Abhijit Chavda Breaks Down Robert J. Oppenheimer, Nuclear Power Race for BeerBiceps | TRS 328

if I can remember correctly the first ever UFO crash or whatever was in as far as I remember was 1947 Roswell New Mexico in which a flying saucer or some some UFO of some kind was said to have crashed initially it came out in the news news media and the newspapers that it was a crashed UFO but then they changed the story to a weather balloon that crashed and that sort of thing now I don't know what is true what is not not too many people had even heard about Oppenheimer until this Nolan movie what is Albert Einstein's role in like World War Two then Einstein had essentially no role on that theory the theoretical groundwork that it did in developing the science of quantum mechanics that is what led to the eventual technology that was that was developed for the Manhattan Project so without the understanding of quantum mechanics that he gave us they would not have been able to eventually engineer use that to engineer a nuclear bomb and to engineer nuclear reactors okay yeah so that was his role he was a theoretician he was not an experimentalist he was not an engineer a pure theoretician openheimer hype and myself hadn't watched the movie at the time of recording what I will say about this episode is that it's a slightly geopolitical narrative on the field of science at that time it's a slightly behind the scenes version of oppenheimer's life whether or not you have seen the movie you will find a lot of value in this episode and we also went slightly tangential spoke about aliens a little bit spoke about science a little bit spoke about the future a little bit and tried understanding nuclear warfare in much greater detail it's a heavy scientific geopolitical episode that's a breakdown of Christopher Nolan's new film Oppenheimer enjoy today's episode with the legend abhiji chavra thank you [Music] this is for all the people in the house who haven't seen Oppenheimer yet just like us welcome back thank you so much always wonderful to talk to you likewise sir why have we both not seen Oppenheimer well I've been very busy traveling and doing things I it's something I really want to watch it's on my bucket list and it's something I would like to see soon what I've heard is that there's a lot of geopolitical narratives within the movie they have shown a bit of a court case uh and I'm sure knowing Nolan I've not seen the movie I'm 100 sure there's a scene of the atom bomb actually going off is there there is right okay so um this podcast is both for the people who haven't watched Oppenheimer and for the people who watched it but are more podcasting more raw form of it uh so do you think that the right point to start this Oppenheimer story is actually to start with the origin story of Einstein uh yeah the origin story of the entire thing is the birth of quantum mechanics that's where all this starts I mean the atom bomb was was developed because of the advances that we made in the first half of the 20th century which is the birth of quantum mechanics which is down to Einstein uh it it did not start with Einstein it started with Max Planck it started with uh Marie Curie and uh some other scientists who first discovered a few things and then Einstein took those discoveries which were so perplexing and he throw shown some light on that and explained why these phenomena occur so that's how it was born maybe then we should begin slightly before quantum mechanics okay in order to just understand what quantum mechanics is in the first place okay let's do that so until the 19th century people believe that everything that should be discovered or could be discovered had been discovered and whatever new discoveries would be made would be at uh you know the degrees of decimal points so 0.001 change or something like that so that's what people mostly believed and then there was this new discovery or new invention which was the light bulb so the light bulb has a filament inside right that yellow glowing filament and there was a very brand new technology at the time and various scientists were wondering how to perfect that and one of the main questions in that was that if we take a light filler a metallic filament in vacuum and we heat it why does it Glow with a certain color at a certain temperature okay that was the big mystery that nobody understood as in at different temperatures it would be green red blue Etc yes that's right so why does that happen and nobody had any idea why and then there was a discovery of radiation which I believe happened at the very end of the 19th century which is that certain substances certain certain elements are naturally unstable and they radiate certain weird things at a constant rate so these were new discoveries that nobody could understand and nobody had any idea why these things why these properties existed so that was the impetus for the birth of quantum mechanics and it was I think Max Planck in 1900 who came up with an equation with with the Planck constant H which said that uh atoms have been uh you know light behaves in a certain way and that essentially was the birth of quantum mechanics there was a birth of the quantum so H the the plan constant was the an integral part of that and then in 1905 Einstein actually threw light on that as to why it is like this and so so 1905 is called Einstein's mirabilis the miracle year in which he published five groundbreaking papers I think it was five most likely five papers which threw light on very different topics but that was essentially uh where we started understanding what quantum mechanics is what is the meaning of the word Quantum what is the meaning of the word mechanics so mechanics mechanics means how things work the mechanics Dynamic Statics all of that so let's say if I throw a pebble uh front of me why does it go in a parabolic Arc so that's Newton's Laws that's the mechanics of the fall of the of projectile motion so quantum mechanics is about how atoms behave and how the subatomic particles in the quantum world in the ultra microscopic World behave so that's what it is now uh the quantum is the leaps that of electrons make within an atom so for example you take the hydrogen atom it's just one proton at the center which is the nucleus and one electron that goes around it now why doesn't why why if if an electron goes around the the nucleus then why doesn't it decay I mean it's it's orbital Decay because of the laws of electromagnetism which say that a moving charge is going to radiate uh radiation it's going to give off radiation and therefore its orbital decay and it should crash into the nucleus orbit should Decay as and it will lose energy yeah it will lose energy car running out of petrol almost kind of like that and then and the orbit should become smaller and smaller eventually it should crash into the nucleus but that doesn't happen why is that so then Max plan came up with a new uh understanding of the world that only certain orbits are allowed and if as long as the electron is in that orbit it will not Decay ever so these are called Quantum jumps each orbit is a certain Quantum state so that's where the word Quantum comes from so one n equal to one two three these are the various different orbits that the the electron can have and these the the principal quantum number n is is where the where the word Quantum comes from okay how does this thought lead to the destruction of Hiroshima Nagasaki yeah that's where it all begins but then yeah so initially we knew that we have atoms but what was the structure of the atom no one knew then the I don't know what the exact chronology is in which year what happened but then we discovered that the atom is mostly empty space but there's a nucleus at the center so that was one thing that was discovered then the electron was discovered and then it was discovered that atom the the nucleus of an atom contains protons and neutrons I think the proton was first discovered then eventually the neutron was discovered the neutrons are neutrally charged particles they don't they don't have any charge protons are positively charged electrons are negatively charged like charges repel each other opposite charges attract these are the basic laws uh so so that's how it happened so this is the beginning of quantum mechanics we understood what the nature of the atom is and then they discovered that certain elements I think it was discovered in the late 19th century with certain elements are radioactive they give up some kinds of some kind of radiation now what that is was not understood but I think it was in the 19 late 1920s or early 1930s after the discovery of the neutron that it was discovered that certain um certain elements in the periodic table Decay at a given rate because and and they emit uh certain particles called alpha particles which are helium nuclei so so there are four different kinds of radiation uh alpha particles then beta particles which are electrons then there is gamma radiation and there are neutrons so this was eventually discovered over time and then it was a German scientist I believe who who came across the idea that if a neutron can hit an atomic nucleus and break it up and if the if the breaking of the atomic nucleus also releases more neutrons then if you have sufficient quantity of that substance this Neutron will start hitting the atoms one after the other it's gonna cause a chain reaction which will give off more and more neutrons and that could give off an enormous amount of energy so that was the first time the idea of a nuclear reaction I mean explosion was thought about in the early 1930s this was a German scientist if I am not mistaken and then at this time there was this geopolitical angle that Adolf Hitler was was coming to power the Nazi party Germany had been deeply humiliated at the end of the first world war the nation was destroyed and the economy was destroyed and then the Nazi party comes to power Hitler's thoughts rebuilding the economy and he wants to rebuild Germany's pride and regain its lost Prestige and territories and all that and this was a very dangerous time Hitler was seen as a very evil person obviously he was evil we can deny that so he was very evil oh we need to put that on the record yes we both we both think he was evil yes absolutely and now we'll move on with the conversation because we're all about learning and correcting the past slightly right because at the end of the day we are experimenters researchers uh questioners and that pass clip was just a form of understanding the truth better we've understood the truth he was Satan in human form absolutely no denying that let's go answer so this guy the German scientist whose name I don't remember right now he came up with this idea that the release of neutrons could give rise to a chain reaction which could give off an enormous amount of energy from a small amount of matter or radioactive element so this I think this idea I think he patented that and then he sold the patent if I'm not mistaken to the British government and he eventually there's this guy called J robot Oppenheimer who was an ex whose theoretical physicist uh he was in some University in the U.S and he came upon upon this idea uh and he initially rejected it and he was of the opinion it can't happen but I think one of his students announced the one of his students discovered that German scientists had actually made this happen with uranium uranium-238 I believe it was there are there are two different isotopes of uranium 235 and 238 mainly so I think German scientists were the first to do this they used neutrons to break apart a uranium atom and that released more neutrons so that is something that will definitely give you a chain reaction if you know how to make it happen so that news came out and then Oppenheimer and his student they tried it out and they discovered that it actually works and then you had the birth of the atom bomb project because the Germans had already taken a lead they had already done this experiment before the Americans and anybody else so then the US government got involved in this let's rewind a little bit to understand this better yeah in the 2020s where we are right now would an equivalent technology we General artificial intelligence or something like AI is just taking off in the world spoken about it enough on the podcast um what would be their 2023 equivalent of such a scientific scenario when everyone knows that oh man we're sitting on something so did the whole world know about nuclear power like that it's a new scientific phenomenon or was it kind of Under Wraps it was deeply secret it was kept very Secret Under Wraps because there was like a revolutionary groundbreaking technology today if you were to think of something like that I would think of tabletop nuclear fusion so right now we haven't achieved nuclear fusion on planet Earth unless it's in a nuclear explosion a nuclear explosion is uncontrolled Fusion I'm talking about the thermonuclear reaction the hydrogen bomb but we haven't been able to achieve sustained and controlled nuclear fusion ever so the atom bombs that were used in World War II were based on nuclear fission fission where it's exactly what you explained you throw an a neutron at a nucleus and then it splits up that's what fission is yes Fusion is what Fusion is when you so fission is when you split an atom when you split a nucleus Fusion is when you take two different nuclei maybe of hydrogen or deuterium or tritium and you squash them together so hard that they're gonna fuse together and give rise to a new element and that gives off an enormous amount of energy more energy than fission would give you so that's nuclear fusion enough to destroy our planet or not enough to destroy a planet but well if you have sufficient quantity of fusionable material then you may be able to do that see every time you look at the sun you witness a nuclear fusion the soil is a fusion reaction going on in real time and that's what keeps us alive so it's an enormous amount of energy that gives it gives out so a nuclear fusion is the opposite of fission but it gives off more energy and it doesn't have any any radioactive byproducts as such compared to nuclear fission I believe the problem with nuclear fusion is that we as humans have not figured out how to control it that's right that's why people are not delving into nuclear fusion Technologies oh they're trying just figuring that yeah so it takes an enormous amount of energy to just just to squash two nuclei together okay a huge amount of energy but then the output is way more than you you initially put into it but it's very hard to to to control that amount of energy and to squeeze nuclear together little science fiction question if we are able to control nuclear fusion what are the applications of it in terms of real world Technologies spaceships or first of all you could get almost unlimited uh Electric Power okay because you need a very little amount of of material to to undergo fusion to give off a huge amount of energy for example on the surface of the Moon you have the moon's soil the regolith which contains an abundance of uh certain isotope of helium called helium helium mod 5. one of the Isotopes of helium so this isotope of helium is an extremely good potential fuel for future nuclear fusion reactors and about a kilo of that would be enough to sustain a whole city for a year or so I mean I'm just giving you a rough ballpark figure but that's the kind of thing it is so it would give you essentially unlimited energy if you use it in a good way but of course you can create a more wondrous weapons with that and you could even power spaceships indefinitely you could power submarines even indefinitely if you have that uh so yeah the applications of such a technology would be essentially endless it could help you maybe reach outer space beyond uh maybe beyond the solar system if you want a power source that will sustain you for a century maybe that's that's what you want so that sort of thing so the nuclear fusion if you can control it that would be the kind of Quantum Leap of technology that we would have today which would be comparable to what they had in the 1930s uh 1940s with the nuclear fission do you think China or America and or America actually figure out nuclear fusion the Chinese yes yes the Chinese are working on something called an artificial sun so that's a nuclear fusion uh they're testing nuclear fusion technology they haven't yet achieved diffusion uh it's it's something called a some form of a Toka Mac which is a toroidal thing in which you have magnetic confinement you have a plasma inside a machine in vacuum and the plasma is in extremely hot form of matter extraordinarily hot form of matter but it's confined within a certain region with the through magnetic fields so that's what the Chinese are working on and the Americans also have certain certain such projects and I believe there's such a technology being tried out in Europe as well and somewhere or the other I think they have got more energy output than the input into it so I think we are on the cusp of maybe making this work in the next few years possibly uh very tiny stray away from Oppenheimer uh have you been following this whole America talking about UFOs thing or have I have uh for the sake of TRS clips and the sake of the audience which wants to hear this from you it's Tuesday today right I believe yes this episode is getting released on Friday okay so this whole American alien UFO thing has happened two or three days ago uh let's talk a little bit about that just to understand the magnitude of what the world's governments are actually capable of hiding so the Americans they recently had this disclosure uh thing or whatever in which various uh former U.S government officials came out in public and went on record saying that they have uh recovered alien artifacts and certain biologics non-human biologics so that's the term they used uh so thus far I think it and they they gave this a sworn testimony so if they have been lying it means they perjured themselves and they will be liable for punishment of some kind or the other so they have given this sworn testimony that the US government is in possession of alien uh technology alien artifacts and non-human biologics or whatever that is what does that mean non-human biologics so that's that's a point of contention non-human biologics from a lay person's perspective would mean that alien bodies bodies of alien individuals but from a scientific perspective it can also mean grass or it could mean a mushroom it could mean a cat or a pigeon or anything so there you was the vague term which could mean a lot of things so it's not really specific and they've made the claim that they the US government has alien artifacts now this is once again from my perspective it's words we haven't seen any actual evidence of this I mean there are lots of UFO side sightings and videos and the US government is also the U.S military has also released videos of the Tic Tac UFO and and certain other things but all I can see is some grainy footage black and white footage and and words testimony but show us an actual artifact show us a high quality video I mean everyone has that everybody has good cameras and all nowadays show us high quality video of this and then make full disclosure so as far as I'm concerned I am still not 100 convinced all I have seen is words uh so I am still a very skeptical person I still am I want to believe I want to believe but I am unable to believe thus far because they have not shown any real hard evidence okay um what about the first two where they said alien artifacts and UFOs alien artifacts and biologics that's it two things if two things as far as I remember there they've spoken about alien artifacts is very likely some sort of Weaponry or equipment or a crashed UFO or something like that you know crashed craft spacecraft that's what it sounds like alien artifacts I mean what else could it be okay yeah so a UFO that's come from another galaxy it's traveled across space crashes on Earth's body like after traveling through space crashes on Earth's ground yeah how does something crash on Earth in the first place let's travel through space yeah I mean to travel to crash onto the Earth you need to first of all get into Earth's orbit and then descend through the atmosphere and then make contact with the ground so if you have the technology that will allow you to go across star systems and maybe even troubles galaxies I don't think it would be very hard for you to go and land on a planet so why would you crash first of all so yeah it doesn't make sense to me but uh that's what they claim or it was friendly aliens and the American Air Force or some air force would have shorted down I'm sure they have the if they can travel across galaxies or Star systems they can defend themselves against a puny little missile that comes from Human technology I mean the technology they would have would be orders of magnitude beyond what we have it would be technology we can't even imagine that would look like magic to us so it doesn't really make sense to me that the US government would be able to shoot something down you know have they claimed something like uh it's been with them since 10 decades that's the rumor making the rounds uh yeah the first ever if I can remember correctly the first ever UFO crash or whatever was in as far as I remember was 1947 Roswell New Mexico in which a flying saucer or some some UFO of some kind was said to have crashed uh initially it came out in the news news media and the newspapers that it was a crashed UFO but then they changed the story to a weather balloon that crashed and that sort of thing now I don't know what is true what is not but I if the first uh artifacts that they recovered if they were in 1947 that's at least 75 or so years before today that's like three quarters of a century if that's the case why now why are they talking about it now well that's a question why are they trying to uh make disclosure now given the fact that if they actually have this uh evidence then they've been conceding it for decades why are they revealing this now and that's a question that I am unable to answer is this a distraction are they trying to distract the world's attention from something else that's happening somewhere else I mean it's come out in the news um in the recent times that whenever there was a coup attempt somewhere or something they would release plant stories of UFOs and flying saucers in the media to divert The public's attention from something that's really important something that's happening in the US government was involved in that so uh it's it's often a diversionary tactic to release certain public interest stories that will grab the public imagination to divert attention away from something else but I'm only speculating I don't really know why they are disclosing this now is there a coup happening anywhere oh there's a coup happening right now as we speak it's in Africa it's in which country it's in Niger I think the coup has already happened okay the French have been evicted from there and Mr Putin and the Wagner company are involved in this in the fra in the French are very unhappy and there could be a counter coup which what could happen soon in the next hours or days who knows really yes obviously because of America uh the French the French so in Western Africa it's they typically been the French who have dominated the region uh they still actually are the colonizers by proxy of this region in this country in Asia the coup has been to uh to free this country from French domination so then the French are unhappy because Indonesia is a big producer of uranium the topic of our overall topic of our this this conversation today uranium is what you know gives you nuclear power and the significant amount of French electricity is generated from nuclear power maybe more than 60 percent so they need uranium Amnesia is a major producer of uranium and now they have evicted all the French soldiers from their territory which means France has lost control of the uranium mines in this country and that's not a good thing for them if lost control to Russia ah yes yes Russia is involved in this uh the Wagner group Mr pregosian's uh you know paramilitary force is most likely uh present on the soil of this nation and they could help the government the new government the coup regime to to prevent a counter coup or something so there's a lot going on over there right now very tiny update on Russia Ukraine is uh right now the war is very slow right now uh Russia is in control of roughly a fifth of the country the donbass region and whatever uh whatever counter offense of the ukrainians have tried have all the counter offensives have have unfortunately for from their perspective failed very badly uh eventually it may it looks like Ukraine may break up and Poland may be a new entrant into this into this war and they may gobble up whatever is left of Ukraine Incorporated that into polish territory Belarus may get involved uh on the side of Russia so there's a whole lot happening there as well this may get involved is because the leaders of those countries have come out and shown support yes Belarus essentially is a Russian vasal it's it's a Russian client State um uh lukashenko that that president is a great uh Ally and supporter of Mr Putin and the Wagner group is has a presence right now in Belarus and Russia has also transferred tactical nuclear weapons onto Belarus territory which tells you that Belarus is fully informally under Russian control this war happening this coup happening is it normal or are we seeing a cycle repeat itself and I ask you once again because we've used this title on so many thumbnails is this the start of a bit of a World War and I say that very cautiously well the good question you know the situation kind of reminds me of the days of the early 1910s right before the first world war started you know there were all there was this absolute geopolitical mess at the time lots of countries were trying to regain lost territory and loss of all various alliances were forming and counter alliances were being formed similar to what we are seeing right now so there is a mess in in Ukraine in Eastern Europe uh Poland might get may get involved uh Europe is being the industrialized essentially by starving heat of energy so all the uh Industries are are not doing well Europe is going into recession Germany he has officially entered recession there's a mess in Africa so much is happening so and there's a there's a whole different angle in Asia as well there is the pi one angle there's the India China angle the Pakistan nuisance is always there North Korea is there the Russia Japan angle there's a whole lot happening the world is kind of in very rapid motion now geopolitically and a lot could change in the next couple of years who knows and possibly nuclear fusion has been invented somewhere uh possibly we may have overcome the Threshold at which you get get more energy output than your inputting into it but uh using that uh in a sustained controlled manner may take at least a decade perhaps more so it's not something you can start using right away equivalent of early 1930s a little bit as well equivalent of the beginning of the Manhattan Project perhaps which is the early 1940s so that's when the U.S understood the potential of uranium and they decided that we need to get this technology in our hands before the Germans develop it so that was the beginning of the Manhattan Project which was overseen by Oppenheimer which began by talking about Oppenheimer but the reason of bringing up all this is because the greatest lesson in history is that history repeats itself it is yes so it's very important to understand history as well as what's happening in your present times otherwise there's no point in studying the present times or in studying history if you don't understand that they're linked which is why I'll probably take the narrative back to the 1930s why was a whole movie made on Professor Oppenheimer so he is an extremely pivotal figure he well fairly or unfairly he's regarded as the father of the atomic bomb and he is regarded as the father of atomic power in atomic energy as well so he oversaw the Manhattan Project which was in essentially an emergency project that the Americans cobbled together they brought together the world's best scientists the best theoretical physicists the best chemists the best engineers and also the American armed forces the military put all these people together and the mission was to assemble a nuclear reactor and create a nuclear bomb ASAP as soon as possible and the pressure was that the Germans could do it before us and you don't want nukes in Germans Germany's hands you don't want nukes in Adolf Hitler's hands there was a whole thing so uh they and by that time it was known that uranium undergoes fission you can use a neutron you can shoot a neutron at a uranium nucleus and it will break up it will give off give off more neutrons and that is something that will start a chain reaction if you know how to engineer that so the question was how do you engineer atoms how do you get a neutron to to strike an atomic nucleus and then to engineer the rest of the Chain Reaction process so uh so then what they did was yeah Congo so Congo there were three or four places at the time where you had uranium mines one was Canada one was Czechoslovakia one was Congo and one was somewhere else maybe California or something so the Americans persuaded the belgians who held to Congo at the time to reopen the uranium mines over there and they did that they were obviously paid for it and several thousand tons of uranium over were shipped to the US I think a thousand and a half tons or so were shipped to the US now this uranium over is all dust and rocks and some uranium it has to be purified then when you purify uranium you get uranium-238 so when you get a brick or or let's say a kilogram of uranium metal out of it 99.5 three percent of that is going to be uranium 238 and only 0.7 percent is going to be random 235 but the the isotope you want is 235 so that's really hard to procure so you've got to invent means to purify the uranium and to extract the uranium-235 out of it so they had to devise the mass spectroscopy and various other ways uh you know they would make they would create this uranium hexafluoride gas and then use certain techniques to to you know take out the uranium-235 so that was a very long procedure a lot of engineering prowess went into that but eventually they were able to start purifying uranium enrich uranium to uranium-235 to about 90 Purity which is weapons grade uranium so all this was overseen by J Robert Oppenheimer who was a theoretical physicist not an experimentalist but they the U.S army military I think they regarded him as a genius and he actually did the job so a whole bunch of the world's best physicists chemists all of them Enrico Fermi uh Richard Fineman and a whole host of other other scientists they all came together and by 1944 or 1945 they had enough uranium to put together uh you know the first rudimentary nuclear bomb so they assembled one bomb in which you the the fissile material was uranium and one bomb in which the fissile material was plutonium and the first test was done in in New Mexico somewhere in 1945 I think it was in July it was a plutonium bomb and it worked that's called the Trinity test so that is the culmination of the Manhattan Project they had two more bombs that they had they had constructed by the time one uranium one plutonium these were shipped off to Japan and in August one was dropped on Hiroshima and a few days later the next was dropped on Nagasaki and they had more bombs in the pipeline but the they chose not to use those and by I think October or November that year the Japanese surrendered so that is how the nuclear weapons technology was was born and J Robert Oppenheimer was the father is regarded as the father of this technology so during times of worldwide conflict do the scientists in these developed Nations become an extended wing of the army yes if you coped them into the into the military effort definitely because the only way to to overcome your enemy is to have better technology to just make the audiences understand this better the hypothetical Indian scenario is that if India enters a war with anybody tomorrow there's going to be a call from the pmo to ISRO and they're going to tell ISRO listen stop whatever you're doing and start working on some technologies that will assist us in this war am I right in thinking this way or definitely yes so the call would go out not just not just to ISRO it would go out to BARC it would go out to every other Institute where you have high quality scientists and the objective would be to give us the technological Edge whatever the Chinese or whoever has we need something better than that we need the technological Edge it's always technology that gives you the results in in war decide with the better technology wins because technology is a force multiplier speaking about technology whenever it was tech for World War II growing up we only heard about Albert Einstein not too many people had even heard about Oppenheimer until this Nolan movie uh what is Albert Einstein's role in like World War II then uh Einstein has essentially no role on that uh the theory the theoretical groundwork that it did in developing the science of quantum mechanics that is what led to the eventual technology that was that was developed for the Manhattan Project so without the understanding of quantum mechanics that he gave us we would not have been able to eventually engineer use that to engineer a nuclear bomb and to engineer nuclear reactors okay yeah so that was his role he was a theoretician he was not an experimentalist he was not an engineer a pure theoretician okay now let's speak about Oppenheimer so say he was recruited by the American government and they told him that listen we're at War you're one of the best scientists in the world you need to help us with the technological Edge therefore we're giving you this project where you have to further the understanding of nuclear technology is that the likely narrative that was given by the American government to him or did they tell him listen at some point we're going to have to drop atom bombs on our enemies because they'll drop it on us first what was the narrative given to him the narrative was that the Germans have already achieved nuclear fission and they will definitely be working on a nuclear bomb project so we need the bomb before them that was a narrative so get together the best scientist that you know of put assemble together and assemble them together in a team we're gonna give you the assistant of the US Army the military they will give you whatever you need you get together with with German with General whoever is I forget the name of the guy and you assemble a team a crack team together you will get whatever funds you want get this done there was the uh brief given to him okay I believe the movie is about a court case that happens post World War II right am I right so uh what was the court case then so Oppenheimer was a very interesting person he had a certain political ideology ideologically he was left cleaning he had associations with the Communist Party of the United States and I believe his wife was a member of the Communist party maybe he even his brother uh so that was a deal but he was a patriot and he worked for the US and he developed this entire project he made it happen uh but uh you see when you were all the scientists who were working all the physicists the engineers Etc who were working on the Manhattan Project they were all spied upon by the FBI and because you know there was always the possibility of somebody leaking information to the enemy when it actually happened eventually a few names came out uh there was a german-born physicist who was passing on uh Manhattan project information to the Soviets yeah and that came out later on so at that time they did not realize it but there was this intense surveillance on each and every person there was a proper file and dossier created for every person all their whereabouts were known they would be tail they would be surveilled there was no privacy whether they knew it or not that sort of thing okay so after everything was done after the One World War II uh there was this this intense period of what they call McCarthyism in the U.S in which uh communism was declared to be an Un-American ideology an enemy ideology because it was the ussr's ideology and the US government went after anybody who was suspected to of having any sympathy for communism and this guy Oppenheimer was like he had a very clear communist leanings his family members were involved in this so they revoked his security clearances they kind of uh disgraced him uh there was a Witch Hunt against him and it was kind of humiliation for him and he faced a lot of hardships he had to come and testify against a in front of various committees and prove his innocence and even though he was never found guilty of any kind of wrongdoing but he was tarnished because of his communist Association and I believe there must have been court cases and all that against him so like he was demonized and there was this terrible Witch Hunt against him and he became very bitter and unhappy naturally because of that so he was going through hell in America post World War oh definitely he was going through hell because all of his uh I believe many of his colleagues must have distanced themselves from him canceled him so to say that sort of thing he was essentially was canceled you know very publicly it was a humiliation and all that so yeah it was a very bad time for him it was obviously if you see his uh interviews in later times when he is a much older person you can see the bitterness and the sadness in his face you know that sort of thing so yeah they created it treated him very badly a genuinely American hero and he was not a guy who wanted to kill people with nuclear bombs he was doing it because he was ordered to do it and he always had a lot of regret for what happened I mean the number of people that were killed in Hiroshima key it was very very uh he felt a lot of guilt for that you know he was one could say a Hindu possibly because you know he was a Sanskrit scholar he had translated the bhagavad-gita from Sanskrit to English himself from the original Sanskrit and he would quote uh passages from the bhagavad-gita and all that so yeah so when it came to building the atomic bomb and you know unleashing this terrible power he reminded himself of what Lord Krishna told Arjun that just do your duty don't worry about the consequences you know that sort of thing but also urge my editing team to play that voice clip of his which has now become famous yeah here we go king of the world would not be the same two people laughed few people cried most people were silent I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture of the bhagavad-gita Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says now I am become deaf the destroyer of worlds I suppose we all thought that one way or another what made him say that I have become death the Destroyer worlds uh there are so many remarkable passages in the bhagavad-gita but I think this one came to him immediately when he saw the the incredible Brilliance and the shattering blinding brightness of of the new of the first nuclear explosion the Trinity explosion which Shone brighter than the sun the nuclear test took place I think around 5 20 or 5 30 in the morning in the pre-dawn time before the sun rises and this nuclear flash it it Shone brighter than the sun can never shine it illuminated all the hills around the place like you would never imagine it and for some reason that worse came to his mind and that's why he is so closely associated with that particular passage of the bhagavad-gita also from a human empathy perspective this human being has given a significant portion of his prior decades to furthering nuclear technology maybe someone is Hardy knew not someone that he obviously knew that this is going to turn into a bomb at that point but maybe he was so into his work and furthering his understanding of science due to his love for science he just kept going forward and then somewhere along the lines he realized oh man I've given so much of my time to something that has actually caused this much suffering in the world right definitely the guilt was there but it also Advanced you see obviously the atomic bomb was is a terrible thing it ended World War II but it set off the Cold War and it set up the situation that we have today where so many nuclear weapons are pointed at various Nations so that's something that uh is something that his work triggered off right but it also led to lots of advances in nuclear technology nuclear medicine which is used to diagnose and cure cancer it gave us nuclear power which is actually a very clean form of power so all of this was done all of these all of these advances in technology and science happened because of him technology is always a double-edged sword you can use it for good or for bad it's up to the person who wields the technology right so as a scientist he did his duty his country called upon him they said you we need you to do this he did his duty and he produced the goods but then over time he saw how it was used and that left a lot of bitterness in him so I think we're almost at the end of this episode um the only question my teammates have actually sent to me in order to get more insight on through you is this whole angle of nuclear fusion that was spoken about in the movie I believe there's a scene where someone tells Oppenheimer that hey if we actually go for nuclear fusion it might be an even bigger explosion that we'll be able to create but there's a 0.1 chance that the Earth can get destroyed um it's been a long time since World War II and say if there is another worldwide conflict who's to say that someone won't be stupid enough to use a nuclear weapon somewhere so this is a two prong question one I would love to understand the science and geopolitics of this scene where they speak about nuclear fusion and two do you think human beings are stupid enough to actually use nuclear weapons in a big way again right right so the nuclear fusion angle was that uh there was a very small possibility I'm not sure who came up with this I've not seen the movie but uh there was a small possibility a tiny possibility that the first nuclear explosion or any nuclear explosion because of the incredibly high temperatures would cause the hydro there's a very little amount of hydrogen in our atmosphere very little it could possibly cause the hydrogen to fuse together and give off a huge amount of energy which would trigger off more Fusion reactions it could possibly even dissociate the the water molecules in the in the atmosphere into oxygen and uh hydrogen and cause those hydrogen atoms to start fusing and that could trigger off a global planet-wide fusion reaction of all the hydrogen there's also a possibility that the nitrogen itself might start burning up in the atmosphere so the overall possibility even though it was very small was that the entire atmosphere might burn up that's what was the feared and uh various physicists calculated the probability of this happening and they said it was negligible it won't happen but Oppenheimer was kind of concerned about this right so this is the the fusion angle that there was a small possibility that the entire atmosphere would burn up and this this test of the nuclear weapon could end up destroying the interpret so that is the first thing now secondly that same calculation of hydrogen fusing together gave rise to the possibility in P in scientists Minds that there could be a different kind of weapon that we could create which would use the initial fission reaction to trigger off a secondary fusion reaction of various hydrogen Isotopes like deuterium and tritium and that is something that eventually gave rise to the hydrogen bomb or the thermonuclear bomb which is essentially a three-stage explosion there is an initial conventional explosive explosion that causes the the two hemispheres or whatever of uranium or plutonium to come together which gives off the chain reaction that sets off the fusion of the fission reaction and this fission reaction would cause a secondary or tertiary fusion reaction which would give off incredible amounts of energy I think it was in 1950s some 52 or something that the first Hydrogen Bomb was tested and the first uh fission bomb the Trinity bomb was it gave a yield of I don't know how many kilotons maybe 20 kilo tons of TNT the first Hydrogen Bomb the IV mic explosion gave an output of maybe 10 megatons of TNT like a thousand times more now that sort of thing so that's what Fusion is and eventually the the Soviets in the 1960s or something tested the Tsar Bomba which is the largest explosion ever manufactured which is about 50 megatons of TNT they actually wanted 100 mechan explosion but they could not engineer it properly but I'm sure they can do it today so so that's the fusion thing that's a fusion angle the hydrogen bomb angle let's paint a present scenario um maybe a tertiary question is also explain what nuclear winter means oh that's a frightful Prospect okay uh you also asked me whether anybody is crazy enough to start off a nuclear war I hope nobody is I hope nobody is crazy enough to do that I'm sure that uh people have sane minds and nobody is going to press the red button but who knows even North Koreans I don't think the North Korean leader is crazy I don't think Mr Kim is a Madman even though he's painted as such he's kind of eccentric and also it's easier to paint him like that I don't think he would do that I hope I hope he doesn't do that uh so see we went to the Cold War and no such thing happened we came close a couple of times but sane Minds overall prevailed so today I think we are in a slightly better situation and there's not any urgency to press the red button so I think it it I I genuinely hope and pray it doesn't happen now what's nuclear winter okay so this to understand that we have to consider the scenario in which somebody is crazy enough to press the button so let's say somebody is crazy enough to press the red button and someone let's say from Russia okay let's let's consider the hypothetical case of Russia somebody in Russia some military commander for some reason presses the red button shoots off a ballistic missile towards the U.S the U.S has automatic systems that will detect a ballistic missile launch and they will calculate very rapidly that the trajectory brings it on U.S territory it is inevitable that you have to respond before the missile hits you so they're gonna set off a bunch of launches to retaliate once the so once the Russians see that a bunch of missiles is coming towards them they're gonna send some more and within maybe minutes you're gonna have hundreds of missiles being launched at each other ballistic missiles typically take about 30 minutes cruise missiles they might take hours but and and we have anti-ballistic missile defenses and countermeasures and all that let's say they take care of 50 of the missiles but we have thousands of missiles and nuclear warheads on the planet So eventually in this unfortunate hypothetical scenario Messiah the WarHeads will start hitting the U.S and Russia they will not only hit uh the major cities they will hit all the military sites and the Russians know that according to Nato uh protocol or according to the NATO treaty if the U.S is hit with a nuclear strike its NATO allies are obligated obliged to retaliate which means that France and Britain are also targets which means they will also take out France in Britain it's going to be catastrophe so then what happens you have thousands of nuclear explosions in Europe on on U.S soil hopefully not in Asia but it doesn't make any difference what happens is that once this nuclear explosions start going off they're going to vaporize entire patches of ground create big craters and all that vaporized matter material is going to go high up into that machine because it's incredibly hot there's going to be a lot of burning of cities and forests and trees and what not organic material which is going to give off a huge amount of carbon which will go up into the atmosphere is soot and after a few hours you're gonna have the an entire planet-wide covering of carbon soot high up in the atmosphere which is gonna block out the sunlight and this situation will persist for months or maybe years depending on how many nuclear warheads have gone off so even though most people won't die of nuclear contamination radiation or radiation sickness poisoning all that what will happen is in the northern hemisphere at the higher latitudes even at medium latitudes there's no there's going to be a freezing temperatures which will prevail for days weeks maybe months or even years uh various calculations show that it could kill off about 90 or to 99 of humanity people in the equatorial regions May survive but it's going to destroy the entire global system uh you know there could be food scarcity and all so it could be kind of like the aftermath of the impact that happened 66 million years ago which killed off the non-avian dinosaurs so that's what a nuclear winter is like it's a complete disaster and that's what will happen if somebody presses the red button and even sends one missile even sends one missile that's that's enough that's enough ah terrible terrible nightmare scenario that's what we are living on the brink of every single moment any signing off notes for this uncomfortable podcast uh well you know we human beings have good size and bad sides to us and everybody has a bit of a bit of light a bit of dark we're all Shades of Gray I hope that overall in the long run at the end of the day the better side of our human nature will will shine through and take us through this difficult time uh in the long run maybe we will go and colonize I mean settle down on maybe the moon on Mars also I hope we don't take that over the nuclear technology nuclear weapons technology I hope we use science and technology for good uh the nuclear weapons conundrum that we have today is not something that's going to be sold solved anytime soon but I hope that the leadership is has a say in mind and doesn't use it overall I am optimistic for Humanity we we have survived how many thousands of years 300 000 years uh hopefully we survive at least 300 000 more so I'm optimistic overall and the obvious plan for survival should be space exploration and keeping bits and pieces of human biology in space as well I think it makes sense for us to make the leap to the next uh next Frontier until recently the final frontier was was the ocean that's where you would go and explore but now we have discovered everything there is to discover on the surface of the planet so now it makes sense for us to make the leap to the moon and to Mars I think there's a new space race that's beginning right now uh India is also involved we have a spacecraft right now on the way to the Moon right so uh that is the next Frontier I think by 2030 by the 2030s 2040s we're gonna have people definitely on the moon maybe Indians as well and we're gonna have the first steps on Mars as well so I think that's a great step for Humanity eventually we're gonna who knows uh travel far and wide okay so exciting okay AC another epic episode uh all I'll say is that we'll be back soon and thank you sir thank you very much my pleasure thank you that was the episode for today I remember the first time I recorded videos with AC I thought hmm we've recorded four videos I don't know how many more podcasts we'll be able to do together and we've easily done 15 to 20 episodes already over the course of two years there's a lot more topics for us to explore so please keep suggesting the topics that you want AC and myself to break down we will follow whatever you say just keep supporting us make sure you follow AC everywhere on Instagram on YouTube on Twitter gents like this need to be celebrated on a world stage if you're a viewer from outside the Indian subcontinent make sure you check out our entire library of podcasts there's a lot of content especially on our English YouTube channel that you'll find a lot of value within lots of love from AC from BB and the rest of the team we'll see you later on TRS oh [Music]

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Keywords: podcast, indian podcast, indian podcasts english, ranveer allahbadia, beerbiceps, the ranveer show, the ranveer show podcast, the ranveer show beerbiceps, trs, abhijit chavda, abhijit chavda live, abhijit chavda beerbiceps, abhijit chavda podcast, physicist, human evolution, fungus, abhijit chavda geopolitics, abhijit chavda science, oppenheimer, oppenheimer movie, christopher nolan, nolan movie, christopher nolan movie, oppenherimer film, real oppenheimer, story of oppenheimer

Id: BMFLAcjye8w

Length: 52min 58sec (3178 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023