Christopher Nolan’s superb movie “Oppenheimer” justifiably received 13 Academy Award nominations, the highest of any movie this year and only one short of the record, as well as five Golden Globes and many other awards. It portrays the life of the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer and is centered on his role in the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the first fission atomic bombs. The legendary events it portrays are both epochal and somber. But also, to see some of the greatest names in physics from the last century—Alvarez, Bethe, Bohr, Born, Einstein, Fermi, Feynman, Heisenberg, Lawrence, Rabi, Szilard, Teller, and many others—portrayed as characters in a serious, dignified, and accurate way, if even only briefly, is remarkable. I doubt we’ll ever see another movie that portrays, again very briefly, the legendary mathematical logician Kurt Gödel about to go on his daily walk with Einstein. The enormous significance of the University of Göttingen in Germany, at the time arguably the greatest scientific center in the world, also features. Like many physics departments in the U.S., a number of IU physics faculty worked on the Manhattan Project and various projects leading up to it. They are all discussed in the excellent “History of Physics at Indiana University” by Mark Gebhard. Maybe most prominent among these was Emil Konopinski, recruited in 1938 by then-IU President Herman Wells. He would spend nearly his whole career at IU, becoming a Distinguished Professor in 1962. It was said that no physicist with a Ph.D. from IU was untouched by his deep physical insight and inspiration, and that he lectured with such clarity and precision that each lecture was a beauty to behold (https://bit.ly/3UdWqoA) . There is an IU archival recording of him describing the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico, which is portrayed in the film (https://bit.ly/42ar18L). One theme that flows through “Oppenheimer” is the concern expressed during the Manhattan Project that an atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the earth. Though a good dramatic device, it is an exaggeration. It had been raised early in the Manhattan Project but was rapidly dismissed as the calculations showed it was not possible. Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, who was involved in this work, wrote later that there was “no chance whatever that an atomic weapon might ignite the atmosphere or the ocean” and that such claims were “nonsense.” (https://bit.ly/48O5O6Q) Konopinski also played a central role in this work and, together with Edward Teller and Cloyd Marvin, wrote the key internal Manhattan Project technical paper describing all the calculations. It was classified for decades but was declassified in 1973 and made publicly available (https://bit.ly/3tZmIR4). The IU physics department, for years, held an annual Konopinski Lecture funded through his estate to honor his outstanding work during World War II and his long and meritorious career at IU.
I worked for Dr. Konopinski during my years in the IU Physics Department. Not only was he a genius, but a very humble and kind man.
Rick Van Kooten
8mo
There is also the interesting story of Prof. Larry Langer, a colleague of Emil Konopinksi in the IU Dept. of Physics who fell asleep on top of the first atomic bomb "Little Boy" while working for the Manhattan Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Marvin_Langer
Tony Cremer
6mo
President McRobbie, thank you for sharing this great history about Professor Konopinski. He died while I was a student at IU. I remember reading about all his accomplishments and the work he did on the atomic bomb project. We talk a lot about Dr. Watson and Dr. Kinsey - and rightfully so! We should hold Dr. Konopinski in that same light.
Retired Executive Officer, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
8moThank you for your compelling review. It was, indeed, an outstanding film. There were, regrettably, serious omissions in the film, particularly with regard to women physicists. Lise Meitner was not mentioned along with Hahn and Strassman as a co-discoverer of nuclear fission. She was the first woman professor of physics in Germany, and was fired by the Nazis because she was a Jew. She realized that the atom had been split whereas Hahn and Strassman did not. Madam Wu was not mentioned. Ernest Lawrence called her the best experimental physicist he had known. She was professor of physics at Columbia and had a key role in the gaseous diffusion process that produced uranium for the atomic bomb. Maria Goeppert Mayer was a theoretical physicist at Columbia who had a role in the Manhattan Project, and later received the Nobel Prize in Physics when she was professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. Another glaring misstatement of fact had to do with E. O. Lawrence’s role in Oppenheimer’s AEC security clearance hearing. The movie portrays Lawrence as arriving at the hearing and, seeing I. I. Rabi sitting outside the hearing room, …