transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Where do you think Oppenheimer lands among these 26?

Speaker 2:
[00:03] It's gotta be top three. I mean, you know, it's gotta be top three, but I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[00:07] Yeah, well, maybe in some rankings, but not in mine. I'll tell you that. 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, OK? Not clout, not vibes, not hype, anything like that. So we're going to make a list.

Speaker 2:
[00:25] Hello, Internet, this is your captain speaking Lester Nare. I'm joined, as always, by my co-host and our resident Ph.D., 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. 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.

Speaker 1:
[01:45] That's right, only 26. 25 physicists and one mathematician. And these characters make an appearance in the film, not just being mentioned off hand. So we're going to 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?

Speaker 2:
[02:27] So this is interesting, because this is a blind ranking for me. And you have a very clear vision on the ranking. My gut was like, I mean, we call him the father of the atomic bomb for a reason. So it's got to be top three. I mean, you know, it's got to be top three, but I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[02:46] Yeah, well, maybe in some rankings, but not in mine. I'll tell you that. 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?

Speaker 2:
[03:16] For some folks who may be not as very online as we are, S tier is better than A.

Speaker 1:
[03:23] Yes, it's like super. That's what the S is.

Speaker 2:
[03:26] So it's sort of like grades, but S tier is the best.

Speaker 1:
[03:29] Yes. And let's get started with number 26. That is David Hill. He was played by Rami Malik 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 Ph.D. at Princeton under John Archibald Wheeler, who we talk about a lot. Great gravitational research person who sort of made general relativity cool again at Princeton. In the movie, he's featured delivering testimony against Louis Strauss, 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., who went after Oppenheimer in the proceedings, right? In terms of actual history and what he did, he worked on the Chicago Pile 1, 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 testifony effectively tanked Louis Strauss' nomination for Secretary of Commerce, right? But in terms of the actual physics that he did in his life, not like that much. Still quite a lot. Like, who am I to talk? But, you know, we're talking about some of the greatest of all time on this list. And that's why he's at the bottom. He's known for the Hill-Wheeler formula, 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 own right. But among all the scientists here, he is at the bottom at number 26.

Speaker 2:
[05:35] Number 26, David Hill, born in 1919, passed in 2008.

Speaker 1:
[05:41] Okay. Next, number 25, Klaus Fuchs. This was the rat in the Manhattan Project. 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 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 Tea Division. He was played by Christopher Denim 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. And most of the stuff that he worked on was shockwave theory, which is the idea of how shockwaves moves through material. He came up with this Fuchs-Nordheim method for calculating 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.

Speaker 2:
[07:08] It's interesting, you know, the likes of Klaus and others during this time period in the Manhattan Project where the paranoia about 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, was because of the failures of the Manhattan Project to remain under wraps. And so, it is...

Speaker 1:
[07:39] So, he's the reason why, like, compartmentalization and, like, classified, top secret, all this other stuff.

Speaker 2:
[07:46] Special access programs, unacknowledged waves, special access programs. Fuchs, born in 1911, passed away in 1988.

Speaker 1:
[07:55] 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.

Speaker 2:
[08:06] Nepotism is alive and well.

Speaker 1:
[08:08] 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 make this happen. And the general at the time was like, General Groves was like, all right, fine, whatever. 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. He was working on that. If you remember from the movie, they have a jar with marbles. 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. He actually founded the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco. So that's pretty cool. Again, doesn't really contribute to his scientific rigor. But in terms of science communication, huge.

Speaker 2:
[09:20] Bonus points.

Speaker 1:
[09:20] He was blacklisted post-war because of McCarthyism.

Speaker 2:
[09:23] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[09:23] Because of that whole Communist Party affiliation.

Speaker 2:
[09:26] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[09:27] 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.

Speaker 2:
[09:53] 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 U.S.'s current excursion into Iran around trying to get control over their uranium deposit, their uranium stash, because there is 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 it just speaks to just having possession of uranium does not mean you can make a nuclear weapon. You have to get that certain type of flavor of it, and that enrichment process is what motivates a lot of geopolitical conflict as it relates to nuclear weapons.

Speaker 1:
[11:00] Definitely, and this guy is one of the OGs of doing that. All right, coming in at number 23 is Donald Hornig. He was an American physical chemist played by actor David Rizdahl in the movie.

Speaker 2:
[11:15] No relation to Kai Rizdahl, the MPR announcer.

Speaker 1:
[11:19] Anyway, 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 going to be, if you have just one piece of wire that's going in, the delay between the signal from where you press go, do the explosion, to the closest part of the bomb, is going to be less than the delay to the other side. And so you're going to get an asymmetric kind of implosion because this side is going to go first and then the signal is going to 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. In the movie, remember, there's a storm and it's raining? This dude was on top of that 100-foot tower the whole time, just babysitting, making sure nobody was sabotaging, which is hilarious, right? And 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, where, yeah, you're just, okay, it's like the freshman, yeah, you go do it. And I don't know if it was because I was expendable or I was the best person to climb the 100-foot tower. That's what he said.

Speaker 2:
[13:10] Everyone had bad knees.

Speaker 1:
[13:11] Yeah, it's pretty funny. In terms of physics, he did shockwave theory, some foundational work in shockwaves 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. 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.

Speaker 2:
[13:51] And we have past episodes where we touched on this. Donald Hornig, 1920 to 2013.

Speaker 1:
[13:57] That's right. And now we get to number 22. This is Vannevar Bush. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. This guy was highly influential, I'll have to say. He was an American engineer in science administration. He was the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which is kind of the... the thing that was there before NSF, okay? 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 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, a really huge guy. One of the cool things that he did after the war was actually, 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.

Speaker 2:
[15:56] Yes. I will note that probably the most well-matched casting from what Vannevar Bush looked like, and Matthew Modine, it's almost identical.

Speaker 1:
[16:06] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[16:07] It could be twins.

Speaker 1:
[16:08] It's quite good.

Speaker 2:
[16:08] It's quite incredible. And just to 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, which is needed for this. And it's the number one funder of fundamental research in the US. And so that entity... I'm not 18 anymore. I'm working, raising two kids, and I have little free time.

Speaker 1:
[16:34] That's why I chose University of Phoenix. I take one class at a time, and log in on my schedule. University of Phoenix, built for real life. Get started at phoenix.edu.

Speaker 2:
[16:55] I'm just going to...

Speaker 1:
[16:57] And so that entity...

Speaker 2:
[17:01] So yeah. And so, you know, that entity is really the bedrock, not only for the advocacy piece, but also for the capital and funding piece.

Speaker 1:
[17:12] Yeah, very much a hugely influential person.

Speaker 2:
[17:15] Born in 1890, passed away 1974.

Speaker 1:
[17:18] 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 Evert Bush to recruit J. Robert Oppenheimer. He's 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-Volkoff 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 and cosmological theory, very much one of these top dogs.

Speaker 2:
[18:31] Yes, Tolman, born 1881, passed away in 1948. So one of the older graybeards of the group.

Speaker 1:
[18:39] Yes, exactly. He was one of the old guard during this time. Finally, number 20, Robert Cerber. He's very famous among those at the Manhattan Project. He was played by Michael Anger-Arano. I've seen him a lot in movies, actually. 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 Norell. His lectures got compiled into something called the LA-1, which was the Los Angeles 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 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?

Speaker 2:
[19:49] Yes, Mr. He's the guy who on boarded everybody, which is not is non-trivial.

Speaker 1:
[19:54] No, like for something for something as cutting edge, right? As building an atomic bomb, right? Onboarding is not just HR, right?

Speaker 2:
[20:01] Right, right, right. There's a level of... 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.

Speaker 1:
[20:11] 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.

Speaker 2:
[20:30] Robert Server, born in 1909, passed away in 1997.

Speaker 1:
[20:35] All right. And number 19, Snyder, Hartland 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 do really poorly in the mathematics of quantum theory. But 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 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 Chandrasekhar 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 ten years later, 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.

Speaker 2:
[22:36] And this is to get points. Being first does get you points, even if not perfect, in this ranking.

Speaker 1:
[22:42] Yes, because I think that's a huge deal, right? Yeah, because you see the idea. And that's why I think he's in front of all of the other guys. Because I think the concept of a black hole is a very big deal, right? Or even fundamental physics. Because now you're saying the universe has like regions where there's a point of no return.

Speaker 2:
[23:00] Right.

Speaker 1:
[23:00] That's a pretty big deal.

Speaker 2:
[23:01] Yes. Hartland Schneider, born in 1913, passed in 1962.

Speaker 1:
[23:07] And that marks the end of our D tier.

Speaker 2:
[23:09] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[23:09] 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 in the movie. And it's going to be in ascending order going to the left. So that marks the end of D tier.

Speaker 2:
[23:24] Yes, which it's a pretty star-studded D tier.

Speaker 1:
[23:27] Yeah, already, already like the guy who invented the concept of a black hole. Yeah. Right. The guy who did Cosmic Rays.

Speaker 2:
[23:35] Right.

Speaker 1:
[23:36] Very, very big deal.

Speaker 2:
[23:37] Not a bad place to start.

Speaker 1:
[23:39] Yes. OK, now we get into some of the real big wigs. OK, at number 18 is Léod Szilard. He was pretty prominent in the movie. 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 sort of started nuclear weapons, you know?

Speaker 2:
[24:19] He was the baby daddy. Yes.

Speaker 1:
[24:21] 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 the nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi, who is down on the list. So a lot of really good things.

Speaker 2:
[24:49] I mean, that's pretty tough to beat.

Speaker 1:
[24:51] 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. So consider the following thought experiment, where you've got... This is called Maxwell's Demon. Consider you've got a box and you've got two halves of the box with a single particle moving around. If I know which half of the box the particle is in, and I put a little barrier in the 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 now 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. 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.

Speaker 2:
[26:17] Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 1:
[26:19] 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? Right? 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.

Speaker 2:
[26:40] Right.

Speaker 1:
[26:40] Right. So a visionary of his time.

Speaker 2:
[26:43] That is fascinating.

Speaker 1:
[26:45] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:45] And like a non... It's a step in thinking that is not necessarily obvious to make until you say it.

Speaker 1:
[26:54] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:55] And then once you say it, it's like, oh, yeah, like, yeah, obviously.

Speaker 1:
[26:57] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:59] But that leap is very interesting.

Speaker 1:
[27:01] I thought that was 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...

Speaker 2:
[27:11] Insight.

Speaker 1:
[27:12] Insight is very, very nice.

Speaker 2:
[27:14] Leo, born in 1898, passed away in 1964.

Speaker 1:
[27:18] Yes. And he was played by Matej Hauman.

Speaker 2:
[27:22] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[27:23] In the film.

Speaker 2:
[27:24] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[27:24] Okay. At number 17, we've got Edward Condon.

Speaker 2:
[27:27] Oh, yes.

Speaker 1:
[27:28] Okay. And he is a distinguished American nuclear physicist. He was played by Oli 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 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 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. 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.

Speaker 2:
[29:00] Yes. There is an interesting other thing that he's very popular for, particularly within the UFO community, which is the Condon Report, 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 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. There's a lot of folks who, you know, it really kind of ended the popular engagement in the subject at the time, because it was a definitive scientist who had the credibility in 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.

Speaker 1:
[30:10] Okay, great. Yeah. Well, he comes in at number 17.

Speaker 2:
[30:14] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[30:15] 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.

Speaker 2:
[30:27] Such a shocking casting. He did great, though.

Speaker 1:
[30:29] He did great. And honestly, the casting for this film is just amazing, I think.

Speaker 2:
[30:35] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[30:36] Really, really well done in terms of like getting actors who look a lot like their historical counterpart. He was an American physicist at Harvard. He was the director of the Trinity Test. So that's why in the movie he comes in with the key and he's got his hand on the red button in case he wants to abort the test. He supervises the countdown at the Trinity Test. 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 going to say it. He goes to Oppenheimer and he says, now we are all sons of bitches.

Speaker 2:
[31:15] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[31:15] Because everybody there realizes, well, we just did it.

Speaker 2:
[31:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[31:19] The atom bomb is real, nukes are real.

Speaker 2:
[31:21] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[31:22] Here we go.

Speaker 2:
[31:22] There's no going back.

Speaker 1:
[31:23] 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, if we can do it, literally everyone can do it. This is not going to be pretty.

Speaker 2:
[31:46] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[31:47] 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 built high precision spectrometers. And in 1933, this is before he actually came on to 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. So experimentally, this guy was like really high for me, right? To straight up verify E equals MC squared using atomic nuclei, that's quite good.

Speaker 2:
[32:25] It's tough. Not good enough to get you in the top 15, but tough nonetheless.

Speaker 1:
[32:30] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[32:31] Born 1904, passed away in 1996.

Speaker 1:
[32:34] 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 Devin 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 big because at Caltech, he was under the tutelage of Carl Anderson, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the positron, which is the first anti-matter particle. He was involved in that research, so he was probably either a post-doc 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. 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? There should just be one, but apparently the universe created three. It was so weird that Isidore Rabi, who we will discuss later on, one of the quips he said about the muon was like, who ordered that? Like, we had things on the menu.

Speaker 2:
[34:15] Why did you bring breadsticks?

Speaker 1:
[34:16] Yeah, exactly. So that was a huge surprise to physicists, and a very big deal for fundamental physics research.

Speaker 2:
[34:22] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[34:23] The discovery of the muon.

Speaker 2:
[34:24] Yes. The muon positron Seth Neidermeyer 1907 to 1988.

Speaker 1:
[34:30] And that ends our C tier.

Speaker 2:
[34:33] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[34:34] So now we've got two rows.

Speaker 2:
[34:35] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[34:36] And we still got a long ways to go. We got 14 other scientists to get through.

Speaker 2:
[34:42] We've gone through 12. The 12 are in the bottom two tiers. I'm very fascinated. There's some names that I knew wouldn't be there. I'm interested to see how this progresses.

Speaker 1:
[34:54] All right. So let's start with number 14, Edward Teller. Yes. A big villain. Eddie. 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. Like.

Speaker 2:
[35:21] That's so good.

Speaker 1:
[35:22] Yeah. Yeah. Not great.

Speaker 2:
[35:24] Not great.

Speaker 1:
[35:25] Not a good look, mate.

Speaker 2:
[35:26] Oh, it was Benny Safdie?

Speaker 1:
[35:28] Yeah. Benny Safdie.

Speaker 2:
[35:29] I think I actually put two and two together.

Speaker 1:
[35:31] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[35:32] That's interesting. OK.

Speaker 1:
[35:34] Yeah. Benny Safdie played Edward Teller. Great Hungarian accent, by the way, by Benny Safdie. In playing that, I really like that, because if you if you watch videos of Edward Teller's interviews, the he nails the accent. It's very, very good. 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. 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 Stanislaw Ulam to make the Teller Ulam design, which is the thermonuclear weapon design for creating the hydrogen bomb. He also worked on the John 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 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, stereochemistry, 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. Very much really low-hanging fruit.

Speaker 2:
[37:17] Yeah, VGV, talk about it.

Speaker 1:
[37:19] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[37:20] Edward Teller, 1908 to 2003, which is quite recent, actually.

Speaker 1:
[37:24] Yes. Yeah. Very recently he passed away. Never won the Nobel Prize because he never would, because he betrayed Oppenheimer.

Speaker 2:
[37:31] Right.

Speaker 1:
[37:32] Can't do that.

Speaker 2:
[37:33] Can't do that.

Speaker 1:
[37:34] Yeah. And now we start getting into Nobel prizes.

Speaker 2:
[37:37] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[37:37] 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 apparently actually happened, although it wasn't that bad as it was in the movie. Obviously, the writers and the producers take a little bit of liberty, but it's still a great scene. He is famous. He's no longer involved in the Manhattan Project. 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.

Speaker 2:
[38:40] It's movement through space.

Speaker 1:
[38:41] 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 two particles, an anti-matter particle and a matter particle, like an 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.

Speaker 2:
[39:28] Is this the arises out of nothing thing that we've talked about previously?

Speaker 1:
[39:32] It's very related.

Speaker 2:
[39:33] The popping in and out.

Speaker 1:
[39:34] Yeah, very related, very related. Those are virtual particles, and these are actually real. But it's same same in the sense that like there's energy, and then that energy creates particles.

Speaker 2:
[39:45] Blackett, 1897 to 1974.

Speaker 1:
[39:48] Yes, and he was played by James de Arcee, a British actor or a British physicist.

Speaker 2:
[39:55] Yes, makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[39:56] Yeah. Number 12.

Speaker 2:
[40:01] This is shocking. This is...

Speaker 1:
[40:04] Number 12 is J. Robert Oppenheimer. You said number three, bro.

Speaker 2:
[40:08] I said top three.

Speaker 1:
[40:09] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[40:10] This is... I would like an explanation.

Speaker 1:
[40:11] Well, I guess you're going to get an explanation for all of the 11 to 1, because I'm going to make cases about why they deserve to be higher than J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Speaker 2:
[40:20] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[40:21] At number 12, obviously played by Celine Murphy, yes, who was the star of Oppenheimer. You're right.

Speaker 2:
[40:29] I will say, I think it's Killian, and they might kill you for mispronouncing.

Speaker 1:
[40:34] Oh, is it Killian? I think it is Killian. Oh my God, the Irish are going to come after me.

Speaker 2:
[40:39] It's Killian Murphy.

Speaker 1:
[40:40] It is Killian Murphy.

Speaker 2:
[40:40] Apologies.

Speaker 1:
[40:41] We're going to need to, I'm going to need to splice that together when we do socials. Or maybe I keep the original one just so everyone goes ham. Yeah. Anyways, he was considered the father of the atomic bomb.

Speaker 2:
[40:55] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[40:56] He's a chain-smoking polymath, as they say in the cinematic role. I mean, the movie is about Oppenheimer, right? 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.

Speaker 2:
[41:12] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[41:12] And really built that to what it is today because before him, it was just like, Einstein's there. When he came up and sort of chaired that institute, it became a center for research. He opposed the H-bomb and he opposed the McCarthy stuff. That's probably why he got the clearance revocation at the end.

Speaker 2:
[41:38] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[41:38] They're 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.

Speaker 2:
[41:51] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[41:51] 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.

Speaker 2:
[42:15] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[42:15] Okay. Like 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've got to 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. 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. You remember that?

Speaker 2:
[43:09] That was quite good. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[43:11] This is the paper that he's talking about, the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. He also knew Max Born, because, you know, Heisenberg worked very closely with Max Born, which we'll get into later on. But those are really the two sort of fundamental physics contributions that he made.

Speaker 2:
[43:27] Which is fair. And so, in that context for how we're ranking, Robert Oppenheimer, 1904, 1967, is our number 12.

Speaker 1:
[43:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[43:36] Okay, let's see.

Speaker 1:
[43:37] 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. He was played by Alex Wolf, great actor, and again, great casting. Luis Alvarez's role in the movie is just a post-doc of Ernest Lawrence at the time when he was at Berkeley. There's that scene where he rushes in with the news of fishin 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. Yes. Right? In the Manhattan Project, he was leading the group that developed the exploding bridgewire detonators. Those are the detonators that were used to implode in that implosion device, right? Yes. And he was actually there for the Hiroshima mission to measure the blast yields. So he was on the observation plane when the Enola Gay dropped the bomb. There was another plane that was trying to measure how much the yield was.

Speaker 2:
[44:50] 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 basically interviewed a lot of the staff and former both intelligence military and scientists in and around the nuclear infrastructure we currently have today, referenced that we don't really have a lot of data on the impacts of the dropping of a nuclear atomic weapon on a highly populated area. And there was only one scientist that was present on the military plane that was able to actually look at that scientific data, Luis Alvarez.

Speaker 1:
[45:32] Yep, that's Luis Alvarez.

Speaker 2:
[45:33] And it's kind of, you know, and it's all still super classified and yada, yada, yada. You know, some 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.

Speaker 1:
[46:00] Yeah, yeah, definitely. I can't even imagine, right? Yeah. 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. 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, 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, 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 is very famous for side quests. So the first side quest he did with his son, he came up with the Alvarez hypothesis, 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 is 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. He's the first guy to do that. 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.

Speaker 2:
[49:07] That's really fascinating.

Speaker 1:
[49:09] That was his first side quest. The second side quest, we've talked about this on the podcast, muon tomography. He invented the idea of using muons to chart the inside of the pyramids 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 stuff that's inside the pyramids. But if there's a hole, then there's gonna be part of the pyramid that's gonna 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.

Speaker 2:
[49:57] This is also... This was our story where we talked about using the muon detector for analyzing the T-Rex skeleton or T-Rex fossils.

Speaker 1:
[50:08] 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. We can just 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 months. Because his particular experiment to chart the pyramids took months. Because you just got to wait for muons, which takes a long time.

Speaker 2:
[50:38] Luis Alvarez, 1911 to 1988. I'll give that.

Speaker 1:
[50:42] And with that, we end B-tier. So Oppenheimer is on the B-tier, along with these distinguished gentlemen. Edward Teller at least is not above Oppenheimer, because I was never going to do that.

Speaker 2:
[50:54] There would have been a riot.

Speaker 1:
[50:55] So that's the end of B-tier. Now we start getting into the true greats. The top ten. At number ten is Isidor Rabi. I think some experimentalists are going to be mad that he's not higher. But I'm going to put him at number ten. He was played by David Krumholtz, another very famous actor. He was Robert Oppenheimer's confidant and refused full-time Manhattan Project residency, but served kind of like a consultant. 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, which is pretty big, right? That's not why he's number 10, though. If he only did that, he would not be number 10. His main contribution to me is something called the Rabi oscillations, 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 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. 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. Every quantum computing system, they rely on these things called Rabi oscillations to talk about, okay, 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? It doesn't really go back to zero. 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 was at Columbia University the whole time and made Columbia Physics Department like one of the greatest of all time.

Speaker 2:
[53:50] Yep. A brief question I have on the atomic clocks piece is, was that a prerequisite for us having GPS?

Speaker 1:
[53:59] Yes, very much.

Speaker 2:
[54:00] Because the only way you get the precision, etc. is it required atomic clocks.

Speaker 1:
[54:03] It required atomic clocks. Yeah, it required not only an atomic clock, but one that we can put in space, right? But the whole idea of getting resolution such that an atomic clock only like decays one second every billion years, which we have now, 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 Rabi was key for that.

Speaker 2:
[54:33] So you can thank Isidore Rabi for your ability to order Uber and DoorDash. Oh, yeah. And be able to scroll on TikTok and all of that, because none of that would be possible without...

Speaker 1:
[54:44] 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 Rabi.

Speaker 2:
[54:57] Born 1898, passed away 1988.

Speaker 1:
[55:02] All right. And now we get to number nine, Max Born. This one I had to kind of sneak in. Okay, because he's shown in the movie just as on the blackboard.

Speaker 2:
[55:13] Right.

Speaker 1:
[55:14] Okay. So I don't know who the actor is. Actually, this is something that, you know, if you're watching till now and you have any idea of who the actor is, who's played Max Born, who's the guy when Oppenheimer goes to Göttingen to get training in quantum mechanics, he's being tutored by Max Born at the blackboard.

Speaker 2:
[55:35] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[55:35] Please let us know. But Max Born is one of the greats. Yeah, we've talked about him a lot. He turned Göttingen into the world center of theoretical physics in the 1920s. Background figure for Robert Oppenheimer, co-authored that Born-Oppenheimer approximation that I was talking to you about.

Speaker 2:
[55:57] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[55:57] Right.

Speaker 2:
[55:58] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[55:58] 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. Yes. His main papers are the quantum mechanics papers of 1926, which followed the Heisenberg paper of 1925, the M. Doitung paper, where he finally comes up with this matrix mechanics. 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.

Speaker 2:
[56:29] One of our most viral clips and one of our best episodes, I think like three, episode three or four, 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. And was a fundamental unlock for me mentally in how I think about these concepts. 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.

Speaker 1:
[56:58] I think so too. I'm very proud of that.

Speaker 2:
[57:00] That was really, really good. And so it's all the dots are connecting again.

Speaker 1:
[57:05] 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 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, they used to only learn calculus. 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. And then 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, 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 has spin up or spin down, the wave function tells me the probability of these two states. And that's all I can tell you, right? So, pissed off Einstein for very good reason. Introduced this kind of fundamental randomness that now we take for granted in quantum mechanics. So, you know, huge, huge deal in physics.

Speaker 2:
[58:59] For anyone who's a fan of the Bourne series, I'm sure when he walked in the room, everyone was like, Jesus, Jesus Christ, it's Max Bourne. Born 1882, passed away 1970.

Speaker 1:
[59:10] Yes. All right, now we get to number eight, Ernest Lawrence.

Speaker 2:
[59:13] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[59:15] Played by Josh Hartnett.

Speaker 2:
[59:17] Another great casting.

Speaker 1:
[59:19] Yeah, it's just great casting.

Speaker 2:
[59:20] Unbelievable.

Speaker 1:
[59:21] Yeah. They look so alike. It's pretty funny. 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. 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.

Speaker 2:
[60:03] War will do that to you.

Speaker 1:
[60:05] Yeah, and he didn't actually testify for or against Oppenheimer in the hearing, 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.

Speaker 2:
[60:30] RRN.

Speaker 1:
[60:31] Yeah, so he won the Nobel Prize for building the cyclotron, which is this particle accelerator that uses magnetic fields and an oscillating electric field to accelerate charged particles to really, really high speeds. Inventor of particle physics in general. Some people would say, like, okay, that was actually Rutherford, but I would really say the modern version of particle physics is Ernest Lawrence.

Speaker 2:
[60:54] And would you sort of say, as we look at physics as a whole, this high-energy particle physics as a subgenre is a top-tier subgenre within all of the subgenres, the modern physics.

Speaker 1:
[61:07] Exactly, yeah, it's probing 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. Yeah, just give me the money.

Speaker 2:
[61:18] We need the power of the universe in our hand. Yeah, and that requires a lot of money.

Speaker 1:
[61:21] Yeah, and a big room.

Speaker 2:
[61:23] And a big room.

Speaker 1:
[61:23] Like, give me a whole building, please.

Speaker 2:
[61:26] 1901 to 1958.

Speaker 1:
[61:29] Yeah, so that's number eight. Number seven. It pained me to put Hans Beilig at number seven, because I want him to be number one. But given everyone else who's coming, he's going to have to be number seven. Still in the top ten.

Speaker 2:
[61:41] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[61:41] One of the greats, honestly.

Speaker 2:
[61:43] Hans Beilig.

Speaker 1:
[61:44] He was played by Gustav Skarsgård in the film.

Speaker 2:
[61:48] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[61:49] The head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos. So you can imagine the theoretical division at Los Alamos. And he's the head.

Speaker 2:
[61:58] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[61:58] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[61:59] That's the egos in that room.

Speaker 1:
[62:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[62:01] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[62:01] And they all were okay with Hans Beta. It says being the head that says a lot about who this man is.

Speaker 2:
[62:08] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[62:08] Right. Yep. He was a refugee from the Nazis. He had a Jewish mother. He had encyclopedic knowledge. I have a soft spot for Hans Beilig myself because I am part of his academic progeny. Right. So my Ph.D. advisors, Ph.D. advisors, Ph.D. advisor was Hans Beilig.

Speaker 2:
[62:28] Right.

Speaker 1:
[62:28] So I was like great grand kid, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[62:31] Great, great. Or great. One great.

Speaker 1:
[62:32] One great.

Speaker 2:
[62:33] One great.

Speaker 1:
[62:33] Yeah. In terms of... That's pretty good. So I'm close enough. So Hans Beilig always, you know, a soft spot for him. Crucial in terms of doing things like, oh, is there going to be atmospheric ignition? Hans Beilig did the calculation and said no. And everyone was like, okay.

Speaker 2:
[62:49] Is the whole sky on fire? Burn the world.

Speaker 1:
[62:52] Yeah, yeah. And 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 Beilig. It's like, okay, why do you want me to check? I'm worse at math than Hans Beilig. You know, and that's actually true. Hans Beilig was just ridiculous at math. So let me go through some of the stuff that he was known for, because there is a lot. 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 math-ing, you know?

Speaker 2:
[64:03] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[64:03] 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 this 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. Right. Okay?

Speaker 2:
[64:33] Right.

Speaker 1:
[64:34] So he won the Nobel Prize for that. He explained why the sun shines.

Speaker 2:
[64:38] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[64:38] That's a huge deal.

Speaker 2:
[64:39] That's pretty... something that's been sort of just idolized by societies, civilizations, religions for millennia.

Speaker 1:
[64:47] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[64:48] And now it's like, oh, no, but now we know why.

Speaker 1:
[64:49] 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 graduates 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.

Speaker 2:
[65:32] And he was Dyson's the man too.

Speaker 1:
[65:33] 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? 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. Slightly as in like it was like one part in a million type thing, but he had really honed in. And 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. 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 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 said, The Most Important Calculation in Physics for Decades, right?

Speaker 2:
[67:32] Number seven.

Speaker 1:
[67:34] And he's at number seven.

Speaker 2:
[67:37] This is, and sorry, I cut you off. I don't know if you're going to say because, if you want to finish.

Speaker 1:
[67:40] 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. I got that comes up later because the next guy is going to be the guy who perfects it.

Speaker 2:
[67:53] Hans Beta 1906 to 2005.

Speaker 1:
[67:57] Yeah, very recent.

Speaker 2:
[67:58] Very recent.

Speaker 1:
[67:59] Very recent. Number six, Richard Feynman.

Speaker 2:
[68:04] Gotta be on the list.

Speaker 1:
[68:05] Richard Feynman. He's at number six. He did not make top five.

Speaker 2:
[68:08] It's OK.

Speaker 1:
[68:08] But he's at number six. This is a photo of him at Princeton. Yeah, actually.

Speaker 2:
[68:12] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[68:12] 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. Right. But there's no reason why he would be in that part of campus. I was 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, as you've talked previously about your feelings about the physics and math building. Yeah. Well, at the time, at the time, the physics and math buildings were frisked.

Speaker 2:
[68:42] Yes, that's true.

Speaker 1:
[68:43] So that's still like kind of pretty, but no, we're not nearly as pretty as, you know, where the chapel and like Nassau Hall are.

Speaker 2:
[68:51] Very cinematic.

Speaker 1:
[68:52] 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 Bethe 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 glass is going to stop the UV, 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? Which is hilarious, because that's a real thing. Like that shockwave, you don't know how big it's going to be, right? 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, 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. I don't have enough time to explain it to you, but effectively, it's like a really good way to interpret quantum mechanics, I think.

Speaker 2:
[70:46] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[70:46] Right? Yes. Specifically, he also developed Feynman diagrams, which are a visual tool that are used in all sorts of physics.

Speaker 2:
[70:54] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[70:54] 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.

Speaker 2:
[71:05] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[71:05] Effectively.

Speaker 2:
[71:06] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[71:07] So that's what he won the Nobel Prize for. He figured out how electricity and magnetism... He figured out the theory behind how electrons and photons interact effectively.

Speaker 2:
[71:17] Which...

Speaker 1:
[71:18] Quantum electrodynamics.

Speaker 2:
[71:19] Which has...

Speaker 1:
[71:21] I mean, that's the nature of reality, right? What is light? He told you what is light.

Speaker 2:
[71:26] Right.

Speaker 1:
[71:26] Okay. 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. 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. We can't be doing it with classical transistors and things like that. Makes a lot of sense. Great teacher. He did the Feynman lectures in physics. We can do an entire deep dive on him. Probably will, where we will talk about some of the, you know, issues as we always do. He's not a perfect human being.

Speaker 2:
[72:32] As men of his time are known to have had things.

Speaker 1:
[72:35] And even for someone of his time, like a glaring sexist, but still a giant in the physics community.

Speaker 2:
[72:43] 100 percent. Richard Feynman, 1918 to 1988. And we'll be sure we do the deep dive to send it to Dave Chang, as we know, big Feynman fan.

Speaker 1:
[72:53] Yes, of course. And that is the end of the A-tier.

Speaker 2:
[72:55] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[72:56] OK. So now Feynman is not in the supers.

Speaker 2:
[73:00] Yeah. I mean, the A-tier is that's like the Avengers already.

Speaker 1:
[73:03] Yeah. I don't know how the A-tier already has Feynman and Beta. All right. Now we're getting into the S-tier.

Speaker 2:
[73:10] OK.

Speaker 1:
[73:11] At number five.

Speaker 2:
[73:12] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[73:12] Is Werner Heisenberg.

Speaker 2:
[73:14] My favorite.

Speaker 1:
[73:15] Yes. He was a German theoretical physicist, and he is the architect of quantum mechanics.

Speaker 2:
[73:21] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[73:21] Right.

Speaker 2:
[73:22] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[73:23] 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, fudge the calculations on purpose. I don't think so. I think he was just really bad at calculating and doing experiments. He was famous for that. He was a peer to Robert Oppenheimer. He's played by Matthias Schweighoffer, a very famous German actor, actually. He's kind of an ominous off-screen threat. But in this race mentality, they keep saying that he was 18 months ahead, because Heisenberg is just so good at anything physics related. And truly, in terms of theory, he really was. 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, okay? He's not someone for the A-tier.

Speaker 2:
[74:24] Yes, yes, yes. He's not of the bottle, as we like to say in Europe.

Speaker 1:
[74:29] His 1925 paper in quantum mechanics, the one that we covered in one of our earlier episodes, that paper started the modern quantum revolution, right? This idea of linear algebra coming in to quantum mechanics, and the fact that he figured that out without having any training in the mathematics. He just invented it on his own, while having an allergic attack on an island.

Speaker 2:
[74:52] Hey fever?

Speaker 1:
[74:53] Just insane. Yeah, hey fever, right?

Speaker 2:
[74:55] Astonishing.

Speaker 1:
[74:56] Yeah, just insane, right? And that was in 1925. Just that paper put him, I think, in the S-tier, right?

Speaker 2:
[75:02] 100%.

Speaker 1:
[75:03] On top of that, he developed this thing called the uncertainty principle, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Speaker 2:
[75:08] One of my favorite things in science.

Speaker 1:
[75:10] 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, you know? So we 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...

Speaker 2:
[75:52] This is not a judgment of whether they're good people or not.

Speaker 1:
[75:54] Yeah, that's a different...

Speaker 2:
[75:55] That's a wholly different thing. Werner Heisenberg, 1901 to 1976.

Speaker 1:
[76:02] All right, coming in at number four, Enrico Fermi. This guy is, I think, the last renaissance man of physics.

Speaker 2:
[76:10] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[76:10] Okay. He's the last guy to be simultaneously a goat in theory and a goat in experiment.

Speaker 2:
[76:17] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[76:18] 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.

Speaker 2:
[76:31] In both communities.

Speaker 1:
[76:33] In both communities. Yes. Yeah. They used to call him the Pope of Physics because he was Italian. Just a kind of a side note. When I visited Rome, 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, 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.

Speaker 2:
[77:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean, I know.

Speaker 1:
[77:22] 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. 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. Okay.

Speaker 2:
[77:53] Okay. Okay. Okay, LeBron.

Speaker 1:
[77:54] Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's played by Danny DeFerrari.

Speaker 2:
[77:58] That's a good name.

Speaker 1:
[77:59] That's a great name.

Speaker 2:
[77:59] DeFerrari. Let's go Ferrari.

Speaker 1:
[78:01] I still hope. I still have hope in 2026. His arrival signals the transition to engineering reality, okay? When he got to America, that's when everyone, all of the physicists in the allied countries were like, okay, we're doing this. Like, we're actually doing this. The way he got there was pretty crazy, because I believe 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 won the Nobel Prize, and I believe it was like in 1938, 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 going to win it, right? And they're like, why don't we do that this year? So that you can have an excuse to come to Sweden, accept the Nobel Prize, and then just go to America and just get the hell out of there. Isn't that so amazing?

Speaker 2:
[79:07] And it's incredible how these little, this is the butterfly effect, right? Like had that not transpired, who knows?

Speaker 1:
[79:13] Who knows? Yeah. If the Nazis captured him and made him work on there, who knows?

Speaker 2:
[79:19] Who knows?

Speaker 1:
[79:21] He was the leader of the Fermi Division. He had his own division named after him, the F Division at Los Alamos. Okay, come on.

Speaker 2:
[79:29] I want to get a Fermi Division.

Speaker 1:
[79:30] Yeah, dude, that should be one of our merch. Yeah, exactly. In the movie, he's depicting, directing the Chicago Pile-1, the CP-1, which is the first self-sustained chain reaction under the Chicago football field.

Speaker 2:
[79:47] Oh, the Bears?

Speaker 1:
[79:48] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[79:49] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[79:49] No, no, no, the University of Chicago.

Speaker 2:
[79:51] University of Chicago. I was like, what?

Speaker 1:
[79:52] 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, OK, this is real.

Speaker 2:
[80:07] Because that was the first necessary step to be able to actually get to the end goal, which was the bomb, which required which is a runaway chain reaction, right? Right.

Speaker 1:
[80:16] But controlled in some sense, because we don't want that happening everywhere. Right. A lot of balls to actually do it in the center of a city, right? Because if that chain reaction became runaway, starting to run away, it's like, what do you it's like the first time that you're doing it. But that's how much trust the people had in Fermi's calculations, right? Where he was just able, there's also the famous Fermi problems. I don't know if you've heard about these. It's like, how many piano tuners are there in Los Angeles? That all comes from him. He was incredibly good at doing these kinds of back of the envelope calculations. So in terms of 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 and 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. And he developed a theory for that. Kind of makes sense, because if you're slower, you get captured. But if you're faster, you'll just sort of bounce right through. But he developed some of the principles behind these nuclear reactors and why we need moderators, right? Where like you have like graphite pads to slow the neutrons down. 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 Bose-Einstein 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, all of these people, all of these particles that have half-integer spin, they're called Fermions named after him.

Speaker 2:
[82:31] 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.

Speaker 1:
[82:40] Fermions.

Speaker 2:
[82:40] Yeah. Right?

Speaker 1:
[82:43] And that's like electrons, like electrons, protons, neutrons, all of it, named after Enrico Fermi.

Speaker 2:
[82:51] That's so sick.

Speaker 1:
[82:52] He also authored my favorite book on thermodynamics.

Speaker 2:
[82:56] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[82:57] It's called Thermodynamics 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 get our shelf, that's one of the first that's going to go up there.

Speaker 2:
[83:15] Enrico Fermi, 1901 to 1954, short time, hugely impactful.

Speaker 1:
[83:25] Number three, our first non-physicist, Kurt Gödel. 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. Yeah, he's at number three, because 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? From that, can I now prove from First Principles that one plus one equals two? 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.

Speaker 2:
[84:50] It is a big question.

Speaker 1:
[84:51] It's a big question, right? It's a nature of logic. Not even reality has nothing to do with whether atoms exist or we exist. I think for me, this is like just logic is on another level of like, can we actually just prove true and false?

Speaker 2:
[85:07] Right.

Speaker 1:
[85:07] Okay? He showed that a system like mathematics is one of two things. 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.

Speaker 2:
[85:36] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[85:36] That's quite insane to think about.

Speaker 2:
[85:40] Yeah. And...

Speaker 1:
[85:43] 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 because of the way that I've written it down.

Speaker 2:
[85:52] Right. Okay. Right.

Speaker 1:
[85:54] But it's outside of my level of proof or my ability to prove things.

Speaker 2:
[85:59] Right.

Speaker 1:
[86:01] It's something that I think we need to go on a deep dive about.

Speaker 2:
[86:04] This is actually something because I have so many questions and it's not the... I'm like holding back so much.

Speaker 1:
[86:09] Yeah. There's a lot that goes into this.

Speaker 2:
[86:11] But I understand the conundrum that is presented by that, the theorem as is described.

Speaker 1:
[86:20] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[86:21] And it triggers so many questions.

Speaker 1:
[86:25] Yeah. It's like, it's really, really weird, dude. And it's something that I really can't get into here.

Speaker 2:
[86:32] I understand.

Speaker 1:
[86:33] But what I want to really sort of convey is that it's probably one of the biggest results in the history of mankind. That one statement.

Speaker 2:
[86:45] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[86:46] That like the mathematics itself is not what we think it is, which is like this just like true thing.

Speaker 2:
[86:52] That we discovered math. It is not an invention.

Speaker 1:
[86:56] It has to do with that.

Speaker 2:
[86:57] Right. Like the difference between is, is it a fabric? Is it a fundamental fabric of the reality?

Speaker 1:
[87:02] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[87:02] And we found it.

Speaker 1:
[87:03] Yeah. And it's so fundamental that like Roger Penrose, you know, when he talks about how consciousness is like a quantum phenomenon?

Speaker 2:
[87:09] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[87:10] It comes from this, from incompleteness theory.

Speaker 2:
[87:13] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[87:13] Like that line of thought comes from the fact that there are things that are not computable.

Speaker 2:
[87:19] Right.

Speaker 1:
[87:19] 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 of a statement that he or she wrote down?

Speaker 2:
[87:37] Right.

Speaker 1:
[87:38] Right.

Speaker 2:
[87:38] Oh, this is deep.

Speaker 1:
[87:39] It's very deep.

Speaker 2:
[87:40] I like it.

Speaker 1:
[87:40] And I just want to put him at number three because he deserves to be number three. Fair.

Speaker 2:
[87:45] And in the comments, let us know if you want to come back on a deep dive, both on the incompleteness theorem and its surrounding subject matters. But anyway.

Speaker 1:
[87:55] Yeah. And Kurt Gödel is played by James Urbanik.

Speaker 2:
[87:58] Yes. 1906 to 1978. I'm mad you brought that up because now my brain won't stop thinking about it.

Speaker 1:
[88:04] Yeah. Well, let's get it through just the last two, right? At number two, Niels Bohr.

Speaker 2:
[88:09] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[88:10] Played by the very famous Kenneth Branagh.

Speaker 2:
[88:14] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[88:17] Obviously, the philosopher king of the quantum revolution.

Speaker 2:
[88:20] I love these names, by the way. The Pope of physics, the philosopher king, the father of the bomb.

Speaker 1:
[88:25] 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 used 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 Ernie Urban Schrödinger at a time. 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. That became sort of standard quantum mechanical interpretation, and the properties are definite for a system only upon measurement, otherwise they're in this weird wave space.

Speaker 2:
[89:47] You got to observe for the wave function to collapse.

Speaker 1:
[89:49] Exactly, yeah, otherwise it's just a wave function. So, all of that was Niels Bohr. And I really think, you know, given his sheer influence in physics, right, on top of his just contribution as the Bohr model, which is the first sort of quantum mechanics of matter, I think he deserves to be at number two.

Speaker 2:
[90:15] 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 that then was utilized by so many of even other people on this list and beyond this list, in a way that's really hard to beat in the modern, in the modern era.

Speaker 1:
[90:46] Yeah, no, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[90:48] So very much well deserved. Number two.

Speaker 1:
[90:51] Okay, that's that number two. And that actually is the end of the S-tier.

Speaker 2:
[90:54] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[90:56] So now do we have our list? No, because that was number two.

Speaker 2:
[90:59] We have 26 people total we're supposed to reference. I see 25 on the board.

Speaker 1:
[91:04] Right. So we're missing the one and only, the obvious number one, Albert Einstein.

Speaker 2:
[91:13] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[91:13] 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.

Speaker 2:
[91:31] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[91:32] Okay. I think the guys in that S-tier, if you ask them, they'd be like, no, he doesn't belong with us. Okay. On a log scale, he's like plus two. Okay. It's pretty ridiculous because Einstein is Einstein. I don't have to say much.

Speaker 2:
[91:47] Right.

Speaker 1:
[91:49] 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? I think we did. Yeah. Bose-Einstein statistics. That's Einstein. Just the photoelectric effect.

Speaker 2:
[92:09] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[92:10] 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.

Speaker 2:
[92:25] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[92:26] 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 separate.

Speaker 2:
[92:38] Okay. So I have a funny question. So in football, we talk about the current GOAT era as being between Christiano Ronaldo and Messi. The past era is like Maradona-Pelle. 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 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... But both goats, but fundamentally for different reasons. One was born with it, one just worked really hard. Might not perfectly map, but I'm curious if you can, if you have a thought between who might be which.

Speaker 1:
[93:24] If you forced me to do the match, I think Isaac Newton is Messi.

Speaker 2:
[93:29] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[93:29] Okay. Everything just came natural to him, and just it was like easy for him. And other people would have a problem with you, and they talked to him about it, and he'd be like, Oh, I solved that two years ago. And they'd be like, Where? He's like, Oh, I threw it away. And they're like, Well, find the... What do you mean? Like Edmund Haley came up to Newton and was like, Hey, I'm trying to figure out what Haley's comments orbit is. And Newton was like, Oh, yeah, I solved that. Well, I didn't think it was that interesting. And then Edmund Haley was like, Dude, I've been trying for the past three years to figure this out. You need to find that and publish it. 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? And like a month later, he's just like, Oh, OK, I made a better solution, but here's calculus. And everyone's like, What is going on right now? On the other hand, Ronaldo, as you said, had to put in a lot of work, right? Einstein also had to put in work. For example, his miracle year in 1905, it seems like he didn't have to put in that much work. But 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. But it took him another seven years of just learning mathematics and like brutal like training in mathematics to finally come out with the full theory. And that kind of reminds me of Ronaldo.

Speaker 2:
[95:03] And he's still playing to this day. Longevity, da-da-da. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[95:06] And Einstein again, longevity is like huge. But for Newton, it was like a 10 year span where he just did balls to the wall. And then he started doing like side quests. Kind of like what Messi's doing right now.

Speaker 2:
[95:17] He's doing it in Miami.

Speaker 1:
[95:18] In Miami, right? Like Newton was like, okay, I'm going to like, you know, he started like degenerate gambling and like trading in like stocks, lost a bunch of money, like just doing random stuff.

Speaker 2:
[95:30] That is fantastic. That gives us our full ranking table 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.

Speaker 1:
[95:53] Great. I'm glad.

Speaker 2:
[95:54] I think there'll be some people who are going to be, I think, in the 5 to 12, like 6 to 12 range, I think there may be some movability on there. I think the top 5 is hard to argue with.

Speaker 1:
[96:08] Yeah. I think there might be some people that are going to be mad that Bohr is number 2 because they're all Everradyan degenerates who believe in the multi-universe. You know, but come at me, bro.

Speaker 2:
[96:22] Let's go Copenhagen interpretation.

Speaker 1:
[96:23] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[96:25] 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. 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 and debate. If you would like to support the show monetarily, you can go to ffp.com/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 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.