Elemtary question.

I know this forum is WAY out of my league, I'm no rocket scientist.

I want to ask a really dumb question, and have gained the courage through the general anonymity of this forum. You'll probably laugh, or roll your eyes, but please may I just have someone answer me in lay terms or with an analogy I can understand?

When I was a kid at school, science was not an interesting subject and teachers were not enthusiastic about teaching it. I remember a nun (yes, Catholic all-girl school) telling us that the smallest 'thing' is an atom. I know better now, but at the time I accepted whatever was being taught. Then, when the atomic bomb was discovered, I was told that man had split the atom, thereby creating this massive explosion. This left me scratching my head thinking how could this be? At the time I was much too shy to ask, although I had the destinct impression that the nun teaching the subject didn't want to answer any questions.

I know this is very elementary for you all, but can someone explain what actually happened? What is an atomic bomb compared to a neutron bomb or a thermo nuclear bomb or a hydrogen bomb? Are these bombs conceived by changing the configuration of an atom?

I've never had the nerve to ask someone I know, and even though I sift through various physics and scientific writings, the answer has not materialised for me.

I feel really embarrassed asking this question. I'm hoping that the friendship I've experienced on these forums will not make fun of me too much about asking this.

Thanks to anyone who is kind enough to answer,
Teri

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I too am a bit of a beginner, but I'll say what it looks like to me and then others can point me in the right diretcion if I have it wrong. Good to have people fill in the gaps and such.

To knock apart an atom (split up the many nucleons and electrons and such) you have to bombard it with energy. This literally breaks it apart. The bits that break off it other atoms and break bits off them. If you start by smashing up one atom, and knock it apart so dozens of nucleons break off and race out and hit dozens of other atoms, and so on, then you have a geometric rate of expanding decay, a cascade effect, which is called a chain reaction. The heavier, radioactive elements are very good for this because they are so damn huge, with so many nucleons, that when smashed they release buckets and buckets of nucleons to smash into heaps of other atoms, so their size alone provides great opportunity for a chain reaction. If one breaks up and knocks apart the surrounding 10 atoms, and they in turn knock apart the surrounding 100 atoms, and so on, pretty soon you've got an enormous amount of energy being released.

The way I understand the types of these bombs is...

A neutron bomb is designed to have a relatively small physical explosion and a huge amount of radiation. The radiation of course is quite unhealthy, but since there is very little explosive force, there is not much radioactive material thrown about. After that initial release of dangerous radation, there's not much left to cause problems.

A hydrogen bomb on the other hand has a big explosion and causes all the irradiated materials to be thrown about, later to be breathed in, consumed through water supplies, et cetera. Gets up into the weather and moves around a lot.

Thermonuclear as far as I know is just about the high temperature explosion of non-radioactive materials used to start the chain reaction in the heavy elements in the bomb.

In NBCD training in the Navy, we dealt mainly with how we can, as soldiers, try to protect ourselves and our ship, how we measure things, what we wear, what we look out for, et cetera. It was not a "physics of nuclear weapons" course. However, we did learn lots of interesting things.

 

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Teri 2 ...

If you don't mind doing a bit of reading, check out:

http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

Take care and don't feel dumb asking questions ... It's the best way to learn.

 

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Thanks guys,

and especially thanks for not laughing at me. Chagur that link is great, I've made it available off line so I can so some reading. It looks like it has what I'm looking for.

Reading your answers makes it really hit home of how little I do know, and it's going to take me time to digest it and sort it out in my head.

The worst thing now that I find at my age is how important maths was! I hated it at school, it was my worst subject. Now I wish I could go back and start from scratch.

But it's very comforting to know that I can ask and be answered without contempt for my ignorance.

Thanks again. When I think I've got it straight I'll write and you all can confirm, okay?

Cheers
Teri

 

Hi Teri, when you have finished looking at the last link you may want to have a look here and find out all about what atoms are made of.

<A HREF="http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure/index.html" target=new><FONT COLOR=blue size=+1> The particle adventure</FONT></A>

 

Thanks for that link, it's fantastic. Very good stuff. Learning heaps from it.

 

Learning heaps

I agree with Adam, thanks John,

I adore finding out and learing new things, and these links are like little gold mines of information.

Although, I wish I didn't feel quite so ignorant of a lot of basic stuff. Never mind, I'll learn.

Thanks again
Teri

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I think I'll go a little more in depth.

A Fission bomb, as atated above, involves the simple splitting of plutonium or uranium nuclei. If you dont know what a nucleus is;
here is a basic model of an atom. There are much better resources online, but heres a basic.

<img src="http://www.chem4kids.com/files/art/atom_struct1.gif">

These are all out pf proportion, but you get the general Idea.

Uranium is a very good metal, meaning it always wants to give it's outer most principal energy level (OPEL) electrons away. This has nothing to do with nuclear fission, but it is interesting. Because Uranium has all those electrons flying around its outer energy levels, it has the highest chance of destroying another Uranium atom's nucleus. Uranium's nucleus is also huge, so the power created when it is split is tremendous.

Fission involces the splitting apart of the red thing and the blue thing. Hwen they split, they shoot out of the atom so fast that they break apart other atoms of the same kind, creating a chain reaction that continues until all of the plutonium or uranium is burned up.

It is easy to make a bomb out of breaking apart gigantic atoms with many PELS (Principal Energy Levels), but it is hard to fuse small atoms together. You cant use TNT to do this like you would in a regular fission bomb, because TNT simply doesnt have enough power.

To fuse the lighter atoms in a hydrogen bomb, the amount of power needed is equal to several atom bombs. This may seem impossible, but the way hydrogen bombs are made is placing many small atom bombs around a hydrogen core. All atom bombs detonate at the same time, providing the amount of heat needed to fuse the hydrogen.

The resulting explosion is VERY VERY (cannot convey the sense of VERY) large. The largest ever detonated was in Russia oh, 40 years ago. It completley flattened almost a thousand square miles, and the explosion was the power of 80,000,000 tons of TNT. Russia has a bomb that can reach 120,000,000 tons of TNT (120 megatons), but it has never been detonated.



BTW, here is a little explanation of sizes.

An object you can see > molecule > atom > Nuclear particles > leptons/etc > quarks > strings

 

Hi tetra,

"The largest ever detonated was in Russia oh, 40 years ago. It completley flattened almost a thousand square miles."

Do you have any resources where I could find the area affected by fission/fusion bombs ? I've been wondering about that for quite some time actually.

Thanks!

Crisp

 

Just as a little side note, it's interesting to know that nuclear bombs are actually very inefficient. In a matter/antimatter reaction however, 100% of the mass of the two atoms (one matter, the other antimatter) is converted to energy. I can't quite remember, but I think the energy released in a matter/antimatter explosion involving just two atoms (again, one matter, one antimatter) of hydrogen is around 2x10^16 J. I hope that's right...

And actually, modern theory suggests the particles in the nucleus of an atom (proton, neutron) can be split even further, into 3 smaller particles called Quarks.

I actually felt the same way as you did about physics and math at first Teri, but one day I decided to pick up a book about it, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and I was hooked

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There's just so many strange things out there waiting to be discovered and explained, at the moment the only thing keeping me from tackling these problems is the sheer lack of knowlege (I'm only in Gr. 11 after all

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). I hope there's something left for me to do after I graduate university

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Ooookay, don't ask me where I got 1x10^16 J for just two atoms...

For one-half kilogram of matter and one-half kilogram of antimatter, 1x10^16 J of energy is released.

*feels really stupid now*

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Hi Xelios

It was actually after reading the book "A brief History of Time" that started my interest in physics. I had read it long ago. The problem is with me I've got no head for math whatsoever and I can see how important it is. But that doesn't diminish the wonder of reading about all these things.

When you mentioned the atoms and quarks, if you go into John Devers link posted earlier - The Particle Adventure - it will open up a whole new subatomic universe! I still haven't read it all and a lot of it is over my head (and I'm not ashamed to admit that, I have great respect for people that do know all about this stuff). One thing it did show me is how important math is, so if you've got the message early, great! Keep it up at school.

BTW I posted somewhere else that Stephen Hawking has a double video out called "Stephen Hawking's Universe" which is also amazing.

It really is all wonderous, isn't it?

I don't know if you've heard of Carl Sagan, but you might want to check him out also. He's another one who can communicate to lay people without making you feel totally stupid.

Good luck with your studies.
Cheers,
Teri

 

There's something about theoretical physics I just can't resist. So many possibilites to explore, so many things to discover. I mean, who can honestly say they would not enjoy smashing two particles together at 99.9% light speed?

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Fusion was not the main source of energy in the early h-bombs. In fact, in produced perhaps 20-30% of the energy in the explosion. The bombs worked in two stages. A regular atom bomb is the first stage. The second is several cylinders. a plutonium core was surrounded by lithuim deuteride. This is surrounded by a thick tamper made by u238. The outside was a foam material. Radiation from the fission device superheats the foam. The foam turns to plasma, compressing the other components. The plutonuim core fissions, adding to the heat and pressure and causing the lithuim deuturide to change to trituim and deuturuim, and fuse. all this produces emormous amounts of neutrons, which are absorbed by the u238 which fissions and releases most of the energy of the bomb. No doubt they have a better way to do it now, and I'm still wondering, how exactly does a neutron bomb work?

 

Neutron Bombs

As stated before, a fussion bomb (Hydrogen bomb) works by fusing a hydrogen isotope. The force need to do this is provided by an atomic explosive (fission reaction). A neutron bomb is a fussion bomb set off using only "conventional" chemical explosives. No fissionable material is used. That is why it's a "clean" neuclear weapon. There are no heavy radioactive materials left over in the proccess. About 20 years ago there was a lot of talk in scientific circles about building fussion reactors. This reseach was probably a front for Neutron bomb development. Or maybe the Neutron bomb was shown to be possible because of this research. Anyway, without fissionable materials in the design probably makes it possible to build them really small an light. No shielding for radioactivity needed. Designing the special shaped charges and getting the specialty explosives is not an easy matter. There is some concern that neutron weapons blurr the line between conventional and neuclear weapons. There is also some speculation that they have already been used upon occasion or may be used in conventional warfare. Except for the effects of neutron radiation, they are probably not much different than a very powerful conventional explosive.