Mind meeting: Einstein and Oppenheimer together in 1947 Photo: World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
Of all the star names in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer – Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Robert Downey Jr. and others – perhaps the most intriguing is Tom Conti: not so much the actor himself as the character he plays. Because Conti plays the role of Albert Einstein, the most iconic and influential scientist of the 20th century, and this role is key to the film.
Typical of Nolan, the film takes place simultaneously in multiple timelines, one before Trinity J. Robert Oppenheimer's atomic bomb test in April 1945 and another after it. Einstein is featured in the latter talking to Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer by a pond in Princeton. At first, we can't hear what they're saying, but the gist of the conversation is clear both from the body language and from the fact that they're being watched from afar by Lewis Strauss, Downey's hawkish supporter of second-generation hydrogen bombs.
As the film unfolds and the scene is mentioned several times, it becomes clear that Einstein's role is significant for two reasons. First, he represents the old physics of the new Oppenheimer's: Einstein's thinking (for example, his famous equation E = mc2) was what roughly made the bomb possible, but has now been superseded by a man who has the will and the ability to take science to a new level. Secondly, Einstein is actually Oppenheimer's moral conscience, showing him the full horror of the atomic age that has begun now, and convincing him of the irreversibility of his creation.
As a dramatic device, it works brilliantly: it's Yoda and Luke Skywalker, it's Dumbledore and Harry Potter, it's Uncle Ben and Peter Parker. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. But is it? The answer, as is often the case in films based on real characters and events, is partly.
Einstein and Oppenheimer first met in the early 1930s at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where Oppenheimer taught and Einstein served as a visiting professor several times. Returning to Europe after his third stay at Caltech in March 1933, Einstein decided to renounce his German citizenship, seeing that the government of Adolf Hitler, then barely a couple of months old, was already a de facto anti-Semitic dictatorship. /uploads/2023/07/f544848253ea652bce1944723284d30d.jpg” />Tom Conti as Albert Einstein and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Nolan's new film. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Nor were they close during World War II, when Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. True, in 1939, Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning of the possibility of Nazi Germany developing “a single [atomic] bomb, delivered by boat and exploded in a port, which could very well destroy the entire port, along with part of the surrounding area”, but the Manhattan Project did not begin for another three years, and Einstein was denied admission to the program on the basis of his leftist political convictions.
Therefore, only after the war, a professional acquaintance grew into a personal friendship. In 1947, Oppenheimer joined Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study, which had by then become the venue for various academic versions of star rock supergroups. There is a photograph of them taken in the same year by Alfred Eisenstaedt that seems to reveal the nature of their relationship. Two men are sitting at a desk. Einstein is on the left, immediately recognizable by his thick mustache and mop of hair. Dressed in a casual sweatshirt, he writes equations in a notebook. On the right, Oppenheimer—suit, tie, side parting—leans forward, watching. The teacher-student hierarchy is clear—Einstein was 25 years older—but there's also something shrewd about Oppenheimer's gaze, which suggests that not much gets past him.
friendship: Robert Oppenheimer, Elsa and Albert Einstein, Margarita Konenkova, adopted daughter of the Einsteins Margot. Photo: Album/Alamy Stock Photo
By that time, both men had already given up their role in the development of nuclear weapons. In a meeting with President Truman after the end of the war, Oppenheimer said that he had “blood on his hands,” a remark that infuriated Truman so much that he later snapped, “I don't want to see that son of a bitch in this office again.” For his part, Einstein said in a magazine interview that “if I had known that the Germans would not be able to develop the atomic bomb, I would have refrained from doing anything.” His fear of a weapon capable of destroying a single port had become obsolete in just a few years to an absurdly bizarre degree: Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated that entire cities could be vaporized, and by the early 1950s, thermonuclear bombs could theoretically destroy the entire planet.
Einstein and Oppenheimer may have been friends and fellow travelers, but their personalities were also sharply at odds. Oppenheimer wasn't afraid to hurt people when he needed to (and often when he didn't) and had his fair share of psychological problems and self-destructive tendencies as a young man, but he was also an inspiring and dynamic leader.
On the contrary, he considered Einstein “the friendliest of men. Just being with him was wonderful … [He]
also known, and I think rightly so, as a man of very good will and humanity.
Oppenheimer also spoke of Einstein's aversion to authority and his pacifism. “His voice was very weighty, he spoke out against violence and cruelty, wherever he saw them. In his later years, as far as I knew him, Einstein was a 20th-century Ecclesiaste, speaking with implacable and indomitable vivacity: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” He was almost completely devoid of sophistication and utterly devoid of worldliness.
But Einstein was not as naive as Oppenheimer portrayed, and this misjudgment cost the young man dearly. In 1954, Oppenheimer was called to a meeting with Strauss on trumped-up charges related to weak communist ties since the 1930s. This was the pinnacle of McCarthyism, and Einstein urged Oppenheimer not to give this process any legitimacy. He spent an hour trying to convince him to jump before he was pushed, to leave the Atomic Energy Commission on his own terms and not suffer the public humiliation that Strauss clearly meant for him.
Interview with Christopher Nolan
But Oppenheimer felt that this would be unpatriotic, so he was court-martialed, branded a traitor based on evidence that was nothing more than hearsay, and stripped of both his security clearance and any political influence he might still have wielded. “The problem with Oppenheimer,” Einstein later said, “is that he loves [what] doesn’t love him—the United States government.” Einstein was a nomad who had six separate citizenships during his lifetime, as well as a period of statelessness. Oppenheimer was just a proud American.
This episode so burned Oppenheimer that the following year he did not even sign the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, in which Einstein and Bertrand Russell called for the peaceful resolution of international conflicts and the involvement of politically neutral scientists in assessing the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. But he agreed with her goals, and for himself and for Einstein – his friend, colleague, his inspiration – one phrase from this manifesto ultimately turned out to be true: “Remember your humanity and forget about everything else.”
Oppenheimer is in theaters now. Read our review here
Recent Comments