I'm shocked that it took so long for someone to make it, but not surprised at all that Christopher Nolan is the one to do it.

Me personally, I'll have to apologize in advance and promise to try not to nerd up the discussion in this thread too much with the history and the physics of what they discovered. I'm sure the actual physics in the movie will be much less than I would have liked. But there's so much drama, even without the explicit calculation of cross sections, that I know it'll be a spectacle long before the first mushroom cloud we see.

This story is the only *real* example I can think of for one of the oldest tropes in drama: regular people, via enormous skill and even greater luck, doing something superhuman and changing the nature of humanity. They found a tiny door in the universe that changed forever, and likely for the last time, what humans will ever be capable of.

Paraphrasing Stanislaw Ulam (who will almost certainly be a significant character in this): the entire direction of international events, the ultimate meaning of war, and the nature of human existence into the indefinite future, would be completely altered if the results of a few mathematical calculations had differed by about five percent.

If we're able to survive climate change and live as a society into the 22nd century, more than anything it will be because of the discoveries made here. And if all of humanity is wiped out and the world is made completely uninhabitable during our lifetime, it will most likely be because of the discoveries made here. The story *since* Oppenheimer is the story of humanity trying to figure out if it can harness its genius or whether it'll be destroyed by it. During my lifetime we've all gotten complacent, but as recent events have reminded us, it only takes one mistake for everything to come crashing down.

I hope the movie isn't entirely about Oppenheimer, because ultimately he was just one of the ten or so most important people in the story. Though he was the first one to really understand all of it, for better and for worse, and at a human level as well as a technical level.

If anyone wants to read up before the movie comes along, I assume the main source material was the biography by Bird and Sherwin, which I'm told is great but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. (In fact according to IMDB, Bird and Sherwin are listed as writers on the script, along with Nolan. This bodes well.)

The real source that everyone needs to read if they want to know more about the true significance of this story is Richard Rhodes's masterpiece of history writing, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." I've been rereading it myself and I've never seen a story so profound. You don't have to know any physics to read it, though being interested in a few technical details would really help especially with the first half of the book, which covers the initial discoveries of quantum theory, nuclear structure, radioactive isotopes, leading to the strange mysterious isotope of Uranium, U-235, which lies right at the boundary between stability and instability and ultimately makes everything else in the story possible. Along the way in that first half of the book he intersperses telling world events. The chapter on the first world war is harrowing, and he skillfully draws parallels (among other things) between the adoption of gas warfare in the first world war and nuclear weapons in the second. The story of the rise of fascism in Europe is chilling, especially as one parallel after another seems to pop up in modern-day news reports on at least a monthly basis. (Rhodes wrote the book in the '80's, and probably never realized just how contemporary it would eventually seem.)

Most of what's in Rhodes's book won't be in Nolan's movie, like how Fermi had to use the acceptance of his Nobel prize as a ruse for him and his Jewish wife to escape Italy just before another wave of anti-Jewish laws would have sent her to prison or worse; or how they needed conducting metals to build solenoids for isotope separation but couldn't get any copper in the middle of the war, so they literally went to Fort Knox and borrowed over 300 million dollars worth of silver to make solenoids, and returned it all, down to the last ounce, once the war was over; or how Leo Szilard talked his friend Einstein into signing the fateful letter to Roosevelt that eventually led to the beginning of the Manhattan project (Einstein didn't actually write the letter, because he didn't feel he knew enough about nuclear physics, but he knew Szilard well enough, and knew enough about the importance of the research to attach his name to it anyway despite his passionate and life-long stance as a pacifist). If I had any pull at all in Hollywood, I'd be banging on every studio's door saying they needed to make a 20-episode series out of this story.

There's also an extraordinary opera, "Doctor Atomic," by John Adams, which pulls its libretto almost entirely from historical documents. If you're interested in this kind of thing, find a full performance. I doubt there are any stagings coming up before the film opens but it's worth your while if you can find one. If not, find the video or audio recording and listen to it start to finish, not in bits and pieces. If you're paying attention, it'll have a big effect on you. I saw the premiere staging in San Francisco sometime around 2005, and a more recent staging by the Santa Fe opera a few years ago. It's a visceral, punishing reenactment of the exhaustion, fear, and overall constant inescapable suffocating tension in the weeks and days before the Trinity test.

As for the production, all I know is that Cillian Murphy looks a hell of a lot like Oppie, so well-done there. I can definitely imagine Matt Damon playing general Groves, though I hope they had him put on some weight, as his main bit of comedy was annoyance at the fact that he was so much fatter than the chain-smoking physicists buzzing all around him.

To whatever extent he gets into the science, I imagine that'll all be presented in a really solid way. Bird and Sherwin know what they're talking about, and Nolan has good connections, through the production of Interstellar, with a bunch of great physicists who know important it is to get a story like this right.