J. Robert Oppenheimer ultimately came to be known as “the father of the atomic bomb” – a weapon that changed the course of history, from its nascent tests in the vast plains of New Mexico to its horrific blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But as the buzz builds for the eponymous biopic in his name opening nationwide Friday, July 21, so does a much more complex, IMAXian portrait of a man whose swift ascent to the highest echelons of American science found its way not just through the classrooms of Princeton and the labs of Los Alamos, but through a urban-suburban Southern California city: Pasadena.
“Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan, with a star-studded cast headed by Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Matt Damon, traces the creation of the bomb — and the famous physicist’s leading role as its architect — during World War II.
It also tracks a life filled with paradox — from his teaching and leading, to his early intellectual and scientific triumphs to the tragedy of the bomb itself to the man who came to speak out against the cascade of nuclear armament that his work would unleash only to fall under suspicion of being a Soviet spy at the height of the McCarthy era.
In those war years, Oppenheimer had to convince the best and brightest physicists in the country to join a top-secret mission he was prohibited from fully explaining as he recruited top minds to a distant New Mexico town that would become the laboratory for a weapon for the bomb. That project — the Manhattan Project — and the trajectory of his life after the war, makes Oppenheimer “the most important person who ever lived in human history,” Nolan recently told the New York Times.
Flashforward to Caltech, 2023: That that person lived in Pasadena on and off for about 12 years is not lost on the community at the California Institute of Technology.
Students this week said they plan to watch the three-hour film, if only to connect with the intellectual icon who mixed dry martinis at the campus’ Athenaeum and drove his powder-blue Cadillac convertible (with leather interior) around town.
As it is today, Caltech, in the heart of Pasadena, was during the pre-World War II years a hub for the great theoretical physicists, chemists, mathematicians of their generations.
Among them, there was Albert Einstein, who as a visiting professor taught there, and who lived in the city in the early 1930s.
Linus Pauling’s 1954, Nobel Prizes would be based on the work he did there on the nature of chemical bonding and the structure of the atomic nucleus. In 1962, he would also receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work against above ground nuclear testing.
In 1932, collaborating with Beno Gutenberg—a renowned German geophysicist who joined the Caltech geology division— Charles Richter developed an earthquake magnitude scale, better known as the Richter Scale.
The list goes on, and so do the mathematical formulas for particle physics, which we will stay away from here. But the legacy is alive and well, and the release of the film has awakened the memory — and legacy — of a man who walked the halls, dotted the chalkboards, lived and breathed local air.
“A simple walk through the physics department on California Avenue would convince any layman that the students here genuinely believe that the future is quantum, theoretical and brilliant,” said graduate student Surya Narayanan Hari.
And so, in the spirit of what is building up as an epic film release on a life so consequential, here is a primer on Pasadena’s (and hence, Southern California’s) ties to J. Robert Oppenheimer (the J stands for Julius).
Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer?
The son of German immigrants, the New York-born Oppenheimer is known as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” for his role in making the world’s first atomic bomb.
He briefly returned to Caltech after World War II, later settling in Princeton, New Jersey.
He spoke out publicly about the dangers of atomic warfare shortly after the war. During the McCarthy era, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked his security clearance in 1954, citing his association with Communists.
Downplaying this episode, Oppenheimer kept his job at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton until 1966.
Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in his New Jersey home in 1967. He was 62.
For homework, check out the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J, Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, on which “Oppenheimer” is based.
How did Pasadena figure in his life?
Penny Neder-Muro, of Caltech’s Archives and Special Collections found a photo of Oppenheimer, circa 1930, around the time his association with Caltech began.
Hired as an assistant professor in theoretical physics at age 26, he taught advanced courses such as statistical mechanics, quantum theory and the quantum theory of radiation.
Oppenheimer would spend about 12 years going back and forth between UC Berkeley and Pasadena, going on leave from 1944-1945 to direct the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M.
He came back to campus in 1946 to teach Principles of Quantum Mechanics and left the next year to direct the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University.
It was at a 1939 garden party at Caltech that Oppenheimer met his future wife Kitty, played by Emily Blunt in the movie. Their son Peter was born in Pasadena in 1941.
What’s the significance of the work he did at Caltech?
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Oppenheimer usually spent one term each year on the Caltech campus, becoming a full professor in 1938.
A 1939 weekly calendar had Oppenheimer lecturing on stellar energies in Room 201 of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics.
Oppenheimer’s students said he was a hard but patient taskmaster.
He played a major role in the careers of many prominent physicists, including Carl Anderson, who won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the positron, and Robert Christy, an Oppenheimer recruit to the Manhattan Project, and later acting president at Caltech.
Christy later said he was happy to join his professor in Los Alamos because “like most of his students, I would more or less follow him to the ends of the earth.” Christy also credited Oppenheimer with introducing him to martinis, “so you do not only learn physics, you learn other things, too.”
How did he explain his secret war project?
In a typewritten letter to Caltech’s president, Robert A. Millikan, Oppenheimer cited “new and compelling reasons” for leaving Pasadena.
“The wholly altered character of our work, both in Pasadena and Berkeley, during these war years, has made it seem wise for us to reconsider whether my customary visits to the Institute…might not with reason be abandoned.”
Where did he live on campus?
The stately Athenaeum, at 551 S. Hill Ave., in Pasadena, is listed as Oppenheimer’s residence in one faculty directory listing.
But he also stayed in the guest house of his friends, Richard and Ruth Tolman, at 345 S. Michigan Ave., Pasadena. Tolman was a mathematician and dean at Caltech who also served as an adviser to the Manhattan Project.
Was there any filming at Caltech or in the area, for the film?
No.
However, a Sierra Madre home designed and built by the architectural firm of brothers Charles and Henry Greene in 1904 was used in the filming of Nolan’s movie.
Greene and Greene built the eight-bedroom, six-bathroom house spanning 4,676 square feet for Edgar W. Camp, a prominent lawyer and early civic leader. When the home was up for sale last year, according to listing agent Nazee Rix of Compass, the film crew used the upstairs bedroom as Oppenheimer’s bedroom. They also shot scenes inside the large living room, distinguished by its dramatic ceiling and arroyo-stone fireplace, and across the property — a nearly half-acre cul-de-sac lot.
Was he at Caltech when Albert Einstein was there?
Yes.
In 1965, two years before he died, Oppenheimer called Einstein “the greatest of our time” and said he knew the scientist for 20 or 30 years. But it was only in the last decade of their lives that the two became “something of friends.”
Both were at Caltech in the early 1930s and most probably crossed paths then.
But according to Diana Buchwald, professor of history at Caltech, Einstein was never in California after March 1933, so it’s safe to say Einstein knew Oppenheimer but probably did not call his fellow physicist “Oppie” as more familiar colleagues did.
What other ‘Caltech people’ make an appearance in the movie?
Before the war, Oppenheimer led students on an annual trek between UC Berkeley and Caltech, including Robert Serber (Michael Angarano), tasked with explaining the mission to incoming Los Alamos staff.
Another student, David Hill (played by Rami Malek) graduated from Caltech in 1942. Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, he of the bongo-playing prowess and groundbreaking work in quantum electrodynamics, is played by Jack Quaid.
Oppenheimer’s younger brother Frank is played by Dylan Arnold. The younger Oppenheimer earned his doctorate from Caltech in 1939.
Ruth Tolman (Louise Lombard) also makes an appearance in the movie.
Why is Oppenheimer’s life often considered a triumph and a tragedy?
Oppenheimer’s rise to prominence was meteoric. He was considered a hero in American science until the mid-1950s. That’s when he fell under McCarthy-era suspicion as a communist and a Soviet spy. After days of hearings, the 1954 decision by the Atomic Energy Commission blocked his access to national atomic secrets.
As the New York Times noted recently, the revocation brought his career to “a humiliating end. Until then a hero of American science, he lived out his life a broken man and died in 1967 at the age of 62.”
But in 2022, Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm announced that the decision of her predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, to bar Oppenheimer’s clearance was the result of a “flawed process” that violated its own regulations.
She noted that over time, evidence had emerged affirming Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the nation, and he was cleared of what had been a “black mark” on his record for nearly 70 years.
Source: Orange County Register
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