General > General Technical Chat

Oppenheimer Movie Review

<< < (22/46) > >>

HuronKing:

--- Quote from: Veteran68 on July 28, 2023, 08:45:00 pm ---
--- Quote from: fourfathom on July 27, 2023, 05:50:49 pm ---
--- Quote from: msuffidy on July 27, 2023, 04:13:57 am ---Well murdering your prof with cyanide is a pretty big personal error up there with random bombings. I am GUESSING that didn't really happen?
--- End quote ---

According to "Modern Prometheus" Oppenheimer did indeed inject some type of poison into his professor's apple, or at least he claimed that he did.  The exact details vary, depending on who is relating the story.  The professor probably didn't eat the apple.  His father pulled strings so that Oppenheimer wasn't expelled or prosecuted, but one of the conditions was that he take psychiatric counseling.  He was definitely a troubled, brilliant, young man.

--- End quote ---



--- End quote ---

If *some* form of the incident never happened, I wonder why Oppenheimer's parents had to buy off the school to keep him from getting arrested.

It's unclear exactly what he did since according to witnesses Oppenheimer told different people different things... but it is evident he did a naughty whatever it was.

KE5FX:
That's some impressive string-pulling.  "Uh, Dad, I tried to kill my professor with cyanide and now they're going to kick me out of school.  Bunch of reactionaries.  Can you, you know, say something to somebody?"

TimFox:
His parents were wealthy.  Enough said.

Szilard and Fermi patented the nuclear pile in the US:  filed 1944 and granted 1955.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2708656A/en

When I got to the University in 1970, the new library built on the site of Stagg Field had just opened.
The last bit of the stands (at 57th and Ellis) was supposed to be gone by then, but there had been a bookstore fire and they kept the run-down building temporarily until the bookstore could reopen.

peter-h:

--- Quote ---Implosion was required for the plutonium bomb because plutonium had too high a spontaneous fission rate to use the gun mechanism.
--- End quote ---

Curiously that isn't the case. David Hess is right.

You can make a "gun" device but you need a much higher velocity. The resulting device is about 5m long. The US built some mockups and spent a lot of time dropping them to get them to fall in a stable way instead of wobbling. I have a book by a guy who tracked down a lot of the drop sites of various mockup devices (he got the coordinates from a "contact"). Very good read.

Implosion is of course much more compact. As interesting is how they made 155mm shells... this is still well classified but most likely the PU was egg-shaped and charges convert it into a spherical shape. That destroys the shape of the shell of course but it doesn't matter by then.

msuffidy:
It seems to me that you are working with a bomb material that is pretty much always putting out some neutrons, so you would not like to like just handle it. When you squish it together somehow, all of a sudden so many neutrons are splitting more and more nucleus until there is a lot of energy being created. So it was classified at the time, but like maybe if you had like a vacuum foam bubbles in a sphere and you could just smash it all into a small sphere that would do it. Ideally the geometry would be very regular between the explosives and the metal foam ball, so you don't want like a tube canister between them. Or maybe there could be like a neutron inhibitor that scoots somehow as it is crushed.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod