Tag: J. Robert Oppenheimer

The value of ripeness

Think of the long centuries in which attempts were made to change mercury into gold because that seemed like a very useful thing to do. These efforts failed and we found how to change mercury into gold by doing other things that had quite different intentions. And so I believe that the availability of instruments, the availability of ideas or concepts—not always but often mathematical—are more likely to determine where great changes occur in our picture of the world than are the requirements of man. Ripeness in science is really all, and ripeness is the ability to do new things and to think new thoughts. The whole field is pervaded by this freedom of choice. You don’t sit in front of an insoluble problem for ever. You may sit an awfully long time, and it may even be the right thing to do; but in the end you will be guided not by what it would be practically helpful to learn, but by what it is possible to learn.

On July 25, the science writer Ash Jogalekar shared this excerpt from Robert Oppenheimer’s 1964 book The Flying Trapeze, a compilation of the Whidden Lectures that he delivered in 1962.

Oppenheimer’s invocation of the notion of ‘ripeness’ is quite fascinating: it is reminiscent of the great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss’s personal philosophy, which is also inscribed on his seal: “pauca sed matura“, Latin for “few but ripe”. Gauss adhered to it to the extent that he would only publish his work on mathematics that was complete and with which he was wholly satisfied. As a result, he had a large body of unpublished work that anticipated discoveries that other mathematicians and physicists would only make much later.

‘Ripeness’ also beings to mind one of the French mathematician’s Alexander Grothendieck’s beliefs. In the words of Allyn Jackson:

One thing Grothendieck said was that one should never try to prove anything that is not almost obvious. This does not mean that one should not be ambitious in choosing things to work on. Rather, “if you don’t see that what you are working on is almost obvious, then you are not ready to work on that yet,” explained Arthur Ogus of the University of California at Berkeley. “Prepare the way. And that was his approach to mathematics, that everything should be so natural that it just seems completely straightforward.” Many mathematicians will choose a well-formulated problem and knock away at it, an approach that Grothendieck disliked. In a well-known passage of Récoltes et Semailles, he describes this approach as being comparable to cracking a nut with a hammer and chisel. What he prefers to do is to soften the shell slowly in water, or to leave it in the sun and the rain, and wait for the right moment when the nut opens naturally (pages 552–553). “So a lot of what Grothendieck did looks like the natural landscape of things, because it looks like it grew, as if on its own,” Ogus noted.

Ripeness, in Oppenheimer’s telling, is the ability to do new things, but I find the preceding line to be more meaningful, with stronger parallels to both Gauss’s and Grothendieck’s views, in the limited context of scientific progress: “the availability of instruments, the availability of ideas or concepts … are more likely to determine where great changes occur in our picture of the world than are the requirements of man.”

Oppenheimer says later in the same lecture that progress is inalienable to science; this, together with his other statements, provides extraordinary insight into where progress occurs and why. Imagine the realm of knowledge that science can reveal or validate to be a three-dimensional space. Here, the opportunities to find something new are located at, or even localised to, points where there is already a confluence of possibilities thanks to the availability of information, instruments, techniques, resources, and sensible people. It is in a manner of speaking, and as Oppenheimer also indicates (“than are the requirements of man”), the substitution of individual people’s needs and pursuits as the prime mover of discoveries with the social and cultural prerequisites of knowledge itself.

This also seems like a better way to think about what some have called “useless knowledge”, which supposedly is knowledge produced without regard for its applications. I’m referring not to Abraham Flexner’s excellent 1939 essay* here but to the term as wielded by some political leaders, policy-setters, and the social-media commentariat, and which often finds mention in the mainstream English press in India as the antithesis of “knowledge that solves society’s problems”. Rather than being useless, such knowledge may just be charting new points in this abstract space, and could in future become the nuclei of new worlds; and when we dismiss it as useless, we preclude some possibilities.

I won’t deny that a strategy of randomly nucleating this opportunity-space could be too expensive (for all countries, not just India: I don’t buy that our country has too little money for science for the reasons discussed here) and that it might be more gainful for governments to assume a more coordinated approach. But I will say two things. First, when we’re pursuing or being forced to pursue a more conservative path through scientific progress, let us not pretend – as many have become wont to do – that we’re taking a better path. Second, let us not wield short-sighted arguments that privilege our earthly needs over something we simply may not even known know we’re losing.

Finally, perhaps these ideas apply to other forms of progress as well. Happy Independence Day. 🙂

(* Flexner cofounded the Institute for Advanced Study, which Oppenheimer was the director of when The Flying Trapeze was published.)

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