Oppenheimer

Day after tomorrow, 21st July, will be the premier of the biopic Oppenheimer. I looking forward to watching the movie at an IMAX GT theater in Austin TX sometime in the next couple of weeks. I’ve always been fascinated by J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Part of my fascination was due to his deep knowledge of and interest in Hinduism. In a TV interview, when asked what his reaction was when he witnessed the test (in New Mexico, code named Trinity) of the atom bomb he had helped in creating, he said that he had recalled lines from the Bhagavad Gita — “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

Most people don’t know the context of that line, and therefore misinterpret it. They think that he was claiming to have created an instrument of death that could destroy the world. Not at all. The context is as follows.

The setting is the battlefield of Kurukshetra where the armies of the Pandavas and Kauravas are all set to begin the great war. Arjuna, a Pandav, has as his charioteer Sri Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu.) Just as the battle was about to begin, Arjuna has grave doubts about fighting. He wonders aloud what good is it to win a fratricidal war that would result in the killing of many respected elders and relatives. He tells Sri Krishna that he won’t fight.

The Bhagavad Gita (the Song of the Lord) is a record of the conversation between the warrior and his charioteer. Why was this avatar of Vishnu a driver for a warrior who was a mere mortal? We’ll go into that later.

So then, Sri Krishna tells Arjuna that it is his duty as a warrior to fight injustice. That that’s his dharma. That he has to focus on action that is consistent with his dharma, and not be concerned with the results of his actions. Time stands still as the conversation proceeds.

Sri Krishna instructs Arjuna on Yoga. At one point, Arjuna says, “Show me your divine Self.” So Sri Krishna takes on his multi-armed form which has the brilliance of a thousand suns. Arjuna is blinded by the light. Sri Krishna says, “I am Time, the Destroyer of Worlds.” (In Sanskrit, “Kaalo asmi loka kshaya kritpraviddho” — kaal means time.)

The brilliance of the test reminded him of the vision that Vishnu allowed Arjuna to behold. It was as if Oppenheimer was Arjuna on the battlefield.

A recent GQ essay notes:

Oppenheimer even enrolled in weekly Sanskrit lessons [at UC Berkeley] with a Sanskrit professor, who introduced him to the Bhagavad Gita which he later called “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue”. He kept his well-thumbed copy of the Gita at his work desk.

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I enjoyed reading a well-written, recent piece published by the BBC titled, “Who was the real Robert Oppenheimer?“. A few excerpts:

It was the early hours of 16 July 1945, and Robert Oppenheimer was waiting in a control bunker for a moment that would change the world. Around 10km (6 miles) away, the world’s first atomic bomb test, codenamed “Trinity”, was set to proceed in the pale sands of the Jornada del Muerto desert, in New Mexico.[1]

…

The explosion, when it came, outshone the Sun. With a force matching 21 kilotonnes of TNT, the detonation was the largest ever seen. It created a shockwave that was felt 160km (100 miles) away. As the roar engulfed the landscape and the mushroom cloud rose in the sky, Oppenheimer’s expression relaxed into one of “tremendous relief”. …

In interviews conducted in the 1960s, Oppenheimer added a layer of gravitas to his reaction, claiming that, in the moments after the detonation, a line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, had come into his mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The translations frequently say “death” but “time” is a more accurate translation.

Born in New York City in 1904, Oppenheimer was the child of first-generation German Jewish immigrants who had become wealthy through the textiles trade. The family home was a large apartment on the Upper West Side with three maids, a chauffeur, and European art on the walls.

At the time of the Trinity test in 1944, Oppenheimer was only 41 years old. Before that he had taught at University of California at Berkeley (my alma mater) and Princeton NJ, where he worked with Einstein. Einstein was a German Jewish immigrant to the US. He signed a letter (written by Leo Szilard) to the President Roosevelt asking him build an atomic bomb before the Nazis did it.

On the Nazi side was another great physicist, Werner Heisenberg, he of the uncertainty principle fame. Heisenberg was three years older than Oppenheimer, and at one point they were colleagues. But they ended up on opposing sides in the 2nd world war.

On Youtube, there’s a great deal of material on Oppenheimer. Veritasium did one a couple of days ago.

Here’s an extract of a very famous interview of Oppenheimer.

Finally, here’s an excerpt from Anuradha Paudwal’s recitation of the Bhagavad Gita. The first verse is

dhṛitarāśhtra uvācha
dharma-kṣhetre kuru-kṣhetre samavetā yuyutsavaḥ
māmakāḥ pāṇḍavāśhchaiva kimakurvata sañjaya

Dhritarashtra said:
O Sanjay, after gathering on the holy field of Kurukshetra, and desiring to fight, what did my sons and the sons of Pandu do?

Listen:

It’s all karma, neh!

Related posts:

Destroyer of Worlds. May 2020.
Rationality in a World of Suicidally Deluded People. Feb 2020.

NOTES:

[1] Wiki says,

Jornada del Muerto was the name given by the Spanish conquistadors to the Jornada del Muerto Desert basin, and the almost waterless 90-mile (140 km) trail across the Jornada beginning north of Las Cruces and ending south of Socorro, New Mexico. The name translates from Spanish as “Dead Man’s Journey” or “Route of the Dead Man”.

That’s where the Trinity test took place.