>Ayys make a weapon that splits every single atom in something.
Assuming each and every one of those atoms go nuclear go nuclear, how powerful of a weapon would this be?
>>47685339
Wouldn't be very useful if you're trying to take a place over
>>47685339
I think you're talking about 100% efficient fission. If that's the case, I think it's just E=MC^2 where M is the mass of your fissionables.
>>47685369
Not unless you use it for intimidation.
Nothing makes a empire shit it's pants like knowing you can make things goNUCLEAR
>>47685392
*Its
Fak
>>47685339
>atoms go nuclear
Somewhere a physics teacher is crying.
Crying bitter anti-blue tears into an uncaring quark sea.
>>47685418
Well it's not my fault that the first thing google images gave me when I looked up "atom splitting" was a explosion.
>>47685439
It's actually appropriate. >>47685418
is just being pedantic.
Atoms have a nucleus, which splits during nuclear fission, releasing X-rays, protons and neutrons. Hopefully, those neutrons hit the nuclei of other atoms, making them unstable and continuing your chain reaction.
>>47685339
Define 'going nuclear'.
Anyways E=mc^2. Fusion releases about 0.4% of it's mass into energy iirc so 0.004 times the mass times the speed of light squared.
>>47685477
Or in common tongue KAFUKINBOOM!
>>47685339
You mean like in Ender's Game?
Could one technically make a beam weapon that splits atoms resulting in nuclear explosion? That would be pretty awesome I think.
>>47685665
Well, if you aimed a particle beam weapon at something you probably would split a few atoms. Hell, a fast enough rock would split atoms on impact. The problem is, unless your target is made of slightly subcritical plutonium, there's no chain reaction to keep adding energy to the explosion.
>>47685665
Sure, the issue is getting a chain reaction out of light atoms.
>>47685616
Lots of things go KAFUKINBOOM! 'every atom going nuclear' could mean either fusion or fission.
Though if you're after the the biggest boom so to speak you would have to have a matter antimatter reaction which would release about 250 times more energy than an equally sized fusion reaction.
>>47685339
The problem with a weapon is twofold
First, on an atomic level there is no boundary between one thing and another, so unless you have arbitrary game mechanics kick in, there's no way to set a stopping point at a particular object or person.
Second the weapon would be useless because any scale you intend to use it on, assuming the wielder and the target are roughly in the same magnitude of size, will always result in the annihilation of the user because the resulting nuclear blast will easily vaporize them. The only situation where it could be of any use is as some kind of space-based long-range sniping shot to destroy ships
If you could make every single atom in an average Apple (0.18 kilograms) release all of their energy, you would end up with 1.61775x10^10 joules of energy being released in a fiery explosion equal to the largest ever recorded nuclear blast in human history. Now just imagine if the object in question is a 120kg scrap metal ingot, or a fully loaded 35,000kg 18-wheeler.
>>47685339
Assuming you're trying to use this to make an explosion, you need to start with atoms heavier than Iron (atomic number 26). Splitting atoms lighter than that actually takes energy instead of releasing it.
You would maximize your energy yield by starting with something very heavy (like, say, Uranium) and splitting it into multiple Iron nuclei. A quick (and imprecise at best) calculation gives a yield of 86 kT TNT equivalent from 1 kg of Uranium. (compare to a theoretical maximum of 6 kT/kg for a conventional Uranium fission bomb.)
>how powerful of a weapon would this be?
Not actually an explosion unless you're using it on something made of heavy metals. Ten times as powerful as a conventional nuke if you use it on solid Uranium. Less powerful than a theoretical high-efficiency fusion bomb.
>>47690492
I should have specified: this answer assumes you meant what you said: "split every atom". If you actually meant "convert all mass to energy", then (assuming you've solved the CP violation that entails), >>47686201 is correct (but missed a factor of a million: the apple would release 1.6e10 Megajoules, or 3.8 MT TNT equivalent.)
>>47685339
When you say "split" an atom, I'm going to presume you mean "separate into two parts, of comparable mass, in a manner so that they will not instantly recombine". This is more commonly known as Fission.
The results of doing so would depend on the substance that is split. The energy that you get comes from the Nuclear Binding Energy (see pic) of the substance: for materials heavier than Iron fission releases energy, but for materials lighter than iron it absorbs energy. In that case, combining (Fusion) is what you want to release energy.
This means if you put anything into your machine with an atomic mass smaller than iron (eg, all organic substances) it would get COLDER, rather than release energy. This could be dangerous for the surroundings in the long term, but wouldn't produce an explosion.
If you put in materials a little more massive than Iron, it would release energy equal to the difference between the starting energy and the final energy of both byproducts. Since you have to sum the products in this way, many of these would also produce zero (or less) energy.
If you put in materials more than twice as massive as Iron (eg, metals heavier than silver), it would produce alot of energy and you'd get your explosion. In fission reactors/bombs, only a small percentage of the atoms actually undergo fission, so from this point up the explosion would scale with fuel very, VERY quickly.
>>47685377
>E=MC^2 where M is the mass of your fissionables
That would only be if you were annihilating the whole of your fuel (eg, matter-antimatter annihilation). In this case M is the difference in mass between your starting state and your end products: this difference is a very small proportion of the mass of the protons and neutrons.
>>47685339
Well, keep in mind that only atoms heavier than nickel-56* "go nuclear" when split. Atoms lighter than that actually lose energy when split, although the energy it takes to split anything lighter than lead or so is so enormous you'd still get a boom from the leftover energy.
*Iron-56 has the lowest mass per nucleon, but nickel-56 has the actual highest binding energy; iron-56 just has more protons, which are a bit lighter than neutrons.
Just like atoms binding into molecules, nucleons bind into atoms because that configuration has a lower potential energy/is more "stable"; it takes energy to pull those bonds apart. However, also like different molecules, different nuclei have different amounts of potential energy, and so various reactions can be exothermic or endothermic depending on the binding energies of the products and reactants, provided you put in the activation energy needed to break them out of their current configuration.
So, say, take water versus hydrogen peroxide: It takes energy to split up water into hydrogen and oxygen, but splitting hydrogen peroxide into oxygen and water actually produces energy and peroxide will spontaneously decay into the two if you look at it funny. (On the other hand, combining hydrogen and oxygen *into* water produces quite a bit of energy; this is analogous to fusion). Most molecules we see are more stable than smaller molecules they could be split up into, because generally otherwise they'd have already split up. A weapon that split up all the molecules in a person into their component atoms would be incredibly devastating, but it would actually release much less energy than it took to split them in the first place, and could perhaps more productively have been used to just blow them up directly.
The difference is, of course, that the binding energies of atoms are way, way larger than those of molecules, so an "exothermic" reaction is REALLY, REALLY exothermic. [cont]
>>47691587
[cont]
As an example, the energy it takes to pry a hydrogen atom apart chemically (pull the electron off of the proton) is 13.6 electron-Volts (eV)* - but to pry a helium nucleus apart takes 28,300,000 eV. (28.3 MeV).
This gives you an idea of the energy scales involved here.
So, what exactly happens will depend on what the target is made of. Certainly, though, it will explode messily no matter what; even if no energy is released at all (extremely unlikely) it will still wreak merry hell with the chemistry of the target and release an awful lot of chemical energy. And you'll get a bunch of unstable fission products left over, so you'll get a massive burst of radiation and incredibly nasty fallout.
*The favorite unit of particle physics - the energy it takes to move one electron across an electric potential difference of one volt. Because Einstein relates energy, momentum, and mass (as well as length and time), and Schrodinger relates energy and length, you can measure any damn thing you like by sticking constants onto eV.
Working out exactly what would happen would be really complicated, because there's lots of different atoms in things and you also have to guess at what the fission products will be and then look at their binding energies and what they decay into and with what energies, but I'd guess that it comes out to somewhere in the range of 0.1-10 MeV per atom for a typical target including decay products, and there's roughly 10^28 atoms in a human, so a person-sized target will probably get you somewhere between 40 kilotons of TNT and 4 megatons depending on composition, along with about 70 kg of weird fission products that'll probably decay pretty quickly but make for godawful fallout.
(If you were able to actually shoot at something fissile, like pure U-235, you'd get something on the order of 20 kilotons of TNT per kilogram, so like 14 megatons for our 70kg-ish human-mass target).
>>47685411
Apostrophe of posession douchebag
>>47692398
>Apostrophe of posession douchebag
Different anon here, you are incorrect. There is no apostrophe in the possessive "its". There used to be, but it's fallen out of use in the last hundred years.
t. editor
>>47692418
I literally don't believe that any person who corrects typing actually believes that language evolves with usage.
>>47686201
>>47690492
>>47690538
>>47690648
>>47691587
>>47692391
So many quality posts and nobody gave a shit
