how stars die…

Recently I read this article about the Godfather of AI quitting his position at Google. And in his parting press conference said something that stuck with me. "I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have..."  Some times even with all the power of creation, the creator goes on to regret the decision. Even God repented that I have made men.

You can chain Prometheus for eternity but I believe us mortals have something innate that the gods can never take away, we are persistent. With or without the help, we would have harvested fire and rain it on whomever we wanted. Even on the gods! 

Oppenheimer is a biopic of intense canvas that leaves you with a sense of exasperation and exhaustion not only with the drama, also with the sheer length of it. As my friend rightly said, RDJ had a great performance and CM was just living. Stop the count, and announce it already. This might be the piece that cements the genius of Christopher Nolan into the annals of academy awards. Maestro!

In one of the interrogation scenes, an officer ask Mr. J Robert Oppenheimer, Did your moral qualms change after the bombing? There were many instances of his distorted moral compass in regard to love, fidelity, ideology and even his friendship in the three hour saga. And hence that question struck me more than any of the questions asked. When did the destroyer of the worlds became a pacifist? When did his moral compass find its magnetic north pole?

I think it was Khalid Hosseini who said, “Theft is the one unforgivable sin, the one common denominator of all sins. When you kill a man, you steal a life. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched than stealing.”

While in Europe, Oppenheimer when asked to stay back and clean the laboratory, the place he despised the most, far from home and with no affinity to the practicality of physics, committed his first theft. He took his professor's apple. Oh yes, he poisoned it with potassium cyanide too. He stole someone’s food and almost his life too. 

There is a language that goes extinct every time when two people who knew well and made promises decides to stop talking. When Jean tells Robert, you stopped picking up my calls. Robert replies, but you said don’t pick my calls. Jean replies, but you promised you’ll pick. He stole the only solid ground someone had and incidentally pushed into sinking sand.

It's interesting how the theoretical physicist works, they can draw up the inner realms of the universe on a blackboard yet not see how it works in reality. Then he saw the flash of light gleaming into his eyes, how the three person’d god, the trinity towered over Los Alamos in its wrath. Yet he sat in attendance to the meeting which decided the fate of two cities. He stole countless dreams from a generation.

"...we're all human. Oh, we all do our duty when there's no cost to it. Honor comes easy then. Yet sooner or later in every man's life there comes a day when it's not easy. A day when he must choose."

When you hold the weapon to incinerate the world, you expect people to bow down to you. But it doesn't work that way. Men are not wired that way, we are persistent. If there is a Thanos holding an Infinity Gauntlet, there will be a Thor who will be ready to take the force of a dying star on himself to make a Storm-breaker that could chop the head of the one wielding the gauntlet. 

It wasn’t so much that his moral qualms changed, but how he saw the true darkness in men in the bright light that flashed in Trinity. 

While making the atom bomb, they feared a distant possibility of how it could trigger an atmospheric ignition which leads to the destruction of earth as it was. But the math proved right, it couldn’t happen. Yet there are weapons that can ignite the world with utmost certainty which are neither produced nor found in nature. It lives and have its being in the darkness of men. Hatred, vengeance, bitterness. Forces that could trigger a never ending chain reaction.

So having his moral compass fixed help him? 

You know how stars die? They became brighter and brighter until they abruptly sputter out and gravity swallows the last ray of light, finally becoming a boring lump of gases hanging in the universe minding their own business.