The Aryavarth Express
Agency (New Delhi): There is one question that haunts many viewers of Christopher Nolan’s film on creator of the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – J. Robert Oppenheimer — which swept the Oscars this year. Did Oppenheimer endorse the use of the bomb on an essentially defeated enemy? And if so, how can we hail such a man as hero? One of the reasons he endorsed it might be because of his ego. He had spent three years building the bomb with his team at a secret facility in Los Alamos,, and he wanted to see the consummation of his efforts. Greatness was within his grasp. Also, he reasoned that the bomb’s power would ensure the end of all wars in future.
But the truth might be more complex than this, and encapsulated in a scene in the film right after the Trinity test, when the bomb was first successfully tested on the plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range. While giving the victory speech to the thumping cheers of his colleagues and friends, Oppenheimer (played by a brilliant Cilian Murphy) blanks out and in the flash of a blinding light, he sees a woman’s molten skin. As he walks out, he imagines stepping on the remains of a corpse.
“Oppenheimer knew the exact human suffering that his bomb would cause,” says Kai Bird, who co-wrote American Prometheus , theoretical Physicist’s biography on which Nolan’s film is based. “Yet this is the same man who gave instructions on the attitude at which to drop the bomb in order to inflict maximum damage.” Bird was speaking at a session of the Jaipur Literary Festival .
This complexity in Oppenheimer’s character is converted in the film into a meditation on the complexities of the universe from which the bomb’s power is harnessed.
Bird feels that what made Oppenheimer a great scientist was that he was a polymath. He read Marcel Proust, T S Eliot, and Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. “He was never good with his hands and failed in Cambridge as an experimental physicist”, says Bird. “But when he discovered quantum Physics in 1920s, he could hear music of the science that explains this world, and he had the imagination to ask right questions. He predicted the existence of black holes when we did not have X-Ray telescopes. When we could not see anything out there in the universe, he could imagine. He was brilliant scientist precisely because he was a humanist”. (IPA Service)
By Harihar Swarup