Bruce Hunt was particularly tickled, when watching the movie Oppenheimer, by a quick moment, easily missed, when a man getting a haircut in a barbershop reads in a newspaper that scientists have first produced uranium fission. He jumps out of his chair, mid-haircut, and runs off.
“You have to know the story, or you won’t even notice it,” says Hunt, a historian of science and professor of history at UT Austin. “This is in January of 1939. They’re sort of panning down the street, following Oppenheimer and his girlfriend Jean Tatlock, and then somebody dashes out of a barbershop with the barber’s cloth still around his neck. That really happened. Luis Alvarez, who was later a Nobel Prize winner, was getting a haircut, and he read the news and ran back to the lab at Berkeley to tell Phil Abelson about it, because Abelson was close to discovering it himself.”
Since the late 1980s, Hunt has been teaching a course at UT on the “History of the Atomic Bomb.” It’s a perennially popular course with students, but it has a little extra frisson this year, says Hunt, in the aftermath of the film. In anticipation of increased interest, he raised the cap on the lecture to 150 slots, all of which have been filled.
In this episode of the Extra Credit podcast, I talk to Hunt about his course, his own take on the film, and what we misunderstand about the history of that period.
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