Hi
@don_fabio
Your take on Oppenheimer was both curious and interesting to me. It made me think a lot. Thanks! I saw the movie and liked it, very much to be honest, but after your comment I might understand it better (at least, why I liked it). Let me think it out loud here a bit.
Context: I am a physicist -- on paper from the precise area we are talking about, but in real life that was not exactly the case. But I understand fairly well what is going on. I also know decently well the historical part. These two facts are heavily influenced by the fact that I have the fortune of being a personal friend of a person who knows *deeply* well both.
I was taken aback by your comment because I simply didn't *expect* the movie to be about physics -- no expectations, no delusions! But you make a valid point. Actually I was pleasantly surprised the movie did not have any major scientific flaw -- as it is so common. I was expecting a few. Now that I think of it, the "justification" I can think of is simple: the movie is named "Oppenheimer", and not "The making of the atom bomb". Your point -- and I agree with you -- is that the second is more interesting than the first. But it is what it is...
You correctly pointed out that the movie is centered on the political part. Trying to figure out the underlying political message here was harder than I would imagine. It has even a "pacifist" spin (luckily, given our context). The obvious parts were painting yet again JFK as a "good guy" (he is explicitly mentioned) in the end, and exploring the crazy part of the anti-communist hunt (which is a not so subtle blow to the ones with the anti-communist position still today). But all in all it is way less explicit and/or twisted than the typical hollywood movie.
One aspect the film did not explore -- and this is pretty curious -- is how much of an international effort the Manhattan Project (MP) is. You have the Hungarians (Szilard and Wigner wrote the original letter to begin with, and then there is Teller), you have Bethe (German), Fermi (Italian), you have the English group, and so on. This was something that could be (politically) explored, but it wasn't. Oppenheimer, together with Rabi, are basically the only important Americans in the group (Feynman is there, he is depicted playing the Bongos, but he is not of primary importance in the project). This is only vaguely mentioned in the movie when Oppenheimer is studying in Europe (someone says he is one of the few Americans to understand Quantum Physics). I guess film makers did't want to suggest the bomb was not totally American. It is "American" in the end, but... without the brains and initiative of foreigners, it would not even be attempted. So this is, now that I think of it, a flaw of the script.
There are minor inaccuracies, one right at the beginning (Bohr saying the it was Einstein who "started it all", which is not only wrong, but something Niels Bohr would *never* have said). Regarding Einstein, btw, I was also positively surprised the movie did not portrayed him a scientific super hero, as it is so common. Other is the scene when they read in the newspaper about Uranium fission, and ran to lab to reproduce it. This info came to America with Bohr and Rosenfeld, they new it (from personal communications) before the Meitner/Strassman paper was published. The first observation (which I guess is the one mentioned), done by Han, went largely unnoticed. The "rush" to the labs was after Rosenfeld commented about fission with someone during a Bohr lecture.
So I was actually very happy watching all those physicists on the big screen. Seeing Kenneth Brannagh (who I like so much) as Bohr was so fun! How could I not like such a movie!
Also, it shows what is for me the greatest scientific anecdote of all times, when Bethe concludes that the world would *not* end after the test explosion. Someone raises the possibility that the explosion would trigger a (chemical) chain reaction that would burn up the entire atmosphere. The guy then goes out and demonstrates that it would *not* happen. How insane is that? This is not brilliantly depicted in the movie, but the mere mention of it was an extremely nice surprise to me.
Now to you point, that the actual story of the atom bomb would a better theme. Yes! You are completely right, it would be simply fantastic! But... (there is always a but).
...it would be for a selected crowd. It is subtle, sometimes complicated, and it takes patience to follow the plot. Not exactly material for the 140 characters generation.
Let me annoy you and give you an example -- which is fantastic, but hard to explain/depict:
First, the time/historic coincidences: Hans' observation of fission is in 38!!! One or two years before, the geo-political map was different, key scientists could be in different places, there would be more time to finish the bomb. One year later, maybe no one would even connect the dots (at the time at least, this is a fantastic story within the story, Lise Meitnner escape from Germany), and there would not be time to finish the bomb.
BTW, about time: this was an enormous unknown quantity. The actual number of the critical mass is difficult to calculate. Estimations from the different teams (American, English, German) were vastly different. If you underestimate the critical mass, your device won't work. If you overestimate, you might conclude it is physically impossible to enrich enough Uranium for it. Probably the great question mark in everyone's head at the test was exactly this one. If the test had failed, they would have concluded that the critical mass estimation was wrong. The MP estimated 15 Kg (and those estimations were constantly revised, up and down), and the actual figure today is understood to be around 10 Kg. Considering how hard it was (and still is) to enrich Uraniun (or get Plutonium), each Kg makes a lot of difference. There is a fantastic debate about the german (Heisenberg's) estimate...
But to show how hard it is to calculate critical mass is not simple. Specially, how hard it was at the time. General public usually has this very fantasized notion of *exact sciences* . Everything is down to a formula... but what do you do when you still don't know the formula? When you are still grasping what is going on, not to mention *why* somethings are going on... people were doing applied physics when the theoretical physics underlying it was basically very far from being perfectly understood... how do you put it all on the screen?
Can it be done? Yes, sure. But a lot of people out there would find it boring. Not you, for sure... but I am afraid you are not the majority here. But, just for you not to accuse me of bringing only bad news, I can tell you that there is a fantastic bbliography about this topic. The greatest one for me is this:
Compre online Operation Epsilon, The Farm Hall Transcripts, de na Amazon. Frete GRÁTIS em milhares de produtos com o Amazon Prime. Encontre diversos livros escritos por com ótimos preços.
www.amazon.com.br
(maybe all this might interest
@Chris Koziarz -- I miss our conversations)
