Mr. Gray is looking forward to the screening of Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy as the great physicist who has been called “the father of the atomic bomb” and played a leading role in the creation of the Hiroshima bomb.

It premieres on July 21st, and in Nolan’s favorite habit, it’s already been preceded by short teasers that reveal little but pique curiosity about the film.

The first “regular” trailer was recently released, revealing more: in one scene, Murphy as Oppenheimer approaches an elderly Einstein (played by veteran English actor Tom Cody) and they strike up a conversation. The scene has already become the subject of discussion in foreign media, the truth is that they met several times, and these meetings are mentioned in the book on which the film is based, “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. .

On the night of the world’s first atomic test at Los Alamos on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer saw “the radiance of a thousand suns” over the New Mexico desert. “We knew the world would never be the same again. Someone laughed, someone cried, the majority was silent, ”he wrote later. And he? He sang the now famous Sanskrit verse: “Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

“We knew the world would never be the same again. Some were laughing, some were crying, most were silent.”

After the bombing, Oppenheimer turned to Hinduism to find inner balance. Of course, it wasn’t easy, and these moral dilemmas lend themselves to compelling narratives. Oppenheimer and Los Alamos were also turned into a novel (Louisa Hall’s Trinity) and a great opera by the American composer John Adams (Doctor Atomic, staged at the San Francisco Opera directed by Peter Sellars).

Mr. Gray can’t help but notice Nolan’s almost mystical depiction of an atomic explosion in the trailer. What makes him realize that the mysticism of the Hindu Veda is entangled (in Opie’s mind?) with the enigma of the decay of unimaginably tiny matter and the unfathomable energy released from it. It was a matter not only of destroying the world, but of understanding a deeper reality…

Modern Sanskrit scholars say that the translation of the verse read by “Opi” was inaccurate: in essence, it expresses that the time has come to destroy the world; and that everything is now in the hands of God, who shines like “a thousand suns” shining at the same time.

All this in itself was a very explosive question: does matter really exist?