Queens’ ties to Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’
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Richard Feynman, Queens born physicist, will be portrayed by Jack Quaid in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” which opens in theaters this week. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
By Ryan Schwach
Later this week, audiences will head to the movie theater to see Christopher Nolan’s three-hour historical epic, “Oppenheimer,” about the man who led the American effort to construct the atomic bomb during World War II.
Although the film will mostly concern J. Robert Oppenheimer, there is a lesser known character involved in the creation of the bomb with close ties to Queens. Richard Feynman, a junior physicist on the Manhattan Project, was born and raised in the Queens community of Far Rockaway.
Feynman, who will be portrayed by Jack Quaid in the new film, spent his entire childhood in the beach town, which in 1985 he described as the “outskirts of New York.” He graduated from Far Rockaway High School, and was known locally as a kid who could easily fix radios without any real instruction.
From a young age he was considered intelligent beyond his years, teaching himself advanced science and mathematics before he was 16-years-old.
He attended MIT, and got recruited by Oppenheimer as a mere 24-year-old physicist without a graduate degree.
In “American Prometheus,” the Oppenheimer biography Nolan used as his main guide for the film, Feynman is described as “a brilliant and cheerfully mischievous…physicist.”
Feynman was known for that mischief at Los Alamos, the secluded section of the New Mexico desert where the atomic bomb was constructed.
He was known for arguing, and doing so in an intense New York accent. Also, he made a habit of cracking open numerous safes at Los Alamos and exposing other security holes at the base, just for his own amusement.
“I love puzzles,” he wrote in his 1985 autobiography. “One guy tries to make something to keep another guy out; there must be a way to beat it!”
Feynman also helped calculate the yield of the fission bomb, and his intelligence quickly made him a team leader in the project.
After Los Alamos and the atomic bomb, he dedicated his life to physics, teaching at the California Institute of Technology and Cornell. He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965, and was a key figure in the Rogers Commission, a panel tasked with figuring out what led to the Challenger disaster in 1986.
He died in 1988 from complications with a rare form of cancer, and is buried in California.
In Feynman’s native Far Rockaway, an area of Cornaga Avenue is co-named Richard Feynman Way.
