I saw Christopher Nolan’s new movie Oppenheimer yesterday. I wasn’t able to see it in 70mm IMAX but not sure that really mattered – the film still had such a dramatic impact on me. The film is based on the book “American Prometheus“ by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin which I read earlier this spring. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2006.
All of the actors in this film gave amazing performances – but Robert Downey Jr. in particular was just wonderful. Almost all of his parts of the film were in a high contrast black and white which I also really enjoyed and added to the drama of his role.
This morning I was doing some browsing and stumbled across a link to a 1966 article about Einstein written by J. Robert Oppenheimer and published in the New York Review of Books. I was struck in particular by this quote:
“Late in his life, in connection with his despair over weapons and wars, Einstein said that if he had to live it over again he would be a plumber.”
New York Review of Books – https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/03/17/on-albert-einstein/
Plumber indeed! Nolan’s been quoted in various interviews saying that he believed Oppenheimer (not Einstein) was the most important person that ever lived. In the film you really see his humanity, his brilliance, and just how poorly he was treated late in his life. Nolan’s message in the film seems to be in a similar vein to that quote above from Einstein – and those messages aren’t optimistic…
He was America’s Prometheus, “the father of the atomic bomb,” who had led the effort to wrest from nature the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Afterwards, he had spoken wisely about its dangers and hopefully about its potential benefits and then, near despair, critically about the proposals for nuclear warfare being adopted by the military and promoted by academic strategists: “What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”
from American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
Note: see my notes from my visit in 2019 to the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque.
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