The Prometheus Constellation: Dramaturgical and Scientific Analysis of the Physicists in Oppenheimer (EP 39)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this special episode ranks the 26 scientists shown in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer by one standard only: their contribution to fundamental science. Starting with the Manhattan Project figures near the bottom and working up through the giants of quantum mechanics, relativity, nuclear physics, and logic, the episode turns a movie cast list into a surprisingly deep walk through the history of modern physics. Summary A ranking framework that actually means something — this list is based on scientific achievement, not movie prominence, clout, or vibes. A tour of 20th-century science — from nuclear chain reactions and black holes to MRI, GPS, quantum mechanics, and information theory. The great debates — several placements are designed to provoke real argument, especially around how Oppenheimer compares to the physicists around him. A top tier full of monsters — the back half of the episode becomes a speedrun through some of the most influential scientific minds of the modern era. Support the show Donate: FFPod.com/donate Follow: @FFPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Where do you think Oppenheimer lands among these 26?

• 0:03Lester Nare?

  It's gotta be top three. I mean, you know, it's gotta be top three, but I don't know.

• 0:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, well, maybe in some rankings, but not in mine. I'll tell you that.

• 0:10Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 0:11Krishna Choudhary?

  My ranking has everything to do with the greatest, according to me. And what that means is their contribution to fundamental science and fundamental research. Okay, not clout, not vibes, not hype, anything like that. So we're gonna make a list.

• 0:26Lester Nare?

  Hello, internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. We have a very special episode for you this week in celebration of the birthday of Robert Oppenheimer, who was born on April 22nd. And in celebration of the father of the atomic bomb, we are going to be ranking the 26 scientists that were featured in the Christopher Nolan film, Oppenheimer. Interestingly, we are going to talk about the science from the ground up today, even though this is a ranking episode, because this is from First Principles.

• 1:24Lester Nare?

  Many people are already familiar with The Manhattan Project, one of our greatest sort of scientific endeavors in recent memory. And this was memorialized in the Christopher Nolan film, Oppenheimer. And although there were hundreds of scientists involved in The Manhattan Project itself, only 26 of them were featured in the film.

• 1:45Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right, only 26. 25 physicists and one mathematician. And these characters make an appearance in the film, not just being mentioned offhand. So we're gonna focus on just these 26 individuals. Christopher Nolan omitted a lot of people because one of the things he was doing with the movie was... Showing it from Oppenheimer's perspective the entire time. So we're going to get into some of the people that were omitted in another video. But for now, I have a question for you. We've got 25 physicists, one mathematician. One of them is obviously Oppenheimer, the narrator of the biopic. Where do you think he lands? Where do you think Oppenheimer lands among these 26?

• 2:26Lester Nare?

  So this is, this is interesting because this is a blind ranking for me. And you have a very clear vision on, on, on the ranking. My gut was like, I mean, we call him the father of the atomic bomb for a reason. So it's gotta be top three. I mean, you know, it's gotta be top three, but I don't know.

• 2:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, well, maybe in some rankings, but not in mine. I'll tell you that.

• 2:49Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 2:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, because my ranking has everything to do with the greatest, according to me. And what that means is their contribution to fundamental science and fundamental research. Okay, not clout, not vibes, not hype, anything like that. So we're going to make a list. It's going to start with D. This is one of those like, you know, tier lists that we have. It's going to start with D and it's going to go all the way to A. And then there's going to be like an S tier, right?

• 3:16Lester Nare?

  For, for some folks who may be not as very online as we are, S tier is better than A.

• 3:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, it's like, it's like super. That's what the S is.

• 3:26Lester Nare?

  So it's, it's sort of like grades, but S tier is the best.

• 3:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. And let's get started with number 26. That is David Hill. He was played by Rami Malek. And he is at the bottom of this list. Okay, even though the character himself had a pretty big presence in the actual film. He was a nuclear physicist from America, graduated from Caltech and then earned his PhD at Princeton under John Archibald Wheeler, who we talk about a lot. Great gravitational research person who sort of revived, made, he made general relativity cool again at Princeton. In the movie, he's featured delivering testimony against Louis Strauss.

• 4:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And he has that epic moment where he like slam dunks on Louis Strauss about how he was trash effectively. Louis Strauss is the Character played by Robert Downey Jr.

• 4:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 4:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Who went after Oppenheimer in the proceedings. Right? In terms of actual history and what he did, he worked on the Chicago pile one, which was the first nuclear reaction that was sustained at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi. And he also signed the Seelard petition, which is something we're going to get into. But that's the sort of petition that said, hey, maybe we shouldn't be dropping this bomb on anyone. His big deal in the movie was that his testimony effectively tanked Louis Strauss's nomination for Secretary of Commerce. Right? But in terms of the actual physics that he did.

• 4:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 4:59Krishna Choudhary?

  In his life, not like that much, still quite a, quite a lot. Like, who am I to talk? But, you know, we're, we're talking about some of the greatest of all time on this, on this list.

• 5:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 5:09Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's why he's at the bottom. He's known for the Hill Wheeler formula, um, which was kind of this way to develop a generator coordinate method to mathematically describe nuclear fission and collective motion in some sense. Right? Not like hugely influential, but still very much a respectable scientist in his, in his own right. But among all the scientists here, he is at the bottom at number 26.

• 5:35Lester Nare?

  Number 26, David Hill, born in 1919, passed in 2008.

• 5:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Next, number 25, Klaus Fuchs. This was the rat.

• 5:48Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 5:49Krishna Choudhary?

  In the Manhattan Project.

• 5:50Lester Nare?

  I see.

• 5:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's not why he's number 25. Again, I said, we're only ranking based on scientific achievement, not based on personal history. But even given that he's number 25, he was a German, German theoretical physicist turned Soviet spy. He fled the Nazis to Britain and then he was sent to Los Alamos as part of the British mission. It's the British, dude. They just trust too much. I guess. He was kind of a background figure in the T division. He was played by Christopher Denham in the movie. And his treachery, his sort of leaking of secrets to the Soviets was revealed in the third act when he passes the bomb design to the Soviets. In his own right, he was a brilliant physicist.

• 6:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And most of the stuff that he worked on was shockwave theory, which is the idea of how shockwaves moves through. Material. Um, he came up with this Fuchs Nordheim method for calculating um implosion assembly, energy yield. Implosion was this new atomic bomb design where a bunch of charges would push in on the fission material all at the same time from all these different angles to create that critical mass of uranium in the center. So he was working on that in the Manhattan Project and that's really what he's known for.

• 7:08Lester Nare?

  It's interesting, you know, the likes of Klaus and others during this time period in the Manhattan Project where the paranoia about the secrecy and leaks was because the stakes were so high, was incredibly high, is part of the reason why we, the current national security state and security apparatus is as locked down as it is, um, was because of the failures of the Manhattan Project to remain under wraps.

• 7:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So he's the reason why, why like compartmentalization and like classified top secret, all this other stuff.

• 7:46Lester Nare?

  Special access programs, unacknowledged wave special access programs. Fuchs, born in 1911, passed away in 1988.

• 7:55Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. Number 24. This is Frank Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer's brother. Honestly, probably one of the only reasons why he was on the Manhattan Project is because Oppenheimer pulled some strings.

• 8:06Lester Nare?

  Nepotism is alive and well.

• 8:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because I mean, this guy was a former Communist Party member. So that plagues both brothers, but I think him more. But Oppenheimer was like, no, I need my brother here to, to make this happen. And um, the general at the time was like, General Groves was like, all right, fine, whatever. Um, he was played by Dylan Arnold in the Christopher Nolan movie. He worked on uranium enrichment. So this is the idea of there's only one isotope of uranium that is truly fissionable in terms of like creating an atomic bomb. And that isotope is very rare in naturally occurring uranium. So in order to get. Enough, you have to do a lot of tricks.

• 8:51Krishna Choudhary?

  He was working on that. If you remember from the movie, they have a jar with marbles.

• 8:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 8:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And they're populating the marbles to see how much uranium do we have? How much plutonium do we have for the two bombs? He was part of the group that was trying to figure out how to actually get that uranium, right? He actually founded the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco.

• 9:12Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 9:12Krishna Choudhary?

  So that's pretty cool. Again, doesn't really contribute to his scientific rigor, but in terms of science communication, huge.

• 9:20Lester Nare?

  Bonus points.

• 9:20Krishna Choudhary?

  He was blacklisted post-war because of McCarthyism.

• 9:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 9:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Because of that whole Communist Party affiliation.

• 9:26Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 9:27Krishna Choudhary?

  In cosmic rays, he participated in the discovery that cosmic rays contain heavy atomic nuclei. So that's a pretty big deal. And he was really gifted with instrumentation. He contributed to the Calutron, which is California Particle Accelerator, one of the very first. So, you know, very much someone who contributed a lot to science. But again, we're dealing with some of the greatest of all time, so he is at number 24.

• 9:53Lester Nare?

  Yes, number 24, Frank Oppenheimer, born in 1912, passed away 1985. I will just note on the uranium enrichment point. It's interesting, in the current zeitgeist news cycle, this has been argued as one of the justifications for the US's current excursion into Iran around trying to get control over their uranium deposit, their uranium stash.

• 10:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 10:28Lester Nare?

  Because there's a fear that they're going to begin to enrich that uranium. And this was sort of the structure of the JCPOA, which was the Iran nuclear deal that Obama had put in place to allow inspectors to go in to ensure there wasn't enrichment happening. So just, it speaks to just having possession of uranium does not mean you can make a nuclear weapon.

• 10:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Lester Nare?

  You have to get the certain type of flavor of it. And that enrichment process is what motivates a lot of geopolitical conflict.

• 10:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Lester Nare?

  As it relates to nuclear weapons.

• 11:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Definitely. And, you know, this guy's one of the OGs of doing that.

• 11:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 11:04Krishna Choudhary?

  All right, coming in at number 23 is Donald, Donald Hornig. He was an American physical chemist, played by actor David Rizdal in the movie.

• 11:15Lester Nare?

  No relation to Kai Rizdal.

• 11:17Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 11:17Lester Nare?

  NPR announcer. Anyway.

• 11:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. He earned his PhD at Harvard and later served as president of Brown University and science advisor to President John F. Kennedy and President Johnson. So very much in on the political stage for most of his life. He designed the high voltage capacitors and the electrical switching on the implosion bomb. So if you imagine for the implosion bomb, right? You have a bunch of charges that need to detonate so that the whole thing gets compressed and the plutonium gets compressed from all different sides at the same time. There's a lot of really cool electronics that goes into doing that because if you imagine just like one piece of wire, there's gonna be, if you have just one piece of wire that's

• 12:02Krishna Choudhary?

  going in, the delay between the signal from where you press go do the explosion to the closest part of the bomb is gonna be less than the delay to the other side. And so you're gonna get an asymmetric kind of implosion because this side is gonna go first and then the signal is gonna go to the other side. So they had to figure out how to time it such that the implosion was entirely spherically symmetric, right? The most famous job that he had was actually babysitting the bomb at the top of Trinity Tower on the stormy night before the test to prevent sabotage. So in the movie, remember, there's like, there's a storm and like it's raining. This dude was on top of that 100 foot tower the whole time, just babysitting, making

• 12:47Krishna Choudhary?

  sure nobody was sabotaging, which is hilarious, right? And when they were, when he was asked about it, he said that they asked for volunteers and he was the youngest guy present, so he was selected. It's kind of like a frat. Yeah, you just, okay, it's like the freshman. Yeah, you go do it. And I don't know if it was, it was because I was expendable or I was the best person to climb the 100 foot tower. That's what he said.

• 13:10Lester Nare?

  Everyone had bad knees.

• 13:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's pretty funny. In terms of physics, he did shock wave theory. Some foundational work in shock waves that produce that are produced by air explosions. So, very cool. Also infrared spectroscopy. His spectroscopy research was conducted post-war. And he figured out how to do spectra of crystalline solids, which is very good for figuring out. You know, it's kind of like X-ray spectroscopy, but in the infrared.

• 13:41Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 13:41Krishna Choudhary?

  There are challenges there, but again, you can discern the nitty gritty crystal structure of solids that way. So that's most of the research that he did.

• 13:50Lester Nare?

  And we have past episodes where we touched on this, Donald Horning, 1920 to 2013.

• 13:57Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right. And now we get to number 22. This is Van Ever Bush. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. This guy was highly influential, I'll have to say. He was an American engineer and science administration. He was the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which is kind of the

• 14:16Krishna Choudhary?

  the the thing that was there before NSF.

• 14:20Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 14:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 14:20Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 14:21Krishna Choudhary?

  And he was actually one of the people who advocated for the NSF. He published this report called The Endless Frontier in 1945. It was a report to the President of the United States where he called for an expansion of government support for science. And he pressed for the creation of the National Science Foundation. So scientists all over this country owe him a lot because he created the National Science Foundation, which is kind of the bedrock for a lot of fundamental science research here in this country. In the movie, he served as the interface between the scientists and the White House. He was played by Matthew Modine. He facilitates this early Manhattan Project. He's the guy who comes in

• 15:04Krishna Choudhary?

  and tells Robert Oppenheimer to leave the room when they're talking about the project because Oppenheimer didn't have clearance at the time. And he wasn't on the project at the time. Everybody knew what they were doing, but out of formality, so.

• 15:18Krishna Choudhary?

  A really huge guy. One of the cool things that he did after the war was actually,

• 15:23Krishna Choudhary?

  he wrote another memo called the Memex. It conceptualized machines for storing and linking information. He had this essay called As We May Think in 1945, and it was a precursor to a lot of the ideas behind computation and connecting computers and a precursor to the World Wide Web and the Internet. He had all of those ideas in the very beginning. So very much an influential person. But in terms of influence, not in terms of, you know, straight up research.

• 15:56Lester Nare?

  Yes. I will note that probably the most well-matched casting from what Van Ever Bush looked like and Matthew Modine, it's almost identical.

• 16:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:07Lester Nare?

  They could be twins.

• 16:08Krishna Choudhary?

  It's quite good.

• 16:08Lester Nare?

  It's quite incredible. And just a note on the NSF in terms of why is the NSF so important for fundamental science research, among other things, in terms of continuing to make it important within the DC blob and the political architecture, it's capital and funding.

• 16:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:23Lester Nare?

  Which is needed for this, and it's the number one funder of fundamental research in the US. And so, you know, that entity is really the bedrock, not only for the advocacy piece, but also for the capital and funding piece.

• 16:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, very much a hugely influential person.

• 16:40Lester Nare?

  Born in 1890, passed away 1974.

• 16:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. All right. Now we get to number 21. Richard Tolman. He was played by Tom Jenkins in the film. He's a physical chemist and mathematician at Caltech. He was the chief scientific advisor for General Leslie Groves. And he was, again, this bridge between military and scientists. In the movie, he visits Berkeley with Van Ever Bush to recruit J. Robert Oppenheimer.

• 17:11Krishna Choudhary?

  instrumental in the decision to pursue the implosion method, which is that second bomb that they tested at Trinity and does a lot of work in the theoretical thermodynamics of cosmology and the universe. He comes up with something called the Tolman Oppenheimer Volkov limit, which calculated the upper mass limit for a neutron star. And above this, the star must collapse into a black hole. So that was pretty fundamental research for astrophysics in general. And he's also one of the first to propose this model of a cyclic universe where the universe is born and then it dies and then it implodes on itself and then it's born and it dies and implodes on itself. So instrumental in cosmological theory, very much one of these top dogs.

• 17:57Lester Nare?

  Yes, Tolman, born 1881, passed away 1948. So one of the older gray beards of the group.

• 18:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. He was one of the old guard during this time. Finally, number 20, Robert Serber. He's very famous among those at the Manhattan Project. He was played by Michael Angarano. I've seen him a lot in movies, actually.

• 18:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 18:21Krishna Choudhary?

  He was an American physicist. He was Oppenheimer's closest protege. They would call him Oppenheimer's intellectual shadow. He was constantly at Oppenheimer's side and he actually gives orientation lectures to the new recruits. He would joke about naming the bombs Thin Man, Fat Man, and the device The Gadget. So all of those names come from Robert Serber. His lectures got compiled into something called the LA1, which was the Los Angeles, the Los Alamos Primer. It's this top secret handbook on bomb physics. You know, whenever you join a company or a new research project, you need some kind of material that's going to get you situated into the science, right? He was the guy who was responsible

• 19:06Krishna Choudhary?

  for giving these lectures to the new recruits, being like, hey, this is what we're doing. This is the science behind it. These are the open questions that we need answered and this is what you need to work on, you know?

• 19:15Lester Nare?

  Yes, Mr. He's the guy who on boarded everybody.

• 19:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 19:18Lester Nare?

  Which is not, is non trivial.

• 19:20Krishna Choudhary?

  No. For something, for something as cutting edge

• 19:23Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 19:23Krishna Choudhary?

  As building an atomic bomb.

• 19:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 19:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Onboarding is not just HR.

• 19:26Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right, right. There, there's, there's a level, he had to have his own technical sophistication at a high enough level to also understand how to delineate details and et cetera, et cetera.

• 19:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And after the bomb, he contributed to the Betatron, which was a particle accelerator theory. And also in quantum electrodynamics, he did a lot of work on vacuum polarization of strong electromagnetic fields. So a lot of very fundamental research in quantum field theory was done by him after the Manhattan Project.

• 19:55Lester Nare?

  Robert Server, born in 1909, passed away in 1997.

• 20:01Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. And number 19, Snyder, Heartland Snyder. He was a graduate student of Robert Oppenheimer and the collaboration was decades ahead of its time. In the movie, he's one of the first students in Robert Oppenheimer's class. He actually is shown to like, do really poorly in the mathematics of quantum theory. But um, he published a paper with Oppenheimer that's one of the most influential of all time. The paper was called Continued Gravitational Contraction. It's the first one to show a black hole is something that could happen, according to Einstein's theory of relativity. It's a legendary paper, right? It's not definitively showing that a black hole could happen because the assumptions of this paper were

• 20:46Krishna Choudhary?

  you have a uniformly symmetric object, a spherically symmetric object that's not rotating, it's just kind of sitting there. And if it has enough critical mass, it's going to go through past the Chundershaker limit, past the electron degeneracy pressure, keep contracting, keep contracting, until there comes a point where the escape velocity is going to be faster than the speed of light. And that means nothing can escape, according to Einstein's general relativity. The critics of this paper say that, well, the assumptions are kind of unreal, right? Because there's no such thing as an object in space that is not rotating, that is completely spherically symmetric. All of these assumptions aren't really true, which is why Roger Penrose, later on, about 10 years later,

• 21:29Krishna Choudhary?

  showed definitively that even without those assumptions, you will get gravitational collapse, you will get a point of no return, and you will get something like an event horizon beyond which nothing can escape. Roger Penrose won that Nobel Prize, won a Nobel Prize for that paper. This one, not so much because there were all these assumptions tied to it. But in any case, it's the first time that we have a mathematical description of something like a black hole. So that's a very big deal. This is the first time something like a black hole shows up in science.

• 22:01Lester Nare?

  And this, this is, get points. Being first does get you points, even if not perfect in this ranking.

• 22:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, because I think that's a huge deal, right?

• 22:09Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's why, yeah, and that's why I think he's in front of all of the, all of the other guys. Because I think, I think the concept of a black hole is a very big deal, right? Or even fundamental physics.

• 22:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Because now you're saying the universe has like regions where there's a point of no return.

• 22:25Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 22:25Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a pretty big deal.

• 22:26Lester Nare?

  Yes. Hartland Schneider, born in 1913, passed in 1962.

• 22:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And that marks the end of our D tier.

• 22:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:35Krishna Choudhary?

  So here, we're going to be showing the scientists. We're actually going to be showing the photos of the actors who played those scientists.

• 22:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:43Krishna Choudhary?

  In the movie, and it's going to be in ascending order going to the left. So that marks the end of D tier.

• 22:49Lester Nare?

  Yes, which it's a pretty star studded D tier.

• 22:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, already, already, like the guy who, the guy who invented the concept of a black hole.

• 22:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? The guy who did cosmic rays.

• 23:01Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 23:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Very, very big deal.

• 23:02Lester Nare?

  Not a bad, not a bad place to start.

• 23:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. Okay, now we get into some of the real big wigs, okay? At number 18 is Lietzsi Lard. He was pretty prominent in the movie.

• 23:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:14Krishna Choudhary?

  He's an Hungarian-American physicist. And he came in quite early because he urges US action about the bomb. He drafts the letter for Albert Einstein to sign. And that letter gets sent to Roosevelt, and that's what starts the Manhattan Project. So he's pretty instrumental in terms of history of just the world. Because this is the guy who

• 23:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Sort of started nuclear weapons. Yeah. You know? He was the baby daddy. Yes, he actually conceived of the nuclear chain reaction and he coined that term. He tried to get a patent for it. He also has one of the first publications on the concept of an electron microscope. This guy was trying to get patents all over the place. So he has patents on the electron microscope, on the cyclotron, on the linear accelerator. And he patented, he patented the nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi, who's down on the list.

• 24:13Krishna Choudhary?

  So a lot of really good things. I mean, that's, I mean, that's pretty tough to beat. Yeah, and we're at 18, right? One of the coolest things that I think he did was, so not just the chain reaction, which is the bedrock of nuclear energy and the atomic bomb. One of the cool things that he did was resolve this paradox about acquiring information and making a perpetual motion machine. Okay. So consider the following thought experiment where you've got, this is called Maxwell's demon. Okay, consider you've got a box and you've got two halves of the box with a single particle moving around, okay? If I know which half of the box the particle is in, and I put a little barrier in the

• 24:57Krishna Choudhary?

  middle, so I can find the particle to one part of the box, and then I put a piston on the other side, and then I remove the barrier. That particle, because it's on one side, as it expands, it's going to do work on the piston, and maybe I've just created work out of nothing. Hmm. Right, so isn't that a perpetual motion machine? The way he resolves it is he says, well, actually, the information of you knowing that it's on one side or the other is itself a resource, and you're going to have to take work, and he calculated the amount of work that it would take and the amount of entropy that is in the system, just by someone having the knowledge of knowing one way or the other. And so he does this fundamental. Connection between information and thermodynamic entropy.

• 25:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 25:44Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's and that forms the basis for later work by Claude Shannon, where he starts talking about information theory and using the physics of thermodynamics to then talk about, okay, how many lines can I fit in a telephone line?

• 25:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 25:57Krishna Choudhary?

  How many individual bits do I need to encode a certain amount of information? And that's really the bedrock of now all of information theory today.

• 26:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 26:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, so a visionary of his time.

• 26:08Lester Nare?

  That is fascinating. And like a non, a step in thinking that is not necessarily obvious to make until you say it.

• 26:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Lester Nare?

  And then, once you say it, it's like, oh, yeah, like, yeah, obviously.

• 26:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:24Lester Nare?

  But that leap is very interesting.

• 26:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I thought that was so, so very, very, very cool. It was a rudimentary calculation and a lot of people later on like refined it. But that first like sort of, you know.

• 26:37Lester Nare?

  Insight.

• 26:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Insight is very, very nice.

• 26:39Lester Nare?

  Leo, born in 1898, passed away in 1964.

• 26:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, and he was played by Mate Hauman.

• 26:48Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 26:49Krishna Choudhary?

  In the film.

• 26:49Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 26:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, at number 17, we've got Edward Condon.

• 26:52Lester Nare?

  Oh, yes.

• 26:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and he is a distinguished American nuclear physicist. He was played by Ollie Haskivi. He's the guy who was complaining about all the compartmentalization and like, oh, I can't like go to the Chicago, you know, Art Institute, because I'm involved in this and blah, blah, blah. There's conflicts between General, General Leslie Groves over this compartmentalization. He resigns after only six weeks because he refuses those conditions. So didn't do a lot with the Manhattan Project, but he was.

• 27:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Instrumental later on in developing a theory of alpha decay. Alpha decay is the process by which a heavy nuclei spits out a helium nucleus, two protons and two neutrons. We knew that that was happening because alpha particles were discovered. They were used by Ernest Rutherford to discover the nucleus in the first way, way in the beginning of the 1900s. But the theoretical assumptions of how an alpha particle actually leaves is something that he figured out. It was through quantum tunneling, which is something we've talked about, especially with the Nobel Prize last year.

• 28:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 28:05Krishna Choudhary?

  The idea is you've got a barrier in the nucleus that usually you shouldn't be able to get through. But the alpha particles have just enough energy that they'll just shoot right through this barrier in the process of tunneling. So it explained how particles escape the nucleus. And that's pretty huge for a theoretical understanding of nuclear fission.

• 28:25Lester Nare?

  Yes, there is an interesting other thing that he is very popular for, particularly within the UFO community, which is the Condon Report.

• 28:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 28:37Lester Nare?

  Which was a report that was compiled after Project Blue Book, which was a government program to look into all these foo fighters and UFO sightings that was led by Dr. J. Allen Hynek. And there was a huge conflict amongst about his engagement in the creation of that report because effectively the public report said, there's nothing to see here. But now, since other of the internal deliberations have been declassified. Also, if you just actually read the Condon Report, the executive summary says there's nothing to see here. But then the actual data that's in there is like, there's clearly something to see here. And a lot of folks who, you know, it really kind of ended the popular engagement in the subject at the time.

• 29:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Lester Nare?

  Because it was a definitive scientist who had the credibility and the clout saying there's nothing to see here. And everyone kind of looked in the other direction. And so just another interesting side note in his legacy that I know the UFO community is very, very aware of.

• 29:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, great. Yeah. Well, he comes in at number 17.

• 29:39Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Number 16, Kenneth Bainbridge. This was the man played by a favorite of ours, Josh Peck from Drake and Josh. You know, everybody, everybody our age group remembers Drake and Josh.

• 29:52Lester Nare?

  Such a shocking casting. He did great, though.

• 29:55Krishna Choudhary?

  He did great, and honestly, the, the, um, the casting for this film is just amazing.

• 29:59Lester Nare?

  It's fantastic. Yeah.

• 30:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, really, really well done in terms of like getting actors who look a lot like

• 30:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:05Krishna Choudhary?

  their historical counterpart.

• 30:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:07Krishna Choudhary?

  He was an American physicist at Harvard. Um, he was the director of the Trinity Test. So that's why in the movie he comes in with the, with the key and he's got his hand on the red button and or in case he wants to abort the, abort the test. Um, he supervises the countdown at the Trinity Test.

• 30:25Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, after the blast, he delivers a very famous line to Robert Oppenheimer, which is not featured in the movie, but, and it's not very family friendly, but it's a quote, so I am gonna say it. He goes to Oppenheimer and he says, "Now we are all sons of bitches."

• 30:40Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Because everybody there realizes, "Well, we just did it."

• 30:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:45Krishna Choudhary?

  The atom bomb is real, nukes are real.

• 30:47Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 30:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Here we go.

• 30:48Lester Nare?

  There's no going back.

• 30:48Krishna Choudhary?

  And what's interesting is everybody at the Manhattan Project knew that at the end of the day, the engineering and the physics wasn't really that hard. It took a lot of resources, but this is something that everyone is capable of doing. You know, and that's why it's like, oof.

• 31:07Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:07Krishna Choudhary?

  If we can do it, literally everyone can do it. This is not gonna be pretty.

• 31:11Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, in terms of the physics that he did, one of the really key things he did was perfect the science of mass spectrometry. He can do high precision, he, he built high precision spectrometers. And in 1933, this is before he actually came onto the Manhattan Project, he made the first precise measurements of the mass difference between nuclear isotopes. And that was an experimental verification of E equals mc squared.

• 31:40Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 31:40Krishna Choudhary?

  So experimentally, this guy was like really high.

• 31:44Lester Nare?

  Top notch.

• 31:44Krishna Choudhary?

  For me, right?

• 31:45Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:45Krishna Choudhary?

  To, to straight up verify equals mc squared using atomic nuclei, that's quite good.

• 31:50Lester Nare?

  It's, it's tough. Not good enough to get you in the top 15.

• 31:53Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 31:54Lester Nare?

  But, but tough nonetheless.

• 31:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Tough nonetheless, yeah.

• 31:56Lester Nare?

  Um, born 1904, passed away in 1996.

• 32:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep. Number 15, Seth Nadermeyer. He's an American physicist at Caltech and Los Alamos. He first proposes the implosion idea, which is using these explosives to go in and crush subcritical plutonium. He was played by Devon Bostick. Oppenheimer actually removed him from being group leader because he wasn't able to manage the complex engineering. But nevertheless, that insight saved the plutonium bomb and it was huge for the project. In terms of the physics and the research that he did, this guy was pretty, pretty big because at Caltech, he was under the tutelage of Carl Anderson, who won the Nobel

• 32:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Prize for discovering, discovering the positron, which is the first antimatter particle. He was involved in that research. So he was probably either a postdoc or a graduate student involved in that experiment. Later on, he was instrumental in discovering the muon, which is the first subatomic particle of that next generation.

• 33:06Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:06Krishna Choudhary?

  We had discovered protons, neutrons and electrons. The muon was very weird because it was just like the electron, but it was more massive. And it puzzled physicists and it still kind of puzzles physicists today because why are there three versions of everything?

• 33:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? There should, there should just be one, but apparently the universe created three. It was so weird that Isidore Robbie, who we'll discuss later on, one of the quips he said was about the muon was like, who ordered that?

• 33:33Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like, like we had things on the menu. Why?

• 33:40Lester Nare?

  Why did you bring breadsticks? We already have salad.

• 33:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that was a huge surprise to physicists and a very big deal for fundamental physics research.

• 33:48Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:48Krishna Choudhary?

  The discovery of the muon.

• 33:49Lester Nare?

  Yes, the muon, positron, Seth Nadermeyer, 1907 to 1988.

• 33:56Krishna Choudhary?

  And that ends our C tier.

• 33:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:59Krishna Choudhary?

  So now we've got two rows.

• 34:01Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:02Krishna Choudhary?

  And. We still got a long ways to go. We've got 14 other scientists to get through.

• 34:08Lester Nare?

  We've gone through 12.

• 34:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:09Lester Nare?

  Uh, the 12 are in the bottom two tiers. I'm very fascinated. There's some names that I knew wouldn't be there.

• 34:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:17Lester Nare?

  Uh, I'm interested to see how this progresses.

• 34:19Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. So let's start with number 14, Edward Teller.

• 34:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:24Krishna Choudhary?

  A big villain.

• 34:24Lester Nare?

  Eddie.

• 34:25Krishna Choudhary?

  In the, um, in the Manhattan Project, a villain in the Oppenheimer movie. He's the guy who betrayed Oppenheimer at the hearing and said, oh, maybe I would have done things differently. And let me tell you, in history, after he did that, he never held another academic position again.

• 34:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Like.

• 34:46Lester Nare?

  That's so good.

• 34:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. Not, not great.

• 34:49Lester Nare?

  Not great.

• 34:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Not, not a good luck mate.

• 34:51Lester Nare?

  Oh, it was Benny Safdie?

• 34:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, Benny Safdie.

• 34:54Lester Nare?

  I don't think I actually put two and two together.

• 34:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Lester Nare?

  Um, that's interesting. Okay.

• 34:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, Benny Safdie played, um, Edward Teller. Great Hungarian accent, by the way, by Benny Safdie.

• 35:06Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 35:06Krishna Choudhary?

  In, in playing that. I really like that because if you, if you watch, um, videos of Edward Teller's interviews, the, he nails the accent.

• 35:15Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 35:15Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's very, very good.

• 35:16Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 35:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, as part of the atomic bomb, he really just wanted to make the super, which was the fusion bomb, the hydrogen bomb. And Robert Oppenheimer indulges him. Uh, they meet at once every week to talk about how to build a fusion bomb. And that was really just so that Oppenheimer could like get him out of the way so that they could focus on building the atomic bomb. In terms of the physics, he worked with Stannis Laulam to make the Teller Ulam design, which is the thermonuclear weapon design for creating the hydrogen bomb. He also worked on the Jean Teller effect. This is what he's most known for in fundamental physics and chemistry. It's basically a theorem that talks about the geometric distortion of molecules.

• 36:02Krishna Choudhary?

  To low energy and it uses these distortions of molecules and ions to talk about all the different electron configurations and then fundamentally, what are the chemical properties? Given the kinds of symmetries that molecules hold within them, like, you know, kinds of like flip symmetry this way or this way, things like that. It was a very important mechanism and currently it's responsible for a variety of phenomenon in spectroscopy, stereo chemistry, crystal chemistry, solid state physics, material science. So it's still being used today when people go in and try to make, you know, computer simulations of these types of materials.

• 36:40Lester Nare?

  Very much. Really low hanging fruit.

• 36:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Lester Nare?

  V2V talk about it.

• 36:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 36:46Lester Nare?

  Edward Teller, 1908 to 2003, which is quite recent, actually.

• 36:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yeah, very recently he passed away. Never won the Nobel Prize because he never would, because he betrayed Oppenheimer.

• 36:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 36:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Can't do that.

• 36:58Lester Nare?

  Can't do that.

• 36:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And now we start getting into Nobel Prizes.

• 37:02Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 37:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Speaking of Nobel Prizes, number 13 is Patrick Blackett. He was Oppenheimer's tutor in Cambridge. There's the famous scene where Oppenheimer tries to poison him because Blackett is being kind of mean. That like apparently like actually happened, although it wasn't like that bad. As it was in the movie, obviously, you know, the writers and the producers take a little bit of liberty, but it's still a great scene.

• 37:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 37:28Krishna Choudhary?

  He is famous, he's no longer involved in the Manhattan Project, right? This is just someone who was mentioned in the movie and not involved in the Manhattan Project. He perfected the Wilson Cloud Chamber, which is a chamber built out of some kind of condensation. Usually it's like alcohol and alcohol vapor. So when a particle goes through, it'll leave a track of condensation and you can watch particles. This was the first time that we could watch particles, right? Not just with like a film where like, oh, the particle hit this part of the film. Now we can actually watch a track of the particle.

• 38:05Lester Nare?

  It's movement through space.

• 38:07Krishna Choudhary?

  It's movement through space and that's super important because if we can apply a magnetic field, we can watch it curve and we can figure out things like what is the charge to mass ratio of this particle, right? Things like that, very much super important. That's why he won the Nobel Prize. He confirmed that the positron existed and he demonstrated pair production, which is this idea of.

• 38:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Two particles, an antimatter particle and a matter particle, like electron and a positron, coming out of nowhere and then sort of curling opposite directions. Okay, and they can spontaneously come up if two bits of photons interact and that has just enough energy to create two particles. Is this the arises out of nothing thing that we've talked about previously? It's very related. The popping in and out. Yeah, very related, very related. Yes. Those are virtual particles and these are actually real. Real. But it's same same in the sense that like there's energy and then that energy creates particles. Blanket 1897 to 1974? Yes, and he was played by James De Arcy.

• 39:17Krishna Choudhary?

  A British actor or a British physicist. Yes, makes sense. Yeah. Number 12.

• 39:26Krishna Choudhary?

  This is shocking. This is. Number 12 is J. Robert Oppenheimer. This is shocking. You said number three, bro. I said top three. Yeah. This is, I would like an explanation. Well, I guess you're gonna get an explanation for all of the 11 to one because I'm gonna make cases about why they deserve to be higher than J. Robert Oppenheimer. Okay. At number 12, obviously played by Cillian Murphy. Yes. Who was the star of Oppenheimer. You're right. I will say. The father of the atomic bomb. I think it's Killian and they might kill you for mispronouncing it. Oh, is it Killian? I.

• 40:02Krishna Choudhary?

  I think it is Killian. Oh, my God, the Irish are gonna come after me. It's Killian Murphy. It is Killian Murphy. Apologies. We're gonna need to, I'm gonna need to splice that together when we do, when we do socials. Or maybe I keep the original one, just, just so everyone. Just to cast their nation. Yeah. Anyways, he was considered the father of the atomic bomb. Yes. Um, he's a chain smoking polymath, as they say. In the cinematic role, I mean, the movie is about Oppenheimer, right? So I don't have to get into that. A great leader, post-war, he was a public intellectual. He was actually the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Yes. And really built that to what it is today because before him, it was just like, oh, Einstein's there.

• 40:43Krishna Choudhary?

  When he came up and like, sort of chaired that institute, it became a center. Yes. For research, you know? He opposed the H-bomb and he opposed like the McCarthy stuff.

• 40:58Krishna Choudhary?

  That's probably why he got the clearance revocation at the end.

• 41:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:04Krishna Choudhary?

  There. In terms of the physics that he did, I'm going to highlight two things that he's most known for, his most cited papers. The first one is that gravitational collapse paper that we mentioned earlier with his student Hartland Snyder.

• 41:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 41:17Krishna Choudhary?

  This predicted black holes, those massive stars that collapse. It's the first time that black holes have ever appeared in scientific literature. And the other thing that he's very much known for is the Born Oppenheimer approximation. This is the assumption that when you want to do quantum mechanics of molecules, you can basically assume that the nuclei don't move.

• 41:40Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 41:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Like if you've got a, if you've got the hydrogen atom, for example, you can very easily just go into the reference frame of the proton in the middle and then talk about what is the electron doing around it, right? When you've got a bunch of, let's say the O2 molecule, right? You've got two nuclei and then you have electrons buzzing around. Well, sometimes you gotta worry about the, what happens to the nuclei as they interact, right? He created the Born Oppenheimer approximation with his PhD advisor, Max Born, because he wanted to solve what the electrons were doing in these molecules. And he said that the electrons and the nuclei could be treated separately because the nuclei are just so much more massive than the electrons moving around that really we don't have to care about it as much.

• 42:24Krishna Choudhary?

  There's a famous scene in the movie where he meets Heisenberg for the first time. And the thing that Heisenberg says is, ah, Oppenheimer, I liked your paper about molecules. Do you remember that?

• 42:35Lester Nare?

  That was quite good.

• 42:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Lester Nare?

  That was quite good.

• 42:37Krishna Choudhary?

  This is the paper that he's talking about, the Born Oppenheimer approximation.

• 42:40Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 42:40Krishna Choudhary?

  He also knew Max Born because, you know, Heisenberg worked very closely with Max Born, which we'll get into later on.

• 42:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 42:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, but those are really the two sort of fundamental physics contributions that he made.

• 42:52Lester Nare?

  Which is fair. And so in that context, for how we are ranking, uh, Robert Oppenheimer, 1904, 1967 is our number 12.

• 43:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:02Lester Nare?

  Okay, let's see.

• 43:03Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. So now we're going to go with number 11. This is Luis Alvarez. We've talked about Luis Alvarez all the time on this podcast for multiple reasons.

• 43:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 43:13Krishna Choudhary?

  He was. Played by Alex Wolf, great actor, and again, great casting.

• 43:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Luis Alvarez's role in the movie is just a postdoc of Ernest Lawrence at the time when he was at Berkeley. There's that scene where he rushes in with the news of fishing being discovered. And he goes and replicates it in the lab while Oppenheimer is busy trying to show why it's not possible. And you know, that's the whole theory only takes you so far kind of thing, right? In The Manhattan Project, he was leading the group that developed the exploding bridge wire detonators. Those are the detonators that were used to implode in that implosion device, right?

• 43:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 44:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And he was actually there for the Hiroshima mission to measure the blast yield. So he was on the observation plane when the Inoligay dropped the bomb. There was another plane that was trying to measure how much the yield was.

• 44:15Lester Nare?

  Can I make a quick insertion here? Because I think this is in the recent book, I believe it's called Nuclear War Scenario by Annie Jacobson. Who was, who'd basically interviewed a lot of the staff and former both intelligence, military and scientists in and around the nuclear infrastructure we currently have today.

• 44:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Lester Nare?

  Referenced that, you know, we don't really have a lot of data on the impacts of the dropping of a nuclear atomic weapon on like a highly populated area. And there was only one scientist that was present on the military plane. That was, that was able to actually look at that scientific data, Luis Alvarez.

• 44:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep, and that's Luis Alvarez.

• 44:59Lester Nare?

  And then it's kind of, you know, and it's all still super classified and yada, yada, yada. You know, so people don't know what the impacts are, but that must have been. Again, given the moral quandaries that arose in and around the team, the juxtaposition of, you know, your life's work kind of thing, and then the human and, you know, emotional toll must have been hard to process.

• 45:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. I can't even imagine, right?

• 45:29Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 45:30Krishna Choudhary?

  So let's get into the physics because I do want to make a case to you as to why Alvarez is number 11 and Oppenheimer is beneath him.

• 45:37Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 45:37Krishna Choudhary?

  So the first thing, he won the Nobel Prize for developing the hydrogen bubble chamber. This was an upgrade of the cloud chamber that was developed by Blackett, who was number 13 on our list. This bubble chamber lets you analyze short-lived particles. For the cloud chamber, you need something that's long-lived in order to actually see this thing. A lot of times in particle physics, these particles last for fractions of a second. So it presents two challenges. One, how do I capture that track? And then two, once I capture that track, how do I get enough data to know that it's above noise? And so the other thing that he did was with his team,

• 46:20Krishna Choudhary?

  take millions of photographs of these particle interactions. He came up with the ingenious way to trigger photographs on these particle interactions and then develop computer systems to measure and analyze these interactions. And then he discovered an entire family of new particles and new resonance states, just putting particle physics research years ahead. And this is really the first instance of how we do particle physics research today, which is we bomb a bunch of particles together. But most of the work is done not by the eye and by a brain, but by computer algorithms, right? Even at the end of CERN, inside CERN,

• 47:02Krishna Choudhary?

  you have the two jets of protons that are coming together and you get this flurry of particles. All of those flurries of particles are then analyzed by computer programs, machine learning programs today to figure out what I am seeing, right? This is that first instance of using computation to your advantage. This was a very big deal at the time. That was the first thing he did. Second, he's very famous for side quests.

• 47:27Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 47:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so the first side quest he did. With his son, he came up with the Alvarez hypothesis.

• 47:34Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 47:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is, how did the dinosaurs die? He found evidence for iridium deposits all over the earth between where the Cretaceous and the, I forget what's the next one? The Paleogene, something PG, right? It's the Cretaceous and the Paleogene boundary. All over the earth, there's a layer of iridium. And that iridium is very rare on earth, but very much present in meteorites. So he was the first one to say, hey, maybe the dinosaurs died because a giant meteorite slammed into earth.

• 48:10Lester Nare?

  No way.

• 48:11Krishna Choudhary?

  He's the first guy to do that.

• 48:12Lester Nare?

  That's interesting.

• 48:13Krishna Choudhary?

  And then years later, decades later, oil companies in Mexico figured out, hey, there's a crater here that matches exactly the profile that you guys are thinking and the age that you guys are thinking. So even before we discovered the crater, he was the guy who said, hey, I think it's probably a meteorite.

• 48:32Lester Nare?

  That's, that's really fascinating.

• 48:34Krishna Choudhary?

  That was his first side quest. The second side quest, we've talked about this on the podcast, muon tomography.

• 48:41Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 48:41Krishna Choudhary?

  He invented the idea of using muons to chart the inside of the pyramids.

• 48:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 48:47Krishna Choudhary?

  To see if there are any hidden chambers. Effectively, what you do is you stare at a piece of sky to count how many muons are coming through. And then you stare at the piece of sky going through the pyramids to see how much fewer muons are coming through. And the muons are getting blocked by, you know, stuff that's inside the pyramids. But if there's a hole, then there's going to be part of the pyramid that's going to let in a lot more muons. And then you can chart the inside of giant mountains now. We can do muon tomography of volcanoes and things like that using this technique. He's the first guy to think of that.

• 49:23Lester Nare?

  This is also, this was our story where we talked about using the sort of muon detector for analyzing the T-Rex. Skeleton or two wax fossils.

• 49:33Krishna Choudhary?

  It was, that was one of them. And then the other one was, there was a story about how Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley lab had come up with a muon gun effectively. So we don't have to wait for cosmic rays.

• 49:46Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 49:46Krishna Choudhary?

  We can just like have a gun on one side that's shooting a bunch of muons. And then we have a muon detector on the other side. So we don't have to wait like months. Because his particular, his particular experiment to chart the pyramids took like months.

• 49:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Because you just gotta wait for muons.

• 50:01Lester Nare?

  That's, this is.

• 50:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Which takes a long time.

• 50:03Lester Nare?

  Luis Alvarez, 1911 to 1988. I'll, I'll, I'll give that, I'll give that.

• 50:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And with that, we end B tier. So Oppenheimer is on the B tier.

• 50:12Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 50:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Along with these distinguished gentlemen.

• 50:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 50:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Edward Teller at least is not above Oppenheimer.

• 50:17Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause I was never gonna do that.

• 50:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah, that, that, that would have been a riot.

• 50:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So that's the end of B tier.

• 50:23Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 50:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Now we start getting into the true greats.

• 50:26Lester Nare?

  Yes, the top 10.

• 50:27Krishna Choudhary?

  The top 10. Okay. At number 10 is Isidore Robbie. I think some experimentalists are gonna be mad that he's not higher.

• 50:35Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 50:36Krishna Choudhary?

  But I'm gonna put him at number 10. Okay? He was played by David Krumholtz, another very famous actor.

• 50:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 50:44Krishna Choudhary?

  He was Robert Oppenheimer's confidant and refused full-time Manhattan Project residency. But served kind of like a consultant.

• 50:58Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, he grew up in the Jewish ghettos in New York City, known for his moral clarity. He won the Nobel Prize in 1944 for nuclear magnetic resonance, which is the bedrock of MRI imaging, right? Magnetic resonance imaging, this method for measuring the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. Huge for every application of MRI.

• 51:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is pretty big.

• 51:24Lester Nare?

  That's pretty big.

• 51:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That's not why he's number 10 though. If he only did that, he would not be number 10.

• 51:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 51:30Krishna Choudhary?

  His main contribution to me is something called the Robbie Oscillations.

• 51:36Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 51:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is really nuclear magnetic resonance at the end of the day, nuclear magnetic resonance. Is an application of some of his fundamental work when it comes to two level quantum systems that are subject to some type of drive, some type of oscillatory drive. Now with nuclear magnetic resonance, that's a two level quantum system in terms of the spin.

• 51:58Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 51:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And a kind of radio wave that's going in and interacting, right? But basically, any two level quantum system in the presence of some kind of wave-like oscillation. He developed the theory and the experiment to deal with that.

• 52:12Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 52:13Krishna Choudhary?

  And a great variety of physical processes have to do with that. Quantum computing, condensed matter, atomic and molecular physics. They're all two level quantum systems, quantum computing especially, right? You've got like a qubit that's either in a zero or a one.

• 52:28Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 52:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Every quantum computing system, they rely on these things called Rabi oscillations to talk about, okay, how, how good is my qubit? How long can my qubit remember what it is? How good are my gates when I switch from zero to one and back to zero? Does it really go back to zero?

• 52:45Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 52:46Krishna Choudhary?

  The other thing that this was really key for is atomic clocks. He's the first guy to propose that there is something that we can use other than like quartz crystals and things like that. We can use the atomic nature of reality to make a clock and create extremely precise time resolution, right? So very huge in the field. He basically, he, he was at Columbia University the whole time and made Columbia Physics Department like one of the greatest of all time.

• 53:16Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 53:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Lester Nare?

  A question, a brief question I have on the atomics, atomic clocks piece. Is, was that a prerequisite for us having GPS?

• 53:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, very much.

• 53:25Lester Nare?

  Right, like because the only way you get the precision etcetera is it required.

• 53:28Krishna Choudhary?

  It required atomic clocks, yeah. It required not only an atomic clock, but one that we can put in space, right?

• 53:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 53:34Krishna Choudhary?

  But the whole, the whole idea of getting resolution such that an atomic clock only like decays one second every billion years, which we have now.

• 53:44Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 53:45Krishna Choudhary?

  We're actually pushing way beyond that, which we'll get to in another episode. But all of those fundamental physics of two level systems of these oscillations at the quantum level. Isidore Robbie was was key for that.

• 53:59Lester Nare?

  So you can thank Isidore Robbie for your ability to order Uber and DoorDash.

• 54:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:04Lester Nare?

  Instacart and be able to scroll on TikTok and all of that because none of that would be possible without.

• 54:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Among other things.

• 54:10Lester Nare?

  Among other things, among the, you know, cryptography that's going away because of the quantum computing that's coming through. So your Bitcoin going to zero, that's also Isidore Robbie. Born 1898, passed away 1988.

• 54:27Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. And now we get to number nine, Max Born. This one I had to kind of sneak in.

• 54:33Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 54:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Because he's shown in the movie just as on the blackboard.

• 54:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 54:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so I don't know who the.

• 54:42Lester Nare?

  Actor.

• 54:42Krishna Choudhary?

  The actor is actually, this is something that, you know, if you're watching till now and you have any idea.

• 54:48Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 54:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Of who the actor is who's played Max Born, who's the guy when Oppenheimer goes to Gottingen to get training in quantum mechanics, he's being tutored by Max Born.

• 54:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 54:59Krishna Choudhary?

  At the blackboard.

• 55:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Please let us know. But Max Born is one of the greats.

• 55:06Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 55:06Krishna Choudhary?

  We've talked about him a lot. He turned Gottingen into the world center of theoretical physics in the 1920s. Background figure for Robert Oppenheimer.

• 55:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Co-authored that Born Oppenheimer approximation that I was talking to you about.

• 55:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 55:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:24Krishna Choudhary?

  So Oppenheimer is one of his most influential papers is one of Max Born's least influential papers in terms of the papers that Max Born contributed to the field.

• 55:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:36Krishna Choudhary?

  His main papers are the quantum mechanics papers of 1926, which followed the Heisenberg paper of 1925, the Imdohting paper, where he finally comes up with this matrix mechanics.

• 55:48Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:48Krishna Choudhary?

  And he's like, guys, let's just not care about what the electron is doing. Let's only care about how the electron is jumping around.

• 55:54Lester Nare?

  One of our most viral clips and one of our best episodes is I think like three, episode three or

• 56:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, three or four.

• 56:01Lester Nare?

  Was around this concept of the Heisenberg quantum paper and how Max Born followed it up and the matrix multiplication. And it is really, really very well explained.

• 56:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:13Lester Nare?

  Um, and was a fundamental unlock for me mentally and how I think about these concepts.

• 56:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:17Lester Nare?

  So I just really do encourage people to look back at that episode if you're interested in that subject because I think we did a really good job in covering it.

• 56:24Krishna Choudhary?

  I think so too. I'm very proud of that.

• 56:25Lester Nare?

  That was, that was really, really good. Um, and so it's all, all the dots are connecting for me again.

• 56:30Krishna Choudhary?

  So one of the big papers was the follow-up to Heisenberg's paper where Heisenberg said, I've come up with a multiplication rule where A, B, A times B does not equal B times A. I don't know what I'm doing. And Max Born was like, actually, you just don't know any math. This is like trivial. This is matrices. This is linear algebra. And so in the 1926 paper by Jordan, Born and Heisenberg, the first section of that entire paper is Born explaining linear algebra to physicists because it's the first time that like a bunch of physicists, you know, we, they used to only learn calculus.

• 57:06Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 57:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Linear algebra is a very different beast that now is fundamental to all of physics, but Max Born knew about it because he was a mathematical physicist at the time. Um, and then what the thing that he won the Nobel Prize for in 1954 was for something called the Born Rule. At the time, there was this idea of the wave function, right? Schrodinger had come up with the wave function and his wave mechanics and nobody really knew what the wave function is, but like the numbers that were coming out kind of made sense with the periodic table and things like that. He's the guy who figured out that the wave function is related to the probability that you see in experiments. So that whole thing about God does not play dice that Albert Einstein was pissed off about.

• 57:51Krishna Choudhary?

  That's because Max Born implemented the Born rule when it came to interpreting what the wave function meant for an experimentalist. And for an experimentalist, what it means is if I'm measuring whether the electron is spin up or spin down, the wave function tells me the probability

• 58:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 58:08Krishna Choudhary?

  of these two states.

• 58:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:09Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's all I can tell you.

• 58:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 58:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:12Krishna Choudhary?

  So pissed off Einstein for very good reason.

• 58:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Introduced this kind of fundamental randomness that now we take for granted in quantum mechanics. So, you know, huge, huge deal in physics.

• 58:25Lester Nare?

  For anyone who's a fan of the Born series, I'm sure when he walked in the room, everyone's like, Jesus, Jesus Christ, it's Max Born. Born 1882, passed away 1970.

• 58:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. All right, now we get to number eight, Ernest Lawrence.

• 58:39Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 58:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Played by Josh Hartnett.

• 58:43Lester Nare?

  Another great casting.

• 58:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, great casting.

• 58:46Lester Nare?

  Unbelievable.

• 58:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. They look so alike.

• 58:49Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 58:50Krishna Choudhary?

  It's pretty funny.

• 58:51Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 58:52Krishna Choudhary?

  American experimental physicist, the inventor of the cyclotron, which is this first of big particle accelerators. He's kind of the founder of particle accelerator research. Okay, he's the first one to build one. Professor at UC Berkeley, pioneer of big science, the idea of getting a lot of money to make really big things.

• 59:12Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 59:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 59:13Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 59:14Krishna Choudhary?

  To probe energies at a really high scale. Good friend of Robert Oppenheimer, warned Oppenheimer against politics, and post-war, they kind of stopped being friends.

• 59:27Lester Nare?

  War will do that to you.

• 59:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and he didn't actually testify for or against Oppenheimer in the hearing.

• 59:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is interesting. Which is interesting, right? He founds the Berkeley Radiation Lab, which is what we see in the film. And he invented the Calutron, which is the California University Cyclotrons. Used that for uranium-235 enrichment at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.

• 59:55Lester Nare?

  Arlen.

• 59:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so he won the Nobel Prize for building the Cyclotron.

• 1:00:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is this particle accelerator that uses magnetic fields and an oscillating electric field to accelerate charged particles to really, really high.

• 1:00:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Speeds.

• 1:00:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Inventor of really particle physics in general.

• 1:00:12Lester Nare?

  In general.

• 1:00:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Some people would say like, okay, that was actually Rutherford. But I would really say the modern version of particle physics is Ernest Lawrence.

• 1:00:20Lester Nare?

  And would you sort of say, as we look at physics as a whole, this high-energy particle physics as a subgenre?

• 1:00:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Lester Nare?

  Is a top-tier subgenre within all of the subgenres?

• 1:00:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:00:32Lester Nare?

  The modern, modern physics.

• 1:00:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, yeah, it's probing, you know, the fundamental limits of reality. And this is the guy to really be like, no, we just need to spend a lot of money and make big machines.

• 1:00:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Just give me the money.

• 1:00:44Lester Nare?

  We need the power of the universe in our hand.

• 1:00:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Lester Nare?

  And that requires a lot of money.

• 1:00:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Lester Nare?

  Ernest Lawrence.

• 1:00:48Krishna Choudhary?

  And a big room.

• 1:00:48Lester Nare?

  And a big room.

• 1:00:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, give me a whole building, please.

• 1:00:51Lester Nare?

  1901 to 1958.

• 1:00:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so that's number eight. Number seven. It pained me to put Hans Bethe at number seven because I want him to be number one. But given everyone else who's coming, he's gonna have to be number seven. Still in the top 10.

• 1:01:06Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:01:07Krishna Choudhary?

  One of the greats, honestly.

• 1:01:09Lester Nare?

  Hans Bethe.

• 1:01:10Krishna Choudhary?

  He was played by Gustav Skarsgård in the film.

• 1:01:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:01:15Krishna Choudhary?

  The head of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos. So you can imagine, the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos.

• 1:01:22Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And he's the head.

• 1:01:23Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, that's.

• 1:01:25Lester Nare?

  The egos in that room.

• 1:01:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Krishna Choudhary?

  And they all were okay with Hans Bethe.

• 1:01:31Lester Nare?

  Says a lot.

• 1:01:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Being the head. That says a lot about who this man is.

• 1:01:33Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:01:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:01:34Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:01:36Krishna Choudhary?

  He was a refugee from the Nazis. He had a Jewish mother. He had encyclopedia knowledge. I have a soft spot for Hans Bethe myself because I am part of his academic progeny.

• 1:01:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:48Krishna Choudhary?

  So my PhD advisors, PhD advisors, PhD advisor was Hans Bethe.

• 1:01:53Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:54Krishna Choudhary?

  So I'm his like great grand kid, I guess.

• 1:01:56Lester Nare?

  Great, great or great, one great.

• 1:01:58Krishna Choudhary?

  One great.

• 1:01:58Lester Nare?

  One great.

• 1:01:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Lester Nare?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:02:00Krishna Choudhary?

  That's pretty good. So I'm close enough. So Hans Bethe always, you know, a soft spot for him. Crucial in terms of doing things like, oh, is there going to be atmospheric ignition? Hans Bethe did the calculation and said, no.

• 1:02:14Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:02:14Krishna Choudhary?

  And everyone was like, okay.

• 1:02:15Lester Nare?

  This is the whole sky on fire.

• 1:02:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:02:17Lester Nare?

  Burn the world.

• 1:02:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. In the film, Robert Oppenheimer goes to Einstein to be like, hey, did you, can you check these calculations? And Einstein was like, well, who did these? And he's like, Hans Bethe. And it's like, okay, why do you want me to check? I'm worse at math than Hans Bethe.

• 1:02:34Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, and that's actually true. Hans Bethe was just ridiculous at math. So let me go through some of the stuff that he was known for because there's a lot.

• 1:02:43Krishna Choudhary?

  The thing that he won his Nobel Prize for in 1967 is he figured out the birth of the elements. How are elements made inside stars? He discovered the proton-proton chain reaction, which is how the sun makes helium out of hydrogen and keeps us all alive through nuclear fusion. There's a very specific pathway where four protons have to come together to create a helium nucleus and a neutrino, I think two neutrinos that go out and a bunch of photons that go out. And there's specific pathways where like in the middle, there's like a deuterium that happens. And then there's two deuteriums that come together. That entire process is what he figured out. And the mathematics of that process was exactly right for how big we know the sun is and how bright we know the sun is. All of the math was mathing, you know?

• 1:03:28Lester Nare?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:03:29Krishna Choudhary?

  He also discovered the CNO cycle, which is the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen cycle, which is how larger stars, you know, the blue stars, that's how they burn fusion. They go from carbon, then hydrogen and helium come in to become nitrogen. Then it becomes oxygen and then the oxygen spits out a helium nucleus to go back to carbon. And the cycle of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen is what powers those higher stars. You can't sustain that kind of luminosity with just proton-proton helium fusion.

• 1:03:58Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:03:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 1:03:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:03:59Krishna Choudhary?

  So he won the Nobel Prize for that. He explained why the sun shines.

• 1:04:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:04:04Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a huge deal.

• 1:04:05Lester Nare?

  That's pretty. Something that's been sort of just idolized by societies, civilizations, religions for

• 1:04:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Lester Nare?

  millennia.

• 1:04:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:13Lester Nare?

  And now it's like, oh, no, but now we know why.

• 1:04:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Now we know why, and it's because of HANS Bethe. The other thing he developed was something called the Bethe Ansatz, which is this method for guessing, and then from that guess, figuring out what the correct answer is. He specifically used it to find the exact solutions for quantum many-body problems. But that Bethe Ansatz is still a technique that is taught in graduate-level physics today to figure out, you know, like, if you've got a problem, kind of just try to guess at a right answer, but have enough knobs that you can tweak to get to the correct one, as long as your logic is sort of there. The physicist Freeman Dyson, who was once his doctoral student, called him the supreme problem solver of the 20th century.

• 1:04:57Lester Nare?

  And Freeman Dyson's the man, too.

• 1:04:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and Dyson's the man, too, right? And Edward Kolb called him the last of the old masters of physics. One of the big things that he's known for, actually, is quantum electrodynamics. So before Feynman and all of these guys perfected quantum electrodynamics, post-war America was the crucible of experimental physics. This is where all of the big experimental experiments were happening, right? You had the Lawrence Large Particle Accelerators. And on the other hand, you had, on the eastern seaboard, you had extremely precise experiments because we had gotten really good at radar. And so we can use really precise microwave signals to start probing the spectra of atoms, right?

• 1:05:43Krishna Choudhary?

  And the light that's coming out of the atoms. So from there, Lamb, Willis Lamb, discovered something called the Lamb shift. Which showed that in the hydrogen atom, there's actually, the energy levels of the hydrogen atom are slightly off from what Paul Dirac had predicted from his equation.

• 1:06:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Slightly as in like it was like one part in a million type thing, but he had really honed in. And one of the, one of the possibilities that people were floating around was, oh, maybe that has to do with the fact that the electron is like interacting with its own electric field.

• 1:06:18Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:06:19Krishna Choudhary?

  But when you do that, you have this kind of recursion math that's happening. It quickly blows up and you get infinity in your answers and nobody really knew how to work it out. Beta went to that symposium in Long Island and then on his way back on the, on a train. He figured out how to do the calculation and his calculation is called by Richard Feynman, no less. It was called by Richard Feynman, the most important discovery in the history of the theory of quantum electrodynamics. Yeah. And Paul Dirac said, this is Paul Dirac.

• 1:06:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:06:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Said the most important calculation in physics for decades. Right?

• 1:06:58Lester Nare?

  Number seven.

• 1:06:59Krishna Choudhary?

  And he's at number seven. Yeah.

• 1:07:02Lester Nare?

  This is, this is, and sorry, I cut you off. If you're gonna say because, if you wanna finish.

• 1:07:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, no, yeah, no. I mean, basically, I mean, it's because it was before quantum electrodynamics. This is the seed that led to all of it.

• 1:07:15Lester Nare?

  I got you.

• 1:07:15Krishna Choudhary?

  That comes up later because the next guy is going to be the guy who perfects it.

• 1:07:18Lester Nare?

  Hans Beta, 1906 to 2005.

• 1:07:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, very recent.

• 1:07:23Lester Nare?

  Very recent.

• 1:07:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Very recent.

• 1:07:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Number six, Richard Feynman.

• 1:07:29Lester Nare?

  Gotta be on the list.

• 1:07:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Richard Feynman, he's at number six. He did not make top five.

• 1:07:33Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:07:34Krishna Choudhary?

  But he's at number six. This is a photo of him at Princeton, actually. I don't know why he's walking past the humanities and language building. But I guess that's because, I mean, yeah, I get it, right? The building is prettier.

• 1:07:47Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:07:47Krishna Choudhary?

  But there's no reason why he would be in that part of campus. Talking to General Groves and Robert Oppenheimer. But I see you, Christopher Nolan. I get it. I'm glad you used the pretty part of our campus, you know?

• 1:08:00Lester Nare?

  As you've talked previously about your feelings about

• 1:08:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Lester Nare?

  the physics and math building.

• 1:08:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, well, at the time, at the time, the physics and math buildings were frisked.

• 1:08:08Lester Nare?

  Yes, that's true. That's true.

• 1:08:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That's still like kind of pretty, but nowhere, not nearly as pretty as, you know, where the chapel and

• 1:08:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:08:15Krishna Choudhary?

  like NASA Hall are.

• 1:08:17Lester Nare?

  Very cinematic.

• 1:08:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so very cinematic. Anyways, he was a young junior physicist at Los Alamos, very young. Was like in the middle of his grad school, in the middle of his PhD when he was doing this. He was recruited by Hans Beta to do this. Incredible intuition and later on in his life just becomes a behemoth for physics. Probably one of the most famous physicists of all time, you know? He's played by Jack Quaid in the movie. He's seen playing the bongos, challenging security. And he watched the Trinity test through a truck windshield. If you remember, they're all sitting there watching the Trinity test and he goes behind a windshield. And he's like, oh, the, the glass is going to stop the UV. Right.

• 1:09:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And the funniest thing is Edward Teller, who's like putting on a bunch of like sunscreen to stop the UV is like, what's going to stop the glass?

• 1:09:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is hilarious because that's a real thing like that shockwave. You don't know how big it's going to be, right?

• 1:09:20Krishna Choudhary?

  So he was one of the group leaders of the theoretical division, not the leader. That was of course Hans Bethe. He developed formulas for the fission bomb yield. He's one of the first guys to manage the IBM machines. Right. That were put in Los Alamos to numerically calculate things like the yield of this bomb. In terms of the actual physics, great work. He developed the path integral formulation in quantum mechanics, which is the idea of an interpretation of quantum mechanics where a particle and all of your experiments go from one end to the other end. A particle moves from one end to the other end by going through all of the paths.

• 1:10:04Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't have enough time to explain it to you. Right. But effectively it's like a really good way to interpret quantum mechanics, I think. Yes. Right? Yes. Specifically, he also developed Feynman diagrams, which are a visual tool that are used in all sorts of physics. Yes. Actually, not just in particle physics and high energy physics. They're also used in condensed matter physics and things like that. It's a visual language for simplifying really complicated integrals. Yes. Effectively. Yes. So that's what he won the Nobel Prize for is he figured out how electricity and magnetism. He figured out the theory behind how electrons and photons interact effectively. Which. Quantum electrodynamics. Which has. I mean, that's the nature of reality, right?

• 1:10:49Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:10:49Krishna Choudhary?

  What is light? He told you what is light.

• 1:10:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:10:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 1:10:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:10:52Krishna Choudhary?

  On top of that, he also did theory on liquid helium. There are some amazing lectures by him on what is computation. He's very famous for saying that all of the Encyclopedia Britannica should be able to fit in a box this size. Because he was saying, let's get down to the atomic scale. We need bits. This is how small atoms are. Even if we do hundreds of atoms, I'm telling you that all of that information should be able to fit on my fingertip. People thought he was crazy, but we're pushing that boundary a lot, right? He also came up with the idea of quantum computing. One of the first people to write a paper saying that, hey, if we want to simulate physics and reality, we need a computer that is quantum in nature.

• 1:11:36Krishna Choudhary?

  We can't be doing it with like

• 1:11:38Lester Nare?

  Classical.

• 1:11:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Classical transistors and things like that.

• 1:11:41Lester Nare?

  Makes a lot of sense.

• 1:11:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Makes a lot of sense. Great teacher. He did the Feynman lectures in physics. We can do an entire deep dive on him. We probably will, where we will talk about some of the, you know, issues.

• 1:11:54Lester Nare?

  As we always do.

• 1:11:55Krishna Choudhary?

  As we always do. He's not a perfect human being.

• 1:11:57Lester Nare?

  As men of his time.

• 1:11:58Krishna Choudhary?

  At all.

• 1:11:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Are known to have.

• 1:12:00Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And even for someone of his time, like glaring sexist, but still a giant in the physics community.

• 1:12:09Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:12:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Lester Nare?

  Richard Feynman, 1918 to 1988. And we'll be sure we do the deep dive to send it to Dave Chang, as we know.

• 1:12:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Lester Nare?

  He's a big Feynman fan.

• 1:12:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, of course. And that is the end of the A tier.

• 1:12:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:12:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So now Feynman is not in the supers.

• 1:12:25Lester Nare?

  Yeah. I mean, the A tier is, that's like the Avengers already.

• 1:12:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Lester Nare?

  I don't know how.

• 1:12:30Krishna Choudhary?

  The A tier already has Feynman and Beta. All right? Now we're getting into the S tier.

• 1:12:35Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:12:36Krishna Choudhary?

  At number five.

• 1:12:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:12:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Is Werner Heisenberg.

• 1:12:39Lester Nare?

  One of my favorites.

• 1:12:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. He was a German theoretical physicist and he is the architect of quantum mechanics. Yeah. Right? Yes. Um, he remained in Germany during World War II to lead the Nazi nuclear project. Wasn't very good and there's debate about whether he like, you know, fudged the calculations on purpose. I don't think so. I think he was just really bad at calculating and doing experiments. Um, he was famous for that. Um, he was a peer to Robert Oppenheimer. He's played by Matthias Schweighhoffa, um, a very famous, um, German actor, actually. Um, he's kind of an ominous off-screen threat. Um, but in this race mentality, they keep saying that he was 18 months ahead. Because Heisenberg is just so good.

• 1:13:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. At anything physics related and truly in terms of theory, he really was. Um, the German project actually failed because lack of resources, lack of support, and also a calculation error, which we're not sure if it was real or not. Right? But in terms of physics, there's no doubt that Heisenberg is someone who belongs in the S tier. Yes. Okay. He's not someone for the A tier. Yes, yes, yes. He's not of the bottle, as we like to say in Europe. His 1925 paper in quantum mechanics, the one that we covered in one of our earlier episodes. Yes. That paper started the modern quantum revolution. Yes. Right? This idea of linear algebra coming into quantum mechanics and the fact that he figured that out

• 1:14:10Krishna Choudhary?

  without having any training in the mathematics. He just invented it on his own while having an allergic attack on a island. Hay fever? Just insane. Yeah. Hay fever, right? Astonishing. Yeah, just insane, right? And that was in 1925. Just that paper would have put him. Yeah. I think in the S tier, right? Hundred percent. Um, on top of that, he developed this thing called the uncertainty principle, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. One of my favorite things in science. Yeah, that fundamental property that you can't know both the position where something is and how fast it's moving, the momentum with arbitrary precision simultaneously. A central tenet in quantum mechanics and really one of the things that sets it apart from classical mechanics, the fact that there are observables that are completely separate. Yes.

• 1:14:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, so. Won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for this mathematically complete version of quantum mechanics. Very much deserved and very much deserved to be in the S tier, even though, you know, he's a Nazi sympathizer and everything. I told you from the beginning, right? This is a ranking about their contributions to physics, regardless of.

• 1:15:18Lester Nare?

  This is not a judgment of whether they're good people or not.

• 1:15:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's a different.

• 1:15:21Lester Nare?

  That's a wholly different thing. Werner Heisenberg, 1901 to 1976.

• 1:15:27Krishna Choudhary?

  All right, coming in at number four, Enrico Fermi. This guy is, I think, the last Renaissance man of physics.

• 1:15:35Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:15:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, he's the last guy to be simultaneously a goat in theory and a goat in experiment.

• 1:15:43Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:15:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, the theory guys would look at him and be like, wow. And then the experimentalists would look at him and be like, wow. I think he's really genuinely the last person to hold that ranking.

• 1:15:57Lester Nare?

  In both communities.

• 1:15:58Krishna Choudhary?

  In both communities, yes, yeah. They used to call him the Pope of Physics because he was Italian. I, just a kind of a side note, when I visited Rome,

• 1:16:10Krishna Choudhary?

  I got there through the train station, right? Because you can take a, you can take a train to the central train station and his birthplace is right next to the central train station. So I went there and there's a little plaque that says Enrico Fermi was born here. So I posted on my Instagram story, I took a photo of that and said, Enrico Fermi, the greatest contribution of Italy to the world in the 20th century. And I got a lot of hate as, because people were saying that, oh, I'm saying that like the Italians haven't contributed anything. I'm like, no, no, no, I'm saying the Italians contributed Enrico Fermi.

• 1:16:46Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what you mean, I know what you mean.

• 1:16:48Krishna Choudhary?

  You know what I mean? Like, you don't understand what I'm saying. I'm saying that this guy is one of the greatest physicists of all time. And it is an honor that your country contributed someone like Enrico Fermi to the world.

• 1:16:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:17:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so just for the people who were in my DMs after that Insta story, here's why, okay? So he was treated with reverence by the entire community. And again, we've been through some of the names on this list. Those guys are looking at Fermi like, oh, yeah.

• 1:17:18Lester Nare?

  Okay, okay, okay, LeBron.

• 1:17:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, he's played by Danny DeFerrari.

• 1:17:23Lester Nare?

  That's a good name.

• 1:17:24Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a great name.

• 1:17:25Lester Nare?

  DeFerrari.

• 1:17:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Let's go Ferrari. I still hope, I still have hope in 2026.

• 1:17:32Krishna Choudhary?

  His arrival signals the transition to engineering reality. Okay. Um, when he got to America, that's when everyone, all of the physicists in the allied countries were like, okay.

• 1:17:46Lester Nare?

  Yeah, we're doing this.

• 1:17:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, we're actually doing this. The way he got there was pretty crazy because I believe his, his wife was Jewish. Okay. And so he needed to get out, but he's like under an embargo and all this other stuff, right? It's hard to get out. And so he, he won the Nobel Prize. And I believe it was like in the late, in 1938.

• 1:18:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. They expedited his Nobel Prize because the Nobel Committee was literally like asking him, hey, do you need a way to get out? Because he was gonna win it.

• 1:18:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And they're like, why don't we do that this year?

• 1:18:21Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Krishna Choudhary?

  So that you can have an excuse to come to Sweden.

• 1:18:25Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Accept the Nobel Prize.

• 1:18:26Lester Nare?

  And never.

• 1:18:27Krishna Choudhary?

  And then just go to America and just get the hell out of there.

• 1:18:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Isn't that so amazing?

• 1:18:33Lester Nare?

  And it's incredible how these little, this is the butterfly effect, right?

• 1:18:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36Lester Nare?

  Like, had that not transpired, who knows?

• 1:18:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Who knows? Yeah, if the, if the Nazis captured him and made him work on there.

• 1:18:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Who knows?

• 1:18:44Lester Nare?

  Who knows?

• 1:18:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Um, he was the leader of the Fermi Division. He had his own division named after him, the F Division at Los Alamos. Okay.

• 1:18:54Lester Nare?

  Come on, I want to get a Fermi Division.

• 1:18:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude, that should be one of our merch. Yeah, exactly. Um, in the movie, he's depicted, uh, directing the Chicago Pile One, the CP One, which is the first self-sustained chain reaction. Under the Chicago.

• 1:19:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Football field.

• 1:19:13Lester Nare?

  Oh, the the Bears?

• 1:19:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:15Lester Nare?

  Wow.

• 1:19:15Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, the University of Chicago.

• 1:19:16Lester Nare?

  University of Chicago. I was like, what?

• 1:19:18Krishna Choudhary?

  But under the University of Chicago football field is where he had this giant like basement room. And he built a pile of uranium and graphite, uranium and graphite to create the first self sustained chain reaction. When that happened, everyone was like, okay, this is real.

• 1:19:33Lester Nare?

  Because that that was the first necessary step to be able to actually get to the end goal, which was the bomb, which required.

• 1:19:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is a runaway.

• 1:19:39Lester Nare?

  Runaway chain reaction.

• 1:19:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:19:41Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:19:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, but controlled in some sense, because we don't want that happening everywhere.

• 1:19:45Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:19:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, a lot of balls to actually do it in the center of a city, right? Because if that chain reaction became runaway.

• 1:19:51Lester Nare?

  It started to run away.

• 1:19:52Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, what do you? It's like the first time that you're doing it, but that's how much trust that people had in Fermi's calculations, right?

• 1:19:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:19:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Where he was just able, there's also, you know, the famous Fermi problems. I don't know if you've heard about these, where it's like, how many piano tuners are there in Los Angeles? That all comes from him. He was incredibly good at like doing these kinds of back of the envelope.

• 1:20:12Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:20:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Calculations.

• 1:20:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:20:16Krishna Choudhary?

  So in terms of the the theory and the physics that he did, obviously, the first self sustaining chain reaction, huge, worth a Nobel Prize. The second thing he did was induced radioactivity. The idea that I can shoot neutrons at stuff at a stable element and that stable element will become a radioactive isotope. That's the first, he's the first guy to show that. He's also the first guy to show that slower neutrons are better at inducing radioactivity than faster neutrons. Okay, and he developed a theory for that. Kind of makes sense, because if you're slower, you get captured. If you're faster, you'll just like sort of bounce.

• 1:20:53Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:20:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, bounce right through, right? But he developed some of the principles behind these nuclear reactors and why we need moderators.

• 1:21:00Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:21:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Where like you have like graphite pads to slow the neutrons down.

• 1:21:03Lester Nare?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:21:05Krishna Choudhary?

  He also developed something called Fermi Dirac Statistics. He took the idea from Pauli, which is this idea of the exclusion principle. The fact that, you know, two electrons can't occupy the same state. So one has to be spin up, one has to be spin down. You can't pile on like a boson where you get the boson condensate. Fermions don't do that. So what do fermions do? Well, they are like ideal gases in the sense that they have to bump into each other. And when they bump into each other, they go their opposite direction. So ideal gases are Fermi Dirac. And they obey Fermi Dirac Statistics. So from first principles, you can figure out the equation state of the gas in this room using Fermi Dirac Statistics. And now the fermions, which are like electrons, quarks, things like that.

• 1:21:49Krishna Choudhary?

  All of these people, all of these particles that have half integer spin. They're called fermions named after him.

• 1:21:56Lester Nare?

  It's crazy that fundamental particles of our reality, you get to have the whole family of them named after you. That's crazy. That's crazy.

• 1:22:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Fermions.

• 1:22:06Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's, and that's like electrons.

• 1:22:09Lester Nare?

  F E R.

• 1:22:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Like electrons, protons, neutrons, all of it named after Enrico Fermi.

• 1:22:16Lester Nare?

  That's so sick.

• 1:22:18Krishna Choudhary?

  He also authored my favorite book on thermodynamics.

• 1:22:21Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:22:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, it's called Thermodynamics.

• 1:22:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:24Krishna Choudhary?

  By Enrico Fermi. Tiny little book. If you guys really want a nice read on how like just Carnot engines work and work, pressure, entropy, that textbook is amazing. When we, when we get our.

• 1:22:37Lester Nare?

  Shelf.

• 1:22:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Shelf, that's one of the first that's gonna go up there.

• 1:22:40Lester Nare?

  Uh, Enrico Fermi, 1901 to 1954. Uh, short time.

• 1:22:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Lester Nare?

  Hugely impactful.

• 1:22:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Hugely impactful. Yep. Um, number three, our first non-physicist Kurt Gödel.

• 1:22:55Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:22:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. He was a mathematician, but he's mentioned in the movie on his walks with Albert Einstein outside of the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study. So I had to put him in here. Um, yeah, he's at number three because.

• 1:23:13Krishna Choudhary?

  What he did was something so fundamental that I still have trouble trying to figure it out. He had nothing to do with the Manhattan Project, okay? Pure theory, pure mathematics, more about logic than about mathematics. He came up with something called the incompleteness theorem, okay? This is the idea that if you have a system of logic, like mathematics purports to be, right? Mathematics is something where, let's say I've got axioms and I've got ways to prove or disprove statements based on those axioms. The axioms can be stuff like, numbers exist, right?

• 1:23:55Krishna Choudhary?

  From that, can I now prove from first principles that 1 plus 1 equals 2? Or can I prove from first principles like the Pythagorean theorem? That's this idea, right? The idea that you've got an axiomatic system where there's a finite number of axioms and from that can I prove all of mathematics? That's the question. It's a big question. It is a big question. It's a big question, right? It's a nature of logic. Not even reality has nothing to do with whether atoms exist. Right. Or we exist. Right. I think for me, this is like, just logic is on another level of like, can we actually just prove true and false? Right. Okay? He showed that a system like mathematics is one of two things.

• 1:24:40Krishna Choudhary?

  It is either incomplete in the sense that there are statements which are true, which you can never prove, or it is inconsistent. Meaning, you'll be able to prove things that are not true. You will never be able to create a complete system of logic. Okay. That's quite insane. Yeah. To think about. Yeah. Yeah. And... Like, there are statements that I can write down in mathematics that I will never be able to prove. But I know to be true.

• 1:25:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:25:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Because of the way that I've written it down.

• 1:25:17Lester Nare?

  Right, okay.

• 1:25:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:25:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:25:19Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's outside of my level of proof or my ability to prove things.

• 1:25:25Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:25:26Krishna Choudhary?

  It's, it's something that I think we need to go on a deep dive about.

• 1:25:29Lester Nare?

  This is, this is actually something, because I have so many questions and it's not the, I'm like, holding back so much.

• 1:25:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, there's, there's a lot that goes into this.

• 1:25:36Lester Nare?

  But I, I understand the conundrum that is presented by that, the, the theorem as is described.

• 1:25:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Lester Nare?

  And it triggers so many questions.

• 1:25:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's like, it's really, really weird, dude. And it's something that I really can't get into here.

• 1:25:58Lester Nare?

  I understand.

• 1:25:58Krishna Choudhary?

  But what I wanna, what I wanna really sort of convey is that it's probably one of the biggest results in the history of mankind.

• 1:26:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:26:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That one statement.

• 1:26:11Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:26:11Krishna Choudhary?

  That, like, the mathematics itself is not what we think it is, which is like, this just like, true thing.

• 1:26:17Lester Nare?

  That, that, that we discovered math that is not an invention.

• 1:26:21Krishna Choudhary?

  It has, it has to do with that.

• 1:26:22Lester Nare?

  Right, like, the difference between is, is it a fabric, is it a fundamental fabric of the reality?

• 1:26:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Lester Nare?

  And we found it?

• 1:26:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and, and it's so fundamental that, like, Roger Penrose, you know, when he talks about how consciousness is like a quantum phenomenon?

• 1:26:35Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:36Krishna Choudhary?

  It comes from this.

• 1:26:37Lester Nare?

  Ah.

• 1:26:37Krishna Choudhary?

  From incompleteness theorem.

• 1:26:38Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:26:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, that line of thought comes from the fact that there are things that are not computable.

• 1:26:44Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:26:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, there are statements that I cannot prove using deterministic algorithms. And so if all of physics is just deterministic algorithms, how do we get things like consciousness where a conscious entity can make sense?

• 1:27:00Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:27:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Of a statement that he or she wrote down.

• 1:27:03Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:27:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:27:04Lester Nare?

  Oh, this is deep.

• 1:27:05Krishna Choudhary?

  It's very deep.

• 1:27:05Lester Nare?

  I like it.

• 1:27:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And I, I, I just wanna put him at number three because he deserves to be number three.

• 1:27:09Lester Nare?

  Fair, and in the comments, let us know if you wanna come back on a, on a deep dive, uh, both on the incompleteness theorem and its surrounding subject matters, but, but, I, anyway.

• 1:27:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and Kurt Gödel is played by James Urbannick.

• 1:27:24Lester Nare?

  Yes, 1906 to 1978. I'm mad you brought that up, because now my brain won't stop thinking about it.

• 1:27:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, well, let's get it through just the last two, right? At number two, Niels Bohr.

• 1:27:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:27:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Played by, um, the very famous Kenneth Branagh.

• 1:27:40Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:27:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Obviously, the philosopher king of the quantum revolution. I love these names, by the way, like the Pope of Physics, the philosopher king, the father of the bomb. He was really the philosopher king. He, obviously, he created the Bohr model in 1913, which is the fact that electrons have discrete quantized orbitals around an atom. So one of the big things that explained hydrogen spectral lines, use this idea of quantized energy levels, the fact that I make jumps from one to the other without ever being in between. He's kind of a mentor to a lot of physicists, including Oppenheimer, but there's Heisenberg, there's Wolfgang Pauli, there's Erwin Schrodinger at a time.

• 1:28:27Krishna Choudhary?

  So really this like scientific godfather of that era of physicists. He championed something called the Copenhagen interpretation with Heisenberg. The Copenhagen interpretation, because he had an institute called the Niels Bohr Institute, or I think it was called the Institute for Theoretical Physics, but everyone knows it as the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. And that's where everybody, it was the Mecca of theoretical physics. Everybody would go there to sort of pay their respects and learn from the master himself. Right. That became sort of standard quantum mechanical interpretation. And the properties are definite for a system only upon measurement.

• 1:29:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Otherwise, they're in this weird wave space. You gotta observe for the wave function to collapse. Exactly, yeah. Otherwise, it's just a wave function. So all of that was Niels Bohr.

• 1:29:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And I really think, you know, given his sheer influence in physics. Yeah. Right? On top of his just contribution as the Bohr model, which is the first sort of quantum mechanics of matter. Yes. I think, I think he deserves to be. At number two.

• 1:29:40Lester Nare?

  I think this is fair. Niels Bohr, 1885 to 1962. And I do think it's important that you know, like that we are putting value on. He instilled the framework and the fundamental like state of mind and way to think.

• 1:29:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:00Lester Nare?

  That then was utilized by so many of even other people on this list.

• 1:30:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:30:05Lester Nare?

  Beyond this list.

• 1:30:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:06Lester Nare?

  In a way that's really hard to to beat.

• 1:30:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Lester Nare?

  In the modern.

• 1:30:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:30:11Lester Nare?

  In the modern era.

• 1:30:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no, exactly.

• 1:30:13Lester Nare?

  Um, so very much well deserved. Number two.

• 1:30:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, that's at number two, and that actually is the end of the S tier.

• 1:30:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:30:22Krishna Choudhary?

  So now, do we have our list? No, because that was number two.

• 1:30:25Lester Nare?

  We have 26 people total we're supposed to reference. I see 25 on the board.

• 1:30:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, so we're missing.

• 1:30:32Lester Nare?

  We're missing.

• 1:30:33Krishna Choudhary?

  The one and only, the obvious, number one, Albert Einstein.

• 1:30:38Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:30:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, I didn't want to put him on the S tier because that would be a disservice to Einstein. To put him in the company of people like Niels Bohr and Gödel and Fermi and Heisenberg. That's how ridiculous Einstein is, and I think everyone on that list would agree.

• 1:30:57Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:30:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, I think the guys in that S tier, if you ask them.

• 1:31:00Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:01Krishna Choudhary?

  They'd be like, no, he doesn't belong with us. Okay? On a log scale, he's like plus two, okay? It's it's pretty ridiculous because Einstein is Einstein. I don't have to say much.

• 1:31:13Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:31:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Relativity, both special and general. Mass energy equivalence equals mc squared. The laser, did you know that like the theory behind the laser was also Einstein?

• 1:31:26Lester Nare?

  I think we.

• 1:31:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Bose Einstein, yeah, Bose Einstein statistics.

• 1:31:29Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:31:29Krishna Choudhary?

  That's Einstein.

• 1:31:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:31:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Just the photoelectric effect.

• 1:31:35Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:31:35Krishna Choudhary?

  That's Einstein. So the fact that light is quantized is Einstein. The fact that atoms exist, Brownian motion, again, a 1905 paper, just ridiculous things, right? In the history of physics, there's only one other person that belongs in the same conversation, and that is Isaac Newton.

• 1:31:51Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, otherwise, all of these other, all of these other scientists, they can be in their chart. But Albert Einstein, if we look at the full ranking, he is going to be.

• 1:32:03Lester Nare?

  Okay, so I have a funny question. So in in football, we talk about the current goat era as being between Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi.

• 1:32:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:12Lester Nare?

  The past era is like Maradona, Pelé. Let's ignore those two. Let's just keep the Messi Ronaldo. Between Newton and Einstein, who do you think is more as the Messi and who do you think is Ronaldo? Because like Messi is viewed as just an alien born with it. Just it's it's it's God's gift to this earth. Ronaldo worked for it, maybe better on some stats and just like is a killer, like wins, scored like to but both goats, but fundamentally for different reasons. One was born with it, one just worked really hard.

• 1:32:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Lester Nare?

  Might not perfectly map, but I'm curious if you can, if you have a thought between who might be which.

• 1:32:49Krishna Choudhary?

  If you forced me to to do the match, I think Isaac Newton is Messi.

• 1:32:54Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:32:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 1:32:55Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:32:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Everything just came natural to him. And um, just it was like easy for him.

• 1:33:02Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Krishna Choudhary?

  And other people would would have a problem.

• 1:33:05Lester Nare?

  With you.

• 1:33:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And they talked to him about it and he'd be like, oh, I solved that two years ago.

• 1:33:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And they'd be like, where where he's like, oh, I threw it away. And they're like, well, find the, what do you mean? Like Edmund Halley came up to Newton and was like, hey, I'm trying to figure out what Halley's comet's orbit is. And he was like, oh, yeah, I solved that. Well, I didn't think it was that interesting. And then Edmund Halley was like, dude, I've been trying for like the past three years to figure this out. You need to find that and like publish it.

• 1:33:30Lester Nare?

  That's right.

• 1:33:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And then when Newton found it, he's like, why does he think it's interesting? And then he invented calculus. You know what I mean?

• 1:33:39Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Krishna Choudhary?

  And like a month later, he's just like, oh, okay, I made a better solution, but here's calculus. And everyone's like, what what is going on right now? On the other hand, Ronaldo, as you said, like had to put in a lot of work, right? Einstein also had to put in work. For example, his his miracle year in 1905, it seems like he didn't have to put in that much work. But what's true, what he's truly known for as like being the great, great, great is general relativity, which is the idea that gravitation and spacetime. It's the curvature of spacetime and all this other stuff. He had the insight for general relativity in 1907, 1908.

• 1:34:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:34:15Krishna Choudhary?

  But it took him another seven years of just learning mathematics and like brutal like training.

• 1:34:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:34:22Krishna Choudhary?

  In mathematics.

• 1:34:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:34:24Krishna Choudhary?

  To finally come out with the full theory. And that kind of reminds me of Ronaldo.

• 1:34:27Lester Nare?

  Ronaldo, and he's still playing to this day, longevity, da, da, da.

• 1:34:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and Einstein, again, longevity is like huge, but for Newton, it was like um, a 10 year span where he just did balls to the wall.

• 1:34:40Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:40Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, and then he started doing like side quests, kind of like what Messi's doing right now.

• 1:34:43Lester Nare?

  Miami.

• 1:34:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Went to Miami, right? Like Newton was like, okay, I'm gonna like, uh, you know, he started like degenerate gambling and like trading in like stocks.

• 1:34:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:34:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Lost a bunch of money, like just doing random stuff.

• 1:34:56Lester Nare?

  That is fantastic. That gives us our full ranking table.

• 1:35:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:01Lester Nare?

  With Einstein as our alpha, as the goat in this context of the top 25, sorry, 26 scientists that were featured in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer ranked by tier. I think you've made a very good argument for every placement.

• 1:35:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Great, I'm glad.

• 1:35:19Lester Nare?

  I, I think there'll be some people who are gonna be, I think, in the five to 12, right? Like six to 12 range. I think there may be some moveability on there. I think the top five is hard to argue with.

• 1:35:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Um, I think there might be some people that are gonna be mad that Bohr is number two because they're all Everian degenerates.

• 1:35:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Who believe in the um, multi-universe, you know? But come at me, bro, let's go.

• 1:35:48Lester Nare?

  Copenhagen interpretation.

• 1:35:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Lester Nare?

  Um, this was a really fantastic special episode. You notice how we did not even break in the middle to promote the show? That's how excited we were to talk about it. If this is the type of content that you want to continue to see, all your support is helpful. A like, a share, a comment, bring it up at Journal Club. It's not quite a research paper, but it is very much going to be a sort of trigger for conversation.

• 1:36:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:17Lester Nare?

  And debate, if you would like. To support the show monetarily, you can go to ffpod.com backslash donate. Every dollar helps support the two of us run the greatest science show of a generation. From First Principles, I am Lester Nare, your host. Joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, not a top 26 scientist featured. No. In Oppenheimer, but hopefully in a future movie about our generation's scientific progress. As we really push the boundaries and are still searching for that error that we once had. Before everyone got lost in string theory. Anyways, we will see you all later this week.