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As you can see above, I'm an obsessive about this story and I've been anticipating it for years. As for the film itself -- incredibly skillful on all counts. Deserves all the awards etc. etc. But nobody needs me to tell them that. I do actually have some quibbles with it. Some minor, some major. But none of them cloud the fact that this is probably the best that this story could possibly be told in this medium to such a broad audience.
After my first viewing (I'm seeing it again in giant-screen Imax tomorrow), what I mostly have right now are random scattered thoughts, comments, opinions, and things I noticed. I'll start with the trivia.
The Trinity test:
Like a lot of reviewers, I found the Trinity visuals to be kind of a letdown. This was mostly due to Nolan's insistence on avoiding digital effects. If you don't use digital effects, you just can't convincingly represent a nuclear-powered explosion. Chemical combustion involves reactions that are vastly less energetic than nuclear reactions. So what we got was really just a big, mushroom-shaped fireball. The real Trinity explosion looked a lot more exotic -- a lot more white light, a lot less orange light, and a hazy purple aurora around the whole thing, caused by superheated plasma from x-ray emissions interacting with the ambient air. That said, the temptation to celebrate these explosions like fireworks is best avoided, considering their deeper significance. I think they made the right choice to downplay the visual spectacle. Downplaying visual spectacles does not seem to come easy to Christopher Nolan.
Also on the Trinity scene: it wasn't just an artsy flourish that they cut the sound during the explosion. That's really how it was. Each of those viewing sites was five and a half miles from the point of the explosion. Light travels five miles almost instantaneously. But the sound from the explosion would take 26 seconds to travel that far. So they were able to see the whole explosion before they heard a peep of sound. Next time I see the movie I'm gonna try to time that silent section out in my head. I hope it was 26 seconds long.
One thing I wish they had tried harder on in the Trinity scene, was the initial flash. By all accounts the light was astonishingly bright, easily even bending around corners to turn night into blindingly-bright day (I actually wonder if this will look more convincing on the giant-screen Imax projection I'll see tomorrow than on the "Cinemark XD" screen I saw it on last night). As much as I'm glad they downplayed the visual spectacle, this was such an otherworldly part of the experience to merit retelling. It lasted about two seconds, but felt much longer. Richard Rhodes quotes Izzy Rabi (David Krumholtz in the movie):
"We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the east; you could see your neighbor very dimly. those ten seconds were the longest ten seconds that I ever experienced. Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. I was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You would wish it would stop, altogether it lasted about two seconds. Finally it was over, diminishing, and we looked toward the place where the bomb had been; there was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. It looked menacing. It seemed to come toward one. A new thing had just been born; a new control; a new understanding of man, which man had acquired over nature."
People:
Historically speaking, and in the general view of the physics community, Edward Teller was just as much a snake as he was made out to be, here. Good to see that presented clearly. There's more to be said about the kind of physicist he was (I've known others who behaved similarly on a much smaller scale), but I don't have the energy to go there now.
A cute little cinematic easter-egg: During the Trinity test scene, Teller is sitting in a chair with dark, round welding goggles and pasty white skin from his thick coat of suntan lotion. If you thought he looked like Doctor Strangelove, that's because the character of Doctor Strangelove was based directly on Edward Teller.
Hans Bethe, the tall, half-bald, German-born theorist who argued once or twice with Teller in the movie, is now as revered among physicists as Teller is loathed, mostly for purely scientific contributions (though by all accounts he was a lovely fellow as well -- I used to work in the Cornell astrophysics department, and people there still get rhapsodic about what a supportive and intellectually generous a person he was). Before and after the Manhattan Project, he mostly worked on applying nuclear theory to astrophysics. His greatest discovery (which actually came before the Manhattan Project, IIRC) was arguably one of the biggest discoveries of the 20th century. He literally figured out how the sun works. For centuries, people thought of the sun as a literal ball of fire. Newton even tried to argue in the Principia that the sun burns in the same way as "a culinary fire." But by the early 19th century, we knew enough chemistry to know that such a fire would have to burn out in just a few hundred years if it was lit by chemical means, so this posed one of the great quandaries of the age, the "dark energy" question of its time. Almost single-handedly, Bethe hypothesized and showed that the sun is powered by gravitationally-induced thermonuclear fusion, and he was even able to calculate the various chemical abundances and how they evolve over time. Basically 90% of what we know about how stars are powered and how they evolve was discovered by Bethe in a sequence of just a few papers written at a time when the basic theory of fusion had just barely been discovered. He also, years later, developed the theory of supernovas, which are still a difficult subject for theory today. Everyone I know who works in supernova physics assigns students to start by reading a review paper that Bethe wrote in 1990.
Speaking of stars: as noted in the movie, Oppenheimer's most revered early contribution to physics was a paper he wrote with his Berkeley student, Harland Snyder, about the relativistic gravitational collapse of collisionless dust. This was indeed the first paper that showed how black holes form, at a time before the phrase "black hole" even existed and well before we broadly thought of them as astrophysical objects. His other blockbuster early paper, from around the same time, was the first (and still best) mathematical description of Neutron stars. If you go to a relativity conference to this day, maybe 30% of the talks will mention "TOV stars" for Tolman, Oppenheimer, and Volkov. If Oppenheimer hadn't been so many decades ahead of his time on these papers, they most definitely would have won him a Nobel prize.
Speaking of TOV, I had actually forgotten that Oppie had had an affair with Tolman's wife. That complication aside, Tolman and Oppenheimer had a really good working relationship, and basically founded the theoretical astrophysics group at Caltech. I did my PhD in theoretical astrophysics at Caltech, and I still remember the huge portraits of them both that I used to walk past between meetings.
Kurt Goedel -- the guy Einstein was walking with when Oppie was bringing him Teller's calculations about runaway reactions in the atmosphere -- Kurt Goedel was a real guy and indeed a good friend and frequent walking companion with Einstein in his later years. And he's a figure in some ways analogous for pure math to what Bohr and Heisenberg were for the physical world. He developed the structures that define modern mathematical logic. And along the way, in his most famous discovery, he showed that no "complete" system of mathematics could ever be constructed. All mathematical systems must begin with a few basic definitions and assumptions, and whatever you start out with, whatever system of math you construct, there will always be statements that are true but literally unproveable, no matter how smart one might be. You might say that math has an "uncertainty principle" like physics does (though this one is very different in structure), and that was Goedel's discovery. He also did some physics, perhaps inspired by conversations with Einstein. One of the really interesting spacetime structures that still bedevils theoretical physics as a counterexample to many of the usual assumptions about causality, was discovered by Goedel.
I do wish we'd been able to see more of a few particularly crucial people, but I understand that doing so would have required blowing this movie way out over the three hour mark (I still think this story should have be a 10-20 episode series, not a movie). In particular, there are at least three people around whom even better films could have been written: Szilard, Bohr, and Heisenberg (and maybe Fermi).
We saw Szilard in only two or three scenes, and for some reason he looked a little creepy in both. But Szilard was, for one thing, the real conscience of the nuclear community, and for another thing, the real "father" of nuclear physics. He was the first person to realize that nuclear chain reactions could occur, that they could be used for safe, clean energy generation *and* for catastrophically violent weapons. He developed the science in secret for years before anyone else got into it (he even played elaborate tricks with patent law to keep the discoveries secret at a time when the UK and US militaries didn't think it was realistic enough to classify). And yes, he famously wrote the letter, signed by Einstein, that went to FDR and led to the creation of the Manhattan project. The reason we didn't see more of him in this movie is basically because he was sidelined by politicians even *before* the project began. In many ways, he was Oppenheimer before Oppenheimer was Oppenheimer.
It was cool to see David Hill (Rami Malek), a Szilard associate, as the guy who eventually surprised everyone by speaking up against Strauss and in support of Oppenheimer in the hearing. I was unaware of that particular association.
Bohr, as in the movie (Branagh), was the great sage of quantum mechanics even before quantum mechanics existed. Weirdly, he was able to develop the science, and the whole framework of thinking about it, not by being a great physicist (though he absolutely was) but by knowing a lot of philosophy and taking it seriously. Much of how we now think about QM actually came from Kierkegaard by way of Bohr.
But the actual mathematical structures that define QM today came from Bohr's student, Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg, though we know his science and his biography inside and out, is a deeply mysterious fellow, historically. Mostly this is because of his leadership of the German nuclear project. The Nazis indeed had an 18-month head start, and they indeed had (by near-universal acknowledgement) the most skilled and efficient theorist in the world in Werner Heisenberg. But why did Heisenberg, protege of the great sage, work for the Nazis even after seeing scientific institutions all over Germany decimated by purges of Jewish academics (and, eventually, much worse)? And more interestingly, how could the greatest mathematical theorist of his century fail so completely at his work despite a huge head start? We briefly saw an element of the answer in the movie, where Bohr (Branagh) reported that Heisenberg was focused on heavy-water as a moderator, which Oppie and the team saw as a dead end that would never be useful for weapons anyway. Early in the development of the German program, Heisenberg severely messed up some calculations related to critical masses of enriched Uranium and Plutonium, leading to the (untrue) conclusion that they could never be used for practical weapons. So the program switched over entirely to energy generation technology (nuclear reactors). Did he really mess up that calculation? Or did he intentionally mess it up, knowing that if he did it right he'd be forced to make a bomb that he didn't trust Hitler to use, knowing full well that after the Jewish purges there weren't enough skilled theorists in the country to disagree? Heisenberg himself implied the latter in his later years, but it's such a self-serving story that people are naturally skeptical. People mostly know Heisenberg nowadays for the "uncertainty principle" at the foundation of quantum mechanics. But he somehow found a way to tangle his own history into a state where we'll probably never be sure whether he was an opportunist Nazi toadie, or someone who gave up all of his friendships, prestige, and public respect to literally save the world.
An interesting bit of game theory if we take at least part of that Heisenberg story for granted: the US developed the bomb because they knew that the Nazis could never be allowed to develop it first. Heisenberg and the Nazis (arguably) frittered away the idea of nuclear weapons because they *didn't* have an existential fear of the west. In a competitive situation, the side that poses greater existential risk is naturally less inclined to develop more terrible weapons, and the side that poses less existential risk is naturally *more* inclined to develop more terrible weapons. One of the many situations where perverse incentives developed through layer after layer of unintended consequences.
As for Bohr, he spent about half the war still working in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Despite his high public profile, he was instrumental in a clandestine program (microfilms, dead drops, all the usual spy paraphernalia) to get hundreds of Jewish refugees out and to the west. He himself was under almost constant Nazi surveillance, so this was a pretty astounding feat. There's also the question of what happened between Bohr and Heisenberg, as Heisenberg took over the department at Goettingen (the institute where Oppie ended up finishing his PhD, on Bohr's recommendation), and eventually the German nuclear program. Heisenberg was Bohr's greatest protege, so it was a very difficult situation for their relationship. There was a great play, a decade or two ago, that goes into this later relationship in detail, called "Copenhagen." I saw a pretty good BBC adaptation of it a while ago (with Daniel Craig as Heisenberg). It goes over a series of tense meetings between Bohr and Heisenberg, well into the war, as they were desperately trying to figure out each other's allegiances, and more importantly, how much each other knows about nuclear physics, as a matter of espionage. (That's how Bohr was eventually able to feed this heavy-water info to Los Alamos.)
Speaking of Daniel Craig: Bohr's eventual escape from occupied Denmark (which he briefly mentioned in the movie, in the noisy party scene after he arrived in Los Alamos) was a story right out of James Bond. they stuffed him into the unpressurized bomb bay of a Nazi military plane (key members of the crew were undercover British agents), Bohr messed up his oxygen tank and passed out during the flight, nearly dying, and eventually he was dropped over Scotland, like a bomb, from that bay with a parachute that thankfully opened automatically. Yes, Niels Bohr was the coolest fucking scientist who ever lived.
A random observation, unrelated to basically everything else in this post:
After years of delay, on Oppenheimer's implicit recommendation I finally just got a copy of the Bhagavad Gita (though not in sanskrit, lol). Oppie was not Hindu, or religious in any conventional sense, but he did indeed have an abiding fascination with this book, and kept it on his desk for basically his whole life. As I'm learning about it and starting to read it, I'm noticing how different it is from most scriptural texts. The whole story is really just a retelling of a military campaign. How did a myth about war become so central to one of the world's great religions? The simple answer (as far as I understand) is that the war is symbolic of the internal struggles in the human soul. It strikes me as an interesting coincidence that the story of the Manhattan project, itself an explicitly military project, is so symbolically meaningful to the struggles of morality and the human soul.
Finally, my two quibbles. First, the less serious one:
Physics lectures don't look like that, physics talks don't look like that, conversations among physicists (technical or nontechnical) don't look like that. Technical conversations probably couldn't be presented well on film. There's just too much hidden language. But I'm a little surprised that in all my years of obsessing over sciencey movies, I've never seen a physics lecture in a movie or a TV show that looks anything like a physics lecture. I would have guessed Nolan could be the guy to do it, but nope. For one thing, where were the goddamn chalkboards? I've been doing physics for about 25 years, and chalkboards have always been my instrument of choice. I've never used, or seen anyone use, one of those dinky, single-pane, rolling on casters, little chalkboards that were all over this movie, for anything more substantial than "Welcome to the conference! Pick up your name badges on the table to your left." Anyway, that's just a silly complaint for the physics nerds.
My more significant complaint, and respectfully, it's kinda central to the movie:
Too much goddamn Oppenheimer! And way too much Louis Strauss. I could spend all day watching these actors playing those parts as beautifully as they did. And I get that interpersonal conflicts are almost a necessity for anchoring historical stories, especially biographies. I also get that the conflict between Strauss and Oppenheimer is symbolic of the conflict between politicians and scientists, which is a much deeper and more meaningful part of the story of the Manhattan Project. But we're talking about the future of all humanity here, and hundreds of thousands of people who were vaporized, melted, or worse. And the center of the movie is a petty squabble that did little more than lower the public profile of two men both well into their has-been years? I was honestly a little insulted by the flashy lights and noises, invoking the Trinity explosion when Oppie was in the hearing room. I think it's unfair to say that the movie ignores Japan, as some critical reviews have argued. Japan haunts this movie probably more than it haunted Oppenheimer himself, to be honest. As it should. But that self-indulgent scene was a catastrophic missing of the real point, as, again, I think the overall emphasis on Oppenheimer was as well.
Okay, that's it for this viewing. Clearly the movie was a hell of an experience for me, both for what it included and for what it didn't have time to include. I think this movie is a major event in the history of physics, in part because of the time it appeared. I hope it can drive a new public understanding of what science is, can be, and should be, in this era where we seem to have forgotten most of that. I also fear that all of the effusive praise it's currently getting will soon-enough engender a backlash from those who've decided science is the cause of all the world's ills rather than the complex and essential element of the human condition that it truly is. For now, I'm really just glad that we have opportunities to collectively think such big thoughts.
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