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At the Trinity test site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, looking at the fireball of the atomic bomb explosion on July 16, 1945, J Robert Oppenheimer said: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The line is a quotation from the 32nd verse in the 11th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, typically notated as 11.32. Now, the release of Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer has given rise to fresh concerns about whether his quotation is a mistranslation or if it shows a more fundamental misunderstanding of the revered text.
Verse 11.32 of the Gita says: kālo’asmi, lokakśayakṛt pravṛddhaḥ lokān samāhartum iha pravṛttaḥ. The conventional translation of “kālaḥ” is “time”, and via this interpretation, here is the literal prose translation: “I am time, the cause of world-destruction, mighty; come here to annihilate the worlds.”