Oppenheimer read the Gita deeply, quoted from it. He wasn’t a believer

Here’s the Thing

Oppenheimer is the flavour of the season. The movie is a poignant story that captures the intense excitement and attitudes of an era when the lives and passions of quantum physicists, communists, and McCarthyists all collided. In my reading, the movie centres around Oppenheimer’s triumph in making the atom bomb and the moral and ethical questions and dilemmas that haunted him forever after. It is even more strikingly about how, as soon as he went from being the enthusiastic scientist who wanted nothing more than to succeed at his scientific project to one who became despondent over the consequences of his achievement and advocated against an arms race, he began to be hounded by the American establishment of the J Edgar Hoover-Joseph McCarthy era.

Oppenheimer, then a national hero, could not have been denounced and silenced without smearing him as a ‘communist agent’, and he could not have been damned as a communist agent without exposing his non-belief in God.

This – his non-belief – might come as a surprise to those who are charmed by the fact that Oppenheimer read and quoted from the Bhagavad Gita (and other Sanskrit works). But Oppenheimer was not alone in that era, especially in his circles of theoretical and quantum physicists, to have taken to Hindu and Buddhist texts and eastern mysticism in general.

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Quantum physics is such a thing that boggles the mind of anyone who contemplates the world of atoms and sub-atomic particles. Imagine how profoundly shocked the scientists of the 1920s and 30s must have been when they first encountered the world of particles (or are they waves?)! There is nothing certain at the quantum level. Everything is a probability. No less than Einstein refused to believe the implications of his own discoveries. “God does not play dice,” he said. But indeed, it turns out, ‘God’ does. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger’s Cat, wave-particle duality, and so on.

It was only natural that many of them looked far and wide to make sense of what they were learning and to come to terms with it. Christian theological ideas and creationism could not have satisfied their minds. There was too much certainty, contrary to what the scientists were learning about the universe on the cosmic and quantum scales. Hindu and Buddhist thoughts on creation and on the nature of knowledge and truth, etc., must have appealed as being far more sophisticated than the certainty that God created the Universe in such and such a way.

The physicists of the early quantum age – Oppenheimer, Schrodinger, Bohr, Heisenberg, etc – came to Hindu and Buddhist texts and eastern mysticism and philosophy – not to find God, but to be able to deal with complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty. It was the scepticism of the Hindu mind, not certainty, that attracted them.

That brings me to something else that happened last week. A Kannada teacher (not a scientist but a poet and writer), who is a rationalist inspired by the likes of H Narasimaiah, ridiculed ISRO officials for visiting a temple, with a mini model of the Chandrayaan-3 (C-3) rocket, to seek God’s blessings ahead of the launch. The man’s questioning of the act was legitimate, though he might have just left it at that rather than go on to suggest that C-3 might also fail, as C-2 had. He was trolled and threatened for it, and a former BJP minister sought an explanation from him. No one has ever sought an explanation from ISRO chairmen who have routinely visited the Tirupati temple to seek God’s blessings for rocket launches.

Are ISRO officials right to seek God’s blessings for successful launches? Do they do it out of belief in God?

I remembered a conversation that I had with a nuclear scientist (no, engineer, to be precise) and spy (and at the time, my boss at a government think-tank), who asked me these very questions. He himself had been a non-believer all his life but was having doubts as he got older. It was actually a test – to see if I, the youngest of the lot, would dare contradict him in front of senior colleagues who, he knew, would not. An ISRO Chairman had just visited the Tirupati temple ahead of a launch that day. “What is wrong in it? Why can’t he be a believer?”

I answered that I did not think the ISRO Chairman goes to the temple ahead of the launch out of belief, nor does he go as a ‘scientist’. Rather, there may be an element of fear, or more likely, a sense of responsibility – after all, he’s heading a national mission. To ‘believe’ is something entirely different. Scientists in the fundamental sciences think deeply about science, and inevitably about God. But engineers and administrators running a space programme need not. Their raison de etre is mission success. For them, the physics of rocketry matters, so they go to science. But the success of the rocket launch matters more, so they pray for it. What is being sought is not truth, but success.

When the astronauts of Apollo 8 reached moon orbit, and saw earth rise from there, they were so awestruck that they could think of nothing more appropriate than to read from the Book of Genesis: In the beginning, God created heaven and earth…

A lady from Texas, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists, filed a lawsuit against them for violating the US Constitution’s First Amendment! The courts threw out her case. Our Kannada teacher was not far off the mark.

Let me leave you with Oppenheimer’s thought. Answering a question about “his concept of God” after a lecture to the Princeton Theological Seminary, Oppenheimer said, “I don’t use the word (God) because it seems to me the most ambiguous word I know.”