why splitting a tiny particle can cause such a devastating blast
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The answer to your question is, unfortunately, so fundamental that the explanation will probably not yield the insight you seek. That shouldn’t stop you from asking though. Just be prepared to very quickly run into the “it’s that way because it is” wall.
When you cut a piece of pie, you always end up with exactly same amount of pie as when you started. For example, if you start with 200 grams of pumpkin pie, and you cut it perfectly in half, you end up with two slices that are 100 grams each.
But when you get down to the atomic level, things change in fundamental ways. If you split an atom, the parts you end up with don’t add up to the mass of the original atom. A small part of the atom’s mass is converted from mass to energy. The reason this happens is “fundamental” to the laws of our universe. There is no deeper “why”, it just is.
So when you split an atom, some of the mass is converted to energy, but how much energy? You might have heard of the formula E=mc^(2). If we spell that out, it’s energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
This formula tells us how much energy will be produced by the reduction in mass that occurs when you split an atom.
Let’s pretend for just a moment that we could convert 1kg of pie directly into energy. How much energy would that get us?
m = 1 kilograms (kg)
c = 300,000,000 meters per second (ms-1)
This gives us 1kg × 300,000,000ms^(-1) = 90,000,000,000,000,000 joules
Cool, right? What the hell are joules? 1 joule per second is the same as 1 watt, so we can convert joules to kilowatt hours to get 25,000,000,000 kWh. In the US, the average home uses around 10,500 kWh per year, so we can divide 25,000,000,000 kWh ÷ 10,500 kWh to get roughly 2,380,952.
So to summarize, E=mc^(2) tells us that 1 kg (around 2.2 lbs) of matter converted directly to energy is enough to power 2,380,952 average US homes for an entire year.
This fundamental aspect of matter/energy conversion is why splitting the atom results in so much energy being released.
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