@SkyPowers said:

Standard m.o. for English speaking audiences to hear German accents while speaking English.

I don't mind the accents. What I do mind is that, ironically, they don't pronounce "Einstein" properly. It's not spelled Einschtein, which is how they pronounce it.

If that's true it's a major flub. You can't correctly pronounce the name of your main character? Perhaps it's a different dialect. Norway has dozens of distinct dialects.

@SkyPowers said:

If that's true it's a major flub. You can't correctly pronounce the name of your main character? Perhaps it's a different dialect. Norway has dozens of distinct dialects.

No, it's a common mistake I've seen in many productions (e.g., Peter Ustinov got it wrong). It drives me nuts. This is an American production, and Ron Howard should have done better research. And one is always supposed to pronounce the person's name the way they do, especially when it's such a simple name. In this case, whether in German or Swiss or any language, it is an "s" sound, not "sch."

Re: E=mc-squared, folks might be interested to know the following fact (which I also posted over at the Mechanical Universe forum).

That equation indicates that a small amount of mass can be converted into a huge amount of energy. For example, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima had a force of about 13-18 thousand tons of TNT. But in that explosion, only about 1/3 the mass of a U.S. dime was actually converted into energy. (And most of the force resulted from the rapid unbinding of tightly packed neutrons in the atomic nuclei of uranium.)

What was the composition of the 1/3 of a dime mass, if not uranium?

At the time of the first U.S. test, there were some who theorized a chain reaction might occur that would destroy the entire planet. I can't imagine the trepidation of that first test.

@Thebridge said:

What was the composition of the 1/3 of a dime mass, if not uranium?

It was uranium, but only a miniscule fraction of the starting amount of uranium (equivalent in mass to about 1/3 of a U.S. dime) was actually converted from matter into energy. The bomb contained 64 kg (141 lb) of enriched uranium, of which less than a kilogram underwent nuclear fission. And of that small fraction that underwent fission, only a tiny percentage actually got converted from mass to energy. Nearly all the amount of starting uranium ended up dispersed as dust after its neutrons had become unbound. It is the rapid unbinding of the neutrons from the nuclei--not the converting of mass to energy--that caused the huge explosive force, heat and radiation.

Ha, and they did it anyway. They had to know and didn't care if the atmosphere was set ablaze. There's something of an ego that goes hand in hand with the big brains.

@Thebridge said:

Ha, and they did it anyway. They had to know and didn't care if the atmosphere was set ablaze. There's something of an ego that goes hand in hand with the big brains.

No, they didn't seriously think that the bomb could destroy the earth's atmosphere. That crazy idea was started by Edward Teller, a notorious exaggerater. But his and others' calculations disproved the possibility. This site discusses it. Here are some excerpts [errors in spelling/grammar/punctuation are the original author's, not mine]:

"In 1942 the decision was made to research a fission bomb. However, Edward Teller continued attempts to gain support for creating a much more powerful thermonuclear bomb (fusion bomb). It was during those early years, when fusion was not well understood, before even the first controlled fission reaction, that Teller first speculated about how a fission bomb might ignite the atmosphere with a self-sustaining fusion reaction of Nitrogen nuclei. (Teller developed a track record for overstating the likelihood of fusion reactions. Bethe, a key figure in the bomb's development, recounted how the H-Bomb could have been produced much sooner were it not for Teller miscalculating the likelihood of thermonuclear reactions.)"

"Anyway back to 1942. Upon hearing the prospect of an uncontrolled atmospheric reaction, Oppenheimer set Hans Bethe to look into the matter. Bethe, using early IBM digital computers to achieve his results, calculated that a fission reaction could not induce a thermonuclear reaction in the open atmosphere. Research resumed and the first A-Bomb was constructed."

"During the Trinity test, Enrico Fermi recalled Teller's idea of igniting the atmosphere. In an attempt to relieve some tension, he started taking bets on whether the test would destroy the world, or merely glass the State of New Mexico."

"Development of a fusion bomb began after the war. Soon the notion of igniting the atmosphere surfaced once again. Only this time it was speculated that a thermonuclear reaction could trigger the fusion of Nitrogen nuclei in the atmosphere. In 1946, Teller's own Calculations showed that the bomb was not large enough trigger a cascade, and even if it were, other physical phenomenon would disperse the energy required to sustain the reaction. He concluded the prospect was so improbable that it was considered impossible. Oppenheimer agreed."

"This meme that mad scientists will risk the destruction the world for the sake of their precious experiments persists to this day. A Scientific American article caused a big flap when it speculated the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider might produce a doomsday scenario. This was seen yet again with The Large Hadron Collider."

"Scientists were not careless when they evaluated the possibility of global destruction during the first nuclear bomb tests nor are they careless when evaluating geoengineering experiments today. Some are advocating for more research in the subject so that if, at some time in the future, should it be the only card left to play, we could engage in a responsible geoengineering program that would have the highest probability of success with the least damage."

Wow, thanks so much for that PT! Now this is something that could stand as its own drama. I haven't seen it included in any of the melo-dramatic movies or tv about fusion and fission, not really.

@Thebridge said:

Wow, thanks so much for that PT! Now this is something that could stand as its own drama. I haven't seen it included in any of the melo-dramatic movies or tv about fusion and fission, not really.

Here's a transcript of an interview with one of the members of the Manhattan Project talking about the "destroying the atmosphere" theory.

Incidentally, there was a lot of debate at the time about Edward Teller's desire to skip development of a fission bomb (Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) and go right to development of a far more powerful, hydrogen (fusion/thermonuclear) bomb, which was seen as at least theoretically possible to achieve. They figured building a fission bomb would be quicker and more likely to succeed, so he was overruled.

IMHO Edward Teller was sort of a jerk. His later testimony helped cause J. Robert Oppenheimer ("father of the atomic bomb" because he led the Manhattan Project effort at Los Alamos) to lose his security clearance after Oppenheimer suggested that the U.S. should not pursue Teller's pet project to develop the hydrogen bomb (fusion rather than fission bomb)--thus JRO was characterized as being "soft on communism" and a security risk. JRO was concerned about an arms race involving thermonuclear weapons, and he was right to be concerned. Teller was right that we couldn't unilaterally refuse to develop the hydrogen bomb and let the Soviets have it all to themselves. But he shouldn't have smeared JRO's reputation to get his way.

There are several TV episodes or movies covering the development of the fission bomb and fusion bomb, and some of them touch on this Teller/JRO argument and the "fallout" from it. Some of them can probably be found on the Web at either YouTube or the PBS Website. E.g.: American Experience: Race for the Superbomb. And Here's a blurb about that American Experience episode discussing the Teller/JRO rift. The top of the page looks a little strange, but the blurb starts out a little farther down the page.

There are also some books about Teller, etc. E.g.: Judging Edward Teller: A Closer Look at One of the Most Influential Scientists of the Twentieth Century.

Perhaps the most definitive book about the Manhattan Project is The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

You can probably find out more about the "atmospheric destruction" theory via a bit of creative Googling.

I found Race for the Superbomb on Youtube. It was interesting to see Bethe and Teller speaking directly about the Hydrogen bomb and the tests. The doc seemed to avoid Oppenheimer's large role at Los Alamos to some extent, not really fleshing him out, but I did enjoy it. Googling about Oppenheimer later, I found some articles that discuss how the Atomic Energy Commission in fact did not destroy his life and how he did not become a "broken man," but was always well received by the rest of the country. When looking at some of the the redacted minutes of the meeting with them, you could see how they appreciated Oppenheimer's work for them. I think Oppenheimer's limpid-eyed soulful look came from his own demons about the matter. But he knew what was at stake. At least Teller addressed in the show that he had thought about the physical damage that would be caused but admitted that "as a scientist I must know what can be done". Say what you will, he was the only one to admit this out loud, as far as I know. Oppenheimer can pout with the Vedic "I am become death" all he wants. The job needed to be done and he did it. I enjoyed this American Experience, thanks PT.

One of the ironies about Oppenheimer is that he eventually did acknowledge that the U.S. needed to develop a hydrogen bomb; so he eventually agreed w/Teller about this. But his change of mind was not enough to prevent his losing his security clearance. However, from Wikipedia:

"In a seminar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute on May 20, 2009, based on an extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks taken from the KGB archives, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev confirmed that Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union. The KGB tried repeatedly to recruit him, but was never successful; Oppenheimer did not betray the United States. In addition, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan Project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union."

No matter what one thinks of JRO, he was one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th Century, perhaps surpassed only by Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein. This fascinating Wikipedia article discusses his life and his academic and scientific accomplishments. [A side note: JRO eventually became Director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ (where Einstein had also worked and resided). ]

There have been a couple of plays written about Feynman. They never really took off in the public's imagination, but there's a subject for a movie if ever there was one. I will admit that his lecture videos (Feynman diagrams) go over my head.

@Thebridge said:

There have been a couple of plays written about Feynman. They never really took off in the public's imagination, but there's a subject for a movie if ever there was one. I will admit that his lecture videos (Feynman diagrams) go over my head.

Yes, Feynman's lectures are rather opaque to most people--even though he admitted that his measured IQ was "only" 125. (The test was probably biased toward verbal ability rather than math, at which Feynman was a genius.)

Interestingly, Feynman once said that, although he probably understood Einstein's theories of special and general relativity as well as any living physicist could, he still didn't fully understand how Einstein came up with these theories, because they are so far removed from our everyday experience and are so counterintuitive.

But when someone suggested to Einstein that he was the most brilliant scientist ever, he said that, no, the most brilliant scientist ever was Isaac Newton. And he was probably right. When his college classmates were sent home to avoid the plague that was ravaging London, they took a happy vacation; whereas Newton went home and invented calculus.