Barbie, Oppenheimer, Barbenheimer · 12:14pm Aug 20th, 2023
This week, you get a break from my current series of contrived attempts to mix particle physics and pony episodes, and instead you get my perspective on attempts to mix plastic dolls and historical nuclear physics. It’s time to talk about Barbenheimer.
What exactly was she awarded a Nobel Prize in physics for? Backstory needed.
When I noticed that Barbenheimer was a thing, I felt I should make an effort to engage. However, on the opening weekend, the idea of fighting the Barbie fans for the last cinema seat; then watching two hours of Barbie; then three hours of Oppenheimer; then trying to think of something intelligent to say about it… That all sounded like a rather bothering sort of day. I decided to stay at home and read a book instead. With hindsight, I missed something obvious. You don’t need to see the films to post a meme about them. I am not social media pro.
In my own time, I saw and enjoyed both films, and can recommend both. Barbie is immensely entertaining, very clever, and completely ridiculous. It feels like the culmination of a movement that has been building up for the last ten years as consumerist capitalism has fully embraced the message of female empowerment and used it to sell dolls. Ten years ago, I was pushing Girls in Science events, with others, and complaining about Barbie’s that said “Math class is tough”. We were aware that alternatives like the Lottie dolls were not going to change the world on their own. To change the world, you need to get Barbie on your side. But to get Barbie on your side, you need to change the world. The world has now changed. And for all the social-science-jargon-filled comments it generates, Barbie is at heart a very silly film.
Switching Barbieland for Los Alamos, Oppenheimer is a rather different epic. It was clear that this would be good. Christopher Nolan is a very good director. Robert Oppenheimer’s leadership of the Manhattan Project is a fascinating story. The setting was an incredible time for nuclear physics. Physicists were still trying to take in the consequences of the Quantum Mechanics revolution when the neutron was discovered in 1932. Just six years later, it was found that it could be used to induce the fission of uranium. The realisation that this could be used to build a weapon of unprecedented destruction arrived at precisely the time when you really didn’t want the wrong side to get it. The historical questions are just as intriguing as the physics. Historians have long puzzled as to why Oppenheimer was put in charge of the project, when everything we know about the US military at the time would suggest his Jewish background and communist sympathies would normally have excluded him. It was not a normal time.
Now, can we do a crossover? Is it possible to use the Barbenheimer meme to create something to explain some bit of nuclear physics with a pink doll? That was my first thought. However, after watching the two films, the Barbenheimer meme makes rather less sense than it did before. Reasons emerge why juxtaposing these themes might not be appropriate. Keeping in mind that some experiments must be done with extreme caution, where can we go with this?
It seems appropriate to take inspiration from another of Margot Robbie’s acclaimed appearances, her cameo in The Big Short (2015). The background to this one: The Big Short is a docudrama about the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It often encounters the need to explain technical details about banking to the audience so they can understand the plot, but this comes with the risk of sending them to sleep. How do they do it? By bringing in Margot Robbie to give a one-minute summary of sub-prime mortgages from the bath. [This is an example of a writing technique called the Pope in the Pool. When you need to convey an important detail to the audience, do it in an unusual/interesting/wacky setting to make sure they are paying attention.]
Could we instead have something like this in Oppenheimer to clarify the physics? Imagine the scene, where he drones on about quantum physics in a dusty classroom. Enter Margot Robbie and Emma Mackey in Barbie dresses:
Why did we not see this scene? Maybe because Margot Robbie was unavailable as she was busy with Barbie. Or possibly because Christopher Nolan is a competent director who knew what he was doing.
I loved the storytelling in The Big Short, and I think that you are right; that sort of thing is great for explaining things that make very little intuitive sense. So... ponies and particle physics is a perfect match!
Now I'm imagining Twilight Sparkle muttering the famous line about becoming death, as the first-ever balefire bomb test goes off in the distance.
But it's fun to follow your feed when you only post informed takes on things, though.
Sadly I have yet to see either of them. I should really do that.
I have watched "Oppenheimer" a little more than three weeks ago, because with the current situation in Ukraine and Russia's constant nuclear threats, I see a need to suck in as much information about nuclear weapons as possible. And watching that movie was very beneficial, because it made me realize who the Barbenheimer Pony is.
5743039
Why Twilight and not Flurry Heart? Flurry makes much more sense as a pony version of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
I was wondering if I should do anything, kaaping or income, abut a book I picked up from my old school library, First edition 1928 book or so about Science YEsterday, Today And tomorrow where theyre going on about the immense energy released from the nucleus of atoms breaking apart, and how much power it could be for good, or heaven forbid, the worse was to occur instead.
5743067
And honestly, the "aged like milk" moment is as much about Chernobyl as it is Hiroshima.
5743049
Oh yeah, the Princess of Explosions would make a lot of sense.
5743049
Do I now need to write a story where Flurry Heart mathematically predicts the existence of blacks holes?
5743256
Black holes? I would have expected an answer like "Do I now need to write a story where Flurry Heart explains a nuclear chain reaction?". What do black holes and nuclear explosions have in common? Maybe I missed something during the movie.....
And wasn't it Albert Einstein who mathematically predicted the existence of black holes? Or is my brain mixing up random historical facts absorbed many years ago?
5743266
Sorry, didn't really explain that. Black holes were Oppenheimer's big contribution to theoretical physics before he joined the Manhattan project. The link is black holes are neutron stars, which are really big nuclei.
5743347
So..... Black holes are basically gigantic neutrons. Terrifying. That makes me wonder if they could be used as massive weapons at a cosmic level that can blow up entire planets and galaxies. Maybe that weapon from the old "Star Wars" movies wasn't so wrong..... Maybe atomic bombs aren't the end of humanity's capability to develop ever more destructive weapons.
I watched that video and now I also understand what Oppenheimer meant when he said that the nuclear chain reaction in an atomic bomb could, theoretically, continue forever and dissolve the entire planet. He was more literal than I thought when he called himself the "Destroyer of Worlds".
I'm still waiting for someone to use the Barbenheimer crossover to write a 600,000-word post-apocalyptic Barbie story. Describe how the radiation has hardened her plastic shell to unlock the lifting of heavier loads at the expense of making her brittle to vibrations.
5743347
I know that you are the Physicist, but blackholes are neutronstars under neither relativity nor that untestable stringtheory:
Under relativity, everything in a blackhole gets crushed to a singularity. Under stringtheory, just under the eventhorizon, blackholes are all of the strings they ate, thus solving the blackholeinformationparadox, with Hakingradiation being strings leaking back into the universe,thus taking the information with them back into the greater universe. Many blackholes start as collapsing neiutronstars but are not neutronstars anymore.
Neutronstars are indeed big nuclei.
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If anyone had the power to create and control a black hole as a weapon, they would probably already know how to destoy planets.
The idea that an atomic bomb could ignite nuclear fusion in the atmosphere seems crazy these days now we know how hard it is to sustain fusion reactions in the laboratory, but you can imagine how, for a short period in the 1930s, it seemed like a real potent risk.
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I'll leave that for someone else to write. 600,000-word post-apocalyptic fics are not really my thing.
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Oppenheimer went as far as showing that a neutron star can contract to the point where it is smaller than its event horizon - so becomes a black hole. What happens next is where theoretical physics merges with fairy tales. Since no light can escape, there is no direct observational evidence to test any theories.
5743486
One of the things I do not like about stringtheory is that it is untestable; it could be a fairytale. As for the neutrons, ¿would not they form a quark/gluon-plasma as the neutronstar collapses?
All analogies are wrong, but some are useful:
Particle/wave-duality is so problematic that some physicists came up with pilotwaves where particles are always real with real waves guiding them. Perhaps a better analogy is just waves traveling through the quantumfields, but if the waves are large enough, the have breaking crests we perceive as particles. This is a simpler analogy and has the explanatory value of particle/wave-duality without the magical switching between waves and particles. Switching to just waves on the quantumfields would angerpilotwavetheorists because it would imply that they wasted decades of their livesworking out how waves guide particles, only to discover that the particles do not really exist.
5743486
True, but doesn't mean it couldn't happen. That someone could use a black hole as is just makes them feel even more dangerous, actually.
On the other hoof, if someone were able to move a black hole to an undesired planet (or create one there), there might still be some time to prevent the destruction. But an explosion is instantaneous. If someone could use a black hole the way a neutron is being used in the chain reaction of a nuclear explosion, but at a cosmic scale, there would be nothing that can stop it.
5743534 I think Perry Rhodan did it best, and first. I mean if there was a planet to be destroyed in that series, they'd find a new and interesting way of blowing it up.