Director Christopher Nolan’s biographical thriller, Oppenheimer, is the frontrunner at the upcoming Oscars, scoring a grand 13 nominations. The film also emerged as a blockbuster hit, grossing more globally than most recent Marvel movies, and currently ranking as Nolan’s third-biggest hit, behind his second and third Batman blockbusters. In a nutshell, Oppenheimer is an anomaly – a three hour, dialogue-heavy, thematically complex film with zero capes and very little ‘action’.
The film focused on theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer’s contributions to the creation of the world’s first atomic bombs, which were controversially dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending World War II. The movie tackles the moral complexity of Oppenheimer’s actions, and has inspired numerous debates about the subject. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and theoretical physicist Brian Greene got together to dissect the movie in a recent conversation shared on the StarTalk YouTube channel.
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One of the topics that they discussed was the possibility of the Trinity test igniting the atmosphere, and effectively destroying the world. The movie makes a big deal of this possibility, with Matt Damon’s character even having a conversation about it with Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy. “Why did they give so much weight to the risk of igniting the atmosphere? It seems to me the probability would have been so astronomically low, but it makes a really good headline, ‘Oh my God, we could’ve ended the world…” Tyson began. Greene quipped, “As an astronomically low probability of ending the world does.” Tyson laughed, admitting his mistake, and said, “Thank you, I agree.”
Greene continued, “Look, it was a real worry, and people had to sit down and do the calculations. We had the same thing at the Large Hadron Collider. People worried that you turn on the accelerator, create a little black hole that would swallow up Switzerland… The serious point is, it’s a real concern, and you’ve got to sit down and do the calculations. And colleagues of mine did the calculations, and showed that it wasn’t something that we should worry about. It was spectacularly unlikely that you could put it to the side. But this is what we should always do, because ending the world is kind of a big deal.”
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Greene said that the scientists at Los Alamos were ‘creating temperatures and densities of energy that hadn’t been created before on Earth’, and so, the logical question to ask was, ‘Is there any collateral process that this may spark… And, the answer is, in principle, yes, in practice, no.”
Also starring Robert Downey Jr, Josh Hartnett, David Krumholtz, Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt and several others, Oppenheimer has grossed nearly $960 million and counting. The film has been re-released several times, and will likely be re-launched in theatres at least until it hits the $1 billion mark globally. The Oscars will be held on March 11.
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