“J Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse.” This extravagant claim was made by Christopher Nolan prior to the release of his enormously successful biopic. It seems a bit like nit-picking to even ask: but is it true? Well, no. Oppenheimer wasn’t even the most important scientist at Los Alamos. Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman and Edward Teller, to name but a few, made more important contributions to physics than Oppenheimer. And, outside Los Alamos we have Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein, while in the past we have Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz and James Clerk Maxwell. Outside science altogether, are we really going to say that Oppenheimer was more important than Jesus Christ, the prophet Mohammed, Alexander the Great, Plato, Shakespeare, Leonardo, etc?
As for Nolan’s justification for his claim (“He made the world we live in”), a much better case, it seems to me, can be made for saying that the world we live in was made by Alan Turing. Turing’s notion of the “Universal Computing Machine” lies at the basis of almost every aspect of modern life, from personal computers to the digitised music that we listen to on our phones and the digitised movies that we stream into our living rooms. We are living through the Digital Age far more than we are living through the Age of the Atom Bomb.
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