Started watching the film Oppenheimer (2023). It was about time, considering Nolan is one of my favorite directors and Murphy actors.

Thinking of Oppenheimer as a kind of leader, I wonder if this will have heist movie vibes where an important part is collecting the team.

Finished the film now. Pretty good. I guess I wanted it to be more about scientists and less about politics. The relationship drama was also a bit superfluous in my opinion, but I suppose big films need to have that. By giving up creative vision on something small like that, big directors like Nolan get the license to keep making big movies which is what they care for. Being too insistent on the full authenticity of your work won’t get you anywhere.

Oppenheimer was a tall, thin chain smoker, who often neglected to eat during periods of intense thought and concentration. Many of his friends described him as having self-destructive tendencies. A disturbing event occurred when he took a vacation from his studies in Cambridge to meet up with Fergusson in Paris. Fergusson noticed that Oppenheimer was not well. To help distract him from his depression, Fergusson told Oppenheimer that he (Fergusson) was to marry his girlfriend Frances Keeley. Oppenheimer did not take the news well. He jumped on Fergusson and tried to strangle him.

He didn’t have Sitzfleisch, ‘sitting flesh,’ when you sit on a chair. As far as I know, he never wrote a long paper or did a long calculation, anything of that kind. He didn’t have patience for that; his own work consisted of little aperçus, but quite brilliant ones. But he inspired other people to do things, and his influence was fantastic.

Oppenheimer’s diverse interests sometimes interrupted his focus on science. In 1933, he learned Sanskrit and met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley. He read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit, and later he cited it as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life. His close confidant and colleague, Nobel Prize winner Isidor Rabi, later gave his own interpretation:

Oppenheimer was overeducated in those fields, which lie outside the scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular, which resulted in a feeling of mystery of the universe that surrounded him like a fog. He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had already been done, but at the border he tended to feel there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was … [he turned] away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition.