I'm back reading my Atomic Bomb book. A lot of it is extremely dry, and even though I've read it at least a dozen times I can't even come close to understanding the physics mumbo-jumbo. It must be one of the most complex achievements ever come up with by humanity, and it can all be summed up with "Boys With Toys."
Anyway, a couple of things: did you know that Plutonium was initially called Neptunium? Also, it was completely hypothetical for at least a couple of years until they synthesized it. And the first morsel of plutonium that was ever seen by mortal eye took days to make and ended up being smaller than a grain of sand.
A grain of sand, mind you, if anyone were able to take it to critical mass, would be enough to obliterate a block of apartments.
Hell -- the shooting of a neutron into the nucleus of an atom -- JUST ONE ATOM -- (which of course you know is called fission), produces enough energy to make a visible grain of sand visibly jump. And there are 78,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one quintillion) atoms in a grain of sand; far, far more than there are stars in our galaxy.
That's about as much physics as I can stand today.
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| Enough plutonium to completely erase the island of Manhattan |
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