The "articulate synthesiser" of knowledge
Postcards from Penang + comparing Oppenheimer in the film and the real Oppenheimer in the biography American Prometheus + readings on how we see the world and tell its stories.
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
It feels like I am hardly ever writing to you all in real-time. I drafted this letter sometime ago but got too occupied with life’s events to put the finishing touches to it, until tonight. Truly, all social media use for me is a retrospective, introspective exercise, which makes me feel out of step with much of the world—but I’m learning to embrace it. As I noted in Chat (accessible to all subscribers), I’m currently in Berlin, where the streets are swathed in fallen autumn leaves, but my “postcards” here harken back to my always sunny and humid Malaysia ☀️—well, before the arrival of the near-annual haze blanketing the region anyway…
After watching Oppenheimer recently, I turned to reading American Prometheus, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin that apparently inspired Nolan to make the movie.
Not having known very much about Oppenheimer before watching the film, I’ll admit to feeling like the film still left me a little in the dark as to the true nature of Oppenheimer’s genius. Why, for instance, was he—above all other physicists who seemed more comfortable with the experimental and not just theoretical side of things—appointed as the one to lead the national American endeavor to produce the world’s first atomic bomb?
In fact, Colonel Leslie R. Groves (played by Matt Damon in the film), who was put in charge of overseeing the bomb project, said that the “scientific leaders of that era” were opposed to the suggestion of Oppenheimer’s appointment as director of the Manhattan Project laboratory. According to the book’s authors, one of the drawbacks Groves perceived to Oppenheimer’s selection was apparently that he “lacked a Nobel Prize and Groves thought that might make it difficult for him to direct the activities of so many of his colleagues who had won that prestigious award”. And for another, he was more of a theorist (the film did make the point that he was incompetent at lab work), when one would assume that building an atomic bomb would require more practical talents.
Add to all this the fact that he was said to have terrible administrative qualities—one peer said he couldn’t be depended to run a burger stand, much less a bomb-making lab—why, then, was he ultimately judged to be the man for the job?
According to the authors, from testimonials gleaned from his peers, it was above all because he was an “articulate synthesizer” of knowledge. They wrote:
While Oppenheimer was a theorist who knew how incompetent he was in the laboratory, he nevertheless stayed close to experimentalists like Lawrence. Unlike many European theorists, he appreciated the potential benefit from close collaboration with those who were involved in testing the validity of the new physics. Even in high school, his teachers had noted his gift for explaining technical things in plain language. As a theorist who understood what the experimentalists were doing in the laboratory, he had that rare quality of being able to synthesise a great mass of information from disparate fields of research.