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Albert Einstein plays an important role in the Christopher Nolan film 'Oppenheimer'.
In reality, Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer knew each other, but were not friends until much later.
The real Einstein would not have helped Oppenheimer with top secret calculations about the atomic bomb.
For someone who wasn't involved in the race to develop the first atomic bomb, Albert Einstein plays a surprisingly important role in Christopher Nolan's film "Oppenheimer."
The film focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw the assembly and testing of the very first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
In several scenes, the physicist, who becomes the "father of the atomic bomb," goes to Einstein for advice during and after the secret initiative, codenamed the Manhattan Project.
But in reality, "Oppenheimer and Einstein were not friends," nuclear weapons historian Alex Wellerstein told Insider. 'They knew each other. They worked in the same place after the war. But Oppenheimer saw Einstein as a kind of old guard.'
Einstein once wrote that he did not believe in quantum physics, which would become Oppenheimer's field of expertise. The younger scientist later called Einstein "completely cuckoo."
Only in the last decade of Einstein's life, after the bombs had already fallen, the war had ended and both physicists were at Princeton, did the two become "close colleagues and friends of sorts," Oppenheimer wrote in 1965.
"I saw the relationship between them as one of the master who had been displaced and whose work had been taken over by the younger," Nolan told the New York Times.
The film captures some of the real-life tension, and later, the camaraderie between the two influential physicists. But some parts of it are fiction.
Einstein would not have helped with top secret calculations
In the film, Manhattan Project physicist Edward Teller calculates that the atomic bomb they are building could set off an endless series of reactions that set the entire atmosphere on fire.
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Faced with the possibility that his experiment will end all life on Earth, Oppenheimer rushes to Einstein to double-check the numbers. That's pure fiction.
"He didn't go to Einstein and ask him to check calculations. That didn't happen. Einstein wouldn't have been good for that anyway," Wellerstein said. "It's the wrong kind of science."
Even if Einstein had been the man for the job, it is unlikely that Oppenheimer would have gone to him with such confidential calculations.
In reality, Oppenheimer consulted Arthur Compton, who led the University of Chicago's efforts on the Manhattan Project.
"I shifted that to Einstein," Nolan told the Times. "Einstein is the personality that people know in the public."
Einstein and Oppenheimer disagreed on an important issue: government
Einstein was not invited to participate in the Manhattan Project, partly because of his socialist leanings, but it is possible that he would not have accepted such an invitation anyway.
The scientist was an ardent pacifist. Fearing that the Nazis would develop and use a nuclear weapon, Einstein wrote the letter that convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to launch an atomic bomb program.
He later regretted it, saying, "If I had known that the Germans would fail to develop an atomic bomb, I would not have done anything."
Einstein was a refugee in the US, fleeing the Gestapo raids and the rise of Hitler. His distrust of the government is not prominently featured in the film. Instead, there's a glimmer of it in his eyes as he passes Senator Lewis Strauss in one of the film's most critical scenes, next to the Princeton pond.
In the film, Strauss is convinced that Oppenheimer said something that turned Einstein against him. But Einstein turned against politicians long before that.
"The problem with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him - the government of the United States," Einstein once said, according to the book "American Prometheus," on which the film is based.
That's "Einstein-level combustion," Wellerstein said.
Einstein encouraged Oppenheimer to turn his back on the US
After all his work and after the war was over, Oppenheimer's life came under a bizarre national security investigation, which is the subject of the film's third act.
Indeed, Einstein told Oppenheimer to give up his security clearance and walk away from government work. That scene in the movie is based on true events.
"There's a fundamental difference between the two that I think this reveals. Einstein didn't think Oppenheimer owed the government or the country anything like that," Wellerstein said.
However, Oppenheimer couldn't let it go.
Einstein the outsider, Oppenheimer the disgraced insider
After the government decided to revoke his security clearance, Oppenheimer stopped working on nuclear issues altogether. His career virtually ended.
"Even though he knew a lot of things and had a lot of opinions, he basically felt that if you didn't have a security clearance, you weren't capable of being an important person," Wellerstein said.
"Someone like Einstein would think that's nonsense," he added, calling the legendary scientist "a perpetual outsider."
Wellerstein, on the other hand, concluded that "Oppenheimer starts out as something of an outsider, becomes a real important insider, and then gets thrown out and can never recover."
Read the original article on Business Insider
