Can someone explain the feared runaway nuclear reaction that Oppenheimer presented Einstein in the film? The one where detonating a nuke would’ve exploded the whole world?
Wouldn’t that scenario require many orders of magnitude more energy than the output of the what the first (or current) nuclear weapons were capable of?
In: Physics
Imagine you’re playing with matches, and you’re worried that if you light one, it might set the whole house on fire. That’s kind of what the scientists were worried about with the first atomic bomb. They thought that if they set it off, it might be like lighting a match that could start a fire so big it would burn up the whole world.
They were afraid that the explosion might make the air or the ocean catch fire and keep burning, like when one domino knocks over another, and it just keeps going. But before they lit the ‘match’ (set off the bomb), the scientists did a lot of math and figured out that the bomb wasn’t powerful enough to start such a huge fire. It was more like a sparkler—it could burn really bright and hot, but it would burn out quickly and not catch everything else on fire.
So, even though they were nervous at first, they realized that it was safe to set off the bomb without worrying about burning up the whole planet
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