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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The movie was outstanding. But then, I like thoughtful movies that leave me thinking about the subject when I leave the theatre. Great casting. [/quote]

Is Richard Feynman featured in the movie and is he depicted with accuracy (ie being the most creative and thoughtful member of the team)?  [/quote]

He’s in it but not a huge role. Young and smiley. 
[/quote]

Well that is just silly, especially if they make Oppenheimer more than a project manager.  The brains were with the young guys, [b]especially Feynman[/b]. [/quote]

That's not correct.[/quote]

The work Feynman did was crucial.  What he did with Bethe stands out for example:

Efficiency of the device was particularly difficult to calculate because it depended on the evolution of the assembly in time, but a breakthrough came early in the project. One evening following Robert Serber's overview of efficiency in his April 1943 introductory lectures, Bethe and Feynman discussed efficiency and "the physical parameters which matter" since they did not know how to solve the complicated diffusion and hydro-dynamical equations for supercritical systems. "I think we guessed," Bethe later recalled, that the rate of decrease of multiplication during the expansion, assuming known beginning and endpoints of the expansion, would be proportional to the relative expansion. To fix the overall constant, Bethe and Feynman used Serber's result, as described in his lectures, for small excesses over the critical mass, a case that was relatively simple to analyze. Using this approach, Bethe and Feynman developed a formula for efficiency. This, according to the authors of the technical history of Los Alamos, was "the most brilliant example of theoretical problem solving" under the difficult conditions at the lab. Bethe and Feynman identified the crucial physical parameters in the calculation. Guided by their extraordinary physical insight and understanding of physics, they were able to use their limited knowledge of the phenomena and available data to produce a workable approximate formula for efficiency. As this feat shows, finding the best approximations to theoretical problems hinged on a talent for integrating and interpreting information in relation to a deep understanding of the laws of physics, a skill possessed only by the most talented scientists.[/quote]

John Von Neumann was probably the most important. The bomb wouldn't explode without his calculations for the explosive lens.

He's also the one who basically did all of the theoretical physics to figure out that you don't detonate the bomb in the surface, but detonate in the atmosphere to inflict maximum damage.

If you read the biography of John Von Neumann, you'll read how his peers both in the Manhattan Project and at the Institute of Avanced Studies at Princeton we all intimidated by JvN's intellect. We are talking about some of the greatest minds in mathematics and physics who have ever walked the Earth. Peers like Einstein, Godel, Oppenheimer, etc. etc. were afraid of how smart von Neumann was.  He was described by even those kinds of peers as being completely from a different planet and alien like. By the time he was  10 he could already speak like 6 languages and was doing advanced calculus.[/quote]

He was truly brilliant and particularly capable across many fronts but Feynman had one thing almost none of them had (and admittedly this is outside of the MP) - he could teach and explain on a level beyond almost anyone else.  [/quote]

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