4 ms·
Don’t Worry – It Can’t Happen (1940) [pdf]
- yetihehe 8y ago> The extra neutrons are perhaps so speeded up by the heat that they cease to be efficient atom-busters. Thus the reaction poohs out as the temperature rises. One can wonder, was it disinformation or just that they didn't know good neutron reflectors which could be used for making viable bombs?
- wbl 8y agoIt was completely true in all respects. Natural uranium requires a moderator.
- ridewinter 8y agoAllied scientists discovered that highly pure graphite could be used as a neutron moderator, I’m not sure of the timing compared to this article. Fortunately the German scientists never figured this out, and continued to attempt to use heavy water, never succeeding partially due to Allied sabotage in Norway. Heavy Water Wars is a great TV series about the sabotage!
- mark212 8y agoThe Heroes of Telemark is even better! Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris, what could be better?
- jacobush 8y agoWorry
- rossdavidh 8y agoI was thinking, this is either a really subtle pun, or a typo.
- smacktoward 8y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13904384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13904384 I'll just say now what I said then (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905409): This is not as silly an article as it may appear to be in hindsight. When it appeared (in May 1940: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-worry-it-cant-happen/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-worry-it-can...), most scientific authorities, including such non-idiots as Niels Bohr, believed that, while an atomic chain reaction was theoretically possible, the only way an it could be achieved was by bringing together a quantity of nuclear fuel so large as to make the effort impractical. The first proof that this was not in fact the case came in the Frisch-Peierls memorandum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memorandum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memoran...), which had been written two months before Harrington's article appeared, but which was highly classified and thus out of reach of pop-science journalists. Frisch and Peierls' figures indicated that a critical mass could be achieved with just one kilogram of uranium-235; this turned out to be an underestimate, but not so much as to invalidate their fundamental point, which was that criticality could be achieved with a mass of fuel small enough to be delivered by a 1940s-era airplane. This came as news to the brightest lights in the world of physics, up to and including Albert Einstein, so it's probably unfair to expect a contemporary writer for Scientific American to be further ahead in the science than they were.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mikeash 8y agoIt’s also worth remembering that the existence of nuclear fission was only discovered in 1938. Getting some of the details wrong in a popular magazine only two years after the phenomenon was discovered doesn’t seem too bad at all. Fission went from initial discovery to wrecking cities in only seven years. It’s like if Ben Franklin started out flying a kite in a thunderstorm and ended up creating a smartphone.
- CamperBob2 8y agoAnother interesting comment from that discussion was [flagged] and [dead]: The entire idea that atomic bombs were ever manufactured, let alone used, is absolutely ludicrous. There have never been any atomic bombs deployed any more than men have walked in the moon. Just more pish-posh propaganda from the government. Whether that poster was joking or not, it doesn't seem unlikely that at some point we will start seeing "bomb deniers" emerge, just like the Apollo deniers and vaccine-deniers that already infest our discourse. Relatively few people, certainly among those under the age of 50, have ever seen a nuclear blast in person. As time goes by, these weapons will seem less like game-changing, world-ending tools of the Apocalypse and more like, well, bigger bombs.