Watching Oppenheimer through Latour’s lens [1]

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to demonstrate what myths of and about science are reproduced in this popular cultural work (movie – “Oppenheimer”). This is done by examining the unconscious hegemonic positions supported by the reproduction of stereotypical and mythical images of science.

Design/methodology/approach

Content/Text Analysis: The conceptual analysis of a cultural text – a film (“Oppenheimer”) – through a theoretical apparatus (B. Latour’s theory).

Findings

The film demonstrates its reproduction of three distinct elements. Firstly, it exhibits classic scientistic clichés pertaining to technoscience. Secondly, it highlights the replication of the individualized monomyth about the (super) hero, leading to the exclusion of the intricate conditions of technoscience’s existence. Lastly, the film aligns with the Californian ideology, as proposed by Barbrook.

Originality/value

The value of the text is twofold: (1) To show that the classical approaches of Bruno Latour are still relevant. (2) To show what hidden premises and myths about technoscience are being propagated through a work of pop culture (the film “Oppenheimer”) and, in effect, to show what kind of influence of cultural hegemony is at work here.

Citation

Nowak, A.W. (2024), "Watching Oppenheimer through Latour’s lens [1]", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 132-147. https://doi.org/10.1108/QROM-10-2023-2605

Myths are not innocent

I left Oppenheimer disappointed and irritated, especially with the way science was shown in the film. I was not alone in such a reaction; for example, Sam Altman reacted on X (formerly Twitter): I was hoping that the Oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists, but it really missed the mark on that. let’s get that movie made! (I think the social network managed to do this for startup users) [spelling of the original] (Altman, 2023). posted online 22 July 2023 and it has 11,000 likes, 3,000 reposts and 1,000 comments, 843 people bookmarked it. One of the comments was made by Elon Musk and it was very short: Indeed (Musk, 2023). We do not know with what part of Altman comment he agreed. The Reboot editorial board also discussed the tweet, and this discussion went in an interesting direction (Kupperman et al., 2023). Particularly noteworthy was the position of Jasmine Sun, who, having watched the film at a private screening with engineers and scientists, reported that they were of the opinion that there was too little physics and engineering. They did not understand why Nolan devoted so much space in the movie to bureaucratic procedures and interrogation. In contrast to her fellow engineers, Sun placed the emphasis somewhat differently: Ultimately, the “boring” conference room montages were why I liked the film. It was about the inevitable gap between theory and practice—between the elegance of theoretical physics and the messy morality of real-world deployment (Kupperman et al., 2023).

So it would seem that I side with Sam Altman and other Californian engineers in their assessment of the film. Well, that is not quite the case, as I also partially agree with Jasmine Sun. A key observation in this discussion for me is that of Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: There’s triumph here on the most basic level of bombs being built and Big Science being done, but the model of governmental-scientific-technological collaboration is portrayed as a sort of original sin for the military-industrial complex rather than a model to emulate. (Kupperman et al., 2023) This model of science was juxtaposed in this discussion with the techno-libertarianism prevalent in Silicon Valley (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996).

What struck me was that Nolan’s film, while seemingly disliked by the California “gurus” Altman and Musk, at the same time partially favors the techno-libertarian position they occupy: It was hard not to notice how much this movie seemed to reflect the paranoias of aspiring great men of history and (especially) technology—by the movie’s end, poor J. Robert is left marginalized by the political forces that used his brilliance for their gain, ostracized by his scientific peers, and forced to reckon with the terrible gravity of his prize invention. (Kupperman et al., 2023).

This paradoxical situation stems from the fact that, on the one hand, the film depicts the relationship between science and techno-militarism and, on the other, indulges in clichés and tropes from “superhero” cinema, and this correlates with the traditional trope of the solitary genius. This trope, also, strongly correlates with the self-mythology of environments associated with Silicon Valley. It is noteworthy how this auto-mythology to some extent was present, at least for a while, in the context of the involvement of Elon Musk and his Starlink satellite network in the war in Ukraine. He appeared like an incarnation of Iron Man – at least until he revealed himself as a person with a more ambivalent political stance (Phelan, 2022).

Oppenheimer leans hard on “the myth of solitary genius.” Apparently, certain white men are special in their talent and drive; they recognize, help, and fight each other, often working in groups, but the important thing is that their vast intellectual gifts make them profoundly lonely in pursuing their visions (as well as, in poor Oppenheimer’s case, victim to Robert Downey, Jr.’s dangerous spite). What an obnoxious way of portraying insight and discovery: to heroize a few figures and downplay the prejudices and myopias supporting them, as well as the toxicity of their obsessions. Christopher Nolan basically celebrates Oppenheimer as the tortured, talented Batman of physics. (Wheeler, 2023).

Nolan is unable to go beyond the scheme of superhero cinema (Collins, 2023) [2] – it is no exaggeration to say that Oppenheimer is actually his fourth Batman film. We can also situate the scenes of the construction of the atomic bomb somewhere between the tales of the toys of the wealthy gentleman Bruce Wayne or the billionaire Tony Stark. I will point out that the casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss makes an interesting, if unspoken, connection between Oppenheimer and Iron Man. Kyriakos Eleftheriou’s reaction to Sam Altman’s tweet is in this point very informative: TBH the first Iron Man achieved that well (Eleftheriou, 2023). Both are fierce anticommunists, symbols of the militaristic power of the American Empire. In writing this, I am referring primarily to the origins of the comic book character Iron Man, not his “watered down” Marvel image.

But Nolan fits into Hollywood’s prevailing pattern of mythologizing more broadly as well: his film, by focusing on a single character and reducing conflicts to psychological and character conflicts, realizes a mono-myth, a pattern reproduced to the point of boredom.

Yet it’d be wrong to say the movie is a straightforward endorsement of that Great Man theory—we’re never given a particular indication of Oppenheimer’s brilliance among an already brilliant scene of physicists and engineers aside from his own self-regard, no scene indicating that Oppie was the only guy who could have achieved it: he just happened to be the one who did achieve it, and the burden of this knowledge was what overtook and dismantled him. One place where the movie toys with this notion (maybe too subtly!) is in its presentation of Oppenheimer’s self-construction as a singular figure, broken apart from all the communities—political, religious, etc—that might hold him. (Kupperman et al., 2023)

Zeynep Tufekci brilliantly characterized this trend in her analysis of the rise and fall of the Game of Thrones series. She pointed out that while the first seasons followed the original book and, like it, adopted a complex sociological perspective as the basis for creating the world depicted, the last two seasons, without a literary basis, changed their style to a psychological one (Tufekci, 2019). This psychological reductionism was particularly evident in depicting the relationship between Oppenheimer and Strauss; Nolan admitted that it was inspired by the movie Amadeus directed by Milos Forman, and the way the conflict between Salieri and Mozart was shown in it. This is all the more striking since Forman’s film, already creating this psychological conflict between Salieri and Mozart, abandoned the reconstruction of historical facts in favor of a psychologizing narrative (Tunzelmann, 2009; Kurowska, 1998).

I am aware that the genre of biographical film imposes specific patterns and gestures. First and foremost, one such in this case is the eponymous character. In this regard, moreover, Christopher Nolan largely follows the argument of the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Bird and Sherwin, 2021). The movie thus inherits the shortcomings of this biographical story – especially with regard to the portrayal of (techno)science. It should be noted that Bird and Sherwin’s book is criticized for making strong theses, drawing elaborate pictures without citing sources or mentioning them very sparingly and without giving voice to other voices (Borgwardt, 2008, pp. 564–565), Such was the case with the suggestive story (also present in the film) of an actual poisoned apple on the desk of his Cambridge supervisor, the future Nobelist P. M. S. Blackett (Borgwardt, 2008, p. 565).

The movie follows the book and its retelling of the story of Prometheus. The story of a man who is bold and daring enough to “think ahead.” He created humans and gave them the gift of fire – the privilege of the gods. In the end, he was punished for this. The film follows the formula quite closely, using basic substitutions: atomic energy (or modern science in general, as represented by physics) stands for fire, and the commission tasked with issuing safety certifications serves as the rock upon which the commission’s vultures peck out Prometheus–Oppenheimer’s liver. Focusing solely on the protagonist, it is unclear how “fire” operates and why its bestowal upon humanity was significant. This creates a potentially misleading account of the mythological understanding of science depicted in the narrative.

I am aware that my criticism is formulated rather from a heteronomous than an autonomous point of view (Cramer, 2018), and I resemble someone who points his finger at the screen and lists what is “untrue” in the movie. However, I am not writing this text from the position of someone who just demands reality in a blockbuster, non-documentary film (even if it is a biography), someone who does not understand the autonomy of cinematic artwork. On the contrary, I fully understand that Hollywood produces myths (Barthes, 2022). It also covers the atomic bomb and its mythological creation (Hales, 1991) – and it is on the mythological level I want to engage with Nolan’s film. Consequently, I will be primarily interested in what mythic image of science Oppenheimer may perhaps support.

Allow me to state my position directly and plainly: in depicting science, Nolan reproduces the most stereotypical, outdated clichés about it. For example, by presenting a bomb as a kind of theological, mysterious artifact, a manifestation of God, Nolans follows the dominant tendency after the Trinity experiment (Hales, 1991, p. 13). Such supernatural images of the bomb naturalized it, cut it off from how it was manufactured and how much it cost (effort, materials, funding). As a result, this made it difficult to discuss the responsibility for its manufacture and use (Hales, 1991, p. 13). This correlates well with the purified image of scientists, reduced in large part to intellectual effort.

The three-hour film makes room for the iconic portrayal of Einstein (in an old sweater and with a distinctive hairstyle), a group of more or less aged men discussing against a backdrop of blackboards (sometimes writing on them with chalk) and new-age visuals of “The Mystery.” Science appears here as the activity of a single human (or rather male) subject. This single genius encounters other single intellectuals and discusses how together they “create science.” In presenting such an image, Nolan’s film follows the pop culture stereotype of the genius, emphasizing the “eccentricity” and originality of “nerds” and the non-schematic nature of their relationships with women.

My criticism is primarily due to the – in my opinion – missed opportunity that Bruno Latour showed when, following how Tolstoy demythologized Napoleon, he analogously critically deconstructed the myth of Pasteur as a genius (Latour, 1988, p. 15). At the same time, Latour’s demythologization of Pasteur allowed him not only to show science from a technoscientific perspective but also to show how science, technology, politics and society are co-produced (Jasanoff, 2006). As a result, Latour was able to deconstruct the myth of Pasteur while showing the complex web of conditions that made his actions and success possible. It was not a simple criticism of the “myth of Pasteur” but rather a more comprehensive picture of it. I would like to sketch a similar critique of Oppenheimer’s myth (and science) as presented in Nolan’s film, and thus I will “take” Bruno Latour with me to the cinema to watch this film through his eyes.

Oppenheimer is a fascinating person to make a biographical movie about. His complicated and multifarious life could serve as a case study, as rich in philosophical, sociological and political references as Bruno Latour’s book “Pasteurization of France.” (Latour, 1988) However, because the process of writing a biography is a little bit like being married to one’s subject (Borgwardt, 2008, p. 558), it carries many dangers. First, because of the genre, there is a risk of limiting the sociological, historical and political imagination, and consequently focusing on micro-history centered on personal and family history.

An important part of the Bird and Sherwin thesis is that “a person’s public behavior and his policy decisions (and in Oppenheimer’s case perhaps even his science) are guided by the private experiences of a lifetime.” Borgwardt (2008, p. 563).

There is also a temptation to psychologize, quite obviously from a methodological point of view, given that we are depicting the life of one person and his decisions. As Borgwardt points out (Borgwardt, 2008), we can use the history of Oppenheimer’s life to show the transformation of universities and the transformation of science into Big Science, linked to the emerging military–industrial complex, the impact of McCarthyism on science and American public life, the problem of the use and control of atomic bombs. This wealth of references is due to the fact that he was an extremely complex figure:

J. Robert Oppenheimer played myriad roles in the science and politics of modern America: as a physicist working to establish a synthetic American school uniting theoretical and experimental approaches, as a government functionary and “weaponeer” piloting the development and fine-tuning the deployment of the first atomic bombs; as insider, consultant, and oracle speaking in the name of American science; but also as outsider, voice of conscience, and political pariah. (Borgwardt, 2008, p. 547)

This role of Oppenheimer as a kind of “spiritus movens,” more of a fox than a hedgehog (using I. Berlin’s metaphor) (Borgwardt, 2008, p. 551), seems uniquely suited to illustrate Latour’s description of (techno)science as a blood flow system (Latour, 1999b, pp. 80–112). As indicated by biographers, Oppenheimer “didn’t have Sitzfleisch,” a concept much less colorfully translated as stick-to-itiveness or perseverance (Borgwardt, 2008, p. 551). Oppenheimer could be a brilliant illustration of the Latourian description of scientific discovery viewed in terms of a network rather than a person, such as Pasteur, or Oppenheimer in our case. Unexpectedly, and contrary to the reservations Latour himself expressed (Latour, 1999a), we can find confirmation of this “network intuition” in science network analysis (SNA) of the networks of relationships between researchers involved in the Manhattan project (Janosov, 2023). This network analysis shows that the dominant node in this network was Enrico Fermi, followed by Niels Bohr and Edward Teller, then the roughly equivalent node of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Hans Bethe, followed by nodes such as those of Leo Shilard, Arthur Compton and Robert Bacher (Janosov, 2023, p. 4). Of course, such network social analysis is not enough to be able to present the concept of network in the sense as formulated by Latour:

For instance, work by Bruno Latour shows that Pasteur was nothing more than a network of heterogeneous elements (Callon and Law, 1997, p. 168)

While Pasteur combined microbes, cattle, French officials and laboratories, Oppenheimer can be perceived as a hub, as a part of the networked process of making an atomic bomb, which combined uranium from the Congo, generals, stenotypists, communism, Roosevelt and many other elements:

Oppenheimer as “a uniquely prominent site” in the history of twentieth-century America, offering this striking locution as a way of capturing how Oppenheimer played a “dual role as the recipient and the agent of multiple and portentous fates.” (Borgwardt, 2008, p. 548)

I would put forward a strong argument that Oppenheimer, like the Latourian Pasteur, can serve as a great example of innovation simultaneously situated on micro- and macro-levels, local and global, personal and systemic (Latour, 1988, p. 14). In this sense, we can see how the process of constructing the atomic bomb needed an “Oppenheimerization of America”, which can be treated as analogous to Latour’s presentation of how the Pasteurization of France took place. Using metaphor of “Oppenheimerization of America” I am following here not only Bruno Latour and his “Pasteurisation of France” but also Gabrielle Hecht and her book Radiance of France (Hecht, 2009).

As I pointed out above, the film also has vital political significance to me. I am interested not in the film as a work of art (along with its autonomy) but in how it can potentially affect collective perception, as a residuum of mythologies, and consequently be an actor of social-political change. In this sense, I follow Antonio Gramsci and how he delineated the relationship between philosophy and so-called common sense, folklore and everyday knowledge about the world (Stephen Olbrys, 2010; Cirese, 2022). For Gramsci, in a passage that has astonishing resonance with Latour, the key was to recognize not a single, “brilliant” discovery but to trace its diffusion, how it becomes part of widely shared common sense. In this sense, following the Latourian model, the film is part of “the loop,” which Latour calls popularization (Latour, 1999b, pp. 105–106). This is a part of the circulation and stabilization of a scientific fact, which is responsible for “contact” with a general audience; it corresponds with the common sense understanding and public images of science and its mythology. I started this text by mentioning Sam Altman’s Twitter comment and the discussion it sparked because social media, along with movies, TV series and PC games, are today’s main “generators ” of common sense. Nolan’s film, as this discussion pointed out, did not satisfy California engineers with the way it portrayed science. The response also debated its usefulness as a gateway to science for teenagers. But at the same time, we know that Altman and Musk, with their techno-libertarian ideology, are not impartial and safe Allies of technoscience and the critics of its ties to government and politics. However, we know that this “California ideology” simultaneously exists primarily thanks to government aid and subsidies. The one thing they don’t want is to have a string attached to their projects (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). Thus, as I pointed out above, Nolan’s film, so firmly (and rightly) critical of the McCarthy era, may unwittingly (and paradoxically) become their ally. However, choosing between California techno-libertarianism and overly superficial criticism of the state’s role in the Manhattan Project and the birth of Big Science (Weinberg, 1967; Price, 1963) more generally is not a choice. And that’s why the reception of Nolan’s film interests me: It could potentially have a significant impact on what mythological story will prevail.

What is hidden in a glass marble or everything we did not learn about (techno)science

The discrepancy between the mythology of science depicted in the film and technoscientific practice is best illustrated by the two round glass jars slowly filled by Oppenheimer with glass marbles (Whitlock, 2023). They symbolize the amounts of uranium and plutonium needed to construct bombs. The glass marble is a good illustration of scientistic propaganda, erasing its technological, practical and political dimensions from the picture of science. The filmmakers removed from the frames that which made technoscience successful: the possibility of mediation, the production of complex networks and alliances and the stabilization of reality. The cinematic image of technoscience in Nolan’s film is a form of purification; below, I would like to present what this purified vision omits. I will recall, however, that for Latour, the work of purification (the level of myth, narrative) and the work of translation (the level of practice) (Latour, 1994), although separated from each other, are inextricably intertwined in an arrangement he calls constitution. The absent aspects I show (erased by purification) are, at the same time, a call to think of another alternative work of purification (and we know from Latour that it is necessary). This scientistic mythology works well as a “salesman” of science (but at the cost of purification). When the “public” has questions or needs, they go to the Important People in the Lab Coats, who provide answers or solve problems. How this happens remains hidden. What was left unshown in the case of Oppenheimer?

Above all, the entire city which was built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Kiernan, 2013), has a population of more than 75,000. I focus on Oak Ridge because it was not really shown at all. Los Alamos was established in the movie; yes, scientists working there were shown, and laboratories were also shown rather superficially; in the background, you could see employees, technical labs, secretaries, etc. But the critical issue for me is what was wrapped up in the “glass marble” metaphor. They appeared in Los Alamos, hiding the entire network that transformed the US, making the bomb (and Los Alamos itself) possible (Conant, 2007).

The complex in Oak Ridge was built in a rush, and it was an astonishing social experiment: it mixed groups usually divided by issues of race, class and gender. The need for military secrecy organized civilian life. For more about the relation between science, the production of ignorance and military secrecy, see (Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008). Residents of the surrounding mountains and valleys experienced massive and ruthless displacement. Oak Ridge became a model for other “Plutopia” gated cities, both in the US and the USSR, which dominated the lives of the people living in them for decades (Brown, 2013). Today, a distant pop-culture echo of this “plutopian” world is the curious “Fallout” series of computer games and the world they created.

Workers, engineers and, above all, women – operators of calutrons (Kiernan, 2013), devices that separate the isotopes of uranium ²³⁸U and ²³⁵U, participated in the outstanding construction of a mysterious place:

While she did, other women on other trains kept pulling into the very same station, their routes like veins running down the industrial arm of the East Coast, extending from the heart of the Midwest, the precious lifeblood of a project about which the women knew nothing, all of them coursing toward a place that officially did not exist (Kiernan, 2013)

And the place not only existed but was one of the many hearts through which “the blood flow” of facts and things functioned, through which the future atomic bomb could be created. “The blood flow” existed thanks to the work of countless people.

Unfortunately, there is virtually no place for them in the scientistic-heroic mythology of Nolan’s film, except in a few snapshots where workers of Los Alamos provide a background for the “heroes-scientists.” Oak Ridge, a Plutopia lost in the Appalachian Valley, was like a “black hole,” siphoning off people, knowledge and materials for years. Secrecy was crucial to its existence, which is why it also came so easily to wipe out all traces of those who created it:

Lines of packed train cars snaked through the land, and convoys of overloaded trucks headed into that strange new Reservation. But nothing ever seemed to come out: no tanks, no munitions, no jeeps. The perpetual rumble and hum of transport and construction seemed to carry on the wind, landing in Clinton’s ears, teasing those who lived there with its incessant song of mysterious progress. (Kiernan, 2013)

The symbolic glass marble in the film contained all this, compressing people and things, exactly like Latour’s description of the purification procedure, which turned the complex process of translating reality and the hybrid networks needed to transform it into “elegant” equations and theories that sustain the scientistic ideology of science (Latour, 2012). The women mentioned above, who were erased from the picture, were not just an “add-on,” a supplement to the scientific process, for their work was at the very core of this project.”

The calutrons, which required depots of female operators, were just one of the uranium enrichment process technologies that were being tested:

Meanwhile, in another area of CEW, the Y-12 plant remained the only fully operational option for enriching Tubealloy, ground zero for the electromagnetic separation process that Ernest Lawrence had developed at Berkeley’s Rad Lab. This process centered on calutrons—University of California Cyclotrons. If Tubealloy was the lifeblood of the Project, then Y-12’s calutrons were CEW’s beating heart and soul. (Kiernan, 2013)

And this is just one set of calutrons and one method of enrichment (electromagnetic at the Y-12 plant). The K-25 plant, which worked with gaseous diffusion technology, had far more significant momentum; when this building was completed, it was the world’s largest building under one roof at the time (489,000 m2 of space). However, it was not until 1946 that this plant was able to supply a fully enriched product on its own (K-25 History Center, 2023).

There is no space in this text to discuss in detail all three uranium enrichment methods and the fascinating story of the intertwining of economics, technology, science and politics that accompanied the creation of Oak Ridge (Smith, 2023; Turner, 2023). That is not what is relevant to my discussion either – it is enough for us to note that without the more than 75,000 residents of the city (out of a total of 130,000 people working on the Manhattan Project), without the miners extracting the rocks containing uranium ore, without the women bent over the calutrons, there would have been no atomic bomb. Without them, there would be no other Robert J. Oppenheimer than the physicist-theorist. “The father of the atomic bomb” was no single parent, but rather a collective, networked one (Latour, 1988), made up of thousands of workers and laborers, chemists, engineers, female calutron operators, FBI agents guarding secrets, guards, soldiers, people serving canteens and feeding this scientific and technical army. It was they, together with a heterogeneous network of objects, materials and tools, who made the transition from so-called “small science” to “big science” - symbolized by the Manhattan Project (Price, 1963; Weinberg, 1967).

Such a picture of science, where whole networks of people, materials and things are compressed into a marble ball, is no different from magic, or how the process of constructing inventions was portrayed in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote animated shorts. Almost every imaginable product is provided by the mysterious ACME Corporation (“American Company that Manufactures Everything.”) – crucial gadgets that seem to appear out of thin air. This metaphor becomes even more ironic when we remember that the bomb, which the film’s plot revolves around, was named The Gadget.

The movie fails to show what is crucial, according to Latour, for a scientific process – mediation (accompanied by translation and circulation) (Latour, 1999b). Atomic bombs or other inventions do not fall ready-made from the heads of geniuses with visuals. (Techno)science is a complex process of combining theory and practice, the mathematical with the efforts of engineers, weaving together theoretical innovations with achievements in new technologies. In the case of the Manhattan Project, it was necessary to create this Plutopia – a closed model city. In order to smash atoms, whole areas of the country had to be changed. In fact, this process has no “end” because, as the experience of later years has shown, it will not stop until it has transformed entire nations and societies. This was brilliantly demonstrated by Gabrielle Hecht, who used the metaphor of the “radiance of France” (Hecht, 2009) following Bruno Latour and his book The Pasteurization of France (Latour, 1988).

Oppenheimer was not a “radiant” genius, as depicted in the film. Instead, his success lay in his ability, along with others involved in the Manhattan Project, to “radiate” the USA – to transform the whole of American society of the time, and also to be mutually be transformed in a process.

Circulations and blood flow of scientific facts

In his book Pandora’s Hope, Bruno Latour proposed framing science as a blood flow (Latour, 1999a, b, p. 80). The example on which he built the comparison deals with analogous issues to those presented in Oppenheimer. Latour reconstructed how the French scientist Frederic Joliot was involved in the French atomic program, with the ambition to produce an atomic bomb. Latour begins the story in 1939 by showing a legal arrangement between Joliot and a Belgian company for the supply of uranium from the Congo. This required a series of complex economic and political operations. Latour reconstructs the complex web of dependencies, institutions and relationships that conditioned the French atomic program (Latour, 1999a, b, p. 81).

It is not enough to say that the connections between science and politics form a very tangled web. To refuse any a priori division between the list of human or political actors and that of ideas and procedures is no more than a first step, and an entirely negative one at that. We must also be able to understand the series of operations by which an industrialist who wanted only to develop his business found himself forced to do calculations of the rate of absorption of neutrons by paraffin; or how someone who wanted nothing but a Nobel Prize set about organizing a commando operation in Norway. In both cases, the initial vocabulary is different from the final vocabulary. Political terms are translated into scientific terms and vice versa. For the managing director of the Union Minière, “making money” now means, to some extent, “investing in Joliot’s physics”; while for Joliot, “demonstrating the possibility of a chain reaction” now means in part “looking out for Nazi spies.” The analysis of these translation operations makes up a large portion of science studies. The idea of translation provides the two teams of scholars, one coming from the side of politics and going toward the sciences and the other coming from the side of the sciences and following the circulating references, with the system of guidance and alignment that gives them some chance of meeting in the middle rather than missing each other (Latour, 1999a, b, p. 87).

Latour describes Joliot’s research in order to present the so-called circulatory (blood flow) system of scientific facts. It is a model that opposes the idea that there is a rigid “core” of real science and an unimportant “shell.” When describing this in lectures for my students, I often use the metaphor of a sunny-side-up egg; Latour wants to show that there is more to science than just this tasty “yolk” and an unnecessary envelope of “whites.” The author of Pandora’s Hope proposes four systemic loops in his model: mobilization of the world (instruments), autonomization (colleagues), alliances (Allies) and public representation. Tracing their operation and role will help us in the analysis of Oppenheimer.

Mobilizing the world is a whole effort, a whole series of instruments and equipment (often expensive and large), through which it connects what is theoretically postulated with reality. This loop corresponds most closely to what we commonly identify with science:

In specific disciplines, such as Joliot's nuclear physics, this expression primarily designates the instruments and major equipment that, at least since World War Il, have made up the history of Big Science. (Latour, 1999a, b, p. 100)

and:

Through this mobilization, the world is converted into arguments. To write the history of the first loop is to write the history of the transformation of the world into immutable and combinable mobiles*. In brief, it is the study of the writing of the “great book of nature” in characters legible to scientists, or, to put it another way, it is the study of the logistics that are so indispensable to the logics of science. (Latour, 1999a, b, p. 102)

This level was, in fact, outlined in Nolan’s film – we saw Oppenheimer going from a room equipped with blackboards and chalk to a room where theories were tested “from the blackboard” by building laboratory equipment. We also had a scene where “Oppie” and other scientists, observing pulses on a screen, get confirmation of a discovery.

Autonomization is a process of establishing a research field and convincing others of its importance. Put simply, it involves gaining recognition among fellow scientists. This can be accomplished by initiating scientific organizations, societies, publications, conferences and more. The film’s first half portrays this stage of the scientific circulation “loop.”

In the Manhattan Project, however, another loop was even more critical: Allies. It was the one that left the most significant imprint on the fate of the project and the people associated with it. The Allies loop, by the way, is one of the more controversial levels – according to it:

The military must be made interested in physics, industrialists in chemistry, kings in cartography, teachers in educational theory, congressmen in political science . Without this labor of making people interested, the other loops would be no more than armchair traveling; without colleagues and without a world, the researcher won't cost much but won't be worth much either. (Latour, 1999a, b, pp. 103/104)

How did it happen that the esoteric “new physics,” which until a few years previously had actually been just a fad in the US, became worth the risky investment of two billion dollars at the time? The magnitude of this dependence is aptly conveyed by one episode of the Manhattan Project, in which 6,000 tons of silver were required for the construction of electromagnets (in order to keep intact the stockpile of copper needed for the production of cartridge casings for the front). The undersecretary of the Treasury Department and the Secretary of War decided to deliver it.

They agreed not to discuss specific details about how the silver would be used, only that it would, at some point, be returned to the federal government. Eventually, about 13,540 short tons of silver (395 million troy ounces) were borrowed from the US Treasury, taken from government vaults at West Point, and used to construct the calutron magnets. Price tag: more than $300 million (Kiernan, 2013).

We cannot gain much insight into this from Nolan’s film, wherein government officials act as oppressors or, at best, hindrances to Oppenheimer, rather than his supporters and Allies. Most of this influence was rather dichotomously presented by contrasting the ally that was General Groves (Kunetka, 2015), and the enemy that was Strauss, but the whole Latourian circulation, the networked approach, was missing.

Only by understanding the scale of the project and how “small science” (symbolized by the blackboard and chalk) became “big science” can we know Oppenheimer and the other project participants. The scale of the project caused their ethical political imaginations to be overwhelmed by what they were able to do as scientists. Only the already-ready bomb made them realize the full implications of those discoveries. The film is accurate in depicting the moral shock resulting from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how it impacted attitudes towards the bomb and the project. However, it fails to acknowledge the awakening of scientists to a new reality. Their success exceeded that of their predecessors and reshaped the role of scientists in society. This brings us to Latour’s final loop: public representation, for it reflects the perception of scientists by society, the role of science and its mythology among other societal mythologies.

Latour’s model is valuable insofar as it makes it possible to show a rather banal truth: that a “scientific fact” needs a whole circulatory system in order to “exist.” Without silver from the West Point vault, electromagnets would not have been built, and without them, a sufficient amount uranium could not have been enriched in time. Had it not been possible to show a working bomb before the end of the war, or at least to present newly elected President Truman with a realistic time frame, the fate of the project would have turned out differently (this time pressure is indeed present in the film). Analogous entanglements and networks that were stabilized and made success possible can be listed in many ways. One could equate these with the “bloodstreams” of all the national teams working on atomic bombs at the time (in France, the Third Reich, and later also in the USSR) and thus get an additional answer to what success depended on. From Nolan’s film, we don’t actually learn why Oppenheimer should have been a more outstanding genius than Heisenberg – that is, why the American team outperformed the German one. Much could be illuminated here by the fact that in the US anti-Semitism had not become as strong a factor as in Nazi Germany (where it most likely, and fortunately, influenced the failure in the race to develop the bomb).

The model of science as a circulatory system (blood flow), and thus attention to the conditions of possibility of the circulation of scientific facts and their stabilization, is crucial today. The scientistic vision of science as an effect of a lone genius presented in the film may seem convincing. Moreover, such a mythology of science has “sold” quite well over the years. The vision of the scientist as a lone genius is relatively widespread; it is even a popular cultural pattern (TvTropes, 2023). However, this stereotype is dangerously similar to the self-creation of figures like Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed billionaire savior of the world under the sign of the (anti)philosophy of long-termism. The libertarian techno utopia they promote is a negation of the political and social climate that made the Manhattan Project possible. This is why the film’s mythological message is dangerous: it removes Oppenheimer from the context of his time and turns him into a Batman/Iron Man-Elon Musk, a neoliberal self-made man trying to save humanity. I wonder whether Sam Altman and Elon Musk didn’t like the movie – as we saw from their tweets – due to a psychoanalytic gesture of denial or whether, following Zizek and Sloterdijk, this was a form of a cynical reason (Žižek, 2008, pp. 25–26).

And as I mentioned, such a description of Oppenheimer hides what his strong points really were – his ability to be a spiritus movens, one who circulates following a blood flow of materials, ideas, people, constructions, politics and other parts of this heterogenic network (Callon and Law, 1997; Latour, 1988). But when we discuss the network, we need to ask not only about those that Oppenheimer was able to establish and navigate but also those networks that created him. But also, we don’t learn that Oppenheimer was a “networked” from the start, and in this, he had more in common with Batman or Iron Man than we realize: like these heroes, he was a kid from a wealthy family. Oppenheimer’s father, Julius, was a wealthy textile entrepreneur; Ellie’s mother was a painter and art collector; and both belonged to the Ethical Culture Society, which preached rationalism and progressive, secular humanism (Bird and Sherwin, 2021). They sent young Robert to an experimental school under the auspices of this society. He grew up in a house whose walls were decorated with paintings by Van Gogh, a painting by Picasso and a sketch by Rembrandt. Robert’s genius grew in the hothouse conditions provided by his parents. The movie manages to avoid this biographical motif – Nolan presents us with Oppenheimer as a “ready-made” genius who goes to England, where he suffers in scientific purgatory, in order to be elevated to the heaven of physicists in Göttingen. Could it be that a wealthy background spoils the mythology of the lone genius who succeeds against all odds?

The atomic bomb also had mothers

What else threatens the myth of the lone genius? The answer is simple: women. Nolan’s movie, by the way, has been accused of erasing them since its release (Rubiera, 2023). The lack of women and their representation in Nolan’s film is striking, as Tanya Roth ironically commented: “Fun fact: no women speak until 20 min into Oppenheimer and then within a minute there’s a sex scene.” (Donnelly, 2023).

In the previous section, I mentioned the women calutron operators [3], – the Manhattan Project would not have been possible without the work of the women hunched over the computers at Oak Ridge. It was thanks to them that our “geniuses” were supplied with ready-made calculations. There is an established and somewhat patronizing name for them “The Calutron Girls” (Wikipedia, 2023). But the Manhattan Project also involved women scientists (The Lost Women of Science Initaitve, 2022).

While the more episodic treatments of the Oppenheimer story treat the women in his life as peripheral, one is nevertheless struck by the numbers of women scientists gliding through the Oppenheimer story: Nobelist Maria Goppert, doctoral candidate (and later physics instructor) Melba Phillips and German physicist Charlotte Riefenstahl, but also Kitty Oppenheimer herself (who trained as a botanist), psychologist Ruth Tolman and psychiatrist-in-training Jean Tatlock. Prestigious, high-status identities were not available to these talented women, and the thwarted nature of their professional lives manifested itself in various personal ways: in Kitty’s rashes, Tatlock’s suicide and the widespread alcoholism of “the wives” at Los Alamos–many of whom were also scientists in their own right—a problem so pervasive that it prompted an official quest for activities that would seem meaningful for these women to do (Borgwardt, 2008, p. 564).

This issue is important for several reasons. The first is related to science and higher education policy – the presence of women and gender parity in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). In Oppenheimer’s time, yes, there was a strong disempowerment of women in the STEM field, however they were sporadically present. In recognizing them it is essential firstly to point out the Matilda effect – the process of erasing women from science, and secondly to point out that current efforts to improve women’s presence in STEM are an inscribed long process of encouraging women to exercise the right to be subjects rather than mere objects of knowledge.

Thus, the club of “discordant boys” depicted in the film actually symbolizes a concern for the sexual purity of the scientific group’s image. The male discussion club depicted by Nolan was made possible by the invisible work of women. This should be read in conjunction with the circulatory model of science (Latour, 1988). This model, presented in previous section, sensitizes us to consider the totality of connections and conditions, and also points to the hidden conditions that make both scientific discovery and its subsequent application possible. By erasing women and their role in the Manhattan Project and showing us a story focused on an individual genius, Nolan’s film actually offered us a deeply reactionary image, in line with current neoliberal-conservative mythologies from Silicon Valley (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). What is even more interesting is that such images are more conservative than the images and mythologies created during Oppenheimer’s lifetime. For example, it is interesting how Oppenheimer and his family are presented in the magazine “Life” in 1949. Most of the pictures follow a mythological pattern showing Oppenheimer as a scientist (smoking, talking with other scientists etc.). Still, a few photos are trying to show Oppenheimer as “a family man” (we know this is somewhat problematic in the light of facts from his biography). Oppenheimer is shown playing with kids and reading a book to a son. But one picture is fascinating. It is described in “Life” as follows:

Katherine Oppenheimer, wife of J. Robert Oppenheimer, held a degree in mycology, and here tended some rare plants in their home greenhouse as her husband and their children Peter and Toni looked on, 1949.

In this rare moment of reversal, it is Katherine Oppenheimer who is the agent, a carrier of knowledge, growing rare plants, while Robert is merely an observer standing with the children. Of course, it can be pointed out that, notwithstanding the mention of a “degree in mycology,” the photograph nevertheless still depicts “stereotypically feminine” activities – Katherine Oppenheimer is simply watering the plants in the greenhouse, and nothing else other than a thermometer and probably a hydrometer is presented – she is not surrounded by sophisticated “scientific scenery.” But still, even this conservative image presented Katherine Oppenheimer as a scientist, which was not the case in the movie.

If we consider the extent to which this movie supports the silencing of women from the history of STEM, it is worth noticing some of the prominent mothers of the atomic bomb - “hubs” in the network who make it. It is worth mentioning that the Matilda effect is also visible in the mentioned paper about scientists involved in creating an atomic bomb. Because Janosov is following Wikipedia entries and narratives about the bomb, he is illustrating the patriarchal process of erasure of women (Janosov, 2023). But he has some very illustrative findings. When he divided people involved in the Manhattan Project according to specialization and occupation, predictably the biggest categories were taken up by physicists (51,99%), chemists (17,7%) and engineers (9.29%), followed by quite a strange category: “Others” (6.19%):

Among these unconventional contributors are Wolfrid Rudyerd Boulton, an American ornithologist, who also happened to become responsible for monitoring the supply of uranium ore from the Belgian Congo, and Edith Warner, a tea room owner in Los Alamos whose role was said to have profoundly impacted researchers’ morale. Some other notable “other” figures include Charlotte Serber, a journalist, statistician, librarian, and the sole female laboratory group leader in Los Alamos. (Janosov, 2023, p. 2)

This shows that the discussion of the erasure of women is not only necessarily a politically motivated desire to restore justice but also simply an indication of the reconstruction of the entire network that formed the phenomenon in question. Women scientists, women workers, women stenotypists, etc., were necessary elements of this network, although (this is a fact) the visible nodes of this network were men. The movement to restore the memory of these women is not only to do justice to them but also has an ontological dimension – without which neither the nodes, connections or conditions, nor building the bomb would have been possible at all. It is worth briefly recalling a few of them in this section. One could start with pioneers in radioactivity – Marie Curie-Skłodowska or Harriet Brooks, Ernest Rutherford’s collaborator, who convinced him of the radioactivity of radon. Another heroine should be Lisa Meitner, an Austrian physicist of Jewish descent who collaborated with Otto Hahn, and whose research and calculations developed the theoretical basis that allowed practical work on atomic fission (Borgwardt, 2008, p. 550).

Others bestowed upon Lise Meitner the credit that Otto Hahn did not give her. In November 1945, the Atlantic Monthly quoted Albert Einstein as saying: “I do not consider myself the father of the release of atomic energy. My part in it was quite indirect. I did not, in fact, foresee that it would be released in my time. I believed only that it was theoretically possible.… It was discovered by Hahn in Berlin, and he himself misinterpreted what he discovered. It was Lise Meitner who provided the correct interpretation.” (Montillo, 2020).

Need I mention that the Nobel Prize for this achievement – mentioned in the movie – actually went only to Hahn? Also erased was the contribution of Ida Noddack, a pioneering researcher whose essay on the possibility of atomic fission was ahead of its time. Neither was there any place for Melba Phillips, Oppenheimer’s direct collaborator at Berkeley, who, together with him, discovered the nuclear reaction process later named after them. It is worth noting that this communist physicist, unlike Oppenheimer, refused to testify against her colleagues and associates before McCarthy’s Senate committee, which cost her job.

Project Society or the Manhattan Project as the swan song of the New Deal

Now, we can move on to the last issue that was erased from the film. This is the essential part of Oppenheimer’s biography, the episodes with communism and the New Deal.

Although we see President Truman in the film, the mobilization of tens of thousands of people to work on a secret government project was only possible because of the American public’s trust in President Roosevelt. This was a result of the success of government programs in fighting unemployment and recovering from the Great Depression. Elected to the presidency four times, Roosevelt became a symbol of progress and a contract with the public: trust in government action was “repaid” by building dams, power plants and roads, providing jobs, and progressive legislation. It was the New Deal and the trust it engendered that allowed a communist Jew, Robert J. Oppenheimer, to feel part of the American political project.

Contrary to Nolan’s superhero mythology, it was the collective dream and sense of being part of society as a project that was an essential aspect of Oppenheimer’s involvement in the Manhattan Project. Ultimately, this anticipates why the film’s protagonist cannot be effectively fitted into the story of the lone Prometheus. The Manhattan Project was part of a war machine, but one born in a society that believed in its peoples' agency – and what is more an agency mediated by the state.

Oppenheimer’s political sympathies were common among British or American physicists at the time – communism seemed a natural consequence of the scientific worldview. Science was treated as relatively politically independent and was associated with progress (the First International Congress on the History of Science and Technology in London in 1931 – an important event for the scientific left – became a symbol of this). From the perspective of California, the actions of the American Communist Party may have appeared as a more radical version of the “New Deal,” a political force capable of pushing the Roosevelt administration to build a more just society. The socio-political promise of the New Deal made it possible to believe that a society could overcome racial and ethnic divisions, that a more economically egalitarian society was possible. And a society in which science and education would play a significant role in bringing it about. Only by understanding this context can we understand why Oppenheimer initially insisted on a uniform. (The uniform had to be custom-made because the scientist was too tall and thin to fit into a standard uniform.) The uniform was more an extension of Oppenheimer’s donations to the war against fascism in Spain than a praise of militarism. Moreover, the uniform proved that Jewish ancestry was no obstacle to participation in the American progressive political project. All of this allowed the Manhattan Project to appear as an extension of the New Deal projects – work on the atomic bomb was similar to the construction of dams, roads and other public investments [4].

It was only with the change of symbolic and real rulers, with the growing role of the “military-industrial complex” (Eisenhower’s term), that the Manhattan Project showed its other face. It turned out that the American public’s trust in government and scientists did not create a better world but a bomb that threatened to destroy it. Oak Ridge, contrary to the progressive rhetoric of the Roosevelt administration, turned out to be a city of racial and class segregation. It was also the site of secret medical experiments that exposed unknowing patients to radiation doses; Oppenheimer was likely aware of these experiments. In Nolan’s film, however, there are no victims other than Oppenheimer – we will not see the effects of the medical experiments, the forcibly displaced villagers in New Mexico, nor (most importantly) the civilian victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The protagonist takes on the role of suffering for all, as his wife reminds him in one scene when she speaks of “letting himself be crucified.” With these words, the myth of Prometheus becomes the myth of the Antichrist (the one who, in order to redeem humanity, brought the specter of annihilation).

But the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer’s biography are not a variation on the Bible nor a variation on the story of Prometheus, who stole the divine secret. Nor is there a motif of a sorcerer’s apprentice driven out of control by a “magical force”. This is and should be the story of a scientist who saw in the alliance of science and state the possibility of realizing noble ideas. A person who, at the same time, saw the ideology and the apparatuses of the state being hijacked by militaristic and reactionary forces.

It is through this prism that the conflict between Oppenheimer (a communist liberal, a child of the “New Deal” era) and Lewis Strauss (a militarist, anticommunist) should be viewed. This is a much more fruitful perspective than the psychological one adopted by Nolan and inspired by Milos Forman’s depiction of the Mozart–Salieri conflict in Amadeus.

Notes

1. The text is an extended and altered version of the review of the movie Oppenheimer that appeared online in Polish (Nowak, 2023).

2. Thanks to Michal Radomil Wisniewski for bringing this text to my attention.

3. I would like to thank Stephen Dersley for bringing this fact to my attention.

4. For a Roosevelt-–Oppenheimer relations see a letter sent by Franklin D. Roosevelt to J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his colleagues to thank them for their continued secret research on the atomic bomb. 29 June 1943 (Roosevelt, 1943).