Oppenheimer: From Cambridge to Trinity

Cambridge, 1925. The young Oppenheimer works at the Cavendish Laboratory and hates it. "The lab work is a terrible bore," he writes; The film opens on these unhappy years, including the poisoned apple he once confessed to leaving on his tutor Blackett's desk, a story historians have since questioned. Nolan never shot in Cambridge; UCLA's Kerckhoff Hall stood in for both Cambridge and Göttingen. The old Cavendish stood on the New Museums Site in central Cambridge.

Visitor guidance: The old Cavendish site is on Free School Lane in central Cambridge, a short walk from the river.

Oppenheimer leaves Cambridge in 1926 for Göttingen to take his doctorate under Max Born. The town is one of the world's great centres of theoretical physics, and he argues so insistently in seminars that Maria Goeppert gathers signatures asking him to quieten down. He finishes in March 1927, aged 23, and the paper he writes with Born — the Born–Oppenheimer approximation — becomes his most cited work. The film's Göttingen scenes share UCLA's Kerckhoff Hall with Cambridge. The University of Göttingen still dominates the town.

Location precision: Oppenheimer studied at the university, whose buildings are spread across the town; the pin marks the centre of Göttingen.

Visitor guidance: The university's historic buildings are in and around Göttingen's old town.

Berkeley makes Oppenheimer. He joins the physics department in the summer of 1929 and keeps office 219 in LeConte Hall, beside Ernest Lawrence and the first cyclotron. In 1942 he heads the fast-neutron group and runs a summer school on bomb theory on the top floor. The film shot its campus scenes around the University of California, Berkeley, but moved the city streets to Pasadena. LeConte Hall still houses the physics department, where a plaque outside room 433 honours Oppenheimer and his students.

Visitor guidance: LeConte Hall still houses the physics department on the Berkeley campus.

Oppenheimer picks a boys' school on a New Mexico mesa for the secret laboratory, and the Army buys the Los Alamos Ranch School. Fuller Lodge, built in 1928 from hundreds of ponderosa pine and aspen logs, becomes the social heart of Los Alamos as the town swells from a few hundred people in 1943 to more than 6,000 in 1945. The film rebuilt 1940s Los Alamos on a plateau at Ghost Ranch, then filmed interiors in the real town and in Oppenheimer's restored cabin. Fuller Lodge is open to visitors today.

Visitor guidance: Fuller Lodge is open for visitor viewing in central Los Alamos.

At 5:29 a.m. on 16 July 1945, in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, the first nuclear weapon is detonated. Oppenheimer later said: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent." The nearby McDonald Ranch House had been the laboratory for bomb components. Today a lava-rock obelisk about 12 feet high marks ground zero, and the site opens once a year, on the third Saturday of October. The film recreated the test in Belen, New Mexico, with a 100-foot replica tower.

Visitor guidance: Trinity Site opens once a year, on the third Saturday of October.

After the bombings, Oppenheimer goes to Washington to tell President Truman he feels he has blood on his hands. In the film Truman dismisses him afterwards as a "crybaby". The film's Washington scenes were shot in Santa Fe, reusing an Oval Office set from the television series Veep. The White House is still the president's official residence and workplace at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Visitor guidance: The White House offers free tours, but they must be arranged well in advance.

In 1947 Oppenheimer becomes director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the quiet research home of Albert Einstein. Fuld Hall, opened in 1939, holds the director's office. Lewis Strauss suspects Oppenheimer turned Einstein against him there, and the film's final flashback returns to a 1947 conversation between the two physicists. Nolan shot on location at the institute in April 2022.

Visitor guidance: The institute is a working research campus in Princeton, New Jersey; check before visiting.

Over four weeks in 1954 the Atomic Energy Commission examines Oppenheimer's past and revokes his security clearance by two votes to one. The hearing is held in Temporary Building 3 near the Washington Monument, and turns on a story he once invented about a Soviet approach — "Because I was an idiot", he explains. The film shot its hearing scenes in a disused office building in Alhambra, California. The temporary building is gone; the monument area remains the nearest landmark.

Location precision: Temporary Building 3, where the 1954 hearing was held, stood near the Washington Monument and no longer exists; the pin marks the monument area.