yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

A Tale of Two Atoms | Cosmos: Possible Worlds


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

The writer H.G. Wells, who first imagined time machines and alien invasions, had a nightmare of a future world where atoms were weaponized. In his book called "The World Set Free", written in 1913, he coined the phrase atomic bombs and loosed them on helpless civilian populations. He set his vision of a nuclear war between England and Germany in the impossibly distant future of the 1950s.

[music playing]
[bomb exploding]

In 1933, the Hungarian physicist, Leo Szilard, was contemplating becoming a biologist.

Dr. Szilard? Are you quite all right in there?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: He read Wells's novel, and it started him thinking. Szilard knew that atoms are made of protons and neutrons on the inside and a skittering vale of electrons on the outside. Suddenly, while waiting for the light to change at this intersection in London, he was struck by the thought, if he could find a sufficiently large amount of an element that would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one, it would sustain a nuclear chain reaction. Two would produce four, four would produce eight, and so forth, until enormous amounts of energy in the nucleus itself could be liberated. Not a chemical reaction, but a nuclear one.

[alarm wailing]
[bomb exploding]
[music playing]

This was the moment our world changed. Leo Szilard also knew the power of exponentials, and if a neutron chain reaction could be triggered down there in the world of the atom's nucleus, then something like Wells's imaginary atomic bomb might be possible. He shuddered at the thought of this destructive capability. It was just the latest development on a continuum of violence that began long, long before.

50,000 years ago, all humans were roving bands of hunter-gatherers. They communicated over limited areas by calling to one another, that is, at the speed of sound, around 750 miles per hour, but over longer distances, they could communicate only as fast as they could run.

Around 12,000 years ago, about the same time as the invention of agriculture, they developed the power to kill at a longer distance. The kill radius expanded to the arc of an arrow launched by a bow, and they could kill one person with a single arrow. Our ancestors were not particularly warlike because there were so few people and so much room back then that moving on was preferable to armed conflict. Their weapons were used almost entirely for hunting.

Their identification horizon was likely small, only with the other members of their band of 50 or 100 people. But their time horizon took a giant leap. They worked long and hard planting crops in the here and now, so several months later, they could harvest them. They postponed present gratification for later advantage. They began to plan for the future.

More Articles

View All
Applying the chain rule and product rule | Advanced derivatives | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is try to find the derivative with respect to X of (x^2 \sin(X)) all of that to the third power. And what’s going to be interesting is that there are multiple ways to tackle it. I encourage you to pause the video and …
Estimating quotients
We are told to use estimation to tell whether each estimated quotient is reasonable or unreasonable. So we have a bunch of estimated quotients here. Someone is estimating that 2419 divided by 3 is roughly equal to 7500. We have to figure out is that reaso…
The REALISTIC Millionaire Investing Advice In Your 20s
What’s up, guys? It’s Graham here. So, some of you know I just recently turned 30 years old, and looking back, my 20s have been absolutely by far the most transformative years of my entire life. Not only in terms of investing my money and building my wea…
Why following your dreams is ruining your life
Okay. So, I’ve been wanting to make this video for a long time, and I’m still not totally confident that I have the exact words that I want to say, but I am pretty passionate about this concept. And I think there is sort of a toxic narrative in the world …
Collision theory and the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution | Kinetics | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
Collision theory can be related to Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions. First, we’ll start with collision theory. Collision theory says that particles must collide in the proper orientation and with enough kinetic energy to overcome the activation energy barr…
Graham Stephan; 2018 REALTOR® Magazine 30 Under 30 Applicant
What’s up you guys! It’s Graham here. So, this video is a bit different than the other videos that I made, but it’s extremely important to me. Each year, Realtor Magazine comes out with the top 30 real estate agents under the age of 30 here in the United …