But who was the eponymous-title character in Nolan's epic about the birth of the atomic age?
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Julius Robert Oppenheimer, who went by J. Robert Oppenheimer in his life and career, was born on April 22, 1904 in New York City, to a Jewish family. His father Julius, for whom he was named, was a German immigrant who worked in the textile business, and his mother Ella Friedman was a painter whose family had been in New York for several generations. He also had a younger brother named Frank.
He attended Ethical Culture School in New York and graduated from Harvard University in 1922 with a BA in chemistry. He went to Christ College in Cambridge, England in 1925 to study at the Cavendish Laboratory but left a year later to study with Nobel Laureate Max Born at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany.
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There, Oppenheimer met and worked alongside some of the scientific luminaries who would later join him at the Manhattan Project. Gottingen was also where he worked in the then-new field of quantum mechanics.
Oppenheimer received his PhD in physics from Göttingen in 1927 and returned to the United States. In 1929 he began teaching a joint professorship at the University of California - Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology. teaching quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. He remained in that position for a decade. In 1940, he married German American botanist and biologist Katherine Puening. They would go on to have two children, Peter and Katherine.
During his time teaching at Berkeley, Oppenheimer became friends and colleagues with Ernest Lawrence, who had turned the Radiation Laboratory into a major American center for nuclear physics. It was this friendship with Lawrence that brought Oppenheimer into the fold of the research efforts to develop an atomic bomb in 1941.
The following year, he was asked to coordinate work in weapon theory and fast-neutron research at half a dozen universities, which he accepted. He was assisted by John H. Manley, an experimental physicist based at the University of Chicago's Metallurgic Laboratory.
The outbreak of World War II changed the context for all scientists working on atomic energy and atomic weaponry. The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and entrance by the United States into the war greatly increased the urgency to develop this new powerful weaponry.
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In 1942, Oppenheimer was appointed to be the director of a new weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico and develop an atomic bomb. It was given a code name: the Manhattan Project.
The Manhattan Project involved multiple labs in secret locations across the U.S., but included Los Alamos, the University of Chicago and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In Los Alamos, Oppenheimer gathered the best minds in physics to solve the problem of creating an atomic bomb.
For the next two and a half years, Oppenheimer and the scientists in the Manhattan Project worked to research, develop and finally build an atomic bomb. The government ordered a uranium bomb ("Little Boy") and a plutonium bomb ("Fat Man") to be built by the summer of 1945.
On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and the scientists at Los Alamos carried out the first ever test of a plutonium atomic bomb, which he named the Trinity test after the poems of John Donne. He chose a remote corner of the site's bombing range known as the "Jornada del Muerto" or "Journey of Death," 210 miles south of Los Alamos. The test was scheduled to begin at 4 a.m., but had to be pushed back due to rain.
At exactly 5:30 a.m., as scientists and staff took cover in shelters, the bomb was detonated and the nuclear age began.
Three weeks later, on August 6, 1945, "Little Boy" was dropped from the Enola Gay air craft onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki. Together, historians estimate almost 200,000 people were killed in the two atomic bombings.
Oppenheimer was, by all accounts, horrified by the terrible power his work had unleashed. He would later say that in the control room at Los Alamos on the morning of the Trinity Test, words from the Hindu sacred epic, the Bhagavad-Gita, sprung into his mind: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."
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After World War II ended, the Manhattan Project was replaced by the Atomic Energy Commission, in which Oppenheimer served as the Chairman of the General Advisory Committee. There, he vociferously opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bombs he had developed, calling it "a torture thing that you could well argue did not make a great deal of sense."
At the same time, anti-communist fever swept swept through the nation, led and personified by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Unamerican Activities Committee. Oppenheimer found himself swept up in the fervor as well, due to his association with left-leaning political and social causes and radical political figures. He was subjected to a security investigation in 1953, and lost his security clearance; as a result, he lost his position at the AEC.
For the next decade, Oppenheimer retreated from public life. He lectured and consulted at scientific institutions around the nation and around the world. He also served as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1947 to 1966.
He was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award, the highest honor given by the AEC, by President Lyndon Johnson in 1963.
J. Robert Oppenheimer died from throat cancer on February 18, 1967. He was 62.