 I'm Francis Saunders, I'm the President of the Institute of Physics and I wanted to welcome you here on behalf of the science community. This is one of a number of conversation that we're at the institute, we're stimulating between the science and the arts, and particularly between physics and the arts. I think it's really interesting if you think about what's happening at the moment in terms of the range of stories that are being told about scientists and physicists as people. And this production of Oppenheimer is obviously one of those yn ond y galluín cyhoedd yma, ond twp hwnnw'n gwybod gael prosperent ac yn cyhoedd hwnnw hwnnw, yn cwyliliadau yn bwysig, ond mae'n ddylai'r cymunedau gyda'n cyflosig, be nhadau a roedd cael ei plwy, ond mae'n bod ni'n ddim yn olygu ei wneud a'r cyfrannu cyfrannu cwylili a fwyddiolol. Felly rydych chi'n gweld am y dyfodol y ffrindio cyfanyddol â'r eisiau ac rydw i ni wedi ddyn nhw'n cael ei pob lŷod o'r pryddyn nhw. Dwych, ddwych. Fy rydyn ni'n meddwl, wrth gwrs, sy'n ddweud yw'n meddwl yw'r trofynol. Felly, rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r gweithio, sy'n ddweud yw'r trofynol i'r ffordd o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Yn ymgyrchu, dyna'n ddweud rydych chi'n meddwl. Felly, dyna'n meddwl i'r trofynol o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'ch ddweud i'r trofynol i'n dweud, nad yw'n meddwl i'r trofynol i'r trofynol o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, sy'n ddweud, sy'n ddweud, ond ychydigiaeth yn amlwg itynau jewch mor byd o'r ddweud, o'r myd, i ddim yn fwy o'n meddwl y ddweud o'r 20 ysgengdyn. Yn ymddyddwr i'r disfnod sy'n mynd fath o'r disfnod ac yn ddweud o'r pedal sy'n ddweud. Fyd mewn gwirio'r rai a ddwygr yn ei ffawr i gyd ac yn gweithio gwybod i gyd, a gweithio'n gwybod i gyd o'r bolidog yn y gallu, yn ei wneud o'r cyd-dweud y bydd Tom i'r gwybod i gael a'r gwybod i'r ffant yma, ac yn ymddych chi'n gwybod i'r gwybod oes yma yn gwrs. Felly, rwy'n gyntaf i'r gwybod i'r gwybod Tom, ac yn ymgyrch i'r gwybod i'r gwybod i'r gwybod, Mae'r unig yn cychwyn, mae'n fydd yw, ond mor nhw'n fydd yw'r ysgol yn ei ddechrau. So, yna'n ddechrau i'w ddweud o ddechrau'n ddechrau'n gweithio bydd y gwaith yn y gallu bwysig o ddydd fyddau. Wna'n gweithio'n ysgol i'r ysgol i'r effigiaeth eraill. Rwy'n ymdweud, mae'n gweithio'n cerddau. Quick Women has written very extensively about a range of extraordinary people, as well as extraordinary books, but including most recently, people, men who have embarked on astonishing science and engineering projects, and the moment you were writing a book about the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge. Yes, indeed I am. Washington Roebling. Is his name? Fascinating thought to build a bridge just there, it's become so iconic. To Herla Frank Close, who is a physicist, so it's all right. Frank can make sure we don't talk nonsense about physics. Frank, a fellow of ecstacology in Oxford, at one time the head of theoretical physics at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory, again acclaimed for his writing on science. So we will talk of course as you'd expect about what does it mean to try and write about science and write for a broad audience as well as a specialist audience. Frank, most recently, especially in a book called Half Life in which you do deal with, as you put it, the other side of the Manhattan Project. That's right, yes. I mean, the Brits were involved in this in a big way and there was a man called Bruno Ponticorvo who disappeared through the Iron Curtain in 1950 and was he the missing atoms spy while you have to buy the book to find out? Frank is already persuading Tom to write a play about it, so he'll be fine. To my right, Alec Jar, who's the science correspondent for ITV, but more pertinently has written across all sorts of ideas about modern science and the history of science and has been particularly intrigued or certainly at one time intrigued by science which leads inevitably or otherwise to great destruction. Would you say a little bit more about that? Well, actually, bizarrely, it's meant to be an optimistic book. I know it doesn't sound like that, but based around some of the ideas of how scientific endeavour and understanding of science could lead to the end of the world, gives you a handle on how to stop that. That was my aim in that book. Thank you very much. Just here to his right, Angus Jackson, the director of Oppenheimer. For those of you who have seen it, you will understand that Angus took on an extraordinary challenge and has risen to it completely magnificently, but a little fact that I didn't know about him when we asked him to come and direct the plays that he studied physics and philosophy at university. The perfect man for the task. So, for those of you who haven't seen the show yet, it is, to my mind, a kind of searing and also extraordinary, ambitious way of telling the story not just of one man, although centrally one man, but, as I said earlier, truly some of the most significant and defining events of the 20th century. What on earth possessed you, Tom, if I might start there to tackle such a subject? Where did it come from and why did you want to do it now? Yes, that's a big question. Why did I do it? I think I'd had in my head the idea of writing about physics on stage for a long time, I think certainly some of my favourite plays when I started getting interested in theatre were Tom Stoppard, Michael Frane and that was my first introduction to physics and to science was through playwrights. When I was invited by the RSC to come, they ran some workshops with some writers. The idea was to have us work with the vocal departments and we had a rhetoric coach coming and work with us to see if the tools that the RSC has for actors to help them inhabit an epic stage like the RST or the swan, whether they were of any use to writers, if they would inspire an epic idea. Then we got to pitch an idea and I pitched Oppenheimer. I thought that's the biggest thing I can think of. What better subject to try and put on a stage like this though yes intimate allows you to talk directly to the audience about really big events and ideas. I think it's so important now that nuclear weapons have never gone away, they cast a big shadow over, I certainly felt it growing up in the 80s, the threat of nuclear annihilation was always somewhere in the back of my mind, where I grew up there was a nuclear bunker quite close where we used to go and picnic next to. That was a big influence on having those ideas in my head. It's one of those things that if you're talking about the world today and whether you're talking about an energy crisis or climate change or whether you're talking about North Korea or Iran or even Scottish independence, the idea of nuclear power and nuclear weapons is so pertinent to where we are now and how the world is now. It felt like the perfect time to go back and see the birth of it and see the point and the circumstances which kicked the atomic age off. I suppose you alluded to this but it's true that the next bit is our fault of course because we loved it. It felt very good timing for the RSE in a very particular sense. Next door in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre I've directed The Christmas Truths which plays in repertory with Loveslovers Lost and Loveslovers One, what to do about nothing. It's worth mentioning that only in the sense that we were keen as many people have been in throughout 2014 and I suspect going forward into the next two or three years to think deeply about the First World War in the commemorative years as we think about the 100-year anniversary. The difficulty of course is that when you're thinking about 1914 and the true streets very specifically of those few months, you're talking about a moment of innocence. When I read Tom's play that seemed to me and it seems clear and clear and now seeing it on the stage that the journey from a kind of innocence at the beginning of the century to 1945 and the events towards the end of the play is an enormous journey that defines us morally as well as scientifically and politically. To that point Erika, I wonder if you would just give us a sense of what are the challenges of telling a story like this and why are we so interested in telling a number of stories like this right at the moment I think about the films that have recently been released, been released a fascination with the history of science and the history of theory. Well I think as Francis was alluding to in her introduction this is something I find, I'm not a scientist, I'm a lay person, someone who studied the arts but always fascinated by science and engineering. The way that I can access these technological developments is through the stories of the people who made these technological developments. So I think, you know, I'm thrilled that we seem to be in a moment where there are a lot of these stories around whether it's Tom's wonderful play, whether it's the theory of everything. However much these stories as they're told, Tom Stoppard's new play is about neuroscience, however much these stories and of course they are stories approach the hard science of the subject, I think they can give an audience, me, a desire to find out more. They're a wonderful kind of window into this work which otherwise can seem abstract, inaccessible to people who aren't trained. I made the mistake of saying to Angus and Tom that the science in the play made me feel clever and they gave me a slightly withering look. Having met a couple of scientific colleagues with us in the last few days I realised that actually the science that they explained to us isn't as complicated as I thought it was but I did feel great that I'd followed it, absolutely. But do you think there's more to it? I wonder if, because of course the story of Oppenheimer treats such big moral decisions, political decisions, are we looking back at these moments of scientific progress because we're searching for that idealism or the loss of idealism or the loss of innocence? I think this is a very particular moment. I think there are not many moments in the history of the world where we say before and after. This is one of the most profound ones. The day before the bomb, the world was a wholly different place. I also completely agree with Tom. It is interesting now, it seems to me, my son who is 15. When I was 15, I was really in 1984, I was really scared that the world was going to blow itself to hell. It was really, really frightening. We have other things to fear now, but still the scale of that destruction is there. So I think it is absolutely a really, it's a perfect moral moment to examine and to set as this play, it seemed to me, I saw it last night wonderfully does, the excitement of these people working on this project, the joy that they feel in pursuing these extraordinary ideas to the very limit and then understanding what the limit looks like. Yes, what they've done or what they might do. Angus, how has it felt to make the show, to make it now? Has it felt to you as though it speaks to a particular moment now or is it a timelessly important story or both? That's a good question. I think one of the things making it now is the appetite for it. I don't know, we go through our careers doing different shows about different things, so you're aware when you write today that you get 20 people drawing these equations. If you can see the floor, they've left the floor for us. It starts clean at the start of the evening. There's a currency to that which is fun. I don't know in terms of making it now politically, you know, you're aware if you sit on this stage and say a weapon of mass destruction, it probably means something very visceral to us which perhaps it wouldn't have, you know, if we'd made this show 15, 20 years ago. So I think you've got those two things that run alongside each other. I'm startled by the relationship, perhaps I shouldn't be, but the relationship between America and the rest of the world that's portrayed in the play, that when you see how much that has changed in these years that have gone by since, it's a sort of obvious point, but the naivety with which or the straightforwardness with which America felt responsible for trying to bring the water close and to win the scientific race, you know, it feels like a wholly different time to now. I think we're much more suspicious now of the idea of good guys and bad guys. Yes, quite. Which brings me perhaps neatly different. The good guys or the bad guys. No, I wanted to ask you from your perspective, what has it done to science? How has it changed physics, scientists, the world that you occupy? Well, one thing that Erica said, I also at the age of 15 was very worried, unfortunately that was 1960. So it certainly did change things and as a scientist myself, I had sort of the experience a couple of years ago when the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced, the same sense that those kids had back in 1945 when they first exploded the bomb, and it was the fact that for a long time in advance of that, you know, we all knew in our hearts that that was the way that the world worked, but when finally the announcement was made at CERN that this is how it is, it was an incredibly emotional moment and we knew for all time, we now know this fact and if a thunderbolt had come to the CERN auditorium at that moment and Charlton Heston's voice had been berating us for going where we had no right, I wouldn't have been surprised. I had that sense without spoiling the play for people that the moment when they finally achieve the atomic bomb test and it exceeds all their expectations and they realize what they have finally achieved, to me that was a very powerful emotional moment that I felt it very much and then of course the moral issues come to bear and they realize what they have done and it occurs to me that now, the concept that science or physicists have known sin and judgments take place, I mean, we all know of Feynman on the Challenger Inquiry and Hans Bater and Oppenheimer and so on. I see in the audience here people pretty well of my generation and that is the age of the people as we know them and as we judge them, but how many people in here are in their 20s? Can you just stand up a second so we can remind ourselves? Bravely is missing it. Thank you for coming. Thank you. The average age was 25. Klaus Fuchs makes an appearance last night. Everybody has heard of him as a spy. Ted Hall, who probably nobody has ever heard of, was so successful as a spy because he wasn't found out. He was 18. Oppenheimer himself was only 39. These were kids doing it and what you bring out very well, Tom, in the play is the excitement of these kids. They've gone into science because they're excited by wanting to know nature and here is something that they are trying to do and when they do it, their reaction is their response to the universe. Then you see them realise what happens next and that's, of course, everything else is history, so to speak, but that was the moment. I'm interested though. Do you mean that it's harder now in one's early years as a scientist to in a way pursue the science for its own sake, having a wonderful phrase, having known sin? Is it now true that actually one is always aware of the implications or applications of the science that you're doing? Well, the nature of science certainly changed and in a way perhaps the Manhattan Project was the beginning of it. I mentioned the discovery that Higgs Boson where of the order of 10,000 scientists, engineers, technicians around the world have worked together and that is big science. The Manhattan Project at its height had the order of 100,000 people and before it started, the nature of scientific research one, two, maybe three people might work on an experiment together. The cyclotron of Lawrence would have fitted on this stage. So the Manhattan Project was completely and utterly different and my understanding of the question why was it Oppenheimer, for example, that General Groves worked with and not one of the Nobel Laureates or others that were around there. My understanding is that Groves found all the academics he spoke to typical ivory tower people. Only Oppenheimer had the insight that this was an industrial project that he was taking on board. It was something qualitatively different. Seventy years later science, not just in physics in my own area but you know now the human genome project science is big science, it's vast numbers of people working collaboratively together. It didn't directly come out of the Manhattan Project but the sort of pressures that Oppenheimer felt. He had to deliver the US taxpayer was paying a big bill and if it didn't work whose head was going to roll that is there behind the scenes all the time. So the pressures that have come now on scientists to have to satisfy the funders is certainly there. I would just say, it's interesting to hear you talk that way I'm writing a book about an engineer and what you're describing in a way it's as much an engineering project a project of that kind of scale where again you have a government looking over a budget, this is the task to be accomplished that's industrial. Absolutely, I'd like to point that out in fact that the science of the atomic bomb is certainly speaking quite simple there was no secret to the atomic bomb everybody knew it pretty well but it was an engineering project so it's the engineers that are at fault. That's what we say that, don't they? Let me come to you so back to your point about a kind of optimistic view about the potential of science and you saw the play last night has that changed your view? What does the Manhattan Project make you think about modern science, what is the relationship for you given you think about this all the time? You asked Frank about the implications for the Manhattan Project to science and you've particularly talked about the collaboration that's one aspect of it what happens of course after the Manhattan Project is that the world the people of the world who maybe don't know what science is or what scientists do are suddenly aware of this one particular thing that scientists do is themselves and it's reflected upon in the play wonder what they've created and there are some interesting stories about those people moving away from anything to do with war for example going into biological science for example etc but what happens is that you have this incredible PR disaster for science and there's this idea that this is what scientists do of course that's not what all scientists do but this is where publicly funded science comes from the government start funding huge amounts of science and now the paradigm we know of where governments fund most science in this country and many others it comes from the 50s and so on and there was a huge sort of PR exercise afterwards to sort of try and reform science as this great hope, the white heat of technology these are the people that are going to save the world we're going to have if you think about the 50s and 60s you had visions of the future with jet cars and jet packs and things it was all because there was a particular attempt to get science away from this idea of destruction into something very progressive and futuristic the other aspects of it of course CERN comes out of government's attempts to stop Russian scientists building the bomb essentially the fusion reactor being built at CERN is something similar sorry fusion reactor being built at in the south of France is being something similar space race comes out of an attempt by governments again to show superiority and also give them a cover to building intercontinental ballistic missiles that deliver nuclear bombs huge implications about what the potential of this thing is I think what is optimistic about it is that CERN is a very optimistic idea it's a very peaceful place and if you speak to any of the scientists there they talk about how it is meant for peace one of the things they talk about is that it's meant for a peaceful use of this technology of course who knows what people might be able to use the Higgs boson for in a thousand years time but you know it is a peaceful use the fusion reactor as I mentioned again in the south of France which is an international project again it's a peaceful use of nuclear energy and so I think that the collaboration all these things made scientists especially and governments and all sorts think that they had to work harder to persuade the rest of us that there was there were things that scientists could do beyond this one horrible I don't want to say horrible this dangerous thing what you were saying reminded me actually a couple of weeks ago Will Self was on the radio for a quarter of an hour of your lunchtime taking his tour around CERN on the first or second day there he was in the CERN canteen and he was very hard job obviously selling him the idea I mean the first mistake that was made was that they put a PR person on rather than a young scientist which is the young scientist of the people who are excited and will tell you how it really is and Will Self knew that and then he said well all you ever did for us was make the bomb that killed everybody well the answer was let me introduce you to this Japanese colleague of mine who is working on the experiment with me today the fact that CERN was built the concept came up within five years of the end of the war involving all the things that we see happening on the stage last night and that countries that have been fighting each other just a few years before were now working collectively together I think as a political enterprise it was as successful as a scientific one Tom can I just pick up on in this conversation about a kind of pessimism and optimism obviously dreadful things came as we talked about it at the beginning from this decision to pursue the bomb and use it but also we're sort of touching on a thought that perhaps it's given us a kind of more reflective and more public relationship with science having written the play and the experience of having it staged how do you now feel about those events I mean is it as complex as that or is it all more so or do you have a clear view on its impact yeah it's tricky I spent three hours essentially discussing it with myself which is what people see and I don't think I come to any hard and fast conclusion it's it comes down to the extraordinary coincidence that atomic fission was discovered at the start of the world's first fully industrialized war I think had the world would have been in a very different place if Hahn and Strassman hadn't kind of been breaking apart uranium atoms in Germany in 1939 if they'd kind of done it ten years later yes but that's just what ifing that's kind of spending your entire time looking at well what would the world be like if we hadn't bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki if the Nazis weren't their atomic program wasn't really coming to anything so if the Americans had just not invested in it how would the world have been different and it comes back to the idea of the players do you believe that what is possible is inevitable and I think the real fear at the time from the from the scientists was that the Nazis were ahead they had Heisenberg they had all the scientists like Hans Better who was kind of coming over from Europe kind of had first hand experience of fascism and there was a real belief that the Nazis could not be allowed to have the bomb and so that further drove the American project and yeah it's a really difficult moral question but I don't think I still don't have an answer for but this is the history that we have can I just add something to of all the people who were distressed by what happened it wasn't the people at Los Alamos it was Han the German himself who when discovered that the atomic bomb had been dropped and for the first time the German scientists realised the possibility it was Han who felt that having discovered the phenomenon of fission that it was his responsibility that opened up this terrible thing goodness to me what a responsibility to bear to think that you had begun a process that was indeed inevitable someone else has picked it up on the other side of the world the other thing which people might have some insight into to explore is that as Tom said the project was to build a bomb before the Nazis did and a substantial percentage of the scientists on there were Jewish emigres from Nazi Europe which I always thought was one of the great ironies of what Hitler achieved for German science he sent it all over here but the thing was that when it became clear that Germany was going to lose the war and more important that they had not made any significant progress on an atomic weapon of their own the prime reasons for building the bomb no longer existed yet only one scientist left the project it was Joe Rockblatt who later got the peace prize many years later but with his exception they all continued and of course one of the ways was that Oppenheimer was to invest upon them that there are reasons for doing this and the reason that was eventually given for using it against Japan was we have the choice of losing a million US military invading Japan or dropping a bomb and one of the things also that I discovered in preparing for this I was reading Ray Monk's 700 page book about Oppenheimer but the fire bombings of Tokyo that had taken place not far in advance of the atomic bomb itself had already killed 20,000 people and I'm just making this up as I go along but I can imagine that to the extent that young kids thought about this at that stage this new bomb was perhaps not going to be qualitatively different it was one bomb that would do what thousands of bombs were doing and Oppenheimer also being aware that this would give radiation that he had advised that the Japanese would probably not feel much radiation effects because they were going to air aid shelters the moment they were aware the air aid was on and of course there wasn't an air aid there was one plane and air aids involve hundreds of planes that people are going to shelters there was one plane and they all looked up wondering what this one plane was doing and these were things that people didn't anticipate beforehand and after the event it was all very obvious Yes, you touch on something there I think which is very powerful in the play the kind of flavour of understanding what they'd done not of course that they'd invented a bomb that could kill so many people but what that bomb was like was of a completely different order and experience and I suppose it seems to me Tom that you quite rightly don't land on a moral conclusion but you do land on an emotional conclusion in the play that the move from the kind of idealism we haven't really talked about the politics in the play those of you who've seen it it's a very important part of the play that Oppenheimer is associated both before the Manhattan Project and later with communist ideas and ideals and indeed with a communist party and many close colleagues and that kind of political idealism seems towards the end of the play to be translated into a dreadful sense of the loss of innocence and that idealism is not possible Is that fair? That's pretty bleak isn't it? It does upset me I must say I think looking at the arc of the character of Oppenheimer in my play it's a journey from idealism to cynicism and the lines he has at the end of the play which I don't want to give away but the decisions he's made he's consciously kind of given up on his idealism to do this thing and it's tough it's a tough thing that I think everyone goes through as you get older your youthful idealism gets stripped away by just living and just kind of existing and this is a very extreme example of that Tom is a shockingly young man to be saying such a thing but Erica do you agree? No I do agree and I would just interject that that's sort of returning to what I was saying before I think that's one of the ways in which the construction of a story can make really challenging material like this accessible to us because to some extent that happens to us all in less we hope perhaps dramatic circumstances but that's a journey which as an audience member you can understand you start off with a particular way of how things are going to go and funnily enough they don't really go that way so that's a way in for audiences to the story This brings us back to why these stories are intriguing and I just wonder Alec probably because you talked about the optimism the positive results or later developments in science I wonder do you think that there's something around progress that we nearly lost your point about the PR disaster around science immediately after the Manhattan Project and I was talking to a scientist for him there's something about science which believed in the inevitability of progress that it was always going to be to the positive to explore the next idea and the next idea Have we retained that or was it in a sense lost forever? Well I think if you ask many scientists who do science because they're interested and they talk about blue skies and curiosity driven search then yes and CERN is a classic example of that it's purely abstract in many ways and curiosity driven although it has managed to engage quite a lot of people who are not interested in theoretical physics per se so yeah progress is there and one of the themes of the play and of this discussion is about whether things are inevitable I mean if fission hadn't been discovered in 39 by the scientist in question someone else would have done it two years later five years later I mean lots of discoveries in science seem to be to happen around the same time independently of each other because the time seems to be right and I don't want to get spiritual about it or anything but there is sometimes an inevitability about a certain discovery or a certain thing because of some technology or some idea circulating and so on and I think that we stick with that today in lots of respects people are now more competitive when it comes to science and the way they do it they want to publish in great journals and that's all dependent I mean the way the science is done now is because it's government funded and you have to get amazing results and amazing journals that all this competition means that that's all that scientists do in some respect and it's hard to see then how you attach these sort of abstract ideas to it all but I think that to answer your question yes these things are inevitable these things will happen if you don't do something someone else will and it's just getting bigger and bigger and more people do it the only contribution you can make is so tiny nowadays in these big collaborations or by yourself it's an unstoppable machine Can I just add one thing to Alex's remark there because the what if aspect people have often said if fishing had been discovered say later would the atomic bomb have happened from it because the enterprise was so big it required the war to do it etc etc and I think the answer is yes it would because one of the things that I discovered researching this latest book was that the Soviets of course they started their own atomic bomb project not in order to have it ready in the second world war because they thought this was something that would take much longer to develop but Stalin saw this as a hedge for future wars so I think that that experience shows that it would have led to that development whatever whenever it was found Of course there are very chilling moments in the play again hoping not to spoil too much for you that just allude to the cold war and the fact that no one had imagined that such a thing would happen that that relationship would be there for so long between the Soviet Union and America I don't know if you agree Frank but in terms of inevitability if that's just one thing I can't think of a single scientific idea that even though we associate them with individual people or groups wouldn't have happened if that person had not been alive except for general relativity perhaps which is Einstein I don't know if maybe you can say whether that would have come along from someone else What an interesting question It's funny I mean I had that idea then discovered it had already been done I think that general relativity is often cited as the one thing and perhaps that is true What again does come across well and this is alluded to in the programme notes so you'll see it anyway was the world politically was very different in the 1930s that you're in a world where the Spanish Civil War is happening or are you a fascist or are you anti-fascist that was really the decision that people had to make and of course 20 years later as the world had changed the McCarthyism has arrived the decisions that people made in their 20s during the 1930s come back to Hauntland in later life and clearly one of the things which troubled many of the scientists was the fact that the Soviet Union were allies of America and Britain again one of these obvious facts which is often overlooked that people think why wasn't Klaus Fuchs executed answer because he wasn't a traitor he passed information to an ally not to an enemy and there was a great feeling among the scientists that freezing the Soviet Union out of this work was sort of wrong that was the political decision that was made there's a bit of a sort of Pontius Pilate effect here I think the scientists were doing their thing and it was the politicians who were deciding what you do with it so yes scientific discovery by definition is progress because you end up knowing things about what is possible than you knew before what you do with that is then the decision to be made and I will come to you any moment which I promise and I just want to ask Angus in light of this discussion in essence do you think this is a play about science or something else besides that's a very good question I said about halfway through rehearsals I thought it was a play about leadership you know obviously we're here at the RSC and a lot of those Shakespeare history plays are about I could argue are about leadership and I think that's very interesting and talking to, I studied physics and two of my tutors have been involved Dave Walk and John Butterworth and they will talk endlessly about the organisation of scientists and how difficult it is and I think you get to a point again which I try not to talk too much about the play but where he's at the top of the mountain there's room for only two feet where Oppenheimer's running these other scientists who are his competitors and his at least equals in ways so for me a lot of the play is about that that's absolutely right that does seem to me why it sits very well on this stage because Shakespeare also writes about very conflicted and ambivalent leaders and leaders with great talents but those talents being the other side of that coin being hugely dangerous I am now going to try and hand over a little bit to the audience although I'm sure all of us have lots more to say but what are your questions I'm only a little bit afraid of what they might be please do put your hands up and we'll yes the lady at the front I'd like to ask Tom I haven't seen the play yet but I have seen quite a few modern plays which have tried to get a point across to the trap of leaving me feeling as though I've been beaten about the head with a baseball bat how as a writer do you prevent yourself which I assume you have but in not falling into that trap he has yeah I hope that people don't come out being felt that I've been beaten up though by the end you do feel a bit of that but in a good way there is no agenda I'm pushing with this play I wanted to explore all the arguments because it's such a morally grey area the things that there is no right answer to the question of was it the right thing to do there's no correct answer well this is what they did is it better, is it worse than what could have happened it's an unanswerable question and I hope that because lots of people everyone kind of has an opinion no matter how little they know about Jay Robert Oppenheimer people kind of turn up with what they think at the start I hope that by airing all of my arguments as I can surrounding those questions that it maybe pushes people to think about it from the other angle I suppose one unusual thing about play when we talk about a big play it's got a quite a big cast and so Tom has handled a remarkable range of characters and that helps enormously because then scene by scene you see very different perspectives not least coming into the room with Oppie but also actually some of the things that Frank was talking about about the innocence and wonderful energy and enthusiasm of the very young scientists immediately gives you another perspective on what you might think is a foregone conclusion about a terrible act or the terrible effects of an event that you see this wonderful eagerness so immediately emotionally you're in a different place and there are many other perspectives that again we won't spoil but Eric do you have a perspective on how one tells these very complex moral stories without lecturing? Well I think a word that Tom used just now is explore I think that you know in my experience and I've been privileged in my career to talk to a lot of really wonderful writers and I think you know this doesn't just apply to the wonderful play I saw last night but I think of talking to Margaret Atwood about her Mad Adam trilogy which is about what happens in a future earth she is exploring what those possibilities might be rather than saying and this is what I think I think that's what you're referring to and you know that's the trick it is a hard trick to to pull off but that's to me what the best plays do I mean you talked about Stop Art at the beginning you know Arcadia is a great example of a play that interrogates ideas that are out there they're less perhaps morally pressing than what we saw tonight but absolutely when I saw the play I did think that's one of its great strengths was that I wasn't being told what to think When we get it right the theatre is a perfect place to do that I mean Shakespeare is a great emblem of how to explore very complex moral positions and we are just about to go into rehearsals for Merchant of Venice and Othello two of the plays that require perhaps more than the others a sense of heartfelt belief and interest in characters who are less than morally pure you know about to do things or do do things that we might abhor who we find charismatic on route so I suppose we might be in the right place to try another question lots of hands sorry yes sir thank you great question I hope everybody could hear but why Tom chose not to include in the play therefore we're not spoiling anything the events that surrounded Oppenheimer in the early 50s around his security clearance which I alluded to earlier in the play but Tom that would have to be another play it's I mean that that whole period and the relationship with his relationship with Edward teller how it developed and how hard he argued against the hydrogen bomb being developed and how that led to his security clearance being taken away from him and how all of the stuff that happens at the beginning of the play with his involvement with communist associates and associations that all comes comes back to bite him on the behind kind of in the 50s and the building of the atom bomb is a huge you know I've managed to kind of condense quite a lot into three hours to then try and do all of McCarthyism and the politics of the hydrogen bomb into that same three hours then well we'd be here all night we've been very tough on Tom making sure that it fitted just within three hours so that's a very good answer but how much I can come to Eric again because I wonder how much do you think those later events in Oppenheim's life have influenced the way we think about him beyond the play? Oh I think enormously but I mean as Tom said I think that's a very different story and I wonder if that's to do I had some conversations with Graham Formlow physicist who I was discussing this event with about the perception of him you know I'm in the United States which is where I'm from although I haven't lived there for a very long time but you know I think still there are people whose reputation is kind of clouded, obscured by what happened during that McCarthy period I think maybe particularly in the realm of science where a general audience has less of an understanding of what was actually going on but I think that's absolutely true but yes that's another three hours I was just going to add something this is a story that I was reminded of as you were saying about Oppenheimer about 25 or 30 years ago I went to Los Alamos and I was waiting in the Albuquerque airport to get the little commuter plane and there was only one other person standing there waiting with me and I started talking to this guy and I said what's your name his name was Oppenheimer it turned out he was a member of the family and he was at college and he was travelling around the states visiting all the places and so there's only one place to stay at Los Alamos even today that's the Los Alamos and it really is a Hicksville at the middle of nowhere and I was rather amused I said you must check in first I wanted to see the reaction at the desk and he checked in nothing at all well maybe that's a good thing another question yes sir yes I was intending to absolutely Gus are you there perhaps we could just ask you to tell us a little thank you very much thank you very much thank you very much for this well it's very interesting I suppose I'm the only person here and far feel to have known Oppenheimer personally I was a child of five he came to my father for his PhD in 1926 when I was five so you can work at my age now and and he took his PhD and then they kept in loose contact until the war my father refused to work on the bomb unlike many of his colleagues he didn't want to do that and I remember Oppenheimer really quite well overlaid with lots of stuff of course as it happens when you know somebody as a child he was very interesting person shy and arrogant at the same time and you can read about him quite well in a couple of books in my father's biography by Nancy Greenspan and my father's autobiography and the Einstein born correspondence which is another book and that gives you a greater information what kind of person he was this is all long before he got involved in the war as great leader of the scientists and those elements I thought the only best thing I can do and take a couple of minutes is to read my father's letter to Oppenheimer on his 60th birthday and that will take a couple of minutes and finish it and it's quite nice letter it's dated April 1964 Dear Robert Oppenheimer I'm too old to write an article for your first truth please accept instead a few lines of reminiscences and congratulations you joined my department in Goettingen in 1926 after the first papers of quantum mechanics had appeared it was an exciting and exhilarating time there was a gathering of pretty young men working on the new methods it was hard for me to keep abreast of them it seems if some of them were a little impatient with the professor I recall the collaboration with you thoroughly enjoyable I have looked into the volume containing all the doctor's thesis made in my department and find your papers content theory in German I now have considerable difficulty reading this very condensed account of your considerations and I have the suspicion that even then 37 years ago I hadn't followed all your reasons later we wrote a paper together about quantum mechanics quantum theory of molecules which has been put into my collected papers when you left Goettingen you were so kind as to give me an old valuable book of Lagrange which I still have this has survived all upheavours evolution, war, immigration and so on and I'm glad it's still in my library it represents very well your attitude to science which comprehends it as a part of the general intellectual development in the course of human history since that day in 1926 I haven't seen you again and when I have remained in the narrow domain of university life you've taken a leading part in great historical events I followed your public career with deep interest and sympathy and only because you probably and only because you proved to be a leader of men and the most efficient administrator but because I felt that you were burdened with a responsibility almost too heavy for a human being but this is not the occasion to enter into these questions for nearly for many years now you've been back in academic life and pure as such and have again been successful may there be many happy and successful years in store for your Max Bond goodness me thank you so much girls thank you so much you couldn't do it better I can remember him quite vividly in all his various incarnations thank you that's so extraordinary to hear that and so many things that we've been talking about this morning I'm so struck by that phrase I write with interest and sympathy extraordinary so the idea that from not so very far away he could really see the burden that was placed on Oppenheimer as a scientist and also to Angus' point about being a leader that he was obviously very good Erica thank you so much can I just add one thing that you said which was very striking that Max Bond refused to work on the bomb there were many scientists who did refuse to work on the bomb we hear the stories about those who worked on it but in fact it's not true that all scientists worked on the bomb many did not and yet 100,000 did it's just a bewildering isn't it not 100,000 scientists 100,000 people administrators nothing's changed I wonder what that makes you feel extraordinary honour to have you here sir and to hear that letter is that the Oppenheimer that you recognise I'm aware that Gus is rather frighteningly is going to see the show this afternoon yeah it's an incredible thing to hear I think one of the the difficult the one of the challenges about writing this play was that so many of these characters and many of these scientists because of the historical importance have started to make the transition from fact into myth yes and this story has been told before in different ways in operas in films in TV shows and what I've written is not a documentary it is the retelling of that myth and and so it's a fine line of trying to do justice and pay respect to the real life characters that they were and also to find out what it is about them and their roles in the story that resonates with humanity at large and finding that balance between fact and myth is hopefully what I've managed to do I was just going to add because of course Tom is modest and can't say this about his own work but it was very striking for me to hear Mr Bourne describe that balance between the sort of combination, odd combination of shyness and arrogance which I absolutely think is in the play and it's an unusual combination and something hard to convey so that was very striking to hear it's interesting I wonder whether we think it's odd because we sort of polarised our heroes when in fact a combination of Americans, shyness can be quite a helpful way to get things done but another question sorry somebody at the front had their hand up yes sir one of the things that's sort of going through the initial discussion was the probably inextricable link between scientific development and the political environment and at this point that some scientists refused to work on the bomb many of us didn't which to me plays to this point about the inevitability of progress of whatever is there to be discovered will be discovered it's just a matter of time and that the most scary aspect of any development is where you get a perfect alignment between political interests and scientific development when the scientists themselves may not always know where they're going because it's curiosity, it's intellectual stimulation development and sometimes when they get to a destination they become very frightened by what they've developed that you can't unknow what you then know and I just wondered whether we have any sense whether the sort of political world today is a different world when you look back at some military historians argue that there wouldn't have lost a million men in defeating Japan in the Second World War and that actually the reasons for dropping the bomb were nothing to do with winning the war were everything to do with establishing the principle that the atomic bomb worked and creating fear in the rest of the world to leave America in a primary superpower race I don't know the answer to that but I'm just interested in this sort of political scientific kind of function For those of you who didn't hear the question I won't repeat it all but a really interesting summing up of the intertwining of the political world and atmosphere into which these scientific developments found themselves I'm going to come to Alec first actually given that you write about science now and indeed in the context of our news and our political and our literary environment do you think it's changed? vastly do you think that we are that science is bound up with politics in the way that it was then and has been ever since? Absolutely In the day to day in terms of how you get your money you have to predict as a scientist what your research will be useful for even if you don't actually end up doing what you said you're going to do with that money I mean that's probably an in-joke for scientists more than anyone else but yes capital P politics absolutely look at America the greatest country in the world for science but weirdly polarised when it comes to things like climate change or stem cell research or those sorts of things the UK number two in the world of science but as every government will tell you we do great impact with our small amounts of money has less political interference although that's changing somewhat of late as Government society decide where the money's going to be focused so we win a Nobel Prize a few years ago in Graphene and so all the money seems to be going to Graphene without anyone really realising where that should be going or how it should be organised there's a lot of political interference with science I mean interaction with science and that's a good thing one of the advisers to this pledge on Butterworth he writes talks very eloquently over the last few years of becoming politicised i.e realising how politics works and being able to interact with it in a way that gets funding essentially and all scientists have to be interacting with these things there's a point about controversial type science a few years ago scientists in Holland and the US genetically modified the flu virus to H5N1 avian flu virus to make it infectious between people it's a very dangerous virus in birds but it's very violent in people if you get it 50% of people seem to die but it can't spread between people so it can't produce a pandemic but they mutated it in the genetic code of this thing to make it transmit between people and the US security services immediately shut that research down which said you can't publish this work in anywhere you cannot publish it because terrorists will take this work and do something with it at all level of conversation that might sound terrifying but as these scientists pointed out number one the whole point of science is to be open you have to publish your research because a that's how you get your money in the future and QDOS and scientists are nothing if not seekers of QDOS to be honest where's my credit coming from is what always they're asking it's not about what do I discover about the universe how do I fit into the REF frameworks of next university cycles and things that's number one but number two it's actually quite hard to engineer things and make this stuff happen engineering is very difficult the ideas might be easy but the engineering is difficult so for two years there was a moratorium and eventually they did publish pretty much all of their research and their argument was if the pandemic is going to happen and we see with things like Ebola pandemics, epidemics can get out of control we need to be on the front foot we need to know what this virus might look like in future so we can already start preparing vaccines the first Ebola vaccine was flown out yesterday it's too late to be honest for this epidemic what we need is it takes years to develop these things so these conversations are always going on between security, politics and the applications of science and long may that continue Holy part of the point from my point of view is that this conversation itself is quite unusual in this particular funding climate because if you work in the arts one is always battling with the idea that we have to choose between science and the arts in higher education particularly so for another time but it does seem to be that we agree completely that we are completely bound up in the question of how do we see the role of science in our society Actually I think some scientists especially at the edge of theoretical physics and those sorts of things want you to see science a bit like art let's not have any purpose to this it's just this is the expression of human ability in the same way that someone writes a great opera or performs a wonderful aria or something or writes a great play this is what human minds are capable of and to hell with everything else or at least it exists now let's talk about it your point about the research of the flu virus thank you very much, fascinating answer we have time I'm afraid for one more question and I will say only this when I start to get brutal if we don't leave the stage on time then you won't be able to see Oppenheim this afternoon so one final question I shall try and scout oh the lady there has been trying to get my attention thank you what an excellent question well Tommy is actually young is the first answer no Michael Billington makes me a little younger in the review I actually am it's quite interesting but not for the year it's a very good question and I think we've alluded again to the production some of you have seen there are a lot of young men and women portrayed and I think the women very brilliantly I have to say very hard to do in a story that seemingly is about men but young people therefore in the company how much has thought about young voices been part of making the production Tom I think when we came to cast the play one of the discussions that me and Angus had was very much that we wanted to have the characters on stage as close to the cast as close to the actual ages of the of the people they're representing because there's something quite shocking about this about how youthful they all were and Oppenheim was in 1939 when the play begins Oppenheim's 35 and yes so that was very important to me and to Angus when we were casting yes there's a youthful vigour in the play and that's carried through in the enthusiasm of how the scientists go about their business and there's a moment about half way through at one when the first time we see General Leslie Groves and William Gammonara walks on stage and suddenly there's an adult in the room and it's quite powerful there's quite a strong sense isn't there that results in that moment that actually the scientists of quite a range of ages have a child-like playfulness in their experimentation and that's very captivating and when we think of plays like Copenhagen of course they are rather more staid in their approach to the audience so for us at the ROC it's wonderfully inviting to a younger audience but Angus what's it been like for you having again quite a young cast and their response to telling this story yeah that's interesting I mean I became quite fixated on it we did a workshop with some brilliant actors and one in particular was very very good and I wouldn't have him because he was I said well no he's clearly 40 it's too old I mean I grew up in the environment where I studied we were around a lot of these people how have they I mean it's brilliant having a young company like this it's brilliant having some senior figures in it as well William and Vince it's a way you do like as an audience I think it's nice to feel everybody's represented it helps but it is relatively Jack Holden's particularly good they're all particularly good but he plays Wilson he's a fascinating character who went on to build Fermilab and I don't know because you can't generalise but their engagement with it is extraordinary the way they've John sat on two nights ago John Butterworth watched them writing these equations at and he said to me in the interval well yeah they're all right he actually said plausible cos that's what scientists you know plausible and Dave Walk is my other tutor said well yeah cos I provided them John they're all from Edward Della's paper and they just they've really really engaged with it and I'm sure more senior actors would too but the energy where you tell them that they're all going to have to learn these incredibly complicated equations fantastic 22-23 year old actors or Jamie Wilkes is brilliant he has to write one thing whilst saying another both on the subject of nuclear physics and he said it's going to take me a few days but I will be able to write one thing on the blackboard whilst I'm saying a completely different thing about science so that's the fun of it and fun is a very important word and perhaps quite a good way to end that actually if we are to tell the stories the utmost seriousness of purpose and provoking of debates such as this it's very important that we engage an audience and that there is something to really relish and enjoy and slightly fool the eye and I don't know whether the panel have any final comments on this or something else but for me is something delightful about not seeing a play about science where everyone's terribly earnest about the science all the time I'm actually really thrilled by the science excited by it that you talked earlier on about the importance of remembering how young they were I've nothing to add I've just got one question was Oppenheimer actually left handed? He was ambidextrous we do know so John's left handed this is what it's been like so the first thing that happens is he writes his name on a blackboard with his left hand because John's left handed and we immediately turn around and Alex sitting at the back and the staff director had to go off and find out and he was ambidextrous there we are what a brilliant final question little insight in the production fantastic thank you all very much being a very patient and fascinating audience and thank you so much to my panel to Frank, to Erika, to Tom to Alok and to Angus for being here so early on a Saturday morning I hope for those of you who see this afternoon you really enjoy the show thank you