"Radioactive" What I hate about modern movies dealing with historical s
From
RichA@21:1/5 to
All on Sun Jul 10 22:39:48 2022
First, they turn the f----- movies into soap operas. The whole POINT of science from that era was that people dedicated their lives to the science and not 99% to their personal and social lives. This is to pander to the mouth-breathers in the audience
who don't know an atom from a horsecart. Much of the discovery work up to the concept of a new element was ignored. Finding out that the ore of uranium emitted more energy than uranium itself was a major discovery. Yet not even shown in the movie.
The scene where a guy slings a sack of pitchblend over his should was ludicrous, it would have weighed over 200lbs. Juxtaposing cheeseball scenes of love-making in with arduous labwork was silly. Nothing along the way is explained in-terms of the
science. All of a sudden, she's got radium refined out of the pitchblend. In reality, this was a monumental achievement. When Pierre Curie is giving his Nobel speech, they shove in a snippet of Hiroshima being bombed in 1945 and later an atomic bomb
test on a fake town in 1960. But Pierre says more good than bad will be derived from the discovery. He was right of course. Atomic power and cancer treatments vastly eclipse the lives lost in the bombing of Japan. Pierre is already ill from radiation
poisoning from working with the stuff, but he ends up killed in a street accident. What the movie does do it point out that the rapid increase in scientific and technical progress in those days came from risk. The lack of risk today in such fields and
endless regulation no doubt stifles progress. There are indications that people were getting sick from exposure to radium, but in reality, that didn't come home to roost until the 1920's with the experience of people who'd taken quack radioactive
medicine or licked paint brushes dipped in radium-based paint.
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