Oppenheimer (film)

[Alex_Krycek]

Saw this recently and thought it was excellent movie.

Very interesting to understand more about Oppenheimer's life, worldview, political affiliations, the Manhattan project and all the physicists involved.

Anyone else catch it?

[TheVat]

We hope to see it soon.   The 3:15 running time has made it a little more difficult to fit in at a busy time, but the coming week things slow down so should not be a problem.  We were actually in line for the show last week when it sold out, which was surprising in this town, it's not the sort of movie that usually sells out here.  

[Peterkin]

1 hour ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Saw this recently and thought it was excellent movie.

Better than the 1980 miniseries? I'll see it as soon it's streaming - we don't go to movie theaters.

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, Peterkin said:

Better than the 1980 miniseries? I'll see it as soon it's streaming - we don't go to movie theaters.

Same here, though the time commitment is probably a bit of an issue. While the movie is presumably very good, one has to be a big careful about this bit:

 

2 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Very interesting to understand more about Oppenheimer's life, worldview, political affiliations, the Manhattan project and all the physicists involved.

A movie about a person is probably a very bad way to learn about that person. A primary role of movies is to entertain and not to inform. It invariably is a dramatization of a particular interpretation of a person. A movie is story telling and stories do not have to be truths.

 

[exchemist]

18 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Saw this recently and thought it was excellent movie.

Very interesting to understand more about Oppenheimer's life, worldview, political affiliations, the Manhattan project and all the physicists involved.

Anyone else catch it?

I saw it at last weekend. Very interesting, though to me somewhat annoying in the format used (lots of short, intercut scenes from different points of time, and relentless, hammering music). I'm told that's just Nolan though. I had no idea so many well-known names were involved or what a large proportion of them were Jewish. Of course, that was partly because the original impetus was to defeat Nazi Germany by getting a bomb before they did and partly because a huge proportion of the quantum physicists of that era were in fact Jewish: Oppenheimer, Bohr, Schrödinger, Born, Teller, Pauli, Wigner...... 

I had no idea Oppenheimer's postwar career was screwed by this guy called Lewis Strauss, out of personal spite. 

[CharonY]

Not that it is important and (luckily) Germany lost a lot of Jewish scientists, but for some on the list, I am not sure whether they were really Jewish. Most did have some some connection to Judaism, and I may be misremembering stuff (as my infatuation with individual scientists faded a fair bit after high school) but:

Niels Bohr had a Jewish mother, but the father was Lutheran, Erwin Schroedinger was in my memory had a somewhat pantheist view (not sure about household religion), Wolfgang Pauli had Jewish heritage but was raised catholic. Again, these are really just nitpicks without real relevance as they did face persecution because of their connections, regardless whether they were practicing Judaism or not.

[exchemist]

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

Not that it is important and (luckily) Germany lost a lot of Jewish scientists, but for some on the list, I am not sure whether they were really Jewish. Most did have some some connection to Judaism, and I may be misremembering stuff (as my infatuation with individual scientists faded a fair bit after high school) but:

Niels Bohr had a Jewish mother, but the father was Lutheran, Erwin Schroedinger was in my memory had a somewhat pantheist view (not sure about household religion), Wolfgang Pauli had Jewish heritage but was raised catholic. Again, these are really just nitpicks without real relevance as they did face persecution because of their connections, regardless whether they were practicing Judaism or not.

Oh sure. But from Hitler's point of view they were Jewish and therefore they had to get out. He described QM as "Jewish physics", and he was, er, sort of right, actually! But then he and the party tried to stop it being studied. Heisenberg carried on, but was hassled so much that his mother had to call Himmler's mother (!) to get the SS dogs called off.  

The film did not include the British contribution to the bomb project, which was called Tube Alloys. In fact at the start of the war Britain was ahead of the US. It was two British scientists that worked out you could make a bomb (i.e. achieve critical mass) with only kg quantities of U235. But they were emigrés who has taken out British citizenship and were called Rudolf Peierls and Otto Robert Frisch and they of course.....Jewish, by ancestry, and thus at risk.

It was quite clearly an intellectual disaster for northern Europe to lose so much talent - and not only in the field of science. 

[Alex_Krycek]

18 hours ago, CharonY said:

Not that it is important and (luckily) Germany lost a lot of Jewish scientists, but for some on the list, I am not sure whether they were really Jewish. Most did have some some connection to Judaism, and I may be misremembering stuff (as my infatuation with individual scientists faded a fair bit after high school) but:

Niels Bohr had a Jewish mother, but the father was Lutheran, Erwin Schroedinger was in my memory had a somewhat pantheist view (not sure about household religion), Wolfgang Pauli had Jewish heritage but was raised catholic. Again, these are really just nitpicks without real relevance as they did face persecution because of their connections, regardless whether they were practicing Judaism or not.

There were many notable Jewish physicists involved in the Manhattan project:

• Robert Oppenheimer
• Ed Teller
• George Placzek
• Joseph Rotblat
• John von Neumann
• Leo Szilard
• Otto Frisch
• Felix Bloch
• Hans Bethe

20 hours ago, exchemist said:

I saw it at last weekend. Very interesting, though to me somewhat annoying in the format used (lots of short, intercut scenes from different points of time, and relentless, hammering music). I'm told that's just Nolan though. I had no idea so many well-known names were involved or what a large proportion of them were Jewish. Of course, that was partly because the original impetus was to defeat Nazi Germany by getting a bomb before they did and partly because a huge proportion of the quantum physicists of that era were in fact Jewish: Oppenheimer, Bohr, Schrödinger, Born, Teller, Pauli, Wigner...... 

I had no idea Oppenheimer's postwar career was screwed by this guy called Lewis Strauss, out of personal spite. 

 

I found the non-linear temporal format interesting: the black and white representing the present day of the film, the color representing Oppenheimer's subjective memory, the somewhat faded colorization of the security clearance interrogation (which served as the mechanism to connect the story together).

The game theory aspect of the saga was most fascinating.  They're in a race against the Nazis at first, then that becomes moot when the Germans surrender, but the bomb is done anyway, so Truman proceeds to use it against Japan anyway, to end the war quickly.  

Supposedly the invasion of Japan was projected to cost 5 million lives (both US and Japanese soldiers, plus Japanese civilians who were prepared for a total mobilization and guerrilla warfare to protect their homeland).  I didn't know this, but the fire bombing of Tokyo prior to dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the most destructive bombing raid in world history, and was on par with the damage caused by the atomic bombs.  So it's not like Truman wasn't going to use the bomb if he got it.  Nor were the Americans unique in their barbarism during the war.  The Axis Power (Germany, Japan, Italy) inflicted some of the worst atrocities of course.

Oppenheimer believed though, that the bomb would facilitate a pause in mass global conflict due to its sheer destructive power.  On some level he may have been right.  

Interesting segment here with Oppenheimer:

 

[CharonY]

19 hours ago, exchemist said:

Oh sure. But from Hitler's point of view they were Jewish and therefore they had to get out. He described QM as "Jewish physics", and he was, er, sort of right, actually! But then he and the party tried to stop it being studied. Heisenberg carried on, but was hassled so much that his mother had to call Himmler's mother (!) to get the SS dogs called off.  

The film did not include the British contribution to the bomb project, which was called Tube Alloys. In fact at the start of the war Britain was ahead of the US. It was two British scientists that worked out you could make a bomb (i.e. achieve critical mass) with only kg quantities of U235. But they were emigrés who has taken out British citizenship and were called Rudolf Peierls and Otto Robert Frisch and they of course.....Jewish, by ancestry, and thus at risk.

It was quite clearly an intellectual disaster for northern Europe to lose so much talent - and not only in the field of science. 

No doubt about that. It was really just a niggling thought at the back of my mind in terms of accuracy. But regarding impact and persecution it is of course not relevant. And luckily Germany lost all that talent! If they had been mindful about the way they expressed their ideology (as folks do nowadays), it could have ended way worse.

[exchemist]

47 minutes ago, CharonY said:

No doubt about that. It was really just a niggling thought at the back of my mind in terms of accuracy. But regarding impact and persecution it is of course not relevant. And luckily Germany lost all that talent! If they had been mindful about the way they expressed their ideology (as folks do nowadays), it could have ended way worse.

Sure. It's funny: when I was at university in the 1970s, the older dons were recommending anyone aspiring to do research to learn German, since that was still considered by them to be the lingua franca of physical science. But it was already becoming an obsolete view.

I did however learn my first proper quantum theory, in my first term, from Gerhard Herzberg's "Atomic Spectra and Atomic Structure", in a translation made in 1937. Herzberg emigrated to Canada in 1935 because............he had a Jewish wife  - and consequently lost his job as a lecturer. Another one. 

I still have that book, a little paperback. It was a classic in its day and I would not be surprised if it is still used by undergraduates today. I see from Amazon it is still in print.  

[CharonY]

There are many (good) classic books also in other sciences, and it is interesting to see that quite a few are not in English (which is almost unthinkable today). Biology has changed a fair bit, but on some of the more complex topics, quite a few old microbiology books still absolutely brilliant (and in many ways surpass modern ones). While most are in English, some have sentence structures that are quite clearly written by a German, which amuses me to no end.

Well, until I read my own writing that is. Another funny story is that I learned all of my basic chemistry and physics in Germany, so while I am fluent in biology-English, I sometimes have to convert basic chemistry and physics in my mind from German to English.