Like we all who built it first and all, but how did the humans know that such a weapon could be possible to build with so much capability? Was there research from older scientists and physicists that led to the idea that such a thing was possible and only needed to be built?
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It’s the most cliche physics thing possible, but it all traces back to Einstein.
When he discovered that “General relativity” was a better model of reality than Newtonian physics, one of the consequences was that energy and mass could be substituted for each other. That is to say, you could turn a little bit of mass into a lot of energy.
That’s where Enrico Fermi comes in. He’s faffing about with Uranium, and thinks he created a new element by smashing a neutron into it. But it turns out that he didn’t create a new element, he had instead split that Uranium, and released a lot of energy in the process.
So then all you need is an isotope that releases more than 1 neutron when it is split apart, and you could get a chain reaction that could sustain itself into a bomb.
That isotope is Uranium 235.
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