THIS MONTH OPPENHEIMER
Q Did Oppie really meet Einstein, as depicted in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer? Or it is just theory?
J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘It was only in the last decade of his life that we were… something of friends.' They regularly went on walks together and chatted. Whether the duo discussed the cost of scientific breakthrough while gazing at a pond isn't known, but the conversation the twosome have (that so enrages Robert Downey Jr.'s Lewis Strauss in the film) was based on documented sentiments and interactions the eggheads had. During one of their strolls, Einstein told Oppenheimer, ‘When it has once been given you to do something rather reasonable, forever afterward your work and life are a little strange,' and later disagreed with him about Oppenheimer's security-clearance hearing in 1954. Einstein did not think Oppenheimer should subject himself to such interrogation, believing that he had served his country during the war, but Oppenheimer ignored his advice and went ahead. Did they specifically discuss whether he had indeed ‘destroyed the world' in dreaming up so abominable a weapon? No one knows.
