Tag: blue sky research

Review: ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)

Oppenheimer was great. I really liked it. I don’t have a review as much as some notes that I took during the film that I’d like to share. But before diving into them, I should say that I got a certain impression of the film before I watched it based on all the reviews, the hot-takes, and the analyses, and it was almost entirely at odds with my final experience of it. How happy am I to have been wrong.

SPOILERS AHEAD

1. “Brilliance makes up for a lot.” – The idea that genius is an excuse to overlook other flaws, a famously problematic notion among scientists, as we’ve seen of late, recurs non-ironically throughout the film. But it’s also the sort of criticism that, while it’s important to take note of, doesn’t seem interesting vis-à-vis the film itself. The film shows Oppenheimer as he was, warts and all – and there’s value in that – living and working in a time that encouraged such thinking. The point was neither to redeem him nor make sure we ‘learn’ that such thinking is worthy of discouragement, in much the same way it doesn’t discuss who occupied the land where the Trinity test was conducted.

(This said, it did strike me as odd why the film chose not to show the images of the bomb’s consequences in Japan, as they were being displayed to an audience that included Oppenheimer. I can’t say I agree that us observing him as he reacted to those images was more important.)

2. Military and science – This is a tension that’s also been made clear in several historical accounts of the Manhattan Project, of the working culture among scientists clashing with how the military operates, and how, in the course of this contest, each side perceived profound flaws in the way the other achieved its objectives. One is, or claims to be, democratic (epitomised in the film by Oppenheimer persuading Teller to stay back at Los Alamos) while the other prizes brutal efficiency and a willingness to get its hands ‘dirty’ because of the clear apportionment of blame (irrespective of whether that’s really possible from the PoV of today).

3. “How could this man who saw so much be so blind?” – Strauss’s comment in the beginning sets up the kind of person Oppenheimer was very well. The real-world Oppenheimer was often disrespectful, flippant towards other people’s opinions or feelings. But in the film, this disposition is directed almost always at Strauss, so it’s possible to come away thinking that Oppenheimer just believed Strauss alone to be worthy of some disdain. But Strauss’s comment hints at Oppenheimer’s hubris very well, and so concisely.

4. “Scientists don’t respect your judgment” – Another comment of Strauss’s, which although we see by the end of the film was born largely out of an inflated self-importance, also spoke, I thought, to the tension between how the scientists and the soldiers operate and to the sense of unease among some in the military that comes of looking outside-in into the Manhattan Project, until of course the bomb was delivered.

5. A science and military complex – Vannevar Bush is ‘represented’ in the film. After the war ended, he was to famously advocate for the US investing in blue-sky research, that such research, while delivering no short-term gains, would in the longer one hold the country in good stead on a variety of advanced technologies. The complex still operating today is the military-industrial one, but science during the war became a glue holding them together. And it’s interesting to get such a well-dramatised view of the tensions through which these two enterprises were reconciled.

6. Tension ahead of Trinity – This is the principal reason I liked Oppenheimer. I’ve read a lot (relatively) about how the bomb came to be, but one thing all of those accounts lacked is such a faithful – or what I imagine is a faithful – description of the emotions at play as the bomb was built, tested, and reckoned with. When that man’s fingers tremble over the big red button that would detonate the weapon, I was trembling in my seat. The nervousness, the anger, the frustration, even the complementary nonchalance of Teller and Feynman. This is very difficult to get through scholarship.

7. Nolan’s comment – In several interviews before the film’s release, Nolan said he believed Oppenheimer was the “greatest person” to have ever lived. I assumed before watching the film that this was an insight into the sort of film Oppenheimer would be, with hero worship and its attendant rituals. But in the end, the comment was so irrelevant to the experience of the film.

8. What is a nuclear weapon? – To me, Oppenheimer‘s principal triumph is that, through the eyes of its eponymous protagonist, it conveys what it means for there to be such a thing as a nuclear weapon. It’s fundamentally the breaking of the strong nuclear force between two nucleons, but it’s also, to paraphrase something Strauss says in his angry tirade near the end, the irreversible act of letting the nuclear genie out of the bottle and everything that entails. It’s power and therefore a herald of cynical politics. It’s classified information and therefore a source of mis- or dis-trust. (“If you create the ultimate destructive power, it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you” – Nolan.) It’s knowledge of another country’s power and intent. It’s a demonstration of its scientists’ ability to channel their talents as well as their moral bearings. It’s the weapon to reshape all wars. So forth.

9. Shockwave in the gymnasium – This was such an excellent, poignant scene, when Oppenheimer is going through the motions, or what he thinks ought to be the motions, and the place goes quiet just as it did when the Trinity shot succeeded. Then, as he is walking out, the sound of his audience’s cheering hits him like a shockwave. Such a well-conceived metaphor for the bomb’s political nature, and a cementing of Oppenheimer’s epiphany that there’s really nothing he can do to control how it will be used.

10. Partial fictions – Strauss’s vendetta against Oppenheimer isn’t borne out in the historical record, including the fact that Strauss was the one to hand the FBI the all-important file (via Borden). This sadly constitutes the same sort of mistake that films of lower calibre do: claiming to be based on real-world events (or, as in this case, a book documenting real-world events) but then fictionalising some small detail. The effect is for a watcher to be left wondering what else didn’t exactly happen, which they won’t know about unless they specifically check. In Oppenheimer, this is true of parts of the Strauss storyline, the Oppenheimers’ parenting skills, how concerned the physicists really were of the bomb setting “the air on fire”, and, irony of ironies, it all begins with a literal poisoned fruit.

(A couple inconsistencies are in my opinion worth singling out, despite being quite minor: (i) when the Trinity shot succeeds, Oppenheimer is shown being accosted by George Kistiyakowsky demanding the $10 he bet Oppenheimer the previous night that the test would go through. Oppenheimer says “I’m good for $10” and hands him a bill, but in reality he didn’t have the money. But that’s not all. In that moment, Oppenheimer would later recall mulling those famous words from the Gita, only for Kenneth Bainbridge to have been plainer: “Oppie, now we’re all sons of bitches.” (ii) When Chevalier tells Oppenheimer that Eltenton can help pass information through to the Soviets, Kitty comes to the kitchen not wanting the two of them to be alone and is also the one to tell Chevalier that his proposal constitutes treason. In the film, Kitty enters the kitchen after this conversation has concluded. This is worth pointing out because, in the film itself, she’s always been the better judge of character than Oppenheimer.)

11. Compartmentalisation – The concept of compartmentalisation appears throughout the film in the context of maintaining the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. But as it happened, a certain loss of compartmentalisation had to transpire for the project’s physicists to actually want to build a bomb – something that happened, by some accounts, at a meeting on April 15, 1943, when Robert Serber clarified to those present at the Los Alamos site that they were to build a nuclear weapon. When the physicists set about their task with gusto, they surprised Enrico Fermi, who then told Oppenheimer: “I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.” A terribly profound comment.

Addendum

Oppenheimer forced me to confront and question a little knot of apprehension that had taken root within my mind when it released. It was fed mostly by the fact that the film would expose to a very large number of people a world of information that had taken many others (myself included) a lot more time to find, learn, and parse. I was apprehensive that some nuance of this passage of history would get shredded by some inane right- or left-wing outrage, and be denied an opportunity to make some meaningful impression on the minds of its viewers.

I daresay that this is a legitimate concern at a time when writers and journalists have had to double-check how something might be construed on social media platforms, in specific parts of the country, even to a court somewhere. We may never be able to fully control how something that we produce will be consumed but there are parts of it that we can. In my own writing, I noticed last year a tendency to be defensive, to write in such a way that I explain myself thoroughly and accommodate all possible counter-arguments. The style is time-consuming and, more importantly, because how we write can affect how we think, it leads to defensive thinking as well.

I was also anxious of encountering the hypocrisy that I suspected would be put on display when, despite being able to find physics beautifully described in hundreds of articles and videos on the web, the “average audience” recoils from them but gravitates with glee to Oppenheimer, and perhaps after holds forth on Facebook as if it understood the ideas involved all along.

But then, in the film, Oppenheimer tells Leo Szilard that the scientists who made the bomb have no greater say than others about how to use it. I disagreed with the comment, but it struck me that we’d have to agree if we replaced “bomb” with “knowledge”. I’m glad that more people now know about the circumstances in which the first nuclear weapons were made because even if only a few are prepared to treat the film as a gateway, rather than as the definitive take or whatever, the world should be the better for it.

Featured image. A screenshot of a scene from Oppenheimer (2023). Source: YouTube

Reimagining science, redux

This article on Founding Fuel has some great suggestions I thought, but it merits sharing with a couple caveats.

First, in narratives about making science “easier to do”, commentators give science-industry linkages more play than science-society ones. This has been true in the past and continues to be. We remember and periodically celebrate the work of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar and M. Visveshwaraya, but not with nearly equal fanfare that of, say, Yash Pal or the members of the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme.

In public dialogues about making the work of scientists more relevant, writers and TV panellists often touch on spending more money to setup larger, better supplied labs and improving ties between the labs and industry, where research is translated into product or service. Spending more on science is necessary, as is the need to support collaborations, regularise funding and grant-giving, improve working conditions for teachers, etc.

More broadly, I acknowledge that the problem is that there isn’t enough good science happening in the country, that the author is recommending various ways in which science-industry linkages and tweaks within the science ecosystem can both change this for the better, and that science-society linkages are unlikely to be of help on this front. However, could this be because we’re asking the wrong question?

That is, what science and industry can do for each other becomes relevant if what we’re seeking is the growth of science, as defined by some parameters (number of citations, number of patents, etc.), as an enterprise in and of itself – as if its fortunes and outcomes weren’t already yoked to other societal endeavours. Growth for growth’s sake. Science-society linkages become relevant on the other hand when the parameters are, say, research and academic liberties, extent of public participation, distribution of opportunities, freedom from government interference, etc. – when quantitative growth is both difficult and more aligned with nation-building.

Ultimately, we don’t need a science that becomes easier to do at the expense of not thinking about whether it needs to be done, or done differently. This is not a veiled comment against ‘blue sky’ research, which must continue, but is directed against ‘black sky’ research – which goes on to pollute our air and water, drills forestland for oil, dams rivers and destabilises ecosystems without thought for the consequences.

Nevertheless, in a system designed increasingly to incentivise working with the private sector, to self-finance one’s work through patents and other licenses, and to translate research into arbitrarily defined “useful” things, such thinking can only become more penalised, more unfavourable. And the science that is rolled into technologies will only be industry friendly, which in the current political climate means Ambani- and/or Adani-friendly, to the detriment of everyone else, especially those on the bottom rungs of society.

Second, the article’s author uses Nobel Prize-winning work to describe presumably the extent of what is possible when faculty members at an institute work together or when researchers collaborate with their younger peers. But in the process he frames ‘collaborations that produce Nobel Prizes’ as desirable. This is a problem because doing so overlooks collaborations that didn’t win Nobel Prizes, because laureates are often white men (non-white, non-cis-men may not be able to ‘breach’ such ‘in-groups’ because of structural factors even as solutions to break these barriers are ignored in favour of a flatter ‘prize-winning’ one), and because “Nobel-Prize-winning collaborations” is an oxymoron.

The last is easiest to see: the prizes are awarded only to three people at a time whereas the author himself quotes a study that found that the number of authors per scientific paper increased from 3.2 to 4.4 in 1996-2015.

As a corrective of sorts, to infuse deliberations prompted by the Founding Fuel article with what a focus on industry-oriented development leaves out, let me quote at length from an essay Mukund Thattai published with The Wire three years ago, exploring the existence of “an Indian way of doing science” (emphases mine):

There is a strong case to fund science for the same reason we fund the arts or sport. Science is a cultural activity: it reveals unexpected beauty in the everyday; it captures the imagination of children; it attempts to answer some of humanity’s biggest questions about where we came from. Moreover, scientific ideas can be a potent component of the process by which society arrives at collective decisions about the future. Among the strongest reasons a resource-limited country such as India should fund curiosity-driven science is that the nature of future crises cannot be predicted.

It is impossible to micromanage the long-term research agenda, so the only hope is to cast a wide net. A broad and deep scientific community is a valuable resource that can be called upon to give its inputs on a variety of issues. They cannot be expected to always deliver a solution but can be expected to provide the best possible information available at any time. In this consultative process, it is crucially important to not privilege scientific experts over other participants in the discussion.

… Science thrives within a diversity of questions and methods, a diversity of institutional environments, and a diversity of personal experiences of individual scientists. In the modern era, the practice of science has moved to a more democratic mode, away from the idea of lone geniuses and towards a collective effort of creating hypotheses and sharing results. Any tendency toward uniformity and career professionalisation dilutes and ultimately destroys this diversity. As historian of science Dhruv Raina describes it, a science that is vulnerable to the “pressures of government” is “no longer an open frontier of critical activity”. Instead, science must become “social and reflexive”.

Ideas and themes must bubble up from the broadest possible community. In India, access to such a process is limited by the accident of one’s mother tongue and social class, and this must change. Anyone who wants to should have the opportunity to understand what scientists are doing. Ultimately, this must involve not only scientists but also social scientists, historians, philosophers, artists and communicators – and the public at large.

… Is there such a thing as an “Indian way” of doing science? Science in the abstract is said to transcend national boundaries. In practice it is strongly influenced by local experiences and local history. Unfortunately, even as national missions have faded to the background, they have been replaced by an imitation of Western fashions. It has become common to look to high-profile journals and conferences as arbiters of questions worth asking. This must stop. The key to revitalising Indian science is the careful choice of rich questions. These questions could be driven by new national missions that bring the excitement of a collective effort. Or they could be inspired by observing the complex interactions of the world immediately around us.

There is a great deal of scholarship and scientific inquiry that can arise from the study of India’s traditional knowledge systems. The country’s enormous biodiversity and human genetic diversity are an exciting and bottomless source of scientific puzzles and important secrets. Such questions would allow for a deeper two-way engagement with India’s people. This is not to say Indian scientists cannot work on internationally important problems – quite the opposite. The scientific community in India, working within their own unique contexts, could become the source of important problems that anyone in the world would be excited to work on.

… The internationalisation of science is an important goal in and of itself. While it stimulates cross-fertilisation of ideas and pushes up standards within science, it also creates opportunities for broader global discussions and engagements. The unfortunate hurdles which curtail the ability of Indian academics and students to travel abroad, and the enormous difficulty foreign academics face in obtaining necessary permissions to visit their colleagues in India, serve no purpose. In spite of all this, there is a healthy trend towards stronger international links.

…

Academic scientists have long played dual roles as teachers and researchers. Within India, science has a remarkably broad appeal. Public science talks are standing-room-only affairs, and famous scientists receive the kind of adulation typically reserved for movie stars. Students across the country are excited about science. Many aspire to become scientists themselves.

Historically, engineering and medical colleges have attracted scientifically-minded students, but this is changing. The Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research have now been running undergraduate programs for over a decade in cities across India. These institutions are to science what the IITs are to engineering, attracting some of the brightest students each year. Science programs within public universities have not fared as well, and must seize every opportunity to reinvent themselves. A science curriculum based not on dry facts but on the history and process of discovery can form the base of a broad education, in conjunction with the humanities and the arts.