Dan Snow's History Hit - Oppenheimer vs Einstein

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

Today we're talking about two 20th century titans, the physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. Their scientific achievements changed the world, and yet they were sceptical of one another. In the 1930s, Oppenheimer had described Einstein as 'completely cuckoo' - later in his life, Einstein would say that he admired Oppenheimer as a man, but not as a physicist.So why did Einstein feel so uneasy about Oppenheimer's discoveries? And who left the most profound legacy? Dan is joined by Cindy Kelly, founder and President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, to find out.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about two of the most important men who have ever lived and breathed on the podcast today. And they had some choice words about each other. In the 1930s, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the young, thrusting physicist, called Einstein a complete cuckoo. Late in his life, Einstein said that he admired Oppenheimer as a man, but not as a physicist. After the Second World War, these two giants ended up as colleagues. They worked alongside each other at Princeton. They became, in the words of Oppenheimer, sort of friends. They once listened to classical music together on Einstein's birthday. Imagine being a flower on the wall there.

In this podcast, we're going to dig into these two giant figures. We're going to talk about their scientific achievements, their legacy, and we're going to come up with the absolutely conclusive and not at all debatable winner. Which of these two men left the most profound legacy? We'll be hearing about Albert Einstein, certainly one of history's most brilliant thinkers. High school dropout, and yet one who, by his own admission, had, quote, mastered integral and differential calculus by the age of 14.

The young Einstein epitomised love the world around him, and also loved algebra and geometry, which meant that he later said that at the age of 12, he was certain that all this beauty, all this seemingly chaotic and eclectic nature that we see around us could only be understood as having a quote, mathematical structure. What a teenager. In 1905, in his spare time, he published four papers that are now compared really only to Newton's work on gravity for their epochal importance. They lay the foundation for the giant strides forward that were made over the subsequent century. He won one Nobel Prize, but it's now thought that any of the four quite

different papers was Nobel worthy. Buried in among those gems was an explanation of why a nuclear reaction would produce a titanic, an unimaginable amount of energy. He won his Nobel Prize in 1921, but interestingly, it was not for the theory of relativity, for which he's now famous, because the scientific community still hadn't quite got their heads around that yet. It was for another aspect of his work. He was certainly a giant. Julius Robert Oppenheimer had a slightly different path to greatness. He was far more privileged, grew up in America rather than Central Europe, facing the anti-Semitism that plagued Einstein and his family. He was born much later than Einstein. He was born as Einstein was actually working on his revolutionary papers. Oppenheimer was part

of the next generation. He was building on that theoretical work that Einstein had really begun. Now, everyone knows because of the big movie that Oppenheimer was the American Prometheus. He was the destroyer of worlds. He was the man who translated that physics from the blackboard to the battlefield. He was the director of America's World War II Manhattan Project. What got me thinking about this topic was the recent Bauchbeck, in which we see the wonderful scenes in which Oppenheimer and Einstein meet by the edge of that pond. They're so powerful, those scenes. But sadly,

I now learn they are works of fiction. So in this podcast, as always, folks, we get to the truth. We try and peel back the layers of fiction and myth and find out what we know about the history beneath them. What did Einstein and Oppenheimer really think about each other? Who left the most profound legacy? Joining me to tell me what is what, we've got Cindy Kelly. She's the founder and president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation. Please go and check out their website. It is a truly remarkable public history project, and I'm very, very excited and grateful to have her on the podcast. Einstein showed us how the world was created. Oppenheimer showed us how it could be destroyed. Listen to this podcast and work out who you think was the most important.

Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Cindy, this is such a huge subject.

I guess let's start, we'll come to them both in a second, but when did they first meet? Do we know when they first met? That's a very good question. It's interesting because you have to keep in mind they were not contemporaries per se. Einstein is 25 years older than Oppenheimer. I mean, Oppenheimer, I think, even used this phrase. He was like the patron saint of physics at the time. Oppenheimer was a young man. Oppenheimer was one year old when Einstein published his five

theories of special relativity. So he was a one-year-old when Einstein was becoming the most famous physicist and scientist in the world. So they were in way, light years apart, but they knew each other more as colleagues at Princeton. They were both at the Institute for Advanced Studies in 1947. Okay. So that's when they started to see each other more perhaps as equals, by which time, of course, Oppenheimer had done all his stuff. Right. By that time, he had done his stuff. It's interesting that they were colleagues and cordial, but never kind of close friends by any means.

Interesting. I think in the 30s, Einstein went on this tangent after he produced these brilliant theories of special and then general relativity in 1915 that transformed the science of the time or of our world today, he began to second guess himself. And he kind of wanted everything neat and tidy and have a unified theory of all these factors of space, time, gravity, mass, and it didn't work at all levels. It could work in the cosmos, big mass level, but not in the tiny particle infinite level.

But he kept pushing this, and Oppenheimer, who sometimes was a little too flippant, he said, he is completely cuckoo. I can't imagine this did great things for their relationship. But it was true that most of the physics world of the 1930s had advanced in the previous 20 years since the theory of relativity were published by Einstein and totally embraced it and went from there and discovered it worked really well to explain what was going on at the subatomic level and in the heavens. And they were distressed to see that Einstein was off on this tangent and kept finding what he called inconsistencies in his theory. But then when Oppenheimer and his other physics friends

tried to reconcile these inconsistencies, they found that they were reconcilable, that it was kind of like almost big mistakes that Einstein was making. Oh, well. At any rate, so that couldn't have gotten him off to a great footing. Let's start by quick, this is impossible, but just quickly talk to me about by the 1930s, Einstein is Annus Mirabilis in so-called in 1905 when he published unbelievable, remarkable papers that transformed physics in all sorts of different ways. Is he the most famous and accomplished scientist in the world? Is that how he's regarded by this point? Absolutely. He was heralded by numerous universities and he fled Germany. Obviously, Germany was riddled with anti-Semitism that

affected his own childhood as his father had a very difficult time getting his businesses traction. And the family had to leave to Italy to try to set up a new business in that country because Germany was so inhospitable. And Einstein found the Prussian authoritarianism of his schools so horrible that he ran away. He ran away as a 13 or 14-year-old and fled to Italy to join his parents without a high school degree, which means his chances of getting into university were very dim. It was a difficult time for Einstein to grow up in Europe, and he had a hard childhood. And that, of course, contrasted greatly with Oppenheimer, whose parents also had fled Germany, were Jewish. They, like the Einsteins, were secular. They were not terribly religious. But Einstein's father was

incredibly successful in New York, working with his relatives in an import fabric business. And he lived in kind of a palatial apartment on Manhattan. The walls were decorated with Impressionist paintings. And his father by the 30s or 40s was a multimillionaire. So Oppenheimer, he had very supportive teachers at the private ethical cultural school in New York City. He had all the best of educations that were very copacetic to his thinking, unlike Einstein, which is interesting because it forced Einstein to be a bit of a rebel. As I said, he ran away from boarding school to another as well, calling Einstein a complete cuckoo. So the two of them were often offending people, I guess. And this hurt Einstein when he finally got his college diploma from the Swiss Polytechnic Institute and was certified to teach math and physics. He couldn't get a job.

certified to teach math and physics, he couldn't get a job. And he thinks he was torpedoed by the recommendations of the faculty there. They were still kind of hurting, maybe, from his insults or his uppityness or whatever it was that put them off, that then actually, it put Einstein off a track as a teacher, but he found work as an examiner in the Swiss patent office, which was a godsend. As a patent examiner, you have to kind of evaluate proposals for innovations. You have to kind of imagine how these gadgets or whatever was being proposed work. And he was very good at that. And he was very good at understanding the larger concepts of whatever the invention had to do with. And he could do his work really quickly and really well, which left him plenty of time to think about his thought problems, which he loved doing. Thank goodness the internet didn't exist, otherwise we'd be looking at cat videos all day.

And instead, he was able to completely transform our understanding of the universe. So he publishes those papers. He then enters academia after that. Let's quickly nip back to Oppenheimer, because you've very cleverly put us on these two parallel tracks. that. Let's quickly nip back to Oppenheimer because you've very cleverly put us on these two parallel tracks. Oppenheimer has a very, very different school experience. Everything laid on for him, as you say, great privilege. Does he just move straight into postgraduate and doctoral and postdoctoral studies? Has he got a conventional academic track? There's nothing conventional about Oppenheimer. He was a very unusual young man. He and Einstein were both so gifted and so brilliant that it was hard for the other guys, the other boys, to kind of relate to them. So they were loners.

They had few friends in their boyhood. Oppenheimer, he relished studying. He was very good, not only in science and math, but in languages. He picked them up very easily. He was speaking seven languages by the time he was, I don't know, in his 20s. He was the valedictorian of high school, despite the fact that he took the full load and then added on four additional subjects, Latin, Greek, English, and German. He was a quick study, which really held him in great stead. I think one of the things that was his Achilles heel was that he was so brilliant, he would be wanting to go on to the next problem. So when he was starting to teach, he taught at University of California, Berkeley and California Polytech in Pasadena jointly.

He really created America's first theoretical physics school. And he was adored by his pupils. He was hard driving, and they loved him. And later, he recruited many of them and many of the luminaries in science to Los Alamos. And he was a terrific listener. This is interesting because not everybody who's a brilliant physicist, high-level thinker, can relate to the everyday man and his problems. But he was able to do that. Machinists who are having trouble making some component that was essential for the working of an atomic bomb could talk to him about their problems. And he got it. There was no one that he didn't make think that you were the most special person in the room.

He would look at you intently and take in what you were saying. And it wasn't just a momentary thing. When he was running Los Alamos, there were as many as 2,000 or 3,000 people working on this project. He would remember what you might have told him three months ago about your problems with X, Y, or Z. Then he would run into someone and say, wait a minute, you should talk to Gus. He's doing a similar thing. You two get together and these talents he were really really put to use by him it was a very interesting confluence and so different from einstein

so let's switch back to einstein i'm gonna ask you if you can to sum up the anus mirabilis if that's not too painful for to do So his extraordinary four papers, and then his later theory of relativity in his early 20s Nobel Prize. So this kind of extraordinary 15-year period in which he basically completely changes the way we see the world. What is that Einstein legacy? How does he do that? It's interesting, because he did it with thought problems. He did it in his head. He didn't have a huge laboratory. He didn't have a particle accelerator or a cyclotron or 2,000 people working with him. He was alone in his thoughts.

And even as a child, one of his first presents when he was five was a compass. And he was immersed in wonder at looking at the needle bouncing up and down and trying to imagine these invisible forces of gravity that were at work to tug that needle toward north. He imagined for his 1905 work, he imagined riding on a light beam. What would it be like to ride on a light beam? Have you thought about that? I mean, he then thought about what if you had a trampoline and you threw on it a bowling ball? So the bowling ball is heavy. It makes a little depression in the middle of the trampoline. And then if you take lighter weight billiard balls, what happens to them? And they somehow get trapped by the depression that the bowling ball has made.

And while maybe we've seen people jumping on trampolines at various points in our lives, how many of us have then translated that into theories of space and time and their relationships with mass and gravity. Somehow, Einstein figured this out and translated that into how objects in space will affect each other. What he came up with transformed the world of physics, of science, came up with transformed the world of physics, of science, and our lives today. In that he came up with the Big Bang Theory, the beginning of the universe. He kind of can trace that back. We're still looking now with the James Webb Space Telescope, far back into the first few hundred million years to kind of see if Einstein was right,

how that happened, if we can see that evidence of it. He came up with quantum theory, which is the basis for all electronics and computing and how radioactivity works. And it led to treatment of cancer and diagnostics with nuclear imaging. I mean, all of these things that at the time he did them, he may not have conceived of, but he laid the foundations in his theories for work that continued for the next hundred years and is still continuing to kind of build on

those fundamental ideas, these foundational theories that he posited as a 26-year-old and that as a 36-year-old. Amazing. Let's switch back to Oppenheimer now. I want to know, when he was a student and entering teaching, do we know what he thought of Einstein at that point? I mean, was he in awe of Einstein much as everyone else was, or were these young, new, thrusting people already thinking Einstein was kind of old news? Well, as I say, Oppenheimer was born in 1904. So the first set of special theory of relativity, the five papers, which included the famous formula equals mc squared

about the relationship between energy and mass, That happened when he was one years old. So by the time he was in his 20s, Oppenheimer went to study with Max Born, who was head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Germany. And he was at the University of Göttingen then. And he discovered this world of scientists, of young men, it was mostly young men, interested in figuring out how this world works, the subatomic world that was opened up first by Oppenheimer

and then by many people like Niels Bohr and others. And in his classroom were people who would then become the leaders of this high-energy physics of the atomic bomb efforts in their own countries, like Werner Heisenberg, who led the Nazi effort in Germany during World War II to build an atomic bomb. He was a classmate of Oppenheimer's. They were within a year or two of each other in age, and they were together studying how these things worked. So that when the war broke out,

and the scientists in the United States and the UK agreed to collaborate to try to see if they could have an allied effort to build an atomic bomb. All of those folks knew the folks that were working with Werner Heisenberg on the German effort, and they knew they were no dummies. They were Nobel Prize winners. But they all would have acknowledged what they'd have all looked upon Einstein as a foundational figure, if not someone whose research at that point was still cutting edge. Correct. Yeah. No, they were very respectful of all that Einstein had laid out in 1905 and 1915. And the work that was done by his accolades, let's say, and people who took his theories and ran

with them, they were the leading lights of the high energy physics world, which was a totally new discipline that basically was born with those theories. And it was just playing out, you know, 20 years after when Oppenheimer was a student. You listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about Einstein versus Oppenheimer. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

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Okay, so Einstein has found his way to the US where he's a grand old man of physics. Oppenheimer is a thrusting young guy. We've just sent him to California, have we, where he's a great teacher. He's in the right place at the right time when war breaks out. Who was more important in that decision to pursue this project, to pursue a nuclear bomb? Was Oppenheimer just watching from the sidelines? Because Einstein was involved, the famous letter Roosevelt. Tell me about that. Well, it's interesting because Einstein, yes, signed this letter that was addressed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, our president through much of the 30s and through 1945. The letter was signed in August of 1939. This is one month before Hitler invades Poland and World War II breaks out. Einstein was put up to signing this letter. He was at a cottage on Long Island, peacefully sailing around the Sound, not thinking about these things. He was not engaged until his old friends, emigres from Hungary, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller came knocking on his door and said, look, would you sign this letter?

So they had a couple of drafts and Einstein agreed to sign it. So it was a sort of collaborative effort. He was put up to it. Some say the letter, you go to museums and it's framed and say, this is what clinched it. But it was really another two years of kind of false starts and slow efforts and disbelief by the top advisors, science advisors to Roosevelt, that the United States could ever pull this off in time to make a difference in World War II. And so Einstein played no real part after that? No, he was not invited and he didn't take part. And I don't think he would have accepted it if he were invited to roll his sleeves up or even as a consultant. Niels Bohr kind of played a role that

perhaps Einstein, if he had been a younger man, might have played. Niels Bohr was kind of number two in that realm of thinkers and working on quantum mechanics. And he became a regular advisor to Oppenheimer and the scientists at Los Alamos, but he didn't live there. He just visited now and then. So similar to Einstein, he was within the orbit, but he wasn't in the center of things. What's Oppenheimer done to move the ball down the pitch? Like before the Manhattan Project, as a scientist alone, how excited are we about his contribution? Oppenheimer was pulled into the project because he was in the right place. As you say, he was at UC Berkeley.

And there, Ernest Lawrence had built this centrifuge that was one of the only machines that could accelerate particles at high speeds and bombard them. By August 1939, they knew that uranium would lend itself to be a fuel for an atomic bomb. It was fissile. But Enrico Fermi, one of the most brilliant physicists of his day, had tried in 1933 to find what is the element that would work this way, that you could bombard with a neutron and split an atom and capture that energy and make an explosion and a chain reaction. And he narrowly missed finding it, which, of course, if he had, would Mussolini be the first to have an atomic bomb? Quite possible. And he confirmed he was instrumental. I mean, he emigrated, he picked up his Nobel Prize and just continued moving from Italy to Sweden to New York City and fled the Nazi regime. And was just a center in creating the reactors that produced plutonium and proved that you could create a chain reaction.

Oppenheimer was in that mix and he was recruited to be on committees to look into the feasibility of creating the bomb. He proved himself to be a good collaborator and also a brilliant physicist. He was a theoretical physicist and he was one of the leading candidates to lead the scientific work for the project. Okay, Cindy, though, if the second World War had never happened and we're just bringing the guillotine down in 1939, would we remember Oppenheimer for his work to that point? Second World War had never happened, and we're just bringing the guillotine down in 1939. Would we remember Oppenheimer for his work to that point? Probably not.

We probably wouldn't remember him. He had not got Nobel Prize. Part of the explanation might be that he was on to the next puzzle, the next problem. He got impatient. There's a lot of hard work that has to go between your insight and theory and then writing it up and proving it in a way that your peers and colleagues will say, yes, he's got it. So more often than not, Oppenheimer, working with his graduate post-grad students would come up with an innovative and insightful concept, but it needed more work before it would be qualified for a Nobel Prize. So many of his accolades got Nobel Prizes, but Oppenheimer did not.

Oh, really? Oh, yes, absolutely. Okay. Well, that's impressive. That's enough for me. I like both the brains and the commitment to get a Nobel Prize, so I'm still impressed if he's got half of it. But then his great achievement, so in a different way to Einstein, his great achievement, obviously the Manhattan Project, is not only being brilliant enough to understand and lead this group of extraordinary physicists,

but run the biggest, most expensive project in the human world to that point in history? Well, he did it in partnership with a man who was also primed to run this project. It was General Leslie Groves, that often is the unsung hero. If it weren't for him, he was a West Point graduate and frustrated that there was no war going on when he graduated after World War I. So he couldn't get his stripes. He couldn't become a general without that battlefield opportunity. Anyway, he was looking to go into the European theater when he got pulled aside because he had been magnificent in building the Pentagon and in building the army munitions plants and the training centers and all the pre-World

War II facilities that needed to get the United States ready militarily. He was behind the scenes working with America's corporate infrastructure to bring those resources to bear to build our battle-worthy ships and all that. Anyway, they picked him to run this project. And if he could have, he would have turned it down. But since he was stuck with it, he saw in Oppenheimer the way to achieve his ambitions. And Oppenheimer saw in this project a way to make up for the fact he didn't have a Nobel Prize and get the fame and recognition that he so dearly sought. So they were a marvelous pair. They were like Mutt and Jeff.

So they were a marvelous pair. They were like Mutt and Jeff. Oppenheimer, real thin and aesthetic and reading Baudelaire and speaking seven languages. And Groves, kind of burly and a bit of a chocoholic. He loved Whitman samplers and chocolate cake and struggled with his waistline. But he was no nonsense. Damn the torpedoes. we're going to get this done. And here's my deadline, and everybody's going to stick to it. He drove himself very hard. And the two of them were an extraordinary pair. And in the movie Oppenheimer, there is a wonderful

scene where Oppenheimer does visit Einstein to get his opinion on where the atmosphere is going to be set on fire as a result of the first nuclear test. I'm taking it that was artistic license. It was artistic license. It's because everybody knows the name Einstein. That's a shame. That's a shame. I've read Arthur Holly Compton was the person. He was running the Manhattan Project's chapter at the University of Chicago and a brilliant mathematician. And that was whom he went to, not Einstein. So Oppenheimer never went to Einstein for a little fireside chat during the Manhattan Project and asked him advice?

Not that I know of. And Cindy, they met each other and he became colleagues after the Second World War. Correct. Einstein was enjoying the peace inquiry of Princeton. He was kind of perplexed by Oppenheimer wanting to maintain his security clearance and stay in the game. Einstein didn't want any part of that. He had a disdain for government as growing up in Prussia and the authoritarian governments he encountered there. But Oppenheimer, they must have crossed paths. But interestingly enough, when Oppenheimer was proposed first to be invited to come to the Institute for Advanced Studies, the leadership there asked Einstein what he thought. And at the same time, they were proposing Wolfgang Polly, who had been a good friend of Einstein, close enough, and he also won a Nobel Prize.

And Oppenheimer had not, obviously, and obviously rankled Einstein at least one occasion. And so Einstein said, no, I'd rather invite Wolfgang Polly. And on the basis of that, the Institute made the offer to Polly. But as luck would have it, Polly declined. And Oppenheimer came to the Institute. And how would you characterize their relationship then after the war? And how would you characterize their relationship then after the war? Well, it was cordial. I think Oppenheimer said that they were colleagues and sort of friends, as he put it.

Oppenheimer was a very kind person. And even if they weren't close and didn't see eye to eye on a lot of the physics, they enjoyed each other's company. For example, Einstein, he knew, loved classical music and enjoyed listening to the concerts broadcast from New York at Carnegie Hall every Sunday. But he couldn't get the reception he needed in his house. And as director of the Institute, Oppenheimer, secretly had an antenna installed in Einstein's house. And then on his birthday, he brought over a new radio and said, oh, let's listen to the Carnegie Hall concert this afternoon. And they did. And Einstein was thrilled. So I think that shows what an at-heart, warm person Oppenheimer could be

and thoughtful and that their relationship as one-on-one as people was very cordial. We know that Einstein said in later life he regretted sending that letter to Roosevelt, encouraging the American government to look into this astonishing new technology that might enable the creation of a weapon of mass destruction. Einstein did regret his part in that, and did he therefore sort of slightly look down on Oppenheimer as the man who'd made that a reality? Well, I don't think anyone can but admire what Oppenheimer pulled off. Einstein said that he admired him as a man, but not as a physicist. So they had their differences.

Einstein was a pacifist. And one reason, as I mentioned, as a boy, he ran away from his boarding school in Germany was not only the authoritarian style of the faculty and the school. He would have faced two years of military service in Germany after he graduated. And he did not want to serve in the military. And so he was from early childhood a pacifist, and he deeply regretted the letter, he said later, that had set in motion, or some would have said was the cause. It's easy to hold up a letter and point to it and say, this is what did it. There's a lot of false starts. Van Neever Bush, who was Roosevelt's senior science advisor, said it was like swimming in molasses. He was a very compelling blueprint as to how you could create enough fissile material that is enriched uranium to create a bomb. to the attention of the person who was in charge of this special committee for Roosevelt. Well, the person in charge was very cautious, and when it said top secret, he put it in his safe and locked it up and shared it with no one. So finally, Mark Oliphant, who is an Australian but working with the British on this project, volunteered to ride across the Atlantic Ocean in the bomb bay

of a plane to then fly across the United States and meet with all the top people. He met with Oppenheimer, he met with Lawrence, he met with Roosevelt's top advisors, and they got right on it. But you can see we were kind of slow, slow to pick up on it. So the letter didn't just do it. It set a tiny flame, not a huge fire underneath the feet of the folks in Washington. A respect for classified documents that is admirable, is admirable. I'll say no more. So Einstein didn't admire Oppenheimer as a physicist.

Oppenheimer thought certainly in Einstein's older age, he'd gone kind of a cuckoo. So they both thought they were the better physicists. Who do you think, Cindy, as the expert, I guess who's the greatest physicist? But also who had the greatest impact though? Different question. Who had the greatest impact on our lives today? Well, in 1999, Time magazine named Albert Einstein as a person of the century. and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans,

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And I think that was well taken. His influence from everything from the Big Bang to quantum mechanics to electronics to the fundamentals of how our universe is created, astrophysics today, it's extraordinary. It's absolutely extraordinary. This is not to take anything away from Oppenheimer's accomplishments, which were numerous, but in a different sense. In a way, what he produced during the war was unexpected of him. He was in charge of a few graduate students. He was not a manager. People were very skeptical that he could manage this big laboratory and all of the sort of divas, all of these people who were top of their game in their universities and would have to then be working with different directions under his

direction and working in groups. And they weren't used to that. Anyway, he managed because they respected him. And with a few exceptions, they went along with that, along with their assignments. Edward Teller was one exception. He wanted to work on the hydrogen bomb even before the atomic bomb was worked out. But Oppenheimer's strengths were very different from Einstein's. And of course, if you're looking at it from the perspective of history, he was put on the sidelines. He was broken by the system. His security clearance was revoked, and it's now very well known because of the movie Oppenheimer, the travesty of this sort of kangaroo court. But it was the end of his ability to contribute to atomic weapon policy,

about policies of nuclear energy and the like. He was sidelined. Cindy, so you're going with Einstein. In the Oppenheimer versus Einstein bracket, you're advancing Einstein. Yes. Yes, I think so. Okay. And now, because we've got you here, and you're one of the world's great experts, and people are watching the Academy Awards at the moment, just tell us two or three big things that the movie gets right about Oppenheimer, and two or three big things the movie gets wrong. Just quick fire while we got you. What does get right about Oppenheimer? Well, Q is a very complex person. And I think the movie

captures that very well. I mean, he loved his wife, Kitty, but then he continued his relationships with Gene Tatlock when it was clearly an endangerment to his career. He must have known the FBI were likely to follow him to his place and observe that he stayed there overnight. But he was not a political person. He really didn't read the newspaper. He wasn't tuned into that at all. In fact, someone had to tell him that there was a stock market crash, and he was clueless about that. He was really apolitical, although he went along for the gag. He contributed to the campus cocktail party benefits for the Spanish Civil War loyalists who were trying to fight against Franco. In fact, Kitty Oppenheimer was married to someone who lost his life fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

So they had that in common. That was good and bad because it then kind of charred Oppenheimer as a serious communist. He wasn't. It's a dalliance in a way. He was really focused on the physics and his work and accomplishing things. He was, as I say, not much of a manager when he was directing graduate students. And he absolutely floored everyone at how effective he was at Los Alamos. Even Edward Teller, who was a bit of his nemesis, said that no one that he knew could possibly have done it as well, run that laboratory as well as Oppenheimer had. People really respected him. He got the most out of people by not letting them work in isolation, but by bringing them together. He knew that these complex problems were not just a chemical problem or a physics problem or a electronic problem, but he pulled all of these people with these different disciplines

and let them all brainstorm a solution. And that's how many of these problems were solved. It was a brilliant strategy. And you see that in the movie. Okay, that's some stuff they got right. How about any big things they got wrong? Let's see. Well, one of my friends asked me, why was there so much nudity in the movie? And I can't speak to what was going on in Oppenheimer's head. So maybe they got that right. Maybe they got that wrong.

Who knows? I just, I marvel. That's not how I think of Oppenheimer, but maybe that's what it was really like. Who knows? And then the intrusion of Einstein into the movies probably just to get the big guy in there, right? Right. There are some things online that pick at this little thing and that little thing. I think some of them were done deliberately. It was Hollywood actually to try to get a name that everybody would recognize.

You have Einstein be the one he consulted with. It's the kind of movie that you need to watch many times and very closely. I have a friend who has both parents in the movie. His father was Don Hornig, who is famous for babysitting the bomb, being the junior scientist that had to sit up there during the thunderstorm. And his mother was a chemist, and she was in one of the party scenes, and she was asked when she came to interview for her job, well, can you type? And she said, well, frankly, no, I'm a chemist. So, they did make use of her talents as a scientist, but obviously, the stereotypes of what women could do were persistent. Well, thank you so much, Cindy Kelly, for coming on. Tell people how they can engage

with all the amazing work you do. Well, we have a website, atomicheritage.com, and there are 600 oral histories that we've fully transcribed. Some of them include the top echelon. We have a 45-minute interview with Oppenheimer. So you can hear his voice, and it's ethereal. And if you have insomnia, you can listen to 12 hours of General Groves. So those were interviews taken in 1965, and they're now online. And there are many, many people who testified

about working for him in our oral histories collection. So there's a lot of good stuff there. Well, thank you very much. What wonderful work you do. Cindy, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. Enjoyed it. you