And lastly, some people here may also know him for NUKEMAP, a rough tool for estimating nuclear explosion effects (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/)
That was a fascinating read thanks so much for posting.
I have to say, there are a number of historians who write about complex historical events in a very accessible way. This blog post is definitely one of them, I also count Rutger Bergman amongst them.
In 1944, John W Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding Science Fiction, had a visit from the FBI. It concerned a published story that had just too much detail about the atomic bomb. Campbell pointed out that the information was available, and other details could be extrapolated...
I wonder whether we humans will ever see a moment like that again - sans the nazis. i.e. I wonder whether humans will ever amass that level of expertise to solve a survival of the species problem in such a short period of time.
Another reply mentioned the Covid-19 vaccines; not quite a survival-of-the-species level problem, but serious nonetheless.
I could imagine scenarios where civilization depended on our ability to create energy or grow food on a scale that required ramping up fission or fusion reactors really fast. For instance, an asteroid or volcanic eruption blocks out the sun and we need to figure out how to keep our cities from starving.
Another technological approach to avert starvation in the same sort of ecosystem collapse scenario is to develop and implement human hibernation, like the cryo-sleep pods from science fiction movies. Thus we drastically reduce the calorie needs of the average person, so that a much smaller population can try to work out the problems and get the world back into a state where it can support a larger population. (There was a movie called Downsizing that was about that kind of solution, except that in the movie they literally shrank people so that their demands on the ecosystem are dramatically reduced, and cost of living is almost nothing.)
If you're worried about that specific scenario there's a charity called ALLFED trying to develop technologies ahead of time to let us survive off of all the resultant dead biomass in a scalable way until farming can be reestablished.
That's really interesting about human hibernation. I have always interpreted it as a way to pass the time. But, now that I think about it it's more often a way to avoid aging.
My knee-jerk was that hibernation doesn't save a ton of calories - a passive day and a highly active day are only a factor of 2 different (something I learned when getting my resting calorie spend as a volunteer medical test subject).
But, pausing aging - that's different than just sleeping all day and keeping your caloric spend to base. If you aren't aging I suspect no calories can be spent.
Is that possible? I know there are the "Walt Disney's head is frozen to be revived later" concepts, but do we have any evidence it is possible to pause aging entirely?
I'd bet that controlled and sustained fusion is closer. And, that seems like fantasy.
I don't know what the current state of the art knowledge is with respect to freezing or hibernating people. I think the science-fiction depiction (like in the Alien movies, or Han Solo frozen in carbonite) is generally that a person's metabolism is basically stopped and (optionally) their body is cooled to a very low temperature to stop chemical processes from happening except at a very slow rate. I think it's implied that you don't age at all, and you probably don't consume calories. (The machine you're in just requires electricity to run presumably and maybe has some consumables like IV fluid and drugs.)
If I understand correctly, one of the barriers to the science-fiction approach of freezing people is that ice crystals form and destroy tissue if one were to actually literally freeze a person. In order to survive that, you'd need some way of inhibiting ice formation. Maybe it could be solved by injecting people with some non-toxic antifreeze solution, or immersing them in fluid at such high pressures that ice doesn't form, or you could just maintain a temperature just above freezing. And then there's the problem of how to thaw a person back out. I don't know if that's solved, but I guess there is a body of knowledge around reviving extreme hypothermia cases.
Less extreme forms of hibernation might look like medically induced coma or like a bear hibernating through the winter. I don't know if bears age significantly while they're sleeping. I'd guess that they age somewhat, but at a slower rate than normal.
One of the differences between the atom bomb and any "breakthrough biotech" project is that the developing the atom bomb, directly, isn't likely to kill people.
It did kill people - of course - due to the criticality experiments - but that was in part caused by cavalier experimentation by a researcher (over the objection of colleagues at the time to boot).
Contrast to biotech: you can't do human targeted biological experimentation without humans. At it's core you put lives at risk doing the most mundane things in biotech. You can easily wind up killing people trying to develop something and the further you're reaching the more likely it is. We don't have disposable, non-sentient human bodies to experiment on with complicated biotechnology and won't for a very long time.
When I think about sci-fi and people pulling together for an earth-scale thing I immediately think about The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin. Culturally interesting that its a chinese movie whereas in my mind a lot of western sci-fi is more individualistic.
The stories that are told maybe more individualistic but that is the nature of the story. However the backdrop usually implies a lot of pulling together e.g. You dont get a space habitat built as one person, or even as one nation.
Also, was your introduction to wandering earth the movie? If so I suggest reading the trilogy.
Have not yet read that one but have read the Three Body Problem by Cixin and am a fan! More of his work is definitely on my reading list.
Indeed nature of the story is to focus on individuals. Still for example interstellar, you fully follow the dad/daughter and all that tubular space station building just happens completely off screen. And its assigned to the brilliance of the daughter instead of the coming together of people (how i interpret it!) curious how you view that for example :)
a movie/book/story needs a protagonist. All that building that goes on off-screen is the meat and potatoes of the solution, yes the daughter has a breakthrough realisation, but the realisation is for nothing if the infrastructure isnt there.
I think the 3body problem has a similar theme, the protagonist is central to the story, without him stuff does/doesnt happen, but the infrastructure (which in the main happens off camera) is built and deployed by the many not an individual, of course some solutions (trying not to spolier anything) are dependant on one individual.
I guess my point is that there isnt much difference between western and chinese sci-fi but chinese sci-fi also has to please the chinese government to be allowed to be published, so that also needs to be considered.
It might take me being further from covid for how similar it is to the Manhattan project response to really sink in. Might be too “fresh.”
Maybe this is a chance to learn something about those times. So until the bomb was dropped, the public wouldn’t have had any conception of it being a way out of the war. Yet if the war was in decline when the bombs dropped, I suspect we can agree the bombs did make the finality pretty certain. (Edit-I would argue the bombs absolutely did end the war in a way that wasn’t assured without them dropping, but that’s a point for another time.)
As someone living through covid, the vaccine was something we all were essentially waiting around for while others developed it. We’re aware of it, even if we don’t know how much work was needed to develop the mRNA vaccines. So in WWII your average person could have perceived much more terror from not even fathoming the end of the war at various points.
> Another reply mentioned the Covid-19 vaccines; not quite a survival-of-the-species level problem, but serious nonetheless.
In a morbidly curious way, I wonder what society's reaction and government reactions would have been in the emergence of an airborne pathogen MUCH worse than covid19. Not some fanciful human species killing event like in "The Stand", but with a potential to kill 10-20% of the planet if left unchecked.
I hope that wealthy countries' reactions to finding a vaccine, cure and preventing the spread would make the Manhattan Project look like building a back yard tool shed, but I don't know for sure how we would have handled the global catastrophe.
Yes indeed, I reckon what Humanity is doing right now is winning our biggest ever war yet(1). We shut down huge tracts of human life and attendant economies to save the lives of the oldest and weakest. We're still doing it.
mRNA is bigger than a bomb, and fully peer reviewed.
> Yes indeed, I reckon what Humanity is doing right now is winning our biggest ever war yet(1).
I study WW2, and just off the top of my head, the Manhattan, B-29 and V-2 projects took longer and cost around $2 billion each in 1945 dollars. The economies involved spent over 50% of GDP on war materiel. So no, corona wasn't even the biggest war project.
> We shut down huge tracts of human life and attendant economies to save the lives of the oldest and weakest. We're still doing it.
I'm not sure it was a good tradeoff, and I would say there wouldn't have been a lockdown if there was enough ICU capacity, which BTW didn't seem to increase in the past year (China built new hospital buildings, but I don't know if they were equipped.)
I would argue that corona was the first smartphone pandemic, which pushed control down from the federal govt. to state govt. and individuals, causing sensationalism and distraction (ie. "do masks work or not?", "omg the number of patients increases every day!", "how is this going to affect my White House run (Newsom)", etc.)
> mRNA is bigger than a bomb, and fully peer reviewed.
There's very little "new" in the vaccine compared to the standard vaccines developed every year for various flu strains. The development was impressive, but not even comparable to the scale of the Manhattan Project.
I think this is not correct - existing flu vaccines are definitely not MRNA based like the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and AFAIK even the adenovirus based vaccines (Astra-Zeneca, J&J, Sputnik) are pretty modern stuff.
The fact that at least five different groups were able to achieve it in roughly the same amount of time kinda proves my point. Impressive, but nowhere near Manhattan Project.
Still, going from "we know how this would work" to "we're actually using this in a wide-scale vaccination effort" seems like a pretty big step forward. These are the first mRNA vaccines licensed for use in humans.
You could say a similar thing about the atomic bomb: the science was well established, but actually building one was still a pretty big undertaking.
Fair enough. Special relativity was published in 1905, which suggested that enormous amounts of energy were potentially available from small amounts of matter, so the possibility of making a bomb was probably on the back of people's minds for a long time before someone actually built one. But yeah, as you say, they didn't really figure out the mechanics of how to build a bomb until quite a bit later.
1938 to the Trinity test in 1945 was about seven years.
Going by the wikipedia article on RNA vaccines, people have been experimenting with them since 1989, but there was a major advance in 2010 on getting mRNA into cells without triggering an immune response. Even then, there were a lot of attempts at treating various diseases and viruses that didn't pan out. So, it sounds like mRNA vaccines were kind of a long slow slog of running into problems and fixing them, whereas in the case of the atomic bomb, the idea was around for a long time but no one really knew how to get started until suddenly they did, and they immediately got busy building it.
It's not over. Developing the vaccine was the easy part--getting it in 6 billion+ arms is the hard part that's just barely starting. That's a Manhattan project level of work IMHO.
That's kind of like the Manhattan Project itself, where the scientists at Los Alamos were only the tip of an iceberg, the rest of it being an enormous engineering and logistics exercise to produce the plutonium and enriched uranium needed.
Yeah, for some reason last year, I was under the impression that once the vaccine had been invented and approved, that would be basically the end of it. But now the prediction is that Australia won't be done until the end of the year and all experts are calling that date optimistic marketing bullshit.
Turns out giving billions of people multiple doses is actually a hard problem.
The very few EU facilities have to supply the entire rest of the world (sans RU, CN). And now the US is talking about doing a third dose per patient before exporting any doses at all.
Vaccine efficacy on mutated strains is a debated topic. Let's wait for another 3-5 years before declaring the new-fangled vaccine as a great human achievement. Also lets solve all the blood-clot issues associated with the adenoviral vaccines.
Honestly. I think people would be absolutely shocked at what is going on under the surface. And it's not just nuclear physics. The nsa is quite likely 20-30 years ahead of publicly known mathematics, the black market is already has logistics that work make FedEx blush. So much is kept secret and kept secret for a reason.
This is just wild-ass guessing though, which is fun, but not informative. Do you have even a shred of evidence the NSA is ahead in the last 20 years? Talking theoretical crypto, algorithm design, etc. of the observers and folks in the academic side of this field many suspect academia more or less caught up to the NSA, for example and they would be best positioned to guess that. Call me a skeptic the NSA is categorically ahead these days.
The NSA might be 20 years ahead in math, but they sure seem to be at least 40 years behind in computer science for some reason. If they actually lived up to the name, our government's computers would be secure, and not exfiltrating secrets every month.
Multilevel Security was a response to lessons learned in 1973, which worked, quite well. Those lessons were apparently ignored when Unix and PCs took off, and far too many people never looked back.
>If they actually lived up to the name, our government's computers would be secure, and not exfiltrating secrets every month.
The NSA is primarily an offensive organization. They spend almost no time on securing US networks or devices. It's like how the FBI catches spies, not the CIA.
That is a recent shift. They used to take their dual mandate a lot more seriously. In fact that used to be the primary mission, before the offensive cyber command was integrated into the dual hat scheme. This was largely a behind the curtains shift, one with minimal input from congress and largely off the radar of voters.
The interactions of NSA and NIST reveal that the NSA is not just an offensively postured organization, they are perfectly willing to destroy US security in the large if it allows them to deliver tasty intercepts in the small.
Iron is at the peak of the curve of binding energy [0]. Fusion releases energy by joining atoms up to it, fission releases energy by splitting atoms down to it.
Only that this is false, or more precisely intentionally misleading. The total binding energy increases all the way up. See carefully the description: It's binding energy per nucleon. It's the amount of energy you get by fusing one more proton with the nuclide, which peaks with iron, but it never goes to negative, ever.
Any system capable of fusion is going to yield more energy from turning into Iron then turning into anything else.
If you fused into something bigger, it would still be more efficient to split that atom and fuse it's nucleons into more Iron.
Atoms are mostly empty space - chemical lattices are mostly empty space - so in something like a star you can make super-dense iron and turn anything else kicking around into more iron.
EDIT: I feel like the problem here if you're assuming that the size of an atomic nucleus is anything other then negligible compared to it's electron shells. There's no situation under which a non-neutron star will "fit" more of a heavier nucleus in, compared to just densifying iron.
>If you fused into something bigger, it would still be more efficient to split that atom and fuse it's nucleons into more Iron.
Of course, but that doesn't easily happen, as the nucleons are already bound together into heavier nuclides.
In fact I guess that might happen in supernovas: The main sequence burns into lead, which is then reconstituted into the iron-nickel mixture that we know from iron meteorites, which also releases energy due to the higher average binding energy per nucleon, but needs extreme conditions to occur.
Except in a star anytime you get two particles interacting enough to potentially fuse, that's potentially a fission event as well. There's no rule which says any given nuclear interaction is fission or fusion: that's what we conclude after it happens.
So in a star creating regular fusion events, even an errant heavier nuclei is going to eventually be decayed down to Fe (or head off to become a heavy element in the upper crust).
That just doesn't happen. We know that elements are stable. It doesn't normally happen that e.g. gold spontaneously explodes into iron, you'd need the extreme conditions inside a supernova to make that happen.
It seems others have already answered you, but just in case: something can't "increase all the way up" and "peak" in the middle.
Below iron fusing nucleons gives you energy; above iron it takes energy. If binding energy increased all the way up you wouldn't be able to have nuclear fission.
>If binding energy increased all the way up you wouldn't be able to have nuclear fission.
You would, because the smaller nuclides have higher total binding energy than the large nuclides. That doesn't contradict every step inbetween being favorable. You are adding hydrogen with zero binding energy.
> Smaller nuclides have higher total binding energy than the large nuclides
i.e. total binding energy literally goes down as you get to larger nuclides.
> That doesn't contradict every step inbetween being favorable.
Yes, it does. Energy is strictly additive.
> You are adding hydrogen with zero binding energy.
Exactly. You are taking a bare nucleon, with zero binding energy, adding it to a system, and reducing the total binding energy (i.e. increasing the potential energy of the system). By conservation of mass-energy, this requires you to put in energy, and increases the total mass of the system.
Iron. That doesn't contradict that fusing more hydrogen with iron is energeticaly favorable, as the binding energy of hydrogen is zero. So you still get energy from fusing it into iron.
Fusing into iron is different from fusing with iron.
Binding energy is a negative energy value; iron having a high binding energy means it is a low energy state, so adding zero-binding-energy hydrogen to that system and decreasing the binding energy increases the potential energy of the system from the low value of iron.
While fusion does not end at iron 56 (whose nucleus has the lowest mass per nucleon), the quantities of heavier nuclei produced by fusion decrease very steeply with increasing atomic mass, becoming low beyond the isotopes of nickel, very low beyond the isotopes of zinc and negligible beyond the isotopes of germanium.
The elements heavier than zinc are produced mostly or completely by other kinds of reactions, e.g. neutron capture.
The nuclei you're producing needs to have a higher binding energy than the nuclei you're fusing do on their own. There is nothing you can fuse with iron, or any heavier nucleus, that will produce a stable element with greater binding energy than its components. Nickel-62 is actually the most stable nucleus, with the most binding energy per nucleon, but stellar nucleosynthesis ends with Nickel-56 which decays into Iron-56, which has the lowest mass per nucleon. All nuclei heavier than Nickel-62 are produced endothermically.
You don't get a copper-63 nucleus if you hit a nickel-62 nucleus with a proton, you get a copper-61 nucleus and two neutrons in the reaction:
62Ni(p,2n)61Cu
Copper-63 has spin of 3/2 while nickel-62 has a spin of 0, so you can't simply add a proton (whose spin is 1/2), you need at least 3 fermions to participate in the reaction.
The Copper-61 and two neutrons of course have a higher mass than the Nickel-62 and the proton.
Also note that this closely corresponds to what we see: A star would be expected to burn by fusing hydrogen into heavier nuclei, which shed helium as alpha particles once they get too heavy, eventually ending up with mostly lead and helium. Which either undergoes a fission event which fissions the heavy metals into iron, or stays the way it is, a white dwarf. No need for "exotic" physics.
And it also explains the persistent failure of fusion energy, as it tries to build upon nonexistent mechanisms made up to confuse people trying to build nuclear weapons.
> That doesn't make any sense, the difference between nickel-62 and copper-63 is one extra proton. It's also bullshit, since the differences in spin get equalized by neutrinos.
First, nuclei are not simply the sum of their protons and neutrons. They have structure. While copper-63 happens to have 1 more proton than Nickel-62, in its stable, lowest-energy form it also has 2 neutrons that are in a different configuration. This is why it's spin is not simply the sum of Nickel-62's spin and a proton's spin. Spin needs to be preserved. Producing neutrinos to carry off spin would violate conservation of lepton number. You need to create a lepton pair, which is exactly how Nickel-63, produced by neutron capture, is able to beta decay into Copper-63.
> Also note that this closely corresponds to what we see: A star would be expected to burn by fusing hydrogen into heavier nuclei, which shed helium as alpha particles once they get too heavy, eventually ending up with mostly lead and helium.
This is not what we see. Stars burn hydrogen by two different methods into helium via the pp process and the CNO cycle. Carbon is formed in the triple-alpha process where three alpha particles fuse. Heavier elements are formed along the alpha ladder by adding alpha particles, a process that stops at iron-56. There are some other side processes like Carbon, Oxygen, Neon, and Silicon burning which also end at iron-56. Heavier elements like lead are not produced during the star's lifetime, but rather during events like supernovae and neutron star collisions by neutron capture in the s and r processes.
> No need for "exotic" physics. And it also explains the persistent failure of fusion energy
Fusion reactors fail because of plasma instabilities which have nothing to do with nuclear reactions.
> as it tries to build upon nonexistent mechanisms made up to confuse people trying to build nuclear weapons.
Basic principles like conservation of spin are not exotic physics nor are they a conspiracy. If the American government did sabotage fusion research to preserve nuclear secrets, why don't any of those powers who discovered those nuclear secrets anyways like Russia or North Korea have working fusion reactors?
Please take the time to read up on nuclear physics, it's a fascinating topic and very enlightening about why many things in the universe are the way they are.
You can't just get a neutrino/antineutrino pair, you need to first create a z0 boson to decay into a neutrino/antineutrino pair, and due to the Z0's high mass this is a prohibitively rare occurrence at the temperatures of stellar cores. Neutrino pair emission can only happen during the extremely high temperatures of a stellar core collapse.
The observation has been made. We can use emission spectra to look at the composition of stars, we can detect neutrinos given off by the stellar fusion processes and measure their energies. Do not mistake ignorance of the data for lack of data.
So if everyone from Washington to Pyongyang is in on the conspiracy, exactly who are they trying to keep these details a secret from?
You can see the emission spectra near the "surface",you cannot see what's inside. Still, plenty of lead heavy stars have been detected.
>exactly who are they trying to keep these details a secret from?
Pretty much everyone. There are not that many countries with thermonuclear weapons (Pyongyang doesn't have one) and you don't want e.g. ISIS make a clandestine 10Mt bomb.
Convection currents mix the star's material together over long time scales. And neutrinos allow us to peer directly into the core in real time.
The most lead rich stars ever detected are less than 0.000000000000005% lead by mass. Stars are formed from stellar nebulae which are the remnants of supernovae that create heavy elements - except for the very first stars in the universe all of them contain heavy elements. As a star ages and its temperature changes, it can bleed off some material, which will preferentially remove lighter elements (because it takes less energy for them to escape), leaving behind an increased concentration of the heavy elements.
Anyone who conducted even rudimentary nuclear experiments would be able to identify if the most basic tenets of quantum mechanics were a lie. Maintaining the ruse would require pretty much all the physicists in the world to be in on it. And if all the physicists are in on it, who exactly that is not in on it would be building these thermonuclear weapons? No, the basic physics of thermonuclear weapons are well known, but the engineering is incredibly difficult and resource intensive.
You get a nickel-63 if a nickel-62 captures a neutron. You can't get a positron/neutrino pair directly, you get a w+ boson which will decay into a positron/neutrino pair, but that w+ boson, like the z0 boson in the other case, is prohibitively heavy so this reaction doesn't take place. If you want, you can think of the 62Ni(p,2n)61Cu as a Nickel-62 fusing with a hydrogen to produce an excited state of Copper-63 which then immediately decays by double neutron emission to Copper-61, but the fact is the end product being Copper-61 is observed reality, and any model that doesn't predict its production is at best an elegant fiction.
>You can't get a positron/neutrino pair directly, you get a w+ boson which will decay into a positron/neutrino pair, but that w+ boson, like the z0 boson in the other case, is prohibitively heavy so this reaction doesn't take place.
Good. So you agree that p+p fusion into deuterium cannot occur?
>Maintaining the ruse would require pretty much all the physicists in the world to be in on it.
Any time anyone figures out they get shut down as described in the article.
>the basic physics of thermonuclear weapons are well known, but the engineering is incredibly difficult and resource intensive.
They figured making false principles well known would make keeping the real mechanism secret easier.
That doesn't make any sense, the difference between nickel-62 and copper-63 is one extra proton.
It's also bullshit, since the differences in spin get equalized by neutrinos.
For fusion to be possible the reaction must be exothermic, which means that the average mass per nucleon in the resulting nucleus must be smaller than the average mass per nucleon in the reactants.
Until the iron 56 isotope, the average mass per nucleon decreases quickly, then it increases slowly with increasing atomic mass.
For reactants heavier than iron 56, fusion is not possible, but for some reactants lighter than iron 56 it is possible to fuse into nuclei a little heavier than iron 56, belonging to the few elements placed immediately after iron, where the average mass per nucleon has not increased much yet, so it is still lower than that of many of the lighter elements.
And then immediately on the addition of a hydrogen, the resulting nucleus is suddenly in a higher-energy (lower binding energy) state than some non-hydrogen splitting of it.
And since most of the results of hydrogen hitting something are unstable, this happens almost immediately, leaving the total process looking more like fission (a proton hitting a nucleus, and producing two nuclei of smaller mass than the original). Which is, in fact, how uranium fission works, only with neutrons rather than protons.
Some of my favorite posts:
On the changing and unclear knowledge of Truman about how and where the bombs would be used: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2018/01/19/purely-military-ta...
On information leakage through the very act of censorship: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/02/12/solzhenitsyn-smyth...
On the inherent human judgment and inconsistency of redaction, and the information leaks that creates: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/04/12/the-problem-of-red...
And lastly, some people here may also know him for NUKEMAP, a rough tool for estimating nuclear explosion effects (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/)