One of the favorite tropes of SF is the mad scientist. He (always he) represents the disruptive power of modern science to old beliefs, and of modern technology to old ways of life. He becomes crazed with this power, and wreaks havoc with the terror of his discoveries. The very first SF novel, “Frankenstein”, is about him, and Jules Verne cemented the meme with the noble and tragic Captain Nemo. Half of SF movies play on this, whether it’s Dr Morbius in “Forbidden Planet” (1956) with the planet-sized engines of the Krell, or Tyrell in “Bladerunner” (1982) with his army of rebellious androids, or Tony Stark in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” (2015) with run-amok AI.

Yet the great recent movie “Oppenheimer” shows how ridiculous this is. J. Robert Oppenheimer was the most famous and influential scientist in the world in the late 1940s. He led the team that created the fission bomb, and so cut short the greatest war in human history. He himself was the very picture of a magus: vastly erudite, tall, skeletal, and with piercing, electric-blue eyes. He dominated every room he was in, and women took notice. His direct scientific contributions were minor, but he knew and had the respect of the greatest scientists of the age: Einstein, Bohr, Bethe, Rabi, Fermi, Lawrence, Szilard and von Neumann.

Yet the core story of the movie is how he came to ruin when he crossed the actual masters of the country. He knew that the nuclear arms race would be madness, but couldn’t prevent it. He argued for international control of nuclear weapons, and for not taking the vastly expensive and dangerous step towards fusion bombs, and they simply ignored him. When he kept protesting, they made a point of humiliating him. It was slyly done, through innuendo about his leftist connections and his adulterous affairs, and through a bureaucratic procedure that was turned into a kangaroo court, but everyone knew what had happened. In crude countries, they kill or imprison their opponents, but in more skilled ones, they de-honor them.

You don’t get to choose what’s done with your work – that’s for the people who pay for it. To be brutal about it, Oppenheimer was an employee. When the Army carted the Bombs away, they didn’t even tell the Los Alamos people what was going to be done with them. Their job was done. In the longer run, their expertise was displaced by that of people like Teller and von Neumann, people who hated communism as fiercely as the Establishment did and so were considered reliable.

You don’t choose the use. Your choice is whether to take part or not. The most sympathetic character in the movie, I. I. Rabi, chose not to join the Manhattan Project, even though he had as much reason to hate the Nazis as Oppenheimer. Instead he worked on radar, which really did shorten the War and has been immensely useful since then. Don’t think that you’ll get to fix things later as Oppenheimer did – work on what’s going to be positive for everyone. You won’t be called an American Prometheus, but you’ll avoid a world of hurt.