Using reliable and verified sources is necessary to determine the veracity of something, and movies are not reliable sources; they are pure entertainment. You cannot learn about espionage, wars, or historical figures from them. To build biceps, one must lift weights; massages and creams won’t suffice.
Some films attempt historical accuracy and can be useful as a reference for an event. Oppenheimer, for example, is a cinematic account of the Manhattan Project, the development of the nuclear bomb during World War II. While it was a highly ambitious technological endeavor, it wasn’t the most complex, as the development of the B29 bomber required more effort, nor was it as decisive, with historians believing Japan surrendered due to various factors, including the Soviet advance in Manchuria.
The film effectively conveys the Manhattan cocktail’s ingredients: brilliant individuals, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants; a budget; academic excellence; a leader with a clear mandate; a measurable objective, and motivation. It also simplifies how disruptive technologies necessitate the trinity of science, technology, and philosophy – science to know what to do, technology to know how to do it, and philosophy to decide what to do. We face philosophical dilemmas in artificial intelligence, autonomous military drones, and self-driving cars today.
Where are the immigrant-origin tech stars in our country?
Advancing in technology is not easy. There are millions of academics and engineers worldwide, but only a few countries and companies achieve significant results, while others progress imperceptibly, akin to the minute hands on a clock. To create technology, we need engineers or their equivalents, and Spain will lack 200,000 in the coming years. This will limit our technological development, just as the number of dishes a restaurant produces depends on its number of chefs. Therefore, we must encourage young people to study engineering, and perhaps Oppenheimer can inspire us. He was the son of immigrants, and key individuals in his project, such as Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, James Frank, Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, and Enrico Fermi, were immigrants as well. It’s noteworthy that the United States has produced numerous tech entrepreneurs from the immigrant world, including Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Sergei Brin (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Steve Jobs (Apple).
This is a social phenomenon conspicuously absent in our entrepreneurial, business, and scientific landscape. It’s a silence that speaks to us. In a country like ours, with many immigrants and a general acceptance of the benefits of coexistence and integration, where are the immigrant-origin tech stars? It’s not clear. Perhaps immigration here is too recent, perhaps meritocracy is lacking, or perhaps some doors are firmly locked. If so, let’s improve our meritocracy, distribute keys, and invite polymaths to come, just as the Anglo-Saxons have been doing so well.
Article written by Marc Murtra and published in La Vanguardia: Where are our Oppenheimers?
