So I’ve watched Oppenheimer and a recurring theme in the movie was how tedious task it was to get fission material (demonstrated as filling a large fish bowl by marbles). All they manage to collect in two year period was just enough for two bombs. but fast forward few years US have a complete arsenal of bombs to flat the earth. I understand they must’ve innovated a method and the exact method maybe classified, what i’m interested in is knowing what was the obstacle(s) for this and rough idea of how they might’ve overcome it.
In: 450
That is just the life cycle of new technology:
1. Small teams or individuals do experiments on some new idea. They probably fail a lot, but eventually figure out something that works, but only on a small scale, and in a lab.
2. At this point, they are the only people in the world who understand this new idea, and the process to do it. They publish a paper about it, and start teaching this new ides to others.
3. Now you may have dozens of teams who understand the idea and process, and start making their own experiments. So you have many new brains coming at the problem from different angles.
4. Those new teams publish papers and teach more people, and before long you have tons of people who can work on the problem.
Basically it is just a numbers game, of how many brains have we focused on the problem, and how many ideas and improvements we can make in a given amount of time.
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