It’s not true. Oppenheimer never even claimed to have said it. He said that, as the glow faded and the shockwave passed, “a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent”, but that he “remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita … ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’” He did not say it out loud.

What he did say out loud may have been more prosaic. His brother Frank was there, and reported that Oppenheimer simply said: “It worked.”

Christopher Nolan has described Oppenheimer, the subject of his latest film, as “the most important man who ever lived”. The brilliant physicist directed the project that, for the first time, made humanity capable of destroying itself. But it is, frankly, remarkable that he was ever appointed.

The Manhattan Project was perhaps the greatest weapons project in history. At its peak, it employed 125,000 people; half a million people worked on it at one point or another. It spent $2.2 billion, equivalent to somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion today — six or 10 times the cost of the Large Hadron Collider. It was conducted in utmost secrecy: the German, Japanese and Soviet governments all knew that the US or Britain were themselves conducting nuclear research, as they all were, to a greater or lesser degree — the theoretical possibility had been known for years, and nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin.

It’s surprising, then, that the job of project director was given to Oppenheimer, a psychologically troubled, communist-sympathising attempted murderer with little managerial experience and an abrasive interpersonal style. And yet it was and he was brilliant. As a result of his genius and aptitude, the Manhattan Project was a huge success, not just at its stated goal but in driving fundamental science forward vast leaps in a very short time.

Could that happen today? Would we want it to? What if we were to spend $30 and $50 billion on something similar? The trouble is, we’re sceptical of genius, now. The “great man theory of history” is a phrase used dismissively. Consider the derision when Dominic Cummings called for “super-talented weirdos” to join the government. And even if Oppenheimer was a genius — which he was, and built a team of geniuses around him — someone of a comparable background would surely get nowhere near the top of any major government project.

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Look at the evidence. Oppenheimer was, if not a card-carrying communist, very close to one. He described himself as a “fellow traveller”, and, on the security questionnaire he filled out to join the Manhattan Project, wrote that he had been “a member of just about every Communist Front organisation on the West Coast”.

Later he would say that was a jokey overstatement, but his communist links were deep. His parents were German-Jewish immigrants to New York who had abandoned their faith but kept their cultural identity, joining a secular group called the Ethical Culture Society, whose founder was inspired by Marx. Oppenheimer’s first great relationship was with Jean Tatlock, a Communist Party member; his wife, Kitty Puening, was another communist. The Berkeley Radiation Laboratory where he worked as a young physicist was a hotbed of radical Leftist thought (it was known as the Rad Lab). A friend of his, Haakon Chevalier, had links to Soviet intelligence and may have even attempted to recruit Oppenheimer as a source. Imagine someone now, under investigation by the FBI for links to Chinese intelligence or some extremist political movement like the Proud Boys or radical Islamism, being put in charge of the development of a new stealth fighter jet — or, perhaps more analogously, an AI-based weapon system.

There were other reasons to think Oppenheimer was a strange choice for director. For one thing, he had no significant managerial experience, certainly not of big projects. For another, he was difficult, abrasive, socially awkward and — in modern terms, at least — deeply mentally unwell. He was sexually frustrated as a youth and angry at others’ happiness. One time, he saw an amorous couple on a train and, according to his school friend Francis Fergusson, when the man left the carriage, Oppenheimer moved to kiss the woman himself. Then he “was at once overcome with remorse, fell on his knees, his feet sprawling, and with many tears, begged her pardon”. But the remorse did not last long: He saw the woman beneath him on the stairs and, bitterly, “was inspired to drop his suitcase on her head. Fortunately, he missed.”

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That violent urge was not a one-off. Oppenheimer, as a youth, lacked control of his emotions, and seems to have twice attempted to kill people. That same friend, Fergusson, told Oppenheimer that he had got engaged to his girlfriend: “I leaned over to pick up a book, and he jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap and wound it around my neck.” Fergusson fought him off, but “was quite scared for a little while”. Oppenheimer then “fell on the ground weeping”, again.

And at Cambridge, where Oppenheimer studied as a postgrad, he seems to have left a poisoned apple on the desk of his supervisor, who had attempted to get him to do more experimental work. (Oppenheimer, though a brilliant theorist, had an amazing ability to ruin every experiment he came near.) He was very nearly expelled, and only avoided criminal charges after his father lobbied the university and Robert agreed to psychiatric counselling.

Oppenheimer himself would say much later that “I was on the point of bumping myself off”. He suffered from depression all his life; he was diagnosed after the poisoned-apple incident as a “hopeless case” of “dementia praecox”, a now defunct diagnosis which is usually now associated with schizophrenia. He probably didn’t have schizophrenia — depression can cause delusions — but he was certainly unstable. And it clearly started to grate: in Göttingen, his fellow students signed a petition saying they’d boycott the class if he didn’t shut up in seminars. At the Rad Lab he would interrupt guest speakers, saying impatiently: “Oh come on now! We all know that. Let’s get on with it.” He sounds, in short, like a bit of a dickhead: rude, self-centred, pushy.

All in all, as discussed, he was not an obvious choice to run a multi-billion-dollar top-secret superweapon project involving hundreds of thousands of people. But General Leslie Groves saw something in Oppenheimer which not everyone else could. Groves would say of him in his memoir that he had “two major disadvantages — he had had almost no administrative experience of any kind, and he was not a Nobel Prize winner”. He noted an “overweening ambition”, a breadth of knowledge, and a considerable genius.

But Oppenheimer wanted something more than scientific discoveries — he wanted glory, fame. His friend Freeman Dyson, another great physicist, would say later: “He always wanted to be at the centre. This quality is good for soldiers and politicians but bad for original thinkers.” He lacked, in Dyson’s phrase, Sitzfleisch. It means “sitting flesh”, backside, but metaphorically the ability to sit still and finish something. Instead, he was “driven by an irresistible ambition to play a leading part in historic events”.

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This made him a flawed scientist. Dyson tells how Oppenheimer invented the concept of black holes in 1939, decades before Stephen Hawking would make them famous. But having made the insight, he never returned to it. He got distracted by other, more fashionable things.

But it made him a peerless leader. “When he was present at the centre of action,” said Dyson, “he rose to the occasion and took charge of the situation with unexpected competence… He was astonishingly effective as leader of the [Manhattan] project.” His dilettante interests meant he could understand the engineers, the physicists, the chemists, the metallurgists. His inability to focus on a topic was less of a problem if he could order an underling to focus on it for him.

Groves saw this. Under Oppenheimer’s guidance, the project took the American nuclear programme from essentially nowhere to completion within three years. When he joined, there was no nuclear programme to speak of. Scientists were imported from Europe, especially Britain and Hungary. Everything had to be developed from scratch, and it was: the Manhattan Project created thousands of inventions. The patents it processed were secret, of course, but if they had been filed, then by the end of the war they would have represented 1% of all existing patents. Nuclear science progressed leaps and bounds in the project’s laboratories, as did digital technology, materials science, and a hundred other disciplines.

Why did it work? Oppenheimer can surely take much of the credit. It was Oppenheimer who recognised that the firing mechanism used for a uranium bomb, one of the two models used, would not be as effective in a plutonium bomb, and called for another system, an “implosion” system which blasted two hemispheres of plutonium together with high explosive. It was also he who recruited John von Neumann, one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, who in turn developed the perfectly shaped lenses of high explosives required to slam the plutonium together with perfectly even pressure all around the sphere, a procedure one scientist compared to trying to crush a beer can without spilling any of the beer.

We can’t know the counterfactual. Perhaps other, less unstable, less communist-sympathising project leaders were available. Perhaps they would have done as good a job: after all, the project “brought together the greatest concentration of scientific luminaries working on a single project that the world had ever seen,” as Alex Wellerstein wrote. As well as Oppenheimer and von Neumann, the project had at its disposal Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Vannevar Bush, Richard Feynman, and many more.

It also had something like 1% of the entire US civilian labour force and 1% of the country’s electrical power at its disposal. Maybe you could have put anyone in charge of that and it would have done well, much as any idiot can probably manage Real Madrid sufficiently well to win most football matches: just tell all your stars to go out and play football. But Groves took a chance that perhaps not many others would, one that would leave him hanging in the wind if it went wrong.

Again, imagine it now: the government appointing someone with a known track record of violence and delusional mental illness, placed in charge of a vital defence project. It would be near-impossible: none of the “weirdos” Dominic Cummings wanted to appoint to government (and I’ve met a few of them) was remotely as weird as Robert Oppenheimer. No Communist Party-adjacent attempted murderers there. Of course, Groves had the dictatorial authority granted by war — the US was committed to the defeat of Germany and Japan and committing its entire industrial base to the task; the perfect situation for big, dramatic bets like Manhattan — but still it was bold and dangerous.

In a weird way, I’m reminded of the appointment of Kate Bingham to the UK’s Vaccine Task Force: She was well-qualified, and again the emergency situation gave the government leeway to make snap decisions that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. But her political connections — she is married to a then-minister, Jesse Norman — made her a target: the Good Law Project sued, calling her appointment “jobs for their mates”. The British vaccine procurement was a roaring success and Bingham’s appointment was vindicated, but if it had not been, then the decision would have looked dreadful. (Please do not take this to mean that I think Kate Bingham is the same as Robert Oppenheimer.)

There are plenty of big scientific projects around today. But nothing on the scale of Los Alamos: Artemis, the successor to the Apollo moon missions, has perhaps 30,000 employees. (Apollo itself, driven by Cold War anxiety and national willy-waving, was bigger even than Manhattan, with nearly half a million staff at its peak.) Perhaps the exciting work has moved into the private sector, but even the cutting-edge AI firms employ a few hundred or a few thousand people, some far fewer. Midjourney, the best of the art AIs, has a staff of a dozen or so. There are plenty of strange geniuses around — Demis Hassabis, the video-game-designing chess savant behind DeepMind, is my favourite — but nowhere has the kind of world monopoly on them that Oppenheimer established.

Nonetheless, there’s a parallel with modern AI. Oppenheimer seemed to want the responsibility of having created the bomb: he said that the physicists involved in the project had “known sin”. Von Neumann responded, pithily, that “Sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it.” When AI researchers now talk of the threat of AI, how it could destroy humanity, there is a hint of that – what we are doing is so amazing and powerful that it could destroy the world, aren’t you impressed? Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s not true – I think there’s a decent chance AI could destroy the world, and developing nuclear weapons really was a morally ambiguous thing to do. But people who want to be great can scratch that itch by being great and terrible, as well as great and good.

Oppenheimer was not ashamed of his work, even if, for PR reasons,  he sometimes wanted to appear so. He “continued for the rest of his life to be proud of his achievement,” Dyson wrote. And when a German playwright depicted him as a tragic hero who regretted his actions, he protested bitterly. The line from the Bhagavad Gita about death was a later amendment. Years earlier, he had quoted a different one: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky,” he said, “that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One.” That does not sound like a man who feels remorse.

The puzzle that Gödel was describing would come to be known as P vs NP. To oversimplify, it asks: can every mathematical question which can be checked quickly also be solved quickly? For instance: you are given a half-complete Sudoku puzzle. Is there a legal solution? If someone were to show you a solution, you could quickly verify whether it was legal. If you used a larger grid, the solution would take longer to check, but not exponentially so[1.  In fact the length of time would grow polynomially – hence P.].

But establishing that there is a legal solution is much slower. There might be quintillions of possible ways of filling it out; the number grows exponentially with the size of the grid. Checking them all one by one might take millions of years even on a powerful computer, if the grid is large enough.

What Gödel wanted to know was: is there some algorithm that could solve the Sudoku (or similar problems) as quickly as we could check a solution? P vs NP is one of the great outstanding questions of mathematics: it has profound implications, but no one has been able to prove it, one way or the other.

The Man from the Future, Ananyo Bhattacharya’s fascinating, fast-moving intellectual biography of von Neumann, made me think of P vs NP. Not because von Neumann solved it; but because von Neumann, in Bhattacharya’s telling, provided solutions to many other previously unsolved problems, in dozens of different fields; others simply had to check them, and expand on them. There is, I think, some discomfort about calling people “geniuses” these days, or in admitting that intelligence is a real thing or that it shapes history – but von Neumann was a genius, and his extraordinary intelligence shaped the modern world.

He was not an economist, but he developed the use of fixed-point theorems in economics in a paper which the historian Roy Weintraub calls “the single most important article in mathematical economics”, and which inspired “half a dozen” Nobel laureates.

His work on game theory – he invented the field, and coined the term “zero-sum game” – inspired at least half a dozen more. Game theory also transformed the study of evolution, inspiring the work of Bill Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, and Richard Dawkins.

He developed utility theory, the basis of modern economics. In 2011 Daniel Kahneman, another economics Nobel laureate (who won his Nobel partly for building on von Neumann’s game-theory ideas), called it“ the most important theory in the social sciences”.

Some of his last work, with Stanislaw Ulam on “cellular automata” – grids of squares that turn on and off according to simple rules – shaped modern computer science in thousands of ways, notably inspiring John McCarthy, who would go on to coin the term “artificial intelligence”.

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Von Neumann’s genius was apparent early. In 1915, at the age of 11, he had gone to the famous gymnasium school in his native Budapest; the “legendary” maths teacher, László Rátz, immediately realised that von Neumann was beyond his ability to teach, and sent him for extra tuition at the local university. There he was mentored by Gábor Szegö, later head of Stanford’s maths department, who was “moved to tears” by his brilliance.

At 17, still at high school, he partly rescued Cantor’s set theory, the basis of much mathematical theory, from a crippling paradox. A couple of years later, he helped reconcile Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger’s rival models of quantum mechanics. In the early Thirties, he met the astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and worked with him on general relativity and the behaviour of stellar clusters. Chandrasekhar would later tell an interviewer, “If I say, ‘He reminds me of von Neumann,’ that’s about the best compliment I can give anyone.”

Von Neumann read some Alan Turing research which imagined a hypothetical computing machine, and saw how to build a working computer. The paper he produced building on Turing’s ideas is considered “the birth certificate of modern computers”, according to the computer scientist Wolfgang Coy. With his wife Kläri, and Ulam, he pioneered Monte Carlo simulations, vital now in climate modelling and a million other fields.

In almost every sphere of scientific inquiry – physics, biology, maths, economics, the social sciences, computing – you find von Neumann’s fingerprints. There is a Wikipedia page of “List of things named after John von Neumann.” Were it not for him, our understanding of the world would be decades behind where it is.

What created this genius? Bhattacharya does not speculate a great deal, but there are things worth considering. First, simple genetics: his family was high-achieving. His father was a doctor of law and an economic adviser to the Hungarian government; his uneducated maternal grandfather apparently could “add or multiply numbers into the millions” in his head instantly, a trick von Neumann emulated. The family was “puzzled” by their son’s inability to play the piano properly at the age of five, suggesting rather higher expectations than most. But it turned out to be because he “had taken to propping up books on his music stand so he could read while ‘practising’”.

He also grew up in a fertile environment. Around the turn of the 20th century, the Budapest Jewish community of which he was part produced an astonishing number of great thinkers. Near-contemporaries included Dennis Gabor, “who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971 for inventing the hologram”; Theodore von Kármán, after whom the “Kármán line” is named, denoting the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space; and Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Leo Szilard, three of the greatest minds behind the Manhattan Project. The atomic bomb has been described as a “Hungarian high school science fair project”.

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The Hungarians who worked on America’s atomic weapons programme in the Thirties and Forties were known as “the Martians” by the other physicists – the joke being that the only way of explaining them was that super-intelligent aliens must have come to Budapest in the late 19th century and had babies with the locals. Von Neumann was the most alien of the lot.

But there was some accident of history that meant that European university departments at that time were disproportionately Jewish, and Belle Epoque Budapest, which was going through a less than usually antisemitic period, had a large and well-integrated Jewish population. Von Neumann himself speculated that insecurity drove this Jewish success – they recognised that Hungary’s tolerance might evaporate at any moment, and that they faced “the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction”.

The tolerance did evaporate, in Hungary and elsewhere. Von Neumann, along with Teller, Wigner and the rest, had already left for Princeton, but Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany devastated their universities: 15% of physicists and 19% of mathematicians were dismissed, including 20 who had won or would win Nobel prizes.

Ironically, this may have lost Germany the war: analysis suggests that the loss of Jewish scientists damaged German science for decades. Werner Heisenberg, a German quantum physicist, was branded a “white Jew” for believing in Einstein’s theories, despite being a nationalist. He later said that it was not worth Germany pursuing nuclear weapons, because they wouldn’t be ready in time to affect the war: he believed this because he thought Germany’s nuclear research was well ahead of other nations. “As it was,” says Bhattacharya. “Until 1933.”

So von Neumann, along with Wigner and others, ended up in Princeton — and then at the next-door Institute for Advanced Study, a sort of intellectual all-star team, where great brains were enticed from around the world with vast salaries, no undergrads to teach, and the promise that they could just think big thoughts. Einstein was there, along with Gödel, Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, Ulam, and a host of others. It was an environment made for a certain kind of hard-to-pigeonhole genius, able to wander from subject to subject simply by walking around campus, surrounded by brilliant weirdos.

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Von Neumann is compelling evidence, I think, that individual genius is important and influential. Yes, he worked in a series of collaborations; yes, he built on the work of others. But he seems to have pushed on, or sometimes simply created, entire subfields of science, into areas that no one else realised could exist. The economist Oskar Morgernstern remembers him rapidly devising utility theory, immediately overturning economic orthodoxy: “But didn’t anyone see that?”, von Neumann asked.

It’s fashionable to say that intelligence isn’t real, or that we can’t define it, or that it’s a Western colonial construct. But the word points to a real thing: there is some quality which rocks don’t have, and which mice have a bit of, and which chimpanzees have more of, and humans have a lot of; and which is something like problem-solving ability or ability to achieve goals. Calling it intelligence seems as good as anything. It is this ability which has allowed humanity to shape the world, and it is this ability that some people – von Neumann among them – seem to have in unusually large measure.

Via scientific and technological progress, intelligence has made human life better. But in itself, intelligence is morally neutral: it can serve any end, good or ill, to which it is put. Von Neumann is a case in point. He developed computers partly to better predict the behaviour of explosive shockwaves and ballistic shells; he designed two different kinds of nuclear weapon, including the plutonium implosion bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki; his game-theoretic ideas led him to suggest using atom bombs in a first strike on Russia, and he was part of the inspiration for Doctor Strangelove. He believed that all this was in the interest of America, his adopted country, and no doubt of humanity; but not everyone would agree with him. First and foremost he wanted to solve puzzles.

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I put the book down wondering if it is still possible to encourage and harness genius. Perhaps it’s as simple as putting lots of clever people together and letting them think weird thoughts — and Von Neumann and his colleagues were often weird people. Or perhaps it is a true accident, and the only lesson is randomness. Perhaps the proposed new field of research into “progress studies” will yield some ideas as to how to recreate that environment in which Von Neumann and his fellow weirdos flourished.

I wondered, too, if John von Neumann was well enough to understand the P vs NP puzzle when he received that letter from Gödel. For it is a wonderful metaphor for genius. I can dimly understand, for instance, Turing’s solution to the “Halting Problem”, or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, or Russell’s set paradox that undermined mathematics. (They’re all based on the “liar paradox” – the statement “this statement is a lie”, which is false if true or true if false.) But it often takes no great brilliance to understand an idea once it has been brought forth: checking the Sudoku solution is relatively straightforward. Finding that idea in the space of possible ideas, though — solving the great sprawling Sudokus of science and maths, as Von Neumann did time and again, that takes genius.