Not long into Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-garlanded Oppenheimer, we recognize a familiar face—or, more accurately, a familiar mane. The year is 1947, and through the picture window of the director’s office at the Institute for Advanced Studies, in Princeton, Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) spot the unmistakable figure of Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) standing beside a pond. Strauss proposes to introduce Einstein to Oppenheimer.
“No need,” replies the physicist, “I’ve known him for years.”
The two men nevertheless set off in the direction of Einstein, who then happens to be chasing his wind-tossed hat across the lawn. Retrieving the hat and returning it to its owner, Oppenheimer proceeds to confer privately with Einstein, conspicuously beyond the earshot of Strauss—indeed, beyond our own.
Einstein appears two other times in the film. The first is during World War II, when Oppenheimer, as head of the Manhattan Project, comes to Princeton to ask him about theoretical physicist Edward Teller’s calculations suggesting that a nuclear chain reaction, once initiated, might not stop until it consumed the earth’s atmosphere. Sarcastically observing, “Here we are, lost in your quantum world of probabilities and needing certainty,” Einstein hands Teller’s scribbled sheets back to Oppenheimer and suggests that he consult Hans Bethe (Gustaf Skarsgård), head of the Manhattan Project’s theoretical division. Seemingly gratuitous, Einstein’s remark is, in fact, crucial to both his role in Oppenheimer and the film’s larger intent.
Einstein’s next appearance comes in 1954, after Oppenheimer has returned to the Institute (of which he is now the director) after a grueling session before a committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was then weighing whether to withdraw his security clearance. Waiting for him near the director’s residence, Einstein, the eternal dissident, urges Oppenheimer to “turn [his] back” on the ungrateful country that “he served so well.” “I love this country,” Oppenheimer parries. To which Einstein responds, “Then tell her to go to hell.”
The actual exchange between Oppenheimer and Einstein was, as it happened, far less cordial than the film’s version. It ended with an exasperated Einstein telling his assistant, “There goes a Narr [fool],” nodding toward the Institute director.
More significantly, Einstein’s appearance in that scene is the only one that corresponds with historical reality. In fact, Einstein had only limited dealings with Oppenheimer, who, for one, never would have consulted with his elder about matters such as Teller’s calculations because he knew Einstein had never even asked for a security clearance. That was also the reason Einstein was never invited to participate in the Manhattan Project, not because of his “obsoleteness,” as the film has Oppenheimer say to Strauss (although, after meeting Einstein for the first time, in 1935, Oppenheimer did write to his brother to say that he found Einstein “completely cuckoo”).
Most significantly, the scene on the Institute lawn, which we see at three different critical points in the film, is itself a complete fabrication.
Einstein in Full Color
So what is Einstein doing there? Why did Nolan, screenwriter as well as director, write him into key moments in the story, including the film’s final scene? At first glance, Oppenheimer is a story about the tenuous relationship between Oppenheimer and Strauss—and between Science and Politics. The film’s dramatic twists and turns, for the most part, elaborate these tensions. One example is the meeting between Oppenheimer and President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) in the Oval Office. The scientist expresses remorse about the decision to drop two bombs on Japan, counting himself responsible for the horrifying results. The president disdainfully explains to the Raskolnikovian scientist that the “blood” is solely on the hands of the commander in chief. As Oppenheimer is leaving, Truman growls to an aide, “Don’t let that crybaby back in here.” Judged by such moments, the film would seem to be primarily about the miscalculation of the scientists who believe that theoretical knowledge and technological miracle-working can be cashed out in the hard coin of power and influence—only to discover that their expertise has no purchase beyond their field.
Yet in the film’s key scene on the Institute lawn, there are three figures: Oppenheimer, Strauss, and Einstein. This triangle challenges the Oppenheimer vs. Strauss / Science vs. Politics interpretation. Einstein was placed in the narrative precisely to introduce a third pole into the spurious dichotomy between Science and Politics and thus to undermine the obvious and exclusively political reading of the film.
Indeed, politics in Oppenheimer is a bit of a red herring. The creation of the first atomic bomb is an event of existential proportions in human history, not an episode of The West Wing. The film’s penultimate scene, set in 1959, aptly summarizes this sentiment. Upon hearing the devastating news that his presidential appointment as secretary of commerce has been rejected by the Senate, Strauss knows whom to blame. Oppenheimer, we hear for the millionth time, turned Einstein against Strauss in that short chat on the Institute lawn, a conversation that triggered a chain reaction that ended in his political demise. Having put up with Strauss’s finger-pointing for so long, a fed-up Senate aide can contain himself no longer: “Is it possible,” he says, “they didn’t talk about you at all?”
What did they talk about, then? Nolan, uncharacteristically, does not keep us in the dark for long. We move directly to the final scene—a rerun of the Institute lawn scene, but this time not in the black-and-white Nolan uses to depict Strauss’s memories, but in the full color reserved for Oppenheimer’s perspective. For the first time, we can hear all of the two physicists’ conversation. Einstein reminds his younger colleague, soon to be his boss, of the transient nature of worldly glory. Einstein mentions a medal ceremony Oppenheimer and his colleagues organized for him in Berkeley back in the day, allegedly to celebrate Einstein’s achievements but really to signify the takeover by the younger generation of physicists. “They will serve you salmon and potato salad,” Einstein warns Oppenheimer in a voice-over, as we watch him, now two decades older, receiving the Enrico Fermi Award from President Lyndon Johnson as his younger colleagues—like mourners in front of the casket—pay their respects.
Back on the Institute lawn, Oppenheimer, still at the peak of his powers, says nothing in response to his old colleague’s advice. Instead, he reminds Einstein of their conversation about Teller’s warning about the atom bomb’s potential to destroy the world.
“What of it?” Einstein asks.
“I believe we did,” Oppenheimer replies.
The ominous background music swells to a crescendo, and we see Oppenheimer’s sorrowful face along with images of ballistic missiles, atomic explosions, and fire that takes over the earth. The film ends.
Oppenheimer—and this is one of the film’s principal merits in an age of faux moral clarity—does not tell us whether to hate J. Robert Oppenheimer or to love him. Not unlike Nolan’s Batman, he is a hero and a villain, “the destroyer of worlds,” but also “human, all too human,” a genius who is so naive that he can be easily fooled by politicians. Several times in the film, we see Oppenheimer with his face half-illuminated and half in shadow.
That moral ambivalence is precisely what makes the concluding scene so astonishing. Oppenheimer confesses that his life’s work may have been a mistake—that the world may have been better off had Prometheus not stolen the fire. Even more astonishing is that Nolan has him make such a confession to Einstein, the patron saint of scientific genius.
Nolan invented that exchange between Einstein and Oppenheimer to represent an actual argument between two competing notions about the nature and ends of science. Early quantum mechanics theory was developed very rapidly by a group of young theorists. That is why Wolfgang Pauli, who was only four years Oppenheimer’s senior and an important member of the group, dubbed the field of quantum mechanics Die Knabenphysik (boys’ physics). Within a few years, a group of twenty-year-olds supported by a handful of older patrons such as Niels Bohr took over theoretical physics. Despite his early contributions to the development of the field, Einstein remained skeptical of the theories that started to take shape in Göttingen and Copenhagen. The “boys,” initially, wished to recruit Einstein to their camp, but as the years went by and he did not budge, they began treating him as senile and obsolete.
Most of the heroes of this story are well represented in the film. Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Ernest Lawrence, Edward Teller, Max Born, Enrico Fermi, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Hans Bethe, and, of course, Oppenheimer were all part of this trend. Only the role of Leo Szilard, the Hungarian-born physicist who pushed the idea of chain reaction in the years before World War II and, as the war progressed, pressured the US government and army to invest in the development of the atom bomb, is significantly downplayed, perhaps to inflate Oppenheimer’s pre–Manhattan Project contributions to the cause.
What Nolan captures so well in the film’s first act, however, is not the accurate historical narrative but the passion that fueled these young physicists and drove their discoveries with unprecedented speed. Within a few years, fundamental physics was overturned, as the feverishly working scientists gave up Christmas breaks and sleep, fearing that others who might have made the same discoveries would beat them to publication. The competition was intense, but so was the cooperation among scientists eager to explore the newfound world of the subatomic. Eventually the field gained such momentum, a critic may add, that the group reached escape velocity and left reality altogether.
The film’s first act centers on Oppenheimer’s four passions: physics, New Mexico, women, and politics. His passions for women and politics are bundled together in the character of Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh), the Communist waitress who becomes his lover. The camp in Los Alamos will be the love child of his passions for physics and New Mexico, but that will have to wait until the second act. The film’s lengthy exposition in the first act focuses on explicating Oppenheimer’s foremost passion, physics.
No wonder, then, that the story begins with forbidden fruit. The Atomic Energy Commission prosecutor—according to the logic of homeland security and in complete ignorance of the practice of international science—expresses particular concerned about Oppenheimer’s time abroad and his communications with foreign nationals. Oppenheimer describes his miserable time in Cambridge after graduating from Harvard. We see young Oppenheimer in a lab, clumsily dropping his equipment. The supervisor orders him to organize the lab after everybody else leaves for Niels Bohr’s lecture. Oppenheimer seeks revenge. He picks up an apple from the instructor’s desk, injects it with a poison he found in the lab, and returns it to where he found it. Following a sleepless night, Oppenheimer rushes to the lab, presumably to get rid of the poisonous apple, only to find the famous Bohr chatting with his loathed lab instructor. Bohr reaches for the apple. Oppenheimer immediately knocks it out of his hands. His explanation: “Wormhole.”
In contrast with the story of the apple in the book of Genesis, the apple incident in Oppenheimer opens heaven’s gate for the protagonist. Impressed by a question Oppenheimer asked during a lecture, Bohr sets him free from confinement to the laboratory and launches him on the trajectory that will lead him to the Manhattan Project.
“Go somewhere they let you think,” Bohr says, recommending that he head to Germany and work with Max Born at the University of Göttingen.
To encourage him to spread his wings, Bohr dismisses Oppenheimer’s doubts about his math skills. “It is like sheet music,” Bohr explains. “The important thing isn’t can you read music, it is, can you hear it? Can you hear the music?” he asks the young American.
That exchange is followed by an excellent string piece by Ludwig Göransson, composer of the film’s score, which, supplemented by an electronic beat, develops a spiral-shaped melody, with every repetition sounding a little wider than the previous one, the tone a little higher, and the tempo a little faster. Suddenly, the beat takes over, and the strings move into the background. In what threatens to be an unending accelerando, the music lifts the listener higher and higher, faster and faster, to the point that Göransson has only one way to end the piece—with a blast. This is the music that accompanies—even pushes—Oppenheimer on his European grand tour to the wonderland of early quantum mechanics.
In a series of quick cuts, the audience gets to know the pioneers of early quantum mechanics and hear snippets of talk that explicate their philosophical outlook. Bohr, for example, lectures that “quantum physics is not a step forward. It is a new way to understand reality. Einstein opened the door, and now we are peering through, seeing a world inside our world, a world of energy and paradox that not everyone can accept.” To which Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer) adds, “One might relate to the presumption that behind the quantum world, there still hides the real world in which causality holds. But such speculations seem to us…explicitly fruitless.”
Young Oppenheimer cannot resist the temptation. Nor can the viewer. Real-life versions of The Matrix’s Morpheus offer us the choice: red pill or blue? Truth or convenience? We want to “accept” and see “the world that is inside our world.” Along with Heisenberg, we wish to scorn those who cannot handle the truth and must lie to themselves about the continued existence of the “real world” of classical physics in which “causality holds.”
In the foreboding atmosphere of interwar Germany, a world of political and economic instability made worse by bitter defeat in World War I, the promise to enter a “world inside our world” was perhaps even more compelling, since clinging to the old, rules-based world order was “explicitly fruitless.” The poet Stefan George, for example, preached to his cult-like following on the existence of Geheimes Deutschland (“Secret Germany”)—the “real” Germany that existed beyond the corrupted German state, known only to those who were “in the know.” Only through their efforts would Geheimes Deutschland arise one day and supersede gray reality—disclosing a “world inside our world.”
Historian of science Paul Forman, in his brilliant early contribution to the history of physics, argued that quantum mechanics was partly a product of the hostility toward the Weimar Republic and the cultural turn against “Western” values such as causality, determinism, and materialism. In other words, iconoclasm was at the heart of quantum mechanics’ charm. Its young practitioners indulged in it. And that attraction held not only for physics but for the entire culture of high modernism.
The real Oppenheimer recalled that when Trinity—the first atomic test explosion—went off, he was reminded of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Nolan places Oppenheimer’s identification with Krishna at an earlier moment, during his love affair with Tatlock. In doing so, Nolan implies that the destruction of the world started long before World War II—and that Oppenheimer, who brought quantum mechanics to America, was already on the frontline.
Playing Dice With God
By the late 1920s, quantum mechanics was in full swing. Yet Einstein, the most famous physicist of the time, refused to join the party, even though he had paved the way for the rise of this new physics two decades earlier. By the time the Knaben took over, however, he had become its staunch critic. When Lewis Strauss asks Oppenheimer why “the greatest scientific mind of our time” had not been invited to participate in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer corrects him: “Of his time,” he says, continuing to explain that Einstein had “published his theory of relativity more than forty years ago now.” In reality, we know, that was not the reason. Einstein’s politics forbade him from getting the required security clearance. In the film, however, Strauss plays along with Oppenheimer’s scientific justification. Even he, the lowbrow investment banker from Virginia, knows the line from Einstein’s 1927 letter to Max Born: “God doesn’t play in dice.”
Einstein’s refusal to join in the development of quantum mechanics was not his only swipe at the new thinking in physics. After reading Heisenberg’s paper on matrix mechanics, he wrote to his friend the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest that “Heisenberg has laid a big quantum egg.” “In Göttingen,” Einstein continued, “they believe in it. I don’t.” Einstein opposed exactly what Forman and others argue was the principal attraction of quantum mechanics in the interwar period: its destruction of a predictable and lawful order.
In October 1927 the Solvay Conference, named after the wealthy Belgian industrial chemist Ernst Solvay, convened to discuss “electrons and photons.” The meeting, which since 1911 has been held in Brussels every few years, brings together all the biggest names in the world of physics. In his memoir, Heisenberg recalled the heated debates that broke out at the breakfast and dinner tables during the 1927 gathering, all of which found their way to the disagreements between Einstein and Bohr.
Einstein rejected all the fundamental principles of what, in reference to its leading proponent, the Danish physicist Bohr, became known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: the rejection of determinism at the subatomic level, Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” (holding that we cannot accurately measure a particle’s momentum and its position, as the more precisely we can know the one, the less precisely we can know the other), and the notion of statistical natural laws. At every breakfast, Einstein would challenge Bohr with a new thought experiment, and by dinnertime Bohr would prove him wrong. Unfazed, Einstein kept returning with new challenges until even Bohr, the mild pluralist, snapped back that, dice or no dice, it was not their business to tell God what to do.
Why did Einstein refuse to concede to the scientific consensus? On what basis did he deny the empirical reality unveiled by quantum physics? These questions haunted the physicists, who wanted to see Einstein join their camp, not to mention historians of physics who tried to account for his marginalization. One of them, the American philosopher and historian Arthur Fine, studied this debate carefully. He established that, despite what quantum physicists have had us believe, Einstein was not senile and did not lose touch with the field or fundamentally misunderstand their claims. Einstein’s correspondence revealed that he was well informed about the developments and took part in the conversation. His main objection was directed toward his interlocutors’ nondeterministic (probabilistic) theories. He simply could not accept that nature can behave differently under the exact same conditions—that reality itself cannot be described by deterministic laws.
In the film, Einstein’s point comes across clearly in the scene on the Institute lawn in which he acidulously brushes off Oppenheimer’s request for insight into Teller’s consequential question. When push comes to shove, Einstein insists, the quantum version of science does not hold.
Einstein did not take Heisenberg’s red pill. His refusal, Fine argues, cannot be traced to a specific disagreement concerning an experimental result or theoretical claim. What was at stake was nothing less than Einstein’s most fundamental beliefs about the nature of scientific knowledge. Scientific theories, he believed, are not identical with their respective sets of experimental results. Scientists ought to make theoretical choices that cannot be established or contradicted by experiments.
Einstein believed that a scientific theory must produce a coherent and comprehensible world picture because, without it, the endeavor could not be worth pursuing. Physicists, he concluded, cannot play fast and loose with basic concepts such as causality—no matter how popular it will make them among the educated elite. In doing so, they would risk abandoning the value of science altogether.
Fine labeled Einstein’s approach “motivational realism.” The motivational realist is not committed to a specific metaphysical conception of reality. Motivational realism, rather, is an attitude, a belief that science expresses truths that exist separately and outside it and can provide some coherent world picture. This, according to Fine, is what Einstein believed made science a valuable human activity. When the center cannot hold, when causality is gleefully thrown out the window, together with comprehensibility, the choice to engage with science is no longer understandable.
Einstein hoped to refute parts of quantum mechanics formally. He failed. The train had left the station. Science would be forever different, and deterministic causality a matter of the past.
In a key moment in Oppenheimer—the score arriving at its crescendo—we briefly see Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Femme assise aux bras croisés. The title refers back to his Blue Period work Femme aux bras croisés (1901–02), thought to be a portrait of a female inmate at a Paris hospital-prison. The 1937 portrait, however, shares very little with its predecessor. The blue woman was deconstructed by Picasso only to be reconstructed in a form that compels us to think of a woman but by no means resembles one. The passion that fueled high modernism left many aspects of culture unrecognizable. Einstein was not the only curmudgeon who abhorred seeing culture’s holiest values being thrown to the roadside. Bohr, perhaps, misunderstood Einstein’s quip about a God who does not play dice. Bohr emphasized the dice. It is possible that Einstein’s true emphasis was on God, not the biblical deity, but the representation of the principles of organization behind reality, whose “mind” the physicists of all generations sought to “read.” In the film, Bohr and Heisenberg mock those who look for a “real” reality behind their quantum wonderland. According to Einstein, they were mocking nothing short of science itself; they substituted the scientists’ prudence with the iconoclast’s exhilaration. They enjoyed the ride, but only in the film’s third act do we learn who had paid for the ticket.
Einstein Walks Away
In the film’s final scene, the thread that ties everything together, Oppenheimer confesses to Einstein that he believes they have destroyed the world. Oppenheimer’s is not a pacifist confession about the horrors of war, nor a political confession by someone who lost power over his creation. In a few words, Oppenheimer tells Einstein that he was right all along. Their project, which dissociated science from its humanistic roots, made the bomb possible, and not only in the technical sense. It created a world in which humanity can destroy itself.
Einstein does not answer. He turns his back on Oppenheimer and, frowning, walks away. Strauss is positive that the frown was meant for him, but Einstein did not even see him. His concerns are a few sizes bigger than this midlevel politician. At least in the film, if not in reality, Einstein knew that his voice was heard—and that it was too late.
The author would like to thank Gal Ben-Porath for his useful feedback on this essay.