2023-08-16 11:34:46
Time.news – In all likelihood this year’s film event will be ‘Oppenheimer’ by Christopher Nolan, in theaters in Italy from 23 August. The film was released in the USA and in other countries and is already a world box office record: as of August 15, 2023, it has grossed over 266 million dollars in North America and 384 million dollars in the rest of the world, for a total of over $650 million. An excellent result for Nolan who will probably see this film get on his very personal podium along with the second and third Batman chapters (both grossed around a billion dollars) and ‘Inception,’ whose total gross of $728.5 million could be surpassed by the new film.
Robert Oppenheimer is among the most ingenious and controversial figures of the 20th century. As director of the Los Alamos laboratory, supervised the operation, succeeded, to beat the Nazis in the race to develop the first atomic bomb, a turning point destined to have important and dramatic consequences on mankind and to make the scientist the father of nuclear weapons. A great organizer, charismatic and competent, who paradoxically was ‘persecuted’ from the beginning of his mission by suspicions of treason due to his sympathies for communism.
On the figure of this scientist whose name is linked to the symbol of death par excellence, the creation of a device capable of destroying the world, many books have been written. Most important of all, republished in Italy by BompianiAnd ‘Robert Oppenheimer – The man who invented the atomic bomb’ (Tascabili Saggistica, pp. 1216; price: 28 euro), written in 2014 by Ray Monk, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Southampton, acclaimed author of ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: The duty of genius’ (Bompiani 1991, Tascabili Bompiani 2000 ), which won him the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize, and a two-volume biography of Bertrand Russell.
In this monumental and highly accurate book Ray Monk digs deeper than anyone into Oppenheimer’s motivations and in his complex personality, through a sensitive investigation conducted with great erudition, which gives us a story of discoveries, secrets, impossible choices and unimaginable destruction.
A book born from reading ‘Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections’ di Alice Kimball Smith e Charles Weinerin which, says the author, we discover how much he was “a man of many and fascinating facets”, who wrote poems and stories, who had a great culture and passion for French literature and “who had found Hindu writings so great inspiration to start learning Sanskrit in order to read in their original language”. Not to mention his intense relationships with his parents, girlfriends, friends and students.
Monk further states in the preface that his goal is to produce “an internal biography rather than external”, which delves into Oppenheimer’s psychological intricacies and which ties his contributions to physics more firmly to his life. The result is a painstaking work that perhaps does not manage to enter as much into the scientist’s psyche as the author would like. author. The details of Oppenheimer’s physics, while clearly stated, reveal little of his controversial psychology. While his childhood is well delineated—a privileged son of nonobservant German Jews and a product of New York’s private school of ethical learning—they do not we learn almost nothing about his marriage or his distant relationship with his children.
‘Robert Oppenheimer’ by Ray Monk (Ed. Bompiani)
As a young scientist, his talent and grit brought him into a community of 20th-century physics giants – from Niels Bohr to Max Born, from Paul Dirac to Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi – and to play a vital role in the labs and classrooms where the world was about to be changed forever. But Oppenheimer’s was not just a story of integration, scientific success and worldwide fame.
In the first part of the book the author describes Oppenheimer’s youth, son of Jews of German Jewish origin who emigrated to New York, a boy of exceptional intellect, driven by the ambition to overcome his status as an outsider and to penetrate the heart of political and social life. The second part of the book deals with the themes of the Second World War and above all the construction of the atomic bomb. In this full-bodied second part, the author immerses himself completely in the story of the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, bringing out the worst in certain characters of the American elite, who from liberators turned into ruthless executioners.
Monk focuses his attention and that of readers on the transformation experienced by Robert Oppenheimer, who he went from enthusiasm for research and the scientific-war enterprise to torment following the discovery that he had created a device of unprecedented destructive power. Whatever Oppenheimer did to thoroughly impress Brigadier General Leslie Groves who chose him as director of the bomb laboratory and to motivate the scientists at Los Alamos does not emerge in the book.
Although it appears clear that during a meeting in Berkeley, Oppenheimer struck the general with the breadth of his knowledge and, above all, for what Groves considered its practicality. More than any other scientist the general had spoken to, Oppenheimer seemed to understand what had to be done to move from abstract theories and laboratory experiments to making a nuclear bomb. One thing that of all he had understood perhaps the only one general Groves who always defended Oppenheimer from attacks by the FBI, secret services and anti-communist fanatics who demanded its replacement.
© Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures / AGF
Matt Damon is Leslie Groves and Cillian Murphy is Oppenheimer in Nolan’s film
Groves was well aware that Oppenheimer was an exceptional man perfect to lead the laboratory. It wasn’t just a physics problem, in fact, a feat had to be accomplished unprecedented engineering, which had to progress while the basic theoretical problems were still being solved.
Oppenheimer believed that there was no better place to do this than outside the university, in a central, remote laboratory. AND he found it in a barely accessible area of New Mexico – an unlikely place that Oppenheimer had discovered on a riding holiday – which became a small town inhabited by scientists and their families and by the military and not just an advanced nuclear laboratory. Indeed, Oppenheimer did not oppose the idea that the operation was supervised by the military and, how notes Monk, he seemed to have “an unerring sense of what Groves wanted feel”.
But when the war ended, the spell was broken. Now the enemy was the Soviet Union and Oppenheimer’s calls to avoid a thermonuclear showdown by sharing technology and giving up the hydrogen bomb were used by his opponents to brand him a communist. And he appealed to his past in which he was a Communist Party sympathizer though not a member of it. ‘Security hearings’ also took place but no evidence emerged that Oppenheimer had engaged in espionage and a personnel committee of the Atomic Energy Commission concluded that he was a loyal citizen. But she was not above suspicion.
© United States Department of Ener / AGF
I saw Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in 1943
This was enough to deprive him of his security clearance and to undergo numerous trials after the war. Finally, Monk recalls Oppenheimer’s disappointment when he realized that the United States they would never share the secret of the atomic bomb, naively believing that the Soviets would fail to make it. The meeting with President Truman to which he said he felt “blood on his hands” was emblematic. A phrase that Truman did not understand and that in fact it represented a sort of discharge from the armyor part of what the president called a “whiny scientist.”
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