(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- The road to the Nuclear Age runs through the campus at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park.
The Chairman of the Physics Department at the U of C said he's looking forward to seeing "Oppenheimer."
"Absolutely. We're all looking forward to seeing this. It's going to be quite an event," said Dr. Peter Littlewood.
The movie, which will be released next week, is about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who is considered "the father of the Atomic Bomb."
As director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Oppenheimer oversaw the team of scientists who were working on The Manhattan Project, which was the effort to build the atomic bomb.
Enrico Fermi was the Manhattan Project physicist who started the first controlled nuclear reaction in a reactor under the old Stagg Football Field on the U of C campus.
Dr. Littlewood said he wants to see a complete examination of Oppenheimer's life.
"The interesting thing about this film is that I'm expecting is that it's very much the life of Oppenhemier. I think it isn't just going to be about the Manhattan Project but what happened afterwards, when he was vilified as part of the Red Scare," Dr. Littlewood said.
Oppenheimer lost his security clearance in the 1950s over alleged ties to Communists. It was posthumously reinstated by the Department of Energy last year.
Dr. Littlewood said the Manhattan Project has a complicated legacy.
All physicists have to live with the threat of nuclear weapons. But, he said, it also left behind a network of federal laboratories that pursue peaceful scientific research to this day.
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