Disorganized thoughts on "Oppenheimer"

I saw "Oppenheimer" today.  Spoiler warning, I suppose, though I think we all know how this story ends.  Just in case you were wondering, there is no post-credit scene to set up the sequel.  (For the humor-impaired: that was a joke.)

The movie was an excellent piece of film-making, and I hope it's an opportunity for a large viewing audience to learn about a reasonable approximation of incredibly consequential history.  Sure, I can nitpick about historical details (why did Nolan leave out "Now we are all sons of bitches", transfer a bet to a different person,  and omit Fermi dropping bits of paper to estimate the yield of the Trinity test?  Why did he show Vannevar Bush seemingly hanging out at Los Alamos?  Update: rereading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I was surprised to learn that Bush apparently was, in fact, present at the Trinity test!  Also, I do now see on an updated cast list that Kistiakowsky was portrayed in the movie, so I may have been wrong about the bet as well.  Mea culpa.).  Still, the main points come through - the atmosphere of war-time Los Alamos, and the moral complexity and ambiguity of Oppenheimer and the bomb.  

The definitive work about the Manhattan Project is The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.  That book truly captures the feeling of the era and the project.  Rereading it now, it still amazes how physicists and chemists of the time were able to make astonishing progress.  Reading about how Fermi & co. discovered moderation of neutrons (that is, slowing of neutrons through inelastic scattering off of hydrogen-containing materials like paraffin) is just mind-blowing as an experimentalist.  (They stumbled upon this by realizing that they got different experimental results if they ran their measurements on wood tables rather than marble tables within the same lab.)  

I saw someone lamenting on twitter that this movie was unlikely to inspire a generation of young people to go into physics.  Clearly that was not the intent of the film at all.  I think it's a net positive if people come away from the movie with a sense of the history and the fact that individual personalities have enormous sway even in the face of huge historical events.  Many people in the story are physicists, but the point is that they're complicated people dealing with the morality of enormously consequential decisions (on top of the usual human frailties).  (One thing the movie gets right is Teller's relentless interest in "the super" and his challenges in working with others on the Manhattan Project.  If Teller had been a less challenging personality, the course of nuclear weapons development may have been very different.  It reminds me superficially of William Shockley, whose managerial skills or lack thereof directly led to the creation of Silicon Valley.) 

For those interested in reading more about the context of the Manhattan Project, I recommend a couple of items.  The Los Alamos Primer are the notes that were given to incoming Project members and make for fascinating reading, accessible at the advanced undergrad level.  The Farm Hall transcripts are the transcribed recordings of interned German scientists held by the British in August, 1945.  They go from denial (the Americans couldn't possibly have developed a bomb) to damage control (clearly we slow-walked everything because we didn't really want the Nazis to get nuclear weapons) in the space of a couple of days.