J. Robert Oppenheimer Explains How, Upon Witnessing the First Nuclear Explosion, He Recited a Line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”
No matter how little we know of the Hindu religion, a line from one of its holy scriptures lives within us all: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is one facet of the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist who left an outsized mark on history. For his crucial role in the Manhattan Project that during World War II produced the first nuclear weapons, he’s now remembered as the“father of the atomic bomb.” He secured that title on July 16, 1945, the day of the test in the New Mexican desert that proved these experimental weapons actually work — that is, they could wreak a kind of destruction previously only seen in visions of the end of the world.
“We knew the world would not be the same,” Oppenheimer remembered in 1965. “A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ ”
The translation’s grammatical archaism made it even more powerful, resonating with lines in Tennyson (“I am become a name, for always roaming with a hungry heart”), Shakespeare (“I am come to know your pleasure”), and the Bible (“I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness”).
But what is death, as the Gita sees it? In an interview with Wired, Sanskrit scholar Stephen Thompson explains that, in the original, the word that Oppenheimer speaks as “death” refers to “literally the world-destroying time.” This means that “irrespective of what Arjuna does” — Arjuna being the aforementioned prince, the narrative’s protagonist — everything is in the hands of the divine.” Oppenheimer would have learned all this while teaching in the 1930s at UC Berkeley, where he learned Sanskrit and read the Gita in the original. This created in him, said his colleague Isidor Rabi, “a feeling of mystery of the universe that surrounded him like a fog.”
The necessity of the United States’ subsequent dropping of not one but two atomic bombs on Japan, examined in the 1965 documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (below), remains a matter of debate. Oppenheimer went on to oppose nuclear weapons, describing himself to an appalled President Harry Truman as having “blood on my hands.” But in developing them, could he have simply seen himself as a modern Prince Arjuna? “It has been argued by scholars,” writes the Economic Times’ Mayank Chhaya, “that Oppenheimer’s approach to the atomic bomb was that of doing his duty as part of his dharma as prescribed in the Gita.” He knew, to quote another line from that scripture brought to mind by the nuclear explosion, that “if the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One” — and perhaps also that splendor and wrath may be one.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020. In the light of the new Oppenheimer film, we’re bringing it back.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Wes Anderson Explains How He Built Asteroid City, the Fictional American Desert Town in His New Film
Wes Anderson’s latest picture Asteroid City is named for the small Arizona town (population: 87) in which its central story takes place. That town, in turn, is named for the incident that made it (modestly) famous: the impact of an asteroid that left behind a large crater. That crater was one of the features that Anderson and his production designers had to make for the shoot — but then, so was everything else in Asteroid City, which had to be raised whole in an out-of-the-way area of Spain. Unlikely though it may sound in itself, the cinematic project of re-creating the American West in southern Europe isn’t without precedent: the “Spaghetti Westerns” of the nineteen-sixties and seventies also relied on the Spanish desert to provide the right atmosphere of sublime desolation.
Just as movies like A Fistful of Dollars or Django are rooted in a certain conception of the second half of the nineteenth century, so Asteroid City is rooted in a certain conception of the middle of the twentieth. This comes through most clearly in the architecture of their sets.
“The thing was to try to make buildings that were as evocative of the time as we possibly could,” Anderson says in the short making-of video above. But this thoroughly midcentury-provincial setting also needed its mysterious elements: the crater, of course, but also the observatory and “the freeway on-ramp there that goes to nowhere.” The fully assembled Asteroid City felt like not just a set, but something approaching an actual place: “Once it was built, we could be a tiny group in this what seemed like an abandoned town.”
Anyone who’s spent enough time road-tripping across the United States of America will recognize that, continental location notwithstanding, Asteroid City captures something essential about that country’s more remote settlements, inhabited or not, located in arid regions or otherwise. This required the fabrication of not just buildings but the flora, fauna, and geological formations of an entire landscape, practically all of it adherent to Anderson’s signature handmade aesthetic scheme, which somehow convinces through artificiality. Even detractors of Anderson’s work surely derive pleasure from the resulting quality of sheer physicality, some of which also owes to his still shooting on good old 35-millimeter film — as this video’s publisher, Kodak, doesn’t hesitate to remind us.
via Laughing Squid
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Wes Anderson Movie Sets Recreated in Cute, Miniature Dioramas
A Star Wars Film Made in a Wes Anderson Aesthetic
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...You Can Get Open Culture Posts on Threads, Bluesky & Other Social Media Platforms
As Twitter decays, we want to remind you that you can find posts from Open Culture on other social media platforms. Find us now on Threads, where have 900+ followers in the first 24 hours. We’re also on Blue Sky and Facebook. Or get our daily email newsletter. Pick your favorite and keep tabs on our daily posts.…
Read More...The Oldest Known Footage of London (1890–1920) Features the City’s Great Landmarks
The City of London has exploded like Blade Runner in the last couple of decades with glass and concrete and shrines to global capitalism like St. Mary Axe (aka the Gherkin) and the Shard (aka the Shard). But has the view from the ground stayed the same? According to this charming then vs. now video assembled by a company called YesterVid, yes.
Trawling through the oldest surviving public domain footage from the early days of film (1890 — 1920), the videographers have placed old and modern-day shots side by side, matching as close as they can camera placement and lens.
Missing from today: the soot, the filth in the gutter, and the free-for-all in the streets as horse-drawn carriages and early busses battled it out with pedestrians. Streets are safer now, with railings to protect citizens, though the signs of increased security are also apparent, and CCTV cameras are most probably filming the director…somewhere!
St. Paul’s still needs room to breathe, and while the Empire Theatre may not show any more Lumiere Cinematographies, it’s still a cinema showing IMAX films. It didn’t suffer the fate of many cinemas outside of London after the ‘60s: being turned into bingo halls or just torn down.
Also: the sea of red poppies seen at 4:28 during the shot of the Tower of London’s moat is an installation work by artist Paul Cummins. Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red was installed between July and November of 2014 and, according to Wikipedia, it consisted of 888,246 ceramic red poppies, each intended to represent one British or Colonial serviceman killed in the Great War.
Final point: the oldest pub in London, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, still stands, and during the sweltering summers provides a cool respite, as most of its drinking rooms are underground. Cheers!
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...George Bernard Shaw’s Famous Writing Hut, Which Could Be Rotated 360 Degrees to Catch the Sun All Day
Seven decades after his death, George Bernard Shaw is remembered for his prodigious body of work as a playwright, but also — and at least as much — for his personal eccentricities: the then-unfashionable teetotaling vegetarianism, the rejection of vaccines and even the germ theory of disease, the all-wool wardrobe. Thus, even those casually familiar with Shaw’s life and work may not be terribly surprised to learn that he not only had an outbuilding in which to do his work, but an outbuilding that could be rotated 360 degrees. “Shaw’s writing refuge was a six-square-meter wooden summerhouse, originally intended for his wife Charlotte,” writes Idler’s Alex Johnson. “Built on a revolving base that used castors on a circular track,” it was “essentially a shed on a lazy Susan.”
The hut became a part of Shaw’s formidable public image in a period of the early twentieth century “when there was a growing appreciation of idyllic rural settings — a knock-on effect of which was that people had garden buildings installed. Shaw made the most of this movement, promoting himself as a reclusive thinker toiling in his rustic shelter, away from the intrusions of press and people alike, while at the same time inviting in newspapers and magazines and posing for photos.”
In 1929, “Shaw stood in front of his hut for a photo for Modern Mechanics & Inventions magazine to promote the idea of sunlight as a healing agent.” Hence the importance of rotating to catch its rays all day long through windows made of Vitaglass, “a recent invention that allowed UV rays to come through, letting, the makers said, ‘health into the building.’ ”
However odd some of Shaw’s views and practices, one can’t help but imagine that at least some of them contributed to his longevity. The 1946 British Pathé newsreel above pays him a visit just a few years before his death at the age of 94, finding him still writing (he still had the play Buoyant Billions ahead of him, as well as several other miscellaneous works), and what’s more, doing so in his hut: “Like G. B. S. himself,” says the narrator, “it pretends to be strictly practical, with no nonsense about it.” Yet Shaw seems to have had a sense of humor about his theoretically humble workspace, naming it after the English capital so that unwanted visitors to his home in the village of Ayot St Lawrence could be told, not untruthfully, that he was in London. But one naturally wonders: when he rang up the main house with his in-hut telephone (another of its highly advanced features), did his housekeeper say it was London calling?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Download Instructions for More Than 6,800 LEGO Kits at the Internet Archive
We’ve all come across a LEGO set from childhood and felt the temptation to try building it one more time — making the generous assumption, of course, that all the pieces are in the box, to say nothing of the instructions. If you’re missing a few bricks, you can always turn to the robust secondary market in LEGO components. If you’re missing the manual, there’s now one place you should look first: the LEGO building instructions collection at the Internet Archive. There you’ll find digitized materials for more than 6,800 different sets, including such popular releases as the LEGO Chevrolet Camaro Z28, the LEGO International Space Station, and the LEGO cover photo of Meet the Beatles.
Since they were first brought to market in the late nineteen-fifties, LEGO’s signature building bricks have been primarily considered children’s toys. And of course, most of us got to know LEGO in childhood; I myself have fond memories of working my way up to the Ice Planet 2002 series, with its still much-referenced transparent orange chainsaws.
But even after coming of age, the serious enthusiast need not leave LEGO behind: the company has put out such adult-oriented models as the Colosseum, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, the Eiffel Tower, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, to name just a few whose instructions are downloadable from the Internet Archive.
The Metafilter discussion of the Internet Archive’s LEGO building instructions collection reveals not only that some are excited indeed about the existence of this resource, but also that others consider building from instructions to be a misuse of the medium. It may be true that following specific documented steps for hours on end may encourage a certain slackening of the imagination. But then, it may also be true that physically working one’s way through a complex assembly process can build dexterity and generate ideas for later freeform constructions. However we approach LEGO, and whatever age at which we approach it, we need only keep in mind the Danish imperative that gave the company its name: leg godt — play well. Enter the collection of instructions here.
via Metafilter
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...How Olive Oil Was Made in Ancient Rome in the Middle Ages (Plus in Modern Times)
If you think cannabis possesses a broad range of applications, olive oil is going to blow your mind!
Humans have been hip to this miracle elixir since approximately 2500 BCE, when Mediterranean dwellers used it as lamp fuel and to anoint royalty, warriors, and other VIPs. (Not for nothing does “messiah” translate to “the anointed one”…)
Its culinary applications entered the mix between the 5th and 4th centuries BCE.
Even amurca, the bitter tasting, foul smelling liquid byproduct of the oil pressing process had numerous things to recommend it, as least as far as the ancient Romans were concerned. They used it as a fertilizer, a pesticide, a floor plaster, a sealant for jars, a fire accelerant, moth repellent, axel grease, a surface varnish, a nutritional supplement for livestock, and a remedy for skin diseases and infections.
It’s also a serious pollutant, so good on them for diverting it from the landfill.
Methods for extracting this practical, nutritional powerhouse from the olive fruit have evolved over time.
Bronze Age frescoes and ancient papyri document the earliest approach.
The Romans and Greeks took things up a notch with mechanical presses, such as the replica at the Biblical History Center, above.
In an episode of his National Geographic Uncharted series, chef Gordon Ramsay traveled to Morocco to take a turn at one of the manually-turned stone grinding wheels that were the Middle Ages’ contribution to the history of olive oil, discovering in the process that such “bloody hard work” is better accomplished by an ass.
His labors were rewarded with a taste of olive oil straight from the press - oh my lord, that is beautiful! I’ve heard of extra virgin but this is gonna be extra-extra virgin!
Insider Food tracks olive oil to the 21st century, where production is underway at a mill in Monopoli in the southern Italian region of Puglia, an area where olive trees outnumber humans, 15 to 1.
Puglia’s 1,000-plus mills supply 40% of the country’s olive oil production, and 12% worldwide.
Contemporary olive oil makers obtain a traditional quality product by splitting the difference between the ancient and the modern, with conveyor belts ferrying the fruit to a vat where machine-driven granite wheels crush them to a pulp.
It’s less picturesque, but also more efficient and hygienic than pre-Industrial methods, thanks, in part, to rubber gloves and stainless steel.
Grading oil according to its purity is also a modern innovation, providing consumers a handle quality, taste and health attributes.
Learn more about the history of olive oil here, then get cookin’!
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...The Remarkable Story of a Black Holocaust Survivor, Told in a Short Documentary
Among millions and millions imprisoned in the Holocaust, one man in particular stands out — and stood out even to his Nazi captors. “At the Mauthausen garage yard, a black point stood about amidst the dust-colored multitude,” writes novelist Joaquim Amat-Piniella. “It’s a black boy from Barcelona, born in Spanish Africa. The officer who had spotted him from the balcony ordered that he be brought up to him. His robust and muscular body surprised the Nazis,” as did his cultivation: that he responded to their questions in German may well have kept him from being sent immediately to the gas chamber. His name was Carlos José Grey Molay, also known as Carlos Greykey, and his remarkable life story is the subject of 5124.GREYKEY, Enric Ribes’ short documentary film above.
Narrated by Greykey’s daughter Muriel Grey Molay, “5124.GREYKEY uses retro techniques, recreated home movies and personal/archival photography to visualise a daughter’s memories of an enigmatic father.” So writes Rob Munday at Short of the Week, going on to describe the film as “consisting of painstakingly recreated home movies (reshot on Super 8 and 16mm — as Muriel couldn’t retrieve them), photos (both from Muriel’s archive and historic archives) and stop-motion (created by S/W alums I+G Stop Motion).”
Through these materials, “much like how the daughter builds a solid understanding of her Dad’s past, bit-by-bit, a picture of Jose only starts to form after we are given the pieces of the puzzle to put together ourselves.”
The Barcelona-born son of parents from modern-day Equatorial Guinea, Greykey was studying medicine at university when the Spanish Civil War broke out. Conscripted, he fought against the rebels, and later moved on to France, where he fought against the Germans. It was the Nazi victory there that put him in the Mauthausen concentration camp along with Amat-Piniella. Like everyone else interned there, he received a number — the titular 5124 — but his refinement and formidable language skills (in addition to his native Spanish, he commanded not just German, but also French, English, and Catalán) secured him the special position of serving at the table of the camp’s commander. Whatever privileges attended this position, Greykey’s wartime experience haunted him for the rest of his life: a life swept up in enough currents of history to be more than overdue for a feature film-treatment.
via Aeon
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch the Newly-Released Trailer for Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Starring Joaquin Phoenix
Ridley Scott’s 1977 film The Duellists stars Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine as Frenchmen in the early nineteenth century. Both of their characters are military officers, Keitel’s a Bonapartist and Carradine’s an anti-Bonapartist, and their relationship plays out over a duel-punctuated sixteen-year period during and just after the Napoleonic Wars. The Duellists is required viewing for any student of Scott-as-auteur, not just due to its being his debut feature, but also to its presumptive connections to his latest work. Even working on a low budget 45 years ago, Scott and his collaborators managed to perform an acclaimed re-creation of Napoleon’s France. What has he accomplished on the far grander canvas of Napoleon, which comes out on November 22nd?
Napoleon, as previously featured here on Open Culture, is also the title of the greatest movie Stanley Kubrick never made. Judging by its newly released trailer, Ridley Scott’s film isn’t exactly a stylistic homage to Kubrick, though one doubts that Kubrick’s work was all too far from Scott’s mind during the project — as indeed it wasn’t in the making of The Duellists, which was heavily influenced by Barry Lyndon.
But as a historical drama, Napoleon seems to have more obviously in common with Scott’s own swords-and-sandals blockbuster Gladiator, which included a memorable performance by Joaquin Phoenix as Marcus Aurelius’ power-mad son Commodus, who kills his father in order to make himself emperor.
Phoenix plays another imperial role in Napoleon: that of the titular military commander who rose to rule the French Empire for more than a decade. Bringing Napoleon’s story to the screen afforded Scott the chance to stage no fewer than six battle sequences — including, as Smithsonian.com’s Teresa Nowakowski notes, “the Battle of Austerlitz, a military engagement that went down in history as one of Napoleon’s greatest successes. The trailer depicts the pivotal moment when Napoleon’s forces fired artillery into the ice on which enemy troops were retreating,” an episode well-suited to Scott’s instinct for spectacle. However much his particular sensibilities may differ from Kubrick’s, it’s easy to understand why both directors would be drawn to the subject of Napoleonic ambition.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Explore the Largest Online Archive Exploring the Genius of Leonard da Vinci
We dare not speculate as to what Leonardo DaVinci would make of artificial intelligence.
We are, however, fairly confident that he would love the Internet.
The Renaissance-era genius applied his sophisticated understanding of the human body and the natural world to other types of systems, including plans for civil engineering projects, military projectiles, and flying machines.
Google Arts & Culture’s new initiative Inside a Genius Mind offers an interactive experience of the codices in which Da Vinci made his sketches, diagrams, and notes.
It’s also a curatorial collaboration between a human — Oxford art history professor Martin Kemp — and artificial intelligence.
Professor Kemp, author of Living with Leonardo: Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond, brings a lifetime of rigorous study and passion for the subject.
His non-human counterpart used machine learning to delve into the notebooks’ contents, investigating some 1040 pages from 6 volumes and “drawing thematic connections across time and subject matter to reflect Leonardo’s spirit of interdisciplinary imagination, innovation and the profound unity at the heart of his apparently diverse pursuits.”
Upon launching the experiment, you bushwhack your way through the individual codices by clicking on the sketches floating toward you like elements in a classic space-themed video game, or choose to enjoy one of five curated stories.
We went with Earth as Body, which gathers seven pages from the UK’s Royal Collection Trust’s Codex Windsor, and one from the Codex Leicester, which inspired an animated model that should surely please its current owner, Bill Gates.
Using a discreet and somewhat fiddly navigation bar on the left side of the screen, we toured Leonardo’s renderings of the flayed muscles of the upper spine, the vessels and nerves of the neck and liver, the Arno valley with the route of a proposed canal that would run from Florence to Pisa, a view of the Alps from Milan, the fall of light on a face, studies of optics and men in action, and observations of the moon and earthshine.
How are these things related?
“Leonardo believed that the human body represented the whole natural world in miniature” and the selections do offer food for thought that Leonardo’s passion for the underlying laws of nature is the common thread running through his research and art.
Each image is accompanied a button inviting you to “explore” the work further. Click it for information about dimensions, provenance, and media, as well as some tantalizing biographical tidbits, such as this, adapted from the catalogue for the 2019 exhibit Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing:
Leonardo had first studied anatomy in the late 1480s. By the end of his life he claimed to have performed 30 human dissections, intending to publish an illustrated treatise on the subject, but this was never completed, and Leonardo’s work thus had no discernible impact on the discipline. His only documented dissection was carried out in the winter of 1507–8, when he performed an autopsy on an old man whose death he had witnessed in a hospital in Florence. The studies on this page from Leonardo’s notebook are based on that dissection: on the verso Leonardo depicts the vessels of the liver; and in notes elsewhere in the notebook he gives the first known clinical description of cirrhosis of the liver.
Perhaps you’d like to circumvent the machine learning and use your own genius mind to make connections a la Da Vinci?
Try messing around with the AI tags. See what you can cobble together to forge a cohesive alliance between such elements as wing, horse, map, musical instruments, and spiral.
Or cleanse your palate by putting a mash-up of two codex sketches on a digital sticky with the help of Google AI, mindful that the master, who lived to the ripe old age of 67, was probably a bit more intentional with his time…
Begin your explorations of Google Arts & Culture’s Inside a Genius Mind here.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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