‘Oppenheimer’: UC Berkeley goes Hollywood in biopic film about father of the atom bomb

IT WAS THE summer of 1942 and a secret group of senior theoretical physicists at the University of California, Berkeley — dubbed the “luminaries” — took the historic first steps toward the design and manufacture of the world’s first nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb.

Amid World War II, which began in 1939, the luminaries joined U.S. and Allied forces against Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Japan and Italy. Enter American physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer, also known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” the director of the secret U.S. Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the leader of the “luminaries.”