The troubled relationship between Oppenheimer and Einstein – 07/31/2023 – Science

“Now it’s your turn to deal with the consequences of your conquest.”

This is the phrase that physicist Albert Einstein says to his colleague Robert Oppenheimer in one of the final scenes of “Oppenheimer”, the film that tells how he became the “father” of the atomic bomb in the 1940s, when he led the Manhattan Project of the United States government.

In the film, Einstein appears in the last phase of his life, when he lived at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with Oppenheimer, who was director of the institution from 1947 to 1966.

They were two of the most important scientists of their time, but they had important differences, both in the way they understood physics and in the way they believed their research could serve — or harm — the world.

“We were close colleagues and to some extent friends,” Oppenheimer said at a conference in Paris in 1965, marking the tenth anniversary of Einstein’s death.

In his film, director Christopher Nolan places the two physicists in dialogues that, although fictional, reflect the relationship of an oppressed Oppenheimer who sought advice from a fatherly Einstein.

And although in real life they maintained important differences, they had a lot of mutual respect.

Two lives in parallel

When the young Robert Oppenheimer graduated and specialized in theoretical physics in the 1920s, Einstein was already a Nobel Prize in Physics and a key figure in the history of science for his General Theory of Relativity (1915) and other works that influenced the scientist. American.

Amid the growing persecution of Jews in Germany, Einstein left Europe and settled in Princeton, New Jersey (USA), in 1932, where he continued his work.

Some time later, in August 1939, he signed the letter addressed to the then President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, written by his colleague Leó Szilárd, in which they warned the White House that Germany could develop an atomic bomb due to discoveries scientific information about the fission of uranium.

This supposedly precipitated the creation of the top-secret Manhattan Project, which the US government put in Oppenheimer’s hands in 1942, when he was already one of the leading scientists in his field.

According to various sources, the 64-year-old Einstein was not included in the project because of his German background and his left-wing ideas. In addition, the different conceptions of theories of physics that existed between him and Oppenheimer also had weight in the decision.

Kei Bird and Martin J. Sherwin state in their biographical book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” (“American Prometheus: The Triumph and the Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, on which the film by Nolan) that the American physicist regarded Einstein “as a living patron saint of physics, not as a working scientist”.

Nolan tried to reflect in his film the type of relationship that existed between the two.

“I saw the relationship between them as that of the teacher who had been replaced and whose job had been taken over by the youngest,” the principal told The New York Times.

Did Einstein participate in the atomic bomb project?

With the Manhattan Project underway, the film shows Oppenheimer doubting the scope that a detonation like the atomic bomb he was developing could have. He then seeks Einstein’s opinion.

However, this was creative license by the American director, as these conversations did not take place as depicted in the film.

“One of the few things I changed is that it wasn’t Einstein that Oppenheimer consulted on this, it was Arthur Compton, who ran an outpost of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago,” Nolan explained to the New York Times.

“Einstein is the person people in the audience know.”

Oppenheimer worked between 1943 and 1945 at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, thousands of miles from Princeton. It is not clear whether during this time the American physicist had any meetings or conversations with Einstein.

But Oppenheimer himself referred in 1965 to allegations that Einstein had somehow participated in the creation of that weapon of mass destruction. “The allegations that he worked on the creation of the atomic bomb were, in my opinion, false,” he told the Paris conference that year.

In his opinion, the 1939 letter urging President Roosevelt to pay attention to German atomic bomb development capabilities “had virtually no effect” on the US government.

‘There goes a fool’

After the successful testing of the first atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was faced with the moral problem that his work was not just used as a threat — but as a weapon of mass destruction, with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Several scientists, including Einstein, Szilárd and others, condemned the fact that the bombs were dropped on Japanese cities, considering that the country was already practically defeated.

The plot of Nolan’s film explores how Oppenheimer tried to persuade the Washington government of the need to set limits on the use of the technology he had developed.

But politicians turned against him and questioned his Communist background, deeming him a national security risk. He had to testify before a government committee.

Bird and Sherwin recount in their book that Einstein told Oppenheimer that he “did not need to submit to the witch hunt, as he had served his country well”, according to the conversation witnessed by the American physicist’s secretary, Verna Hobson.

He told Oppenheimer that “if this was the prize the United States was offering you, you should turn your back.”

However, Hobson claimed that Oppenheimer “loved America” ​​and that his love “ran as deep as his love of science”.

“Einstein doesn’t understand,” Oppenheimer told Hobson.

For Einstein, Oppenheimer should not expect too much from Washington. And he said to the secretary, pointing to Oppenheimer after the conversation: “There goes a narrate (fool, in German)”, according to Bird and Sherwin.

Despite their disagreements, both had mutual admiration and respect, albeit in their own way.

Einstein is remembered for saying that Oppenheimer was “an extraordinarily able man with a multidisciplinary education” that he admired “for his person, not for his physics.”

In turn, when commemorating the tenth anniversary of Einstein’s death and the 50th anniversary of the Theory of General Relativity, Oppenheimer celebrated the contributions of the genius of German origin in a very peculiar way.

“Einstein’s early works were beautiful, but full of errors,” said Oppenheimer in Paris, explaining that the compilation of Einstein’s work in which he participated took a decade of revision.

But he added: “A man whose mistakes take 10 years to correct is a great man.”