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The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin (2016)
- automatic6131 3y agoIn summary: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/111/759/fe2.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/111/759/fe2...
- nielsbot 3y agowow. where’s this from?
- ablation 3y agoIt's an edit this: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-ol-spicy-keychain https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-ol-spicy-keychain
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- spondylosaurus 3y agoWow, I haven't seen the Ol' Spicy Keychain in years... this takes me back!
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoWhat I've found surprising is that there's a whole genre of memes based around the demon core. (e.g. https://imgur.com/t/demon_core https://imgur.com/t/demon_core) There's something uniquely terrifying about a substance that is safe to handle in one orientation, but utterly deadly in another.
- korroziya 3y agoThe 'ol spicy ball.
- iancmceachern 3y agoThere was also a whole thing where a guy faked creating one and the subsequent radiation burns, etc. And shared it all on social media.
- AlexandrB 3y agoAre you maybe thinking of this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMyNQCVS410 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMyNQCVS410 That wasn't something quite as dangerous as the demon core, but a fake "orphan source".
- jchw 3y agoNot to mention Karameru's recurring character "Demon Core-kun". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZIjbX1gj88 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZIjbX1gj88 As bizarre as it is, Karameru's weird shorts probably brought a lot of attention to the Demon Core seeing as they're rather popular (even just that one is currently at 4.1M views.) I'd wager this is the weirdest thing I've ever found an excuse to link to on HN.
- shadowgovt 3y agoGallows humor is a popular go-to for multiple popular internet fora. The topic was also brought up by a few influential YouTube science explainers (here's Kyle Hill semi-apologizing for popularizing the meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z497lu4t5XI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z497lu4t5XI, although I don't think the Google Search history suggests his 2017 video was the primary mover of the popularity spike). In addition to the aspect of its horror that you highlighted, radiation is also a go-to science bogeyman because how how cause and effect are perceptually disjoint. You can feel absolutely fine absorbing way past an LD50 of radiation at the moment it happens; the suffering comes later, from hours to days later. Like firing up a computer with an already-damaged hard drive, you won't have a problem until the OS needs that data and loads garbage instead of useful routines.
- canadianfella 3y ago[dead]
- morkalork 3y agoAlways fun to spot one in the wild too, like this example: https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/139kybg/new_ukrainian_antiinfantry_grenade/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/139kybg...
- akira2501 3y agoI've always found the Tokaimura accidents to be a little "creepier." A vat of liquid can end up in a state of mixture and configuration that causes it suddenly become critical. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents
- lxgr 3y ago> A vat of liquid can end up in a state of mixture and configuration that causes it suddenly become critical. It can indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accid...
- lordfrito 3y agoWow what an interesting article, especially the part about the plutonium liquid vortex reaching criticality. Fascinating (but sad) stuff. Shame how his widow was treated afterwards.
- Arn_Thor 3y agoI have seldom come across a casual sentence as chilling as "bone marrow that was watery and contained no red blood cells".
- kens 3y agoYes, it's a bit surprising how much of a meme the demon core is on Twitter. Some other popular radiation memes: "drop and run", LANL plutonium rods, "3.6 Roentgen not great not terrible" and "This is not a place of honor". Am I missing any?
- Tade0 3y agoI suppose "Completely normal phenomenon" fits the bill.
- akiselev 3y agoIt’s not exactly safe to handle, it’s just not acutely fatal until it’s supercritical. Plutonium forms an oxide that easily flakes off so handling any sized demon core is full of danger. Bump it against something, scratch it, or even if the environment is particularly humid the powder will get everywhere. Ingesting or inhaling any of that oxide would result in a slow and very painful death.
- ortusdux 3y agoThe core was nickel plated to prevent oxidation.
- ttul 3y agoI wonder if we will one day look back and view our early AGI experiments and ask, “How could they have been so careless?”
- progre 3y agoLots of people are saying that now
- kobalsky 3y agoI recall reading that their colleagues were saying these guys would fry themselves long before it happened.
- chasd00 3y ago> ... early AGI experiments and ask, “How could they have been so careless?” what remains to look back may proclaim these times as the birth of their universe ;)
- candiddevmike 3y agoARS has to be one of the worst ways to go, and probably the most unnatural?
- pfannkuchen 3y agoI think it’s probably tied with dying from obesity for being most unnatural.
- shadowgovt 3y agoIt's an interesting topic, what would be the most unnatural way to die. At some point, I got in a conversation about what would happen if you drank nothing but heavy water. The short answer is that yes, this would kill you; the differing molecular weight between molecules built with heavy hydrogen and regular hydrogen will eventually add up to disruption of metabolic processes in ways that we haven't even researched. But we haven't researched them because it would cost an absolute fortune to get enough of the stuff to do yourself in. This would be a suicide reserved for billionaires.
- causi 3y agoThe toxicity of heavy water is not related to its molecular weight, rather to the difference in strength of its hydrogen bonds.
- shadowgovt 3y agoI was under the impression that the difference in mass results in slowing down metabolic processes (mainly because it takes more energy per unit time to move a more massive molecule). I wouldn't expect the hydrogen bond strength to be affected because hydrogen bonds are electromagnetic bonds, and the electromagnetic properties of deuterium and (H1) water are the same (other than the mass-effected ones; heavy hydrogen in an electric field will accelerate more slowly than light hydrogen, but that's because it's more massive, not because it's more weakly coupled to the electric field).
- 3y ago
- ortusdux 3y agoI wonder if this event will be in the new Oppenheimer movie. I do like John Cusack's rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoI watched the BBC series (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078037/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078037/) a few months ago and don't recall any demon core appearances.
- dale_glass 3y agoThat rendition confuses me a lot. What are they doing? Besides being obviously stupid, how is anything useful coming out of that? It doesn't look like anybody is actually measuring anything useful. He's randomly wiggling that screwdriver back and forth, but what for? Is somebody collecting data for a table or a graph? Shouldn't the separation distance, or angle, or something being carefully measured and controlled?
- russdill 3y agoDuring the incident, he was demonstrating the technique necessary to Graves, not performing an actual experiment. He was a bit of a show-off and was doing the demonstration without shims that would have prevented criticality. And yes, all they had were the counters. Other than that, the video is really inaccurate.
- petsfed 3y agoOne of the things I noticed with the experiments I participated in was that while the drama was very real for me, to an outside observer, its actually kind of dull. To keep the pacing tight and keep the audience interested, they have to spice it up a bit. As I understand it, Slotin was demonstrating to another colleague how to test the distance dependence of criticality, so the data collected was less valuable to the demonstration than the procedure. I think the creative license here was the second screw driver to make it look more sciencey. Holding one half of the beryllium sphere with a bare hand (as was part of the approved procedure) probably felt a little too slap-dash, and the fact that Slotin's procedure involving a screw-driver was unapproved in the first place undermines the role of the scene to call out the government's lack of care for Cusack's American-everyman character. If there's a (tenuous) moral to be extracted from the incident, its that Slotin apparently believed in the cowboy persona he projected, and it cost him his life.
- bjt2n3904 3y agoThe fact that Daghlian and Slotin died in the same hospital bed has always been a sobering thought. "Well, that does it" are harrowing words. There are famous engineering incidents that are good to study -- the Challenger disaster, the Minnesota Bridge collapse, the Therac 25... But compared with the LANL Criticality incident, there's something different. The former are all technical failure analysis. This incident is almost existential in it's implications, like Shelly's Frankenstein. A discussion on the nature of humanity.
- lisasays 3y agohttps://archive.is/HopP4 https://archive.is/HopP4
- debacle 3y agoAs we progress scientifically, our ability to accidentally off ourselves will only continue to grow.
- rowanG077 3y agoIncrease in number of ways? Maybe. Increase in accidents? Most definitely not.
- nimbius 3y agoSlotin was an arrogant ass. per wikipedia: "Under Slotin's own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used and the only thing preventing the closure was the blade of a standard flat-tipped screwdriver manipulated in Slotin's other hand. Slotin, who was given to bravado, became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions, often in his trademark blue jeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers." play stupid games, win stupid prizes. his only salvation was that he sacrificed himself to save his colleagues. there were also other, safer ways to do it "Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be "dead within a year" if they continued performing the test in that manner."
- dang 3y agoRelated: The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317021 - Dec 2020 (1 comment) Demon Core: The Strange Death of Louis Slotin (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744425 - Aug 2019 (22 comments) Demon Core: The Strange Death of Physicist Louis Slotin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11749742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11749742 - May 2016 (34 comments)
- CottonMcKnight 3y agoDramatized in a scene from "Fat Man and Little Boy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY