The Abyss of Uncertainty

In the first of many close-ups of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in Christopher Nolan’s new film about the physicist, he’s a young student observing raindrops falling in a well. Murphy’s eyes wander tremulously, his perception of the external puddle prompting him to reflect. He’s a troubled student at Cambridge, isolated and homesick, sinking into depression. He’s aware of how any talents he has cultivated as a theorist are undermined by a lack of finesse in the laboratory. After his professor, Patrick Blackett (James D’Arcy), holds Oppenheimer back from seeing the visiting physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) deliver a lecture, the student injects the professor’s apple with cyanide. Oppenheimer attends the lecture and lies comfortably in bed that night, dreaming of both Bohr’s hidden quantum universe of paradox along with the more immediate bucolic comforts of his family ranch in New Mexico, where we see a horse being fed an apple. The image snaps Oppenheimer out of his reverie. He runs to the classroom, where Blackett and Bohr—who’s seized the apple and is about to bite—are in conversation. Oppenheimer grabs the apple from Bohr and throws it in the trash.