Hacker Cinema
Adventures of a Mathematician
2021 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Thorsten Klein
The warmhearted story of Polish immigrant and mathematician Stan Ulam, who moved to the U.S. in the 1930s. Stan deals with the difficult losses of family and friends all while helping to create the hydrogen bomb and the first computer.
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Stanisław Ulam was a great mathematician. Off topic, but I got the movie made from his book Adventures of a Mathematician from my local library and it was excellent.
Some personal history: Ulam was a good friend of my Dad and when I was a teenager (long time ago!) we rented his house for a summer while he was traveling and our family needed to be Bolder Colorado for some work my Dad was doing. I asked my Dad about Ulam last year and he started to laugh a bit and told me that Ulam used to flirt with my Mom, in a respectful way. Anyway, watch the movie Adventures of a Mathematition - excellent!
Something that I've wondered - a kind of weakly held theory that, from various references, seems plausible - is:
The US military betrayed the trust of many of the scientists and engineers who worked on the atomic bomb, by not doing a demonstration of the bomb first for its enemies, before dropping the bomb on civilians.
I watched "Adventures of a Mathematician" yesterday which really, really dwells on Ulam's reluctance to work on a weapon of death. There is a dramatized scene there of how upset many of the scientists were, that the bomb was dropped without a demonstration. The movie is based on his memoir, and based on that, it really seems that the 'deal' that many of those scientists took, was something like a) we'll work on an atomic bomb so Germany won't get it b) but we won't use it recklessly, it'll be demonstrated first.
Now of course the military didn't promise that in so many words, but that seems to have been very strongly understood, and the fact that the bomb went directly to killing people seems like a violation of what so many of the people who made that bomb possible, expected.