GEORGE TEMPLETON: "Oppenheimer": The loss of innocence that comes with knowing

By George Templeton

Gazette Blog Columnist

My wife and I went to see Oppenheimer in 70mm Imax.  It was intense!  The movie has all the elements:  war, fear, power, fame, profit, love, infidelity, politics, and the loss of innocence that comes with knowing. 

It was in the sixties when the older men in our semiconductor company wore black armbands in a reverse protest against the anti-Viet Nam war students.  It was the time of the Kent State student massacre by the National Guard.  It was the time when adding machines could not multiply or divide and when carbon paper was used for copies.

I was a “Silicon Valley Man” (corduroy coat, hush-puppy shoes, slide rule, briefcase, and punched computer tape hanging out of my pocket) and I thought that MAD (mutual assured destruction) was crazy.   I had short hair.  The Hippies could see that I was not one of them.

I thought that the war was not good.  But like the Oppenheimer crew of scientists, our government needed me, because of the bomb.  It jump-started my life.

I have known many brilliant people during my life, some of them even reported to me.  But I have known only two as smart as Oppenheimer.  Neither of them fit well into society.  Both were arrogant and trustworthy in a way that paid no attention to politics.  They might have thought that they were the most intelligent people in the world.  They might have been correct.

The demoniac in society is the bomb.  We are between a rock and a hard place.  Irresponsible self-interest, promoted by the GOP, makes it worse.  We can’t change our thinking without people getting hurt.   We will experience the terrible bomb again.  Mathematical expectation, an artifact of probability and learning, predicts it.

The movie does not tell you that Oppenheimer was educated in the non-Orthodox Jewish Ethical Culture Society.  They believed that deeds matter. 

They rejected Orthodox Judaism.  They had the objective of remaining “religious” while hiding their family’s identity from anti-Semitism. 

And then there was the trial that was only an inquiry.  Prejudice is not just racial, political, or religious.  It exists whenever we make a judgment about someone before all the evidence is in.