If a bunch of overgrown tenderqueers unhealthy obsessed with one of those godawful sterile Netflix teen gay dramas forced me out of the closet when I was a teenager I’d become homophobic out of spite sorry
This is so fucking despicable I don’t even know what to say. I hope he takes the money he made from being in that shitty fucking show and never sets foot on its set again. Stick to your pathetic webtoons and leave real human beings alone you freaks.
My favorite thing about the Demon Core is that, unlike nearly all other radioactive incidents, everyone manipulating it was completely aware that the game they were playing was ridiculously dangerous and extremely stupid…it was a peer reviewed “fuck around and find out” accident by people with doctorades
The experimenter needed to maintain a slight separation between the reflector halves in order to stay below criticality. The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
Under Slotin’s own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used and the only thing preventing the closure was the blade of a standard flat-tipped screwdriver manipulated in Slotin’s other hand. Slotin, who was given to bravado, became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions, often in his trademark blue jeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers. Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be “dead within a year” if they continued performing the test in that manner. Scientists referred to this flirting with the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction as “tickling the dragon’s tail”, based on a remark by physicist Richard Feynman, who compared the experiments to “tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon”.
On the day of the accident, Slotin’s screwdriver slipped outward a fraction of an inch while he was lowering the top reflector, allowing the reflector to fall into place around the core. Instantly, there was a flash of blue light and a wave of heat across Slotin’s skin; the core had become supercritical, releasing an intense burst of neutron radiation estimated to have lasted about a half second.
Cringe radiation sickness from my fail safety protocol
Wait, this is so fucking funny
“Tonight we honor an American hero: Guy Who Fucked Around and Found Out.
Your quick thinking and fast acting minimized the damage caused entirely by yourself. It would be easy to let your infinite hubris distract you while you played around with a subcritical mass of plutonium near several other people, but in the face of a predictable and entirely preventable accident with a clear precedent, you stepped up to make sure you’d be the only one hit by a lethal dose of ionizing radiation, so your colleagues would merely suffer from cancer.
Thank you for your service, and may you rest in peace.”
I feel like this photo accurately depicts the amount of ‘Fucked around and found out’ going on here
hi, i’m a former particle physicist, and i wanted to come in here really quickly to kill any fun going on in this post (sorry) because the tenor and premise of it are disturbing to me.
i don’t have anything organized to say about the larger forces at work on the Manhattan Project; there are plenty of documentaries to check out with detail and perspective, but i think what i can do is (in a disorganized and off the cuff way) contextualize the Demon Core, its role at Los Alamos, why what happened was not funny or a joke, and why Louis Slotin is not a hero in any sense of the word, even sarcastically or ironically.
first off, some scientific context. the Demon Core was a small (3.5 inch, 14lb) sphere of plutonium-gallium alloy coated in nickel. it was designed to be a core for an implosion-type atomic bomb: in a fission bomb of that type, the sphere would be precisely collapsed on itself to make it dense enough to undergo self-sustaining nuclear fission. on its own, it was very tentatively barely safe, but it would rapidly become very unsafe if it were made more dense, or if neutrons were to collide with it. because it was made of plutonium, it was constantly ejecting some neutrons, so reflecting those neutrons back onto it would also be unsafe. that’s the science.
now history. the Demon Core was scheduled to be assembled into an implosion-type fission bomb and dropped on Japan, but Japan surrendered before a third bomb was dropped and so the core stuck around at Los Alamos. this is the major reason the Demon Core is not something to make jokes about: the Demon Core was intended to be the critical component of an unspeakably destructive weapon with which Harry Truman and the United States military intended to commit unprecedented crimes of war and crimes against humanity and the planet. it is an evil object conceived by terrified, dominating, cruel, uncaring minds. nuclear proliferation is, uhm, bad. for everyone. always.
now to the accidents (there were two). the first was less than a week after Japan surrendered, very near to the range of dates on which the bomb containing the Demon Core was originally intended to be dropped, and the second was a little less than a year after the first. they were both caused by the same scientific principle mentioned above: experiments were frequently done on the Core to verify how close it was to becoming supercritical, or to test properties of other bomb-making materials, like the part of the bomb meant to reflect neutrons back into the core.
the first accident happened when Harry Daghlian was doing an experiment on neutron reflection: the Core was inside a stack of tungsten carbide bricks, which reflect neutrons. Daghlian dropped a brick he was stacking around the Core onto it instead, and quickly moved it off, but received a large dose of radiation. he quickly became sick, and died 25 days later (twenty five days later!) from acute radiation sickness. the flesh on his hand burned and peeled and fell off, and then days after that he died.
the second accident is the one described in the post above. the photo that’s shown is a recreation. the experiment being done also involved neutron reflection, essentially slowly almost completely closing the Core within two beryllium hemispheres. completely enclosing the core would reflect a ton of neutrons, making it supercritical, hence the f*cking screwdriver head preventing that. about half a second after the screwdriver slipped, Slotin instinctively rotated the hand holding the upper hemisphere to stop the daisychaining reaction. but he received huge doses of neutron and gamma radiation, and died 9 days later of acute radiation poisoning. nine days. Alvin Graves, another physicist who was standing behind Slotin, got a sub-lethal dose, but he was hospitalized for weeks, and died 19 years later (may or may not have been related).
after these accidents, remote control systems were introduced for all experiments of these types so that experimenters could be half a mile away while conducting them. here is my second point i want to make: the only reasons for the deaths caused by the Demon Core were carelessness, an appalling lack of scientific rigor, a complete disconnect from the actual life threatening and world altering danger posed by nuclear fission and its use in weapons, and the air of detachment and exceptionalism that characterized physicist involvement in the Manhattan Project. and that is how we absolutely need to remember what happened at Los Alamos in the 1940s.
since then the planet has been irreparably harmed by nuclear tests underground, underwater, and on land inhabited by people deemed expendable by US and other world governments. immature and inhumane physicists partnered with a posturing and bullying american government to bring about the unthinkable tragedies of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. the attitudes revealed in the stories of the Demon Core are central to the mentality that brought nuclear proliferation stumbling and screaming and melting and sickening and forever-ruining onto the world stage. this is not “great moments in fucking around and finding out”. this is what humans look like when they’ve lost contact with the earth beneath their feet in service of their own fear, profit motive, ego, and hatred.
The scientists that aided the government in detonating those ionosphere bombs also weren’t entirely sure that it wouldn’t just ignite the entire atmosphere and cause the instantaneous extinction of all life on Earth, also
In terms of like, Please For The Love Of God Get Hobbies That Aren’t Scrolling Through An App For Six Hours A Day, I understand and experience completely the argument of like. with the stressors of modern work, you don’t have the energy at the end of the day to do anything but mindlessly watch Netflix and scroll through your phone. but like I would like to gently encourage you to simply force yourself for a time to do something instead of pick up your phone, bc the phone is literally designed to light up your brain with no effort from you whatsoever and it does in fact rot your brain. It makes literally anything but scrolling on your phone seem difficult and joyless. But if you stop scrolling on your phone all the time, and start like, reading or embroidering or gardening or going for walks, you will eventually find the joy in them once more
I understand and it is true that it is hard to have a life outside work and scrolling but there is not a near future where that won’t be the case and you should still live a life. And you won’t create a future where that isn’t the case if you don’t have the confidence and experience and drive to fight for it
the trick is to recognize that there’s nothing intrinsically exhausting about reading a book or painting a picture or doing any of the activities that are meaningful to you. What makes these things seem exhausting is the fact that they’re now competing with cheaper stimulation. In a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a group of psychologists suggested that the feeling of effort is a sensation of opportunity costs. When you’re doing something and an alternative activity promises to be easier and more immediately rewarding, the original activity feels effortful.
Therefore, if you want to do the things that matter, you need to make the alternatives less salient. Reading will be hard when Netflix is always an option. Family time will seem boring if your phone is always within arm’s reach. Easier will beat better if it’s always available.
unironically OOP is right. NV made a bunch of compelling individual characters and the most thoroughly uncompelling main narrative i’ve seen in such an acclaimed game.
3, by contrast, has characters that are nearly as compelling and a much better main story. It’s also a great example of What Bethesda Does Best, which is having a map with a bunch of interesting shit sprinkled all over the place once you get off the beaten path.
Your pinned post is about she ra fanfiction pack your bags and go back home to loser island
