We thought Oppenheimer was the way to instill a love of physics to young people but turns out LK-99 was the way to winning people's hearts and minds to delve more into physics.
Don't understand how a movie largely about the psychological horrors of developing and using a nuclear weapons is being construed to be "pro physics" lol. If anything it's the opposite
It’s 90% interpersonal/political drama (Including a bunch of unnecessary nudity thrown in for dramatic effect), a few token scenes with Albert Einstein, a 10 minute detonation with decent SFX, and a small fraction of real physics and engineering. If you’re actually interested in the Manhattan Project you’ll be way more inspired by a history channel documentary than anything in that movie.
It also tells us that Strauss does not quite understand the game.
He had the medal pinned on him, he thinks this is a badge of honour. A mark of the lowly shoe sales man come good.
Einstein tells us this was the marking of the end of his usefulness.
I loved the movie. Ultimately there can be no tension around the creation and use of the bomb. We all know that much of history atleast.
Instead it's a richly weaved tapestry asking an important question in various ways and giving various answers. "can you commit sin and expect sympathy"? We see this asked about nukes, about infidelity, and suicide, political maneovering. About science itself(original sin).
Take even the scene with the poisoned apple Bohr, Placket and Oppenheimer.
Bohr and Oppenheimer talk about forbidden knowledge (don't lift the rock if you're not prepared for the snake) as Bohr holds and apple. The forbidden fruit tempted by the snake in the garden of Eden.
No one with knowledge of WWII science sees a cyanide poisoned apple and doesn't think of Turning. Discarded after the war and persecuted for being gay (as Nazis persecute Jewish scientists and Americans communist scientists).
As Izzy Rabi says, bombs fall on the just and the unjust alike. As Oppenheimers constructed this bomb, the poisoned apple, which is about to hit the just (Bohr) and not Blackett (who he thinks unjust). Before regretting it.
Einstein regrets the bomb before he even started work after writing the letter with Szilard, others reject.it after construction, after testing, after Hiroshima, Oppenheimer seems to think enough is enough after Nagasaki. Teller goes further still... Where do we draw the line?
The apple scene alone is deeply layered with the major themes of the movies.
One of the themes of the movie that gets repeated over and over is "these boneheads who draw equations on whiteboards but can't follow security rules are literally the most important people in the world."
> We thought Oppenheimer was the way to instill a love of physics to young people
The only person so far that I've seen publicly saying that is Sam Altman. Never crossed my mind that this could inspire people (albeit I haven't seen the movie). Same for the Turing movie, or the Hawking movie, none of them really made the work look that cool IMO.
But the movie demonstrated how science, and even individual scientists, can have enormous practical impact, shed light on reality, and raise moral questions of the highest order.
That level of impact inspired me to aim at a science career when I was a student, before I found other pursuits more inspiring to me personally.
