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science, fiction


EINSTEIN AND OPPENHEIMER’S REAL RELATIONSHIP WAS CORDIAL AND COMPLICATED

Though Einstein didn’t help build the nuclear bomb and has just a few scenes in
Oppenheimer, they pack a punch—and reflect the two physicists’ real-life
dynamic.

By Hillary Busis

July 21, 2023
Historical
Save this storySave
Save this storySave

There’s a gutting scene midway through Oppenheimer that finds Cillian Murphy’s
J. Robert Oppenheimer at one of his lowest moments. Despite the scientist’s
service to his country, he’s being accused of harboring treasonous sympathies;
an unofficial trial with a foregone conclusion is dragging him through the mud.
Outside his home in Princeton, he encounters a colleague: Albert Einstein (Tom
Conti), who doesn’t seem to get why his fellow physicist is lying down and
taking it. 

If this is the reward the American government gives Oppenheimer after the years
he spent developing the nuclear bomb that ended World War II, Einstein tells him
in the film, Oppenheimer should simply “turn his back” on America. (It’s what
Einstein was forced to do to his homeland of Germany, after all—and for
understandable reasons, he would never trust governments or politicians.) What
the essentially stateless Einstein doesn’t understand is that for New York
City–born Oppenheimer, this simply isn’t an option. “Damnit,” he replies, “I
happen to love this country.”


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Like many of the details in Christopher Nolan’s script, both lines of dialogue
come straight from Oppenheimer’s source material, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s
biography American Prometheus. (Though Oppenheimer’s memorable reply is actually
lifted from a different exchange.) The scene is a neat illustration of how these
two scientific giants both mirrored and opposed one another. Einstein only has a
handful of scenes in Oppenheimer, but each of them packs a similar
punch—particularly another (fictionalized) Princeton meeting that the film keeps
coming back to, revealing its full significance only in the movie’s final
moments.



It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that the man whose name has become
synonymous with “genius” is only a supporting character in Nolan’s film. Though
it was Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt that convinced FDR to begin a
nuclear weapons program, Einstein was not involved in the Manhattan Project.
(The government deemed him a security risk due to his left-leaning
politics—though it cleared Oppenheimer, despite his various ties to Communists
and Communist sympathizers.) 



And though he and Oppenheimer both lived and worked at Princeton after the
war—specifically at its Institute for Advanced Study, where Oppenheimer served
as director from 1947 to 1966—they were not particularly close friends. While
they had known each other for years before he came to Princeton and he respected
Einstein—who wouldn’t?—Oppenheimer thought of his predecessor “as a living
patron saint of physics, not a working scientist,” Bird and Sherwin write. “In
the last years of Einstein’s life, the last twenty-five years, his tradition in
a certain sense failed him,” Oppenheimer would write in 1965, in a  lecture
later published in the New York Review of Books. 

The older physicist was skeptical of quantum theory, which Oppenheimer would
advance, and didn’t believe black holes could possibly exist. As shown in
Oppenheimer, the younger physicist helped to prove they do. (In a paper
published the same day Hitler invaded Poland!) Though Oppenheimer thought he was
essentially old-fashioned, “Einstein eventually acquired a grudging respect for
the new director” of the Institute, write Bird and Sherwin, “whom he described
as ‘an unusually capable man of many-sided education.’ But what he admired about
Oppenheimer was the man, not his physics.” 



That said, the biographers indicate Einstein and Oppenheimer did still enjoy
each others’ company. They relay a charming anecdote about the two that didn’t
make it into Oppenheimer but would’ve been a gas to see. In 1948, they write,
“knowing Einstein’s love of classical music, and knowing that his radio could
not receive New York broadcasts of concerts from Carnegie Hall, Oppenheimer
arranged to have an antenna installed on the roof of Einstein’s modest home at
112 Mercer Street. This was done without Einstein’s knowledge—and then on his
birthday, Robert showed up on his doorstep with a new radio and suggested that
they listen to a scheduled concert. Einstein was delighted.” 

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Years later, when Oppenheimer was targeted for his past Communist ties and
stripped of his security clearance, Einstein was firmly on his colleague’s
side—even if he didn’t understand Oppenheimer’s response. “The trouble with
Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him—the United States
government,” he told a friend, per Bird and Sherwin. “The problem was simple:
All Oppenheimer needed to do was to go to Washington, tell the officials that
they were fools, and go home.” Einstein was (ahem) smart enough to keep those
views private. Publicly, he expressed his support in a more palatable manner: “I
admire him not only as a scientist but also as a great human being,” he told the
press. 

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Later, Oppenheimer would return the favor: “Einstein is also, and I think
rightly, known as a man of very great good will and humanity,” he said in that
1965 lecture. “Indeed, if I had to think of a single word for his attitude
towards human problems, I would pick the Sanskrit word Ahinsa, not to hurt,
harmlessness.”

In the film, at least, the admiration goes both ways. Early on, Murphy’s
Oppenheimer asks Conti’s Einstein to review a troubling set of calculations as
the Manhattan Project gets underway. According to Edward Teller (Benny Safdie),
setting off a nuclear explosion might cause a chain reaction that would ignite
the atmosphere, destroying the Earth and everything on it. Einstein advises
Oppenheimer to have another physicist, Hans Bethe (Gustaf Skarsgård), run the
calculations again—revealing that while such an outcome is possible, it has a
near-zero chance of actually happening. And near-zero winds up being good enough
for them.

The scene, Nolan admits, is an invention. In reality, Oppenheimer did fear
causing a chain reaction—but he sought counsel from Arthur Compton, a Nobel
Prize winner who directed the Manhattan Project’s University of Chicago outpost,
instead of the man behind the theory of relativity. “I shifted that to
Einstein,” Nolan told The New York Times, because “Einstein is the personality
people know in the audience.” 

Einstein’s status as a popular icon is likely also why Nolan uses an imagined
conversation between Einstein and Oppenheimer as a recurring device in the film,
one that eventually reveals Oppenheimer’s crushing thesis statement. We see
their exchange from a few different perspectives throughout the movie, including
that of Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss, who inadvertently catalyzes the
encounter. 

Strauss, who’s trying to woo Oppenheimer to run the Institute, spots Einstein
outside the Princeton building where they’re meeting and offers to introduce
Oppenheimer to him. Strauss doesn’t know that the men are already acquainted—and
Oppenheimer adds insult to injury by sauntering up to Einstein, then saying
something to him Strauss can’t hear. It’s the first in a series of humiliations
that will spur Strauss to seek vengeance; the administrator is convinced
Oppenheimer has done something to poison Einstein against him. 

In reality, Oppenheimer and Einstein don’t even mention Strauss, though we learn
what the two talked about only in Oppenheimer’s final moments. Their
conversation is a meditation on the consequences of achievement—how governments
can use and discard scientists with impunity, then welcome them back into the
fold after the metaphorical dust has settled if they so choose. When a future
administration decides to give Oppenheimer a medal, Einstein tells him, “just
remember, it won’t be for you.” 



It’s also a callback to that fictionalized pre–Manhattan Project meeting.
Oppenheimer asks Einstein if he recalls when they worried a chain reaction from
the bomb might destroy the world; Einstein remembers. “I believe we did,”
Oppenheimer replies. Though the exchange came from Nolan’s imagination, it
really ends the movie with a bang.

This article has been updated.


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HILLARY BUSIS


SENIOR HOLLYWOOD EDITOR

Hillary Busis is Vanity Fair’s senior Hollywood editor, overseeing the HWD
section’s film and television coverage. Previously, she was the deputy
entertainment editor at Mashable and a digital editor at Entertainment Weekly.
Hillary lives in Brooklyn. You can follow her on Twitter.
See More By Hillary Busis »



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Lindsey Graham to the Trump Supporters Mercilessly Booing Him: “Thank You Very,
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It's not a great look if you need Donald Trump to defend you in your own home
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