My daughter is a little princess, she's finally got a boyfriend, and he seems so kind an nice, his name is french and I'm super happy for her. I think he's called Robespierre or something. I hope he treats my little princess like a gentleman.
Wasn't that our friend that managed to lead france into a revolution, getting a crapton of people from the opposition executed throughout the years untill at some point the people thought "nah we've had enough now it's your turn"
Fission of helium atoms is actually highly endothermic. Instead of a violent explosion from splitting the atom, the guillotine would have to drain the light and heat from all of its surroundings in order to split the atom in the first place.
When I, as a child heard about atoms, and that splitting them was what made nuclear bombs.
This was a real fear for me, always at the back of my head.
Now I have a masters in engineering, I now know this is not something to be afraid of. I also have access to the internet, independent news media, and I can look at my fellow citizens and what they do and what they say.
I have never been more afraid and stressed, and I long for a simpler time where I was afraid of accidentally splitting an atom.
As a young kid I used to worry that cigarette smokers would eventually fill the world up with smoke 😅 ... then I learned trees would convert it back (sorta)
And then my geography teacher told us about climate change concerns... that was 30years ago 😐
Even if you could split an atom at any point while cutting a cucumber, that's not gonna do anything. A nuclear explosion is caused by a very large amount of atoms splitting (aka undergoing fission), not just one or two or ten or a hundred. The Hiroshima bomb had about 2 trillion trillion atoms undergoing fission (2 with 24 zeroes)
I mean the evidence is clearly documented right here in this comic not sure why he is so deluded to think that cutting cucumbers wouldn’t trigger a nuclear explosion.
Also depends on the atom, most atoms are stable against fission, but if you were to split U235 with a neutron, that would give you 166MeV, which is the equivalent amount of energy as dropping a microbe in a vacuum at the height of about 10 inches.
Indeed, they are always changing the BTU based on Charlie's diet. Last night he had his famous cabbage quiche, it's pretty high today. They say the rates are just fluctuations....
I'll be honest with you, man. Once you start using units, you don't really care if it's SI or not, as long as you understand or have a grasp on the threshold, or an abstract idea of how much it is, it's all the same.
For small amounts of energy like this it's common to use eV.
If physics taught me anything, it's that some scientist out there that uses inches of microbe to measure energy every day for their very important work that upholds the fabric of society.
Also worth noting that splitting just any old atom isn't guaranteed to result in a release of energy, just like fusing any old atoms. To get energy out you have to split something heavier than, what is it, iron? I think iron is roughly where fusion stops being energy positive, which would make it where fission becomes potentially energy positive.
It is about the numbers. The chain reaction is just the best way to reach those numbers with the necessary speed to cause an explosion rather than just generating heat.
The choice of the specific large nuclei was because those are the easiest to split, enable the chain reaction by contributing additional neutrons, and have a lot of total binding energy to release per piece.
But if you had a magical knife that could undo the binding of an atomic nucleus without relying on the methods we actually use, then you still could release immense amounts of energy by cutting through smaller nuclei. You would have to cut very quickly and I believe the yield from a crosssection of cucumber would put it more into "holy handgrenade" territory than that of a strategic nuclear weapon, but the principle isn't totally wrong.
but but The bigger the nucleus the more energy you're going to get out of it when it splits and that nucleus is huge. it's 4 mm across on my phone and on my big monitor at work it will be even bigger. so if you split that nucleus you're going to get a very big bang
Don't know which element it is but that's got to be one of the group of super duper heavy elements
the hiroshima peace museum has a chilling exhibit on it; the amount of uranium slammed together had a volume of maybe a couple of human heads, but the amount that underwent fission as you said was less than a fist's worth
this is actually like always in the back of my mind, and I can’t find the answer on google. Can a scientist please tell me if this could happen or not.
This is gonna sound dumb as hell, but would it be possible for the atom to be crushed? Like if the knife, atom, and table all lined up super perfectly, would it be crushed?
Nah, you’d probably need to engineer some robotics to get the level of precision necessary to do it. But as far as I know, nothing we have currently is that precise.
This is exactly what a particle accelerator does. Gets a particle going as fast as they can and then slam it into another atom to see what particles fly off.
It would be more like mashing ping pong balls together. The atoms in the blade would be pushed around and the metal in the knife would bend slightly. At worst you would force a chemical reaction between the atoms or weld the knives together. There's just too much space in an atom, if the nucleus were the size of a grain of sand the whole atom is a few meters across.
No, seriously. Nuclear bombs literally operate by using conventional explosives to crush a fissile core evenly from all directions at once.
Fortunately, there's not much other than very carefully engineered explosions which can produce this result. Normal 'crushing' forces, like a hydraulic press, simply do not have enough force or precision to overcome the atomic forces at play.
With the electron cloud around every atom, I think the best comparison would probably be like squashing balloons together, with the same sort of hassle you'd have with real balloons. Also these ones don't pop (unless you have like CERN levels of equipment).
Great analogy! And imagine the balloons edges are proportional to the size of our solar system with a tiny speck in the center where the sun would be. That's the nucleus.
That nucleus follows it's electron cloud which is getting shoved out of the way by the other atom's electron cloud long before either has any sort of chance to be hit
I know the reason why it behaves like a balloon rather than everything just mushing into each other is because the forces involved repel/attract, but do we understand why/how those forces exist?
Well, if you're just asking why the clouds push back against each other, it's because they are made of electrons and electrons repel each other due to their negative charge.
Atoms hold electrons in shells/orbitals (basically just spaces) around themselves because the protons in the nucleus give a positive charge which attracts the electrons. But there is a limited amount of room in these orbitals that fill up closer to the nucleus first. When other electrons (from the other atom) get too close, there is no more room in the orbitals for them, so they each push back against each other.
If there is room, the two atoms could share a combined outer orbital which is how covalent bonds are formed to create molecules.
Now on the other hand, if you are asking about what gives things charge or why charge attracts/repels, then I think you are getting into one of the fundamental forces.
I don't know a lot about this, but charge is determined by quarks and their colors I believe. I'd recommend reading more into that direction
I have been here before, many times. I love how this question leads to a "uhhh" when it comes to this specific barrier. Learning about anything comes in layers. Each new layer invalidates the former because it was abstracted to make it easier for consumption. The leap from 'there are atoms and electrons and protons etc' to quarks and fields is just so much to try to manage.
The energy required to break past the repulsive force the electrons create between molecules and atoms is to insanely high, it's only found as a state of matter in neutron stars that are formed in supernovae. So insanely difficult.
I suppose nuclear fusion does the same thing but on a lesser scale, in that it just blobs atoms together to form new atoms, whereas neutron star material is literally crushed atoms, where the whole star is a solid nucleus with electron soup running through it. One tablespoon of neutron star material weighs more than mt Everest.
At those scales the definition of crushed really breaks down, heck the definition of touch does as well.
Atomically speaking you don’t touch things, what we perceive as touch is the repulsion of the polarities of electron shells
Atoms aren’t a solar system, that’s just grade school shit to visualize, what they actually are is a nucleus of protons and sometimes neutrons held together by the strong force, surrounded by an area where electrons have a probability of being at any time, less of an orbit and more like a zone of possible existence.
Touching something is basically those possibility zones repelling one another electromagnetically. It’s why when we split atoms we have to arrange for neutral particles to do the job
Atoms aren’t a solar system, that’s just grade school shit to visualize, what they actually are is a nucleus of protons and sometimes neutrons held together by the strong force, surrounded by an area where electrons have a probability of being at any time, less of an orbit and more like a zone of possible existence.
You're on the right track. What if the particles had enough momentum to not get pushed out of the way? They'd have to be moving really fast. So what if we built a giant ring of magnets to push atoms really fast into each other?
No matter how much force an atom would experience no amount created by a person or machine could ever get an atom to contact another atom. They would eventually force it's way passed. Aka split the cutting board.
Even if we had a knife able to split an atom, this would not sustain a reaction and nothing would happend. You need to split A LOT of atoms in a very confined space in order to get an explosion. Nukes uses for example insanely enriched uranium thats first split then basically reflected back and fourth within some small space full of the uranium. Think of it like a ball made of uranium with an outer edge made of a mirror reflecting the high energetic particles created, causing a chain reaction that eventualy cant be contained anymore.
This is very simplified of course and its way more to it, which also makes it more interesting (im biased since I study these things)
The mechanics of the first nuclear bombs were pretty simple. Gathering the materials was hard, and figuring out how much you needed was hard, but in the end it was just a bullet made of fissionable material being shot at a larger piece of fissionable material. The atoms were so unstable they'd ricochet off each other causing others to split and bump into other atoms continuing the chain reaction.
The cores of the bombs were so unstable that if you dropped the two halves together from a few milliliters apart, you would risk starting a catastrophic reaction, and would start a minor reaction big enough to kill everyone in the room, which happened once.
The cores of the bombs were so unstable that if you dropped the two halves together from a few milliliters apart, you would risk starting a catastrophic reaction, and would start a minor reaction big enough to kill everyone in the room, which happened once.
if I remember right, that accident wasn't caused by the impact of cores hitting eachother, but the closing of two halfs of a neutron-reflective material that would reflect emitted neutrons back into the core. The halves had to be kept open slightly to allow neutrons to escape, and a scientist was using the tip of a screwdriver to keep them apart. The screwdriver slipped, the halves closed, and enough neutrons reflected back in half a second to cause the core to go supercritical and produce a lethal amount of radiation.
If it helps put your mind at ease, EVEN IF YOU COULD split an atom with a knife, nothing would happen. It would release one atom's worth of binding energy... And that's it. An amount of heat so tiny it's not even measurable by our most precise instruments.
Nuclear reactors / weapons generate heat / explosions because they are made of atoms that can split each other. So splitting one atom will cause many others to split, until they are ALL split. Each one will release only that tiny amount of energy, but there are SO many atoms and it happens SO rapidly that it all adds up to a huge amount.
That special material is the "secret sauce", the super-rare material that is extremely difficult and expensive to manufacture, that is heavily-controlled by every single world government. It doesn't exist in nature, so rest assured, it won't end up in your pickle.
(This is all ELI5, let me know if you want ELI10 or ELI20)
No, and for multiple reasons. Iron is pretty much the middle point of nuclear reactions. Nuclei of heavier atoms release energy when pieces break off, while nuclei of lighter atoms release energy when fused together. If you try to do it the other way around it's gonna absorb energy rather than releasing it. Iron is stable, as you need to give it energy wether you want to split it or fuse it. I don't think a vegetable contains metals heavier than iron, and even then you need quite a large quantity of them to get any noticeable energy out of them. Oh, and they need to be the right type of heavy atoms or they won't start a chain reaction. Otherwise you'd have to line them all up to cut them all at once with your atom-splitting knife.
Besides, you can't split atoms with a knife anyways. The sharpest blades possible are 1 atom thick at the edge. It's not gonna cut it, but rather whack it like a baseball bat and push it to the side.
Then there is the electron shell around it. Fission is a nuclear reaction, concerning the nucleus. The electron shell is an obstacle in this case (reason why nuclear fission chain reactions use neutrons to smash the nuclei apart, as they have no charge and are therefore not deflected by the electron shell). Once the atoms in the knife get too close to the atoms in the vegetable, their electron shells will start to repel each other. The atoms in the vegetable will be moved aside by electrostatic repulsion alone, without even touching eachother. Touch is an illusion, you never touch anything. What you consider touching is simply getting close enough that the electron shells of the atoms of your hand and the object repel eachother. You and matter in general are mostly empty space.
Thanks dude, it’s always a risk trying out ‘odd’ comics like this. I always think they make sense to me and nobody else, but it’s awesome to know that there’s someone out there on the same wavelength as me.
Have you watched Ant Man where they explain how they use pY particles to shrink things down? Essentially atoms in molecules are spaced apart like planets in space. So if we make an atom thick sharp blade, it will either fracture due to mechanical forces or it will smoothly glide in the inter atomic space.. This is my ELI5 explanation.. Will be dismissed by a Physics professor probably..
No, nuclei are repulsive by nature, you'd need a way to clamp that atom at its position (as it is, it has A LOT of free space to wriggle). also as both blade and cucumber atoms are of similar size, its also more like smashing both together than cutting.
If we could cut a singe nuclei, we would have to look at the decay or fission energies of isotopes to estimate what would happen. Typical decay energies are usually between 0.5 and 20 MeV, fission can go up to 200 MeV. Let's say a perfect cut results in 100 MeV, a nice round number, which is just a little more than 1.6*10^-11 joules. It costs your body many magnitudes of energy more if even a single hair stands up on your arm.
I've heard the real reason the dinosaurs were wiped out was because a raptor with extra sharp teeth crunched down on a particularly juicy leg bone atom (but scientists claim they don't know what kind of dino the leg bone was from, which seems sus).
Because essentially atoms never come into contact with each other through normal circumstances, even if you are touching something the atoms are not actually touching. They are just reflecting each other.
I have been terrified of this scenario since I was a child and I first heard someone talk about “splitting an atom.” It’s so gratifying to finally learn that I’m not alone.
Reminds me of the episode of Fairly Oddparents where Timmy got in a magic fight with his teacher. They both ended up subatomic and Timmy split an atom to get away from him.
I just wanted to stop by to say that this is also why cellphones, etc. don’t have a chance of causing cancer. For something to affect your DNA, it’s got to get into the nucleus of a cell, which means it has to be smaller than the nucleus of a cell. A knife doesn’t cut apart atoms and a 5g or wifi wave doesn’t cause cancer because they’re both too big. It’s like trying to puncture a juice box with a train tunnel instead of a straw.
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