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Albert Einstein plays a prominent role in Christopher Nolan’s film, “Oppenheimer.”
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In reality, Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer knew each other but did not become friends until much later.
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The real Einstein would not have helped Oppenheimer with secret calculations about the atomic bomb.
For someone who was not involved in the race to develop the first atomic bomb, Albert Einstein plays a very significant role in the Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer.”
The film focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the assembly and testing of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
In several scenes, the physicist, who becomes the “father of the atom bomb,” goes to Einstein for advice during and after the secret initiative, called the Manhattan Project.
But in reality “Oppenheimer and Einstein were not friends,” said the nuclear weapons historian Alex Wellerstein Insider. “They knew each other. They worked in the same place after the war. But Oppenheimer saw Einstein as a kind of old guard.”
Einstein once wrote that he did not believe in quantum physics, which would become Oppenheimer’s field of study. The younger scientist later called Einstein “completely quack.”
It was not until the last decade of Einstein’s life, after the bombs had already fallen, the war was over, and the two physicists at Princeton, that the two became “close colleagues and friends,” Oppenheimer wrote in 1965.
“I saw the relationship between them as one of the master who had been replaced and whose work had been taken over by the younger,” Nolan told the New York Times.
The film shows some of the real-life tension and, subsequently, the friendship between the two influential physicists. But some parts of it are fiction.
Einstein would not have helped with secret calculations
In the film, as in history, a Manhattan Project physicist named Edward Teller calculates that the atomic bomb they are building could set off an endless chain of reactions that could ignite the entire atmosphere.
Faced with the possibility that his experiment will end all life on Earth, Oppenheimer goes to Einstein to double-check the numbers. That’s pure fiction.
“He didn’t go to Einstein and ask him to check calculations. That didn’t happen. Einstein wouldn’t have been any good for that anyway,” Wellerstein said. “It’s the wrong kind of science.”
Even if Einstein were the man for the job, it is unlikely that Oppenheimer would approach him with such a secret calculation.
In fact, Oppenheimer consulted with Arthur Compton, who was directing the University of Chicago’s efforts on the Manhattan Project.
“I transferred that to Einstein,” Nolan told the Times. “Einstein is the personality that people in the audience know.”
Einstein and Oppenheimer disagreed on a key issue: government
Einstein was not invited to join the Manhattan Project, partly because of his socialist leanings, but he might not have accepted such an invitation anyway.
The scientist was a staunch pacifist. Fearing that the Nazis would develop and use a nuclear weapon, Einstein wrote the letter that convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to launch an atomic bomb program.
He later regretted it, saying: “If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I wouldn’t have done anything.”
Einstein was a refugee in the USA, having fled Gestapo raids and the rise of Hitler. His lack of trust in the government is not reflected in the film. Instead, he has a look in his eyes as he confronts Senator Lewis Strauss in one of the film’s most important scenes, by the pond at Princeton.
In the film, Strauss is convinced that Oppenheimer said something to turn Einstein against him. But Einstein turned against politicians long before that.
“The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who does not love him – the United States government,” Einstein once said, according to the book “American Prometheus,” on which the film is based.
That’s “on an Einstein level,” Wellerstein said.
Einstein encouraged Oppenheimer to withdraw from the US
After all his work, and after the war was over, Oppenheimer’s life came under a strange national security investigation, which is the subject of the film’s third act.
In fact, Einstein told Oppenheimer to give up his security clearance and go away from government work. That scene in the film is based on true events.
“There is a fundamental difference between the two of them that I think is revealed in the.
Oppenheimer couldn’t let it go, though.
Einstein the outsider, Oppenheimer the shameful insider
After the government decided to revoke his security clearance, Oppenheimer stopped working on nuclear issues altogether. His career almost ended.
“Even though he knew a lot of things and had a lot of opinions, he basically felt that if you didn’t have a security clearance, you couldn’t be an important person,” Wellerstein said.
“Someone like Einstein would think that’s nonsense,” he said, calling the legendary scientist a “perpetual outsider.”
On the other side of the opinion, Wellerstein said: “Oppenheimer starts as an outsider, he becomes this very important insider, and then he starts and can never come back from that.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
