{"id":103,"date":"2023-11-28T10:17:15","date_gmt":"2023-11-28T09:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/physicsworld.com\/?p=110759"},"modified":"2023-11-28T10:17:15","modified_gmt":"2023-11-28T09:17:15","slug":"robert-oppenheimer-how-cinema-has-depicted-this-icon-of-the-nuclear-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hadamard.com\/c\/robert-oppenheimer-how-cinema-has-depicted-this-icon-of-the-nuclear-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Oppenheimer: how cinema has depicted this icon of the nuclear age"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the summer of 1960 I set off for the Los Alamos National Laboratory<\/a> in New Mexico, having just finished my bachelor\u2019s degree in physics from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now part of New York University<\/a>. I had gained a high Q-level security clearance<\/a> and was qualified to enter Los Alamos on a summer programme for students. It was only 15 years after Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists and engineers on the Manhattan project had detonated the world\u2019s first atomic bomb \u2013 the famous 1945 Trinity test<\/a> \u2013 but a sense of atomic history already pervaded the lab.<\/p>\n

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My research group reported to Stanislaw Ulam<\/a>, the Polish mathematician who had co-invented a working hydrogen bomb with Edward Teller<\/a> barely a decade earlier. Another member of the group, meanwhile, had helped assemble the Trinity bomb. Holed away on this desert plateau, which sits more than 2200\u00a0m above sea level, my abiding impression of Los Alamos was of the thin, crystalline air \u2013 flooded with sunshine \u2013 that seemed to promote a kind of otherworldly thinking. It was as if these strange conditions were needed for those great minds to develop their world-shaking bomb.<\/p>\n

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\"Oppenheimer<\/a>