Reading, writing and arithmetic

Maths, 'Oppenheimer' and the 'two cultures'

When I was 17 I met a guy called Dan at a Woodentops gig in Kingston. He didn’t turn out to be a significant figure in my life, but I’ve never forgotten him. Because it was after asking Dan which A Levels he was studying that I discovered, to my complete astonishment, that it was possible to take an A Level in mathematics.

When I said ‘which subjects are you doing’ and Dan said ‘blah, blah and maths’ I thought he was making a joke, like claiming to do an A level in Play-Doh. I gave a light titter in response, as girls do when they’re trying to be nice. Then he looked at me as if to say ‘why are you making that noise’ and I realised he was serious. I said something like: ‘Maths? You can do an A Level in maths? Are you sure?’, as though Dan was so dumb he might be confused about which A Levels he was taking, which understandably pissed him off. This led to a lively exchange in which some of my fundamental misconceptions were corrected.

Until this happened I had thought that maths was a functional life skill and that O Level was where it ended, like the ‘Needlework’ I’d been forced to do when I could more profitably have been picking my nose. I couldn’t conceive of what A Level maths could possibly involve. All I could visualise was really big sums: calculators confiscated at gunpoint, protractors the size of circus stilts, long division going on for days. ‘Have you carried that 8 yet, Steve?’ ‘Not yet Joe, I'm dehydrated after doing the underlining with this ten-foot ruler.’ 

I’m not proud of past-me; I’m just relating a thing that literally happened and that forces its way into my head every six months or so, as is the way with moments of acute personal dumbass-ery. Most recently I was reminded of it when I read a piece by Oliver Johnson – Bristol University’s Head of Maths – about what mathematicians actually do all day (in which I was pleased to see that some of it does involve really big sums).

Why was I like this? I was toweringly ignorant, which is a given when you’re 17. But I didn’t hate or fear maths; I’d got a B at O Level, which is, like, an 8 in new money. (That is a cheap crack, and I apologise.) I had, though, developed a marked antipathy towards the mathematical sciences. My school forced us to do at least one science, but in the taster lessons the physics teacher talked about literally nothing but refraction indices so I ended up taking chemistry, which led to me sitting in the multiple choice exam ticking random boxes while crying. I’d like to blame the teaching, but maybe I just had no talent. 

Also, I had no role models. My mother taught English and my dad made arts documentaries; Thomas Hardy, Moshe Dayan and Oliver Cromwell were all discussed around the dinner table, but refraction indices just never came up. Looking back, I think I concluded that certain areas of knowledge were just alien. I didn’t know a single person (other than Dan, who didn’t seem keen to be my friend) who planned to study maths or science. Female representation in these subjects was a lot worse than it is now and before A Levels I’d been to an all-girls school, so that probably didn’t help. 

On top of that though – or perhaps as a broader reflection of it – I was responding to a set of prevailing cultural cues. This was a time when humanities generalists dominated the landscape. A generation of about-to-be-politicians were taking Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, convinced that the best preparation for running a country involved a series of brief brush-bys with major concepts, all of them interesting but none of them scientific (economics is not a science. No it isn’t.) Generalists were actively sought by the Civil Service; Cambridge Footlights alumni wafted jokes about existentialism on Radio 4; the ‘science’ correspondents at major newspapers had degrees in English Literature. The crucial thing, it seemed, was not necessarily to understand, but to give an impression of understanding that could withstand two minutes of light questioning on The Late Show. And that? That, my friend, is a job for someone with an arts degree. Because while high calibre arts graduates have their own, legitimate areas of expertise, as a group we granted ourselves licence to pontificate about pretty much everything, so long as there were no numbers in it.

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Before the internet, before the explosion in consumer tech, before it became necessary for us all to know what a metadata is and what a confidence interval are, the humanities ruled. Well, we thought they ruled. The Prime Minister had been a research chemist in a previous life, but she didn’t talk about it in public. Millions of people were building major structures and developing computer chips and calculating the parabolic trajectory of things, but they didn’t get much mainstream representation. Instead, we got movies full of imaginary ‘nerds’ and ‘geeks’ and ‘scientists’ who could barely speak or dress themselves. 

Now the cultural balance has changed, every Marvel superhero is a hot nerd, and humanities graduates are having a hard time adjusting to their downgraded status. For a brief period last year Rishi Sunak was proposing that every child in the UK should be required to study maths up to the age of 18. (Rishi Sunak’s policy balloons are like the coastline paradox, in that they just keep getting smaller and smaller while somehow still requiring our attention.) Behind the arguments about policy and practicality – which majored on the sad fact that there are 23 qualified secondary maths teachers in the entire country – you could hear the furious squawking of people whose degree in history from the University of York had been considered rather impressive at the time, actually, and who are utterly fed up that it no longer has as much cachet. (I did History at York. I wouldn’t be derisory about a degree I didn’t take. What do you think I am, an idiot?) This resentment came mostly from older people; younger people are used to seeing mathematicians and scientists as, you know, aspirational. And occasionally hot.

Prominent within the geriatric pushback to Sunak’s idea was the assertion that a focus on maths and science imperils ‘creativity’, as though the two areas are in direct opposition. This comes down to the belief that maths is just arithmetic, all predictable outputs and mechanistic functions, stuff a computer could do better and honestly a computer couldn’t write The Whitsun Weddings could it. This is basically what I thought when I was 17, and were it not for the highly numerate sons I acquired through an odd genetic twist (whom they call ‘Dad’) I might still think that now. Instead, I have young people who know lots of things that I don’t know, and they are willing to explain them to me in exchange for food. On a hot car journey last summer my younger son started talking about retrocausality in the wave–particle duality, in which particles/waves appear to alter their past behaviour in response to scientific measurement taking place in the present: in other words, they know when we’re watching them and they travel backwards in time to screw with our experiments, preserve their ineffability and do crimes. Admittedly I may not have properly understood all of the details, but you’d have to be some kind of inert gas not to find this idea thrilling. 

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So, this is why I hated Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer so much. It wasn’t Cillian Murphy’s performance, which was fine; it wasn’t even that Nolan had forgotten to ask Florence Pugh to get dressed. (I’ve seen Pugh’s bazookas so often that they now provoke a sense of happy recognition, like spotting two casual acquaintances in a crowd.) It was that this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to help the un-mathsy to understand something, and Nolan didn’t even try. 

I was very excited about Oppenheimer when it was announced because I was hoping it was going to be an adaptation of Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a brilliant history of nuclear physics. But instead of adapting Rhodes’s absolute bloody masterpiece, Nolan based his film on Bird and Sherwin’s American Prometheus, a biography of Oppenheimer alone. Yeah, I know: the clue was in the title. Score zero for textual analysis. 

As Tobias pointed out during one of the brief moments he wasn’t shouting at the screen, Oppenheimer is about the isolated nobility of the extraordinary individual: the loneliness of the long-distance project manager (like, ooh, maybe a film director). But massive advancements in science are not typically achieved through the efforts of solitary individuals, no matter how good they are at frowning. That’s not how films get made either, if it comes to that. And it certainly isn’t how the bomb got built. Having Cillian Murphy stare soulfully at a blackboard while someone bangs dustbin lids together outside the window tells us nothing interesting about what actually happened.  

It’s not that Oppenheimer wasn’t astonishing; obviously, he was. One of the ways he was extraordinary was in his intellectual voraciousness: by the time he was 21, as well as taking a Harvard degree in chemistry, he had learned Greek (to which he later added Sanskrit) and burned through hundreds of novels, plays, poems, and religious and philosophical texts. This is characteristic of many of the people Rhodes writes about. Again and again, I was struck by the number of languages they spoke, their interest in literature and philosophy, their close engagement with politics and society. These things weren’t aberrations; they were indications that their minds were wide open to cognitive sparks, and that some of their antennae were permanently set to ‘receive’.

Take Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who was talent-spotted by Einstein and Max Planck. (In Oppenheimer he’s the guy helping Einstein in his effort to mediate with the US government, which is true. Szilard was also the first person to conceive of a chain reaction.) In 1914, when he was 16, Szilard told his classmates that Germany, Austria and Russia would all lose the war that had just kicked off, although (given that Germany and Austria were on one side and Russia was on the other) he couldn’t yet work out how this would happen. The solution to Szilard’s puzzle turned out to be the Russian Revolution of 1917, making this a pretty remarkable piece of geopolitical prediction for anyone, let alone a 16-year-old boy.

Wandering around in the background of Oppenheimer there’s Enrico Fermi, who at 14 taught himself physics from a nineteenth-century treatise in Latin that he found in a flea market, and went on to win the Nobel Prize while plotting his exit from Fascist Italy before building the world’s first nuclear reactor. And there’s Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, philosopher and statesman who was ‘an exceptional athlete’, beloved of Einstein, a devotee of Schiller and fascinated by ideas of the fragmented self (he also, obviously, won the Nobel Prize). In 1943 he escaped to Sweden from Nazi-occupied Copenhagen in a fishing boat before working fiercely to safely exfiltrate over 7000 Danish Jews, just before escaping the Gestapo by flying to Britain hidden in the belly of a Mosquito bomber so that he could get back to contributing to the bleeding edge of atomic physics. I dunno guys, I think these people might have been quite creative.

You’ll have spotted that the things I’ve picked out are the things humanities students can understand. That’s because if I tried to explain these people’s scientific achievements, I’d introduce errors. But it’s all in Rhodes’s book, and if I can get my arms around it, anyone can. And I get it: it’s infuriating that these people spoke seven languages and could have long conversations about Shakespeare’s later plays and made crucial geopolitical interventions, and that they casually fitted these things around the groundbreaking science that they did as a day job. But them’s the facts. They didn’t conceive of art and science and human life as entirely separate spheres. They were interested in all of it.

What bugs me about Oppenheimer is its intellectual capitulation, its apparent concession that science and maths cannot be made interesting to ordinary cinema-goers. Don’t try to understand the physics <handwave>, it’s not important right now. I mean, it kind of is important in this story, Christopher. You’re failing to display any curiosity, which is ironic given the nature of the person you just made a three-hour film about. If Niels Bohr – who was quite busy – could risk his life making diplomatic intercessions that helped to save almost every single Jewish person in Norway in 1943, maybe you could, I dunno, have a go at incorporating some proper exposition around how atoms give up their energy? It’s been settled science for about 80 years. There are GCSE textbooks and YouTube videos and everything. Stop being so bloody wet.

Do I fully understand the atomic experiments described by Rhodes in his book? No. I find them very difficult to visualise, and I get completely lost in the details. (It’s possible that having a B in O Level maths isn’t a great deal of help here, although in truth I blame the C in chemistry more.) But I got some of it, maybe 20% on a good day, and even just that was wondrous. Nolan didn’t think we wanted any of this. I’d like to think he was wrong, but the film has so far made nearly one billion dollars. And apparently, numbers don’t lie.

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For more on biographical movies about massive nerds, what about our piece on the Mark Zuckerberg biopic, ‘The Social Network’, the first of our Aaron Sorkin watch-a-longs. And if you can <ahem> HANDLE THE TRUTH, upgrade to a paid subscription (if you don’t already have one) to get our next Sorkin watch-a-long tomorrow.