Breaking Down Oppenheimer with Brian Greene

What do two physicists think about the movie Oppenheimer? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with theoretical physicist Brian Greene to discuss Robert J. Oppenheimer’s work on the Manhattan Project, the science in Christopher Nolan’s film, and the dawn of quantum physics.

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

• 0:00Brian Greene?

  Would you have gone and worked on the Manhattan Project if you were around at the time? And, you know, it's a tough question, but I suspect I would have gotten caught up in the same kind of fervor because when you see what was happening at Los Alamos, and the movie does a really good job of this, you realize that these scientists are getting, they're caught up in this ocean of excitement to do something that no one has ever done before.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New science, new science.

• 0:29Brian Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 0:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, everybody. Neil deGrasse Tyson here. I've got with me Brian Greene, theoretical physicist, Columbia University. And the two of us, we're just gonna riff on Oppenheimer, the man, and especially Oppenheimer, the movie. So Brian, I trust you've seen the film?

• 1:04Brian Greene?

  I have.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, um, we've, I met Christopher Nolan previously. We've had him as a guest on StarTalk after one of his sort of time-warping sort of movies that he had produced. And a very smart guy, very clever, with a lot of attention to detail. And my sense of the film was that it captured so much of what he cares about. He cares about science, he cares about culture, he cares about entertainment, he cares about all of this. And every little physics tidbitty fact that I knew from that era, he managed to capture,

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  not with an entire off-ramp, just to, just to put in a fact that you know should be there, he managed to fully stitch it. And weave it so that I felt like I was sitting on Oppenheimer's shoulder, watching all of this unfold before me.

• 2:05Brian Greene?

  Yeah, no, I definitely had a similar feeling about it. I mean, there were certainly moments when there were things on screen that I suspect most people wouldn't take much note of, such as the Einstein and Gödel, who famously go for walks together. I mean, there were the wonderful moments when I was just sitting there feeling like, you know, or Feynman playing the bongos.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, because Feynman is not ID'd in the movie. He's the person playing Feynman is credited at the end, but the word Feynman doesn't come out of anybody's mouth.

• 2:39Brian Greene?

  That's right.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, but you have to pay attention to that party scene. He's playing the bongos and it was Feynman in the car. Because in one of his memoirs, watch, in one of his memoirs, he described the fact that he knew that ordinary glass is a very significant UV absorber. And so while they're slathering each other with what is it zinc oxide for the explosion, he's in the car and he says, no, I don't need that. I've got the windshield. It's a heavy absorber of UV. That was Feynman in the car.

• 3:10Brian Greene?

  I didn't know.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, yeah, yeah. And then someone else says, well, but what will protect you from the windshield?

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that was a good rebuttal. So it's with two Feynman, so somebody had to know that little tidbit about Feynman and then put it in seamlessly.

• 3:29Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and that's not even someone who's, where they make a big deal of for his presence.

• 3:34Brian Greene?

  That's what was beautiful about it. It wasn't like hitting you over the head with it. Like, here's this obscure fact that only we, you know, it was just there.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let's throw in on the bongos, right? No, no.

• 3:46Brian Greene?

  You know, the only moment that gave me pause, and I don't know if you had a similar feeling or not, I mean, you and I both spent time giving people a sense of the wonder of the cosmos and things of that. But the first handful of minutes of the film, which kind of tried to go into the mind of a physicist, swirling galaxies and these equations or what, it just sort of felt like, that felt a little much to me. I don't know if it hit you that way at all.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, so I think without that, Oppenheimer is really just a manager.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't see him manifest much physics knowledge.

• 4:28Brian Greene?

  That's true, yeah.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Throughout, he's managing the expertise of others. So that basically established his street cred, especially since his most cited paper is not about normal physics. It's about the universe and black holes, right? Which really didn't have much to do with his leadership in this role.

• 4:50Brian Greene?

  Yeah, no, totally, totally.

• 4:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I thought that was okay.

• 4:54Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was okay. Otherwise, you won't get to do that elsewhere.

• 4:57Brian Greene?

  Yeah, I mean, ultimately, it all worked. But for the first few minutes, I was wondering where this was going. Then it's been segue into where it did ultimately make sense. But it was that one brief moment. But yeah, I love the way that the historical facts were blended with, I guess, things that were well motivated. But you know, Oppenheimer's own personal perspective on what was happening versus the things that are in the personal and then in the public record from the hearing.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, in fact, it was definitely his POV, no doubt about it. So what I liked about it was all of the angst people had about the bomb in a military setting against the Germans, but then against the Japanese and the Jewish science in Germany. They tossed bones to each of these without actually taking off ramps. Because the off ramp would be, well, we're a historical documentary. We have to fully cover it. No, you don't. It's just his point of view. So but they got it all in there. For example, they talked about Well, how special is this bomb?

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just firebombed Tokyo and killed 100,000 people with conventional incendiary bombs. And this, your estimates are not even that high. So how could you carry some guilt with this when we've already committed that level of violence against noncombatant civilians? So that came up. And then there was the, well, what is this with Germany, Hitler and the Jews? How is that going to play out? And my favorite line there, which I think encapsulates a lot of historical dimension, where they say Heisenberg might know this, because will we get it? Heisenberg is brilliant. Will we get it before Heisenberg?

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, because he's Jewish and Hitler doesn't give Jews access to the labs. It relegates them to pencil and pads. And so this was, so that was a fascinating indictment of Nazi racism, basically, and how that very fact probably contributed to their, however slow they were on the development of the bomb.

• 7:27Brian Greene?

  And the other thing, though, I wonder your thought on this. I was very impressed with how the carnage from dropping the bomb was treated. You know, I thought it was a very dramatic moment. No spoiler here, you know, when the sound went off and you had this moment before the actual explosion. And then you don't really see the carnage in any gory, explicit way. But then I began to think about that. And I watched The Day After Trinity, I think that's the name of the documentary. And I began to think, you know, for so many young people, this may be their only direct connection to the events that happened at the end of World War II.

• 8:08Brian Greene?

  Maybe there needed to be more of the shocking visuals in order that the generation really, really understand.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, they described them. They did describe them. They said a person with a striped shirt.

• 8:21Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where the dark stripes were, it burned their skin.

• 8:25Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And where the light stripes were, it didn't. There were other people where their shadows were burned into the exterior of their shadow.

• 8:33Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was burned into the pavement. So.

• 8:35Brian Greene?

  I wonder if that's enough, though, you know?

• 8:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 8:38Brian Greene?

  You know, especially, you know, if it's the only real intro.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the only, yeah. Okay. Yeah, so because war, sometimes you have to see it up close to know that you should never do it.

• 8:55Brian Greene?

  Yeah, and this is a certain kind of violence to humanity that is of a scale and of a sort that is so spectacularly agonizing and awful. And to not fully feel that even momentarily may be, may be a bit of a loss.

• 9:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What about the scene where he, where inside his head and he's about to talk about the success of the bomb to the assembled people?

• 9:29Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he, and he sees.

• 9:31Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Flashes and people's skin burning off. Yeah, that's in his head. It's not the documentary of what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but it's.

• 9:42Brian Greene?

  It was also very relatively brief.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was brief, yes.

• 9:46Brian Greene?

  So, so, yes, I mean, it's a difficult decision to make because as a film, I thought it worked spectacularly as a work of art about this incredibly destructive moment and this incredibly destructive period. But as a, again, it's not a documentary, but it may be treated as a documentary in the sense that.

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, as is our, yeah, our movies are our sources of.

• 10:10Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Historical knowledge, for sure. The, a few other things that I noticed that he did was, we used to say Hiroshima and then later people started saying Hiroshima. In the movie, it's said both ways.

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In two different cases, it's, and I, that has to be on purpose. Just, so he's got both bases covered. He's got both covered. Also, generally, when I see a movie a second time, I hear the soundtrack more because I'm not distracted by having to pay attention to the plot. In Oppenheimer, I already knew what was happening, so I was able to hear the soundtrack. And the moments leading up to the bomb test with the button, there is cacophonous orchestral music. And the editing pace is fast, and the music is getting louder and louder and more cacophonous. And you're not gonna know that, because you're anticipating what's about to

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  happen. And if you're not aware of the music, which, good music in a movie, you're not aware of it, it's just managing your emotions. When they hit the button, and you see the explosion, it is, the silence is definite. Because they take away the music. And of course, there's the sound delay, from the explosion to where they are. So he doubles up on this, on the silence.

• 11:36Brian Greene?

  Yeah, that was beautiful. That was really beautiful.

• 11:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so, they, they were what, one, two miles away? Sound will go a mile every six seconds. So the blast wave, moving at the speed of sound, I think that calculation looked right to me.

• 11:51Brian Greene?

  Yeah, right. Sort of eight, 10 seconds, or whatever it was.

• 11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, they were a few miles, yeah, that's right. But between one and two miles away, would do that.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie, because we listen to StarTalk every night, and support StarTalk on Patreon.

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why did they give so much weight to the risk of igniting the atmosphere? Seems to me that probability would have been so low, to be astronomically low, but it makes a really good headline. Oh my gosh, we could have ended the world.

• 12:44Brian Greene?

  Yeah, you know, and astronomically low probability for ending the world does demand a certain degree of attention.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, thank you. I agree.

• 13:00Brian Greene?

  You know, it was a real worry and people had to sit down and do the calculation. Look, we had the same thing at the Large Hadron Collider. People worried that you turn on the accelerator, create a little black hole that would swallow up Switzerland and then the rest of Europe. But the serious point is, it's a real concern. And you've got to sit down and do the calculation. And colleagues of mine did the calculation and showed that it wasn't something that we should worry about.

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was highly unlikely, yes.

• 13:29Brian Greene?

  Exactly unlikely that you could put it to the side. But this is what we should always do, you know, because, you know, ending the world is kind of a big deal.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what reaction? I mean, when I think of the, you're splitting uranium-235, it sends out to neutrons, hits other nearby uranium atoms. Why would that ignite the atmosphere? What would happen? What nuclear process in the oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere were they thinking would happen?

• 14:01Brian Greene?

  Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know the details of the mechanism that was most concerning to the scientists of the time, but you are creating temperatures and densities of energy that we had never created before on Earth. And so you've got to ask yourself, is there any collateral process that this may spark? And the answer is, in principle, yes, in practice, no. And that's what you need to do to ensure that these things are safe. But you know that... Some of the primary work on the process that you just described where you two thirty five splits and neutrons are sent out happened in the building where I'm sitting right now.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 14:46Brian Greene?

  You know, at CUPEEN at Columbia University had Leo Silarde, who was one of the first people, in fact, the story goes, I believe, that he was crossing the street in nineteen thirty-three in London, just after the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick in nineteen thirty-two.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then it hit him.

• 15:05Brian Greene?

  And it hit him.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, in Cosmos, we went to that very same street corner.

• 15:08Brian Greene?

  Oh, you did, is that right?

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, we did, and I walked up to the street corner and I had no such epiphany. Yeah. Anachronistically in time and place, but we did go to that moment, right?

• 15:22Brian Greene?

  Silarde came to Columbia, he was working here in this building, Fermi was in this building, they're on different floors, each trying to determine if you could get multiple neutrons, they then could have the cascading effect, two neutrons splits other uranium, begets four neutrons, splits the more, begets eight in the whole.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the chain reaction, that's what chain reaction, game currency is a term back then.

• 15:46Brian Greene?

  But it was then that Silarde and Wigner, when they realized this was a real possibility, they get in a car and they drive to Long Island, I think it's in nineteen thirty-nine, to convince Einstein to write the letter that they talk about in Oppenheimer.

• 16:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 16:01Brian Greene?

  Einstein writes to Roosevelt saying, hey, we gotta get a move on, there's a real potential for a weapon.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's possible at all.

• 16:08Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I also heard that Oppenheimer did not have a one-on-one meeting with Einstein, but they had corresponded, and so what they did was use, because we knew Einstein is always wandering and alone.

• 16:22Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In conversation one-on-one, they created a conversation that would have been plausible expression of what their correspondence was.

• 16:31Brian Greene?

  Is that right? I didn't know, that I don't know of in detail.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd heard, I'd heard that, so, but I was okay with that, just because, why not? I mean, you get three for one there, you get Oppenheimer in conversation with Albert Einstein and the Institute for Advanced Study.

• 16:48Brian Greene?

  Yeah, the ingredients are all right, so I guess.

• 16:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, one thing I tweeted this, uh, again, I'll give, I'll give him a hall pass, uh, Christopher Nolan. So July 16th is the test.

• 17:03Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's summertime and at the latitude on Earth where this occurred at 5:30 in the morning, we are well into morning twilight.

• 17:15Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would not have been pitch dark, but if you want a spectacular explosion against a dark sky, I'd give him the dark sky.

• 17:23Brian Greene?

  I've, I've been there. I've been to where you probably have too, where they did the test.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 17:28Brian Greene?

  Yeah. Cause I, in a Nova program, they had me take a, a Geiger counter and actually, you know, and yeah, you get some click, click, click. I mean, there's still some residual impact of all this.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, so I thought the movie, it was two movies. There was the making of the bomb and then the trial.

• 17:42Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, uh, it's quite a challenge to keep that going, you know, after you have, you know, the largest explosion Earth had ever seen.

• 17:52Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think the, the wisdom that Einstein, it was revealed that he shared with him at the end was, uh, in the end, whatever they're doing to you now, in the end, they're going to have to thank you. And basically that's, that's, that's where the movie went.

• 18:08Brian Greene?

  Yeah, yeah. And I don't really face it directly in my own work, but my kids asked me, would you have gone and worked on the Manhattan Project if you were around at the time? And you know, it's a tough question, but I suspect I would have gotten caught up in the same kind of fervor because when you see what was happening at Los Alamos, and the movie does a really good job of this, you realize that these scientists are getting, they're caught up in this ocean of excitement to do something that no one has ever done before.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New science, new science.

• 18:43Brian Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With government money to back it. Right.

• 18:46Brian Greene?

  Yeah. And there's a, I don't know if you've seen this, but Freeman Dyson, there's a quote of his, it's in this documentary, Day After Trinity, he says something like that feeling of power at this gate, you know, so that sense of you are grabbing hold of the universe and you now are using its most powerful forces to shape reality. It's hard not to get caught up in that.

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 19:10Brian Greene?

  You know.

• 19:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 19:11Brian Greene?

  Do you, would you have gone?

• 19:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's, you know, it's hindsight is very.

• 19:16Brian Greene?

  Of course.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, have much more confidence in hindsight than at the time. So I'm, I'm a little conflicted for the following reason. Um, my father was in the service. Okay. At the time. And. The army was segregated.

• 19:32Brian Greene?

  Hmm.

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a segregated army. It wasn't become desegregated until later.

• 19:36Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And. So who? Who am I really defending? Right? What is? Who is my enemy?

• 19:45Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, you know, this is, this was a very real thing. Mixed with the lynchings in the South and the, and so maybe I would have joined. Be out of, because I, I don't want, I didn't want Hitler to take over. Because we can, no matter what's going on here, we all agree Hitler was bad. But once we learn that Hitler was, was about to be defeated. To turn it on Japan. I don't know if, if I were to, if I had an exit. Point, it would have been there.

• 20:17Brian Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

• 20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I had an exit point.

• 20:19Brian Greene?

  Because you know, Leo Silar, one of the things that he was advocating, and you know, it's sort of a travesty that we didn't do it. Explode the first bomb in an uninhabited place. Demonstrate the power of this atomic weapon. And that should be enough to cause any enemy combatant to say, okay, we give up. Don't drop that thing on us. And yet that's not what we did.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, well, plus we only had two of them.

• 20:47Brian Greene?

  Yeah, right.

• 20:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, to get uranium two thirty-five. That's not the natural state of uranium in the ground. Right? I mean, so you have to centrifuge it. And I keep thinking in a centrifuge, do they, just they liquefy the uranium? They have to have some.

• 21:02Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And of course uranium two thirty-five is lighter than uranium two thirty-eight, which I think is the more natural form of it.

• 21:09Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you, if you centrifuge, then the heavier stuff falls to the bottom. Pull that out, centrifuge what remains, just keep that up. And you continue to purify it. Because the other isotopes of uranium are, are not self-physical. Right?

• 21:26Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 21:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not a word. So.

• 21:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anything else about the film that struck you?

• 21:49Brian Greene?

  Well, I thought they caught well the achievement, which is sort of odd to say because so many people died because of the achievement. But think about this abstract idea that these little things called atoms have neutrons that might spit out a few that would break apart other atoms. I mean, it's such an abstract idea. The idea of harnessing that within a decade to actually do something, to me, is an unfathomable scientific achievement. Let me put the horror to the side. And I thought they captured that really well.

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in my world, okay, you may not know this, but the uranium, the element, was discovered shortly after planet Uranus was named. Okay, so they wanted to sort of, you know, they knew the elements should have a deeper, more cosmically inspired nomenclature than other. So uranium is named after the planet Uranus.

• 22:57Brian Greene?

  Don't tell me plutonium is coming up.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm getting it. You just back up, okay? And then we discovered planet Neptune. And shortly after, element number 93 was discovered. That was named Neptunium. In 1930, the object formerly known as a planet Pluto was discovered. And in 1940, element 94 was discovered. And in tradition and in that sequence, it was named after Pluto, plutonium. My point is, we discover plutonium in 1940, and it is weaponized and tested five years later.

• 23:37Brian Greene?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Within five years. This is an extraordinary machine that has been put into place.

• 23:45Brian Greene?

  Yeah, it's just crazy.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we knew uranium was visible.

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we didn't have to test that bomb.

• 23:53Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the plutonium was a new element. So many people don't know that the bomb that was tested was a plutonium bomb, not a uranium bomb.

• 24:01Brian Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even, you know, the fissile nature of uranium was only established in the mid to late 30s.

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:10Brian Greene?

  And so.

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eternity, given you're fighting a whole war with battleships and things.

• 24:14Brian Greene?

  Yeah, but it's again, look, I mean, as a theorist who just plays with equations, I stand in awe of anybody can actually do something. And the fact that these theorists came together with the experimenters under the rubric of the organization that Oppenheimer put into place, the audacity of the goal.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Brian Greene?

  And the fact that he was able to manage it and bring it to a successful and horrific conclusion is just to me, really.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But do you think, do you think a half a dozen people could have done that? I mean, consider that it's a juggernaut, right? We are purifying the uranium. We have Hanford up in Washington and we have all these sites separating the bits and pieces and they're all coming together. Kind of pay or play with or without Oppenheimer, we're making a bomb. I don't know how singular Oppenheimer was to that project. He's made singular course in the film.

• 25:17Brian Greene?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels singular to me because the organization that's required to bring together the theory and the experiment and the engineering and the technology, it's just sort of a mind-blowingly difficult challenge to bring it all together.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you needed, you needed someone with high managerial skills and people skills.

• 25:40Brian Greene?

  Yeah, and I think you need someone who understands the science.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 25:44Brian Greene?

  Because the worst thing in the world is when you have non-scientists who don't appreciate the need for certain things. I mean, the way Los Alamos was set up, Oppenheimer knew how scientists work.

• 25:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Brian Greene?

  How they come together. And without that culture, I don't think this would ever have come to be. But it's interesting to note, I believe that Oppenheimer's initial plan was something like, I don't know, 20 or 30 people. It wasn't like however many they had. I don't know what the final number was. If it was over 1,000, you know, I mean, that was not the original plan, but that was what it was requiring to get to the finish line, you know?

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another thing I liked, which was almost, it was so, I was tickled by it. Each time it happened, I got tickled. And all those meetings that they're having are all these other scientists who are very famous scientists of the era, who have formulas named after them, who have accelerators named after them. And it was just, like, was that E.O. Lawrence? Who was the guy?

• 26:49Brian Greene?

  Lawrence, from Lawrence Livermore, yeah.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Lawrence Livermore, right. And he was building his first cyclotron, or whatever it was.

• 26:56Brian Greene?

  Yeah, in Berkeley. Yeah, it's amazing. And it's also amazing to me that Oppenheimer got them to go. And that, to me, I mean, the film shows it, him talking and, you know, getting the families.

• 27:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Convincing them, yes, yeah.

• 27:12Brian Greene?

  But wow, I mean, how do you get that many people to get up and leave their home, move into the middle of nowhere? What persuasive powers that must have required, you know, to get people to do that? It's just, again, an amazing feat.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And what do you make of their persistent discussion?

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About the difference between fission and fusion. I didn't remember that to be a big issue at the time. We all knew fusion would be a whole other, another, another, right?

• 27:45Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're, you're fusing hydrogen into helium, completely different. Uh, uh, nuclear physics from fission, but they seemed to make a big deal of it. And I don't remember that being an issue.

• 27:56Brian Greene?

  You know, I, I don't know historically speaking, but I gather from a plot line. The reason was because Oppenheimer's less than enthusiastic position.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They needed, they needed to set that up later.

• 28:11Brian Greene?

  Edward Teller, who then testifies later on in the committee that ultimately revokes his Oppenheimer security clearance.

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they shook each other's hands. You saw that.

• 28:21Brian Greene?

  Yeah, they, they did, but, but.

• 28:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but that was, I mean, I, I'd like that.

• 28:27Brian Greene?

  Yeah, I, I agree. I totally agree with all that, but part of the.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even though his wife didn't, you shook his hand.

• 28:33Brian Greene?

  Right. But, you know, but Teller was gung ho on the hydrogen bomb. And Oppenheimer was less so because he thought it would divert resources from the atomic weaponry, which he actually was quite a fan of because he viewed this as a means of now having some mutually assured destruction that might cause peace to prevail. And the hydrogen bomb was not where he wanted the resources to go. But I guess in order to set that up, they wanted us as an audience to know that there's a difference between the fission bombs that Oppenheimer developed and the fusion.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. It's not just another nuke, right?

• 29:10Brian Greene?

  Not just another nuke. Yeah.

• 29:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. And cause when they shook hands, I thought Oppenheimer respected Teller's reasoning.

• 29:23Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About that he wouldn't, he would, he would revoke it. And I, and I thought.

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It takes two scientists to do that, right? Most other people would break out in fisticuffs, but if it's deeply reasoned, then the argument is sound. It's not a matter of what your preference is. It's this is the argument and I gotta go with the argument.

• 29:44Brian Greene?

  Yeah, and I think there's also a deep level of respect that underlies these relationships because this is rarefied physics knowledge. I mean, to be able to do quantum calculations and to be able to really understand the details of how these devices work, not many people ever get to that level. And sort of it's a small club and entry into that club is all coming from up here. And I think that yields this basic level of respect, even if you differ on on critical issues.

• 30:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's a question I had for you. I had not appreciated until I saw the film. How shortly after the development of quantum mechanics, people had to make these quantum mechanical calculations? Right now, we are on the in the centennial decade of the discovery of quantum mechanics, the major tenets of quantum mechanics were the 1920s. And there you have the 30s and right into the 15 years later, they're manipulating all the quantum equations to make calculations.

• 30:49Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How could you just put me in that moment?

• 30:56Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was quantum physics so thoroughly believed and trusted that people just walked flat footed into this and and and made the bomb with it? I mean, is that how?

• 31:09Brian Greene?

  Yeah, so first of all.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People say, I mean, was Einstein, Einstein said, God does not play dice with the universe. This was his indictment of quantum physics.

• 31:16Brian Greene?

  Yeah, but but it's it, but I think that's a good starting point for discussing it because Einstein also said that he believed that quantum mechanics was a correct theory, but something told him that there was a deeper description yet to be found. So he

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so not that it was wrong, not that it was wrong.

• 31:38Brian Greene?

  Yeah, and again, you know Einstein, as you know, his Nobel Prize was for the photoelectric effect, which was one of the first achievements of a quantum perspective.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 31:47Brian Greene?

  And, and, and so, so, you know, 1926, 27, the basic equations are written down, Schrodinger's equations, or Heisenberg's, you know, matrix mechanics formulation, they're equivalent. And so, things have been in place for a decade, and triumph over triumph in these quantum equations, yeah, led people to a great confidence that, yeah, maybe Einstein's right, maybe there's a deeper understanding, but we don't need that deeper

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't need that, you don't need, just shut up and calculate.

• 32:15Brian Greene?

  And then, you know, not all the equations that are underlying the development of the bomb are quantum calculations, you know, there's a whole engineering side of things.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I thought they, they, I don't think they gave enough credit to the engineers in this.

• 32:29Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In, in the film.

• 32:31Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody's got to build it, and the physicist is not building it.

• 32:34Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's be, the theoretical physicist doesn't know which end is up.

• 32:38Brian Greene?

  Yeah, that's what leaves me in awe. I mean, I understand how that, those bomb designs were, you know, little boy Fat Man, it was all, all conceptually clear to me. But if you even today gave me a big laboratory and told me to build one of these things,

• 32:58Brian Greene?

  I don't know what I would do.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd walk in with a hammer and a screwdriver, and you wouldn't know what.

• 33:01Brian Greene?

  You know, I'd have, I'd have to hire a whole group, and I would, again, be just looking at them from a distance, because I just don't.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Arms crossed.

• 33:10Brian Greene?

  Yeah, okay. Exactly, exactly. You know, so, yeah, I always have dreamed that one day I should take an experimental course, even given by my colleagues here at Columbia, so I'd really get my hands dirty once.

• 33:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get some street cred.

• 33:23Brian Greene?

  Yeah, exactly, you know.

• 33:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, but like I said, when I was being tickled by all the names, all those names, everybody has a Nobel Prize for some, uh, and they're just casual names bandied about in the salon, and in the coffee lounge, and everywhere else. Uh, one last thing, I, I thought they made an interesting distinction about his brand of communism.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and it was a, you know, they gave a lot of attention to this topic with his brother and his wife and his friends and his donations of money to causes. And specifically, the movie makes no mention of McCarthy in, in the Senate.

• 34:06Brian Greene?

  Okay. There's a moment where we see him, right?

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We might see him, but we never at any time are told McCarthy needs to interrogate you. And I think it's because, this is my reading on to this, that, that he was above McCarthy's pay grade. Okay? McCarthy is digging out movie stars and people, you know, and here's someone who is, you know, winning wars for us, right? And so I, so my sense was, you don't want him mixed, yes, there was a, there was a red scare, yes. But the McCarthy variant of that was very pedestrian relative to what was going on at his level in the government. That's how I, that's how I viewed that.

• 34:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But also, you know, what kind of, are you Karl Marx communist? Or do you just want the worker to have dignity? You know, there's, there are ways to slice this.

• 35:03Brian Greene?

  Totally.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my sense was, when they said, do you agree? I forgot the exact vocab, uh, um, scripting here, but he said, yeah, there are some things they do that I resonate with, not everything.

• 35:16Brian Greene?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? And if you're trying to always, are you with us or you're against us? Yeah, then you get McCarthyism. But if you, if you trust that not all answers are binary in this way, then you're allowed to be nuanced and think of Oppenheimer not as some traitor, but as, as a patriot who's, who has his own conscience.

• 35:38Brian Greene?

  Yeah, no, totally. I mean, I, I, you mentioned your dad before. I grew up, you know, my dad was very much in the spirit of Oppenheimer, these be his views on communism, you know? And that was a tough position to hold.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was he part of just that huge community of, of the, of Jews who were totally into the communist causes?

• 35:58Brian Greene?

  Absolutely, you know? And, you know, he was one step away on, you know, from the Rosenbergs, you know? And, and he was very close friends with the people who ultimately adopted the, the Rosenberg kids. So it was a very, it was a very difficult time to hold a nuanced view. But you're absolutely right. You know, the world is not made up of black, white answers to most of these very fundamental questions. It's somewhere in the gray place in between.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a quick aside to that, the civil rights movement, as it manifested in the 1960s, was brilliantly conceived because, remember, a big part of that movement was, once again, dignity and first voting rights and housing rights, but also the dignity of honest pay for a day's work to get you out of poverty. That is centerline to the communist movement. And what they said was, we can't have communists leading this movement at a time when we're fighting communists in the world. So, and communists are godless, right? Because in the 50s, we put God on the money, and God on the back wall of the senate, and God in

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the pledge of allegiance, right? God didn't used to be there before the 1950s. But a pledge of allegiance to one nation, under God, indivisible. That totally breaks up that sentence. It was one nation indivisible, with liberty. That was the original wording.

• 37:26Brian Greene?

  I did not know that.

• 37:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which makes complete sense. One nation indivisible. They threw in "under God" to demonstrate that we are God fearing and communists have no God. All right. Point is, if you get Martin Luther King, a preacher, to lead a civil rights movement, he can speak to the rights of the workers without anybody thinking he's communist because he praises Jesus, right? So whatever communism the brand was at the time, it enabled you to still talk about workers' rights without being a shuttled away into the communist ghetto, which is what that was.

• 38:06Brian Greene?

  Yeah. No, and I thought they handled that that well, you know?

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Brian Greene?

  And...

• 38:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so two thumbs up for our movie review?

• 38:13Brian Greene?

  I give it two thumbs up, without a doubt.

• 38:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Brian, nice chatting with you.

• 38:17Brian Greene?

  Thank you. See you later.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Christopher Nolan, I think it's a contender for multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

• 38:24Brian Greene?

  Without a doubt.

• 38:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, without a doubt. All right. Thanks. Thanks for being on StarTalk. This has been a Startalk conversation with my friend and colleague, theoretical physicist Brian Greene, all about Oppenheimer and the Bohr. Until next time, keep looking out.