Are Fears of A.I. and Nuclear Apocalypse Keeping You Up? Blame Prometheus.
The consequences are real enough, of course. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed at least 100,000 people. Their successor weapons, which Oppenheimer opposed, threatened to kill everybody else. But the intellectual drama of “Oppenheimer” — as distinct from the dramas of his personal life and his political fate — is about how abstraction becomes reality. The atomic bomb may be, for the soldiers and politicians, a powerful strategic tool in war and diplomacy. For the scientists, it’s something else: a proof of concept, a concrete manifestation of quantum theory.
Oppenheimer wasn’t a principal author of that theory. Those scientists, among them Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, were characters in Labatut’s previous novel, “When We Cease to Understand the World.” That book provides harrowing illumination of a zone where scientific insight becomes indistinguishable from madness or, perhaps, divine inspiration. The basic truths of the new science seem to explode all common sense: A particle is also a wave; one thing can be in many places at once; “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.”
At their congresses and conferences, debating in train cars and cafes, these quantum revolutionaries are like the gods of Olympus: consumed with their own rivalries and passions, all but oblivious to the ordinary mortal world around them. Oppenheimer’s designation as Prometheus is precise. He snatched a spark of quantum insight from those divinities and handed it to Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Army Air Forces.
His punishment came not at the hands of those he had robbed, but rather from the recipients of his gift. In “Oppenheimer,” during the hearings that will cost him his security clearance and exile him from the center of American public life, most of his scientific colleagues remain by his side. (The notable exception is Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and as such another potential Prometheus.) It’s the lawyers, bureaucrats and Washington courtiers who bring him down. Like the original Prometheus, Oppenheimer survives his disgrace, and ends the movie as a flawed, haunted, regretful creature, carrying a flicker of inextinguishable, theoretical guilt. If we blow up the world, it might still be his fault.
Labatut’s account of von Neumann is, if anything, more unsettling than “Oppenheimer.” We had decades to get used to the specter of nuclear annihilation, and since the end of the Cold War it has been overshadowed by other terrors. A.I., on the other hand, seems newly sprung from science fiction, and especially terrifying because we can’t quite grasp what it will become.
