million to settle legal claims.
Sen. Clinton Anderson, D-N.M., accused Strauss of hiding key information on nuclear policies from the Senate. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn., said a vote for Strauss amounted to "approval of the unwarranted extension of executive secrecy."
In the final vote, two Republicans joined 47 Democrats to scuttle Strauss’ confirmation.
This leads to one other embellishment in the movie.
An aide tells Strauss there were three holdouts, "led by the junior senator from Massachusetts, young guy, trying to make a name for himself … John F. Kennedy."
Nolan takes poetic license with the politics. The vote margin is correct, but Strauss’ bid cratered thanks to the two Republicans. If they had voted his way, he would have prevailed. And every Democrat who was angling to be president, including Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and Stuart Symington, voted against Strauss.
In the movie: Strauss masterminds the move to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance, a loss that would cut Oppenheimer out of any policy role.
In reality: Strauss did muscle Oppenheimer out, and his machinations had surprising repercussions today.
A solid paper trail ties Strauss to the attack on Oppenheimer.
"American Prometheus" pinpoints the day that Strauss launched his campaign to topple Oppenheimer: May 25, 1953. That day, Strauss told Eisenhower that Oppenheimer’s communist sympathies were not to be trusted.
Strauss put the wheels in motion to unseat Oppenheimer even earlier. In April 1953, he met with William Borden. Borden ultimately wrote a letter to the FBI that said, "More probably than not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union." That letter started Oppenheimer’s downfall.
Soon after his April meeting with Strauss, Borden signed out Oppenheimer’s security file from the Atomic Energy Commission’s secure document vault. Borden was a top congressional staffer on atomic policy and had the proper clearance, but even though he left his job at the end of May, he kept the file until Aug. 18. By then, Strauss was fully installed as the commission’s chair.
After Borden returned the file, Strauss immediately signed it out and didn’t return it to the commission’s security vault until Nov. 4. Three days later, Borden sent his letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that called Oppenheimer a Soviet agent.
Harold Green, counsel to the commission’s security division at the time, wrote that people in the division told him that Strauss had promised Hoover that he would get Oppenheimer out of the way.
The proof of Strauss’ fingerprints on the purge of Oppenheimer grows from there. Strauss handpicked the panel that would prosecute Oppenheimer and set the ground rules that blindsided Oppenheimer’s lawyers. He had access to the FBI’s wiretaps on calls between Oppenheimer and his lawyers.
The hearing itself was as grueling as the movie presents.
Anti-communist fervor’s full force was trained on Oppenheimer, and little artistic embellishment was needed; in 2014, the U.S. Energy Department released the entire transcript, giving the filmmakers ample material to include in the script verbatim.
Despite finding "no evidence of disloyalty," the panel and then later the full Atomic Energy Commission voted to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance, and from then on, he was cut off from the government’s official nuclear policy discussions. He remained head of the institute in Princeton and became a sought-after speaker, writing and lecturing on science’s role in the nuclear age.
Epilogue: The 2022 restoration
There’s not much you can do for someone who’s been dead for more than half a century, but on Dec. 16, 2022, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm vacated the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1954 decision. Oppenheimer’s colleagues had been asking for that for decades, starting immediately after the commission ruled against him.
Indirectly, the Oppenheimer film helped reverse the black mark on his reputation.
In March 2022, filming was underway at Los Alamos. Kai Bird, one of the authors of "American Prometheus," was invited to visit the set and have dinner with Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Thom Mason. As the two spoke, Bird made a simple point about Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing.
"What was done to him was unfair and a complete abuse of the kind of legal authorities under which (security) clearances operate," Mason told PolitiFact.
Seen this way, someone didn’t need to challenge the panel’s findings; what was wrong was the deeply flawed process. Mason took that point to eight previous lab directors, and on April 5, 2022, they sent a letter to Granholm asking her to reverse the commission’s decision.
In August 2022, 43 U.S. senators made a similar request. It was mostly Democrats who signed on, but four Republicans did too, including Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Marco Rubio, R-Fla., James Inhofe, R-Okla., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
The push had everything to do with how the deck was stacked against Oppenheimer. This was hardly news. A 1959 internal Atomic Energy Commission review found that "the system failed . . .[(and) that a substantial injustice was done to a loyal American."'
Einstein and Oppenheimer have a short but meaningful exchange at the end of the blockbuster film
'It’s a brilliant time for film lovers at the moment, with the release of two blockbuster films at once - Oppenheimer and Barbie. Both films have been met with rave reviews from critics, but fans of the former have been left wondering about the connection between the titular Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein.
The biographical film, directed by Christopher Nolan, tells the story of American physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, who helped to create the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. Oppenheimer became known as the father of the atomic bomb because of the instrumental role he played in developing the weapon of mass destruction that would bring the war in Japan to a close.
As with other Nolan films, this one follows a non-linear timeline which has caused some confusion for some viewers about the closing scenes of the film, which show Oppenheimer talking to Einstein, one of the greatest inventors of all time.
If you’ve already watched the film and want to find out more about the ending, including what Einstein said to Oppenheimer, keep reading. Warning, this article does contain spoilers.
What was Einstein’s connection to Oppenheimer?
Einstein and Oppenheimer were both scientists, though from different generations. Oppenheimer was born 1904 and died 1967 while Einstein was born in 1879 and died in 1955. The pair did, however, know each other but they were not particularly friends.
But, Einstein does still have a link to Oppenheimer. Einstein sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1939 during World War Two, warning him that Germany could be working on a weapon of tremendous destructive power and urging the United States to create something similar. This advice led to the creation of the Manhattan Project, however, Einstein did not work directly on the atomic bomb project. Instead, Oppenheimer took Einstein’s ideas and theories and used them to direct the Manhattan Project scientists to design and test an atomic bomb.
What did Einstein say to Oppenheimer?
We see various conversations between Einstein and Oppenheimer during the film. Early on, for example, Oppenheimer asks Einstein to review some concerning calculations as the Manhattan Project gets under way due to concerns that the bomb could create a chain reaction which would ultimately destroy Earth. Einstein advises Oppenheimer to have another physicist look at the calculations.
In the final scene of the film, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reminds Einstein (Tom Conti) that while the bomb was still being constructed, they had fears that it could accidentally begin a chain of events that would destroy the entire universe. Einstein asks: "What of it?", and Oppenheimer's answer is: "I believe we did”. This is the final line of the film and what follows is a montage of images depicting the world being destroyed by modern nuclear weapons.
This exchange is accepted to mean that Oppenheimer and Einstein understand that they have created a device through science which, when mixed with politics and other world viewpoints, has the potential to destroy the world.
Nolan has, however, admitted that Oppenheimer did not speak to Einstein about his fear of a disastrous chain reaction. Instead, he spoke to Arthur Compton, a Nobel Prize winner who directed the Manhattan Project’s University of Chicago outpost. Nolan explained in an interview with The New York Times, that he “shifted” the conversation to Einstein because “Einstein is the personality people know in the audience."'
