From First Principles - The Prometheus Constellation: Dramaturgical and Scientific Analysis of the Physicists in Oppenheimer (EP 39)

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this special episode ranks the 26 scientists shown in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer by one standard only: their contribution to fundamental science. Starting with the Manhattan Project figures near the bottom and working up through the giants of quantum mechanics, relativity, nuclear physics, and logic, the episode turns a movie cast list into a surprisingly deep walk through the history of modern physics.SummaryA ranking framework that actually means something — this list is based on scientific achievement, not movie prominence, clout, or vibes.A tour of 20th-century science — from nuclear chain reactions and black holes to MRI, GPS, quantum mechanics, and information theory.The great debates — several placements are designed to provoke real argument, especially around how Oppenheimer compares to the physicists around him.A top tier full of monsters — the back half of the episode becomes a speedrun through some of the most influential scientific minds of the modern era.Support the showDonate: FFPod.com/donateFollow: @FFPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook

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Yeah, well, maybe in some rankings, but not in mine. I'll tell you that. Okay. 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. Hello, Internet.

This is your captain speaking. Lester Nare. joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Chowdery. 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.

That's right. Only 26. 25 physicists and one mathematician. And these characters make an appearance in the film, not just being mentioned offhand. 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? 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 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. Yeah, well, maybe in some rankings, but not in mine. I'll tell you that. Okay. 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? For some folks who may be not as very online as we are, S tier is better than A. Yes, it's like super.

Yes. That's what the S is. So it's sort of like grades, but S tier is the best. 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 revived, he made general relativity cool again at Princeton.

In the movie, he's featured delivering testimony against Louis Frizzan. Strauss and he has that epic moment where he like slam dunks on Lewis Strauss about how he was trash effectively. Louis Strauss is the character played by Robert Downey Jr. Yes. 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 C-LAR 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 testimony effectively tanked Lewis Strauss's 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. Number 26, David Hill, born in 1919, passed in 2008. Okay. Next. Number 25, Klaus Fuchs. This was the rat in the Manhattan Project. I see.

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 T-Division. He was played by Christopher Denham 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 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. Yeah. So he's the reason why like compartmentalization

and like classified top secret, all this other stuff. Special access programs, unacknowledged, Waves special access programs. Fuchs born in 1911, passed away in 1988. 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. Nepotism is alive and well. 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. Yes.

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, right? 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. Bonus points.

He was blacklisted post-war because of McCarthyism because of that whole Communist Party affiliation. Yes. 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 times. So he is at number 24. 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 just it speaks to just having possession of uranium does not mean you can make a nuclear weapon.

Yeah. 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. Definitely. And this guy's one of the OGs of doing that. Yes. All right.

Coming in at number 23 is Donald, Donald Hornig. He was an American physical chemist, played by actor David Risdahl in the movie. No relation to Kai Risdahl. No. NPR announcer. Anyway. Yeah.

He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard and later served as president of Brown University and science advisor to President John F. Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy and President John 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. So in the movie, remember, there's like there's a storm and like 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. Yeah, it's kind of like a frat. Yeah, hazer. Yeah, you just, okay, it's like the freshman. Yeah, you go do it. And I don't know if it was it was because I was expendable or I was the best person to climb the 100 foot tower. That's what he said.

Everyone had bad knees. 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. Bonjour, compadre. It's the... Priceline negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget. The Price Line app.

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. And we have past episodes where we touched on this, Donald Hornig, 1920 to 2013. That's right. And now we get to number 22. This is Van Ever Bush. He was on the cover of Time magazine. This guy was highly influential, I'll have to say. He was an American engineer and science administration.

He was the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which is kind of the thing that was there before NSF. Right. 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 Modin. 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 Mimex. 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. person, but in terms of influence, not in terms of straight up research. Yes. I will note that probably the most well-matched casting from what Vanneva Bush looked like

and Matthew Modin, it's almost identical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It could be twins. It's quite good. It's quite incredible. And just a 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 U.S. And so, you know, that entity is really the bedrock, not only for the advocacy piece, but also for the capital and funding piece. Yeah, very much, hugely influential person. Born in 1890, passed away 1974. 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 Ever Bush to recruit J. Robert Oppenheimer. 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-Openheimer-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. Yes, Tolman, born 1881, passed away 1948. So one of the older gray beards of the group. Yes, exactly. He was one of the old guard during this time. Finally, number 20, Robert Serber. he's very famous among those at the Manhattan Project. He was played by Michael Engerrano.

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. His lectures got compiled into something called the LA1, which was the Los Alamos 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 signs behind it. These are the open questions that we need answered and this is what you need to work on, you know? Yes. Mr. He's the guy who onboarded everybody. Exactly. Which is not, is non-trivial. No. Like for something for something as cutting edge right as building an atomic bomb.

Right. Onboarding is not just HR. Right. Right. Right. Right. There's there's a level. He had to have his own technical sophistication at a high enough level to also understand how to delineate details and etc. 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 field. So a lot of very fundamental research in quantum field theory was done by him after the Manhattan Project. Robert Server, born in

1909, passed away 1997. 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, like, 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 chunder shaker 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 10 years later, show 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. And this is get points. Being first does get you points, even if not perfect, in this rank. Yes, because I think that's a huge deal, right?

And that's why, yeah, 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. Yes. Because now you're saying the universe has like regions where there's a point of no return. Right. That's a pretty big deal. Yes.

Hartland Schneider, born in 1913, passed in 1962. And that marks the end of our D tier. Yes. So here we're going to be showing the science. 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 an ascending order going to the left. So that marks the end of D tier. Yes.

Which it's a pretty star-studded D-tier. Yeah. Already, already, like the guy who invented the concept of a black hole. Right. The guy who did cosmic rays. Right. Very, very big deal. Not a bad, not a bad place to start. Yes.

Okay. Now we get into some of the real. bigwigs. Okay. At number 18 is Leo Cilard. He was pretty prominent in the movie. He's a Hungarian American physicist and he came in quite early because he urges U.S. 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. Yeah.

You know? He was the baby daddy. Yes. 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. Crazy.

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. He patented the nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi, who's down on the list. So a lot of really good things. I mean, that's pretty tough to beat. 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. Okay. So consider the following thought experiment where you've got, this is called Maxwell's Demon, okay? Consider you've got a box, and you've got two halves of the box

with a single particle moving around, okay? If I know which half of the box the particle is in, and I put a little barrier in the middle, so I confine 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.

Yeah, that's interesting. And that's 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. Right. Right. So a visionary of his time. That is fascinating. Yeah. And like a non, a step in thinking that is not necessarily obvious to make until you say it. Yeah. And then once you say it, it's like, oh yeah, like, yeah, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. But that leap is very interesting. Yeah. I thought that was so, 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, insight.

Insight is very, very nice. Leo, born in 1898, passed away in 1964. Yes. And he was played by Mate Howman. Yes. In the film. Yes. Okay.

At number 17, we've got Edward Condon. Oh, yes. Okay? And he is a distinguished American nuclear physicist. He was played by Oli Haskevi. 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, 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 efficient. Yes. There is an interesting other thing that he's very popular for, particularly within the UFO community, which is the Condon report. Okay. 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 Heineck. 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. And a lot of folks who, you know, it really kind of ended the popular engagement in the subject at the time. Yeah. 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 aware of. Okay, great. Yeah. Well, he comes in at number 17.

Yes. Number 16, Kenneth Bainbridge. This was the man played by a favorite of ours, Josh Peck from Drake and Josh. You know, everybody our age group remembers Drake and Josh. Such a shocking casting. He did great, though. He did great. And honestly, the casting for this film is just amazing.

It's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. 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 or 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, 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. Yes.

Because everybody there realizes, well, we just did it. Yeah, yeah. The Adam bomb is real, and nymphs are real. Yep. Here we go. There's no going back. 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. And that's why it's like, oof. Yeah, yeah.

If we can do it, literally everyone can do it. This is not going to be pretty. Yeah. In terms of the physics that you 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 onto 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. Yep. So experimentally, this guy was like really high. Top notch. For me, right? Yes. To straight up verify E equals MC squared using a top.

atomic nuclei, that's quite good. It's tough. Not good enough to get you in the top 15, but tough nonetheless. Tough nonetheless, yeah. Born 1904, passed away in 1996. Yep. Number 15, Seth Nadermeier. 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 antimatter particle. he was involved in that research. So he was probably either a postdoc or 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? Right. Right. There should just be one. But apparently the universe created three. It was so weird that Isidore Robbie, who will discuss later on, one of the quips he said was about the Mewan was like, who ordered that? Yeah.

Right? Like we had things on the menu. Why? Why did you bring breadsticks? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So that was a huge surprise to physicists and a very big deal for. fundamental physics research. Yes. The discovery of the muon. Yes. The muon positron, Seth Nadermeier, 1907 to 1988. And that ends our C tier. Yes. So now we've got two rows.

Yes. And we still got a long ways to go. We've got 14 other scientists to get through. 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. 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, that's so good. Yeah, yeah. Not great.

Not great. Not a good luck, mate. Oh, it was Benny Safdi? Yeah, Benny Safi. I don't think I actually put two and two together. Yeah. That's interesting. Okay.

Yeah, Benny Safdi played Edward Teller. Great Hungarian accent, by the way, by Benny Safdi. Okay. In playing that. I really like that because if you watch videos of Edward Teller's interviews, he nails the accent. Okay. It's very, very good.

Okay. 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 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 Stanislau Lulam to make the Teller Ulau'll. Lom design, which is the thermonuclear weapon design for creating the hydrogen bomb. He also worked on the Jean 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 phenomena 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, you know, V-DB talk about it. Yeah, exactly. Edward Teller, 1908 to 2003, which is quite recent, actually. Yes, yeah. Very recently he passed away. Never won the Nobel Prize because he never would because he betrayed Oppenheimer.

Right. Can't do that. Can't do that. Yeah. And now we start getting into Nobel Prizes. Okay. 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 like apparently like actually happened although it wasn't like that bad as it was in the movie. Obviously, you know, the writers and the producers take a little bit of liberty. But it's still a great scene. Yes. He is famous. He's no longer involved in the Manhattan Project, right? 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 It's movement through space It's 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 antimatter 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. Is this the A Rise Is Out of Nothing thing that we've talked about previously? It's very related.

The popping in and out. Yeah, 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. Blackett 1897 to 1974. Yes, and he was played by James DeRC, a British actor, or a British physicist. Yes, makes sense.

Yeah. Number 12. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

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top three. Yeah. This is, I would like an explanation. 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. Okay. At number 12. Obviously played by Sillian Murphy. Yes. Who was the star of Oppenheimer.

You're right. He was the father of the atomic bomb. I think it's Killian and they might kill you for mispronouncing it. Oh, is it Killian? I think it is Killian. Oh my God. The Irish are going to come after me. It's Killian Murphy.

It is Killian Murphy. Apologies. We're going to need to, I'm going to need to splice that together when we do, 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. Yes.

He's a chain smoking polymath, as they say. In the cinematic role, I mean, the movie is about Oppenheimer, right? So 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. Yes. And really built that to what it is today.

Because before him, it was just like, Einstein's there. When he came up and like sort of chaired that institute, it became a center for research, you know. He opposed the H-bomb and he opposed like the McCarthy stuff. That's probably why he got the clearance revocation at the end. Yes. There. 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. 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. Okay. 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 what happens to the nuclei as they interact, right? He created the Born Oppenheimer approximation with his PhD advisor Max Bourne 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? That's quite good. Yeah.

Those quite good. This is the paper that he's talking about, the Bourne Oppenheimer approximation. That makes sense. He also knew Max Bore, because Heisenberg worked very closely with Maxporn, which we'll get into later on. Yes. But those are really the two sort of fundamental physics contributions that he made.

Which is fair. And so in that context for how we're ranking, Robert Oppenheimer 1904, 1967, is our number 12. Yeah. Okay, let's see. All right. So now we're going to go with number 11. This is Luis Alvarez. We've talked about Lewis Alvarez all the time on this podcast.

for multiple reasons. Yes. He was played by Alex Wolfe, great actor, and again, great casting. Luis Alvarez's role in the movie is just a postdoc of Ernest Lawrence at the time when he was at Berkeley. There's that scene where he rushes in

with the news of fission 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 bridge wire 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 yield. So he was on the observation plane. Yes. When the Inoligay dropped the bomb. there was another plane that was trying to measure how much the yield was. Can I make a quick insertion here? Yeah.

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. Yeah. Referenced that, you know, we don't really have a lot of data on the information. of the dropping of a nuclear atomic weapon on like 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.

Yep. And it's kind of, you know, and it's all still super classified and yada, yada, yada, so people don't know what the impacts are. But that must have been, again, given the moral quandary, 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. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I can't even imagine, right? 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. Okay. 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 very big deal at the time. That was the first thing he did. Second, he's very famous for side quests. Okay. Okay. 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's a layer of eridium, and that eridium 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. No way.

He's the first guy to do that. That's interesting. 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. That's really fascinating. 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, you know, stuff that's inside the pyramids. But if there's a hole, then there's going to be part of the pyramid that's going to 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. This is also a way.

This was our story where we talked about using the sort of muon detector for analyzing the T-Rex skeleton. Or two ex fossils. 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 like months. Because his particular experiment to chart the pyramids took like months. Right. Because you just got to wait for muons. That's, this is... Which takes a long time. Luis Alvarez 1911 to 1988. I'll give that.

Okay. And with that, we end B tier. So Oppenheimer is on the B tier. Okay. Along with these distinguished gentlemen. Yes. Edward Teller, at least, is not above Oppenheimer. Yeah, yeah.

Because I was never going to do that. Yeah, yeah. You know, there would have been a riot. Yeah. So that's the end of B tier. Okay. Now we start getting into the true great. Yes, the top 10.

The top 10. Okay. At number 10 is Isidore Robbie. I think some experimentalists are going to be mad that he's not higher. Okay. But I'm going to put him at number 10. Okay. He was played by David Krumholtz, another very famous actor.

Yes. 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. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty big. That's pretty big. That's not why he's number 10, though. If he only did that, he would not be number 10. Okay. His main contribution to me is something called the Robbie Oscillations.

Okay. 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. Yep. 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 rabbi oscillations to talk about, okay, how good is my cubit?

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 basically, he was at Columbia University the whole time and made Columbia Physics Department,

like one of the greatest of all time. Yep. Yeah. A brief question I have on the atomic clocks pieces. Mm-hmm. Was that a prerequisite for us having GPS? Yes, very much. Right, because the only way you get the precision, etc., is it required atomic clocks.

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. Right. 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 levels, level. Isidore Robbie was was key for that.

So you can thank Isidore Robbie for your ability to order Uber and DoorDash. Oh, yeah. And Instagram and be able to scroll on TikTok and all of that because none of that would be possible without. Among other things. 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 Robbie. Born 1898, passed away 1988. All right.

And now we get to number nine, Max Bourne. This one I had to kind of sneak in. Okay. Because he's shown in the movie just as on the blackboard. Right. 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 Bourne,

who's the guy when Oppenheimer goes to Gottingen to get training in quantum mechanics, he's being tutored by Max Bourne at the Blackboard. Yes. Please let us know. But Max Born is one of the greats. We've talked about him a lot. He turned Gottingen 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. Yes. Right? Yes. 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... That's the thing. Contributed to the field. Yes.

His main papers are the Quantum Mechanics Papers of 1926, which followed the Heisenberg paper of 1925, the Mdoitung 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. One of our most viral clips and one of our best episodes, I think, like, episode three or four. Yeah, 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. Yeah. And was a fundamental unlocked 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. I think so too. I'm very proud of that.

That was really, really good. And so it's all the dots are connecting for me again. 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 b, A times B does not equal B times A. I don't know what I'm doing. And Max Bourne 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 in 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. Right. Linear algebra is a very different beast that now is fundamental to all the physics. Max Bourne 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 Bourne 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 Bourne implemented the Bourne 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. Yes. And that's all I can tell you. Yes. Right. Yes. So Pist off Einstein for very good reason. Yes. Introduced this kind of fundamental randomness that now we take for granted in quantum mechanics. So, you know, huge, huge deal in physics.

For anyone who's a fan of the Born series, I'm sure when he walked in the room, everyone was like, Jesus, Jesus Christ, it's Max Born. Born 1882, passed away 1970. Yes. All right. Now we get to number eight, Ernest Lawrence Lawrence. Okay. Played by Josh Hartnett. Another great casting. Yeah, great casting. Unbelievable. Yeah.

They look so like. 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.

Yep, right? Yep. 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. War will do that to you. Yeah, and he didn't actually testify for or against Oppenheimer in the hearing, which 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. Use that for uranium 235 enrichment at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Arlen. 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.

Yes. Inventor of really 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. 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 of the modern physics? Exactly. Yeah. It's probing, you know, 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. We need the power of the universe in our hand. Yeah. And that requires a lot of money. Yeah. And a big room. And a big room. Like, give me a whole building, please. 1901 to 1958. Yeah. So that's number eight. Number seven. It pained me to put Hans Bele 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. Yes. One of the great, honestly. Hans Betta. He was played by Gustav Scarsgaard in the film. Yes.

The head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos. So you can imagine the theoretical division at Los Alamos. Yeah, yeah. And he's the head. Yeah, yeah. Okay? The ego's in that room. Yeah.

Yeah. And they all were okay with Hans Betta being the head. That says a lot about who this man is. Yep. 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 Beda myself because I am part of his academic progeny. Right. So my PhD advisors, PhD advisors, PhD advisor, PhD advisor was Hans Beda. Right. So I'm his like great grand kid, I guess.

Great, great, or great, one great. One great. Yeah, in terms of... That's pretty good. Yeah, so I'm close enough. So Hans Beda always, you know, a soft spot for him. crucial in terms of doing things like, oh, is there going to be atmospheric ignition? Hans Bader did the calculation and said no.

And everyone was like, okay. This is the whole sky on fire. Yes. Yeah, yeah. In the film, Robert Iphineheimer goes to Einstein to be like, hey, can you check these calculations? And Einstein was like, well, who did these? And he's like, Hans Bader. It's like, okay, why do you want me to check?

I'm worse at math than Hans Beda. You know, and that's actually true. Hans Bitter 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. Okay.

How are elements made inside stars? He discovered the proton-proton-chane 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 mathing, you know? Yep, yep. 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 the cycle of carbon nitrogen oxygen is what powers those higher stars. You can't sustain that kind of luminosity with just proton-proton-proton- helium fusion. Right, okay? So he won the Nobel Prize for that. He explained why the sun shines.

Yes. That's a huge deal. That's pretty... Something that's been sort of just idolized by society, civilizations, religions for millennia. Yeah. And now it's like, oh, no, but now we know why. Now we know why. And it's because of Hans Beta.

The other thing he developed was something called a Beta 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 beta onsatz is still a technique that is taught in graduate 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. And Freeman Dyson's the man, too. Yeah, and Dyson's the man too, right? And Edward Colb 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 and 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. Okay. 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 DeRoc said

This is Paul DeRoc Yeah right Said the most important calculation in physics for decades Right? Number seven. And he's at number seven. Pool days call for cookouts and lots of laundry. This Memorial Day at Lowe's, save $80 on a charbroil performance series four-burner gas grill.

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with a matte finish and perfect for any look. Whether you're building it up for a full glam moment or targeting correction for a more natural vibe. At only $12, it's great for affordable touchups on the go. Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. Yeah This is this is and sorry I cut you off You're gonna say because I would if you want to finish 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 perfected it

Hans beta 1906 to 2005 Mm-hmm Yeah very recent very recent yeah very recent Um Number six Richard Feynman got to be on the list. Richard Feynman, he's at number six. He did not make top five.

It's okay. But he's at number six. This is a photo of him at Princeton, actually. I don't know why he's walking past the humanities in language building. But I guess that's because, I mean, yeah, I get it, right? The building is prettier. But there's no reason why he would be in that part of campus talking to General Groves and Robert Oppenheimer. But I see you, Christopher Nolan.

I get it. I'm glad you use the pretty part of our campus. You know? As you've talked previously about your feelings about the physics and math buildings. Yeah. Well, at the time, at the time the physics and math buildings were frisked. Yes, that's true. That's true. 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. Very cinematic. 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 Beeta. 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.

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 Beta. 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. Yes. Right. Specifically, he also developed Feynman diagrams, which are a visual tool that are used in all sorts of physics. 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. Effectively. Yes. So that's what he won the Nobel Prize for, is he figured out how electricity and magnetism. He figured out the theory behind how electrons and photons interact effectively, quantum electrodynamics. Which has...

I mean, that's the nature of reality, right? What is light? He told you what is light. Right. 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, right? 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. Classical transistors and things like that. Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. Great teacher. He did the Feynman lectures in physics. We can do an entire deep dive on him. We probably will where we will talk about some of the issues.

As we always do. He's not a perfect human being. As men at all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And even for someone of his time, like glaring sexist, but still a giant in the physics

community. 100%. Yeah. Richard Feynman, 1918 to 1988. And we'll be sure we do the deep dive to send it to Dave Chang, as we know. Yeah. It's a big Feynman fan. Yes, of course.

And that is the end of the A tier. Yes. Okay. So now, Fine. is not in the supers. Yeah. I mean, the eight tier is, that's like the Avengers already. Yeah. I don't know how you... The eight tier already has Feynman and beta.

All right. Now we're getting into the S tier. Okay. At number five, yes. Is Werner Heisenberg. One of my favorites. Yes. He was a German theoretical physicist, and he is the architect of quantum mechanics. Yeah. Right? Yes. He remained in Germany during World War II to lead the Nazi nuclear project. It wasn't very good.

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 um he was famous for that um he was a peer to robert oppenheimer he's played by matthias schweighofe a very famous um german actor actually um he's kind of an ominous off-screen threat um 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.

Yes. He's not someone for the 18th. Yes, yes. Yes. He's not of the bottle, as we like to say in Europe. His 1925 paper in quantum mechanics, the one that we covered in one of our early episodes, that paper started the modern quantum revolution. Yes. Right? This idea of linear algebra coming into 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. Hey fever. Just insane. Yeah, hay fever, right? Astonishing. Yeah, just insane. right and that was in 1925.

Just that paper I would put him I think in the S here 100%. On top of that he developed this thing called the uncertainty principle the Heisenberg

Uncertainty principle One of my favorite things in science 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 tenant 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.

Yes. 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... This is not a judgment of whether they're good people or not. Yeah, that's a different...

That's a wholly different. thing, Werner Heisenberg 1901 to 1976. All right. Coming in at number four, Enrico Fermi. This guy is, I think, the last Renaissance man of physics. Okay. He's the last guy to be simultaneously a goat in theory and a goat in experiment. Okay. Like, the theory guys would look at him and be like, wow. Yeah, yeah. And then the

experimentalist would look at him and be like, wow. I think he's really genuinely the last person to hold that ranking. In both communities. In both communities. Yes. Yeah. They used to call him the Pope of physics because he was Italian. Just kind of

a side note. When I visited Rome, I got there through the train station, right? Because 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. I know what I mean? 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.

Right. 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.

Okay. Okay. Okay, LeBron. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's played by Danny DeFerrari. That's a good name. That's a great name. Let's go Ferrari.

I still have hope in 2026. His arrival signals the transition to engineering reality. 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 the late, in 1938. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 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. Yeah, yeah, right? And they're like, Why don't we do that this year? Yeah, yeah. So that you can have an excuse to come to Sweden,

except the Nobel Prize, and then just go to America and just get the hell out of it. Yeah, yeah. Isn't that so amazing? And it's incredible how these little, this is the butterfly effect, right? Yeah, like had that not transpired, who knows? Who knows? Yeah, if the Nazis captured him and made him work on there,

who knows? Who knows? Okay. He was the leader of the Fermi division. He had his own division named after him, the F division, at Los Alamos. Okay? I want to get a Fermi division. Yeah, dude, that should be one of our merge.

Yeah, exactly. In the movie, he's depicted directing the Chicago PIL-1, the CP-1, which is the first self-sustained chain reaction under the Chicago football field. Oh, the Bears? Yeah. Wow. No, no, no, the University of Chicago. University of Chicago. I was like, what?

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, okay, this is real. Because that was the first necessary step to be able to actually get to the end goal, which was the bomb, which required this. Which is a runaway chain reaction. Right. 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. It's starting to run away. It's like the first time that you're doing it, but that's how much trust that people had in Fermi's calculations, right? Where he was just able, there's also, you know, the famous family problems. I don't know if you've heard about these. Where it's like how many piano tuners are there in Los Angeles?

That all comes from him. He was incredibly good at like doing these kinds of back of the envelope. Yes. Calculations. Yes. 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 at stuff at a stable element, and that stable element will become a radioactive isotope. 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. Okay, 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 like sort of bounce right through, right? But he developed some of the principles behind these nuclear reactors and why we need moderators, right?

Where you have, like, graphite pads to slow the neutrons down. Yeah, that makes sense. He also developed something called Fermi-Darach statistics. He took the idea from Pauley, which is this idea of the exclusion principle, the fact that 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 boson send condensate. Firmions don't do that. So what do Firmions 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-Darach 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. 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. Fermions. Yeah. And that's like electrons.

E.R. Like electrons, protons, protons, neutrons. All of it named after Enrico Fermi. That's so sick. He also authored my favorite book on thermodynamics. Okay. It's called Thermodynamics. Yeah.

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. Shelf, that's one of the first things going to go up there. Enrico Fermay 1901 to 1954. Short time. Yeah.

Hugely impactful. Usually impactful. Yep. Number three. Our first non-physicist, Kurt Godel. Okay. Okay. 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.

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 1 plus 1 equals 2? 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. 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? Right. 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.

Okay. That's quite insane. Yeah. To think about. Yeah. Yeah. And 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 right because of the way that I've written it down right right okay right right Right, right but it's outside of my level of proof or my ability to prove things right It's it's something that I think we need to go on a deep dive about this is this is actually something because I have so many questions and it's not the I'm like holding back so much yeah yeah there's a lot that goes into this

But I understand the conundrum that is presented by the theorem as is described. Yeah. And it triggers so many questions. Yeah, it's like, it's really, really weird, dude. And it's something that I really can't get into here. I understand. But what I want to really sort of convey is that it's probably one of the big, results in the history of mankind.

Okay. That one statement. Okay. That like the mathematics itself is not what we think it is, which is like this just like true thing. That we discovered math. It is not an invention. It has to do with that.

Right. Like the difference between is, is it a fabric, is it a fundamental fabric of the reality again? We found it. Yeah. And it's so fundamental that like Roger Penrose, you know, when he talks about how consciousness is like a quantum phenomenon? Yeah, yeah.

It comes from this, from incompleteness theory. Like that line of thought comes from the fact that there are things that are not computable. Right. 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? Right. Right. Oh, this is deep.

It's very deep. I like it. And I just want to put him at number three because he deserves to be number three. Fair. 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. Yeah.

And Kurt Gaudel is played by James Urbanic. Yes, 1906 to 1978. I'm mad you brought that up because now my brain won't stop thinking about it. Yeah. Well, let's get it through just the last two, right? Yes. At number two, Niels Bohr. Yes.

Played by the very famous Kenneth Brana. Yes. Obviously, the philosopher king of the quantum revolution. I love these names, by the way. The Pope of physics, the philosopher king, the father of the bomb. He was really the philosopher king. He obviously he created the bore 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 Powley, there's Erwin Schrödinger at a time. So really this scientific godfather

of that era of physicists. He champions something called a Copenhagen interpretation with Heisenberg. The Copenhagen interpretation because he had an institute called the Niels-Bor Institute, or I think it was called a Institute for theoretical physics, but everyone knows it as the Niels-Bor Institute in Copenhagen. And that's where 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. You got to observe for the wave function to collapse. Exactly, yeah. Otherwise, it's just a wave function. So all of that was Neal's Bohr. And I really think, you know, given his sheer influence in physics. Yeah.

Right? On top of his just contribution as the bore model, which is the first sort of quantum mechanics of matter. Yes. I think he deserves to be at number two. I think this is fair. Nealzboer, 1885 to 1962. And I do think it's important that you note, 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.

Yeah. In a way that's really hard to beat. Yeah. Yeah. In the modern era. Yeah. No, exactly. So very much well deserved.

So, okay. That's at number two. And that actually is the end of the S tier. Yes. So now do we have our list? No, because that was number two. We have 26 people total were supposed to reference. I see 25 on the.

board. Right. So we're missing one. The one and only, the obvious number one, Albert Einstein. Yes. 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 Goetel and Fermi and Heisenberg. That's how ridiculous Einstein is. And I think everyone on that list would agree. 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. 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 both. Yeah, Bose Einstein's statistics. That's Einstein. Yes. Just the photoelectric effect. Yep. 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. Yeah. Okay. Otherwise, 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... Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle.

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Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Okay, so I have a funny question. So in football, we talk about the current goat era as being between Christiana Ronaldo and Messi. The past era is like Maradonna, 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.

But both goats, but fundamentally for different reasons. One was born with it. One just worked really hard. Yeah. Might not perfectly map, but I'm curious if you can, if you have a thought between who might be which. Yeah. If you forced me to do the match, I think Isaac Newton is messy. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Everything just came natural to him. And just, it was like easy for him. Yeah, yeah. And other people would have a problem with you. And they'd talk to him about it. And he'd be like, oh, I solved that two years ago.

And they'd be like, like, where? He was 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, yeah, I'm trying to figure out what Haley's Comets orbit is. And it 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 like the past three years to figure this out. You need to find that and like publish it.

That track. 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? Yeah. And like a month later, he's just like, oh, okay, 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, like, 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's true, what he's truly known for as, like, being the great, great, great, is general relativity, which is the idea that gravitation and space time, 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.

Yes. In mathematics. Yes. To finally come out with the full theory. And that kind of reminds me of her. That's Verrenaldo. And he's still playing to this day, longevity. Yeah.

Yeah. And Einstein, again, longevity is like huge. But for Newton, it was like a 10-year span where he just did balls to the, the wall. And then and then he started doing like side quest. Kind of like what mess he's doing in Miami. 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.

That is fantastic. That gives us our full ranking table. Yeah. 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. Great. I'm glad. I think there will be some people who are going to be, I think, in the five to 12, like six to 12 range, I think there may be some moveability around there. I think the top five is hard to argue with. Yeah. I think there might be

some people that are going to be mad that bore is number two, because they're all Everettian degenerates who believe in the multi-universe, you know, but come at me, bro, let's go. The Copenhagen interpretation. 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, a like, 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 backslash 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. Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees? Get ahead of summer with custom window treatments like solar roller shades from blinds.com

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