The story
In those days of nuclear physics fever, there were large groups corresponding to each of the research units across the United States. When the organization approached Oppenheimer in the movie, he said he wanted to pool the resources of all the major labs in the United States to work on it together, naming Lawrence Rad Lab among them. But in addition to working on nuclear bombs, other directions that rely on these resources have their own stories.
From the 30’s Lawrence and Livingstone made “big enough” gas pedal (can accelerate the proton beam to 1/5 of the speed of light), it is set off a radioactive craze, including biology.
The (bio)chemistry using isotopes to trace carbon at Lawrence Labs, the radioactive oncology experiments with radiation from California, and the phage brilliance that continued at Cold Spring Harbor with a wave of radioactive plus genetic minds (Cold Spring Harbor always has a history of “a whole bunch of physicists flocking to the phage lab”).
Research on carbon-based life started with the $^11C$ that came out of the bombing $B$ crystal. And the story started with Kamen and Ruben, two experimental chemistry scientist in Rad Lab. Their bond got substantiated by experiences like to disprove one of Oppie’s boasting on Rad lab’s achievements in revealing “stupefying brilliant exposition of its theoretical consequences”.
Kamen and Ruben started with an experimental design in which plants absorbed $^{11}C$-enriched $CO_2$ and collected it from their leaves.
and collecting glucose from the leaves, which was converted into glucose by photosynthesis, and then feeding it to rats. But 11C
half-life was only 20 minutes, which was not enough for photosynthesis to get to glucose, let alone feeding it to rats. So they decided to look for the first step in carbon fixation.
In the same year, Krebs had already resolved every step of how glucose decomposing into water and carbon dioxide, although we would guess that photosynthesis is the reverse, but take out the experimental evidence to figure out the process is still in the context of doing nuclear bombs, biology, nuclear level of major events.
This experiment sounds simple. Give the plant $^11CO_2$, do a time series experiment, rip off the leaves at different times and throw them in alcohol to stop the experiment, and then do the usual organic chemistry analysis.
However, it’s basically impractical to do in practice. This experiment was a side project for Lawrence’s group, and they were granted little access to the cyclotron.
Only trace amount of $^{11}CO_2$ came out of the bombarding $BO_2$ and decayed to undetectable in four hours.
The lab where the radioactive samples were taken and the “rat house” where the reagents were prepared for analysis were at opposite ends of the group, so they were often hopping around the building in the middle of the night. The biggest problem was 11C. The biggest problem was that the $^{11}C$ is so small that it can only be detected a little bit 🤏 and is still bound to large proteins. Biochemical analysis is a whole other can of worms, and it’s hard to tell how many biologists there are in this Rad lab.
Still this phase of the experiment did not detect $^{11}CH_{2}O$
and certainly not $^{11}C_{6}H_{12}O_6$,and it was found that the first few steps of carbon fixation (carbon capture) did not require light, and that the product of the first step was a carbonic acid.
The prevailing view in the 1930s was that carbon dioxide was first bound to chlorophyll, and after absorbing light, the chlorophyll transferred electrons to the carbon dioxide to produce formaldehyde molecules, which then polymerized into glucose.
Their experimental results differed from this idea, instead confirming the chemical similarity (opposite) between carbon fixation and the Krebs cycle, and that carbonic acid may be more important in both or even other metabolic reactions. Though any organic molecule that is given $CO_2$ can basically be thought of as hanging a carbonate group, although Ruben had already hypothesized that the organic molecule was a phosphoric acid (substituted) sugar at the time.
In the 1940s, Kamen hit a nitrogen cloud chamber with neutrons ejected from a gas pedal and hit $^{14}C$. Supposedly at the time Oppenheimer was still using some atomic physics theory to calculate that this was impossible (how, I don’t know).
In order to get a larger amount of 14C, at one point Lawrence gave Kamen the highest access to the cyclotron. They first used deuterium to hit $B$ and then enriching $^{13}C$ of graphene to get a little bit of $^{14}C$. Then they hit ammonium nitrate with neutrons and got $^{14}CO_2$ which capped Geiger counter.
After Pearl Harbor in ‘41, the U.S. government takes over Rad Lab’s cyclotron, which is primarily used to produce uranium and plutonium.Kamen is appointed to lead the development of a new experimental process, and Ruben is in charge of the Coast Guard’s phosgene program.
One night Ruben was fatigued from driving and broke one of his arms. Subsequently, while preparing liquid phosgene in the lab, he broke a glass tube and was exposed to a lethal dose, but he calmly disposed of the waste liquid and residue.
Ruben died of phosgene at the age of less than 30.
Kamen deduced that the U.S. was conducting nuclear tests at Oak Ridge through radioactivity testing, and later came into contact with the Russians at a party (a party organized by a well-known violinist who is also mentioned in the great Oppenheimer movie). So he was removed from his post and put under military surveillance.
The movie also has a half hour of literary drama after the nuclear explosion, all of which is devoted to the post-war security hearings on Oppenheimer and the fight with Strauss, and of course rendering the father of the atomic bomb’s circular announcement. But the movie makes no mention at all of the process of security clearances for a bunch of other people caught by the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time. Among them was Kamen, who was publicized in the media as “the atomic scientist who was fired for fornicating with Reds,” only to be cleared up decades later. He did a bit of scientific research later, but no more frontier photosynthesis research, and no more 14C anymore.
At the time, only the Rad Lab had enough $^{14}C$ and only $^{14}C$
enough to analyze the photosynthetic carbon pathway.
After the war, Lawrence brought in another colleague from the Manhattan Project (not in the movie), Calvin, to continue photosynthesis research.
And so it came to be, the era of the Calvin cycle. That was also a long story, in which they publsihed XXI versions of [The Path of Carbon in Photosynthesis].
Comments på bio
- This is Nolan’s work of art, from the first act of the movie gives a strong impression of artistic creation, so Nolan is “unintentionally documentary” in its presentation.
- Oppenheimer does experimental physics at Cambridge (bullying, anyone?). He was in so much pain that he tried to poison his teacher. Okay, I know something about the pain of choosing the wrong direction and being in the wrong group.
- It is said that Oppenheimer asked questions on Bohr’s report and was so impressed that Bohr suggested he go to Göttingen to study the theory of atomic physics. Some segments about Oppenheimer’s report and Bohr pointing out mistakes also come to mind.
- The erotic part, not sexually arousing anyway. But also historically relevant, I guess, and much more explicit than the Theory of Everything and the Beautiful Mind and Turing.
- The Manhattan Project part was set on the same location as the TV show, I think, and the costumes and women and story were pretty much the same.
- Nuclear explosion plot was really catchy.
- Ideology composed a lot of the narrative.
- The written scenes are very much in Nolan’s artistic presentation style.
- Einstein is the most artistic imagery.
- Is there an engineering perspective documentary on the Manhattan Project?
- As superficial as Barbie’s feminism is, Oppenheimer’s masculinity is pretty deep. What feminism was there before and after WWII. There are no female figures at all in the people they had working on the big bomb in the last century, and there are no strong socio-political women in the movie (reality).
- What’s a nuclear bomb in the 21st century? Can it be an electromagnetic cannon? Look up that the US Department of Defense put out a white paper on EM gun defense.
Finally, I don’t know what Nolan is trying to say, but my take home message is:
- Oppenheimer must have been very articulate and politically savvy (there is a lot of history in his speeches)
- Einstein was too artistic
- He had the 🤏 cliché: it’s hard to find the right people to unite & honor belongs to those who have the right to bestow it. Three hours is a long time isn’t it quite worth the price of admission
- One who wants to see Manhattan Project on screen can also watch the TV series
Resources for you to explore more
- Manhattan project background information and preservation from US energy department
- Atom Heritage Foundation profiles
- The story is an excerpt from the Book [transformer] from Nick Lane
- All the stories depicted in the movie are covered by wikipedia
后注：此贴为发表于超理论坛原贴的英文转译。
