American Prometheus
Prometheus was the Greek mythological figure best known for having defied the Olympian gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge, and civilization. He was condemned to eternal torment for this transgression by being bound to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver only for it to grow back overnight so that it might be eaten again in a daily cycle. In the Western classical tradition, Prometheus represented human striving which carried the risk of overreach or unintended consequences.
American Prometheus is Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning biography of a man – J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb – consumed by such striving. It was he who pulled this unimaginable nuclear fire out of Einstein’s quantum Olympian blackboard equations to unleash such existential power that it’s synonymous with the very term Armageddon (or nuclear holocaust). The biopic Oppenheimer, released last week to wide acclaim, was based on that story.
You need neither to have read the book nor have watched the film, however, to appreciate the many underlying moral issues raised by that "event" some eighty years ago. Our discussion piece is An Extended Interview With Christopher Nolan as the director of the biopic discusses his painstaking effort to faithfully capture the science and the ambiguous nature of the man behind the program known as the Manhattan Project.
Chief among the challenges was a concrete visualization of the quantum world that gave rise to what appears as the blackest of magic for those of us used to living in the classical dimension. There's no going back once the genie was out of the bottle and, with it, the existential danger that even the very process of understanding the technology might tend to make its possible use more normalized. The result is generations of people giving an intellectual context to the idea of Armageddon.
To that point, we might have been better served with a reminder of the horrors of Hiroshima served up by John Hersey's 1946 realistic fiction of the same name. Rather, the "success" of that 8:15 a.m. event on August 6, 1945 was depicted on the American side by cheering as if on the winning side of the Super Bowl.
The film does a very credible job recreating what must have been an exciting time in physics when, literally, the laws of the universe were being reappraised. Yet it's also a story of ordinary men, including the protagonist, living in an extraordinary time. There was no certainty that the initial so-called Trinity test at Los Alamos wouldn't ignite the atmosphere and destroy all life on earth. Honestly, now, how would you have proceeded?
The last part of the biopic focuses more on the political and legalistic post-war aspects of Oppenheimer's career including his forced retirement from active engagement purportedly for his divided political leanings but, we are led to believe, due primarily to his opposition to the advancement of the fission-based atomic bomb into its vastly bigger and uglier brother, the fusion-based hydrogen bomb.
Judge not lest ye be judged.