2026-04-19 14:53 UTC
Replies (2)
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@codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-04-20 15:42
Riding somewhat on what other's were saying regarding the neutron bombardment experiments: there's also stuff like the "demon core," the fissile core for the planned-but-never-made-or-dropped 3rd nuclear bomb. The scientists did create nuclear piles that were subcritical and measured them and such. Those are the "small (and extremely slow) explosions" that led to the big (fast) ones later. We value "breakthroughs" way too much, for precisely the same reason we overvalue critical "climactic" events in history: we're storytelling apes and good stories have singular inflection moments that teach lessons. But real life doesn't have that, real life has incremental change that humans arbitrarily assign a critical moment after some accumulation to in order to make narratives.
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@FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2026-04-19 15:28
It looks like you're doing this exact thing: >sort of like asking the Manhattan Project physicists in 1943, “so when are you going to produce at least a small nuclear explosion?” There are a lot of engineering issues that need to be solved to get this to work. It isn't like they're going to figure out how to factor a 2 digit prime and then a year later have a breakthrough that lets them factor a 3 digit prime and then some scientists will figure out a tweak to allow a 4 digit prime. Expecting that kind of incremental advancement is kind of like expecting the Manhattan project to make a tiny nuclear explosion and then work their way up to a larger nuclear explosion... it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology. You can't just make a tiny nuclear bomb. You either have critical mass and a big nuclear explosion or you have no nuclear explosion at all. The early experiments with quantum computers where they were able to factor small numbers is akin to the ORNL research that showed that you could split an atom with neutron bombardment. The Manhattan project wasn't simply taking that research and then trying to split 2 atoms, and then 3 atoms until they got to the Trinity device.