Welcome to what happens next.
My name is Larry Bernstein.
What happens next is a podcast
which covers economics, political science and culture.
Today's topic is Oppenheimer, Babes, Bombs and Beers.
The movie Oppenheimer is a blockbuster
and I want to explore the science, the morality
and Christopher Nolan's filmmaking.
We have three speakers for this podcast.
The first will be Jeremy Bernstein
who is a work colleague of Oppenheimer
at the Institute for Advanced Studies
and is the author of the book, Oppenheimer,
Portrait of an Enigma.
I hope to learn from Jeremy about the scientific
and engineering challenges that Oppenheimer face
for building the Atomic Bomb.
And I want to hear some of Jeremy's personal anecdotes
about interacting with Oppenheimer.
Our What Happens Next, Culture, Critic, Darren Schwartz
will help us find the humor in the Atomic Bomb.
And in preparing for this podcast,
I heard that Billy Harriet, the assistant golf pro
at the Lakeshore Country Club, where I'm a member,
made a road trip from Chicago to Indianapolis
just to watch Oppenheimer on the Amax screen
and its intended 70 millimeter.
We're gonna go deep into that experience as well.
Let's now begin this podcast with Jeremy.
When did you first meet Oppenheimer?
I graduated from Harvard in 1951.
I had a job as a Harvard cyclotron,
which lasted until 1957-56.
And then I got an appointment at the Institute for Advanced
Study as a postdoc.
Well, at that very time, which was the spring of 1957,
Oppenheimer came to Harvard to give us some lectures.
And I went to his lecture with the idea of saying,
hello, I'm gonna be at the Institute next year.
So after his lecture, I climbed on stage.
And he gave me a look of incredible hostility.
I didn't know what to do exactly.
I thought, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
So I proceeded till I got next to him.
I said who I was.
And he transformed completely.
He turned into an absolute ray of sunshine.
And he said to me, Lee is gonna be there,
Yang are gonna be there, the two Chinese sisters.
And we're gonna have a ball.
That's what he said to me.
We're gonna have a ball.
I thought I would go through a boy and a coals for this guy.
Lee and Yang would later earn the Nobel Prize
for their contributions to physics.
In your book, you describe Oppenheimer as weirdered and eccentric.
Yet Oppenheimer's success, dependent on his convincing people
to work with him.
How did he pull that off?
Well, because people want to please him.
And people are very impressed by his facility.
He understood everything immediately.
And my interaction with him, I understand that.
Why this guy was success?
Because how he managed people.
Oppenheimer ran the Manhattan Project
to build the atomic bomb.
What were the physics and engineering problems
that needed to be solved to build an atomic bomb
based on nuclear fission of uranium?
The uranium like all other elements comes in isotopes,
which are versions of the same chemical atom,
but with different numbers of neutrons.
And it turned out there was only one that was efficientable.
And that was uranium 235.
And that barely existed as a natural isotope.
So what the first thing that they had to do
was how do we take the uranium out of the mine,
which is mainly uranium 238, and separate.
So that we get enough uranium 235.
This is a very complicated engineering problem.
Then once they had uranium 235,
roll these questions about how much you need,
what shape should it be in?
Just for clarification, there are two types
of uranium atoms found in nature.
The much more common one is uranium 238.
It has three more neutrons in its nucleus
than uranium 235.
The reason that uranium 235 can be split easily
is because its nucleus has an odd shape and is unstable.
And when you fire a fast moving neutron in its nucleus,
it splits and then releases a lot of energy.
How did Oppenheimer's team design the bomb?
So what you have to do is you have to assemble
enough uranium to make a critical radius.
And then you get a chain reaction.
You did that basically by firing a shell
of uranium into a target.
So that eventually you get enough uranium
so that you have a fishable arrangement.
So all that had to be worked out.
So it was a very complicated scientific engineering job.
And they had this unbelievable assembly
of geniuses working on it.
How does the chain reaction work?
The uranium dukeless splits,
a certain number of neutrons are released.
These are transpetitrate naming uranium.
Those uranium nuclei fishing produce more neutrons.
So it's a question of dimension.
If you're talking about a sphere,
the sphere has to be large enough,
just a critical size that works.
And they partly figured this out theoretically,
partly with experiments, and they did it.
How did Oppenheimer assemble such brilliant minds
to work on the Manhattan Project?
There weren't very many of them.
The theorists who worked on it were Haasbeda and Viscoph.
These are people with German refugees.
They did not need much encouragement.
They were worried that Heisenberg
was the process of making a bomb for the Germans.
They were very scared that the Germans would beat this race.
Einstein sent a letter to Roosevelt
encouraging that the US work on the nuclear bomb
because he feared that the Germans
would get the A-bomb first.
What progress for the Germans making on their nuclear program?
The Germans never got anywhere.
They couldn't even build a reactor.
And that's largely because they relied on Heisenberg.
And I always said of Heisenberg, he was a great physicist,
but not a very good one.
And he was not really good at making a practical machine
that functioned, whereas Enrico Fermi
was an absolute genius at that.
So the Germans were stuck with Heisenberg.
Why were the Americans freaked out
when they heard that the Germans were collecting heavy water?
And what role does heavy water play
in building an atomic bomb?
In a reactor, you have to slow the neutrons down
in order to get them to react.
You slow them down by having a collide
with what's called a moderator.
You want a moderator which doesn't absorb neutrons,
but which is massive enough
so that it slows them down when they bounce off of it.
And it turns out that heavy water is a very, very good moderator.
So we used it, the Germans used it,
but they never really quite made enough heavy water.
And Heisenberg's design for reactor was never very good.
They never made a single reactor that worked.
What is heavy water?
And where do you find it?
Well, it's available to a small percentage of the oceans,
as far as that's concerned.
It consists of two neutrons and one proton.
That's what makes it heavy,
because ordinary hydrogen is one neutron and one proton.
How were they able to separate uranium 238
from uranium 235?
To separate uranium isotopes, you make use of the fact
that one isotope is more massive than the other.
So if you get a movie in a circle,
the heavier isotope will come to the edge of the circle
and you can separate it that way.
Let's see if I got this right.
You heat uranium so it turns from a solid rock into a gas,
just like melting an ice cube and turning into steam.
Then you whip that uranium gas around in a circle really fast.
And then the heavy uranium 238 moves to the edge of the circle
and the lighter U-235 stays near the center.
And then you simply grab the U-235 at the center.
You got it.
In the year 2000, I saw the Michael Frane play
called Copenhagen, which won the Tony Award
for Best Play that year.
And the play was set in Copenhagen in 1941,
and it was based on a meeting
between the famous physicist Bohr and Heisenberg.
Bohr previously made major contributions
on the structure of atoms and quantum theory.
And Heisenberg, at that time,
managed Hitler's nuclear bomb project.
Heisenberg was desperate to find out from Bohr
what he was hearing from the British and Americans
on the AI's nuclear program.
And at the same time, Bohr wanted to find out
from Heisenberg about the German's progress.
Is this story true and what happened?
I have seen the play.
I think much of it is true.
I have had communication with the author of the play.
There were different motivations.
Bohr wanted to find out what the Germans were doing.
And Heisenberg wanted to find out what the Allies were doing.
And they did their best not to tell each other
what they were doing.
And that worked pretty well.
Although Heisenberg told Bohr
more about what the Germans were doing,
then Bohr told Heisenberg what the Allies were doing.
Because at that time, Bohr really didn't know.
He only learned what they were doing
when he escaped from Denmark and went to England.
Of course, Heisenberg threw the Germans
or he could see rather the project.
But I have said that Heisenberg is a great physicist
but not a very good one.
Was Oppenheimer a great physicist?
Well, Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist.
He did a lot of work on different things.
He jumped from one thing to another.
The important thing that he did was to figure out
how to form a black hole.
Which he did with the student they wrote a paper
of the formation of black holes.
And that would have one of the Nobel Prize, I think,
if you live long enough.
At that time, it was not considered to be very serious.
He himself paid no attention to it whatsoever.
For us, Oppenheimer was considered a student exercise.
But that was a paper I think that might have one
of the Nobel Prize because
it's a clear outline of how you collapse a white dwarf star
into a black hole. It's very clear.
When Oppenheimer was in charge of the Manhattan Project,
did he make contributions on the theoretical physics side?
Or as you said, he was very quick.
Was he good at figuring out which problems needed to be solved
and then managing the process by sending the right resources
and people to solve those problems in a timely manner?
All the above.
For example, there came a moment when he had to appoint
somebody to direct a theory group
and tell her very much one of the job.
Teller was not interested in the ordinary Bobby.
He was only interested in fusion.
To keep it moderately happy, Oppenheimer created a small group
three or four people which tell her operated on
and then complained incessantly.
I met him once and I decided that this bed is impossible.
If I have to go to work for this bed,
I will jump out the nearest window.
Teller is famous as the father of the hydrogen bomb.
Why was it impossible to work with him?
Well, he was eccentric and you know what he worked
on his ideas or no ideas.
To give an example,
Iron physicist called Robert Carpless
had taken a sabbatical at Berkeley
and had told Teller about me that I was somebody he might hire.
We met in Washington.
It turned out that the very time we were meeting
was the very time he was testified against Oppenheimer.
I knew nothing about that.
And the only thing he said to me was that he was glad
to talk about physics or other what he'd been talking about.
But he suggested we'd come up to his suite
and he would give me a lecture.
He said the way I prepare for a talk
is I give it to somebody and you don't understand
something you interrupt me.
So he started on this talk and it wasn't I didn't understand.
I just thought it was extraordinarily interesting.
I was unbelievably without any interest.
So I sat totally numb, not saying a word.
But I later learned that was a very day
he testified against Oppenheimer.
I'd never heard from him again, which is just as well.
Tell me about how Oppenheimer managed the Manhattan Project.
Why was he the right man for the job?
Everybody thought he was the wrong man for the job.
Nobody understood why he was selected.
He had no experience in anything involving practical physics.
He was a theorist.
But you know, it's somehow he fitted right in.
I guess he was a good mechanic.
He knew how to talk to people.
Do you want to ask the right question?
He knew how to turn them on.
There's a documentary entitled A Day After Trinity
that interviews the major players in the Manhattan Project.
Do you recommend that documentary film for this audience?
The day after Trinity, you must see this movie.
If you see this movie, you'll understand a lot.
The movie Oppenheimer begins with him working
as a lab technician at Cambridge University.
But your biography starts with his drawing up in New York City.
Why is Oppenheimer's youth important to understanding him?
Well, it was very important.
His father was a rather wealthy man.
wealthy German Jew.
And Oppenheimer was, of course, named Julius after his father.
But he always said, if he was asked what the J stood for
in J. Robert.
And he always said, J. was for nothing.
That's what he said, which is an interesting comment
if it happens to stand through your father.
He had a lot of trouble being a Jew.
But I don't blame him because there was a lot of anti-semitism
at that time.
There is a letter, which I think I haven't
by a biography of Oppenheimer.
The letter of recommendation to a British physicist
say not to worry, but Oppenheimer's Jewishness,
that he's not really too Jewish.
So the basic letter, but it was a very anti-semitic time.
In fact, I had an uncle who went to Harvard's
a graduate student in the 30s.
And when I got accepted there in the 40s, he told me
not to go, he said, it's a very anti-semitic place.
And you will not be happy there.
Well, there were places where Jews could not go.
Jew could not get into a final club.
But who the hell wanted to get into a final club?
I never found it difficult to be a Jew at Harvard.
In your book, you mentioned that Oppenheimer was accepted
to Harvard as an undergraduate, but took a gap year
because of an illness.
The year he started at Harvard, its president
adopted a Jewish quota, limiting all future classes
to be up to 15% Jewish.
Well, I don't know if we knew about it.
I mean, I don't think there any ads say
we limit the number of Jews to 15%.
I'd think they just did it.
Now, when I applied with my friend Henry Steiner
in the 1940s, I don't know if there was still a quota.
We were both admitted, we were both Jewish.
I had counted a few anti-semitic people
what I was there, a few, not many.
Do you think Harvard for the Jews in the 1920s
is like it is for the Asians at Harvard today?
There's a quota limiting the number of Asian students,
but they do not face direct discrimination at the school
by its faculty, administration, or other students.
I think that's about right.
There's a whole book written about anti-semitism
the master of Harvard at Harvard, which is worth reading.
They had an explicit policy, which was actually
pretty deriding that no Jew would ever get tenure.
So for example, Stad Ulam came from Poland
and was a junior fellow at Harvard.
He didn't get tenure.
No Jew ever got tenure in the master of Harvard
at Harvard till after the war.
The book you referenced is a history
in some by Steve Natis and Xing Tung Yao.
Why were there so many Jews working at Los Alamos?
Part of the answer to that question
is that a great many of the Jews were refugees.
And refugees were not allowed to work on radar.
And the Vitalik Bob was considered
to be a less sensitive project than radar.
For example, Hans Pena could not work on radar,
but he was a very important figure at the Vitalik Bob.
So that's why there were a lot of Jews at Los Alamos,
because they couldn't work on radar.
Next topic is how to keep military secrets like the A-Bomb
while employing so many talented scientists
without proper vetting.
The method to keep secrets at Los Alamos
was compartmentalization.
You could only work on a narrow problem.
You couldn't talk to people working on different problems.
And so if there was a leak with respect to any specific problem,
it wouldn't give too much away to our enemies.
There were Russian spies at Los Alamos.
The most famous was the British physicist Fuchs.
Why did the compartmentalization secrecy strategy fail?
Well, in the first place, Fuchs did everything.
He was very, very central.
He had a design for the hydrogen bomb.
So he was able to tell the Russians our design
for the hydrogen bomb, such as it was.
He knew all about our design for the regular nuclear weapons.
Now there was a second American whose name escapes me.
I tell you how you could trace him.
Roy Glauber was an undergraduate when he went to Los Alamos.
He was the youngest member of the technical staff.
He later became professor at Harvard with the Nobel Prize.
His roommate was the other Russian spy.
That American spy was Ted Hall.
In the movie, there's a discussion between Appenheimer and Einstein
about the question about whether a nuclear weapon explosion
might cause an ongoing chain reaction
that would destroy the entire planet Earth.
In the film, Einstein asked Appenheimer, how's that work going?
An Appenheimer response that they calculated
there's a infinitesimal probability, but not zero,
that the nuclear explosion will end the world.
Was this conversation based on fact?
The question was raised long before Einstein had easy to do with it.
And it had been worked on at Los Alamos.
I think Hans Bader worked on it.
People worked on it.
And concluded that it was not going to blow up.
So whatever Einstein had to say about it was irrelevant.
Einstein had been the central figure in physics
at the turn of the 20th century.
Einstein wrote his best papers on Brownian motion
and the photoelectric effect in 1905
for which he received the Nobel Prize.
Einstein retired to the Institute of Advanced Studies
in Princeton, where you worked in the 1950s.
What was Einstein's continuing relevance to physics
when Appenheimer was working on the atomic bomb?
He thought that physics was on the wrong track
that quantum mechanics, while successful,
was basically incomplete.
There had to be a more basic theory
which he spent most of the latter part of his life
trying other success ways to find.
He was looking for something that didn't exist
and he was very stubborn, wouldn't he give up?
Einstein questioned some of the key precepts
of quantum mechanics.
Did anyone follow him on this intellectual path?
Nobody pays the slightest attention.
If you teach a class in the quantum theory
and you want to give a lecture
on what we might call a philosophical foundation of the theory,
you might talk about the Einstein-Pedalski-Rosen paper
which was written in the early 1930s.
And that's the last thing that he said about quantum theory.
In fact, he wrote at least one paper
in which he has the quantum theory completely wrong.
He really checked out.
When Einstein said God doesn't play with dice,
what does that mean?
Is that idea still considered relevant
by leaders in the field?
Quantum theory deals with probabilities.
Quantum theory does not tell you what something is.
It tells you how probable it is that something.
And he felt that for a fundamental theory
to ground itself up probabilities was simply wrong.
So that's what he was talking about.
Nobody cares.
I might tell you what Einstein thought.
But for our teaching a class in the quantum theory,
I would not pay the slightest attention to what he thought
because I don't care.
The movie Oppenheimer delves into his private life in detail.
Did you know his life kiddie when he was her colleague
at the Institute of Advanced Studies?
I never liked her.
I never thought she was terribly dice.
I never understood it.
But I've always felt it's not by business.
And obviously she meant something to him.
They got married and had these two children.
They stuck together.
In the book, you described your first meeting
at the Institute with Oppenheimer.
I just driven through my parents' house at Rochester.
All I wanted to do was to take a bath.
And I went into the office.
And the secretary said,
Dr. Oppenheimer wants to see you.
I told her, though he doesn't,
there's no reason he wants to see me.
Oh, yes, he wants to see you.
So I walked in to Oppenheimer's office
and he's of course impeccably dressed
in one of these headbeats suits that he had.
And the first thing he says to me,
he doesn't say a lower r-rate.
He says,
what is due and firm in physics?
Thank God the phone rang.
And it was his wife.
He talked to her.
And when he hung up, he said to me, it's kiddie.
And I do those as wife.
And he said, she's been drinking again.
I said, nothing and I excuse myself on the left.
So there you are.
What does that expression, new and firm and physics mean?
Well, he did not want to know a rumor.
He wanted to know a new result, which had been established.
He wasn't interested in rumors.
There's a lot of rumors, a lot of experiments that are
have done theories that are partly right.
He didn't want to know.
He wanted to know a truth experiment, a truth theory.
What does new and firm he wanted to know?
When the movie begins, Oppenheimer is studying physics in Europe.
Why were the Europeans at the forefront of the time?
And how did the US become a powerhouse in physics by the time of the Manhattan project?
You have excellent research in Europe.
Oppenheimer and I, Robbie, went to Europe in the late 20s, early 30s,
and discovered that American physics was looked down on.
And they decided that they were going to revive it.
So Robbie created the Department of Columbia.
And I would have created the department on the West Coast, Berkeley and Keltek, and they did it.
In the movie, Oppenheimer, they show the meeting when oppie meets President Truman in the Oval Office.
And he tells the president that he has blood in his hands.
What was that all about?
Well, of course, I wasn't there.
The person who has the most interesting things to say about it is Dyson.
You should listen to Dyson.
Dyson asks the question, what did Oppenheimer mean?
And he comes to the conclusion that Oppenheimer bent
was not that killed for begging it, but that they had such fun.
Does it go back to that same concept that you mentioned earlier?
When you first discussed with Oppenheimer the chance to work together at the Institute for Advanced Studies,
and he said, join me at Princeton at the Institute, and we'll have such a ball.
The blood on my hands reflects his acknowledgement of the perversity that he had such a good time
while making a bomb of mass destruction.
Correct.
Why did Truman take Oppenheimer's statement about blood on his hands so badly?
Because he thought that Oppenheimer had no right
to that attitude because it was true that it dropped a bomb.
Oppenheimer didn't drop a bomb.
In essence, Truman was the one ultimately responsible for Hiroshima,
because he was the one who gave the direct order to drop the atomic bombs on the Japanese.
Oppenheimer had no right to that guilt.
The Manhattan Project was an incredible feat in terms of applied science,
engineering, and management under extreme work conditions.
Oppenheimer effectively ran the project over two years with a multi-billion-dollar budget.
Do you think someone else could have done it besides him?
No, nobody else could have done it.
Because no one else has those qualities.
It brilliance the command of people, the command of language.
He was totally unique.
Thanks Jeremy.
I'd like to move to our second speaker, Darren Schwartz.
Topical of the day is the new movie Oppenheimer.
Right.
What did you think?
I thought it was excellent.
It's a story that hasn't been told before and then needed to be told.
And I thought it was well done, although definitely complex,
which is a typical Christopher Nolan thing and maybe some other criticism.
Again, we can get out of that.
Christopher Nolan, what other of his films have you seen?
I've seen a lot of memento, prestige, interstellar, inception,
Dunkirk, and then his most complex movie that people have complained broadly about is tenant.
It's kind of a time and travel movie that you wouldn't like.
Talk to me about no one's use of time and story overlap,
which may have resulted in some confusion in the audience.
In Oppenheimer?
Yeah.
There are a lot of interlaced storylines.
I personally had an issue because the theater I saw it in, the audio wasn't great.
So I was missing some piece of dialogue.
If you go online, you search like some people were totally confused.
And in general, there is a criticism against Nolan being very confusing.
One of the things that I read that he said is he tries to balance giving away
too much information to early to the audience versus holding it back.
So overall, I think you might have erred on the side of complexity a little bit,
but it is what it is.
Three hours too long.
I think a lot of it could be cut out.
I mean, we can talk about it, but again, the nudity.
You got to cut that.
I don't want to see him sitting there smoking naked with his legs crossed.
Could you do it in two and a half hours probably?
Silly and Murphy plays Oppenheimer and his performance is fabulous.
Will he win the Oscar for best actor?
I would imagine that he'll get nominated at I don't always compete against.
Not only was he excellent and outstanding, he looks like him.
It's amazing.
And they didn't really have to change likes.
I've seen that got other movies.
I mean, he looks just like him.
What did you think of Matt Damon's performance as general Leslie Groves?
And will he get nominated for best supporting actor?
Probably get the nod, you know, who knows?
Oh, that was great.
So I think you had to have the offset of the intellectual,
somers, simmering guy with the belligerent army guy who's like, do it.
Go ahead and get it done.
Emily Blunt played the part of his wife, Kitty Oppenheimer.
I think that she did a great job.
Overall, the women were not done justice in this film.
The mistress, Jean, came off as kind of needy and whiny and Kitty, you know,
there was just a lot of focus on the fact that she was an alcoholic.
And she just couldn't take life as a mother.
And she couldn't just deal with things in general.
And it was constantly kind of having to catch her issues falling.
But at the same time, she was probably his biggest supporter.
And she played a huge role at the end during the tribunal to see if it gets
a security clearance back or not.
The movie goes into detail about his personal relationships, the making of the bomb
and the loss of a security clearance.
This is the most important science movement of the year and one of the most
important of the decade.
And yet, none of the important science or engineering problems are critical
to make you the bomb were examined in a serious way.
Why do they, Christopher, no one did this?
I think they could have done so much more with explaining it.
My criticism of the film are they didn't really go deep enough on some
of the relationship stuff and some of the emotions.
And with the science, they didn't really give you the deep down on what the science
was. The mumbo jumbo and Oppenheimer reminded me of the film, the big short
about the mortgage crisis.
We had our hero, Margot Robbie, explaining CLOs in a bubble bath in a funny way.
She was a friend of the show, Margot Robbie.
Yeah, for sure.
A friend of the show.
And I asked my 12 year old son, after we left the theater, what'd you think?
Can you explain me what CLOs are?
And he said, no, he actually didn't understand her.
Analysis.
So I explained it to him and he goes, well, why do they just say that?
I mean, that's what they did here as well.
Why do they just say it?
Why do I have to make it seem like it's so complicated we can't even talk about it?
So there would have to be a creative way to do it.
What I think they kind of did in the big short where there's just kind of like
an interstitial and like a voice over and says, this happens, this happens,
this happens, and like, you know, text and something that would fit yesterday
in preparation for this podcast.
We watched together the documentary film The Day After Trinity.
This movie is about Oppenheimer and the making of the Atomic Bomb that came
highly recommended by our previous speaker, Jeremy Bernstein.
It included interviews with all the major players like Frank Oppenheimer, his
brother, Nobel Prize winner Hans Bett and Freeman Dyson.
If I remember your favorite part of the movie were The Wagers,
placed by physicists about the results of the first trial test of the Atomic
Bomb. For example, the physicist Fermi wanted to make a bet that the
entire stated in Mexico would be incinerated.
I think there's also another better.
They referenced that this could truly lead to the destruction of the atmosphere
and the world in general.
My favorite was when the nuclear weapon went off, they interviewed someone who lived
like 20 miles away and they said, oh my God, is there an earthquake?
And then he said, honey, you got to get up and see this.
The sun is rising on the wrong side.
Well, what I liked is the interview to woman parents and her were driving her
sister to college and she said the bomb went off and it was like as bright as
the sun and she said, my sister said, what was that?
And the interviewer said, well, why was that notable?
And she said, well, my sister's blind.
This documentary that they after Trinity was really added to the movie Oppenheimer.
It had a lot of additional information and added some fantastic archival footage.
The movie was nominated for an Oscar for best documented feature and won the Peabody award.
And I think it's a well renowned documentary and it's detail heavy.
I think it's the opposite of Oppenheimer.
And I think you also learned about the man as well.
When he was younger, he was quick and impatient.
It would terrorize the students.
It was a bit erasible and kind of bossy.
He would take colleagues to the ranch.
They had a ranch in the remote part of New Mexico.
That's why they end up choosing ourselves.
Yes, there's no heat.
We're freezing.
He'd take us on these multi day horse strips.
No one could ride a horse and it was cold and rainy.
And remember, Oppenheimer said, okay, if I would just do it at night,
which then it goes, well, that was just cold and difficult and rainy and dark.
They touched on this which I think they touched on the film as well.
He really wasn't political.
And he started paying attention when the war in Europe started, you know, raging.
And then when he became a little more aware, you remember what he read?
He read Dusk Kapital and Lenin's work in their original language.
The entire works of Lenin, which I think that actually came back to haunt him.
But he wasn't a zealot in any way.
He was just trying to educate himself.
And I think that definitely came back to Biden.
He wasn't political.
He was kind of naive.
He was kind of like in his own scientific world.
He became aware when the war in Europe was happening.
And then when he got involved, he made this whole very patriotic switch,
where he was actually wearing the uniform.
What else did you learn in the documentary?
They also called the bomb the gadget.
I don't think that was said in the movie.
And the other thing that I liked about Jeremy's comments,
it's something like he didn't have the utmost respect for him as a physicist.
He said, you asked him about, I think, a physicist and he's scoffed.
He said, I don't know, Oppenheim was probably good at fixing his automobile.
He was probably handy with a wrench.
The job that he had at Los Alamos was much broader.
He was a project manager.
He was a project manager.
And it combined two elements.
It combined the theoretical physics side, but also an applied job in engineering.
He had to actually make a bomb and to make a bomb, sometimes you need a wrench.
And you have to be able to think about this.
And everyone was shocked that they picked this guy because he had no experience.
At the time, it was the biggest science project in the history of the world life today.
How do you think about Groves' decision to not only choose a leftist,
but choose someone with no experience to do this?
It seemed like there weren't a lot of other better options.
Groves thought, okay, this is a guy that I can boss around.
I can give him the space he needs, but still kind of, you know, hold the marionette.
This is the kind of guy he smoked.
He didn't eat.
He smoked with 10 packs of cigarettes.
It was really good.
Every, and it isn't the film, both the movie, Oppenheimer and documentary.
And in photographs, he's always has a cigarette in his hand.
And I could believe it.
He dies of lung cancer.
He looked so old.
It would make sense that it really accelerated after his security clearance
because it was really dragged to the mud and the McCarthy stuff.
And he really was villainized.
The guy who was on the cover of life, you know, the other time of bomb.
And then literally it all got taken away from him.
They spent relatively little time before the war,
but so much time after the war, particularly with the barge of the security
clearance issue.
Do you think it was too much time spent on that to make anything?
Who really cares that he lost the security currents?
I think it was critical to go to the movie because it talked about the fall of a
giant, whether it was right or wrong.
He went from the pinnacle of a guy who saved liberty and maybe the world
to this guy who were saying, wait a second, we can't trust this guy with America's
secrets.
He could be a spy.
He's a bad guy.
I mean, I think you had to tell the story of the scientists who came to his
defense, those who kind of turned their back on him.
It was more kiddie really shine.
She goes toe to toe word for word with Jason Clark.
It was a hit job.
He was sent in there by straws.
It was a hit job.
He doesn't do a very good job defending himself.
He seems a little feeble.
I thought General Groves, when asked if Opie would meet the standards for security
clearance, he said he did not, but that nobody could meet that standard.
And I thought this was a real help for him.
Is it Opie or Opie?
Opie is anti Griffith show.
Ron Howard is his boy.
It's called Opie.
Oppenheimer, Opie.
I guess it matches the Oppenheimer, Opie.
Oppenheimer, aka Opie.
Was dating Ted Locke.
And he got himself involved in a relationship with Kitty.
She gets pregnant.
He gets married by the way.
Okay, we got to, we got to queen that up.
Divorce, Mary, Opie, have the kid.
They had a baby and he came home one night.
She was struggling.
She's like, I don't mind enjoying this.
Next thing we know, there's a knock at the door.
Someone asked the door.
They give the kid kids gone.
We never heard from the kid.
Now, I've had, you know, struggles.
I've never given my kids away.
Yeah, yeah.
I tried to me again.
Who's going to take them?
You know, that's a good, mm-hmm.
Let's talk about choosing Los Alamos as a place to put 100,000 people on the fly.
Can you believe the US government chose a place with no water, no civilization?
They patched it together and it was barely functional.
They said they had five baths, one of the guys in the documentary said,
you turn on the water in the morning and worms would come out.
And the other thing they said was they're young people.
And so they still wanted to blow off steam, but they didn't have a lot of store bought liquor.
They would make it.
They had to lab produce alcohol, which was basically 200%, which is just a 100% alcohol.
It's like grain alcohol that they would just get ripped and then be back at the lab.
Managing people, this is something core to who you are.
What do you make of managing people, particularly these hotheads like Teller?
Well, I've never managed scientists.
I don't think anybody in the right mind would put me in charge of scientists, unless it was literally a science experiment.
My perspective is you manage people, you collaborate, you get consensus, and you get buy-in,
when that's possible.
And when it's not possible, you got to do the mission and you got to get everyone marched in the right direction.
I think Opie did.
I mean, he literally built things by consensus.
That's how he project managed.
That seems like what his magic was.
In three hours, we covered a lot of ground.
Yeah, what they miss.
The horrors of war were not really truly recognized or represented.
The whole thing was about this race to save the world and to create this bomb.
But the result of the bomb was you killed two hundred thousand people just to viscerate them, evaporate of them.
And so the only thing they really did is at the end, when Opie was looking in the crowd,
a few people kind of morphed into kind of skeletons.
But what I think they should have done is something like show actual footage of the Nagasaki Hiroshima just flattened.
We all remember from Great Sweden movies where the kids got bandages and like flashes like melted off.
I think that was kind of a huge miss, you know, it spent so much time.
It missed how the science ultimately caused devastating results.
25 years ago in 1998, I was transferred to Tokyo and I managed 30 Japanese men and women.
Most of them were older than I was and you know, I was there with my wife and we wanted to explore Japan.
So I called a group meeting and I mentioned that I was going to visit Hiroshima to go see the bomb site.
I said, anyone recommend any restaurants or think to do in Hiroshima this weekend.
And it became obvious that none of them had ever been to Hiroshima.
So I said, oh, how many of you guys have ever been to Vegas at all 20 razor hand?
So was there any resentment that you felt towards an American specifically you?
No, I asked about that and they were sort of like, look, you know, we started it. We promised you first. I get it.
Really?
Yeah.
One of the big issues in Japan when I was there related to the high school and college textbooks that Japanese would learn in public schools.
That sort of white washed the Japanese war crimes specifically the rip of Nanking, the abuse of prisoners of war.
They recognized Pearl Harbor, but explain it was like justified.
What are other things? I mean, it's three hours. What else do they miss in this three hour extravaganza?
One of the things that was a miss, it wasn't really the content of the film, but.
Crystal is shot this thing in 70 millimeter IMAX.
Now there are 80 IMAX theaters in the country.
There's only 19 of the 80 IMAX theaters in the country that you could truly get the experience that he wanted you to have, which again, seems like there's some level arrogance there.
The only theater I could get into was the Wilmot theater. And the Wilmot theater is one of these 75 to 100 year old theaters.
It's no technology. And then we had the problem. The sound quality was terrible. Should movie theaters have subtitles?
No, it's ridiculous.
Yesterday we saw a day before Trinity. Yeah, subtitles.
No, we did subtitles because the documentary, again, there's a lot of a lot of people or a lot of people coming in. Who's that guy? Who's that guy?
We turned, I turned this subtitle on. Thank you. You're welcome. So we could see who was talking even then they didn't always put it on.
You should know that over time I started just to read the subtitles along.
Right. I think that's a problem because there's a split second that you're missing the visual.
Oh, the way which is how I said, but I don't miss a thing. I've noticed when I'm watching television, when I'm watching films, subtitles, I.
I needed subtitles for peaky blinders. Silling Murphy also. How about that? You watch peaky blinders?
And literally it's a cockney accent. You can't understand it. Blinders, subtitles for that.
Beyond that, don't need it. Now, Oppenheimer, my experience, very similar. It was an Oak Park theater, which was an awesome theater.
And I think it was relatively newer. They refurbished. It was a great experience, but it was very large and it was so echoey.
Some people, you know, maybe they're a little older, they went back, they complained and they gave them like headphones, like old school headphones.
So that's a solution. When you can't hear a movie like this, it's so complex that was actually very frustrated.
I was very frustrated because I invested three hours. I could 80% of the dialogue. I had to say, what do you say?
What do you say? What do you say? And people look at me like, what's wrong with this guy?
Well, as for I'm Barbie, I asked you to compare Barbie to some other comedies. I would like to now compare Oppenheimer to other war films or other science-like movies.
So here we go. Oppenheimer versus back to the future.
I think the flux capacitor was explained better, better, at a detail level that I was like, I get it.
And I use somewhere in my head. It doesn't exist yet. But it's coming.
It's coming.
Band of Brothers.
Well, I think it's certainly represented the war better. Most was one of the best television experiences ever.
And I think it educated the world on what it was really like. And I think from that perspective,
it did a way better job talking about the impact of the war from a soldier's perspective.
Oppenheimer versus Dunkirk. Both Christopher Nolan films.
I would say that I think I'd like to Dunkirk better.
Either too. And what was interesting was no one wanted to make that film from the perspective of the soldier
and not from senior leadership. And so it was very much the man on the ground. That was not the case here.
So now, let me ask you, how many total bombs have been tested or dropped?
It's crazy. There's been 2000 nuclear tests of which the United States has done a thousand on
our own. It's caused tremendous radioactive damage to the environment. There was a nuclear band
treaty. The United States and others agreed to it. Decide to limit the amount of above ground
experiments because the radioactive stuff got everywhere.
Anything else interesting you want to tell this audience?
Well, I mean, one of the things that I found is that Canada was significant in the Manhattan
project, especially the early stages of research and development. And more importantly,
the Northwest Territories were a critical source of raw uranium. But I feel like Canada is always
whitewash. They get nothing. Darren, you are the what happens next film critic. But there are other
film critics in the industry. You're not alone. What are you hearing from your peers, the other
critics about this film? One that stuck out to me is the New Yorker. One of the quotes was that
his sense of self-importance made it seem like the movie could have been done by any journeyman
director. That really there was so much going that it seemed like he was trying to accomplish
for his own personal self-interest. I didn't agree with that. I was actually really surprised.
One of the points that they said in this article was that they could have done as good a job by
just essentially copying and pasting a Wikipedia page about Oppenheimer.
I think it's unfair. Yeah, I think it's unfair too. I don't know what this guy is the always.
How do you feel about the film, all of a sudden, changing into straws played by Robert Downey Jr.,
turning into some combination of this security current issue and then straws' nomination to be
Secretary of Commerce? I found it a little confusing. I found it a little clunky. That part was black
and white. There was like three storylines that were released, but I think it needed to be told
because straws was so petty because it led to, in a way, the destruction of a lot of the Oppenheimer
legacy, which maybe only now with this retelling is coming back. So I thought it was really
critical on an actor note. I thought it was amazing for Robert Downey Jr. I think he gets
nomination. Nomination. Does he win best supporting actor Darren, yes or no? Golden Globe, yes.
And what I loved about him being in the movie is that this is a new career launch for him.
He's not Iron Man anymore, which, I mean, let's be honest, those are great movies and that
kind of resurrected his career got him on the map. Straws also gets upset related to a conversation
between Einstein and Oppenheimer at the Institute. What happened? What we haven't talked about,
you know, so I mean, Einstein apparently is an idiot. That's Jeremy Bernstein's interpretation
that he's quote, checked out. Just checked out. Right. And he didn't really know what fusion or
fission is or what's a bomb. And it seems like they put him at the Institute just to put
out the pasture. It's like running back in the NFL three, four years. Yeah, that's it. Exactly.
Einstein bagels closed in Gwanko. Your view. Well, they also opened and closed in Highland Park.
I mean, nothing stays open in Highland Park. Once upon a bagel, the car wash that's gone. Boom.
So what are you going to do? I mean, maybe Bellevue. I don't know. But Einstein bagels, I think,
you know, I don't think there's a parallel at all, but you know, Einstein bagels in Oppenheimer.
But it's Einstein. But it's Einstein. Yeah. So I think that's really the only crossover.
I want to take the nakedness seriously. When we were kids,
people didn't get naked in talking films. But in this movie, we've got
Oppenheimer naked albeit with his legs crossed, smoking cigarette, having serious conversation.
Why? The only thing I can think of is there was maybe some theme that he was exposed or,
you know, he was vulnerable. But that's just digging too deep. Like, who cares? Like, just cut the
scene or put clothes on, man. I can't take it anymore. Come on. Where's the ashi? Is he ashi? I mean,
that's dangerous. Come on. And the movie Oppenheimer, did you sit through it for three hours?
Or did you get off a take a break? Truth be told, because it's going to probably come on
anyways, is I did doze off a bit. What? A minute, six. I was nudged. I woke up with a start,
realized where I was. And then I did go up and get popcorn and a massive Coke slushy.
And yeah, I was probably gone for four minutes. So, ten minutes, yes. Six minutes sleeping
for four minutes on a food run. I usually end each episode on the note of optimism. What
do you have to talk about, as are the ways to the use of atomic weapons on civilians?
It's a tough one. It's tough to be optimistic. So, I'd say that I'm optimistic that having seen
the horrors and now for people to be reintroduced to that, that it will be a deterrent.
Isn't it amazing that since Nagasaki, we haven't dropped a nuke, anyone's dropped a nuke?
Yeah. Who'd have thought? Thanks, Darren. When I'll be joined by Billy Harriet,
the assistant golf pro at Lakeshore Country Club, Christopher Nolan used 70 millimeter film
for Oppenheimer to watch it on an iMac screen. There are only 19 iMac theaters in the United States
that can properly show this movie. Billy, you made the trek from Chicago to anapolis to see it.
What happened? Yeah. So, my childhood friends and I are big time movie buffs,
made the decision about a month ago to see Oppenheimer and figured might as well go drive
three and a half hour south Indianapolis to see it on the big screen. And it was a fantastic decision.
Is this the first time you've ever traveled for an iMac's theater? Yes, first time.
iMacs is fantastic if there's a lot of action or special effects. But here with Oppenheimer,
it's a serious drama. I don't get it. Shooting on 70 millimeter film is not a cheap thing to do.
So, Christopher Nolan had to have been up to something by doing it. We actually bought the tickets
about a month early and the theater was pretty much already sold out. So, we were a third row out
of about 15 and you had to pretty much look directly up to see the top of the screen.
I want to understand the logistics of your trip to Indiana. Was this going to be like a day trip?
When did you leave? What happened? So, it turns out Indianapolis is eastern time zone, which I mean
none of us know. So, we thought we were getting down there, you know, early, get dinner,
some drinks, turns out we got there about 15 minutes early to a line of about 300 people.
I know you get hungry. You're looking at a three and a half hour drive and then the prospect of a
three hour film. What happened? You know, I think I had a tube of scorching barbecue pringles
and about six modellas on the way down. Okay, you're late. You sit down in the third row.
You're a big guy. Six feet five two hundred and seventy pounds. Were you comfortable in your seat?
Yeah, you know what? They tried to fit as many people in that theater as they possibly could.
It was a small uncomfortable seat than the people in front of us. They leaned back about seven
inches and I've got long legs and these guys, he kept jamming it into my knees. It was very
uncomfortable. They actually sold bottles of wine. So, I had a peanut of grigio, a bottle of
pito grigio. Let me get this straight. So, after the six modellas, you decided to take down some
peanut grigio. Let's bring in our alcohol expert, Darren. What do you think about Billy's decision
to mix bedello with the peanut grigio? Well, what year was the peanut grigio? It might have been
a 2024, yeah. I mean, sound young. It was young, yeah. Okay, we're ready for the big event, Billy.
What do you think of the movie Oppenheimer? I thought it was an incredible movie. Definitely a
dialogue heavy movie with kind of one exciting scene, the test bomb. Overall, I thought it was a very
informative movie and I think everyone living in the USA should definitely see it.
Dear and I were very disappointed with the audio quality in our rather pedestrian movie theaters.
My wife had real trouble hearing some of that dialogue. How was the audio quality in the special
iMacs theater? It was the best audio from any movie I've ever heard. Dialogue was perfectly crisp.
The soundtrack was incredible. There's a scene where Oppenheimer and his girlfriend Jean Tetlock
are having a very serious conversation and they show her oiled up in Topless. What did you think of that?
Unbelievable. I would sit in there and watch it over and over again.
Got it. Dear and I concluded that that scene was ridiculous and should have been cut. Do you agree?
Yeah, I had no importance. Zero importance.
Personally, I wouldn't take it out but no importance to the movie now.
The movie ends. You and your two childhood buddies walk out. You're facing a three and a half
hour commute back home. Billy, did you go straight home? You're probably starving because you missed
dinner due to the Eastern time zone snafu. What'd you do? Well, at this point it's 10 o'clock
at night. Yeah. So white castle. Great call. Yeah. Crave box, 20 pack. So you bought 20 hamburgers?
We did a 20 pack between the three of us. We did not eat them all. How many did you eat?
You know, I probably had, I want to say around nine. So Billy, you did your part and then some.
It wasn't on you. This thing didn't get finished. Yeah, I had more than the third for sure.
Yeah, and then you know, stopped at the gas station, got gas. I ended up getting a couple
scratch off tickets. Billy, are you of age to be gambling? I am. Yo, you know what? I'm 25. So
perfectly of age to get scratch offs. And the deal was is I got a $20 scratch off ticket. I
140. I'm up 20 bucks and she was allowed to sell them to me, but she said it was too late to
cash them out. And I'm never coming back to Indiana ever in my life. I mean, ridiculous.
So I give it to some guy with kids in a family. God, you're charitable. I know. Yeah. So it made me
feel really good. Billy, let's say the two of us are playing golf together. There's money on
the line. And my first putt goes long like three and a half feet past. Will you just give it to me?
Marked back to the ride home. I do have a question, Billy. Just because I'm getting a real strong
visual here. Look at a car. Was it that you were in? It was a 2023 Volkswagen Jetta turbo four
with a good driver. Were you in the back seat or front seat front seat? Billy should definitely
be driving shotgun. I just have this visual of the seat almost all the way back white castle
wrappers on you. Maybe a few pickles and you just snoring with some drill coming up.
100%. I mean, I think, you know, if Christopher Nolan was in the car, I think he'd probably have
the 70 millimeter out. I think he would have been very happy to know that a film buff guy is
going to say, I'm going to make the commitment and drive and make this trek. 100. That's all
that's what it's all about. And I think he might even find some screen time for me somewhere in
the future. Next topic is the visual quality of the film. Yeah. Did the film look different
in the IMAX theater? Was it bigger and crisper? What makes it special? Yeah. So with the 70 millimeter
film, if you see it on a non-70 millimeter theater, it is completely cut down. They pop a CD
in and call tonight. The image quality was more HD than anything you've ever seen in your entire
life. There were the scenes with the atoms flying around. Billy, just to confirm, are you
referencing the scene where Oppenheimer was a lab technician at Cambridge and he was dreaming
of abstract math and Christopher Nolan used a meteorite shower as a metaphor for his thinking
process? Absolutely. Yeah. So that just as an example, that scene was probably one of the most
incredible things I've ever seen. Our film critic, Darren Schwartz, fell asleep for on six minutes
during Oppenheimer when he was sober. You had six spears before showtime. Did you fall asleep
during the film? I was locked in. I was eyes wide open the entire time. I don't think it would have
been possible. I really don't. I mean what the seat in front of me jamming into my knees
and the strength of the audio in the room and the brightness of the big screen, I don't think it
was physically possible for me to sleep. If I drank six spears, there's no way I could wash a three-hour
film without going to the bathroom. What happened with you? Oh yeah, definitely broke the seal
early on the trip down. This theater was you were not getting out. It was go to the bathroom on
yourself or I think you I don't think I saw a single person leave the theater. It was physically
impossible to do so. So Billy, I end each episode with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic
about as relates to IMAX and the use of 70 millimeter film? Personally, I hope nothing really
good comes out on it because I'm not doing that again. What? I thought this is a trip of a life
it would all 100% worth it. Wait a minute. My impression is this was a great bonding experience with
your best friends. You got into the VW Jetta. You had the barbecue pringles, the medellos,
the pinogrisio, the white castle, the excitement of running the scratch off, the time zone change.
This was hugely memorable. So why only one time? I you know what I guess you're right but it has to
be something that would blow my socks off. Oppenheimer too. You know what? I mean, I don't think
they need to do that. Barbie the sequel. No. No, definitely not. So another 70 millimeter film
that Christopher Nolan did was Dark Knight and that's that's an all-time movie. What if they were
showing Dark Knight on IMAX one night only? Yes, I would make the drive. So once in a lifetime
turns into twice in a lifetime. Yep. Yeah, you're right. You know what I would. Yeah.
Thanks to Jeremy Bernstein, Darren and Billy Harriet for joining us today. If you missed last
week's show, check it out. Last week's podcast was entitled, Barbie is the bomb. Global tickets have
already exceeded a billion dollars. This podcast included four speakers. The first was Sophia Saker
who is an intern with what happens next. Sophia recently graduated from Brown and we're working
for a Hollywood town agency after the brightest strike is over. Her talk centered on why Barbie
has become a cultural phenomena. Our second guest was Kay Heimewitz from the Manhattan Institute
and the author of the book Manning Up, How the Rise of Women has turned men into boys.
Kay discussed the battle of the sexes in both Barbie land and the real world.
My sister Debbie Warren spoke about her graduate school application,
essay to Northwestern's Kellogg School, about collaboration when playing with Barbie dolls as a kid.
Our final speaker was our film critic, Darren Schwartz. I now want to make a plug for next week's
podcast with Aaron Tang, who is a law school professor at UC Davis. Aaron is the author of a new book
entitled, Supreme Hubris. How overconfidence is destroying the court and how we can fix it.
Aaron thinks that the court should be humble in his rule making and do the least harm
instead of solving society's problems. You can find our previous episodes and transcripts
on our website, what happens next at six minutes dot com. Please subscribe to our weekly emails
and follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining me. Goodbye.