The physics of "Oppenheimer" (was not quite right)

I feel more attuned to the complexities and problems of the atomic bomb than I used to. The movie Oppenheimer brought it to our collective attention, but in fact synchronicity brought it to my attention six months earlier.

I loved the film, but I found a critical shortcoming in its portrayal of the bomb explosion itself.

I felt dismayed, because by not getting the physics right, in my view they undermined the impact of the movie, and actually contributed to a long tradition of hiding the true destructive nature of atomic weapons. (Interestingly, a large portion of physicists working on the Manhattan Project were against using the bomb. They understood its true nature!)

How I learned about the atomic bomb

Let me start with the synchronicity.

Back in November, my daughter Ellie had to choose a book for English class related to World War II, and she chose the book Bomb by Stephen Sheinkin.

We ended up reading it together and I loved it. The time spent with her was so meaningful. But also, the book is great, and its characters are all the physicists that I admire and grew up learning about: Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi; it was like a who's who of 20th century physics.

More interesting connections

Seemingly unrelated, at this time we had an exchange student. What an amazing experience that was for my family!

She was from Germany. When the movie Oppenheimer came out, she came home from school talking about conversations she had with her American classmates about the relationship between Germany and the US in World War II.

It was a tender conversation for us to navigate with this new family member who we cared so deeply about, and we learned from her perspective about how modern Germans deal with the legacy of Nazism, even as we were reading my daughter's book about Hitler's attempts to build an atomic weapon.

Soon after, Dana arranged for us to attend a screening of the movie Oppenheimer with the Oppenheimer family, through Dana's friend who is related to Frank Oppenheimer.

As this unfolded, I gradually began to make the connection that Frank Oppenheimer (brother of Robert) also worked on the bomb, and happens to be one of my heroes. He created the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco, the existence of which is probably the primary reason I am a scientist today. I went to the Exploratorium religiously with my dad as a seven-year-old, with the Boy Scouts as a ten-year-old, and for teacher training when I was thirty. Frank was an incredible educator who saw the world the way I wanted to see it.

The movie screening was in an IMAX movie theater in downtown San Francisco. I met members of the family and founding contributors to the Exploratorium. It was a night to remember, a dream come true!

Getting the full impact

I was deeply moved and honored by all of the experiences that led me to feel closer to this part of history. I got to meet relatives of one of my heroes, and through our German student and her family this learning experience became deeply personal.

But the filmmakers got the portrayal of the bomb explosion wrong (from my recollection) and it minimized the emotional impact that it should have had.

The testimony from Frank and other scientists about their recollection of the Trinity test, in addition to Sheinkin’s book, convey something that profoundly changed my understanding. People often compare a nuclear bomb to dynamite. But the atomic bomb is nothing like dynamite.

The atomic bomb is an explosion of light.

Mechanics of atomic explosions

Here's how it works. As radioactive plutonium is forced to a certain density, a chain reaction happens in which every atom emits radiation. This comes out in the form of visible light, and other more harmful wavelengths too.

The physicists who witnessed the explosion describe it as a flash of light of indescribable intensity.

At 5:30 a.m., when the land was still dark, it instantaneously lit up the sky brighter than the brightest sunny day. The cliffs and hills, trees and bushes of the surrounding desert were illuminated, casting unearthly brilliant sideways shadows.

The light was first pure white, then became yellow, then orange, then as the fireball rose it became not only red, but purple and blue. Frank says this is so because of the radiation it was giving off at these wavelengths.

Physicist Frank Oppenheimer:

“And so there was this sense of this ominous cloud hanging over us. It was so brilliant purple, with all the radioactive glowing. And it just seemed to hang there forever. Of course it didn’t. It must have been just a very short time until it went up. It was very terrifying. And the thunder from the blast. It bounced on the rocks, and then it went—I don’t know where else it bounced. But it never seemed to stop.”

Physicist Joan Hinton:

“It was like being at the bottom of an ocean of light. We were bathed in it from all directions. The light withdrew into the bomb as if the bomb sucked it up. Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up. We were still talking in whispers when the cloud reached the level where it was struck by the rising sunlight so it cleared out the natural clouds. We saw a cloud that was dark and red at the bottom and daylight at the top. Then suddenly the sound reached us. It was very sharp and rumbled and all the mountains were rumbling with it.”

But what I remember being depicted in the film was a big explosion of the usual chemical type, like a big dynamite explosion, basically a big ball of red and black smoke. The problem is it was like every other movie explosion you've ever seen.

The intense brightness was missing, the color shifting from blue to purple.

An atomic explosion is like nothing we've ever seen before. I wanted to see that and feel that.

Synchronicities can help us see just what we need to see

I came away from reading Sheinkin's book feeling terrified, but also mesmerized.

I came away from Oppenheimer feeling confused. What was the big deal? I found myself terrified by the lack of realism. Until a few months ago I didn't understand viscerally the difference between a regular bomb and a nuclear bomb. People need to know this!

My intention is not to be scary or alarming. In fact, I feel better really getting the science and understanding the danger!

And I wouldn't have had this perspective were it not for the synchronicities that led up to it!

Welcome to a Leap to Wholeness

We are starting a new series of social media posts around my second book, Leap to Wholeness, How the World is Programmed to Help Us Grow, Heal, and Adapt. One of the big themes in the book is identifying the filters that color the way we look at the world and ourselves. When we can identify a filter or belief we have, without trying to change it, we naturally start to see it better and it's easier to see beyond it. I offer this as a way of healing our old patterns of behavior.