how can splitting a tiny piece of an even tinier atom create such a vast explosion?
In: Physics
To add on to the other comments, it’s also *hard* to get that explosion. If atoms are releasing a ton of energy, the atoms near them tend to be blown away from each other. That makes them too far apart to actually slam into each other in order to get them to split. As a result, you have to have a *massive* system in place to try and prevent that as long as possible. The Fat Man bomb had 6.2kg of plutonium, surrounded by over 4500kg of high explosives and a few other tricks in order to crush the plutonium atoms together long enough for them to split. It successfully kept the plutonium atoms close enough together for long enough that enough that about 1kg of the 6.2kg in the bomb actually split. To give a sense of scale here, solids are effectively uncompressable in everyday experience, but in this case a roughly soda can-sized chunk of plutonium was crushed down to the size of a chicken egg for a duration of a few microseconds. For a bomb like Fat Man, even a slight error in the timing of the explosives for compression, microseconds or fractions of microseconds, can result in the high explosives trying to crunch the plutonium having a bigger boom than the plutonium itself does. It requires *incredibly* precise conditions.
To give another sense of scale here, it’s not just a few atoms splitting. If I did my decimals correctly, in the Fat Man bomb, it was about as many plutonium atoms as there are stars in the observable universe, or the number of grains of sand on 1000 copies of earth, that all split in a few microseconds.
Modern fission weapons use various methods so that they can get by with a much smaller amount of explosives around it, but the principle is the same.
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