It does stretch the metaphor, so to speak, but the historical details match up well enough. The Minsk ghetto was liquidated by the Nazis Oct 21 '43.
I think Alphaboi’s (quite reasonable) point is that there WERE no factory owners, as Minsk was controlled by communists, so there was no private ownership of capital at all. That does seem pretty sloppy.
Four hundred thousand what, by the way?
Gotcha, missed that point. Maybe the relatives were always referred to as “owners” as that’s what they were before the revolution? Having only a casual knowledge of the events, but couldn’t it be possible that the family did own the factory until around '18? The show is only ~25 years later.
I think this last episode really went off the rails. First of all, what was that letter to Dr. Oppenheimer that Akely was burning? Did I forget something from last episode? More important, this whole “divide up the problem and tell all these guys over here that they’re just double checking math” makes ZERO sense. That’s just preposterous. And even more preposterous is the idea that one of the guys realizes what’s going on, doesn’t bother actually telling any of the real authority figures despite the fact that he hates Isaacs and (from his perspective) his team is suddenly wasting huge amounts of time instead of doing the incredibly-war-critical thing they’re supposed to be doing, and instead just randomly uses this incredibly important knowledge to leverage some groping on Isaacs’s wife (while, I might add, his wife is one room away)?
Also, super-straight-laced Fritz randomly suggests magic mushrooms? And there’s a weird old guy who runs the armory who we’ve never met before and we’re supposed to care why? And there are some Indians blackmailing Frank because he had an affair with his maid?
Yaaaaaawn. About the only interesting thing that happened involves radioactive babies!
The Indians were put up to it by the Mysterious Guy who’s been following Frank, to see if Frank would breech security by answering the Indian Dude’s question about what they were building.
A side note: the “weird old guy” is the same actor who put his accomplice in the chipper in Fargo.
I’m not sure I’m buying all the radiation that’s seemingly everywhere, when they haven’t detonated anything serious. It’s becoming a soap opera, but that’s not really surprising.
Oh, right. But that doesn’t make a TON of sense unless the mysterious guy totally didn’t mind random Indians getting a free pickup truck out of the deal. Who approached who, here?
though it’s a good soap opera.
Yeah, I don’t mind that, as a single story line of “my numbers are better than your numbers” would have a life span of about two episodes.
I think it would be possible to have a dramatized serialized show set during the Manhattan project that was MUCH MUCH MUCH more authentic and realistic while still having room for storytelling.
Look at the movie Titanic. Whatever you think about it, most people agree that it did a VERY good job of accurately portraying the last few days of the Titanic, despite centering on totally fictional characters having a totally fictional adventure.
I tend to agree with Max, though I’ll keep watching because the science is mostly right, and that’s what brought me to the show.
I imagine we’ll eventually find out what was in the burned letter to Oppenheimer, and who it was from (if not from Akely).
Aside from a bad premonition in the last episode, I don’t know why Charlie would keep the Pu-240 contamination from Akley – seems like he would want to know that his design wouldn’t work. Not to mention the fact that, once this problem was acknowledged, Emilio Segre was able to rejigger the Thin-Man into the smaller “Little Boy” design using U-235 as the fissile material (interestingly, Segre was also the one who, in early 1944, discovered the problem with reactor-bred plutonium that necessitated change in direction the show is trying to depict).
Since the previous episode was set at Christmas (and I think the title-card in the pilot puts them in 1943), they are right at the time when von Neumann arrived and suggested that high-speed detonation could create more symmetrical explosions and achieve greater densities with otherwise sub-critical masses of Pu – This lit a fire under Oppenheimer, who began providing Neddermeyer and his team with more resources. George Kistiakowsky (I presume this is on whom Peter Stormare’s character is based) designed and choreographed the explosive charges
The conflict between the groups is certainly necessary, to some extent, for drama. But the idea that Oppenheimer would deliberately take his only plan-B off the table before they have a working model of plan-A seems just silly. In real life he certainly favored the gun-design (it’s pretty simple after all) but he kept the Fat-Man group working until he needed them (his aloofness seems pretty accurate though, from what I understand).
I am interested to know what happens with the radioactive baby – I know that there were scientists who were contaminated with radioactive materials (besides the two who were outright killed from accidental exposure to high-intensity gamma rays while working on bomb cores), but I’m unfamiliar with any children or civilians being contaminated.
Chefguy – not dealt with in the show, but they did have a small cyclotron on-site as well as a couple of particle accelerators and Van de Graff generators – so I can imagine in these pre-OSHA days that a few guys managed to absorb a not-insignificant quantity of stray neutrons.
there was Oppenheimer the 1980 BBC production. a fine show though not entertaining enough for a contemporary cable tv network.
i will continue to watch it though this is much more of a drama set at a particular time and place rather than a recreation or drama about a historical event.
of some interest to show fans
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/misc/faces-of-project-y/
ID badge photos and stuff
I remember that one - watched it in high school.
Cool.
Richard Feynman: row 9, column 5
Anybody caught up with the latest episode? So, when Toby Ziegler (G-2, I think) is confronting Winter outside his house, he mentions all the people Winter has ruined: Sid Liao, Babbitt (Lenin guy), and also Meeks (Brooklyn Dodgers hat guy). Who last we saw in the prior episode talking on the bus with Mrs. Sid Liao, who told him that Winter was sending her money (feelings of guilt, presumably).
Meeks was no where to be seen in this episode, Fritz (Plutonium Swallowing Guy) and British Guy (aka Mr. Helen Prinz) seemed to be the only guys left in Implosion Lab. Did a scene where Meeks confronts Winter about the money sent to Mrs. Liao and quits the implosion team get lost in the edit room? Or did I forget a scene?
I think it’s because she still sees him as competition. She knows a black man is more accepted in academia than a woman. Her job at the base is the best thing, professionally, that she’ll ever have, so she’s thinking why help someone who might replace her? She tosses the letter away right after Charlie rejects her advances and settles for Crosley, so there’s a bit of a power thing going on there.
I don’t think you missed anything, I think he just wasn’t in this episode. He hasn’t confronted Frank, but there certainly was plenty of foreshadowing for Meeks, so it’s an easy bet something is going to go down soon.
And of course she’s right. At the time Helen was doing undergraduate and graduate work, Cecilia Payne was a lowly lab assistant at the Harvard Observatory, having published in 1925 what was widely acknowledged to be the most brilliant PhD dissertation in history, showing astrophysicists how to interpret stellar absorption lines and proving that the universe was made almost entirely of hydrogen (76%) and helium (23%) instead of iron as was commonly believed.
In her first interaction with Theodore, Helen sympathized with him over the dismissive way the lab directors treated him, and his first reaction was to dismiss this woman who believed that she understood physics as well as he did.
war just got longer.
there will be a second season.
True, Helen’s not looking forward to acting grateful for the change to teach undergrad physics at a private women’s college or state teachers’ college. For all she knows she’ll never be able tell anyone what she did or leverage it into another job.
I’m looking forward to season 2, but am a little confused about how Abby’s cousins got from Occupied Minsk. 
Meeks is the mole, are we supposed to think he’s the one who got them safe passage from the Germans? :dubious: