this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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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.
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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."
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
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 actual 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.
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?
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.
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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).
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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
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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.
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