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Hollywood: Oppenheimer.

History: Dozens of elite physicists and engineers.

EDIT:

Similarly...

Hollywood: Steve Jobs.

History: Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ives, hundreds of engineers.

Fame is an industry. Like Kim Kardashian. They pick someone and generate a story, and that sells.



I didn't really get that sense from the film. At one point, Teller even says (paraphrased) to Oppenheimer, "You're not a scientist anymore, you're a politician now." He is portrayed as a manager, not a lone genius.


A significant scene was just about Oppenheimer going on an Avengers style recruiting mission, getting the who's who of scientists on board. I don't think any endeavour before that or after that comes even close to matching the number of brilliant minds working under the same roof to solve a problem. The closest might be Bletchley Park perhaps, though there the only household name amongst those scientists is Alan Turing.


Tommy Flowers, Bill Tutte, Joan Clarke, ...

These names were known in an Australian household in the 1970s.

I can add more but they get increasingly obscure - but Flowers was as well known as Turing in the commonwealth in the 1980s.

Early peak Turing was when the Andrew Hodges book ('83 IIRC) got mainstream appeal later that decade, from there the myth grew.


It's probably fair that Turing is the only world famous name, but I don't think the BP museum or authors etc. generally do others any great disservice - the names you mention should be familiar to anyone who's visited.

I can't remember the film though, can believe it was more Turing-oriented.


yeah I definitely got the "collaborative" effort from the film.. its just that they made the film a biopic of one guy in that collab effort


The Alan Touring movie was also ugly by assigning credit of many people straight to him.

I wonder if Hollywood writers just can't imagine having accomplishments that required work of many great people.


> The Alan Touring movie was also ugly by assigning credit

Not just the movie, many books and articles. They often give him credit for what a team of people did (in the war-time code cracking efforts) and barely at all mention the work for which he was uniquely¹ responsible. He deserves huge credit for his life's work, no one of a sensible mind would argue there, but many give him sole credit for the wrong things at the expense of acknowledging those he worked with. From what I know (or I am lead to believe, to be more accurate) of his character I think he would be rather miffed by this.

[1] “standing on the shoulders of past researchers/thinkers” arguments aside, in some places


>Hollywood writers

I'd wager the writers are just pandering to the mores of their audience, who currently seem more inclined to an affinity for cult-like behaviour than sustaining an actual interest in the reality of history.


Exactly. Without diminishing their work, what they do has more in common with word freelancer than historian.


What would the Bollywood treatment of this be like?


Yes, but it is that way because these stories are what people want to buy movie tickets for.


Well, put that way, life is an industry.




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