Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Has a Mind-blowing ‘The Big Bang Theory’ Connection
Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, Oppenheimer, has been one of the most successful films at the box office in 2023. The movie even bagged 7 Oscars, along with many other awards. Nolan is known to mess with the imagination of his audience with the sciences he portrays in his movies, with the help of his consultant team.
On the other hand, there is the popular sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. The show and its geeky characters had audiences cracking up for years. It couldn’t be imagined that these two would have anything in common, but that isn’t the case here.
Dr. Kip Thorne’s Role in The Big Bang Theory and Oppenheimer
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Kip Thorne is the main connection between The Big Bang Theory and Oppenheimer. He has expertise in physics, particularly gravitational waves, and he’s been a consultant on both Oppenheimer and The Big Bang Theory.
Not only this, Thorne appeared on The Big Bang Theory in Season 12 as himself. In episode 18, Sheldon and Amy were asked to convince him of some science credits, but they failed to do so. Also, Thorne was like the science critic for the whole show. He checked whether all the theories talked about in the show were real or not.
Thorne has also been Christopher Nolan‘s go-to scientist for a while now. Thorne was an important consultant in Interstellar. Nolan even named a robot in the movie ‘KIPP’, which was a tribute to Dr. Thorne himself. After Interstellar, the director-scientist duo again worked at Tenet and Oppenheimer.
Thorne didn’t just consult on the science stuff in the movie. He actually met Dr. Oppenheimer in person. When he was at Princeton, he went to seminars led by Oppenheimer himself. So when Nolan was making the movie, he got Thorne to talk with Cillian Murphy to give him some ideas on his character.
Thorne told Murphy details, like how Oppenheimer would lead debates and explain complex ideas easily. He even helped to make sure all the scientific equations written on the boards in the movie were accurate. In a way, he brought a piece of the real Oppenheimer to the film.
Dr. David Saltzberg Also Contributed to The Big Bang Theory and Oppenheimer
Apart from Dr. Thorne, there’s another celebrity scientist who’s been quite popular in Hollywood. Dr. David Saltzberg is a physics professor at UCLA, and he’s also been the secret genius behind The Big Bang Theory and Oppenheimer.
For The Big Bang Theory, Saltzberg would go through scripts and fix any scientific mistakes. He even wrote complex formulas to put on whiteboards in the background and invited real scientists to visit the set through the Geek of the Week program. In Oppenheimer, Saltzberg and Kip Thorne worked together to make sure everything was correct scientifically.
During an interview with Symmetry magazine, Saltzberg said that in The Big Bang Theory, the writers sometimes created some circumstances that would be quite unexpected. Once, they asked him for a spoof of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Saltzberg said it was pretty tough, but he still pulled it off. All that proves is that even for a genius physicist, comedy can be very tough.
Saltzberg provided many choices of science references for the writers because he understood that they get concerned about how the words sound, including the rhythmic patterns of the characters’ dialogues. He also ensured that the characters discussed topics that were ongoing in the scientific community.
One of the biggest things about Saltzberg’s work on The Big Bang Theory was how it affected viewers. He explained in the interview that he was actually expecting people to research some of the interesting scientific terms they heard on the show.
These two science geniuses have been behind the scenes, making sure that the science portrayed on the big screen, whether the laughs in The Big Bang Theory or the intense drama of Oppenheimer, is real.
