• passiveaggressivesonar@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    I still struggle to see how that sudden reaction can create so much pressure, a regular explosive is creating heavy byproducts and is expanding the gases already present in the explosive, but the sudden heating of a small uranium core and the air around it can create a bigger explosion than a bomb thousands of times heavier? Boggles my mind

    • purplemonkeymad@programming.dev
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      16 days ago

      Yea, the concentration of energy trapped in matter is immense. People say matter is energy and e=mc^2 but you really have to do the calculations to see how much work that c squared is doing. A small grain of sand is probably more energy than the largest bomb, but the hard part is converting that matter into energy.

      A hydrogen bomb (even bigger than a nuke,) converts less than a percent of the matter in the bomb to energy.