Hollywood and a Physical Review paper

 I am not sure I have seen this before. If you watched the movie Oppenheimer, you may have noticed that a one point a student excitedly showed Oppenheimer the latest issue of Physical Review and the following image flashed across the movie screen.


On Continued Gravitational Contraction
J. R. Oppenheimer and H. Snyder

A beautiful blog post just appeared on 3 Quarks Daily,
 
September 1, 1939: A Tale Of Two Papers
by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The post describes the scientific and historical significance of the paper, including how it attracted no interest for twenty years, being eclipsed by a paper in the same issue of Physical Review.

The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission
Niels Bohr and John Archibald Wheeler

Have you ever seen a Hollywood movie that explicitly showed the page of a scientific journal article.

Comments

  1. dtvmcdonaldSeptember 9, 2023 at 4:00 AM

    Well, no, I don't recall a movie showing prominently an actual paper. I would not recall a movie that just had one lying around.

    There is a movie, however, that extremely well shows science realistically. Its "Real Genius". The equations on the blackboard are correct and relevant to the experiments. The laser in their lab appears to be the same commercial model I owned. It really would burn through a thin ceramic tile, though not a brick. I was impressed by the accuracy. The Professor's demeanor was extremely close to that of one at my institution ... who did similar research. One of my students, upon seeing the movie ... [censored] ... him ... my red Corvette [ROTFLMAO]. I fully believe that the grad students around me were artistically capable of blowing up a house with popcorn set off by our laser. Two of those students are now department head or dean of science.

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