I really WANT to like this show, but I gotta say it’s losing my interest. The main thing I can point out “wrong” about it is how cliche it all seems, even though it’s generally well produced and well acted. It’s just not fooling me into thinking that it’s anything approaching real history.
it is well acted.
it was WWII, it was at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was there. they made a bomb.
it is a good drama in a setting. it is not history, it isn’t a reenactment.
I think it falls somewhere in the awkward middle. I’d enjoy something that was fairly close to accurate (even with some dramatic license). And I think you could have fun just being goofy with it. But it’s trying to both have a grittily-realistic-SEEMING-setting while also telling stories that don’t remotely seem to be historical at all (even if possibly some of them are), which just bugs me.
Yeah, they are exaggerating the nature of the Thin Man/Fat Man rivalry – certainly the equivalent of Frank’s group would never have been in danger of being closed down and sent away – but Oppenheimer was concerned that the implosion mechanism was too complex or would take too long to develop, and the Fat Man group was kept working on what was considered a back-burner project.
Ultimately the problem was that they could not manufacture Plutonium-239 fast enough without significant impurities of Pu-240. Since the spontaneous fission rate of the heavier isotope is 10,000 times greater, the Thin Man device couldn’t achieve a critical mass fast enough, or at a density great enough, to prevent the Pu-240 from blowing the mass apart pre-detonation. This was a problem that was known about early on, so the implosion design group was kept around in case the purity of the plutonium became a problem.
What interests me about the show is that it presents a different view of Los Alamos than you typically get from documentaries and from first hand accounts by project leaders. The strict oversight did affect the scientists and their families, who were living under frontier conditions and were “officially” kept ignorant as to the specifics of the project that was keeping them in this encampment.
And I think the latest episode, with Niels Bohr, was the best yet.
And put me down for a vote that Teller was, indeed, a major loon, though I agree with his late advocacy of thorium molten salt reactors.
I think it’s getting more & more likely that she’ll at least try to leave after tonight’s episode, though maybe not for that exact reason. I wonder what the fallout will be (pun not intended) if that paper she gave to her maid get’s published.
I enjoyed this most recent episode more than the preceding few… Daniel Stern’s character being closeted is an interesting twist, and it didn’t have any moments of towering stupidity or anachronism, at least that I noticed. Still not really living up to its potential, but watchable.
Okay, am I completely ignorant of how radiation is measured? In tonight’s episode they show the meter on the geiger counter measuring radiation in DC volts. WTF? Am I missing something, or is this a major gaffe?
Those geiger counters were clearly kludged together (literally held together with tape). I’m guessing that the dials they used were repurposed from something else entirely.
Or else it was a major gaffe.
This week’s scene involving the reactor blueprints is loosely based on a real trip that Feynman made during the war (including the bit about windows versus valves); Feynman describes it in Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, but Feynman’s role in the episode is taken by the female scientist. See Feynman’s account here Los Alamos From Below: Reminiscences 1943-1945, by Richard Feynman
" Then they explain how it works. The carbon tetrachloride comes in here, the uranium nitrate from here comes in here, it goes up and down, it goes up through the floor, comes up through the pipes, coming up from the second floor, bluuuuurp - going through the stack of blueprints, down-up-down-up, talking very fast, explaining the very, very complicated chemical plant.
I’m completely dazed. Worse, I don’t know what the symbols on the blueprint mean! There is some kind of a thing that at first I think is a window. It’s a square with a
little cross in the middle, all over the damn place. I think it’s a window, but no, it can’t be a window, because it isn’t always at the edge. I want to ask them what it is.
You must have been in a situation like this when you didn’t ask them right away. Right away it would have been OK. But now they’ve been talking a little bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they’ll say, “What are you wasting my time all this time for?"
I don’t know what to do. (You are not going to believe this story, but I swear it’s absolutely true - it’s such sensational luck.) I thought, what am I going to do? I got an idea. Maybe it’s a valve? So, in order to find out whether it’s a valve or not, I take my finger and I put it down on one of the mysterious little crosses in the middle of one of the blueprints on page number 3, and I say, “What happens if this valve gets stuck?" figuring they’re going to say, “That’s not a valve, sir, that’s a window."
So one looks at the other and says, “Well, if that valve gets stuck – " and he goes up and down on the blueprint, up and down, the other guy up and down, back and forth, back and forth, and they both look at each other and they tchk, tchk, tchk, and they turn around to me and they open their mouths like astonished fish and say, “You’re absolutely right, sir."
I was hoping that might be the explanation. A meter with R/s on the dial might give away what they are working on, so they jury rig some other dial to respond to radiation. I’m going to go with that, since they made a point of showing the dial.
I think that this is one of the things that keeps me coming back to the show – Feynman’s descriptions of the place are unique to him, but they’re well-known to people familiar with his books, which are quite popular. Other stories I’m sure are common to multiple sources.
I’ve read a few books and articles about the Manhattan Project over the years, and I’m just familiar enough with the bomb designs, the chemistry and physics of fission that the show has an air of verisimilitude.
Yeah there are anachronisms, and making the major characters fictional brings its own set of problems, and it way overstates what were minor conflicts/jealousies over bomb design in the name of drama – But in terms of capturing both the cloud of uncertainty over the German effort, the overbearing and paranoid nature of the military’s security, and its effect on the scientists and their families, I find it fascinating.
They could factor in more of Feynman’s views about military security, how the the scientists found easy work-arounds, and how unsuccessful they were because they didn’t really understand anything about what they were trying to protect:
My favorite of these stories was how people were using a hole in the fence to avoid waiting in line at the security gate, and he brought the military’s attention to this by going out through the hole, then entering through the gate with his pass, over-and-over again in a loop, until the guard realized that the same guy kept entering the base but never leaving!
I feel the same way. Everybody is trying so hard to hammer in the point that this was IMPORTANT and we should CARE because people are DYING. You can see the capitals and you should never see the capitals; they should emerge from undertones.
The rest is soap opera. I wish they could talk more about the science, but that’s impossible. Giving the women real roles would be a huge step if there were real roles to give them. Unfortunately, the Army treated them like baby factories and general idiots. And that leaves soap opera. Everybody has a SECRET. There go those capitals again. And Frank Winter is more than an antihero. He’s out of his mind and a danger to everybody around him.
I want better. I’ll probably stick with it, but…
The calculator gives those numbers, a 13-fold increase, but I don’t believe it. To get an idea of comparable costs in 1943 you need to multiply by 30 to 50.
Car prices are usually a pretty good indicator. In 1941 Ford introduced the Super DeLuxe.
A Ford Taurus today runs from $27,000-40,000.
it is a bit hard to evaluate the show being so far removed from the then and there of WW2 and a hurried top secret project.
it is a show with limited sets and cast.
i don’t think a physicist would be given the task of recovering microscopic amounts of lost Pu from buckets of puke and piss.
they could likely make radiation survey meters on their own. ‘they’ meaning an electronics shop onsite or an industry.
in all war industrial production there was lots of just do this and don’t ask why. more so with this project.
so there is some basis for the script there seems to be extreme hyperbole; which is normal for dramatic tv and movies. here is a war with these people having a good notion that what they are doing is important, even if they know only their details. yet the only people taking this real seriously is the army, Oppenheimer and Frank (because he’s a WW1 vet). sure there was horseplay, slacking and finding distraction but that is half the show because that is what is entertainment.
it was WW2, it was near Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was there, they were making a bomb.
i see that there are 13 episodes with only 7 scheduled.
I was already to jump on the girl scout cookie reference as being an anachronism, but girl scout cookies became nationally distributed during the 1930s.
I actually enjoyed this last episode a fair bit, despite it being mostly soap opera. But why did Helen (the female physicist) throw out the letter at the end. Everything we’ve seen of her before that indicates that she’s genuinely pissed off about how the black guy was being treated, and she seems to be a nice person. Does she somehow enjoy being the only “token” in the group or something? It’s a HUGELY massive dick move more or less out of nowhere.
It’s also, of course, ridiculous that the person in charge of a state-of-the-art war-critical scientific initiative would have the education and bearing of a random mid-level factory manager.
That bothered me less than the revelation that the Winters never had a maid before. :dubious: Liza doesn’t strike me as the domestic type, and unlike the other wives she has (or at least had before the war) an active career of her own.
Don’t know about Liza’s background, but Frank doesn’t seem like he comes from a privileged household. Presuming they are both college professors, they may not have the income necessary to afford a maid (or perhaps the desire to spend their money that way).
I know we live in different times, but I’ve known quite a variety of professional academics, including more than a half-dozen tenured married couples, none of whom had a maid.
Watched the latest episode last night - it was definitely adultery week at Los Alamos and related locations…
And I just now realized (after rewatching a scene from the latest episode) that Crossly is played by the actor who played Brother of Mine in Doctor Who’s two parter about the Family of Blood.
Someone mentioned last week that Charlie and Helen’s visit to Tennessee included elements of Richard Feynman’s story about making the same trip.
I believe that the Tennessee story this week included some elements of the Chernobyl disaster as well. In 1986 the reactor in Chernobyl failed, leading to the largest nuclear disaster in the history in the world (not including the ones involving actual bombs).
A key ingredient in that failure was the production of xenon-135 as a fission product, an isotope with a pretty large neutron capture cross-section. Xenon-135 “poisons” the reactor by absorbing available neutrons and slowing the uranium fission process. In normal operations this is not a huge problem because the absorbed neutron creates xenon-136, which has a lower propensity to absorb excess neutrons.
Reactor 4 at Chernobyl was doing low-power tests at the time, and xenon poisoning caused the reactor power to drop to lower levels than expected. Due to the testing some safety systems were shut down, and operators reacted to the low-power levels by rapidly removing the graphite control rods to bring power levels back up.
The flood of neutrons generated by increased fission rates turned most of the x-135 into the 136 isotope, and power levels shot upward faster than expected, causing the reactor to go supercritical.
This is the situation discussed by the “Donaldsons” with Theodore in the episode. Aside from bringing the power up slowly with safety procedures in place, you can solve the poisoning problem by shutting the reactor down for ~24 hours – the short half-life of z-135 (9 hours) should reduce it to acceptable levels in that time.
I can’t recall if the reactors at Tennessee or Hanford ever faced a problem like this – or how much the experts at that time knew about some of the issues created by some fission products. I am pretty sure that Charlie’s multiple references to “meltdowns” were anachronistic.
I can buy Abby being naïve enough to not understand how her well-to-do relatives in Eastern Europe could’ve possibly ended up in a ghetto. What I found hard to believe is that Abby has well-to-do cousins that own a textile factory in Minsk, the capital city of Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic! :dubious: