Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer will hit theatres across the world today. The star-studded film chronicles the story of the scientist J Robert Oppenheimer, also known as the “father of the atomic bomb.”
While his accomplishments far outweigh his bizarre life story, which has enough wacko accounts for multiple feature films, some instances from his history will help us understand the conflicted man and his roots a little better.
This trinity of stories is just a glimpse of the idiosyncrasies that made the man both a great scientist and a great subject for a motion picture like Oppenheimer.
![Patrick Blackett](https://i0.wp.com/images.indianexpress.com/2023/07/standard_compressed_Patrick-Blackett.jpg?fit=300%2C300&ssl=1)
Oppenheimer tried to poison his professor
Perhaps there is no better story to begin the anthology of wildness that makes up the genius scientist’s life than one that harkens back to his days in college. While most of us might reminisce about bunking class to watch movies during college back in the day, the young Robert did something that is on a completely different scale of outrageous—he tried to poison his professor.
Vanity Fair reports that what is part of the movie Oppenheimer did happen—Robert Oppenheimer tried to poison his professor Patrick Blackett, who later went on to win a Nobel Prize, by injecting an apple with chemicals.
“Robert did something so stupid that it seemed calculated to prove that his emotional distress was overwhelming him. Consumed by his feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy, he ‘poisoned’ an apple with chemicals from the laboratory and left it on Blackett’s desk,” wrote biographers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin in American Prometheus, the book which Oppenheimer is based on.
This happened when Oppenheimer was a student at Cambridge and university officials eventually found out about it. His wealthy and influential parents had to intervene to stop him from being expelled.
The role of Patrick Blackett is played by James D’Arcy in the movie.
Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer pictured together. (Wikimedia foundation)
Einstein called him a fool
Oppenheimer had some connections to the communist party and this was a bad look for him in the 1950s, a period marked by the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals in the United States.
The physicist was summoned to a security meeting where he had to account for his past behaviour and old associations. Albert Einstein compelled Oppenheimer not to give legitimacy to what was referred to as a kangaroo court by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Instead, Einstein advised Oppenheimer to quit his post and the country as the former had done in Germany during the rise of the Nazis.
Oppenheimer refused Einstein’s advice, which later proved to be a mistake when he was branded a traitor and had his security clearance removed. In 1954, when Oppenheimer had refused the advice, Einstein said, “There goes a narr (fool in Yiddish)” to his assistant, nodding in the direction of Oppenheimer, according to The Guardian.
Scottish actor Tom Conti plays the role of Einstein in the movie Oppenheimer.
Jean Tatlock is an American physician and psychiatrist. (Wikimedia foundation)
He may have codenamed the first nuclear test in honour of his former mistress
The first detonation of a nuclear weapon in human history happened in a desert in the Jornada del Muerto in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The test of an implosion-design plutonium nuclear bomb was nicknamed Trinity by J Robert Oppenheimer.
Although no one knows exactly why the test was christened Trinity by the scientists, one theory amplified by the New Yorker proposes that it is an allusion to the poetry of John Donne. Oppenheimer was introduced to the poems of Donne by his former mistress, Jean Tatlock, who was a student at the University of California, Berkeley when he was a professor there.
Tatlock was found dead in her San Francisco apartment on January 5, 1944, according to Today. “I am disgusted with everything.…To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t.…I think I would have been a liability all my life—at least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world,” wrote Tatlock in what is believed to be her suicide note.
Florence Pugh plays the role of Jean Tatlock in the movie.