In love with Oppie

The movie “Oppenheimer” (Oppie) did not do justice to the man who stole fire for Americans from God. I cannot blame the director for his inability to capture Oppenheimer’s unusual brilliance, character, social skills, generosity, and love for America within a span of 3 hours while also focusing on the ugly post-WWII political drama. It’s like trying to capture the beauty and vastness of the Grand Canyon with your camera; it’s a daunting task. To be frank, I am a novice when it comes to the WWII timeframe and its complexities, and I did not really grasp what the director was trying to convey. I fear that the director assumed some level of awareness from the audience regarding the historical drama, and in that, he completely lost me.

I usually either watch the movie or read the book because watching the movie after reading the book is like throwing water on your dinner plate. I chose to watch the movie “Oppenheimer” before reading the book. Having a PhD in physics and struggling with the abstractions of quantum mechanics during my college days, I was deeply intrigued by Oppenheimer’s ease and confidence as he navigated the academic world. I wanted to learn more about Oppenheimer (Oppie) than the post-WWII drama. I picked up the book titled “American Prometheus” and couldn’t put it down.

Recently, I had the opportunity to read the trilogy about Gandhi so well-articulated by Ramachandra Guha. I have also seen a few movies about Gandhi and have come to realize that movies cannot do justice to such multidimensional, immortal characters. I found “American Prometheus” very satisfying and fell in love with Oppie. When he passed away in 1967, I was 17 and lived tens of thousands of miles away from Los Alamos, oblivious to the Holocaust and World War II. A few days ago, the Hamas attacks on Israel reminded me that antisemitism is still alive. Oppie’s eagerness, as a Jew and a diehard American, to contribute to the war effort with his brilliance in quantum physics was unparalleled. His brilliance helped win World War II, yet his humanity was persecuted by America, the very country he tried to protect. Here again, the parallel with Gandhi stands, who was assassinated by a Hindu.

Soon after finishing the book and falling in love with Oppie, my husband and I took a road trip to Los Alamos to experience firsthand what it was like to create the first atomic bomb under such secrecy. We took our time and reached Los Alamos in three days. My husband asked me what I wanted to see and where we should go first. He was surprised by my answer: “Let’s go to 1967 Peach St.” We used Google Maps and within minutes, we found ourselves in front of the house where Oppie lived during the 27 months it took to build a city from scratch, hire and relocate world-class scientists, and utilize his brilliance to design and launch the world’s first atomic bomb at the age of 40. In Los Alamos, I realized that Oppie had the good fortune to work with Leslie Groves, who was an equally brilliant military engineer. They even complemented each other in their body mass index (BMI), with Oppie being a very slim man and Groves carrying some extra weight.

I am impressed with Oppie’s charm in attracting highly talented scientists from all over the world to Los Alamos, where there were no cities, roads, or transportation. Santa Fe was the nearest railway station, some 80 miles away. I work at a very small institute in South Bangalore called The Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology and know the difficulty of attracting talented researchers to our institute, even though Bangalore in 2010 is no Los Alamos in 1942. The sheer opportunity to associate with Oppie’s brilliance and charm must have been the attraction. I am not joking. Apparently, Oppie had the charm to convince Groves to build homes with bathtubs, which was not the norm in military establishments. There is a road called Bathtub Road in Los Alamos as a witness to Oppie’s influence in building Los Alamos. The sheer number of Nobel Prize winners who were associated with the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos suggests the kind of talents that followed Oppie to Los Alamos. A number of Oppie’s students received Nobel Prizes as well.

However, Oppenheimer was never awarded the Nobel Prize because he was unjustly associated with Hiroshima. Oppenheimer was like the Elephant and the Six Blind Men. No one had the wisdom to capture his depth and breadth of knowledge, brilliance, and humanity.

Oppie was a giver. While he lived and dressed well without hiding his affluent upbringing, he was never shunned by his colleagues for his riches. Whenever people praised any of his belongings, he would readily part with them. His gifts were lavish. One time, knowing that Einstein (I am talking about the REAL Einstein) loved a type of music, which he did not have access to in those days, Oppie had someone install an antenna in Einstein’s home without his knowledge and followed that with a gift of a radio that could be tuned to the songs Einstein loved. Apparently, Einstein never knew about the antenna, yet loved the gift.

I teach and do research in genomics and bioinformatics and am always curious to know if the brilliance of people like Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Gandhi is inheritable or is a genetic accident. Oppenheimer’s daughter was a brilliant person and, I believe, had inherited her father’s genes related to learning languages. Oppie had mastered many languages, including Sanskrit. I had Sanskrit as my third language during school, and I can tell you, it is hard to learn it well enough to be able to read the Bhagavad Gita, let alone quote a stanza from it right after the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb was successful. Apparently, he was a voracious reader and had read several novels in their original languages. At one time, he was so envious of a colleague who had read the original novel in Italian that he vanished for a month and reappeared having mastered Italian. His daughter, who inherited his genes, was equally brilliant and had mastered several languages before working for the UN. However, the ghost of her father’s persecution denied her the security clearance she needed to keep the job. She committed suicide. Oppie’s son Peter, exhausted by the fate of his father, may still be managing the ranch at his father’s estate near Los Alamos. Oppie’s brother, Frank, an equally brilliant experimental physicist, founded the Science Museum at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It can be concluded that genetic inheritance may not always result in the phenotype, like the seed of a banyan tree under the shadow of a big banyan tree, which can only grow so tall.