Opinion: Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ marred by 5 historical inaccuracies

Blockbuster movie is sometimes distressingly errant in dealing with scientists and science

This image released by Universal Pictures shows actor Cillian Murphy, left, and filmmaker Christopher Nolan on the set of “Oppenheimer.” 

(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

By BARTON J. BERNSTEIN |

MERCURY NEWS
July 29, 2023

Over the years, the distinguished movie director Christopher Nolan, whose films have grossed over $5 billion, has expressed interest in science and scientists, his respect for science, as well as his worries about science.

Unfortunately, Nolan’s blockbuster movie, “Oppenheimer,” on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the A-bomb,” is sometimes distressingly errant in dealing with scientists and science. Though Nolan claims in general to be often relying on the prize-winning Oppenheimer biography, “American Prometheus,” by Kai Bird and Martin J.Sherwin, Nolan creates at least five sets of events — about scientists and science — not in the Bird-Sherwin book and that, strong evidence indicates, never occurred.

Put bluntly, Nolan has basically created false history.

1) His “Oppenheimer” film unfairly portrays the Cambridge experimentalist P. M. S. Blackett as forcing Oppenheimer, then a young graduate student, to stay in the physics lab and not allowed to hear, or to delay Oppenheimer in hearing, the great theoretical physicist Niels Bohr, who was lecturing that day at the University of Cambridge. There is no evidence that Blackett was so callous and that Oppenheimer was so impeded. Neither Oppenheimer’s archived papers, nor Blackett’s, nor recollections by Oppenheimer’s younger brother, Frank, indicate any support that such a set of events occurred or that Blackett was callous in his relationship with Oppenheimer.

2) Oppenheimer, unhappy with experimental physics and rather clumsy in the lab, left Cambridge and shifted in 1926 to Gottingen, in Germany, to study with the theoretician Max Born. Oppenheimer had been invited by Born to move to Gottingen and into theoretical physics. Contrary to Nolan’s film, there is no evidence that Born had even suggested such a move to Oppenheimer. That’s a Nolan creation and is also unfair to Born, a 1954 Nobelist.

3) In September 1939, when Oppenheimer, with his graduate student (Hartland Snyder), published in Physical Review a paper on massively dying stars (under the impact of gravity) basically ceasing to exist, there was — contrary to Nolan — no one celebrating at Berkeley, or anywhere, that 1939 publication. Papers by Oppenheimer, by his famous Berkeley colleague, physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, and by others at Berkeley appearing in the rather prestigious Physical Review were not unusual. That Oppenheimer-Snyder paper — which helped pioneer what decades later was called ”black holes” — was not, contrary to Nolan, recognized in 1939, or for many years, as profoundly significant.


Also contrary to Nolan’s film, no one in 1939 would have used the phrase “black holes.” That phrase was not even devised until about three decades later, and then at Princeton, not at Berkeley, and substantially first employed by Princeton physicist John A. Wheeler. There is an important question, thoughtfully addressed by physicist Manuel Ortega, a handful of years ago in the journal Physics in Perspective: Why wasn’t the significance of that 1939 Oppenheimer-Snyder paper recognized then or soon thereafter? Nolan’s distortion and misunderstanding of important science history unknowingly eliminates that very significant question. Nolan, intentionally or not, has created a false history.

4) In summer 1942, when the theoretical physicist Edward Teller concluded, in a special A-bomb-study group at Berkeley headed by Oppenheimer, that a fission-bomb explosion might ignite the atmosphere and destroy civilization, Oppenheimer was — for a period — greatly troubled. Contrary to Nolan’s film, Oppenheimer did not go to New Jersey and consult Albert Einstein on this subject. Oppenheimer actually went to Michigan to consult with the Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist Arthur H. Compton. How and why did Nolan go so wrong on this? Multiple published sources, since at least 1956, have described this set of events, including Oppenheimer’s consulting Compton.

5) At Los Alamos, where Bohr was visiting in parts of 1943-44 and thinking about the implications of the soon-to-be-developed A-bomb, Bohr did not endorse the United States actually using the bomb against an enemy — Germany or Japan. Bohr was thinking about the importance of the A-bomb in U.S.-USSR wartime and postwar relations and about the possibility that the development of such a powerful weapon would help persuade nations, ultimately fearing atomic-bomb war, to seek collective peace. Nolan, greatly misrepresenting Bohr’s thinking, falsely has Bohr endorsing wartime use of the bomb. That seems to be Nolan’s invention.

Creating five false events is dismaying. Any claim of “artistic license,” if offered, seems unpersuasive as a justification. Why create false history? Has Nolan any explanation?

Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” film also merits scrutiny and criticism for its treatment of important political matters in Oppenheimer’s life. As a guide to history, Nolan’s movie, though garnering many enthusiastic reviews, might well carry a needed warning: “Beware — often poorly informed and markedly errant on history.”

Barton J. Bernstein is a professor of history emeritus at Stanford University.