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This year, Cork (and by extension Ireland) won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer. Director Christopher Nolan’s biopic of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, has received near universal praise in the Western world. But the focus on Oppenheimer as the main character makes it possible to explore excluded perspectives, whether it’s interned Japanese Americans or Native Americans affected by radiation near a nuclear test site in New Mexico. is drawing criticism.
In Japan, Oppenheimer was released in March, eight months after its U.S. release. The screening came with a warning that it could evoke traumatic memories of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reactions generally praised the filmmaking, but lamented the lack of consideration for the more than 200,000 victims of the nuclear weapons developed by Oppenheimer and his team.
The film also sparked controversy among India’s ruling party, the BJP. In an intimate scene, Oppenheimer recites Hindu scriptures that some considered blasphemous. He translated a passage from the Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit into English: “I will become death, the destroyer of worlds.” This phrase is often associated with the first successful atomic test. Oppenheimer told a television interviewer in 1965 that the poem came to him after he witnessed an explosion.
In a 1949 Life magazine profile, Oppenheimer wrote a longer part of the poem (“If the radiance of a thousand suns shot out at once into the sky, it would be like the radiance of a mighty man”). He claims to have imagined it. There is a well-established idea in the public consciousness that physicists actually recited the Bhagavad Gita during the first nuclear experiments. Although this is not supported by strong evidence, it reflects Oppenheimer’s interest in Indian religion and raises important points about the relationship between physics and the mystical.
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Oppenheimer grew up in a non-observant Jewish family and never fully embraced Hinduism. But he deeply respected his sacred texts, both for their deep literary value and for their moral, spiritual, and metaphysical perspectives. Proficient in multiple languages, Oppenheimer had already studied German, Dutch, Greek, Latin, and French when he began studying Sanskrit in 1933. Moving to the University of California, Berkeley, Oppenheimer befriended a Sanskrit scholar and decided to read Hindu texts in their original form. .
Recent research by historian Elena Schaar shows that Werner Heisenberg, the Bavarian physicist who worked on Germany’s nuclear energy program, embraced a similar aesthetic relationship to Catholicism. In San Francisco Bay, the philosophical tendencies were more iconoclastic, reflecting an earlier counterculture that was also fertile ground for communist ideas.
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By the 1960s, the counterculture movement’s pursuit of alternative lifestyles had given way to an exploration of consciousness and spirituality. At Harvard, Timothy Leary, who received his PhD in psychology from Berkeley in 1950 and was impressed by the work of physicists, was touting the value of psychedelic drugs. Meanwhile, physicists continued to draw inspiration from Eastern philosophy and concepts such as interconnectedness, the nature of reality, and cycles of death and rebirth.
This broader view of physics, particularly quantum physics, interacted with a growing anti-authoritarian consciousness. Some physicists, such as Belfast-born John Stewart Bell, began to question the dominant theories of quantum physics, particularly the Copenhagen interpretation. This is a set of principles devised by leading physicists in his 1920s, but the one most closely associated with it is Niels Bohr. Bohr rejected the idea that physics should elucidate the fundamental properties of reality, and instead thought it should focus on what can be said about reality, scientifically speaking, based on observations.
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Bell was not satisfied with this approach and its widespread acceptance. Ultimately, he demonstrated that quantum mechanics is fundamentally incompatible with classical understanding of reality. From a fundamental point of view, Bell’s theorem challenges the notion of local realism, stating that interactions between quantum particles should be able to move beyond a limiting velocity, a kind of universal speed limit. I argued that there was no. But in quantum entanglement, two connected particles can influence each other instantly, regardless of the distance between them.
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Albert Einstein termed this phenomenon “spooky behavior at a distance” and hypothesized that it was evidence of a missing variable in quantum mechanics. Instead, Bell argued that no variable could explain the interaction. This discovery influenced not only quantum physics but also our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality, forming the basis for new technologies such as quantum computing and cryptography. In that sense, the interest in Eastern philosophy and alternative lifestyles that Oppenheimer helped ferment has as much influence on us today as his atomic legacy.
Stuart Mathieson is Research Manager at InterTradeIreland
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