Sunday, July 23, 2023

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.  

15 comments:

  1. Haven't seen it yet. Maybe next weekend.

    Just wanted to endorse the Los Alamos Primer and its study. I taught an advanced topics class this last year and wanted to touch on a bunch of things. Didn't quite know what to do vis a vis nuclear physics, but then stumbled on it. As a teaching medium it was excellent. Nuclear physics, diffusion equation in spherical harmonics, rate equations, and the power of dimensional analysis. Actually Serber's original notes are pretty difficult to get through, but Serber and others (Cameron Reed) have published commentary on them, which I found excellent. For instance
    https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-8949/91/11/113002

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  2. JasonDeibel11:09 PM

    Doug,
    Thanks for the review of the movie. I'm hoping to gather my department's summer students together to go see it later this week. During my senior year at my small liberal arts college that had a limited number of physics courses, I decided to pull off a history minor. For my History of Europe 1914-45 class, I wrote a final paper on the German Atomic Bomb project. The Farm Hall transcripts are an interesting read, even bizarre at times. Another interesting read is Goudsmit's book Alsos, which was his analysis of the German Atomic Bomb effort. If I recall correctly, his assessment of the situation was not kind to Heisenberg at all. Goudsmit argued that the German effort's lack of progress was not due to deliberate efforts to delay Nazi access to atomic weapons, but instead a lack of engineering ability, especially in regard to Heisenberg. Decades ago, Physics Today wrote a really nice article about this and there were a lot of people quoted in the article arguing for Heisenberg's bravery and heroism and others arguing that what he said at Farm Hill was contrived to cover up their failures and cooperation with the Nazis.

    Did you ever see "Fat Man and the Little Boy?" It was movie from either the eighties or nineties staring Dwight Schulz (Murdock from the A-Team) as Oppenheimer, Newman as Groves, and John Cuzak dies as a result of the demon core accident.
    - Jason Deibel

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  3. Regarding possible readings, I also highly recommend a somewhat more technical account of the Manhattan project which, as an experimentalist, I found particularly intriguing
    https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/critical-assembly/875AEBA3F62643970B7C3458B1B701AD.
    It is as well documented as the Rhodes' book, but truly gives you a sense of the scale of the technological and scientific challenges behind the delivery of the project just a few years after the discovery of the neutron.

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  4. @Peter: Thanks for the link to the commentary on the Primer, very helpful.

    Incidentally, I happen to be at the same institution as you, but in the medical school (medical physics, to be precise). I'd be interested to learn more about this advanced topics course you developed, as I think it might be good for students working in radiation oncology / radiology / nuclear medicine to be exposed to the foundational nuclear physics behind the technologies we work with. Is there anything further about the course you would be willing to share?

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  5. Thanks, everyone. The quality of discussion in the comments here is one of my favorite parts of blogging.

    @Peter, great link.

    @Jason, I read Alsos, and yeah, Goudsmit was not a Heisenberg fan. I liked "Fat Man and Little Boy", though it played fast and loose with history, too. They transposed the second Demon Core incident into the middle of the Manhattan Project for added drama, for example.

    @Matteo, thanks for the link - that's excellent and I need to look at it.

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  6. Doug - thanks for your review. I look forward to seeing the movie soon. Years ago (1980's) PBS broadcast the BBC miniseries on Oppenheimer with Sam Waterston in the title role and David Suchet as Edward Teller. My recollection is it was excellent (although don't expect much physics content). If anyone knows whether and where it can be streamed please speak up. Richard Rhodes' follow up book on the making of the hydrogen bomb ("Dark Sun.....") is also worth reading and covers the events after WWII in detail.

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  7. David Reichman1:03 PM

    I have always found the Farm Hall transcripts fascinating. You really get a sense of the moral fiber of people like Hahn vs the lack thereof of many of the others. Most however do eventually acknowledge that this kind of large scale collaboration would be impossible in Nazi Germany, which is quite correct. Of course there is a lot of BS about how they were really working towards peaceful use of a reactor…

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  8. David Reichman1:09 PM

    The BBC movie can be found (low resolution in parts) on YouTube. Waterston makes for a good Oppenheimer-

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  9. Anonymous8:19 AM

    I've been to the store for popcorn, and I'm just waiting here for the Dias/Korean/superconductivity post!

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  10. @Anon@8:19, yeah, yeah. I have a family trip coming up, so I will likely be so brief in my write-up that you may be disappointed.

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  11. Looks like the comments/discussion will have to fill in then - let’s see if we can beat 182 replies!

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  12. Anonymous9:10 PM

    The I(v) (NOT flat, but resistive) and R(T) look fishy to me. Levitation is not shown. Vortex locking is absent (type 2). Frogs and graphite levitate too. Seems like a good diamagnetic insulator to me with poor transport experiments.

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  13. @pizza perusing, you can email me. But nuclear physics was a small bit of the course. It was a final semester course for physics majors and I tried to run through a number of topics from the last 100 years.

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  14. Anonymous10:55 AM

    I actually enjoyed "J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life" by A. Pais, I am surprised this book is not recommended anywhere.

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