For the TV Series:
This is an alternate universe...
... where different people handled the Manhattan Project, but to the same end.- Confirmed. Oppenheimer is shown to be essentially hands-off, dumping practically everything into Charlie Isaacs's lap from about 1944 onward, and the famous European theorists who took part in the project are barely mentioned (no Fermi, Szilard or Teller, and only a pass-through of Niels Bohr).
This is all in the head of a writer.
Her husband was a minor scientist in the actual Manhattan Project. She's so bored she's making up these stories in her head. This is a decoy Manhattan Project!
The actual Manhattan Project is still going on - this is the one spies are being quietly diverted to. That's why the secrecy here makes such little sense and the bureaucracy loops in on itself.- Jossed. The actual nuke goes up as in our history in July, 1945.
It's an alternate universe where the Nazis developed Time Travel
The Nazis went ahead in time to when the Manhattan Project was declassified and learned who the major players were. Those players were taken out carefully - mostly the non-famous ones, unlike Bohr and Oppenheimer, whom removing would upset the timeline too much. This Manhattan Project is cobbled together with who was the second-rate scientists and workers who never would have been chosen in the first place.- That rather neatly explains the hayseed running the Tennessee reactor and his utter refusal to realize that he's playing around with something that's still largely untested and experimental.
- And explains why Reed Akley is implied to be a high-ranking Nazi spy in the New Mexico project; he was situated more advantageously in the TV show's timeline and could potentially have slowed up the entire bomb project for several months.
- It also explains how, while in our timeline, the Nazi project foundered due to lack of sufficient personnel and the loss of several scientists who could have sped it up, in this show's world they're almost immediately made aware that implosion is now the technique of interest.
- Jossed. The Nazis are implied to have been as clueless about the Manhattan Project as they were in our timeline, and the Soviets are the ones effectively penetrating American secrecy surrounding it.
Liza doesn't understand decontamination.
She read out lower radioactivity in Callie's room precisely because she threw out the stuff that uranium and plutonium (plus their daughters) would tend to collect on, leaving the relatively unexposed material which only holds background radiation levels.- Corollary: The Geiger counter was accidentally adjusted to a lower sensitivity, which would appear to register lower radiation levels than previously. Minor instrumental errors like this are "normal", and can usually be spotted. But in her case, she didn't think of it when talking to Frank.
- Yeah, at the very least she should understand that burning the clothes would be just releasing the radioactive material into the air as ash to be inhaled by everyone downwind, but she's obviously panicking.
- Which all makes sense because she's a botanist, not a physicist.
Season 2 will see greater use of Historical Domain Characters in minor roles.
As implosion takes center stage and the logistics of building the bomb begins to take over from pure theory many of the scientists who played a part in the real Manhattan project will be tapped to help build the thing, like like a young physicist from New York with a fondness for drumming, safe-cracking, and whose wife is sick in a hospital in Albuquerque.- Confirmed. As of "The Threshold", Albert Einstein's name and residence are explicitly a part of the back story wherein Frank tries to get him to write a letter to Roosevelt explaining the need to marshal resources for an American bomb project. His actual appearance is at the end when Liza goes to appeal to him for help freeing Frank.
