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Hello, this is gonna be Part 2 of the Encore episode for the movie オッペンハイマー where Masako and I talk about the movie when it first came out last year in July 2023.
So if you haven't listened to the Part 1, go back to the previous episode and maybe listen to that one first.
Otherwise, it may or may not make a lot of sense. So yeah, I hope you enjoy the episode.
You know, I don't even have to write the ethical, what do you guys have to do something right for
the human subjects? IRB. Yeah, exactly. I don't have to ever do that. I don't have to worry if
my molecules are getting hurt while I'm doing experiments. And yeah, like it's not like there
are other sort of ethical questions. What would you what would you submit when you start a new
project? I mean, I have no idea. No, nothing. Just a proposal. Just a proposal. Just a proposal
saying give me money. And they do or they don't. Oh, wait. Money means like a research funding?
That's all? Yeah, like for the grants. Yeah. Oh, so you don't need to get any kinds of permission
to do your experiments? I mean, other than like a basic safety training? No. Oh, interesting.
I had no idea. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it doesn't matter how much sample I use.
Doesn't matter how much like how wasteful I am with the sample. It's just my fault, you know?
So, so the basic safety training means it's just really basic stuff. So it doesn't...
I mean, yeah, like chemical handling, like you don't mix acid with organics or,
you know, this is what you're supposed to do when there's a chemical spill,
things like that. And I don't actually have to do any sort of, yeah, no, like,
there's no special like permission I need to request for conducting my experiments on top
of my proposal. Oh. So yeah, so like, yeah. So for example, if your experiment has a small,
like a risk, that... Risk to who? To... To me? To you or other people in the building or something
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like that. I mean, okay, if it's again, like if it's a radioactive substances, for instance,
right? Yeah. Then I need to be, I need to be certified to be able to handle radioactive
things. But it's not like I'm asking some other third party entity to let me handle
the radioactive material. I just need to pass the school's radioactive material handling test
and that's it. And I presumably have done that already before the proposal.
Mm hmm. Yeah. So yeah, like, like very, very little ethical sort of concerns in my line of
research. Right. And I mean, you have a little bit more than I do, but you also don't worry about,
you know, whether you're finding like whether what you're going to discover in this research
is going to start or end the war, right? However, it takes a very, very long time to get approval,
even a slight, slight change, modification to this information sheet. It takes two months,
probably. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's been, it's kind of insane.
But maybe, I don't know, like maybe, maybe that's not for entirely unreasonable reason,
right? Like maybe that is actually important because you, especially because you're dealing
with human subject and even though you think... Yeah, sometimes it's just a bit too much.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For example, if there are typos, yeah, we have to submit for amendment.
Oh, typos. Yeah. It's just, sometimes it's just too much. Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine that it's like
logistically annoying, but if you're experimenting with human beings or with
any living things for that matter, I feel like you don't think that your experiment, which I know
because I've done, is pretty chill. You know, I don't think it's traumatic in any way.
But like, you know, like there's a potential, right, always that they might become triggered.
And like, you know, when that happens, you want to make sure to be able to say that, like, Hey,
you know, we did pass these, all these protocols and you can't blame us, right? Yeah, like in
that sense, like you have a bit more ethical responsibility than I do in my research. But
like, think about Oppenheimer. He was just supposedly purely interested in,
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you know, the nuclear physics, like what's going to happen in atoms under extreme conditions. And
for all we know, that's all he was interested, right? I don't think he was trying to
start or end the war. Like he was just trying to do his science things. It's just that
he felt like this technology, when the Germans were starting to get ahead of this nuclear fission
capabilities, he was like, Oh, this could destroy like the whole country. And when he realized that
he felt like, we need to know more about this technology, like before they get to do it,
we need to get ahead of them, right? And that sort of psychological sort of reasoning
is very understandable. And so does the movie describe what happened to him after the war,
after the bombs were dropped? Yeah, I would say that they spend about a little bit less than a
third of the movie, the last little bit less than a third of the movie, sort of showing how much he
struggles with the consequences of his work. First of all, it was a lot more powerful than he had
ever intention, like had an intention of. And they basically were not aware of any of the long term
effects that people will suffer from, you know, because the sort of the Trinity test, the test
they did at Los Alamos, they did it in the middle of nowhere, you know, made sure everyone is outside
of the blast radius and everything. But yeah, like they simply couldn't estimate what would be the
long term effect and of the radiation. And like, they do sort of show him struggling with like,
oh, like, what have we done by making this technology available? And he I think he really
does struggle with it afterwards. Yeah, and like, I don't want to, you know, say too much,
because it's a bit about it. I was like, like the choices that they made about how to portray
the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that was also like, like, that's how you want to do it.
The concept I was like, I want to see, I want to talk about this with other American friends, who
supposedly have got history education from American system, and how they think about
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how this was portrayed, like, you know, in terms of like biopic, it was solid. I feel like they
could have done something a little bit differently about how they decided to go about portraying
the bombing itself. Yeah. But so yeah, it's, it's like, you know, it's such a, like, for
like, I feel like Oppenheimer, like the movie and from the sort of like, a few like articles I've
read, Oppenheimer seemed like he had, he like, he was obviously talented, and, you know, brilliant
on his own. But I also don't think he was like, Niels Bohr, or Einstein of his era, right? Like,
I think he would have been a pretty normal, solid professor who was like, you know, like doing his
thing, which is most of the academics, right? Like, none of like, most of us don't win Nobel
Prize. And, you know, yet you continue to do interesting research. So I felt like he would
have been that kind of regular professor, if it wasn't for his particular interest in quantum
physics, and him being in a right place, like he becomes friends with Ernest Lawrence, who is the
first person to, you know, who invented the cyclotron. So like, you know, the whole facility
to accelerate particles, right? So like, with people like that around, he was able to do what
he did. But like, you know, if it wasn't for the wartime, if it wasn't for the environment that he
was in, I feel like he would have done a lot more interesting scientific contribution, other than
this, like, this just was like, a huge part of his life, and it sucked the soul out of him.
He was already like, kind of unstable. He was already like, you know, like, like difficult in
like, the regular academic way. Got a little bit up in his mind kind of thing. But like, I think
yeah, after after this, he was just like, such a mess. And you know, he probably could have had
other things he could have done if it was in a peaceful time. Yeah, so yeah, that does that
didn't make me think I was just like, like, you're always like, you know, it makes for a good movie.
But oh my god, what a terrible thing to be actually experiencing through. Yeah, yeah,
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thought a similar thing about Marie Curie as well. When I read her biography written by her daughter,
it was a lot of, you know, there's, in her case, it's World War One,
but there was a war involved. And she like, really worked so hard at this gradient thing. And
it did a lot of incredible record breaking things. But also his her her life was such a,
you know, messy part. And she doesn't seem really happy ever in her entire lifetime. She's like,
working all the time. And so like, yeah, it like made me think about, you know, what it is like,
the sort of dilemma of being brilliant and being like, you know, born in a different time.
Yeah, that's all. I don't know. I realized that we've been talking about it for like 20 minutes.
So I feel like we should wrap it up. Yeah. Okay. Sorry.
That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us at Eigo De Science
on Twitter. That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time.
