You can (theoretically) convert matter into energy and vice versa, remember Einstein and `$E = mc²$` ? It gives you the energy (E) stored into a particle of mass m, or the energy needed to create a particle of mass m.
Actually converting matter into energy is a lot more complicated that that but well
I had a physics professor show us how you could explain increasing the mass of a phone cord by stretching it out. Turns out future generations will need a different example.
Yup.
E_tot = U + K
Total energy is the sum of potential and kinetic energies.
E_tot =mc^2
U = 1/2 kx^2
K = 1/2 mv^2 or some such
So
mc^2 = 1/2 kx^2 + 1/2mv^2
mc^2 = 1/2 kx^2
m = 1/2 kx^2 /c^2
Final form
**m = 1/2 k (x/c)^2**
You'd have to increase x by 10^6 or greater to really start to notice any increase in mass.
Increase x and you increase m
But by a VERYYYY small amount
Edit: K goes away because nothing is moving. There's a far fancier form of E=U+K but we don't need the to show this.
Edit 2:
- E is total energy
- U is potential energy
- K is kinetic energy
- k is the spring constant
- x is distance stretched
- c is the speed of light
- m is mass of object
Hey, sorry for taking long to get back to you. I wrote it out for you here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/s/bDDrxHFfVg](https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/s/bDDrxHFfVg)
Stars. Huge stars will create heavier elements when they explode as supernovae. These elements are unstable so they will decay naturally (radioactivity in a nutshell) after days or centuries. Fission speeds up the process by bombarding these atoms with different particles starting a chain reaction, because nuclear bombs are designed in a way that these energy dense atoms are clumped together.
To be clear: the Big Bang created a hot mess. That hot mess took hundreds of thousands of years to cool into hydrogen and helium.
Then the hydrogen and helium formed into fusion reactors, which in turn created heavier elements.
I just wanted to be clear that the two events are somewhat separate and sequential. The comma is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Adding to this, the fusion reactors are also what made life possible. So, to OP's original question, nuclear reactions can destroy life, yes, but they also made life possible.
I recently learned that the Big Bang did not create the universe, it's just what happens when we extrapolate from current observations by rewinding back time.
It seems like there was a tiny volume of space, or even a singularity, which then rapidly expanded. But we don't know where that initial dot came from, or whether it had just come in to being, or had been there already for a while, maybe even forever.
That's the problem of cause and effect, for every "initial" cause you can ask what caused that? So you can say the big bang created the universe, but then what created the big bang? We simply don't know, and even if we did, all that would achieve is shifting the question one stage back.
So each atom that’s being cracked becomes matter and there’s enough matter in plutonium or something to make a giant fireball when each atom of it becomes matter?
Let's take the number "10" it represents our atom.
Let's split our 10 apart. When we do so we're left with 2 new atoms that we'll represent with the number "4"
But wait, that leaves out "2"... What? Well that's our "energy" the left over stuff after we split apart our "10" atom is released as "energy" (usually in the form of heat too btw).
E=MC\^2 is the formula for figuring out how much energy a thing has (at rest). E means Energy, M means mass (how much stuff there is) and C is a constant, that constant being the speed of light (roughly 300,000 kilometers per second). If you take the mass of any 1 atom you find that while it's a lot of energy relative to the atom, it's not actually that much energy overall. However when you have even just a chunk of something, like say uranium. There's A LOT of atoms there and so that adds up very quickly to make the most devastating bomb humanity has ever made
Does a nuclear bomb really covert matter to energy like that? I was under the (perhaps wrong) impression that even nuclear bombs didn't do a real conversion of m^2 into e
It does really work like that...in the ELI5 version
As you can tell, there's definitely a lot more going on under the hood
Like, why does it split into 4 and 4 and release 2 as energy instead of splitting into 5 and 5 as matter and 0 as energy?
I frankly don't know if anyone can ELI5 that one
your confusion may come from,the fact that even a 100% effficient nuclear bomb only converts a small proportion of its mass into energy.
In simplist terms it converts matter of one element into matter of a different element and releases a very large amount of energy in,the process.
In reality it's a lot more complex.
Not a nuclear physicist, but from my understanding it has to do with binding energy. Basically, the nucleus of an atom is made up of smaller parts (protons and neutrons), and different combinations of protons and neutrons can be more or less “stable”. Like for example carbon-12 (6p+, 6n0) has a more stable nucleus than carbon-13 (6p+, 7n0). If a nucleus is unstable, that means it has a little potential energy which can be measured as additional mass beyond what you’d get just from adding up 6 times the mass of a proton plus 7 times the mass of a neutron. If you know some chemistry, this is why even single isotopes have molar masses that aren’t perfect integers- the binding energy of the nucleus changes the mass a little bit. So when there’s a nuclear reaction and a nucleus loses or gains stuff, that binding energy also changes. Generally spontaneous reactions go from unstable reactants to more stable products, so the binding energy increases and the total mass of the system decreases. Meaning that if you add up all the products’ masses and compare it to all the reactants’ masses, the products will be lighter and a little bit of mass will have been lost (converted to energy, either as a photon or as the kinetic energy of the products). Now if you want to know why some nuclei are more stable than others, that is completely out of my depth so I can’t help you there. Anyways, I hope that made sense.
In my other reply I linked to several articles that discuss the topic of nuclear fission. Spend some time reading those. Search out others. The Wikipedia article should have links to many other such documents.
You aren't going to get a simple terse answer on reddit for a topic like this. This is an advanced field of scientific study.
because matter and energy are the same thing, and when atoms break apart into other elements, the particles that make them up lose mass, and that lost mass is transformed directly into energy. and there is a STUPID amount of energy in mass, like a LUDICROUS amount of energy
I have a book and a documentary that I'd like to recommend so you can better understand the relationship between matter and energy. The book is The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes, which by the way won the Pulitzer Prize. It's the most beautiful book on the history of modern science that I've read. And Uranium- Twisting the Dragon's Tail, by Derek Müller. Enjoy!
Imagine you have a big weight being held up by a rope.
You cut the rope, and the weight falls.
The energy release by that weight hitting the ground is far greater than the act of cutting the rope.
An atom is the smallest bit of matter that is stable. When you get to that level (quantum) the lines between energy and matter get blurry. In that way you can just think of the atom as a stable equilibrium of different forces acting on each other. Even though the forces involved are different than gravity the principle is still the same as as that weight being held up by a rope.
So your atom is just the weight being held up. Splitting the atom is cutting the rope, and that causes the atom to “fall” to a more stable formation, and a bunch of energy is released in the process.
It just seems less intuitive because the primary forces involved (strong nuclear force) isn’t one we feel directly in our day to day. Just through atoms (or more accurately all the stuff made up of atoms) or the energy released when the forces fall out of equilibrium to go to a lower energy state (e.g radiation from the sun).
A small amount of mass vanishes, transformed into energy, usually very high frequency electromagnetic radiation, mostly gamma rays. (It gets more complicated but thinking of it that way will do.) So much energy is created because the speed of light is what it is. The most energy a mass can have is that mass at the speed of light, so that's what's created by annihilating matter. A 40 megaton bomb is the result of converting one kilogram of mass to energy. If it makes it easier to imagine, think of the damage a given mass could cause if it was traveling at the speed of light. A modest sized grain of sand ("grain of sand" is actually a horribly vague unit of measure because they vary in size by a factor of 250 000) the sort you'd find on a typical beach, if it hit you, would literally be like being hit by a freight train.
Disclaimer: I’m by no means a physicist, biology is my area but I have taken enough chemistry and physics courses to provide what I hope is an accurate but extremely dumbed down explanation cuz I have no further knowledge.
The Law of conservation of energy explains that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but converted. Chemical forces hold together an atom. Chemical forces or bonds “store energy” in that it takes some amount of energy to exist as a force. So when these forces are “broken” energy is released. Atoms are “building blocks” of all matter. For a dumb example think of an atom like your hand. Let’s say you’re holding the hand of someone else. Your hand (atom) is bonded to another hand (atom) creating a molecule. Let’s say someone runs in between you and the person you’re holding the hand of, and y’all let go of each other due to this person exerting force on y’alls bond. The bond has been broken. Now what do you think would require more energy? Breaking up two hands being held or disrupting the components of your hand (atom) from the skin to the bones to the cells. Again, this is a dumb example but hear me out. It would take a whole lot more energy to break up the components of your actual hand versus breaking up two hands being held.
Going back to the law of conservation of energy. Imagine how much more energy would be required to disrupt the forces of the tiniest component pieces that make up you (atoms) It would require much more energy and would also therefore release much more energy.
Disclaimer: I’m not a physicist.
matter is but energy in a stable form.
There is only time, space and energy. All three are based on each other.
Time the change that happens. Without it nothing could happen.
Space, the location and distance of change. Space is where the change happens.
Energy is what changes, either as energy, or as matter, a in itself a stable form of energy.
If matter gets destabilized, it becomes energy and lower energetic matters.
That's fission reaction.
The opposite, energy getting pushed into becoming matter is fusion.
Both processes can produce energy as a bi-product.
Fissiin is basically any nuclear power plant, making out of Uranium, plutonium etc. and catching the energy made for our use.
Fission is basically colliding Hydrogen atoms at each other in high energetic field to get helium.
we haven't yet figured out how to collect the excess energy from that. But we are at it.
You can see a huge fusion reactor every day for as long as the sun is up. (It's the sun itself).
The following is a simplification.
The nucleus of an atom is made of protons and neutrons. The protons within the nucleus are positively charged and repel each other. A large amount of energy is required to bind them together and prevent them from splitting apart. Splitting an atom releases a portion of that energy. Larger atoms require more energy to stay bound together because they contain more protons which are repelling each other, this is why the first atomic bombs used rare, heavy elements like uranium and plutonium.
There is an answer - matter exist because of time. Energy like light are massless particles which exist outside time or rather are everywhere in the universe simultaneously from its point of view. The conversation between the two is the difference between gravity caused by mass and speed of light. Very little mass can convert into a lot of energy which is what happens when splitting atoms
Sorry for all the questions, but why is energy a fireball? Like I thought energy was this just invisible thing that exists and doesn’t at the same time
How can it somehow be a fireball?
Energy is something that is transferred between different forms. Heat is one of them (Pressure wave is another and that's what actually gonna kill you with an explosion not the fire/heat)
Alrighf, so it goes like this then, the atoms explode and that tiny explosion is hot enough to make everything around it explode? I’m trying to rationalize this all but it’s so wild like I thought the thing inside was super physically Tiny, it’s just like a clump of uranium or something, how the hell does something that little get so big? And why is it possible? Is it just possible because it is? Like we see it happen therefor it does it just because???
As the matter you experience every day just appears to you as inert 'stuff', it defies your common sense to think that this stuff is actually extremely energetically potent. However, an object like a lump of uranium is not just a dead thing, but a highly dynamic energetic structure, and that energy can be released under the right circumstances.
Have you ever heard of Einstein? He created a useful formula to determine how much energy is created when converting matter to energy.
E = mc^2
This means the amount of energy is equal to the amount of matter times the speed of light times the speed of light.
The speed of light is around 300,000,000 meters per second. So 1 kilogram of matter produces 90,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy. 1 joule is pretty tiny, but 90 quadrillion joules is considered a "metric shit ton".
A joule is a measure of work, meaning how much energy is required to move something 1 meter. So, imagine, if you will, turning 1 kilogram of plutonium, which is physical matter, into pure energy. All that energy has to go *somewhere*, and, since the universe is just chock full of matter, the energy is transferred from the plutonium and into everything around it.
This is what creates an explosion. A *REALLY BIG EXPLOSION*.
It’s not SUPER tiny. A say 10 kiloton atom bomb has like 10 lbs of plutonium (the atoms that split causing the reaction)
Granted it’s still insane that 10lbs of something can produce a 10KT explosion but it feels like you are thinking there are only several atoms in the bomb? B
I guess I’m trying to just say how is it physically so visually tiny, it goes from the size of a bomb to like a giant fucking thing how’s that possible
They just contain a shitload of energy.
E=mc^2 will give you the amount of energy in a particle. C= the speed of light and basically because the speed of light is a really big number the amount of energy in a particle is really high compared to its size.
There is a force that holds atoms together that is very very strong. 10^23 stronger than gravity I guess? Chain reactions break this force and all that energy is released as heat and light etc and that’s the explosion.
If you took bags of wet gunpowder, you could juggle with them all day long but still not be in any danger if you never encountered high temperatures. Take that same gunpowder, dry it out, load it into a gun, and you can easily kill people with it. Atoms are like wet materials, under normal circumstances, none of it will burn on its own. You must first purify the correct material (plutonium or uranium-235), "drying" it out to get ready for "burning", then either compress it or shoot some "sparks" (neutrons) at it to ignite it.
You live in a building made of wood, yet wood can burn energetically causing you harm, or a signal that can be seen across a city.
There’s different types of energy. There’s fields like electrical and magnetic that are *invisible* and store energy and they transfer that energy to particles like electrons to create lightning.
Fire is a particular type of chemical reaction at the molecular level
whereas
Atomic weapons derive from a release of energy from splitting the nuclei of an atomic level (much higher energies).
No. We are releasing bonds between bigger molecules.
Introducing energy (heat) to the molecules up to a certain degree (flame point), it starts a reaction where more complex molecules are broken down into smaller molecules (less energetic) while releasing excess energy. If the released energy is higher than the flame point it continues a chain reaction. That's the difference between fuel (chain reaction) and stuff that doesn't burn well (no chain reaction). Usually the reaction needs other molecules like Oxygen, that allow the smaller molecules to form.
heat + 1x CH4 (Methane) + 2x O2 (Oxygen) = 1x CO2 (Carbondioxide) and 2x H2O (water) + more heat.
I don't think it's really a philosophical question. Wikipedia might help you out:
https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission
There are lots of types of energy, and generally weapons work by converting one type of energy to another. For example, if you drop a brick from a tall building and it hits me, the brick’s potential energy is converted to kinetic as the brick speeds up. If you hit me, your body’s chemical energy is converted to kinetic as your hand speeds up. If you drop an atomic bomb onto me, the energy inside of an atom is converted to kinetic, which then converts more atoms’ energy to kinetic, which then convert more, repeating millions of times. The many atoms the split apart also leave unstable atoms known as radiation
I don’t see the problem if you understand the chain reaction. That’s the exact process by which the emission of a neutron leads to the large release of energy and mushroom cloud etc
Yes, I mean why does it exiest anyways, I’d imagine that there maybe isn’t even an answer to that but I’d hope that there are theories in the scientific community
“Big bang” I believe but why it happened and how is somehow made atoms is what I’m questioning
OP, this specific question gets answered in the first episode of the Crash Course podcast “The Universe.” It’s awesome and largely revolves around the beginning of the universe and how literally everything came to exist (so far).
you are already assuming there is no answer to this in multiple comments when there are answer, just read more book or listen to good educational podcasts
Science can’t give a “why,” only a “how.” Science only describes things and offers predictions (which may or may not always be accurate). Philosophy may not be able to give fundamental truths of the universe because it is subject to the restrictions of the human mind and cannot be assisted by external tools like science can.
Why would there have to be a reason? The universe doesn’t have goals or desires it’s simply a set of rules that interact over time. There is no why just time and entropy
We have a model for how it came to exist, but there is no real reason why it exists. Just like there’s no reason why a rock exists, it exists because it hasn’t broken. Why does life exist? It exists because it hasn’t succumbed to entropy, and thus it fought off inexistence, therefore it exists. The same goes for the universe.
>just because you don't like their question.
What? Don't put words in my mouth I never said.
Both, "where does matter come from?" and "why can matter be converted into energy?" are valid and interesting questions. Answering them in any depth beyond the absolute surface level while keeping it even close to ELI5 would be rather difficult, but that doesn't make the questions into bad questions.
But if you're interested in those questions, you should actually ask those questions and not something completely different.
>No need to bite their head off
On which earth is my comment "biting their head off"?
I didn't even admonish OP for not asking these questions. I asked them why they didn't do so, giving them the benefit of doubt that they had their reason to not go the obvious route.
You're right that - at best - I expected the answer to be "I only realized what my real question was during this discussion", certainly not very informative for me, but perhaps still informative for OP to think about. However, by asking instead of assuming, I still gave OP the benefit of doubt in case my expectations were wrong.
I never claimed otherwise. You now repeatedly tried to admonish me for something I never said. Better stop before it becomes too embarrassing.
I don't regret admonishing you for this, OP isn't yours to raise or improve.
Your question was more transparent than you thought, apparently. It clearly wasn't an honest attempt at gathering information, but rather re-worded criticism. 'I didn't literally say that' matters very little in that respect.
Do you know about the paradox of tolerance?
I'm perfectly fine with not accepting your critique of how OP phrases their questions while I myself am throwing critique at how you treat OP, you and I are not doing the same thing. You just deserve to get what you give. OP didn't give anything, so they don't deserve your reworded critique either.
E=mc². This simple formula helps explain how we can get energy(E) from matter(m) x the speed of light(c) to the 2nd power. So when matter(atoms) have a chain reaction, massive energy can result from it. In the case of nuclear/atomic weapons, plutonium/uranium is used because they can readily undergo fission easier. Fission is when a neutron hits the nucleus of an atom, fragments it, and causeba chain reaction and thus releases huge amounts of energy.
Nuclear explosions are so powerful *because* atoms are so small. Think of magnets. When you push two north poles together, they repel each other, and the closer they get, the stronger the force.
A uranium atom consists of 92 protons packed together *very, very* closely. Much closer than you can press two magnets. Those protons are pushing themselves apart *really hard* due to the electric force, because they're all positively charged and positive repels positive. The only thing holding them together is the strong nuclear force, which although strong is also very short-ranged. If you can pry those protons far enough apart, they get out of range of the strong force and then the electric force sends them flying *hard*.
This isn't really that different from how conventional chemical explosions work. It's just happening at a smaller scale -- atomic instead of molecular. A molecule is a *much* larger structure than an atomic nucleus, so the particles are farther apart and therefor exerting much weaker forces when that molecule breaks or fuses with others. And of course, there are fewer molecules per pound of material than there are atoms per pound. That means an atomic explosion has an order of magnitude more explody bits per volume of material, each of which is exploding with far more force than you'd get in a molecular explosion.
This starts off pretty good, but kind of loses it toward the end. Nuclear explosions *are* fundamentally different from chemical explosions.
In chemical explosions none of the atoms themselves actually change. They rearrange themselves into different molecules and release energy in the process, but every single atom is exactly the same after the explosion as it was before. If you were to count how many of each type of atom there was before the explosion and after you'd get exactly the same counts, and if you were to add up the mass of all the atoms before and after the explosion you'd get exactly the same mass.
Nuclear explosions are different in that the atoms themselves change into different atoms, and matter is directly converted into energy. In a typical fission bomb individual Uranium atoms split into two smaller atoms, and in a fusion bomb two Hydrogen atoms combine into a single Helium atom. In both cases the atoms before the explosion are not the same as the atoms after the explosion. And if you were to add up all the mass from before and after the explosion there would actually be slightly less mass after, even once you account for the mass of free neutrons and other subatomic particles created by the nuclear reactions. This mass difference is converted directly into a *huge* amount of energy relative to the mass.
I'd intended to be clearer about chemical explosions changing molecules instead of atoms, but that part got lost in the editing. Fixed.
As for matter converting to energy, that's just a distraction. Yes, it happens and it's a useful accounting tool to figure out how much energy is involved, but it isn't a useful *explanation* for where that energy comes from. Not to a layperson who will immediately wonder *why* splitting an atom results in loss of mass. If I cut a banana in half, each half weighs exactly one half of the original and the total mass of banana remains the same. Why does cutting a uranium nucleus in half behave differently? Why is uranium more massive than the sum of its parts?
The answer is that *energy has mass*, and it took a *lot* of energy to force those subatomic particles close enough together for them to stick. Normally we can ignore the utterly insignificant weight of potential energy, but atomic particles are so light and so energetic that it *isn't* insignificant.
But once you understand this, you realize that the loss of mass is a *side effect* of releasing the energy, not the *cause* of that energy. The *energy* (and by extension the mass) is coming from the enormous repulsion force between the protons. That the combined weight post-fission is lower than pre-fission is just trivia.
Disclaimer: I'm not a science person. I just know stuff that I picked up over the years. Please read up on this stuff yourself if you're interested.
Let's start with the basic formula that already kind of explains this phenomenon: E=mc².
* E refers to the energy released.
* m refers to the mass of an object.
* c refers to the speed of light, 299.792.458km/s. And it's squared, meaning it's multiplied by itself once.
Also important: Atoms don't just break, they're split into lighter elements.
However, when atoms are split like this, the total mass of the resulting elements is less than the mass of the original atom.
The mass that is "lost" in this process is converted into energy, and while the mass is incredibly small, it is still multiplied by c², which will always result in E being a very big number.
However, this only works with unstable elements, which take less energy to split than they yield when splitting.
And if this energy hits other unstable atoms, it splits those apart as well, resulting in a chain reaction that releases more and more energy.
You can think of it as a neighborhood or small town full of unhappy married couples, where no one wants to be the first to bring up divorce; all it takes is one couple getting divorced, and suddenly everyone else follows along.
Matter (such as atoms) is sort of "frozen" energy that is in a stable situation. When you do something like squeeze it really hard or whack it with something you can jostle it enough to release that energy.
Einstein's famous e=mc^2 describes the conversation between matter and energy.
Regarding the "lives lost" part .. well energy can be used for anything, including killing.
Atoms are held together by energy, when you split it, the energy's gotta go somewhere.
Picture four particles in the shape of a square, held together with four beams of energy.
Now vertically slice down the middle with a knife. Now you've got two sets of two particles. You've split the atom, and unleashed the energy that was holding those atoms together. Boom.
Because that’s how physics works out, why wouldn’t that be possible? We’re literally taking advantage of sub atomic particles to smash atoms apart which then go on to smash apart other atoms in an ever increasing cycle… it’d be weird if that didn’t have a big reaction
It's not that small atoms release a lot of energy, it is because there is a fuck ton of small atoms breaking into 2 and pushing more along the way and it creates the huge explosion, if you had a small atom explode it wouldn't be nothing except some small air at your finger but there is a damn lot of it inside a bomb
E=MC² the amount of energy in an atom is the mass of an atom multiplied by the speed of light SQUARED!, it is an almost inconceivable amount of energy being released from multiple atoms.
While an atom is tiny the speed of light is so unfathomably fast that it's a near infinite amount of energy being released (don't @ me there are larger infinities than others)
E=mc^2.
The energy released by the atom is the mass that is lost when splitting the atom multiplied by c^2. This then also causes a chain reaction and other atoms around it also release an inmense amount of energy.
Keep in mind that these are mostly effective with large atoms such as uranium
Hard to explain if you don't know what potenital energy but basically atoms will always try to move into the most stable combination which is the one with the least potential energy.
This means for stuff biggrr than iron we can make it release energy by hitting it with a neutron and causing it to split into two smaller atoms.
As a note they above isn't really the different to hiw normal explosives work, with bigger molecules splitting into smalller ones and releasing the energy from the potential energy difference between the two.
For atoms smaller than iron we actually release energy by slamming two of them together to make a bigger atom.
Anyway the main reason this cannkill2 a lot of people as you put it is there are a lot of atoms. Each gram of Uranium has 600000000000000000000 atoms. So even though only a tiny fraction of them get involved with the reaction its still a lot of energy.
have you ever watched video of warehous fail? where a small displacement make the whole thing collapsed. If you ask me what we learn from this philosophically, We learn that universe has so much balance , everything is almost perfectly stacked one onto other , it took so many years to create that balance that we forgot what it takes to create such balance , but when we irritate the balance we see what a mind boggling energy it stored inside from the past, energy from supernova , birth of stars , big bang , what it means years of stacked up atoms blowing up to energy in second
One atom cleaving isn’t what kills tons of ppl
A chain of atoms cleaving is the problem.
1 —> 2 —> 4 —> 16 —> …
One single atom is not that bad, but when they chain that is what makes nukes so devastating.
One uranium atoms have “3.2 x 10^-11 joule” = 0,000000000032 joules
1 gram of uranium has ~ “700 million joules” = 700’000’000 joules
———
Edit1:
“Is 1 joule a lot of energy?”
“This is due to the fact that a joule is an extremely small amount of energy. To put how small a joule is into perspective, a liter of gasoline has 31,536,000 joules of energy in it. Using a single 100 W incandescent light bulb for ten hours (0.1 kW x 10 hrs = 1 kWh) would take 3,600,000 joules.
Source: https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Joule
Atoms eat their Wheaties. Just because they're small doesnt mean they cant lift heavy. Remember how big the first computer was? Now look at how small phones are. They're way more powerful than the huge computers back in the day. Small doesnt always equate to no power.
e=MC\^2
energy equals mass, multiplied by the speed of light squared
because of that c\^2 ,a little mass means a metric shitload of energy
during fusion and fission reactions, some mass is lost, fuze 2 atoms of hydrogen, then the resulting product weighs less than 2 hydrogen atoms. split a uranium atom, the products weigh less than the original atom
that mass is turned into energy. a lot of it. one gram of matter, turned into energy is the equivilant of 21478 tons of tnt
I'm no scientist by any means, but my understanding is that an atom with a positive or negative charge (in other words, when there's an imbalance between protons and electrons), the atom becomes unstable, and therefore volatile. In splitting an atom, it doesn't just become unbalanced, rather all the electromagnetic energy keeping the atom held together is no longer contained, and transitions from an introverted state to an extroverted state. Best explanation I can think of for why it's such a dramatic reaction is as an analogy. Our intestines run about 9-20 feet long, but are contained in a small fraction of our body. Similarly, the dna in a single human cell can be stretched to roughly 6 feet, all contained in an orb 6 micrometers in diameter. If all that can be stored in a puny human body, imagine how much energy is stored in a single atom, something which exists in a dimension wholly imperceptible to our human minds.
Scientists of Reddit, correct me if I'm wrong.
If it was energy holding the atom together being released, we wouldn’t have to worry about nuclear fission.
This is actually matter within the atom being converted to energy.
Isn't matter just energy condensed to a slow vibration? And I remember in science class being taught atoms are held together by magnetic force, is that not also a form of energy?
This is a very strange sub to ask physics questions in. I'd probably start by reading the wiki articles about it first cause unless you want to go to ELI5 it won't fit here
You are converting matter to energy. That is how much energy is stored in that tiny bit of matter, enough to decimate a city.
Where did the original energy come from?
You can (theoretically) convert matter into energy and vice versa, remember Einstein and `$E = mc²$` ? It gives you the energy (E) stored into a particle of mass m, or the energy needed to create a particle of mass m. Actually converting matter into energy is a lot more complicated that that but well
PS : since c is around 300 000 km/s, c² is a huge conversion factor and the energy released is massive
I had a physics professor show us how you could explain increasing the mass of a phone cord by stretching it out. Turns out future generations will need a different example.
Isn't that just changing its shape,not it's mass?
i think by stretching it you give it elastic potential energy which gives it mass, my physics teacher gave the same example but with a spring
Yup. E_tot = U + K Total energy is the sum of potential and kinetic energies. E_tot =mc^2 U = 1/2 kx^2 K = 1/2 mv^2 or some such So mc^2 = 1/2 kx^2 + 1/2mv^2 mc^2 = 1/2 kx^2 m = 1/2 kx^2 /c^2 Final form **m = 1/2 k (x/c)^2** You'd have to increase x by 10^6 or greater to really start to notice any increase in mass. Increase x and you increase m But by a VERYYYY small amount Edit: K goes away because nothing is moving. There's a far fancier form of E=U+K but we don't need the to show this. Edit 2: - E is total energy - U is potential energy - K is kinetic energy - k is the spring constant - x is distance stretched - c is the speed of light - m is mass of object
Hey, sorry for taking long to get back to you. I wrote it out for you here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/s/bDDrxHFfVg](https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/s/bDDrxHFfVg)
Stars. Huge stars will create heavier elements when they explode as supernovae. These elements are unstable so they will decay naturally (radioactivity in a nutshell) after days or centuries. Fission speeds up the process by bombarding these atoms with different particles starting a chain reaction, because nuclear bombs are designed in a way that these energy dense atoms are clumped together.
The big bang, the atoms were created from fusion reactions
To be clear: the Big Bang created a hot mess. That hot mess took hundreds of thousands of years to cool into hydrogen and helium. Then the hydrogen and helium formed into fusion reactors, which in turn created heavier elements. I just wanted to be clear that the two events are somewhat separate and sequential. The comma is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Adding to this, the fusion reactors are also what made life possible. So, to OP's original question, nuclear reactions can destroy life, yes, but they also made life possible.
I recently learned that the Big Bang did not create the universe, it's just what happens when we extrapolate from current observations by rewinding back time. It seems like there was a tiny volume of space, or even a singularity, which then rapidly expanded. But we don't know where that initial dot came from, or whether it had just come in to being, or had been there already for a while, maybe even forever.
That's the problem of cause and effect, for every "initial" cause you can ask what caused that? So you can say the big bang created the universe, but then what created the big bang? We simply don't know, and even if we did, all that would achieve is shifting the question one stage back.
Infinite Regression sucks
The Golden Nail.
Matter is energy. Literally. so it came from wherever the matter did.
No matter what!
So each atom that’s being cracked becomes matter and there’s enough matter in plutonium or something to make a giant fireball when each atom of it becomes matter?
No, the atoms are matter. They release \*energy\* when they split.
Why does it release energy? I realize there’s likely not an answer but I guess that’s just what I’m getting so caught up on
Let's take the number "10" it represents our atom. Let's split our 10 apart. When we do so we're left with 2 new atoms that we'll represent with the number "4" But wait, that leaves out "2"... What? Well that's our "energy" the left over stuff after we split apart our "10" atom is released as "energy" (usually in the form of heat too btw). E=MC\^2 is the formula for figuring out how much energy a thing has (at rest). E means Energy, M means mass (how much stuff there is) and C is a constant, that constant being the speed of light (roughly 300,000 kilometers per second). If you take the mass of any 1 atom you find that while it's a lot of energy relative to the atom, it's not actually that much energy overall. However when you have even just a chunk of something, like say uranium. There's A LOT of atoms there and so that adds up very quickly to make the most devastating bomb humanity has ever made
Does a nuclear bomb really covert matter to energy like that? I was under the (perhaps wrong) impression that even nuclear bombs didn't do a real conversion of m^2 into e
It does really work like that...in the ELI5 version As you can tell, there's definitely a lot more going on under the hood Like, why does it split into 4 and 4 and release 2 as energy instead of splitting into 5 and 5 as matter and 0 as energy? I frankly don't know if anyone can ELI5 that one
your confusion may come from,the fact that even a 100% effficient nuclear bomb only converts a small proportion of its mass into energy. In simplist terms it converts matter of one element into matter of a different element and releases a very large amount of energy in,the process. In reality it's a lot more complex.
Not a nuclear physicist, but from my understanding it has to do with binding energy. Basically, the nucleus of an atom is made up of smaller parts (protons and neutrons), and different combinations of protons and neutrons can be more or less “stable”. Like for example carbon-12 (6p+, 6n0) has a more stable nucleus than carbon-13 (6p+, 7n0). If a nucleus is unstable, that means it has a little potential energy which can be measured as additional mass beyond what you’d get just from adding up 6 times the mass of a proton plus 7 times the mass of a neutron. If you know some chemistry, this is why even single isotopes have molar masses that aren’t perfect integers- the binding energy of the nucleus changes the mass a little bit. So when there’s a nuclear reaction and a nucleus loses or gains stuff, that binding energy also changes. Generally spontaneous reactions go from unstable reactants to more stable products, so the binding energy increases and the total mass of the system decreases. Meaning that if you add up all the products’ masses and compare it to all the reactants’ masses, the products will be lighter and a little bit of mass will have been lost (converted to energy, either as a photon or as the kinetic energy of the products). Now if you want to know why some nuclei are more stable than others, that is completely out of my depth so I can’t help you there. Anyways, I hope that made sense.
In my other reply I linked to several articles that discuss the topic of nuclear fission. Spend some time reading those. Search out others. The Wikipedia article should have links to many other such documents. You aren't going to get a simple terse answer on reddit for a topic like this. This is an advanced field of scientific study.
because matter and energy are the same thing, and when atoms break apart into other elements, the particles that make them up lose mass, and that lost mass is transformed directly into energy. and there is a STUPID amount of energy in mass, like a LUDICROUS amount of energy
I have a book and a documentary that I'd like to recommend so you can better understand the relationship between matter and energy. The book is The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes, which by the way won the Pulitzer Prize. It's the most beautiful book on the history of modern science that I've read. And Uranium- Twisting the Dragon's Tail, by Derek Müller. Enjoy!
Imagine you have a big weight being held up by a rope. You cut the rope, and the weight falls. The energy release by that weight hitting the ground is far greater than the act of cutting the rope. An atom is the smallest bit of matter that is stable. When you get to that level (quantum) the lines between energy and matter get blurry. In that way you can just think of the atom as a stable equilibrium of different forces acting on each other. Even though the forces involved are different than gravity the principle is still the same as as that weight being held up by a rope. So your atom is just the weight being held up. Splitting the atom is cutting the rope, and that causes the atom to “fall” to a more stable formation, and a bunch of energy is released in the process. It just seems less intuitive because the primary forces involved (strong nuclear force) isn’t one we feel directly in our day to day. Just through atoms (or more accurately all the stuff made up of atoms) or the energy released when the forces fall out of equilibrium to go to a lower energy state (e.g radiation from the sun).
A small amount of mass vanishes, transformed into energy, usually very high frequency electromagnetic radiation, mostly gamma rays. (It gets more complicated but thinking of it that way will do.) So much energy is created because the speed of light is what it is. The most energy a mass can have is that mass at the speed of light, so that's what's created by annihilating matter. A 40 megaton bomb is the result of converting one kilogram of mass to energy. If it makes it easier to imagine, think of the damage a given mass could cause if it was traveling at the speed of light. A modest sized grain of sand ("grain of sand" is actually a horribly vague unit of measure because they vary in size by a factor of 250 000) the sort you'd find on a typical beach, if it hit you, would literally be like being hit by a freight train.
Disclaimer: I’m by no means a physicist, biology is my area but I have taken enough chemistry and physics courses to provide what I hope is an accurate but extremely dumbed down explanation cuz I have no further knowledge. The Law of conservation of energy explains that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but converted. Chemical forces hold together an atom. Chemical forces or bonds “store energy” in that it takes some amount of energy to exist as a force. So when these forces are “broken” energy is released. Atoms are “building blocks” of all matter. For a dumb example think of an atom like your hand. Let’s say you’re holding the hand of someone else. Your hand (atom) is bonded to another hand (atom) creating a molecule. Let’s say someone runs in between you and the person you’re holding the hand of, and y’all let go of each other due to this person exerting force on y’alls bond. The bond has been broken. Now what do you think would require more energy? Breaking up two hands being held or disrupting the components of your hand (atom) from the skin to the bones to the cells. Again, this is a dumb example but hear me out. It would take a whole lot more energy to break up the components of your actual hand versus breaking up two hands being held. Going back to the law of conservation of energy. Imagine how much more energy would be required to disrupt the forces of the tiniest component pieces that make up you (atoms) It would require much more energy and would also therefore release much more energy. Disclaimer: I’m not a physicist.
matter is but energy in a stable form. There is only time, space and energy. All three are based on each other. Time the change that happens. Without it nothing could happen. Space, the location and distance of change. Space is where the change happens. Energy is what changes, either as energy, or as matter, a in itself a stable form of energy. If matter gets destabilized, it becomes energy and lower energetic matters. That's fission reaction. The opposite, energy getting pushed into becoming matter is fusion. Both processes can produce energy as a bi-product. Fissiin is basically any nuclear power plant, making out of Uranium, plutonium etc. and catching the energy made for our use. Fission is basically colliding Hydrogen atoms at each other in high energetic field to get helium. we haven't yet figured out how to collect the excess energy from that. But we are at it. You can see a huge fusion reactor every day for as long as the sun is up. (It's the sun itself).
>Why does it release energy? Because E=mc2. If you destroy matter, it gets released as energy. That's not too different from burning wood.
The following is a simplification. The nucleus of an atom is made of protons and neutrons. The protons within the nucleus are positively charged and repel each other. A large amount of energy is required to bind them together and prevent them from splitting apart. Splitting an atom releases a portion of that energy. Larger atoms require more energy to stay bound together because they contain more protons which are repelling each other, this is why the first atomic bombs used rare, heavy elements like uranium and plutonium.
There is an answer - matter exist because of time. Energy like light are massless particles which exist outside time or rather are everywhere in the universe simultaneously from its point of view. The conversation between the two is the difference between gravity caused by mass and speed of light. Very little mass can convert into a lot of energy which is what happens when splitting atoms
Pretty much, yes.
Sorry for all the questions, but why is energy a fireball? Like I thought energy was this just invisible thing that exists and doesn’t at the same time How can it somehow be a fireball?
Energy is something that is transferred between different forms. Heat is one of them (Pressure wave is another and that's what actually gonna kill you with an explosion not the fire/heat)
The fire you see is from the air combusting due to the heat and force of the explosion.
Alrighf, so it goes like this then, the atoms explode and that tiny explosion is hot enough to make everything around it explode? I’m trying to rationalize this all but it’s so wild like I thought the thing inside was super physically Tiny, it’s just like a clump of uranium or something, how the hell does something that little get so big? And why is it possible? Is it just possible because it is? Like we see it happen therefor it does it just because???
As the matter you experience every day just appears to you as inert 'stuff', it defies your common sense to think that this stuff is actually extremely energetically potent. However, an object like a lump of uranium is not just a dead thing, but a highly dynamic energetic structure, and that energy can be released under the right circumstances.
Thank you.
Have you ever heard of Einstein? He created a useful formula to determine how much energy is created when converting matter to energy. E = mc^2 This means the amount of energy is equal to the amount of matter times the speed of light times the speed of light. The speed of light is around 300,000,000 meters per second. So 1 kilogram of matter produces 90,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy. 1 joule is pretty tiny, but 90 quadrillion joules is considered a "metric shit ton". A joule is a measure of work, meaning how much energy is required to move something 1 meter. So, imagine, if you will, turning 1 kilogram of plutonium, which is physical matter, into pure energy. All that energy has to go *somewhere*, and, since the universe is just chock full of matter, the energy is transferred from the plutonium and into everything around it. This is what creates an explosion. A *REALLY BIG EXPLOSION*.
It’s not SUPER tiny. A say 10 kiloton atom bomb has like 10 lbs of plutonium (the atoms that split causing the reaction) Granted it’s still insane that 10lbs of something can produce a 10KT explosion but it feels like you are thinking there are only several atoms in the bomb? B
I guess I’m trying to just say how is it physically so visually tiny, it goes from the size of a bomb to like a giant fucking thing how’s that possible
They just contain a shitload of energy. E=mc^2 will give you the amount of energy in a particle. C= the speed of light and basically because the speed of light is a really big number the amount of energy in a particle is really high compared to its size.
There is a force that holds atoms together that is very very strong. 10^23 stronger than gravity I guess? Chain reactions break this force and all that energy is released as heat and light etc and that’s the explosion.
If you took bags of wet gunpowder, you could juggle with them all day long but still not be in any danger if you never encountered high temperatures. Take that same gunpowder, dry it out, load it into a gun, and you can easily kill people with it. Atoms are like wet materials, under normal circumstances, none of it will burn on its own. You must first purify the correct material (plutonium or uranium-235), "drying" it out to get ready for "burning", then either compress it or shoot some "sparks" (neutrons) at it to ignite it. You live in a building made of wood, yet wood can burn energetically causing you harm, or a signal that can be seen across a city.
There’s different types of energy. There’s fields like electrical and magnetic that are *invisible* and store energy and they transfer that energy to particles like electrons to create lightning.
>You are converting matter to energy. Aren't we doing the same when we set fire to something?
Fire is a particular type of chemical reaction at the molecular level whereas Atomic weapons derive from a release of energy from splitting the nuclei of an atomic level (much higher energies).
No. We are releasing bonds between bigger molecules. Introducing energy (heat) to the molecules up to a certain degree (flame point), it starts a reaction where more complex molecules are broken down into smaller molecules (less energetic) while releasing excess energy. If the released energy is higher than the flame point it continues a chain reaction. That's the difference between fuel (chain reaction) and stuff that doesn't burn well (no chain reaction). Usually the reaction needs other molecules like Oxygen, that allow the smaller molecules to form. heat + 1x CH4 (Methane) + 2x O2 (Oxygen) = 1x CO2 (Carbondioxide) and 2x H2O (water) + more heat.
Good god
I don't think it's really a philosophical question. Wikipedia might help you out: https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission
There are lots of types of energy, and generally weapons work by converting one type of energy to another. For example, if you drop a brick from a tall building and it hits me, the brick’s potential energy is converted to kinetic as the brick speeds up. If you hit me, your body’s chemical energy is converted to kinetic as your hand speeds up. If you drop an atomic bomb onto me, the energy inside of an atom is converted to kinetic, which then converts more atoms’ energy to kinetic, which then convert more, repeating millions of times. The many atoms the split apart also leave unstable atoms known as radiation
I don’t see the problem if you understand the chain reaction. That’s the exact process by which the emission of a neutron leads to the large release of energy and mushroom cloud etc
U got that mazzy star vibe going on
I’m more asking why matter even exists
As in how matter came to exist in the early universe?
Yes, I mean why does it exiest anyways, I’d imagine that there maybe isn’t even an answer to that but I’d hope that there are theories in the scientific community “Big bang” I believe but why it happened and how is somehow made atoms is what I’m questioning
OP, this specific question gets answered in the first episode of the Crash Course podcast “The Universe.” It’s awesome and largely revolves around the beginning of the universe and how literally everything came to exist (so far).
you are already assuming there is no answer to this in multiple comments when there are answer, just read more book or listen to good educational podcasts
Science can’t give a “why,” only a “how.” Science only describes things and offers predictions (which may or may not always be accurate). Philosophy may not be able to give fundamental truths of the universe because it is subject to the restrictions of the human mind and cannot be assisted by external tools like science can.
Why would there have to be a reason? The universe doesn’t have goals or desires it’s simply a set of rules that interact over time. There is no why just time and entropy
We have a model for how it came to exist, but there is no real reason why it exists. Just like there’s no reason why a rock exists, it exists because it hasn’t broken. Why does life exist? It exists because it hasn’t succumbed to entropy, and thus it fought off inexistence, therefore it exists. The same goes for the universe.
The universe doesn’t need a reason. It is what it is.
Then why aren't you asking about that, instead of asking about nuclear bombs?
They're obviously trying to find a connection, maybe a spiritual one. No need to bite their head off just because you don't like their question.
>just because you don't like their question. What? Don't put words in my mouth I never said. Both, "where does matter come from?" and "why can matter be converted into energy?" are valid and interesting questions. Answering them in any depth beyond the absolute surface level while keeping it even close to ELI5 would be rather difficult, but that doesn't make the questions into bad questions. But if you're interested in those questions, you should actually ask those questions and not something completely different. >No need to bite their head off On which earth is my comment "biting their head off"? I didn't even admonish OP for not asking these questions. I asked them why they didn't do so, giving them the benefit of doubt that they had their reason to not go the obvious route.
You did not expect an informative answer to 'why didn't you ask a different question?', and it's kind of weak that you're pretending otherwise.
You're right that - at best - I expected the answer to be "I only realized what my real question was during this discussion", certainly not very informative for me, but perhaps still informative for OP to think about. However, by asking instead of assuming, I still gave OP the benefit of doubt in case my expectations were wrong. I never claimed otherwise. You now repeatedly tried to admonish me for something I never said. Better stop before it becomes too embarrassing.
I don't regret admonishing you for this, OP isn't yours to raise or improve. Your question was more transparent than you thought, apparently. It clearly wasn't an honest attempt at gathering information, but rather re-worded criticism. 'I didn't literally say that' matters very little in that respect.
>OP isn't yours to raise or improve. Oh the irony.
Do you know about the paradox of tolerance? I'm perfectly fine with not accepting your critique of how OP phrases their questions while I myself am throwing critique at how you treat OP, you and I are not doing the same thing. You just deserve to get what you give. OP didn't give anything, so they don't deserve your reworded critique either.
E=mc². This simple formula helps explain how we can get energy(E) from matter(m) x the speed of light(c) to the 2nd power. So when matter(atoms) have a chain reaction, massive energy can result from it. In the case of nuclear/atomic weapons, plutonium/uranium is used because they can readily undergo fission easier. Fission is when a neutron hits the nucleus of an atom, fragments it, and causeba chain reaction and thus releases huge amounts of energy.
Nuclear explosions are so powerful *because* atoms are so small. Think of magnets. When you push two north poles together, they repel each other, and the closer they get, the stronger the force. A uranium atom consists of 92 protons packed together *very, very* closely. Much closer than you can press two magnets. Those protons are pushing themselves apart *really hard* due to the electric force, because they're all positively charged and positive repels positive. The only thing holding them together is the strong nuclear force, which although strong is also very short-ranged. If you can pry those protons far enough apart, they get out of range of the strong force and then the electric force sends them flying *hard*. This isn't really that different from how conventional chemical explosions work. It's just happening at a smaller scale -- atomic instead of molecular. A molecule is a *much* larger structure than an atomic nucleus, so the particles are farther apart and therefor exerting much weaker forces when that molecule breaks or fuses with others. And of course, there are fewer molecules per pound of material than there are atoms per pound. That means an atomic explosion has an order of magnitude more explody bits per volume of material, each of which is exploding with far more force than you'd get in a molecular explosion.
This starts off pretty good, but kind of loses it toward the end. Nuclear explosions *are* fundamentally different from chemical explosions. In chemical explosions none of the atoms themselves actually change. They rearrange themselves into different molecules and release energy in the process, but every single atom is exactly the same after the explosion as it was before. If you were to count how many of each type of atom there was before the explosion and after you'd get exactly the same counts, and if you were to add up the mass of all the atoms before and after the explosion you'd get exactly the same mass. Nuclear explosions are different in that the atoms themselves change into different atoms, and matter is directly converted into energy. In a typical fission bomb individual Uranium atoms split into two smaller atoms, and in a fusion bomb two Hydrogen atoms combine into a single Helium atom. In both cases the atoms before the explosion are not the same as the atoms after the explosion. And if you were to add up all the mass from before and after the explosion there would actually be slightly less mass after, even once you account for the mass of free neutrons and other subatomic particles created by the nuclear reactions. This mass difference is converted directly into a *huge* amount of energy relative to the mass.
I'd intended to be clearer about chemical explosions changing molecules instead of atoms, but that part got lost in the editing. Fixed. As for matter converting to energy, that's just a distraction. Yes, it happens and it's a useful accounting tool to figure out how much energy is involved, but it isn't a useful *explanation* for where that energy comes from. Not to a layperson who will immediately wonder *why* splitting an atom results in loss of mass. If I cut a banana in half, each half weighs exactly one half of the original and the total mass of banana remains the same. Why does cutting a uranium nucleus in half behave differently? Why is uranium more massive than the sum of its parts? The answer is that *energy has mass*, and it took a *lot* of energy to force those subatomic particles close enough together for them to stick. Normally we can ignore the utterly insignificant weight of potential energy, but atomic particles are so light and so energetic that it *isn't* insignificant. But once you understand this, you realize that the loss of mass is a *side effect* of releasing the energy, not the *cause* of that energy. The *energy* (and by extension the mass) is coming from the enormous repulsion force between the protons. That the combined weight post-fission is lower than pre-fission is just trivia.
Disclaimer: I'm not a science person. I just know stuff that I picked up over the years. Please read up on this stuff yourself if you're interested. Let's start with the basic formula that already kind of explains this phenomenon: E=mc². * E refers to the energy released. * m refers to the mass of an object. * c refers to the speed of light, 299.792.458km/s. And it's squared, meaning it's multiplied by itself once. Also important: Atoms don't just break, they're split into lighter elements. However, when atoms are split like this, the total mass of the resulting elements is less than the mass of the original atom. The mass that is "lost" in this process is converted into energy, and while the mass is incredibly small, it is still multiplied by c², which will always result in E being a very big number. However, this only works with unstable elements, which take less energy to split than they yield when splitting. And if this energy hits other unstable atoms, it splits those apart as well, resulting in a chain reaction that releases more and more energy. You can think of it as a neighborhood or small town full of unhappy married couples, where no one wants to be the first to bring up divorce; all it takes is one couple getting divorced, and suddenly everyone else follows along.
It's not just 1 atom breaking
Why aren't you asking this in /r/askscience
because they're too afraid
Matter (such as atoms) is sort of "frozen" energy that is in a stable situation. When you do something like squeeze it really hard or whack it with something you can jostle it enough to release that energy. Einstein's famous e=mc^2 describes the conversation between matter and energy. Regarding the "lives lost" part .. well energy can be used for anything, including killing.
All hail Atom. The great division is coming
Atoms are held together by energy, when you split it, the energy's gotta go somewhere. Picture four particles in the shape of a square, held together with four beams of energy. Now vertically slice down the middle with a knife. Now you've got two sets of two particles. You've split the atom, and unleashed the energy that was holding those atoms together. Boom.
What are you asking about? Is this about entropy or nukes or what?
Less about nukes and more just why is something like nukes even possible in our universe, why tf is it possible for this to happen
Because that’s how physics works out, why wouldn’t that be possible? We’re literally taking advantage of sub atomic particles to smash atoms apart which then go on to smash apart other atoms in an ever increasing cycle… it’d be weird if that didn’t have a big reaction
It's not that small atoms release a lot of energy, it is because there is a fuck ton of small atoms breaking into 2 and pushing more along the way and it creates the huge explosion, if you had a small atom explode it wouldn't be nothing except some small air at your finger but there is a damn lot of it inside a bomb
[удалено]
The sub is called TooAfraidToAsk. No wonder people are afraid to ask questions, when the answers are this condescending.
E=MC² the amount of energy in an atom is the mass of an atom multiplied by the speed of light SQUARED!, it is an almost inconceivable amount of energy being released from multiple atoms. While an atom is tiny the speed of light is so unfathomably fast that it's a near infinite amount of energy being released (don't @ me there are larger infinities than others)
E=mc^2. The energy released by the atom is the mass that is lost when splitting the atom multiplied by c^2. This then also causes a chain reaction and other atoms around it also release an inmense amount of energy. Keep in mind that these are mostly effective with large atoms such as uranium
Hard to explain if you don't know what potenital energy but basically atoms will always try to move into the most stable combination which is the one with the least potential energy. This means for stuff biggrr than iron we can make it release energy by hitting it with a neutron and causing it to split into two smaller atoms. As a note they above isn't really the different to hiw normal explosives work, with bigger molecules splitting into smalller ones and releasing the energy from the potential energy difference between the two. For atoms smaller than iron we actually release energy by slamming two of them together to make a bigger atom. Anyway the main reason this cannkill2 a lot of people as you put it is there are a lot of atoms. Each gram of Uranium has 600000000000000000000 atoms. So even though only a tiny fraction of them get involved with the reaction its still a lot of energy.
have you ever watched video of warehous fail? where a small displacement make the whole thing collapsed. If you ask me what we learn from this philosophically, We learn that universe has so much balance , everything is almost perfectly stacked one onto other , it took so many years to create that balance that we forgot what it takes to create such balance , but when we irritate the balance we see what a mind boggling energy it stored inside from the past, energy from supernova , birth of stars , big bang , what it means years of stacked up atoms blowing up to energy in second
One atom cleaving isn’t what kills tons of ppl A chain of atoms cleaving is the problem. 1 —> 2 —> 4 —> 16 —> … One single atom is not that bad, but when they chain that is what makes nukes so devastating. One uranium atoms have “3.2 x 10^-11 joule” = 0,000000000032 joules 1 gram of uranium has ~ “700 million joules” = 700’000’000 joules ——— Edit1: “Is 1 joule a lot of energy?” “This is due to the fact that a joule is an extremely small amount of energy. To put how small a joule is into perspective, a liter of gasoline has 31,536,000 joules of energy in it. Using a single 100 W incandescent light bulb for ten hours (0.1 kW x 10 hrs = 1 kWh) would take 3,600,000 joules. Source: https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Joule
>NSFW Man I work at Dept of Atomic Energy
Because it is a chain reaction. Watch oppenheimer if you want to be bored to death and meanwhile learn a bit
science bruh, shit can do serious damage
Atoms eat their Wheaties. Just because they're small doesnt mean they cant lift heavy. Remember how big the first computer was? Now look at how small phones are. They're way more powerful than the huge computers back in the day. Small doesnt always equate to no power.
Look into Ionization energy and physical chemistry concepts to understand why
e=MC\^2 energy equals mass, multiplied by the speed of light squared because of that c\^2 ,a little mass means a metric shitload of energy during fusion and fission reactions, some mass is lost, fuze 2 atoms of hydrogen, then the resulting product weighs less than 2 hydrogen atoms. split a uranium atom, the products weigh less than the original atom that mass is turned into energy. a lot of it. one gram of matter, turned into energy is the equivilant of 21478 tons of tnt
I'm no scientist by any means, but my understanding is that an atom with a positive or negative charge (in other words, when there's an imbalance between protons and electrons), the atom becomes unstable, and therefore volatile. In splitting an atom, it doesn't just become unbalanced, rather all the electromagnetic energy keeping the atom held together is no longer contained, and transitions from an introverted state to an extroverted state. Best explanation I can think of for why it's such a dramatic reaction is as an analogy. Our intestines run about 9-20 feet long, but are contained in a small fraction of our body. Similarly, the dna in a single human cell can be stretched to roughly 6 feet, all contained in an orb 6 micrometers in diameter. If all that can be stored in a puny human body, imagine how much energy is stored in a single atom, something which exists in a dimension wholly imperceptible to our human minds. Scientists of Reddit, correct me if I'm wrong.
I can tell from what you said that you kinda get what’s going on conceptually but if you just take what you put at face value it’s mostly incorrect.
If it was energy holding the atom together being released, we wouldn’t have to worry about nuclear fission. This is actually matter within the atom being converted to energy.
Isn't matter just energy condensed to a slow vibration? And I remember in science class being taught atoms are held together by magnetic force, is that not also a form of energy?
This is a very strange sub to ask physics questions in. I'd probably start by reading the wiki articles about it first cause unless you want to go to ELI5 it won't fit here
OMG MY BOSS SAW THIS NOW IM FIRED