July 28 panel to discuss Robert Oppenheimer's Berkeley years

Also participating in the July 28 discussion will be two physicists: Yasunori Nomura, 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, will round 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.
They'll delve 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).