The name dropping in Oppenheimer is intense. I recognised a load of them from studying maths and the characters were deriding maths for not being physics. Crazy that they could have such contributions to a field they didn't even respect
I just saw the movie last night and felt the exact same way. I said the first 45 minutes were basically just eye candy for nerds lol. Going through all the famed scientists of that era whom we grew up revering.
Haven't seen the film yet so maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying comparing physics to math in that way is like comparing apples to the molecules that make up apples. Physics is applied mathematics used to attempt to explain the physical workings of the universe. You can't have physics with no math.
And this is coming from an engineer, who thinks we're superior to both!
Close to the end of the war, Japan -- which had made pretty extensive use of biological weapons against China -- was working on also hitting the US with biological weapons. We were far enough away that it would have been difficult, but where they had been able to employ biologicals, in Asia, they did.
Operation PX, also known as Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, was a planned Japanese military attack on civilians in the United States using biological weapons, devised during World War II. The proposal was for Imperial Japanese Navy submarines to launch seaplanes that would deliver weaponized bubonic plague, developed by Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army, to the West Coast of the United States.
That being said, Japan wasn't even the expected target of the Manhattan Project. Germany would have been, but was defeated via conventional force prior to the project reaching completion.
I wonder why they didn't drop the bombs in more remote locations first to minimize victims and send a message... Estimates are that 130k to 225k people died, the vast majority were civilians that had no influence over their country being at war...
"Unlike the people" and their school-aged kids, and their babies, and the old grandmas. Don't let them off they hook, they could have taken down a military dictatorship that dominated East Asia if they felt like it.