Perhaps part of the reason why J. Robert Oppenheimer felt so separated from the consequences of his actions is that he rarely faced them as a young man. In contrast to Lewis Strauss, whose parents were so impoverished by the recession of 1913 that they couldn't send him to college, Oppenheimer's parents were so wealthy and influential that they were able to shield their son from reprisals after the failed poisoning plot was uncovered by the school. He wasn't expelled, much less criminally charged. This scene also informs Strauss' later animosity toward Oppenheimer, as the latter had openly mocked the results of the amateur physics education hard-won by self-study rather than through various expensive universities around the world.
In the film, Oppenheimer gets the rare chance to take back one of his unfortunate actions when he swipes the apple from an unsuspecting Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). He tries impossibly to do this after the first two atomic bombs are used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, urging Strauss to support an agenda of nuclear disarmament. This disconnect between present and future leads not only to his own undoing, but to the destruction of countless lives in the potential future he made possible.
