Oppenheimer: July 28 panel discussion focuses on the man behind the movie

The discussion was moderated by Cathryn Carson(link is external), UC Berkeley professor of history and a specialist in the history of 20th century physics, including its cultural, social and political contexts. She co-edited a volume of papers about Oppenheimer, Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections, that was presented during a 2004 conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Carson was  joined by Jon Else(link is external), UC Berkeley professor emeritus of journalism and longtime director of the documentary program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Else directed the 1981 documentary, The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, which was the first documentary about Oppenheimer’s role in the Manhattan Project. Trinity was Oppenheimer’s name for the first-ever test of an atom bomb, which lit up the night sky in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945.

Also participating in the July 28 discussion were two physicists: Yasunori Nomura, (pictured speaking above) professor of physics and director of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics; and Karl van Bibber, a professor of nuclear engineering who spent 25 years conducting nuclear energy research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Mark Chadwick, chief scientist and chief operating officer for weapons physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory, rounded out the panel. In 2021, he edited and published a suite of papers on the technical history of the Trinity test, written on the occasion of its 75th anniversary.

The panelists delved into Oppenheimer’s impact on quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, the school of theoretical physics he created at UC Berkeley — where he supervised 25 Ph.D. students and many more postdoctoral fellows — and the left-leaning milieu at UC Berkeley that made it an unusual place from which to select the director of a top secret government project.

“However unexpected his colleagues found his appointment at Los Alamos, its spectacular accomplishments came to stand for the Manhattan Project at large,” Carson wrote in an introduction to the centennial volume. “Then his postwar apotheosis epitomized the physicists’ entry into positions of power, just as the McCarthy-era stripping of his security clearance defined their political bounds.”

The movie is based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a book published in 2005 that won the Pulitzer Prize for authors Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. That book and numerous others have contributed to what Else refers to as the “mythologizing” of Oppenheimer, not only for his incredible accomplishment at Los Alamos, but for his tragic fall from grace. Oppenheimer died from throat cancer in 1967. Only last year did the U.S. government vacate the decision to strip him of security clearance.

In the movie, the intense, chain-smoking Oppenheimer is portrayed by Irish actor Cillian Murphy. Other UC Berkeley luminaries are also portrayed: Ernest O. Lawrence (played by Josh Hartnett); physicist and future Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez (played by Alex Wolff); Frank Oppenheimer (played by Dylan Arnold), a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicist who later founded the Exploratorium in San Francisco; and Haakon Chevalier (played by Jefferson Hall), the professor of French literature whose Communist sympathies entangled Oppenheimer in a web of suspicions about the physicist’s own ties to the Communist Party of the United States of America.

Other key protagonists are Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty (played by Emily Blunt), who was a biologist and mother of their two children; and Oppenheimer’s ex-lover, Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a UC Berkeley literature professor (played by Florence Pugh).