Oppenheimer’s Pool of Geniuses

This week in Science Saturday Charlie Keeble takes a look at the science behind the film Oppenheimer, and some of the other scientific geniuses who played their parts in the creation of the atom bomb. Some of them are also well known for making great achievements in science and society and they were very imaginative and curious characters. The blockbuster science biopic Oppenheimer has been bringing the life story of the man who built the most destructive weapon on the planet. J. Robert Oppenheimer is a remarkable character in the film and I watched it myself to see how his story has been told. I’m not that enthusiastic on the study of nuclear physics myself but as science geek I was very curious to learn about his life and how the science was portrayed in the film.

What amazes me about the film is that it showed how Oppenheimer made incredible achievements in science but all his genius did was make him an instrument of destruction. Hence his namesake as the Father of the Atomic Bomb. His famous quote came from a Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”. Although Oppenheimer is the central character of the film and indeed the chief designer of the atomic bomb, the film also features several other scientists who were also the grand designers of the atomic age. There are many interesting and common features of them that they had in sync with each other in their intellectual genius. Each of them brought some contribution to this bomb making plan known as the Manhattan project. Although Oppenheimer himself was credited with creating the bomb several of the scientists were renowned in quantum physics. Neils Bohr, Howard Urey, Enrico Fermi, Glenn Seaborg, Isador Isaac Rabi, Joseph Rotblat, Richard Feynman and many more. 31 of them won Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine and peace. Their contributions consisted of many different things like how much fissionable material they needed, the computations of how the atoms would fuse together, the extraction of plutonium from uranium, etc. Albert Einstein also featured in the film and was a Nobel prize winner himself in 1921, but did not participate in the Manhattan project because of his politics and pacifist beliefs. However he did co-write a letter to President Franklyn Roosevelt warning him that Nazi Germany could build a nuclear weapon of their own, and suggested that America builds it first. This was true because Germany was the intellectual centre of quantum physics that formed the basis of nuclear energy.

However most of these scientists were Jewish and since the Nazis purged the Jews from their homeland, they had scared them away and they lost all the valuable expertise they needed to make such a weapon. In fact most of the scientists on the Manhattan project were Jewish themselves. Oppenheimer among them. In later years the scientists involved in the study of radiation and nuclear energy called for global control of their science to avoid what they described as ‘a catastrophic abuse of intellectual creativity’. I’ve read Einstein’s book The General Theory of Relativity which formed the base science of atomic energy. I didn’t understand it very well but it gave me a decent understanding of what relativity is and the puzzles associated with it. The theory of relativity in it’s simplest form explains how time and space views the way particles of light move in geometric patterns. Hence the famous equation associated with relativity: E=mc squared. This explains that when the mass of an object multiplied by the speed of light (squared) it generates energy, as all things in life are made of energy from your own body to the stars in the sky. This helped physicists understand the way particles moved the way they do and it helped the scientists in atomic energy research develop the ability to fuse and split atoms. There is nuclear fission whereby a nucleus from an atom is released to collide with other atoms to release tremendous amounts of energy, as what happens in an atomic bomb. Then there is nuclear fusion whereby nuclei from two atoms are fused together to merge into a larger nucleus. This is the process by which stars form and generate energy.

Fission splits atoms while fusion joins atoms. Where this resulting entity is formed it’s got less mass because the density of the star decreases as the atoms merge together due to the nuclei discarding their protons and electrons. There is a practical application of this that can be replicated on Earth where physicists are attempting to create an artificial star and place it in a box to create unlimited clean energy. So far they are struggling to get the construction of the box right because it needs to replicate the environment of a star.   Now at the time Oppenheimer had started the Manhattan project one junior called Richard Feynman was still doing his PhD. He was tasked with trying to separate two uranium isotopes from each other. By that time he was still a young physicist and this was his first big role in science, which was very unique for someone of Feynman’s age.

Before advanced computing machines were invented Feynman had to develop new methods for computing logarithms that humans can compute. It was a laborious process having to take so long to process the information by human computers, but it came in useful later when it was used by IBM for processing complicated equations. Feynman’s mathematical speciality in physics was instrumental to the computing age as it was to developing the atom bomb. However he was more focused on a bigger problem that was more to his interests in physics that needed to be challenged. After working at the Manhattan project Feynman decided to investigate a problem for the fun of it. He believed that tackling complex equations should be something done for fun, not just for a purpose like bomb making. One area of physics that Feynman took an interest in was quantum electrodynamics (QED). This described how light and matter interact and merged quantum mechanics with special relativity, the branch of physics that Einstein studied. This was a troubled area of physics that needed to be shown in a new light to examine the way atoms behaved because they did not follow classical physics rules. Feynman believed QED to be “the jewel of physics” and to examine it he devised visual forms of interpreting the way atoms worked. One of these became his most famous creation in science called Feynman diagrams. These diagrams featured photons and electrons as waves and straight lines moving forward in time and space. They are quite perplexing to look at and they represent the motion of particles as mysterious and infinite probable things. Scattering all the illusions that we perceive about how the Sun ray’s feel on your face and the way water feels on your body.

This work on QED earned Feynman along with two other scientists the Nobel prize in physics in 1965. When he received it he said “I already have got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.” This is one of my most favourite things when it comes to solving a scientific puzzle, the fun is in the exploration of the discovery or problem, not the accolade or a title. In fact Richard Feynman is one of my all time favourite scientists and I like him as a science communicator as well. Some of Feynman’s style of educating the public influenced the way I write Science Saturday. He didn’t speak like an authority figure when lecturing people on physics, he did so with humour and the grace of an entertainer. He had a wicked sense of humour and I think these qualities ought to be cherished by scientists when they communicate with the public. There are far too many scientists in the media that I see that present their facts with a condescending attitude that they border on pomposity with authority. Feynman did not do it this way. He believed you can impress people with science without speaking in a patronising tone and demonstrating it with dramatic and wonderful acts like a magician would do. This is the way of truth from a scientist that is presenting without bamboozling people with complex language.      I’ve read Feynman’s book Surely Your Joking Mr Feynman, which is about his adventures as a scientist. It was very well written and influenced my own science communication abilities. Feynman didn’t just indulge in science, in fact he indulged in many passions of different alternating interests. He was an accomplished bongo player and did painting and poetry, which he infused with his science. There won’t be another genius quite like Feynman, and he may be one of the good people to come out of the Oppenheimer film that can give a positive note about the film that deserves credit.

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