| Seventy-eight years ago this week, the temperature in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert briefly reached tens of millions of degrees. The resulting light could be seen on the other side of a mountain range; windows reportedly broke a hundred and eighty miles away. These were some of the first consequences of Trinity, the nuclear test carried out by the Manhattan Project in July, 1945—a blast depicted in “Oppenheimer,” the bio-pic directed by Christopher Nolan that opens in U.S. movie theatres on Friday. In a 2015 piece for The New Yorker, the historian Alex Wellerstein wrote about the science and experience of witnessing the explosion, which was followed, the next month, by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which as many as two hundred thousand people died. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist later known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” would eventually fall victim to McCarthyism, in part for his opposition to the creation of an even deadlier weapon. But, on that sunny morning in New Mexico, the immediate impacts of the experiment were the ones that left the greatest impression. “The enormity of the light and its length quite stunned me,” one observer, the president of Harvard, recalled. “The whole sky suddenly full of white light like the end of the world.” | 
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