A Short History of the World

To the extent you know the history, the technology challenges, and can figure out who is who, the more you will get out of it. If you don't know the history and (there are no subtitles telling you who's who), who's who, the less meaningful it will be. The cast and acting are superb, and the plot is a series of highlights of the prelude to the Manhattan project, of the project, and of the aftermath. For example, one of the tech challenges was using precise explosive material and configuration to jam the radioactive material together and hold it in a critical mass long enough to sustain a chain reaction. George Kistiakowsky led that effort. History - this is more concise than the long Wikipedia article: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ ahf/history/manhattan-project/ #:~:text=The%20story%20of% 20the%20Manhattan,to%20build% 20an%20atomic%20bomb . Cast: https://www.imdb.com/title/ tt15398776/fullcredits/?ref_= tt_ql_1 Needless to say, the movie evokes parallels with the current dr...

Here is Toth's Quora post, with which I can't agree more, but from a lesser knowledge position. Viktor T. Toth  ·  Following IT pro, part-time physicist 3y I wish I had Penrose’s book,  The Road to Reality , back in my early 20s. It would have saved me from a lot of dead ends as I struggled to understand physics. I am somewhat less fond of his attempt to relate consciousness to quantum gravity. But we all have our follies. His contributions to mathematical physics in general? One of the greatest mathematical physicists alive. One of the brightest candles in the dark, to paraphrase the late Carl Sagan.