why splitting a tiny particle can cause such a devastating blast
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Splitting one particle won’t. In fact, particles split all the time all around you and even in your own body. What creates that huge blast is when a huge number of them split all at once.
When an atom splits, some of its neutrons fly off and it releases some of the energy that was holding them there. And maybe, one of those neutrons hits another atom just right to make it split too. And so on. That’s what the “chain reaction” is.
However, even in solids, when you get really really small, there’s actually a lot of space between the atoms, so it’s not very likely a neutron will hit anything. But when you can get a huge number of atoms to split in a chain reaction like this, that’s how you get all that energy.
A stick of dynamite is bigger than an atom, but the “glue” holding an atom together is really strong, so when you pull it apart, you add alot more force, and when it splits, you are sent flying.
One candle is pretty and not that hot up close, a thousand candle is hot, eventually they melt and start lighting each other even when not all are lit at first.
Then the pile has a huge flame which sets your house on fire… It is so hot now that you could not be in the house and it causes devastation.
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One tiny particle is nothing, but splitting that creates byproducts that can make other particles split and those can split even more… Exponential can get really big really fast.
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For example, you fold paper it gets twice as big… What would you think 42 folds would get you.
It would be as thick as the earth moon distance, just 42 folds (put aside the paper side, it just demonstrates Exponential growth)
These answers are all a ways off. Sure there’s lots of particles, but the fundamental point is that all matter is energy and contains a massive amount of it E=mc^2.
You don’t think of matter as energy, however, when rendered unstable it can be converted to nuclear energy. This is the strongest force/energy in the universe (while weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity are all much weaker).
If you push a boulder off of a cliff, you are converting its potential energy to kinetic energy.
Similarly, some nuclei have inherently high potential energy, it’s just not as obvious as a boulder on top of a cliff, but it’s a similar
idea.
If you release that nucleus’s potential energy, you will convert it to other forms of energy, like light/radiation, and other energetic particles (kinetic), which bounce around and cascades down to other forms of energy like heat (molecule vibrations/rotations)
I don’t see much in responses to this post covering the strong nuclear force, so I’ll take a stab at that.
When the atom is split, it releases a large amount of energy (in relation to the size of the atom). Where does that energy come from?
As you may remember from high school science, atomic nuclei are made up of protons and neutrons. The protons are positively charged. Did it ever occur to you to wonder what’s holding them together? Positively charged particles repel each other, after all.
The force is called the strong nuclear force, or the strong interaction. When the (uranium) atom is split, some of the energy behind this force is released, along with a few neutrons. Those neutrons are so highly energetic that they can split other uranium atoms in the vicinity, thereby increasing the energy release exponentially.
So now you can use the numbers referred to elsewhere about how many atoms there in some amount of Uranium or Plutonium or whatever, and marvel at what E=mc^2 really means. Some of the mass that used to be part of the original atom is being converted to energy; the amount of energy is the amount of mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light. Einstein’s revelations gave rise to the theories that an atomic bomb was possible, and the rest was just a series of massive engineering projects.
To put things into perspective, there was about 6.4 kg of Plutonium-239 on Fat Man. Assuming all of it reacted to produce it’s ≈20-21 kt TNT equivalent blast, that is about 0.00000000000545 joules per atom. To boil a pot of water (1kg) from STP, you would need to split 77quadrillion atoms to produce enough energy. (More when accounting for losses)
A tiny particle DON’T cause a devastating blast – only a very tiny one. But trillion zillion of them do.
The stored energy in an atom’s nucleus (nuclear bomb) is a million times more than the stored energy in a chemical bond between atoms (regular bomb). Imagine one stick of dynamite, both in size and in power. Now imagine the power of one million sticks of dynamite all inside a single stick.
It all comes down to Einstein’s famous equation that states that E=mc^(2) in other words if you convert mass into energy you get a *huge* amount of energy.
The thing about nuclear fission reactions when you split a heavy nucleus into smaller nuclei the sum of the mass of the fission products is *less* than the mass of the original nucleus. Mass itself has been destroyed and the amount of energy released is huge. The total number of protons remains the same but neutrons is less.
The same goes for fusion reactions, you smack some hydrogen atoms together hard enough they can fuse into a single helium atom. It’s the same thing again, the number of protons remains the same but neutrons get converted into energy. Lots of energy.
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