Vannevar Bush – Close Read

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

On resource constraints and merit

In the face of complaints about how so few women have been awarded this year’s Swarnajayanti Fellowships in India, some scientists pushed back asking which of the male laureates who had been selected should have been left out instead.

This is a version of the merit argument commonly applied to demands for reservation and quota in higher education – and it’s also a form of an argument that often raises its head in seemingly resource-constrained environments.

India is often referred to as a country with ‘finite’ resources, often when people are discussing how best to put these resources to use. There are even romantic ideals associated with working in such environments, such as doing more with less – as ISRO has been for many decades – and the popular concept of jugaad.

But while fixing one variable while altering the other would make any problem more solvable, it’s almost always the resource variable that is presumed to be fixed in India. For example, a common refrain is that ISRO’s allocation is nowhere near that of NASA, so ISRO must figure how best to use its limited funds – and can’t afford luxuries like a full-fledged outreach team.

There are two problems in the context of resource availability here: 1. an outreach team proper is implied to be the product of a much higher allocation than has been made, i.e. comparable to that of NASA, and 2. incremental increases in allocation are precluded. Neither of these is right, of course: ISRO doesn’t have to wait for NASA’s volume of resources in order to set up an outreach team.

The deeper issue here is not that ISRO doesn’t have the requisite funds but that it doesn’t feel a better outreach unit is necessary. Here, it pays to acknowledge that ISRO has received not inconsiderable allocations over the years, as well as has enjoyed bipartisan support and (relative) freedom from bureaucratic interference, so it cops much of the blame as well. But in the rest of India, the situation is flipped: many institutions, and their members, have fewer resources than they have ideas and that affects research in a way of its own.

For example, in the context of grants and fellowships, there’s the obvious illusory ‘prestige constraint’ at the international level – whereby award-winners and self-proclaimed hotshots wield power by presuming prestige to be tied to a few accomplishments, such as winning a Nobel Prize, publishing papers in The Lancet and Nature or maintaining an h-index of 150. These journals and award-giving committees in turn boast of their selectiveness and elitism. (Note: don’t underestimate the influence of these journals.)

Then there’s the financial constraint for Big Science projects. Some of them may be necessary to keep, say, enthusiastic particle physicists from being carried away. But more broadly, a gross mismatch between the availability of resources and the scale of expectations may ultimately be detrimental to science itself.

These markers of prestige and power are all essentially instruments of control – and there is no reason this equation should be different in India. Funding for science in India is only resource-constrained to the extent to which the government, which is the principal funder, deems it to be.

The Indian government’s revised expenditure on ‘scientific departments’ in 2019-2020 was Rs 27,694 crore. The corresponding figure for defence was Rs 3,16,296 crore. If Rs 1,000 crore were moved from the latter to the former, the defence spend would have dropped only by 0.3% but the science spend would have increased by 3.6%. Why, if the money spent on the Statue of Unity had instead been diverted to R&D, the hike would have nearly tripled.

Effectively, the argument that ‘India’s resources are limited’ is tenable only when resources are constrained on all fronts, or specific fronts as determined by circumstances – and not when it seems to be gaslighting an entire sector. The determination of these circumstances in turn should be completely transparent; keeping them opaque will simply create more ground for arbitrary decisions.

Of course, in a pragmatic sense, it’s best to use one’s resources wisely – but this position can’t be generalised to the point where optimising for what’s available becomes morally superior to demanding more (even as we must maintain the moral justification of being allowed to ask how much money is being given to whom). That is, constantly making the system work more efficiently is a sensible aspiration, but it shouldn’t come – as it often does at the moment, perhaps most prominently in the case of CSIR – at the cost of more resources. If people are discontented because they don’t have enough, their ire should be directed at the total allocation itself more than how a part of it is being apportioned.

In a different context, a physicist had pointed out a few years ago that when the US government finally scrapped the proposed Superconducting Supercollider in the early 1990s, the freed-up funds weren’t directed back into other areas of science, as scientists thought they would be. (I couldn’t find the link to this comment nor recall the originator – but I think it was either Sabine Hossenfelder or Sean Carroll; I’ll update this post when I do.) I suspect that if the group of people that had argued thus had known this would happen, it might have argued differently.

I don’t know if a similar story has played out in India; I certainly don’t know if any Big Science projects have been commissioned and then scrapped. In fact, the opposite has happened more often: whereby projects have done more with less by repurposing an existing resource (examples here, here and here). (Having to fight so hard to realise such mega-projects in India could be motivating those who undertake one to not give up!)

In the non-Big-Science and more general sense, an efficiency problem raises its head. One variant of this is about research v. teaching: what does India need more of, or what’s a more efficient expense, to achieve scientific progress – institutions where researchers are free to conduct experiments without being saddled with teaching responsibilities or institutions where teaching is just as important as research? This question has often been in the news in India in the last few years, given the erstwhile HRD Ministry’s flip-flops on whether teachers should conduct research. I personally agree that we need to ‘let teachers teach’.

The other variant is concerned with blue-sky research: when are scientists more productive – when the government allows a “free play of free intellects” or if it railroads them on which problems to tackle? Given the fabled shortage of teachers at many teaching institutions, it’s easy to conclude that a combination of economic and policy decisions have funnelled India’s scholars into neglecting their teaching responsibilities. In turn, rejigging the fraction of teaching or teaching-cum-research versus research-only institutions in India in favour of the former, which are less resource-intensive, could free up some funds.

But this is also more about pragmatism than anything else – somewhat like untangling a bundle of wires before straightening them out instead of vice versa, or trying to do both at once. As things stand, India’s teaching institutions also need more money. Some reasons there is a shortage of teachers include the fact that they are often not paid well or on time, especially if they are employed at state-funded colleges; the institutions’ teaching facilities are subpar (or non-existent); if jobs are located in remote places and the institutions haven’t had the leeway to consider upgrading recreational facilities; etc.

Teaching at the higher-education level in India is also harder because of the poor state of government schools, especially outside tier I cities. This brings with it a separate raft of problems, including money.

Finally, a more ‘local’ example of prestige as well as financial constraints that also illustrates the importance of this PoV is the question of why the Swarnajayanti Fellowships have been awarded to so few women, and how this problem can be ‘fixed’.

If the query about which men should be excluded to accommodate women sounds like a reasonable question – you’re probably assuming that the number of fellows has to be limited to a certain number, dictated in turn by the amount of money the government has said can be awarded through these fellowships. But if the government allocated more money, we could appreciate all the current laureates as well as many others, and arguably without diluting the ‘quality’ of the competition (given just how many scholars there are).

Resource constraints obviously can’t explain or resolve everything that stands in the way of more women, trans-people, gender-non-binary and gender-non-conforming scholars receiving scholarships, fellowships, awards and prominent positions within academia. But axiomatically, it’s important to see that ‘fixing’ this problem requires action on two fronts, instead of just one – make academia less sexist and misogynistic and secure more funds. The constraints are certainly part of the problem, particularly when they are wielded as an excuse to concentrate more resources, and more power, in the hands of the already privileged, even as the constraints may not be real themselves.

In the final analysis, science doesn’t have to be a powerplay, and we don’t have to honour anyone at the expense of another. But deferring to such wisdom could let the fundamental causes of this issue off the hook.

Freeman Dyson’s PhD

The physicist, thinker and writer Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28, 2020, at the age of 96. I wrote his obituary for The Wire Science; excerpt:

The 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of [quantum electrodynamics] excluded Dyson. … If this troubled Dyson, it didn’t show; indeed, anyone who knew him wouldn’t have expected differently. Dyson’s life, work, thought and writing is a testament to a philosophy of doing science that has rapidly faded through the 20th century, although this was due to an unlikely combination of privileges. For one, in 1986, he said of PhDs, “I think it’s a thoroughly bad system, so it’s not quite accidental that I didn’t get one, but it was convenient.” But he also admitted it was easier for him to get by without a PhD.
His QED paper, together with a clutch of others in mathematical physics, gave him a free-pass to more than just dabble in a variety of other interests, not all of them related to theoretical physics and quite a few wandering into science fiction. … In 1951, he was offered a position to teach at Cornell even though he didn’t have a doctorate.

Since his passing, many people have latched on to the idea that Dyson didn’t care for awards and that “he didn’t even bother getting a PhD” as if it were a difficult but inspiring personal choice, and celebrate it. It’s certainly an unlikely position to assume and makes for the sort of historical moment that those displeased with the status quo can anchor themselves to and swing from for reform, considering the greater centrality of PhDs to the research ecosystem together with the declining quality of PhD theses produced at ‘less elite’ institutions.

This said, I’m uncomfortable with such utterances when they don’t simultaneously acknowledge the privileges that secured for Dyson his undoubtedly deserved place in history. Even a casual reading of Dyson’s circumstances suggests he didn’t have to complete his doctoral thesis (under Hans Bethe at Cornell University) because he’d been offered a teaching position on the back of his contributions to the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and was hired by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton a year later.

It’s important to mention – and thus remember – which privileges were at play so that a) we don’t end up unduly eulogising Dyson, or anyone else, and b) we don’t attribute Dyson’s choice to his individual personality alone instead of also admitting the circumstances Dyson was able to take for granted and which shielded him from adverse consequences. He “didn’t bother getting a PhD” because he wasn’t the worse for it; in one interview, he says he feels himself “very lucky” he “didn’t have to go through it”. On the other hand, even those who don’t care for awards today are better off with one or two because:

The nature of research has changed
Physics has become much more specialised than it was in 1948-1952
Degrees, grants, publications and awards have become proxies for excellence when sifting through increasingly overcrowded applicants’ pools
Guided by business decisions, journals definition of ‘good science’ has changed
Vannevar Bush’s “free play of free intellects” paradigm of administering research is much less in currency
Funding for science has dropped, partly because The War ended, and took a chunk of administrative freedom with it

The expectations of scientists have also changed. IIRC Dyson didn’t take on any PhD students, perhaps as a result of his dislike for the system (among other reasons because he believed it penalises students not interested in working on a single problem for many years at a time). But considering how the burdens on national education systems have shifted, his decision would be much harder to sustain today even if all of the other problems didn’t exist. Moreover, he has referred to his decision as a personal choice – that it wasn’t his “style” – so treating it as a prescription for others may mischaracterise the scope and nature of his disagreement.

However, questions about whether Dyson might have acted differently if he’d had to really fight the PhD system, which he certainly had problems with, are moot. I’m not discussing his stomach for a struggle nor am I trying to find fault with Dyson’s stance; the former is a pointless consideration and the latter would be misguided.

Instead, it seems to me to be a question of what we do know: Dyson didn’t get a PhD because he didn’t have to. His privileges were a part of his decision and cemented its consequences, and a proper telling of the account should accommodate them even if only to suggest a “Dysonian pride” in doing science requires a strong personality as well as a conspiracy of conditions lying beyond the individual’s control, and to ensure reform is directed against the right challenges.

Featured image: Freeman Dyson, October 2005. Credit: ioerror/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.