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This reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”. One of the themes, and I have no idea if it really happened, is that mathematicians worked with the Allied
by URSpider94 5y ago
This reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”. One of the themes, and I have no idea if it really happened, is that mathematicians worked with the Allied armed forces to bury the signals of their future actions. They end up doing things like launching fake paratrooper landings in Norway to cover the signs of the impending D-Day attack - all mathematically calculated to generate maximum entropy.
My second thought : I’m a little surprised that the use of lithium in nuclear weapons represented enough of an increase in the total demand to boost the stock price that much.
- zitterbewegung 5y agoAt that time lithium could have been rarely used and expensive to mine. Although right now lithium I has high demand so it could have gone under the radar due to volume of transactions.
- URSpider94 5y agoSo, from the Wikipedia entry, it seems that the use of lithium in nuclear weapon engineering was indeed a volume driver - in part, because only specific isotopes are used, meaning that lots and lots of lithium had to be mined and then separated, to deliver the needed isotopes (primarily lithium-6 and lithium-7). However, it seems that a lot of the demand comes from the fact that lithium-6 can be irradiated to generate tritium, which is used a a “booster” - do indeed the use in lithium deuteride might be a red herring. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium
- wolfram74 5y agoneal stephenson is no slouch, a lot of cryptonomicon is non-fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra#Safeguarding_of_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra#Safeguarding_of_sources