SPEAKER_1: Would you have gone and worked on the Manhattan Project if you were around at the time?
SPEAKER_1: And, you know, it's a tough question, but I suspect I would have gotten caught up in the same kind of fervor, because when you see what was happening at Los Alamos, and the movie does a really good job of this, you realize that these scientists are getting, they're caught up in this ocean of excitement to do something that no one has ever done before.
SPEAKER_2: New science, new science.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_2: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_2: Hey, everybody.
SPEAKER_2: Neil deGrasse Tyson here.
SPEAKER_2: I've got with me Brian Greene, theoretical physicist, Columbia University.
SPEAKER_2: And the two of us, we're just gonna riff on Oppenheimer, the man, and especially Oppenheimer, the movie.
SPEAKER_2: So, Brian, I trust you've seen the film?
SPEAKER_1: I have.
SPEAKER_2: So, I met Christopher Nolan previously.
SPEAKER_2: We've had him as a guest on StarTalk after one of his sort of time-warping sort of movies that he had produced.
SPEAKER_2: And a very smart guy, very clever, with a lot of attention to detail.
SPEAKER_2: And my sense of the film was that it captured so much of what he cares about.
SPEAKER_2: He cares about science.
SPEAKER_2: He cares about culture.
SPEAKER_2: He cares about entertainment.
SPEAKER_2: He cares about all of this.
SPEAKER_2: And every little physics tidbitty fact that I knew from that era, he managed to capture, not with an entire off-ramp, just to put in a fact that you know should be there, he managed to fully stitch it and weave it so that I felt like I was sitting on Oppenheimer's shoulder watching all of this unfold before me.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, no, I definitely had a similar feeling about it.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, there were certainly moments when there were things on screen that I suspect most people wouldn't take much note of, such as the Einstein and Gödel who would famously go for walks together.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, there were the wonderful moments when I was just sitting there feeling like, or Feynman playing the bongos.
SPEAKER_2: Yes, yes, because Feynman is not ID'd in the movie.
SPEAKER_2: He's, the person playing Feynman is credited at the end, but the word Feynman doesn't come out of anybody's mouth.
SPEAKER_1: That's right.
SPEAKER_2: And so, but you have to pay attention to that party scene.
SPEAKER_2: He's playing the bongos and it was Feynman in the car because in one of his memoirs, watch, in one of his memoirs, he described the fact that he knew that ordinary glass is a very significant UV absorber.
SPEAKER_2: And so while they're slathering each other with, what is it, zinc oxide for the explosion, he's in the car and he says, no, I don't need that.
SPEAKER_2: I've got the windshield.
SPEAKER_2: It's a heavy absorber of UV.
SPEAKER_2: That was Feynman in the car.
SPEAKER_2: I didn't know.
SPEAKER_2: And then, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: And then someone else says, well, but what will protect you from the windshield?
SPEAKER_2: So that was a good rebuttal.
SPEAKER_2: So somebody had to know that little tidbit about Feynman and then put it in seamlessly.
SPEAKER_2: And that's not even someone who's, where they make a big deal of for his presence.
SPEAKER_1: That's what was beautiful about it.
SPEAKER_1: It wasn't like hitting you over the head with it.
SPEAKER_1: Like here's this obscure fact that only we, you know, it was just there.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, let's show them in on the bongos, right?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_1: You know, the only moment that gave me pause, and I don't know if you had the similar feeling or not.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, you and I both spent time giving people a sense of the wonder of the cosmos and things of that.
SPEAKER_1: But the first handful of minutes of the film, which kind of tried to go into the mind of a physicist, swirling galaxies and these equations and what, it just sort of felt like that felt a little much to me.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know if it hit you that way at all.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, so I think without that, Oppenheimer is really just a manager.
SPEAKER_2: We don't see him manifest much physics knowledge.
SPEAKER_1: That's true, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Throughout, he's managing the expertise of others.
SPEAKER_2: So that basically established his street cred, especially since his most cited paper is not about normal physics.
SPEAKER_2: It's about the universe and black holes, right?
SPEAKER_2: Which really didn't have much to do with his leadership in this role.
SPEAKER_2: So I thought that was okay.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I was okay.
SPEAKER_2: Otherwise, you won't get to do that elsewhere.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, I mean, ultimately it all worked, but for the first few minutes, I was wondering where this was going.
SPEAKER_1: And then it went into where it did ultimately make sense, but was that the one brief moment.
SPEAKER_1: But yeah, I love the way that the historical facts were blended with, I guess, things that were well motivated, but Oppenheimer's own personal perspective on what was happening versus the things that are in the personal and then in the public record from the hearing.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, in fact, it was definitely his POV, no doubt about it.
SPEAKER_2: So what I liked about it was all of the angst people had about the bomb in a military setting against the Germans, but then against the Japanese and the Jewish science in Germany, they tossed bones to each of these without actually taking off ramps because the off ramp would be, well, we're a historical documentary, we have to fully cover it.
SPEAKER_2: No, you don't.
SPEAKER_2: It's just his POV.
SPEAKER_2: So, but they got it all in there.
SPEAKER_2: For example, they talked about, well, how special is this bomb?
SPEAKER_2: We just fire bombed Tokyo and killed 100,000 people with conventional incendiary bombs.
SPEAKER_2: And this, your estimates are not even that high.
SPEAKER_2: So how could you carry some guilt with this when we've already committed that level of violence against non-combatant civilians?
SPEAKER_2: So that came up.
SPEAKER_2: And then there was the, well, what is this with Germany, Hitler and the Jews?
SPEAKER_2: How is that gonna play out?
SPEAKER_2: And my favorite line there, which I think encapsulates a lot of historical dimension where they say, Heisenberg might know this, because will we get it?
SPEAKER_2: Heisenberg is brilliant.
SPEAKER_2: Will we get it before Heisenberg?
SPEAKER_2: No, because he's Jewish and Hitler doesn't give Jews access to the labs.
SPEAKER_2: It relegates them to pencil and pads.
SPEAKER_2: And so this was, so that was a fascinating indictment of Nazi racism, basically, and how that very fact probably contributed to their, however slow they were on the development of the bomb.
SPEAKER_1: And the other thing, though, I wonder your thought on this.
SPEAKER_1: I was very impressed with how the carnage from dropping the bomb was treated.
SPEAKER_1: I thought it was a very dramatic moment, no spoiler here, when the sound went off and you had this moment before the actual explosion, and then you don't really see the carnage in any gory, explicit way.
SPEAKER_1: But then I began to think about that and I watched the day after Trinity, I think that's the name of the documentary.
SPEAKER_1: And I began to think, for so many young people, this may be their only direct connection to the events that happened at the end of World War II.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe there needed to be more of the shocking visuals in order that the generation really, really understand.
SPEAKER_2: Well, they described them, they did describe them.
SPEAKER_2: They said a person with a striped shirt, where the dark stripes were, it burned their skin, and where the light stripes were, it didn't.
SPEAKER_2: There were other people where the shadows were burned into the exterior of their shadow, was burned into the pavement.
SPEAKER_1: I wonder if that's enough, though.
SPEAKER_1: Especially if it's the only real entry.
SPEAKER_2: The only, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, so because war, sometimes you have to see it up close to know that you should never do it.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: And this is a certain kind of violence to humanity that is of a scale and of a sort that is so spectacularly agonizing and awful, and to not fully feel that even momentarily may be a bit of a loss.
SPEAKER_2: What about the scene where he, we're inside his head, and he's about to talk about the success of the bomb to the assembled people, and he sees flashes and people's skin burning off.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, that's in his head.
SPEAKER_2: It's not the documentary of what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but it's-
SPEAKER_1: It was also very relatively brief.
SPEAKER_2: It was brief, yes.
SPEAKER_1: So yes, I mean, it's a difficult decision to make because as a film, I thought it worked spectacularly as a work of art about this incredibly destructive moment and this incredibly destructive period, but as a, again, it's not a documentary, but it may be treated as a documentary in the sense that-
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, as is often, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Our movies are our sources of historical knowledge, for sure.
SPEAKER_2: A few other things that I noticed that he did was, we used to say Hiroshima, and then later people started saying Hiroshima.
SPEAKER_2: In the movie, it's said both ways.
SPEAKER_2: In two different cases, that has to be on purpose.
SPEAKER_2: Just so he's got both bases covered.
SPEAKER_2: He's got both covered.
SPEAKER_2: Also, generally when I see a movie a second time, I hear the soundtrack more because I'm not distracted by having to pay attention to the plot.
SPEAKER_2: In Oppenheimer, I already knew what was happening.
SPEAKER_2: So I was able to hear the soundtrack.
SPEAKER_2: And the moments leading up to the bomb test with the button, there is cacophonous orchestral music.
SPEAKER_2: And the editing pace is fast, and the music is getting louder and louder and more cacophonous.
SPEAKER_2: And you're not gonna know that because you're anticipating what's about to happen.
SPEAKER_2: And if you're not aware of the music, which good music in a movie, you're not aware of it.
SPEAKER_2: It's just managing your emotions.
SPEAKER_2: When they hit the button and you see the explosion, it is the silence is definite.
SPEAKER_2: Because they take away the music.
SPEAKER_2: And of course, there's the sound delay from the explosion to where they are.
SPEAKER_2: So he doubles up on this on the silence.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, that was beautiful.
SPEAKER_1: That was really beautiful.
SPEAKER_2: And so they were what?
SPEAKER_2: One, two miles away.
SPEAKER_2: Sound will go a mile every six seconds.
SPEAKER_2: So the blast wave moving at the speed of sound, I think that calculation looked right to me.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_1: Sort of eight, 10 seconds or whatever it was.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, well, they were a few miles.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_2: But between one and two miles away would do that.
SPEAKER_3: Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio.
SPEAKER_3: I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon.
SPEAKER_2: This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_2: Why do they give so much weight to the risk of igniting the atmosphere?
SPEAKER_2: Seems to me that probability would have been so low, to be astronomically low, but it makes a really good headline.
SPEAKER_2: Oh my gosh, we could have ended the world.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, you know, and it's astronomically low probability for ending the world does demand a certain degree of attention.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, thank you.
SPEAKER_2: I agree.
SPEAKER_1: You know, it was a real worry and people had to sit down and do the calculation.
SPEAKER_1: Look, we had the same thing at the Large Hadron Collider.
SPEAKER_1: People worry that you turn on the accelerator, create a little black hole that would swallow up Switzerland and then the rest of Europe.
SPEAKER_1: But the serious point is it's a real concern and you've got to sit down and do the calculation and colleagues of mine did the calculation and showed that it wasn't something that we should worry about.
SPEAKER_2: It was highly unlikely.
SPEAKER_1: Exactly unlikely that you could put it to the side, but this is what we should always do, because ending the world is kind of a big deal.
SPEAKER_2: But what reaction, I mean, when I think of the, you're splitting uranium-235, it sends out to neutrons, hits other nearby uranium atoms.
SPEAKER_2: Why would that ignite the atmosphere?
SPEAKER_2: What would happen, what nuclear process in the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere were they thinking would happen?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, it's a good question.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know the details of the mechanism that was most concerning to the scientists of the time, but you were creating temperatures and densities of energy that we had never created before on Earth.
SPEAKER_1: And so you've got to ask yourself, is there any collateral process that this may spark?
SPEAKER_1: And the answer is, in principle, yes.
SPEAKER_1: In practice, no.
SPEAKER_1: And that's what you need to do to ensure that these things are safe.
SPEAKER_1: But do you know that some of the primary work on the process that you just described, where U235 splits and neutrons are sent out, happened in the building where I'm sitting right now?
SPEAKER_1: And at Cuypene at Columbia University had Leo Szilard, who is one of the first people...
SPEAKER_1: In fact, the story goes, I believe, that he was crossing the street in 1933 in London just after the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick in 1932.
SPEAKER_2: And then it hit him.
SPEAKER_1: And it hit him.
SPEAKER_2: In fact, in Cosmos, we went to that very same street corner.
SPEAKER_1: Is that right?
SPEAKER_2: Yes, we did.
SPEAKER_2: And I walked up to the street corner and I had no such epiphany.
SPEAKER_2: And that chronistically in time and place.
SPEAKER_2: But we did go to that moment.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_1: Szilard came to Columbia.
SPEAKER_1: He was working here in this building.
SPEAKER_1: Fermi was in this building.
SPEAKER_1: They were on different floors, each trying to determine if you could get multiple neutrons, they then could have the cascading effect.
SPEAKER_1: Two neutrons splits other uranium.
SPEAKER_1: It gets four neutrons, splits some more, it gets eight in the whole cascading effect.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, the chain reaction.
SPEAKER_2: That's what chain reaction, gain currency, is a term back then.
SPEAKER_1: But it was then that Szilard and Wigner, when they realized this was a real possibility, they get in a car and they drive to Long Island, I think this is 1939, to convince Einstein to write the letter that they talk about in Oppenheimer.
SPEAKER_1: And Einstein writes to Roosevelt saying, hey, we got to get a move on, there's a real potential for a weapons trade.
SPEAKER_2: Because it's possible at all.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I also heard that Oppenheimer did not have a one-on-one meeting with Einstein, but they had corresponded.
SPEAKER_2: And so what they did was use, because we knew Einstein is always wandering and alone, in conversation one-on-one, they created a conversation that would have been a plausible expression of what their correspondence was.
SPEAKER_2: Is that right?
SPEAKER_1: I didn't know.
SPEAKER_1: That I don't know of in detail.
SPEAKER_2: I'd heard that.
SPEAKER_2: But I was okay with that.
SPEAKER_2: Just because why not?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, you get three for one there.
SPEAKER_2: You get Oppenheimer in conversation with Albert Einstein and the Institute for Advanced Study.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: The ingredients are all right.
SPEAKER_2: One thing I tweeted this, again, I'll give him a hall pass, Christopher Nolan.
SPEAKER_2: So, July 16th is the test.
SPEAKER_2: That's summertime and at the latitude on Earth where this occurred, at 5.30 in the morning, we are well into morning twilight.
SPEAKER_2: It would not have been pitch dark.
SPEAKER_2: But if you want a spectacular explosion against a dark sky, I'd give him the dark sky.
SPEAKER_1: I've been there.
SPEAKER_1: I've been to where you probably have too, where they did the test.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, because in a Nova program, they had me take a Geiger counter and actually, you know, you get some click, click, click.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, there's still some residual impact of all this.
SPEAKER_2: So, I thought it was two movies.
SPEAKER_2: There was the making of the bomb and then the trial.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: And it's quite a challenge to keep that going, you know, after you have, you know, the largest explosion Earth had ever seen.
SPEAKER_2: I think the wisdom that Einstein, it was revealed that he shared with him at the end, was in the end, whatever they're doing to you now, in the end, they're going to have to thank you.
SPEAKER_2: And basically, that's where the movie went.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: I don't really face it directly in my own work, but my kids asked me, would you have gone and worked on the Manhattan Project if you were around at the time?
SPEAKER_1: And, you know, it's a tough question, but I suspect I would have gotten caught up in the same kind of fervor, because when you see what was happening at Los Alamos, and the movie does a really good job of this, you realize that these scientists are getting, they're caught up in this ocean of excitement to do something that no one has ever done before.
SPEAKER_2: New science, new science.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: With government money to back it.
SPEAKER_1: And there's a, I don't know if you've seen this, but Freeman Dyson, there's a quote of his, it's in this documentary, Day After Trinity, he says something like, that feeling of power at this gate, you know, so that sense of you are grabbing hold of the universe, and you now are using its most powerful forces to shape reality, it's hard not to get caught up in that.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_1: You know.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_1: Would you have gone?
SPEAKER_2: So it's, you know, it's, hindsight is very, of course, you know, have much more confidence in hindsight than at the time.
SPEAKER_2: So I'm a little conflicted for the following reason.
SPEAKER_2: My father was in the service, okay, at the time, and the army was segregated.
SPEAKER_2: It was a segregated army.
SPEAKER_2: It wouldn't become desegregated until later.
SPEAKER_2: And so who, who am I really defending?
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: What is, who is my enemy?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: You know, this is, this was a very real thing, mixed with the lynchings in the South and the, and so maybe I would have joined out of, because I don't want, I didn't want Hitler to take over because we can, no matter what's going on here, we all agree Hitler was bad.
SPEAKER_2: But once we learn that Hitler was, was about to be defeated, to turn it on Japan, I don't know if, if I were to, if I had an exit point, it would have been there.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: If I had an exit point.
SPEAKER_1: Because, you know, Leo Szilard, one of the things that he was advocating, and, you know, it's sort of a travesty that we didn't do it, explode the first bomb in an uninhabited place, demonstrate the power of this atomic weapon, and that should be enough to cause any enemy combatant to say, okay, we give up, don't drop that thing on us.
SPEAKER_1: And yet that's not what we did.
SPEAKER_2: Right, well, plus we only had two of them.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, to get uranium-235, that's not the natural state of uranium in the ground, right?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, so you have to centrifuge it.
SPEAKER_2: And I keep thinking, in a centrifuge, do they just liquefy the uranium?
SPEAKER_2: They have to have some...
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, and of course, uranium-235 is lighter than uranium-238, which I think is the more natural form of it.
SPEAKER_2: So if you centrifuge, then the heavier stuff falls to the bottom.
SPEAKER_2: Pull that out, centrifuge what remains.
SPEAKER_2: Just keep that up, and you continue to purify it.
SPEAKER_2: Because the other isotopes of uranium are not self-visible, right?
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: That's not a word.
SPEAKER_2: So.
SPEAKER_2: Anything else about the film that struck you?
SPEAKER_1: Well, I thought they caught well the achievement, which is sort of odd to say because so many people died because of the achievement, but think about this abstract idea that these little things called atoms have neutrons that might spit out a few that would break apart other atoms.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, it's such an abstract idea.
SPEAKER_1: The idea of harnessing that within a decade to actually do something, to me, is an unfathomable scientific achievement.
SPEAKER_1: Let me put the horror to the side.
SPEAKER_1: And I thought they captured that really well.
SPEAKER_2: So in my world, okay, you may not know this, but the uranium, the element, was discovered shortly after planet Uranus was named.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, so they wanted to sort of, you know, they knew the elements should have a deeper, more cosmically inspired nomenclature than other.
SPEAKER_2: So uranium is named after the planet Uranus.
SPEAKER_1: Don't tell me plutonium is coming up.
SPEAKER_2: I'm getting there.
SPEAKER_2: You just back up, okay?
SPEAKER_2: And then we discovered planet Neptune.
SPEAKER_2: And shortly after element number 93 was discovered, that was named Neptunium.
SPEAKER_2: In 1930, the object formerly known as a planet Pluto was discovered.
SPEAKER_2: And in 1940, element 94 was discovered.
SPEAKER_2: And in tradition and in that sequence, it was named after Pluto, plutonium.
SPEAKER_2: My point is we discover plutonium in 1940 and it is weaponized and tested five years later.
SPEAKER_2: Within five years.
SPEAKER_2: This is an extraordinary machine that has been put into place.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, it's just crazy.
SPEAKER_2: And we knew uranium was feasible.
SPEAKER_2: So we didn't have to test that bomb.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: But the plutonium was a new element.
SPEAKER_2: So many people don't know that the bomb that was tested was a plutonium bomb, not a uranium bomb.
SPEAKER_1: But even the fissile nature of uranium was only established in the mid to late 30s.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Well, it's an eternity given you're fighting a whole war with battleships and things.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, but it's again, look, I mean, as a theorist who just plays with equations, I stand in awe of anybody who can actually do something.
SPEAKER_1: And the fact that these theorists came together with the experimenters under the rubric of the organization that Oppenheimer put into place, the audacity of the goal.
SPEAKER_1: And the fact that he was able to manage it and bring it to a successful and horrific conclusion, it's just to me, really.
SPEAKER_2: But do you think a half a dozen people could have done that?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, consider that it's a juggernaut, right?
SPEAKER_2: We are purifying the uranium.
SPEAKER_2: We have Hanford up in Washington and we have all these sites separating the bits and pieces and they're all coming together, kind of pay or play with or without Oppenheimer, we're making a bomb.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know how singular Oppenheimer was to that project.
SPEAKER_2: He's made singular reports in the film.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, I mean, it feels singular to me because the organization that's required to bring together the theory and the experiment and the engineering and the technology, it's just sort of a mind-blowingly difficult challenge to bring it all together.
SPEAKER_2: So you needed someone with high managerial skills and people skills.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, and I think you need someone who understands the science.
SPEAKER_1: Because the worst thing in the world is when you have non-scientists who don't appreciate the need for certain things.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, the way Los Alamos was set up, Oppenheimer knew how scientists work.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_1: They come together and without that culture, I don't think this would ever have come to be.
SPEAKER_1: But it's interesting to note, I believe that Oppenheimer's initial plan was something like, I don't know, 20 or 30 people.
SPEAKER_1: It wasn't like however many they had.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know what the final number was.
SPEAKER_1: It was over a thousand.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, that was not the original plan, but that was what it was requiring to get to the finish line.
SPEAKER_2: Another thing I liked, which was almost, it was so, I was tickled by it.
SPEAKER_2: Each time it happened, I got tickled.
SPEAKER_2: And all those meetings that they're having are all these other scientists who were very famous scientists of the era, who have formulas named after them, who have accelerators named after them.
SPEAKER_2: And it was just like, was that EO.
SPEAKER_2: Lawrence?
SPEAKER_2: Who was the guy?
SPEAKER_1: Lawrence from Lawrence Livermore, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, Lawrence Livermore Rats.
SPEAKER_2: And he was building his first cyclotron or whatever it was.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, in Berkeley.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, it's amazing.
SPEAKER_1: It's also amazing to me that Oppenheimer got them to go.
SPEAKER_1: And that to me, I mean, the film shows it, him talking and getting the families to move.
SPEAKER_2: Convincing them, yes.
SPEAKER_1: But wow, I mean, how do you get that many people to get up and leave their home, move into the middle of nowhere?
SPEAKER_1: What persuasive powers that must have required to get people to do that?
SPEAKER_1: It's just, again, an amazing feat.
SPEAKER_2: Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_2: And what do you make of their persistent discussion about the difference between fission and fusion?
SPEAKER_2: I didn't remember that to be a big issue at the time.
SPEAKER_2: We all knew fusion would be a whole other another another, right?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Because you're fusing hydrogen into healing.
SPEAKER_2: Completely different nuclear physics from fission, but they seem to make a big deal of it, and I don't remember that being an issue.
SPEAKER_1: You know, I don't know, historically speaking, but I gather from a plot line the reason was because Oppenheimer's less than enthusiastic position.
SPEAKER_2: They needed to set that up later.
SPEAKER_1: Edward Teller, who then testifies later on in the committee that ultimately revokes his Oppenheimer's security clearance.
SPEAKER_2: And they shook each other's hands.
SPEAKER_2: You saw that.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, they did, but you know.
SPEAKER_2: No, but that was, I mean, I'd like that.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_1: I totally agree with all that.
SPEAKER_1: But part of the-
SPEAKER_2: Even his wife didn't.
SPEAKER_1: You shook his hands.
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_1: But Teller was gung ho on the hydrogen bomb, and Oppenheimer was less so because he thought it would divert resources from the atomic weaponry, which he actually was quite a fan of because he viewed this as a means of now having some mutually assured destruction that might cause peace to prevail.
SPEAKER_1: And the hydrogen bomb is not where he wanted the resources to go.
SPEAKER_1: But I guess in order to set that up, they wanted us as an audience to know that there's a difference between the fission bombs that Oppenheimer developed and the fusion bombs.
SPEAKER_2: Right, it's not just another nuke, right?
SPEAKER_1: Not just another nuke, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Right, right, right.
SPEAKER_2: And because when they shook hands, I thought Oppenheimer respected Teller's reasoning about that he would revoke it.
SPEAKER_2: And I thought, it takes two scientists to do that, right?
SPEAKER_2: Most other people would break out in fisticuffs, but if it's deeply reasoned, then the argument is sound.
SPEAKER_2: It's not a matter of what your preference is, this is the argument and I gotta go with the argument.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, and I think there's also a deep level of respect that underlies these relationships because this is rarefied physics knowledge.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, to be able to do quantum calculations and to be able to really understand the details of how these devices work, not many people ever get to that level and so it's a small club and entry into that club is all coming from up here and I think that yields this basic level of respect even if you differ on critical issues.
SPEAKER_2: Here's a question I had for you.
SPEAKER_2: I had not appreciated until I saw the film how shortly after the development of quantum mechanics people had to make these quantum mechanical calculations.
SPEAKER_2: Right now we are in the centennial decade of the discovery of quantum mechanics, the major tenets of quantum mechanics, were the 1920s and there you have the 30s and right into the 15 years later they're manipulating all the quantum equations to make calculations.
SPEAKER_2: How could you just put me in that moment?
SPEAKER_2: Was quantum physics so thoroughly believed and trusted that people just walked flat-footed into this and made the bomb with it?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, is that how?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, so first of all-
SPEAKER_2: What were there people saying?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, was Einstein, I said God does not play dice with the universe.
SPEAKER_2: This was his indictment of quantum physics.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, but I think that's a good starting point for discussing it because Einstein also said that he believed that quantum mechanics was a correct theory, but something told him that there was a deeper description yet to be found.
SPEAKER_1: So he-
SPEAKER_2: Okay, so not that it was wrong, not that it was wrong.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, and again, Einstein, as you know, his Nobel Prize was for the photoelectric effect, which was one of the first achievements of a quantum perspective.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: And so 1926, 27, the basic equations are written down, Schrodinger's equations or Heisenberg's, matrix mechanics formulation, they're equivalent.
SPEAKER_1: And so things have been in place for a decade and triumph over triumph in these quantum equations, yeah, led people to a great confidence that, yeah, maybe Einstein's right, maybe there's a deeper understanding, but we don't need that deep understanding.
SPEAKER_2: We don't need, just shut up and calculate.
SPEAKER_1: And then, you know, not all the equations that are underlying the development of the bomb are quantum calculations.
SPEAKER_1: You know, there's a whole engineering side of things.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I thought they, I don't think they gave enough credit to the engineers in the film.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Somebody's gotta build it, and the physicist is not building it.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Let's be, the theoretical physicist doesn't know which end is up.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, that's what leaves me in awe.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, I understand how that, those bomb designs were, little boy fat man, it was all conceptually clear to me.
SPEAKER_1: But if you, even today, gave me a big laboratory and told me to build one of these things, I don't know what I would do.
SPEAKER_2: You could walk in with a hammer and a screwdriver and you wouldn't know what.
SPEAKER_1: You know, I'd have to hire a whole group, and I would, again, be just looking at them from a distance, because I just don't.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_1: You know, so, yeah, I always have dreamed that one day I should take an experimental course, even given by my colleagues here at Columbia, so I'd really get my hands dirty once.
SPEAKER_2: Get some street cred.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_2: But like I said, when I was being tickled by all the names, all those names, everybody has a Nobel Prize for some, and they're just casual names bandied about in the salon and in the coffee lounge and everywhere else.
SPEAKER_2: One last thing.
SPEAKER_2: I thought they made an interesting distinction about his brand of communism, right?
SPEAKER_2: And it was, they gave a lot of attention to this topic with his brother and his wife and his friends and his donations of money to causes.
SPEAKER_2: And specifically, the movie makes no mention of McCarthy in the Senate, okay?
SPEAKER_1: Or there's a moment where we see him, right?
SPEAKER_2: We might see him, but we never at any time are told McCarthy needs to interrogate you.
SPEAKER_2: And I think it's because, this is my reading onto this, that he was above McCarthy's pay grade, okay?
SPEAKER_2: McCarthy is digging out movie stars and people, and here's someone who is winning wars for us, right?
SPEAKER_2: And so my sense was, you don't want him mixed, yes, there was a red scare, yes.
SPEAKER_2: But the McCarthy variant of that was very pedestrian, relative to what was going on at his level in the government.
SPEAKER_2: That's how I viewed that.
SPEAKER_2: But also, what kind of, are you Karl Marx communist, or do you just want the worker to have dignity?
SPEAKER_2: There are ways to slice this.
SPEAKER_1: Totally.
SPEAKER_2: And my sense was when they said, do you agree, I forgot the exact scripting here, but he said, yeah, there are some things they do that I resonate with, not everything.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Right?
SPEAKER_2: And if you're trying to always, are you with us or you're against us, yeah, then you get McCarthyism, but if you trust that not all answers are binary in this way, then you're allowed to be nuanced and think of Oppenheimer, not as some traitor, but as a patriot who has his own conscience.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, no, totally.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, you mentioned your dad before.
SPEAKER_1: I grew up, my dad was very much in the spirit of Oppenheimer vis-a-vis his views on communism, and that was a tough position to hold.
SPEAKER_2: Was he part of just that huge community of Jews who were totally into the communist causes?
SPEAKER_1: Absolutely, and he was one step away from the Rosenbergs, and he was very close friends with the people who ultimately adopted the Rosenberg kids.
SPEAKER_1: So it was a very difficult time to hold a nuanced view, but you're absolutely right.
SPEAKER_1: The world is not made up of black, white answers to most of these very fundamental questions.
SPEAKER_1: It's somewhere in the gray place in between.
SPEAKER_2: Just a quick aside to that, the civil rights movement, as it manifested in the 1960s, was brilliantly conceived because remember, a big part of that movement was once again, dignity and the first voting rights and housing rights, but also the dignity of honest pay for a day's work to get you out of poverty.
SPEAKER_2: That is center line to the communist movement.
SPEAKER_2: And what they said was we can't have communists leading this movement at a time when we're fighting communists in the world.
SPEAKER_2: So, and communists are godless, right?
SPEAKER_2: Because in the 50s, we put God on the money and God on the back wall of the Senate and God in the Pledge of Allegiance, right?
SPEAKER_2: God didn't used to be there before the 1950s.
SPEAKER_2: But appraisal leads to one nation under God indivisible.
SPEAKER_2: That totally breaks up that sentence.
SPEAKER_2: It was one nation indivisible with liberty.
SPEAKER_2: That was the original wording.
SPEAKER_1: I did not know that.
SPEAKER_2: Which makes complete sense.
SPEAKER_2: One nation indivisible.
SPEAKER_2: They flew in under God to demonstrate that we are god fearing and communists have no God.
SPEAKER_2: All right, point is, if you get Martin Luther King, a preacher to lead a civil rights movement, he can speak to the rights of the workers without anybody thinking he's communist because he praises Jesus, right?
SPEAKER_2: So whatever communism the brand was at the time, it enabled you to still talk about workers' rights without being a shuttled away into the communist ghetto, which is what that was.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: No, and I thought they handled that well, you know?
SPEAKER_1: And...
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, so two thumbs up for our movie review?
SPEAKER_1: I give it two thumbs up without a doubt.
SPEAKER_2: All right, Brian, nice chatting with you.
SPEAKER_1: See you later.
SPEAKER_2: Christopher Nolan, I think it's a contender for multiple Academy Awards.
SPEAKER_2: Without a doubt.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: All right.
SPEAKER_2: Thanks for being on StarTalk.
SPEAKER_2: This has been a StarTalk Conversation with my friend and colleague, theoretical physicist, Brian Greene, all about Oppenheimer and the bomb.
SPEAKER_2: Until next time, keep looking out.