 Hello everybody. Thank you so much for coming to the panel. My name is Annette. I'm a sophomore here at Cal. I'm studying film and art practice. In my free time, I like to volunteer with the UC Rally Committee and we get to host a ton of really fun spirit events for students on campus and also introduce all the lovely panelists that you're about to hear from. Before we get started on the panel, I want to make sure to thank all of our generations of donors for all of their contributions to the university and the opportunities that they give all of us students here. And then now to introduce the panelists. We have Katherine Carson who's the chair and professor of history at UC Berkeley. She is a specialist in the history of 20th century physics including its cultural, social, and political contexts. She co-edited a volume of papers about Oppenheimer re-appraising Oppenheimer's centennial studies and reflections that was presented during a 2004 conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth. Next we have Yasunori Nomura, a physics professor and director of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics. Professor Nomura works on theoretical physics, in particular theoretical particle physics, cosmology, quantum gravity, and quantum information. His current research focus includes black hole information problem, holographic descriptions of space time, and multiverse cosmology. And then finally we have Carl van Biber, a professor of nuclear engineering and the executive associate dean of the College of Engineering. Professor van Biber studies basic and applied nuclear science, particle astrophysics, and accelerator science and technology. He spent 25 years conducting nuclear energy research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. So thank you, everybody, for coming. Good afternoon. This is clearly an only at Berkeley panel. And it's wonderful to see you all here today. Can I first get a show of hands? Who has seen the Oppenheimer movie? Okay, that's about 80%. And then there's the 20% remnant who haven't seen it yet, but hopefully that will be an inspiration to you coming out of this afternoon. It's wonderful also to have this panel today. Robert Oppenheimer's years at UC Berkeley were absolutely accrucible for him. They were critical moments in his life. And this campus and its larger setting, its environs were at the center of his life for a crucial decade and more. So to start off, let me set the scene a bit for you. So you probably know that Oppenheimer was the brilliant child of a New York City highly cultivated family in the turn of the century era. He skipped grades in elementary school. He spent his high school years looking at literature and languages and arts and science. And as a college student at Harvard, he studied chemistry and then physics. And he followed that muse on to graduate school in Europe for his PhD. That was what one did back then. So he landed in the discipline of physics at a time of revolutionary change when the scientific revolution around quantum mechanics was really coming into its own. This was what he made his own specialty, applying quantum mechanics to molecules, to the nucleus, to stars. And he also took it further, trying to figure out how to generalize quantum mechanics to something called quantum field theory. That was the frontier of his discipline in the years that he was at Berkeley. So he learned not just to apply quantum mechanics, not just calculate, but also think. Think quantum mechanically. Think in this deeply abstract and counterintuitive way that modern physics has at its core. That became one of his signature strengths that he carried with him after he moved beyond simply the work of a theorist. Now you're probably used to thinking of theoretical physics as a central discipline in modern intellectual life. And as a historian, I'm here to say it wasn't always that way. In the 1920s, when Oppenheimer chose his life's work, theoretical physicists were really curious creatures, very few in numbers, and largely removed from the world. That would change fast over the course of basically those two decades, between 1925 with quantum mechanics and 1945, the end of the Second World War. So Oppenheimer's life unfolded in the midst of that transformation, and in important ways he helped drive it at Berkeley. Because when the Berkeley Physics Department made the decision in 1929 to hire him, it hired the best trained, most intellectually adventurous theoretical physicists in the United States. And Oppenheimer set out here at Berkeley to build a school of theoretical physics to cultivate the next generation here in California. And he did. He built the best school of theoretical physics hands down in the United States. His success marked the department here at Berkeley, it marked the campus, and permanently it stayed even after he departed for Los Alamos, and then after the war to the East Coast corridors of power. Oppenheimer is at our center today, but he and his colleague Ernest Lawrence were a pair. You know that if you saw the film. Lawrence, whose name is on many things around the campus, was an experimentalist in nuclear physics. And for historical context it's worth saying that the neutron, one of the two basic nuclear particles, was only discovered in 1932. Within a year or two it had become a kind of probe experimentally into the nucleus, and within seven years it had been deployed to discover nuclear fission. And the story of nuclear fission and of nuclear weapons unfolds from there so fast in time. So let's round this out before we start our panel by saying something about the style of work and the form of life that Oppenheimer unfolded here at Berkeley in the 1930s especially. His scientific work was collaborative, pointed, directed at the hard problems, not always successful. And he landed in the bay at a time when much else was in ferment here, at the same time as he was devoting himself to theoretical physics and his students, he got engaged with contemporary left-wing politics in the bay area in the 1930s that included the fight against fascism in Nazi Germany and Spain, and also struggles for economic justice and labor in California. And as you probably know if you've seen the film, the Communist Party was part of that setting and he would pay for that during the McCarthy years after World War II. So Oppenheimer during his time at Berkeley immersed himself in the culture of the bay area, the life of the Berkeley faculty, intellectual currents across the university, this broad liberal arts institution that fed his roving mind. So with that as background, I want to start with some questions to my fellow panelists here. Let's begin with a question about science. This might be a question to start with Carl, I think, given your background. I've mentioned Ernest Lawrence as well as Robert Oppenheimer. And they were here at Berkeley together. How did they interact these two twin figures? Thank you, Catherine. This is a very interesting question. And so much of this early history is a story about just amazing timing and alignment of the stars, the fact that you had not just one, but these two figures appearing on the scene at the same time in Berkeley in the 1920s. Just to complete I think what Catherine sort of intimated, the U.S. at that time, both in theory and in experiment, was a backwater. There were some singular lights in both cases, but Europe was where all the developments were happening, the special relativity, the general relativity, the breaking of quantum mechanics in 1925, all in Europe. And you had here a remarkable thing happen in just a space of a few years in the late 1920s. First was Lawrence, who was purely an American phenomenon, very, very different from Oppenheimer. I think this is what makes the story quite interesting. Grew up in South Dakota, sort of good sturdy Lutheran stock, parents were school teachers, got his degrees at South Dakota in Minnesota, and did his PhD at Yale in 1925. And at this point it was recognized that he was going to be the leading light in the U.S. experimentally. He was all of a sudden a really hot commodity, got a National Research Council Fellowship, but he did not use it as normally people would do to travel to Europe. He stayed at Yale, and then all of a sudden was very much, many universities were contending for him, but he actually came out to UC Berkeley and became a faculty member here, I think in 1928. And he was already beginning to have ideas, the gestation of the cyclotron. It's hard to pin down exactly, but between 1929 and the conceptualization of it in 1932, this was a tool which was really going to revolutionize nuclear science. He was a very sort of a steamy person, very proper, I think it was reputed, he never was heard to say a foul word in his entire life, although he was a person of a very strong personality. And began immediately with the invention of the cyclotron, these grand visions of building, and as he executed bigger and bigger and bigger cyclotrons, the first one fit in the palm of your hand, it was invented literally 200 yards away in the physics building on the fourth floor. And all of a sudden there was an 11 inch, a 27 inch, a 37 inch, 60 inch and 184 inch cyclotron. If you drove up University Avenue, UC, on the hill there, this curious orange dome, they kept the original building, it's a historical building, there's some modern light source in there now. That was this 45,000 ton cyclotron, which was the largest in the world at that time. Then you have Oppenheimer, who came, went to Europe, got his degree at Goettingen, 1927 under Max Born, he brought the new physics back to the U.S. And again he was just on a trajectory, he was the leading U.S. theoretical physicist at the time. He was given this kind of jewel professorship, something I don't think would be done today, he was allowed to split his time between Berkeley and Caltech. And I think he arrived here in 29, I think Lawrence's presence must have been part of the attraction for him here. And they made an interesting pair, you had a person who was already very operating in the spirit of corporate physics, organizing a well run laboratory with grand divisions. And this Bohemian, this came from a sort of upper liberal Jewish family in New York City. One photograph that is blazing in my mind, it says it all, it comes from I think the 30s when they would hang out together at Oppenheimer's, where they went, the Oppenheimer family went for summers in the mountains of New Mexico. It shows the two of them in the same camera frame. And there's this very tall, spare looking Lawrence, very well groomed with spats. And then you had Oppenheimer slouching against the car with his hair all tousled. The omnipresent cigarette is not looking at the camera. And you realize that this was kind of the odd couple. And they really worked very well together. And I think part of the attraction was their differences. I think even of the six children of Lawrence, one of them I think he named in Robert's honor. The beginning of the fissure began to be evident. The one thing that Lawrence was increasingly annoyed with early on was his Oppenheimer's left wanderings. He had none of this business of people trying to unionize the people in his laboratory and warned people, and particularly Oppenheimer, to leave politics aside and to focus on science. Which of course, that didn't happen. And that set up the story to evolve from there. But anyway, let me pitch it back to Catherine and Yasinoro. That's a wonderful grounding for actually, I think, a question for you, which is, what do you see as the key contributions that Oppenheimer made in science during this period? Were they solely tied to being here at Berkeley with Lawrence, or did he have his own set of questions to pursue? Yeah, it's kind of difficult. In fact, I'm kind of, I feel like a bit mispraced in the sense that if you see the movie, this movie is not about really literary physics. Of course, story about a physicist, and then story around that time, and politics and a human drama, and so on. And I give you some sense of what he did while he was at Berkeley. That was Oppenheimer-Sneider thing. That's the collaboration with the person called Sneider. That was a big thing. I will talk about it. But then I did it in a previous panel, and then one person sent me a long email, no, Oppenheimer's work is born Oppenheimer. So let me start from, born Oppenheimer is probably one of the most famous things about his work. And that was done when he was still in Europe. So that's the beginning of the quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics was weird theory, like some single particle can exist multiple locations at the same time in parallel worlds or something. That's the one way of phrasing it. In fact, you have precise math, you can compute the probability of these particles floating around in many places, but you can't even phrase that thing. The people were really having trouble of understanding these things. This big monster, it's called quantum mechanics, was new at that time. And to test that idea, that theory with this experiment, and we needed to compute the process to compare with the experiment, one of the standard way of doing computation in a very complicated system was developed by Max Born in Germany and Oppenheimer. It's called Born Oppenheimer approximation of the thing. That was a major thing. But it's interesting that he's so famous, but his work was not like, to be honest, like world changing, like Albert Einstein, or Niez Bohr around that time, if you have heard the name, Werner Heisenberg. And of course, it's a top-rated physicist and top-rated work. Probably his strengths was rather like teaming up the people and really building a group and really starting the project which seemed impossible and make it really, that's including Manhattan Project or even building the quantum group in US that was here, of course. But Born Oppenheimer was probably the best known at that time when he came to Berkeley. And in movie, it's very difficult to explain because this is technical, like way to do approximation of a quantum mechanics zone. In movie, it's one word, molecules. As you said, like, oh, I know you work with molecules. This was Born Oppenheimer, so I wouldn't repeat it because otherwise it's dangerous. I probably keep talking at 58 hours and you probably won't be able to go back. So I will stop it here, but that's the key contribution when he came back to US, came to Berkeley. But here, he did something very interesting. To me, it's very, very, very interesting. It's affecting my research even now. That's called Oppenheimer and Snyder and also some other person. It's something called Black Hole. That's what he essentially discovered. The solution described in Black Hole was there before. It's called Carl Schwarzschild in Germany, it's 19, right after Einstein wrote down the general activity. But the meaning of that solution was not clear. He showed that when the star used up all nuclear energies, the star is bound using nuclear energy. Of course, nuclear physics was also new, but then the way star bonds is that if matter cramps and then, of course, matter attracted with each other by gravity. So if nothing happens, if no nuclear or anything, then the star must collapse because matter attracts. Gravity is universally attractive, no repulsion. So it's an attraction, attraction, attraction, it's becoming collapsing, collapsing, collapsing, smaller and smaller and smaller. But usually that's not what happens in sun, for example, because the sun wants to collapse, but at some point it's a collapse, and density becomes so high and the temperature becomes so hot, so the nuclear reactions start happening. And then energy was liberated, and this nuclear energy have a pressure, and that stops collapsing. And if nuclear energy was used up, and usually what happens is that now the sun starts contracting again, but that contraction is again stopped by some other thing called electron pressure, degeneracy pressure, and usually something's stopping collapsing. It doesn't happen to really to go to every material, go to the point. That doesn't happen. We don't see it. The chair is not collapsing to a point, and the desk is not collapsing to a point. But he said that in certain circumstances, suppose the original star was so big massive, and then he used up all the materials, energies and nuclear energies, and degeneracy pressure is not enough to stop, it's possible that all the material is really, really, really collapsing, nothing to stop, just the gravity make it collapse into a point. All the material, big material, composing entire planet, sun and so on, stars, it's really collapsing to a point. And he really computed that that can happen theoretically, and if that happens, the density is so high that nothing, gravity is so strong that nothing can escape from certain region around that point. So we cannot in principle even see inside, because even light cannot come to you. Light try to escape to the point, and then come back. Nobody can see certain region. It's essentially a totally different region from the rest of the world. It's called Black Hole right now, and in fact, it's observationally discovered only, I think, in this century. So that was really so strange object, the result of general relativity. That was not necessarily direct, I think, interaction with Ernest Lawrence, because it's so theoretical, but so he's doing his own thing here as well, and then it's very imaginary and very original, and it's even affecting my research, and that's the one thing I would pick, and I picked in a previous panel, and then somebody sent me a message that that was wrong pick, but anyway, I just repeat that anyway. And then that's the one he did here. So next is a question for both of you. Raise your hand. Would you have been surprised that Oppenheimer was then chosen to lead Los Alamos, given what you know about his background, his work style? Is it a surprising thing that that was who General Groves lit on to lead the project on the mesa of Los Alamos? I want to hear from both of you, and then I'll add some thoughts after I hear from you. Who goes first? I don't know much, but maybe I could go up. Okay. Just to my own background as an experimental nuclear physicist, I've been a junkie on all the literature of the Manhattan Project, and there's so much good literature out there on Oppenheimer, and the larger troika of Oppenheimer Lawrence and Edward Teller, who plays an interesting role in this overall story as well. Even to this day, and of course, the person whose call this was was General Leslie Groves, who I think is an overlooked figure in the overall Manhattan Project. He was, at the time, I think he was appointed as a Brigadier General just when he was appointed to run the Manhattan Project, of which Los Alamos was a very singular part, but by no means the whole thing. The overall Manhattan Project was a staggering enterprise where the US government literally opened up its checkbook without any limitation, and in the space of 30 or 32 months built up these incredibly massive facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for the separation of uranium, gaseous diffusion plants, the calutrons, the electromagnetic separation plants. These were buildings a mile long, and they were created almost overnight, and then there were actors at Hanford and Washington for creating plutonium. Groves was an Army Corps of Engineers. His previous accomplishment was he was the person that built the Pentagon, which may still be the world's largest building in terms of square footage. He was a master builder and a great planner and project manager, but I think he also understood people in a way that people did not appreciate. Here was Oppenheimer, who had a very tainted past. Even historians to this day argue whether or not he was a communist or not. This is still a matter of contention. His brother Frank certainly was, who I had actually had the opportunity to meet many years ago. He was the person who created the exploratory in San Francisco. His wife was a communist. He hung around with a communist. He took part in... Whether or not he was a full member or not is unclear, but he was a problematic character, and yet Groves recognized in him the ability to grasp all aspects of this very complex multi-physics, multidisciplinary problem of creating an atomic bomb. He also began to emerge, I think, this kind of magnetism personality-wise that could bring all these people that were fleeing from Europe over to work with him. On the other hand, you could have said, well, Lawrence was already a person that showed a kind of a masterful ability to organize. He was sort of the consummate corporate person. Arthur Compton, who ran the metallurgical laboratory in Chicago, another part of the Manhattan Project, was a person that many people said should have been the director of the project. In the end, it was the right decision, but it was... Even to this day, you could sort of say, what did Groves see at the time, and how was he able to see past all the problems to say, this is the person who uniquely should be... To me, it's a bit of a mystery, but go ahead. Me? Okay. All right. I don't know. I'm stealing the phrase from moving, but which I watched finally last night, but... No, it was cool. It was really, if you haven't seen it, you watched it. I mean, you should. It's very great. This is like building Secret City to work on this project, because it's a wartime project, and so, you know, Secret Things, Secret City, building from zero in the ranch, Neo Ranch, I guess, and New Mexico, and nothing's there. The building, all the city, just for scientists, bringing all the scientists all over the world, not from Germany, of course, and then he's a boss, and so, you know, it's a theoretical thesis, as you said, curious, weird people, set of weird people, you know, he must have been excited with that. I mean, and then he was the possibility of, say, being the director of that, right? He must have offered at some point, and then, yeah, I feel like he just said, yes, I mean, no other choice. I mean, later in life, of course, he must have contemplated the consequence of this bomb and so on, and so on, but at that point, my guess, simple guess, maybe wrong, but my simple guess is, wow, that's exciting, yes, just do it. That's, you know, the idea came from where I don't, I'm not really, that's probably communication between him and Leslie and then many people, but when it becomes possibility, I think he must have pushed like crazy. That's my guess. One thing that really came out in between both of your comments is also, Carl said it's a multi-physics problem. Designing a nuclear weapon is not going and taking existing blueprints and going and building. It's actually many different kinds of physics and chemistry that are involved that are cutting edge. If you think about building, say, the plutonium weapon, that's designing and constructing a weapon out of an element that did not exist on this earth in any measurable quantity before the early 1940s, discovered here at Berkeley too. So all of this was cutting edge science in secrecy, in the context of the incredible pressures of the Second World War. And so the challenge of being able to see across all of those disciplines and somehow pick out the crucial problem that needs to be solved at each point in time and bring the group together around it, thinking of it only at this point as a technical challenge racing the clock, because you remember probably, if you've seen the film, that the original concern that motivated the secret crash project and the bomb laboratory at Los Alamos was the concern that Nazi Germany would figure out before the United States and its allies how to build a nuclear weapon first. So it was a completely open question. The lines of communication were shut down. The refugees from Nazi Germany who came because they were expelled or saw the promise here in the United States were motivated hugely by the threat of what was going on in the Third Reich. So all of that pressure comes together at Los Alamos on a scientific problem whose solution is unclear. All that's known is that the clock is ticking. So the project has its own internal dynamics that Oppenheimer also becomes a crucial piece in managing, particularly as you get closer and closer to understanding the true feasibility, especially of the uranium weapon by roughly 1944 at the same time that it becomes clear as you as the Allied forces cross into Germany, that there is no German nuclear weapons project of any significance. And so at that point, the laboratory pivots and it's no longer a weapon that's imagined to be dropped on Berlin. Everyone continues working with very few exceptions because Oppenheimer is their charismatic leader. And then it pivots and points to the war in the Pacific and towards its use on Japan. So Oppenheimer is the motivator and the charismatic leader through the scientific and the political concerns at that point. And he keeps all of the scientists on the project moving forward with the results that we all know. So one of the things I think to come back to Carl's original point about Leslie Groves is yes, certainly Groves recognized the intellectual caliber and the leadership capacity, the leadership charisma of this man. But he also recognized that Oppenheimer was vulnerable because of his political background. And one of the things that as a historian I learned through the film was just the intelligence with which Groves understood that he could keep Oppenheimer under his thumb if needed, that I think the combination of Oppenheimer's ambition, the dynamics of his marriage, and the aspiration to do something world transformative sort of melded in his mind. And I think Groves understood that in him. You remember, Lawrence got his Nobel Prize at the end of the 1930s. Oppenheimer didn't. So what would be his legacy? In some sense, he made a choice. So with that, I think I want to segue a little bit towards the implications of scientific progress and the responsibilities of scientists. Question that the film raises very, very prominently and one that scientists have struggled with from the Los Alamos time forward. Do you think that Oppenheimer is a useful figure to think with? When imagining how scientific progress can lead towards outcomes that were completely unenvisioned. And how should a scientist bring that into their own thinking about their life's career? Would you like to? Yeah, I think that question is pretty relevant. It's actually serious one, right? I mean, even nowadays. So how much scientists should be responsible, or at least should be committed after certain technology or something was developed? It's not obvious. Of course, a final decision must come from politicians in a good sense, namely the people who are kind of selected by people at large. But then of course, scientists cannot say, in my opinion, it's like, okay, this I kind of developed this atomic bomb or something. I don't know how this is used. I mean, it's not my stuff. And that's one possible way of thinking, but I don't think, right, my personal opinion. And then that's what the story of Oppenheimer is giving us still. It's probably not maybe not the same magnitude in a sense. As you said, that that project was really unique, right? The project of science, big project of science, the power, nuclear power, human even didn't know that that kind of thing exists, like 10, 20 years before the project, maybe 30 years. And this is a project of the science, the project of the military thing, and then a huge political thing. It's all done in secret at the time of World War II. It's probably not the same level, even if it's quantum information or something which is related with national security nowadays. It's very important. But it's or cloning technology like CRISPR-Cas9 or something, we can change the genes to make up your own, you know, wanted child or something. What have to think about it is a very important subtle question. And scientists have to still be thinking about may not be the exactly same level of the thing like atomic bomb. But I think it's a very important thing. And nowadays, the story of Oppenheimer is extremely relevant for scientists and politicians, to everybody, I would say. If I can just riff on that a little bit. I think on the main scientists are people who do understand that they're creating technologies which are very often dual use. They can be for the good of humanity, for revolutions in medicine or what not, but can also be used for nefarious purposes as well. And many examples of this. I was a graduate student at MIT in the early 70s when recombinant DNA was developed. And I remember David Baltimore then at MIT, basically as a leading figure of the field, Nobel laureate, convened a moratorium for a while, getting the biologists together to discuss the implications of this. The same is happening today. A lot of the leading figures in AI are beginning to say, look, we need to tap the brakes, talk and advise the government here. On the main, though, that kind of conscience exerted by scientists and engineers sometimes is not by itself quite enough because there is such momentum when a technology gets rolling. It's like a big train and it's very, very difficult to stop. And I think as Freeman Dyson pointed out, his commentary on the Manhattan Project, at the time of VE Day, no one stopped working. I mean, they had a celebration. They just kept right on full bore. He said because the technology had so gripped them that it was at that time unstoppable. And then when it came time for the decision about the use, Dyson's comment was he said the president would have had to have been a man of steel to have said no at that point because the thing was moving with such incredible momentum, it was probably unstoppable. Maybe Catherine, you should throw in your own thoughts about this. My co-panelists know that I started out in theoretical physics in the 1980s, which was the end of the Reagan era before we knew that the Cold War was ending. Yeah. And at that point, the, the political, moral and ethical questions of what use young people's scientific talent should be used was front and center as we looked at the challenges around Star Wars around nuclear disarmament. And I remember at that time, personally as growing up in Washington, DC, thinking I was being coached, being trained to go into theoretical physics. And I expected sort of realized at the end of the 80s that that meant the path was open to the weapons laboratories. And it became very strangely personal at that point. It was actually one of the reasons that I chose in the early 90s to move in a different direction and became a historian of physics because these questions are very individual and personal. And at the same time, they play out against the backdrop of these world historical forces that none of us can necessarily shape or sometimes even understand. Knowing whether your scientific contributions will be used overall for the betterment of humanity, or for the creation of new catastrophes is, I think pretty much beyond any individual to say. So the place where this comes back from me now is, I now teach a course on the human context and ethics of data science and AI in Berkeley's amazing data science major, and walking the students through their own life choices, knowing that their own scientific work may escape their grasp. And yet, there's so so many of them are so fundamentally asking themselves, how can I do good with AI with machine learning with data science and to give them the chance to think through the experience of nuclear physicists at Los Alamos, and having Oppenheimer as a kind of stellar figure to think through becomes one of the exemplars that they can mirror and reflect their own experiences against. So in that sense, it sort of comes full circle. It's a decision that each of us who takes on specific expertise and often technical skill comes to grips with at different points in our career. And one of things that is very clear to me to tell my students is, I'm not as your professor, the one to tell you what's the right decision or the wrong decision. That's yours to work through. But it's one of the things that anyone who moves, I think this might be a moment to open it up to questions from the so we have two folks walking around. So you guys are bringing up AI and ethics and things like that. How are you thinking about people talking about a singularity? And what do we do about maintaining freshness and making sure that our young people are ahead of the game on all of this so that the ethics are in place. It's not being used to destroy humanity and that sort of thing. So did everyone hear the question? It's drawing that arc to contemporary concerns and in this case around AI, but I'm sure we could bring it back to CRISPR-Cas9 and other scientific developments. I don't think there is a way to ensure that the arc of scientific development will always bend towards good. I think that's something fundamental for everyone at work in this field and I think in particular for those who work in computing and AI disciplines where the work that you make, the tools that you build can be used far outside of laboratories where you have control over how it gets used. In that situation where there is no guarantee that all will turn out well, one of the things Berkeley has invested in is giving our students the tools to think about which directions they want to try to move. They can't control the outcomes and I think my concern is actually less about existential risk and the singularity and Skynet and much more about algorithmic decision-making tools that get used in ways that reinforce biases or the sort of removal of our own agency to shape our political discourse in an age of deep fakes. I think there's no way except moment by moment for those who have the technical capacities to think where am I making choices that could lead down a road that I don't want to encourage. They can't force other people away from it, but they can make choices of their own. Forces entirely beyond his control as a physicist. Also, we don't really know. In AI case, for example, the best scenario or something, one possible scenario is that AI is doing something for us. We don't have to do something that I can do, free up our time and spend more time on creative things. That's the kind of like as a tool, AI as a tool, that's the best kind of thing. The other one is that AI starts self-producing themselves and then tries to have a human and then take over like a carbon-based life and so on. They are self-reproducing and 10,000 years later, did you know that life was carbon-based before? Come on, it's true. So, and then evolution was something random thing from radioactive. I can't be true. I mean, we just have to, and that's, there are like a variety and the same for atomic bomb like could wipe out the world and then in the end that was not happening. So, probably what we have to do is keep watching and we really have to keep thinking and to try to use things in the right direction and we don't really know beforehand if everything could have happened like atomic bomb could have wiped out the earth and so far, fortunately, that was not the case in our universe. Hi, I have a question here. The film is particularly interesting to me, not only because my connection with Berkeley. I'm alum and I have two daughters. They're both current students of Berkeley. Also, my brother was a nuclear physicist working for Los Alamos National Lab for 20 years. So, my question is around how Oppenheimer was sort of mistreated later in his life, right? So, I guess he was mistreated partly or if not mainly because he's alleged connection with communism. And my question is that from your position, do you see that kind of situation could happen in the future to to scientists? I mean with, you know, for example, if the United States have political conflict with certain countries and so on. Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. There's no question that there was a real, you know, travesty of justice done to Oppenheimer and I think the case is made. Of course, you know, Louis Strauss and others really went after him. There was, you know, I think enormous prosecutorial misconduct there at his hearing. The rules were not at all fair. The unspoken thing, of course, was that, you know, the powers at that time were really pushing forward with the super project, the development of the hydrogen bomb, the thermonuclear weapon, a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb. And at which point, although Oppenheimer initially supported the research on it, at some point he said, no, we should at this point make an agreement with the Russians not to do this, with the Soviets, we should not do this. And that view was very unpopular and people found him inconvenient and it was important to kind of take him out of the inner circle of advising the government. And that was really, I think, the context which most people would agree upon. Of course, he did, was not his own best friend. I mean, his lapses and failures with the truth by today's standards with, you know, the current Department of Energy security policies for who is granted a clearance and who is not, remarkably consistent with the way it was 50 years ago or 70 years ago now. But I think today we would, you know, there are processes in place which would prevent that kind of, you know, egregious, you know, misconduct, judicial misconduct which happened in his case. You may be interested to know, and I think many academics know and people certainly in our business know, a very important event last year. It was after actually decades of similar attempts. Tom Mason, the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, led an effort, himself plus eight of his predecessors, the living directors of Los Alamos, wrote a letter to the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, a Berkeley faculty member, asking that the decision, the 1954 decision be vacated. I mean, obviously Oppenheimer's been dead since, you know, 50 some odd years. You can't restore his clearance, but they wanted the record to be made clear that, you know, he had been the victim of this, you know, judicial travesty. And she ultimately agreed with it. And if you read the letter of the directors and read, you know, the secretarial memorandum, they're both extraordinary documents. They're both of two or three pages long laying out the case, making clear that it is unclear today whether or not he would be granted a clearance or not based on his, you know, confabulation, particularly in the Huck and Chevalier case, but making it very clear that there was lack of process here. And I think they did the right thing. So in a sense, there has been some restoration of that, what I thought was a terrible deed. Especially given your admiration for his work in Berkeley on the black holes, do you, you know, Oppenheimer never got the Nobel Prize? Lawrence did? Do you think that was political or was he not as brilliant as the others? I mean, many people in a circle got a Nobel Prize, correct? Of course, Nobel Prize is just one of the prizes. And then a prize has a character, like, for example, like Stephen Hawking was like our, the superstar of our time did not get Nobel Prize. That's because nobody was usually given to some people, some work, not like as a person, but some particular work which really made things advance the world in a way that it can be really tested experimentally, very well, to the level that no doubt this is correct. And then, of course, Black Hole was discovered way, way later after he died. And given that, I don't think it's, to me, it may be totally political, and it's totally understandable that he did not Openheimer did not get the Nobel Prize and Lawrence did get the Nobel Prize. It's not, I think it's reasonable, that's my opinion, because Lawrence think really changed the world, by the way. The way we do, say particle physics and nuclear physics, and this is called accelerator nowadays, and cyclotone is one type of it, but the accelerator is the things we're doing. The biggest accelerator we have in Europe right now, like 27 kilometers, something, it's a huge thing, it's a couple of tens of billions that are project, he really created that kind of field, from the, essentially virtually from zero. And those are the things we get the Nobel Prize. Yes, Openheimer's work, a lot of things, a brilliant, but I don't, yeah, who knows, right? I mean, it's somebody's mind, and like mind of the committee members may be affected by political thing, like if this is a guy who developed the bomb, it's possible, but I think it's not just political, it's at least reasonable that he did not get the one. That's my view of personal opinion. In general, how do you think scientists view J. Robert Oppenheimer? How do we view him? Well, I think on the main, scientists view him very favorably, I think, and I think physicists, it kind of, it almost, you know, falls into the adulation. I think we also, you know, history, particularly the whole history of the Manhattan Project, is, you know, the book that the film was made on, American Prometheus, I think is well chosen because you could not see any element of modern human history that falls more perfectly into the template of a Greek tragedy. He's a, you know, a Greek tragic figure. You know, it was the sort of meteoric rise, and then the downfall, the seeds of which he bore within himself in many ways. He is a very complex character. If you read Gregory Hurkins' book, The Brotherhood of the Bomb, or is it Professor UC Santa Cruz, where he talks about the relationship of Edward Teller, Oppenheimer, and Lawrence, he makes the case that all of them were extremely brilliant people, and the bringing together of three of them really made something incredible happen in, you know, the 1940s, but they were all, they all had egos, egotistical, they were vain, they were complex characters, they all had faults, and I think when you begin to delve seriously into the history, you have to see the whole person, the whole Oppenheimer. On the whole, of course, he was a great figure, and we learned so much from him, but, you know, when you really begin to scratch below the surface, like all human beings, he's a very complex, fallible person. Catherine is the best person, I think, to, or? Yeah, I think, the scientist views, I think it's a favorably, it's a pretty great scientist, genuinely, and also he did a really great achievement, and, but there are, like you say, scientists, a lot of different types of scientists, right? Like, one of the scientists, which surrounding me nowadays, like, theoretical physics, like, oh, this equation, I found this equation, that's great, and then some voice somewhere, oh, that's sad, by the way, this equation is, all right, I mean, this, really just cares science, and just as science, and that's, that's funny, you might think that's good, the scientists must be like that, the pure scientist, and they're just a science, but, and that's great, I also value those scientists, that's really great, I probably want to be one of those scientists, but then, if everybody's like that, it's dangerous, people can use how to come with science, and scientists don't care at all, and, and the scientists also have to go to the commission, and so on, and really see what's going on, and how that technology is used, and to follow up those things, and those scientists are also needed, and talking to politicians, talking to a general public, and Oppenheimer is of the latter type, and those persons, those people are needed, and he is a master of those things, he did, I think he did his best, and we, I think, view favorably. I'll add only one small piece, Oppenheimer, as you probably know, was a polymathic intellectual, that was a mantle that he bore also with a fair amount of pride, his, his capacity to read Sanskrit in the original, his occupation with poets like John Dunn, so this sense that a scientist is not narrowly confined to technical work, but instead ranges across the entire scope of human intellectual experience, is a model that many aspiring scientists may hold to, and is then increasingly under pressure as the actual work of a scientific career forces specialization, forces going in depth into one thing, and knowing it better than anyone else in the world. So it's a tension, and Oppenheimer came to embody that tension in a way it was enabled by his time at Berkeley, and his access to the great intellectual treasures of this place, but he is also a kind of inspiration of broad knowledge and political reflection, and in that sense I think, I don't want to speak from my other colleagues, but I see some of that range and breadth in them as well. We have one final question. Thank you. I kind of got the impression that Oppenheimer did not treat security seriously, and that maybe I'm combining this with Feynman's recollections of the Manhattan Project, but he almost had open ridicule towards security procedures. Would you agree with that? Let's see. Well, of course, Feynman himself was a rascal. He used to play games with the security people down there, because he knew how to crack safe, so he would actually open up safes where classified information was kept and would leave love notes to the security people overnight, and it drove them crazy, so you have to take anything that Feynman says with a grain of salt. What has come out by serious scholarship, and certainly after the opening of the KGB files in 1992? Catherine, I think, can speak much more authoritatively to this. When you look at the Soviet side, there was no evidence of any malfeasance in his side. He was certainly not an agent of the Soviets. They did try to recruit him. He rebuffed them at every phase. Whether or not he treated security loosely or not, you have to remember back at that time, the whole thing about classified information and what's called SRD these days, secret restricted data needs to be handled, they were all making it up. It wasn't that long ago, during certainly the time when I was a postdoc at Berkeley, down on campus, there were faculty members here, the old-timers, who still had classified information in safes in their office. Finally, the DOE finally said, okay, enough, that stuff is done over at Livermore. Please give us your safes back. The secret meeting where they actually had the conception of how an implosion weapon might work was done in the building over here. It was a predecessor of the physics building. It was kind of a wooden shack. So they did the best they could, but there were conversations happening on railroad trains, on an airplanes, that would not be allowed to happen today among colleagues. But I don't think, I don't get the impression that they did anything that flaunted the regulations at the time, but I think Catherine made no more than I do. I'm sure that I don't, but one thing I would only add in closing is that connecting across scientific disciplines can't be done in secret silos. And that was one of the things that Oppenheimer recognized and defended and finally achieved at Los Alamos, recognizing that there was actually going to be no way to solve the scientific problem without the ability for scientists to speak freely with each other across their lines of the project. So I think like with Carl, I would not call that a breach of security practices. I would call it intelligent management of a cutting edge project under the evolving security regime of the Second World War. So with that, I believe you would like us to call it close. This was a great presentation. Thank you so much. I don't know. I just, because I wanted to say this and it's a missed opportunity, but I think this, all these Oppenheimer stories, something was very encouraging to me. I mean, I'm now the member of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics. Thank you for some of you who supported that group. And that is the group Oppenheimer formed. And 80 years later, I am directing the group. I am from Japan, where the country he bombed in. And I'm very encouraged by all those stories. I'm very optimistic about amazing. I was really like, I am now as the leader of this group and Hiroshima and Saki from Japan, I think. Yeah, I think. Well, you know, he's had just an elbow operation, but the best baseball player in America now is Japanese. Shohei Otani is the best since Babe Ruth, so anyway.