What’s this from?!
The Amazing World of Gumball. It’s a great show.
The energy from nuclear reactions can be astonishingly large (compared to, say, chemical reactions).
But atoms are really, really, really small.
people with good vision can probably see a single gold atom, I seem to remember that one useless fact about the smallest things we can see
A single atom of gold is far too small for any photon in the visible spectrum to interact with.
A single atom of gold is 0.2 nanometres (a nanometre is an incredibly small thing and a gold atom isn’t even half of 1% of that), meanwhile the wavelength of blue light (The smallest wavelength of visible light) is a hulking 380 nanometres. No matter how much you zoom in you would never see anything a single atom is just too small to interact with light.
A single atom of gold is far too small for any photon in the visible spectrum to interact with.
That’s incorrect — single atoms can, and do, interact with optical photons.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19671 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13716
And the entire field of super resolution microscopy relies on small things (e.g., molecules) interacting with light.
Sorry you’re getting down voted — lots of replies from folks unclear on what the diffraction limit means, atomic resonances, etc.: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161094-a-single-atom-is-visible-to-the-naked-eye-in-this-stunning-photo/
this is what I was remembering!
thank you
You might mean a sheet of gold that is one atom thick, which would be visible and this would be true for most materials, but some are hard or impossible to produce.
I’m trying to remember exactly but I think it was that if you can isolate a gold atom, you can bounce a laser on it and see the reflection with your eyes. Something about the reflection of gold and that being one of its interesting properties. Could be just my imagination though
Not even close, a gold atom is about 140 pm, while the diffraction limit for optical microscopes is around 200 nm, so 1000 Times bigger. And this does not mean that you could see a 200 nm object, only that you can differentiate 2 objects that are at least 200 nm apart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system So no it is not possible to see atoms with visible light photons.
Parent didn’t say resolve, they said see — you can’t resolve stars but you can most certainly see them.
Light up a single atom enough and you can see it (unclear if this works with a dark adjusted naked eye or if a long exposure is required): https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161094-a-single-atom-is-visible-to-the-naked-eye-in-this-stunning-photo/
Nope. Atoms are WAY too small to see, even with the most powerful optical microscopes.
You may be thinking of a human egg cell, which can be seen with the naked eye.
No, they’re too small to resolve. You can see small things if they’re bright enough: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161094-a-single-atom-is-visible-to-the-naked-eye-in-this-stunning-photo/
A chicken egg cell can also be seen with the naked eye
What about a turkey egg?
Ostrich egg
Vegreville egg
Fabergé egg
The width of human hair is the tiniest distance that people can notice
No shot.
I remember growing up as a kid, doing my time in Sunday School, and getting this story pitched as “Wise King Solomon ferret’s out the truth of maternity by determining which claimant truly cares about the life of the child”.
It’s kinda crazy how the story has permuted into “Two women fight over a thing and both agree splitting it in half is the fair solution.”
I think the permutation is because it works better on a comedic level. Probably started out as basic “But what if king Solomon did cut the baby in half” arguments and eventually became a general joke. The base level of “cut the baby in half” is already dark by itself all it takes is going through with it and you have a good bit of dark humor.
Also the whole scenario of king Solomon almost comes across as him not necessarily being particularly smart but moreso that the people he was dealing with were crazy or stupid.
You are waaaay overthinking this
They’re just describing the plot of the story though…
Except they forgot this is a joke.
The story hasn’t permuted into cutting things in half is the fair solution. No one is seriously telling that story.
What I like about the story is that true motherhood isn’t about biology or DNA but about caring. And I get why even people who care about the well-being of a child wouldn’t care about the well-being of an atom
Real talk: Would literally cutting a single atom in half unleash the force of an atomic bomb? Would it even be a noticeable reaction to the unassisted human eye?
I’ve seen some science show stuff at particle accelerators where a dude points to some device giving off sparks and is like “these sparks are actually anti-matter explosions.” So I wonder if a single atom of regular matter would even be a spark.
I found a similar discussion on Reddit and liked this comment because it was easy to understand:
The energy released in the fission (splitting) of ONE atom of U-235 is enough to make a single grain of sand visibly move.
It’s apparently a quote from the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.
So instead of gas powered leaf blowers and all their noise, we ought to go nuclear.
Instead of constant noise there’s just a single pop, and the leaves are gone. Just be careful with the dosage.
There are carbon atoms splitting (decaying) inside of you right now. This is why carbon dating works. Do you notice them?
Yeah, unless the atom in question is neutronium, you won’t notice and if it is neutronium, you have all kinds of issues even without splitting it.
This reminds me of people freaking out over particle accelerators. Will it create a black hole???
Only they don’t know that the Earth is regularly bombarded with high energy particles from space. The reason we need particle accelerators is so that we can accelerate the desired types of particles to the desired speed, and aim them at the desired place.
Most people have no idea just how little they actually know about the world around them.
Hell, most of what the average person “knows” is just made up assumptions they had about things they knew little to nothing about and subsequently internalized those assumptions without actually researching if they were correct.
Humans are hella prone to trapping ourselves in fallacious thought without even knowing we do it. It’s just how our brains have evolved to work through inductive reasoning.
There are carbon atoms splitting (decaying) inside of you right now… Do you notice them?
Silly talk: Idk… I sometimes get this weird, tingling feeling through my whole body. You think it might be carbon decay?
Maybe it’s neuropathy? Maybe it’s Maybelline?
Nah, pretty sure they were born with it 🤷
Not unless you feel it all the time (and even if you do, the energy released is not enough to activate nerve endings).
Only a tiny part of the atom is converted to energy in fission. An antimatter annihilation is 100%
Even then a hydrogen+anti hydrogen releases 1.86 x 10⁻¹⁰ Joules.
You need about 4 joules to heat 1g of water by 1C
and one annihilation is 0.000000000186J
Bananas emit antimatter.
So what happens when you split a banana split?
You make a friend.
Making friends, you say?
Pris could do the splits
it rather depends on the atom and how you go about doing it- and also, what the atom is surrounded by. if it were split in such a way that neutrons were released into other neutrons, generating a cascade reaction… then… yes. That’s kinda how a nuke works.
But in general? probably not.
It worked in the movie Young Einstein and I trust movies, not really I just wanted to make an amusing but related comment about a lesser well than known movie of my youth. Of course since it’s a comic seems semi relevant, it was a part of the movie trailer heh unless my memory is worse than I hope but I don’t want to delve there.
I think the most concerning thing would be the radiation that it would give off. Aside from that, I’m not really sure it there would be more than a possible spark as you mentioned, though it may also depend on the size of the atom.
Man they could have forced countless generations to fight genocidal wars without the monotheistic religious pretext or impetus if this has really happened.
Don’t worry, if that happened, something else will take it place. The only constant is the genocide, the reason is just a variable.
As I’ve learned more, the energy from a single atom is not much. They split nitrogen long before uranium but it didn’t really matter. You need the chain reaction of uranium.
From Gemini:
The energy released from a single uranium atom splitting is an infinitesimally tiny fraction of what’s needed to even warm a mug of water. You would need the simultaneous fission of approximately 1.96 quadrillion (1,960,000,000,000,000) uranium atoms to heat a single mug of water.
*JFC what’s up with the downvotes? Because I used Gemini?
Thank God there was an AI here to tell us something we could just look up.
I was interested in whether this was accurate. I got a similar answer, but I know almost nothing about nuclear fission and math is not my strong suit. Here it is anyway:
The heat capacity of water is fairly linear. At normal atmospheric pressure, it’s 4,200J/kg°C, which means a 300ml mug of water would take 1,260 joules to raise by 1°C and thus 75,600 joules to raise by 60°C.
Fission of a single atomic nucleus of U-235 releases an average of 3.2e-11 joules (0.000000000032). To release 75,600 joules would presumably take fission of 2.3625e+15 atoms (2,362,500,000,000,000 – two quadrillion three hundred sixty-two trillion five hundred billion).
You uh definitely at least took a heat transfer class in college or you wouldn’t know what to do with all this stuff. Hell, I took one 10 years ago, and I barely know what to do with this information anymore. Kudos to you for doing the napkin math
Nah, just read into it a little and then forgot it afterwards! The first link – the old Reddit thread – was quite helpful.
Considering it was 250 ml by 60 C, looks bang on.
I’m not downvoting you, but I think a lot of people, including me, would read “from Gemini” (or any AI) as “you can’t trust this information”.
For me, whenever anyone includes AI generated crap in their comment, I think three things:
- Great, I now need to fact check this because you can’t trust AI
- If I wanted AI generated crap, I’d go get it myself
- The commenter couldn’t even* be bothered to actually author their comment, this is the lowest of low effort content, and is definitionally deserving of a downvote
ChatGPT will straight up hallucinate numbers (or any information). Gemini is much more accurate. Haven’t tried others.
They all do it.
You would need the simultaneous fission of approximately 1.96 quadrillion (1,960,000,000,000,000) uranium atoms to heat a single mug of water.
heat by how much? AI as useful as ever.
deleted by creator
I just cut that bit out. 20 C to 80 C.
Even MY anium???
No, I amanium!
Isn’t that common knowledge? I don’t think that anyone seriously believes that splitting a single atom causes an explosion.
I’d wager loads of people with no scientific knowledge do.
I’d wager they don’t even know what you mean by “splitting an atom” and wouldn’t give a rat’s ass whether it released any energy.
I mean I’m not saying that you’re an expert, but my us highschool education regarding nuclear fission was pretty handwavy, and won’t come up again in most careers
