‘Oppenheimer’ highlights a key episode from physicist’s earlier work
One thing I commend director-screenwriter Christopher Nolan for in “Oppenheimer” is that he delves into J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life as a physicist before his involvement with the Manhattan Project (“ ‘Oppenheimer’ brings out the best and worst in Christopher Nolan,” Weekend, July 21).
Specifically, he includes an episode in which Oppenheimer and a graduate student, Hartland Snyder, published one of the most remarkable papers in the history of science. They explained how a star of sufficient mass, upon exhausting its thermonuclear fuel, would collapse until it closes itself off from the universe and “only its gravitational field persists.” This was a Nobel-worthy insight — the first scientific description of how a black hole is formed — and yet, in part because it was far ahead of its time, and in part because it was published on Sept. 1, 1939, the very day that World War II began, it was overshadowed.
Stephen A. Silver
San Francisco
‘Barbie’ film’s missed opportunity
With all of the hoopla about the Barbie movie, I wish they had filmed it in Boston. Can you imagine the dialogue possibilities?
“Hey, Baah-bee, how you doin’?”
“No, Ken, how you doin’?”
A missed opportunity indeed.
Allen M. Spivack
Jamaica Plain