Did we discover nuclear technology “too early”

[awsumguy76801]

I watched a video or something that said nukes were a “23rd century technology that we accidentally discovered in the 20th.” or something like that. Do you guys think that’s true or is it inevitable for any civilization/species to get that technology when they reach 1940s level technology? Interesting question

[farmerben]

Without Marie Curie, I think nuke tech would be delayed at least 50 years

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

2 hours ago, awsumguy76801 said:

I watched a video or something that said nukes were a “23rd century technology that we accidentally discovered in the 20th.” or something like that. Do you guys think that’s true or is it inevitable for any civilization/species to get that technology when they reach 1940s level technology? Interesting question

I think it was found out in its own time. 

There is a thread of talk among the sci-fi / fearful / weird crowd to the effect that 'humanity is destined to destroy itself'.  The companion to this is 'the reason we don't talk to Aliens is that they've all destroyed themselves.'.  Apparently (according to the line of thought) once a species acquired nukes it is inevitable that they will destroy themselves. 

That is probably hogwash. 

The '23d century tech' bit is the key: they think that somehow, magically, by the 23d century that we would be so enlightened as a species that we could handle the awesome responsibility of having such terrible weapons. 

If you recall your Star Trek canon, there was a terrible nuclear war, which humanity survived, and two centuries later we were bigger and better than ever. (might also be hogwash) 

 

[jost]

Nope, nukes and nuclear Power were the application of the scientific knowledge of that day, discovered düring the five decades before.

 

In the end if the USA wouldn't been first, the soviets or axis  would have done it. Luckily the german nuclear program wasn't very advanced since they lacked funds ( due to wartime) and their approach wasn't practical on an industrial scale. But at some point they would also been at the same stage.

[jost]

The Wikipedia articles on the Uranprojekt are quite enlightening:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=German_nuclear_program_during_World_War_II&diffonly=true

Even more interesting are the Transkription of the talk of impridoned German scientists envolved in the Uranprojekt:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Epsilon

 

They show that ( imho luckily) they did have quite some failure in estamting the needed amount of Uran, needed devices etc. But in the end if sonething don't work you mess around until you find sonething that works. 

 

[Hotel26]

Your question is an implication that some knowledge might better be forbidden.  By which omniscient knowledge should this judgement be made?

Edited June 19 by Hotel26

[kerbiloid]

Both versions are actually true.

After the humanity had been mostly self-destroyed in the nuclear war of XXI, and was thrown back to the XIX technologies, it took them two centuries to rediscover the nuclear power again in XXIII.

[farmerben]

Do we have breeder reactors 50-100 years too late?

Just like the development of fission, it depends on a small number of people with a huge amount of funding.

Renewed interest in thorium reactors is 99.9% due to Kirk Sorenson.  But we won't get it because U233 is WG.

Edited June 19 by farmerben

[TheSaint]

This sort of thing comes up more frequently than you'd expect. I think it arises out of the fact that people think nuclear technology is way more complex (and, usually, more dangerous) than it really is because they personally don't understand how it works. Dunning-Kruger strikes again. I'm sure that at some point it will be like the pyramids, there will be conspiracy nuts claiming that it was far too advanced for humans to come up with themselves, so therefore we were given the technology by aliens.

Remember that well into the 1970s all of our nuclear technology was designed with pen, paper, and slide rules. It isn't terribly complicated. It was just theorized and designed by very smart people.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

40 minutes ago, farmerben said:

Renewed interest in thorium reactors is 99.9% due to Kirk Sorenson

Also - this is a feature; 

"A number of prominent environmentalists – among them Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond, and Gaia-theory promoter James Lovelock – have come out in favor of atomic energy as a response to climate change. Among mainline US environmental groups, there is nearly unanimity that nuclear power remains as bad an idea today as it was during the heyday of the Diablo Canyon protests. But at the grassroots level, opinion is split. As one green blogger has written: “We environmentalists must rethink our opposition to nuclear power. Those who have opposed the building of new nuclear power plants in the US over the past twenty years have actually forced the use of a filthy alternative – coal combustion – that releases millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/will_nuclear_power_split_the_green_movement/

 

 

[Nuke]

seems we got nuke tech right on time, and being humans and having the perfect solution to all our energy problems we decided to ignore it, fear monger against it, and use wind turbines and solar panels instead.

Edited June 19 by Nuke

[DDE]

6 hours ago, awsumguy76801 said:

I watched a video or something that said nukes were a “23rd century technology that we accidentally discovered in the 20th.” or something like that. Do you guys think that’s true or is it inevitable for any civilization/species to get that technology when they reach 1940s level technology? Interesting question

Imagine a continuous development in scale from World Wars I and II with a major global slaughterhouse every 25 or so years, until, and if, demographic transition of the early XXIst century makes expending millions of lives in war prohibitive.

That's what Hiroshima and Nagasaki have spared us from.

[kerbiloid]

  

***

Late XVI. The glass jewelry gives first spherical lenses, and thus starts microscoping and telescoping, resulting into "polish your balls by rubbing them with cloth" competition.

Mid-XVII. Otto von Guericke (or some persons known under this name) is experimenting with the basics of almost all known physics.
He's rubbing the balls with fur, and this results into primitive electrostatic generator (sulfur ball + fur).
Interesting fact: kinda Thales of Miletus was enjoying this with an nephrite amber spindle and fur, but like always this kind of fun was kinda forgotten for 2k years.

He's experimenting with a primitive sucking machine, made of a cylinder, a piston, and a rope.
This became the first vacuum pump.
Interesting fact: kinda Ktesibios was doing it, but without a rope, but this advanced technology was kinda forgotten for 2k years.

He's experimenting with two hemispheres with a valve.
This resulted into the gas physics, atmospheric pressure, and various other games.
Interesting fact: kinda Hero of Alexandria was playing with so-called "aeolipile", just blowing with steam from inside instead of sucking the air from it. Anyway it was kinda forgotten for almost 2k years.

He's experimenting with calorimetry, measuring the amount of heat, required for heating, or releasing on cooling

He invented various scientific instruments, attached to the wall of his home.

He was doing this all between the dull duties of burgomaster, manager, ambassador, and so on, and being a friend of the emperor, conquered his city.

But it doesn't matter, let's think it was indeed a one real man.

 

So, von Guericke and Torricelli had began the gas physics, then Boyle (the 7th son of the 7th son a super-rich British lord, and the 14th his child) had ordered the vacuum pump improvement in the local workshop, and was doing the modern gas physics which we know and love, making fun from the dry language of science (pumping air from glass spheres with small animals inside became a popular saloon fun 300+ years before the Expanse series).

At the same time the electrostatic generator became another saloon fun. Somebody was holding the wires, another one was winding the handle, so a sparkle suddenly hit the first one, then both were laughing.
The most experienced ones were getting electric arcs, hitting the counterpart through the air.

The strong glass spheres together with vacuum pumps and electrostatic generators unexpectedly led to another kind of fun.
The attempts to cause as strong and long sparkle as possible made combining them, and discover the arc discharge in vacuum tubes.

But the joy was not full without the electric charge storage, because it was too boring to keep winding the generator handle.
Happily, they discovered a leyden jar.
The idea was simple like a crowbar. The electricity is invisible liquid, so let's pour it into a jar.
It was a glass jar with an iron chain inside, which allowed to store much greater charge, before it hit the person who was holding the jar in hands.
Later they replaced the chain with a wire and a foil, so the fun became more effective.
The most famous experiment with it was when several tens of soldiers were holding hands of two neighbours, then a big leyden jar was discharged, so the observers noticed various funny screams and poses of the (un)told volunteers.

The electrostatic generator together with the vacuum tube, and a battery of leyden jars made it possible to experiment with so strong arcs in the tube, that the gas inside was glowing.

At the same time the experiments with pumps, hemispheres, gas physics, and calorimetry, and the steel revolution of XVIII gave the steam engines.
Attaching it to the electrostatic generator was promising by orders of magnitude greater fun.

But a century before Otto von Guericke (whoever it was), the English Elizabeth I and James I were sometimes suffering from constipation.
So, their doctor, William Gilbert, was reading books, and had read that the powder from Magnesia, i.e. magnetic ore, is a good laxative.
(It indeed is. If eat a kilogram of it and retrogradely approach to an industrial magnetic crane.)
He started experimenting with magnets, and became the guru of magnetism, giving to the humanity the physics of magnetism (it stays unclear, did it help against the royal constipation, but both patients had ended not  quite well, so who knows).

It appeared that it's much better to rotate a magnet with steam engine, so the electric engines and generators appeared.

But the adepts of the arc discharges in vacuum tubes became addicted more and more.
They discovered that the glowing is attracted by the magnets and electric wires, so the ubergrossekolossal vacuum tubes became "cathode-ray tubes"
(Doesn't relate to Rey Skywalker, though who knows, the lightsabres do glow...)

They discovered that some materials start glowing in presence of the "cathode-ray tubes".

Since early times, the alchemists were experimenting with purifying of chemicals.
Since Lavoisier disproved the classic four elements, and other archaic stuff, before being beheaded, and thanks to the industrial revolution, the purification ran much faster, so the alchemscientists got pure crystals of various chemical compounds, and discovered the fluorescence, i.e. glowing in UV (for example, under the sunlight).

As nobody knew, what are those cathodes-schmatodes, fluorescence-mluorescence, and other fancy vile things, the same physicists were studying them all at once, storing a heap of junk on the same table.
Thanks to that (and to the expensive lighting of laboratory), when Roentgen late in the evening had switched on the cathode-ray tube, the cathode rays hit the crystal of fluorescent compound laying aside and made it glow.
(And no, it's not a lucky coincidence, it's a systematic mess at the workplace, and absence of elementary tidiness. If not Roentgen, a week later somebody else would do the same in his scientific lair.)
First he thought that it's some (obviously poisonous, but who cares) gas, but after playing with a piece of carton, putting it between the tube and the crystal, he got ensured that it's not (poisonous) gas, it's just (poisonous) ray.
Experimenting with the X-ray (xathode-ray ?) tube, and his wife's and assistant's parts of body, Roentgen had studied the X-rays and published his results for free.

Meanwhile, Henri Becquerel was playing with funny glowing fluorescent compounds, putting them under sun together with photopaper, then developing them. So, he "suddenly" discovered that a uranium compound, lying on his table among other chemicals, works like the sunlight, emitting invisible rays.
He published this interesting fact, so everyone who was having a piece of uranium salt on his table, could have a fun, too.
So, it again was not a miracle, but a mess on the worktable with predictable result from unpredictable person.

The Curies read the article, and immediately decided to experiment with.
They got the same result, and started purifying the uranium salt, realizing that it's uranium, who glows.
But keeping doing the purification to extract the emitting piece of the uranium, they realized that it's not uranium, who glows. But an admixture of radium an polonium.

Thus, they got some amount of purified radium solution, which was causing glowing much better than the original uranium salt.
And immediately published their result to show a tongue to Becquerel.

Becquerel read their article, and visited them. They gave him a vial with the radioactive solution, to show it to the students.

Becquerel expectably put the radioactive vial in the pocket of pants, right near the family souvenirs (what can go wrong with the unknown rays from  toxic compound?), and was walking a whole day with it, getting a burn of the vial shape.
(It is not clear, if he had shown to the students only the vial, or the burn, too).

Amused and happy, he came to the Curies, to show them the burn.
The Curies joined to his joy, and Pierre Curi attached the vial to his forearm, to get much better burn than the Becquerel's.

Expectably, he got what he wanted, and then several months was trying to cure the burn.
(So, who knows, maybe that draft horse just gifted him euthanasia, before their radium plays caused something else).

What did Maria Curie do after looking at those two geniuses?
Obviously, she started wearing a vial of radium on her chest.

Interesting fact: none of them even had a thought to first try it on a mouse.

 

Meanwhile, the von Guericke experiments with electrization of the sulfur ball surface, and the XVIII century electric generators brought the electric telegraph, and the electric lamps.
The electric liquid was flowing along the copper wires as via pipes, and a telegraphist was opening/closing the valve with a Morse key.

But by measuring the electric effects they realised, that the electric liquid consists of particles, which were called electrons.

Meanwhile the chemists were purifying and purifying various compounds, studying the compound proportions in chemical reactions, and came to a strange conclusion: all "chemical element" masses are proportional to the hydrogen mass as integers.

This made to think than the elements' atoms actually consist of hydrogen atoms packed together.

But the appearance/disappearance of the electric charge led to the next conclusion: the atom consists of equal amounts of heavy positive particles, "protons", and equal amount of the lightweight electrons.

This brought the "pudding model of atom", where the protons and electrons form pieces of sticky mess (same as the physicists' mess on the table), called "atoms".

But the experiments of the ray scattering had shown, that some electrons are orbiting about a core, consisting of prototns and intranuclear electrons, and probably the reason of the difference is the electrons' energy.

So, by 1910 the pudding model of atom turned into the pudding model of nucleus with orbital electrons around.

But the purification of the chemicals was going on, bringing more and more pure elements, and allowing to measure their atomic masses.
And this caused another confusion.
The atomic masses of same elements from different places were different.
(That's because various deposits had contained different isotopes, and their decay chains had brought different amounts of isotopes of the same element).

They realised, that there are atoms of the same element, which contain different amounts of proton-electron pairs in the nucleus.
They called this isotopes.

 

Meanwhile, the chemists were purifying the elements, and realized that the elements form a linear sequence, more or less by mass, and their chemical properties look periodic, but not that simply.
They were arranging them by mass, writing in rows, columns, and squares, and finally got several variants of the periodic table, between which the Mendeleev's version appeared to be the most close to reality.
Though, it happened only because he had arbitrarily swapped and joined some elements, based on his great experience in chemistry, but without any idea of what is the element number Z in the table, except just an item index.

So:
From your pov: ³He = (2p+n) + 2e, ⁴He = (2p+2n) + 2e,  Z = number of p
From the great nuclear physicists of the early XX pov: ³He = (3p+e) + 2e, ⁴He = (4p+2e) + 2e,  Z = number of p minus number of e in the nucleus = who knows, what's it at all.

When in 1920s they discovered helium in the spectrum of Sun, it became clear for everyone, than the Sun is powered by the fusion of four atoms of hydrogen into one atom of helium.
4[(p)+e] → (4p + 2e) + 2e

The only unclear thing was, how can four atoms of hydrogen collide all at once.

Immediately, it gave an idea: if compress a tank of hydrogen very-very much, the temperature inside will adiabatically raise, and some hydrogen atom will quad-collide and form atoms of helium, releasing much-much energy.

But the fundamentally improbable physics of such collisions made this frustrating.
 

Meanwhile, the physicists were having rest by melancholically putting a radioactive source against a barrel of steam, and making photos of the traces, left by charged particles in its volume. The barrel was in electric field, making the charged particle have curved trajectories.
Usually, they were using expensive radium and polonium in a lead case with a hole.
Having no idea how to make this useful, they were putting sheets of various material between the hole and the steam barrel, and measuring, how thick should be the sheet to weaken the beam.

When Rutherford was asked, if the nuka-physics can be used as weapon, he laughed and explained, that no, it's just a toy for the scientists.

It was joyful and pretty, before they put a beryllium sheet in front of the polonium source.
The alpha particles from polonium were bombing the beryllium nuclei, and thus some straight traces appeared in the barrel, left by some beams, insensitive to the electric field.
It was unexplainable, and they called it "beryllium rays".

Now they were also melancholically experimenting with the beryllium rays, and with same practical result.

In 1932 it got proven that the beryllium rays consist of heavy neutral particles, called "neutrons", and then that the nuclei consist of protons and neutrons, so the fusion means not just merging, but also turning p and n to each other.

Thus, instead of (4p+2e)+2e the helium became (2p+2n)+2e.
It also explained that Z is the number of protons, constant for an element, and the isotopes have same amount of p, but different number of n.

Meanwhile, the chemists were keeping distilling various substances to make them pure.
And finally in 1934 they found deuterium, whih was not (2p+e)+e, like they could think earlier, but (p+n)+e, as they knew now.

The sun and fusion bomb became absolutely clear now. Pairs of hydrogen fuse into deuterium, then pairs of deuterium fuse into helium.
Bingo! No quad collisions, only pairs!
Of course, it was wrong, but who cares.

Having no idea what to do with it, they started electrolizing heavy water, and bombing heavy water with deuterium ions.
So, they discovered traces of tritium.

They spent several years and enormous amount of money to distil some tritium from water and define its concentration, but failed.
Because there was just 2 kg of tritium per Earth before the nuclear tests.

To get significant amount of energy from fusion, they had to compress not a tank of hydrogen, but a tank of deuterium.
So, they were trying to produce small amounts of heavy water.

Also, they began experiments with explosive implosion spheres, fruited in the lovely series of experiments, when the Germans were compressing silver balls by implosion.

But the calculations had shown, that it's not easy to compress deuterium with chemical explosives, but at the same time D+T should fuse at much lower temperature, so a D+T cryotank should be compressed by the explosives, and heat up the main reservoir with liquid D by adiabatically compressing it in a tube.
But the fusing D would be expanding and cooling, so they needed something to compress it back.
The obvious choice was to surround it with liquid hydrogen, whose atomic mass is twice lower, so the pressure is twice higher.
After WWII it brought the presumed RDS-6t design of a 5-t-heavy pure hydrogen bomb.
(The attempt failed because the reaction was coming together with instabilities in the reacting medium.)

But there were unsolvable problems:
1. D+T is still too heatproof for the chemicals.
2. There is no T in nature, while there was no idea of atomic reactors, so the only way of accumulating T was particle acceleration, producing  pathetic amounts of it.
3. Once they had collected measurable amount of tritium, they realized that it's radioactive, so they can't store it forever. Every 12 years they would be losing a half of it.

Having no idea what to do, they were having fun by bombarding with neutrons various things.
And finally in 1938 they had bombarded uranium.

As any smart street guy would first try bombarding that uranium thing which Becquerel used, just from magic thinking (it worked once, should work again), we can state the fact, that the excessive education and overcomplicated thinking have played an evil joke on the physicists, delaying the fission discovery by five-six years.
Look at the radioactivity pioneers of late XIX. They were never thinking before trying.

Once they had known that the uranium fisses under neutrons, and releases more neutrons that flew inside, the further progress was just a question of time.
Actually, the first nukes have been tested 7 years after the fission discovery (1945-1938), or 13 year after the neutron discovery and realizing that the nuclei consist of p and n (1945-1932), or half-century after the cathode rays experiments and fluorescence study, or less than 300 years after the von Guericke's experiments.

As the von Guericke experiments actually require technologies of the early iron epoch, just were looking better in XVII scenery, we can state that any developed civilisation must make its first nukes by the end of its first millenium, so the humans have done it unforgivably slowly.

***

Actually, this means that there can be only two kind of sapient species: troglodytes and nukemasters.
The humans are in the delayed jump from to.

11 hours ago, DDE said:

Imagine a continuous development in scale from World Wars I and II with a major global slaughterhouse every 25 or so years, until, and if, demographic transition of the early XXIst century makes expending millions of lives in war prohibitive.

A grain of pepper.

What if the 25s are just accumulated as debt?

Overpopulation.

 

P.S.
Motto of the real science:

Spoiler

 

Edited June 20 by kerbiloid

[Exoscientist]

8 hours ago, awsumguy76801 said:

I watched a video or something that said nukes were a “23rd century technology that we accidentally discovered in the 20th.” or something like that. Do you guys think that’s true or is it inevitable for any civilization/species to get that technology when they reach 1940s level technology? Interesting question

 Do you have a link to that video? Considering how advanced nuclear power is I could believe the idea it’s a “21st Century technology”, but calling it a 23rd century technology like when Star Trek is supposed to be happening is too far out in time(no pun intended.)

  Bob Clark

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Motto of the real science

Hence the character development arc of KSP 

[Nuke]

1 hour ago, Exoscientist said:

 Do you have a link to that video? Considering how advanced nuclear power is I could believe the idea it’s a “21st Century technology”, but calling it a 23rd century technology like when Star Trek is supposed to be happening is too far out in time(no pun intended.)

  Bob Clark

star trek's timelines are too screwy. everyone wonders what the antique police box is doing in section 31.

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

***

Late XVI. The glass jewelry gives first spherical lenses, and thus starts microscoping and telescoping, resulting into "polish your balls by rubbing them with cloth" competition.

Mid-XVII. Otto von Guericke (or some persons known under this name) is experimenting with the basics of almost all known physics.
He's rubbing the balls with fur, and this results into primitive electrostatic generator (sulfur ball + fur).
Interesting fact: kinda Thales of Miletus was enjoying this with an nephrite amber spindle and fur, but like always this kind of fun was kinda forgotten for 2k years.

He's experimenting with a primitive sucking machine, made of a cylinder, a piston, and a rope.
This became the first vacuum pump.
Interesting fact: kinda Ktesibios was doing it, but without a rope, but this advanced technology was kinda forgotten for 2k years.

He's experimenting with two hemispheres with a valve.
This resulted into the gas physics, atmospheric pressure, and various other games.
Interesting fact: kinda Hero of Alexandria was playing with so-called "aeolipile", just blowing with steam from inside instead of sucking the air from it. Anyway it was kinda forgotten for almost 2k years.

He's experimenting with calorimetry, measuring the amount of heat, required for heating, or releasing on cooling

He invented various scientific instruments, attached to the wall of his home.

He was doing this all between the dull duties of burgomaster, manager, ambassador, and so on, and being a friend of the emperor, conquered his city.

But it doesn't matter, let's think it was indeed a one real man.

 

So, von Guericke and Torricelli had began the gas physics, then Boyle (the 7th son of the 7th son a super-rich British lord, and the 14th his child) had ordered the vacuum pump improvement in the local workshop, and was doing the modern gas physics which we know and love, making a fun from dry language science (pumping air from glass spheres with small animals became a popular saloon fun 300+ years before the Expanse series).

At the same time the electrostatic generator became another saloon fun. Somebody was holding the wires, another one was winding the handle, so a sparkle suddenly hit the first one, then both were laughing.
The most experienced ones were getting electric arcs, hitting the counterpart through the air.

The strong glass spheres together with vacuum pumps and electrostatic generators unexpectedly led to another kind of fun.
The attempts to cause as strong and long sparkle as possible made combining them, and discover the arc discharge in vacuum tubes.

But the joy was not full without the electric charge storage, because it was too boring to keep winding the generator handle.
Happily, they discovered a leyden jar.
The idea was simple like a crowbar. The electricity is invisible liquid, so let's pour it into a jar.
It was a glass jar with an iron chain inside, which allowed to store much greater charge, before it hit the person who was holding the jar in hands.
Later they replaced the chain with a wire and a foil, so the fun became more effective.
The most famous experiment with it was when several tens of soldiers were holding hands of two neighbours, then a big leyden jar was discharged, so the observers noticed various funny screams and poses of the (un)told volunteers.

The electrostatic generator together with the vacuum tube, and a battery of leyden jars made it possible to experiment with so strong arcs in the tube, that the gas inside was glowing.

At the same time the experiments with pumps, hemispheres, gas physics, and calorimetry, and the steel revolution of XVIII gave the steam engines.
Attaching it to the electrostatic generator was promising by orders of magnitude greater fun.

But a century before Otto von Guericke (whoever it was), the English Elizabeth I and James I were sometimes suffering from constipation.
So, their doctor, William Gilbert, was reading books, and had read that the powder from Magnesia, i.e. magnetic ore, is a good laxative.
(It indeed is. If eat a kilogram of it and retrogradely approach to an industrial magnetic crane.)
He started experimenting with magnets, and became the guru of magnetism, giving to the humanity the physics of magnetism (it stays unclear, did it help against the royal constipation, but both patients had ended not  quite well, so who knows).

It appeared that it's much better to rotate a magnet with steam engine, so the electric engines and generators appeared.

But the adepts of the arc discharges in vacuum tubes became addicted more and more.
They discovered that the glowing is attracted by the magnets and electric wires, so the ubergrossekolossal vacuum tubes became "cathode-ray tubes"
(Doesn't relate to Rey Skywalker, though who knows, the lightsabres do glow...)

They discovered that some materials start glowing in presence of the "cathode-ray tubes".

Since early times, the alchemists were experimenting with purifying of chemicals.
Since Lavoisier disproved the classic four elements, and other archaic stuff, before being beheaded, and thatnks to the industrial revolution, the purification ran much faster, so the alchemscientists got pure crystals of various chemical compounds, and discovered the fluorescence, i.e. glowing in UV (for example, under the sunlight).

As nobody knew, what are those cathodes-schmatodes, fluorescence-mluorescence, and other fancy vile things, the physicists were studying them all at once, storing a heap of junk on the same table.
Thanks to that (and to the expensive lighting of laboratory), when Roentgen late in the evening had switched on the cathode-ray tube, the cathode rays hit the crystal of fluorescent compound laying aside and made it glow.
(And no, it's not a lucky coincidence, it's a systematic mess at the workplace, and absence of elementary tidiness. If not Roentgen, a week later somebody else would do the same in his scientific lair.)
First he thought that it's some (obviously poisonous, but who cares) gas, but after playing with a piece of carton, putting it between the tube and the crystal, he got ensured that it's not (poisonous) gas, it's just (poisonous) ray.
Experimenting with the X-ray (xathode-ray ?) tube, and his wife's and assistant's parts of body, Roentgen had studied the X-rays and published his results for free.

Meanwhile, Henri Becquerel was playing with funny glowing fluorescent compounds, putting them under sun together with photopaper, then developing them. So, he "suddenly" discovered that a uranium compound, lying on his table among other chemicals, works like the sunlight, emitting invisible rays.
He published this interesting fact, so everyone who was having a piece of uranium salt on his table, could have a fun, too.
So, it again was not a miracle, but a mess on the worktable.

The Curies read the article, and immediately decided to experiment with.
Thy got the same result, and started purifying the uranium salt, realizing that it's uranium, who glows.
But keeping the purification to extract the emitting piece of the uranium, they realized that it's not uranium, who glows. But an admixture of radium an polonium.

Thus, they got some amount of purified radium solution, which was causing glowing much better than the original uranium salt.
And immediately published their result to show a tongue to Becquerel.

Becquerel read their article, and visited them. They gave him a vial with the radioactive solution, to show it to the students.

Becquerel expectably put the radioactive vial in the pocket of pants, right near the family souvenirs (what can go wrong with the unknown rays from  toxic compound?), and was walking a whole day with it, getting a burn of the vial shape.
(It is not clear, if he had shown to the students only the vial, or the burn, too).

Amused and happy, he came to the Curies, to show them the burn.
The Curies joined his joy, and Pierre Curi attached the vial to his forearm, to get much better burn than the Becquerel's.

Expectably, he got what he wanted, and then several months was trying to cure the burn.
(So, who knows, maybe that draft horse just gifted him euthanasia, before their radium plays caused something else).

What did Maria Curie do after looking at those two geniuses?
Obviously, she started wearing a vial of radium on her chest.

Interesting fact: none of them even had a thought to first try it on a mouse.

 

Meanwhile, the von Guericke experiments with electrization of the sulfur ball surface, and the XVIII century electric generators brought the electric telegraph, and the electric lamps.
The electric liquid was flowing along the copper wires as via pipes, and a telegraphist was openin/closing the valve with a Morse key.

But by measuring the electric effects they realised, that the electric liquid consists of particles, which were called electrons.

Meanwhile the chemists were purifying and purifying various compounds, studying the compound proportions in chemical reactions, and came to a strange conclusion: all "chemical element" masses are proportional to the hydrogen mass as integers.

This made to think than the element atoms actually consist of hydrogen atoms packed together.

But the appearance/disappearance of the electric charge led to the next conclusion: the atom consists of equal amounts of heavy positive particles, "protons", and equal amount of the lightweight electrons.

This brought the "pudding model of atom", where the protons and electrons form pieces of sticky mess (same as the physicists' mess on the table), called "atoms".

But the experiments of the ray scattering had shown, that some electrons are orbiting about a core, consisting of prototns and intranuclear electrons, and probably the reason of the difference is the electrons' energy.

So, by 1910 the pudding model of atom turned into the pudding model of nucleus with orbital electrons around.

But the purification of the chemicals was going on, bringing more and more pure elements, and allowing to measure their atomic masses.
At this caused another confusion.
The atomic masses of same elements from different places were different.
(That's because various deposits had contained different isotopes, and their decay chains had brought different amounts of isotopes of the same element).

They realised, that there are atoms of the same element, which contain different amounts of proton-electron pairs in the nucleus.
They called this isotopes.

 

Meanwhile, the chemists were purifying the elements, and realized that the elements form a linear sequence, more or less by mass, and their chemical properties look periodic, but not that simply.
They were arranging them by mass, writung in rows, columns, and squares, and finally got several variants of the periodic table, between which the Mendeleev's version appeared to be the most close to reality.
Though, it happened only because he had arbitrarily swapped and joined some elements, based on his great experience in chemistry, but without any idea of what is the element number Z in the table, except just an item index.

So:
From your pov: ³He = (2p+n) + 2e, ⁴He = (2p+2n) + 2e,  Z = number of p
From the great nuclear physicists of the early XX pov: ³He = (3p+e) + 2e, ⁴He = (4p+2e) + 2e,  Z = number of p minus number of e in the nucleus = who knows, what's it at all.

When in 1920s they discovered helium in the sppectrum of Sun, it became clear for everyone, than the Sun is powered by the fusion of four atoms of hydrogen into one atom of helium.
4[(p)+e] → (4p + 2e) + 2e

The only unclear thing was, how can four atoms of hydrogen collide all at once.

Immediately, it gave an idea: if compress a tank of hydrogen very-very much, the temperature inside will adiabatically raise, and some hydrogen atom will quad-collide and form atoms of helium, releasing much-much energy.

But the fundamentally improbable physics of such collisions made this frustrating.
 

Meanwhile, the physicists were having rest by melancholically putting a radioactive source against a barrel of steam, and making photos of the traces, left by charged particles in its volume. The barrel was in electric field, making the charged particle have curved trajectories.
Usually, they were using expensive radium and polonium in a lead case with a hole.
Having no idea how to make this useful, they were putting sheets of various material between the hole and the steam barrel, and measuring, how thick should be the sheet to weaken the beam.

When Rutherford was asked, if the nuka-physics can be used as weapon, he laughed and explained, that no, it's just a toy for the scientists.

It was joyful and pretty, before they put a beryllium sheet in front of the polonium source.
The alpha particles from polonium were bombing the beryllium nuclei, and thus some straight traces appeared in the barrel, left by some beams, insensitive to the electric field.
It was unexplainable, and they called it "beryllium rays".

Now they were also melancholically experimenting with the beryllium rays, and same practical result.

In 1932 it got proven that the beryllium rays consist of heavy neutral particles, called "neutrons", and then that the nuclei consist of protons and neutrons, so the fusion means not just merging, but also turning p and n to each other.

Thus, instead of (4p+2e)+2e the helium became (2p+2n)+2e.
It also explained that Z is the number of protons, constant for an element, and the isotopes have same amount of p, but different number of n.

Meanwhile, the chemists were keeping distilling various substances to make them pure.
And finally in 1934 they found deuterium, whih was not (2p+e)+e, like they could think earlier, but (p+n)+e, as they knew now.

The sun and fusion bomb became absolutely clear now. Pairs of hydrogen fuse into deuterium, then pairs of deuterium fuse into helium.
Bingo! No quad collisions, only pairs!
Of course, it was wrong, but who cares.

Having no idea what to do with it, they started electrolizing heavy water, and bombing heavy water with deuterium ions.
So, they discovered traces of tritium.

They spent several years and enormous amount of money to distil some tritium from water and define its concentration, but failed.
Because there was just 2 kg of tritium per Earth before the nuclear tests.

To get significant amount of energy from fusion, they had to compress not a tank of hydrogen, but a tank of deuterium.
So, they were trying to produce small amounts of heavy water.

Also, they began experiments with explosive implosion spheres, fruited in the lovely series of experiments, when the Germans were compressing silver balls by implosion.

But the calculations had shown, that it's not easy to compress deuterium with chemical explosives, but at the same time D+T should fuse at much lower temperature, so a D+T cryotank should be compressed by the explosives, and heat up the main reservoir with liquid D by adiabatically compressing it in a tube.
But the fusing D would be expanding and cooling, so they needed something to compress it back.
The obvious choice was to surround it with liquid hydrogen, whose atomic mass is twice lower, so the pressure is twice higher.
After WWII it brought the presumed RDS-6t design of a 5-t-heavy pure hydrogen bomb.
(The attempt failed because the reaction was coming together with instabilities in the reacting medium.)

But there were unsolvable problems:
1. D+T is still too heatproof for the chemicals.
2. There is no T in nature, while there was no idea of atomic reactors, so the only way of accumulating T was particle acceleration, producing  pathetic amounts of it.
3. Once they had collected measurable amount of tritium, they realized that it's radioactive, so they can't store it forever. Every 12 years they would be losing a half of it.

Having no idea what to do, they were having fun by bombarding with neutrons various things.
And finally in 1938 they had bombarded uranium.

As any smart street guy would first try bombarding that thing which Becquerel used, just from magic thinking, we can state the fact, that the excessive education and overcomplicated thinking have played an evil joke on the physicists, delaying the fission discovery for five-six years.
Look at the radioactivity pioneers of late XIX. They were never thinking before trying.

Once they had known that the uranium fisses under neutrons, and releases more neutrons that flew inside, the further progress was just a question of time.
Actually, the first nuke have been tested 7 years after the fission discovery (1945-1938), or 13 year after the neutron discovery and realizing that the nuclei consist of p and n (1945-1932), or half-century after the cathode rays experiments and fluorescence study, or less than 300 years after the von Guericke's experiments.

As the von Guericke experiments actually require technologies of the early iron epoch, just were looking better in XVII scenery, we can state that any developed civilisation must make its first nukes by the end of its first millenium, so the humans have done it unforgivably slowly.

***

Actually, this means that there can be only two kind of sapient species: troglodytes and nukemasters.
The humans are in the delayed jump from to.

A grain of pepper.

What if the 25s are just accumulated as debt?

Overpopulation.

 

P.S.
Motto of the real science:

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Good summary, note that things speeds up until they get very hard. You go from single scientists who self fund as rich or sponsored by rich people to labs run by companies and nations and communication get better. 
Nuclear power is not super hard its just pretty large scale but much less so than large hydro. 
The research before WW 2 was not very expensive up to the first research reactors. 
Assume no second world war or cold war or major rivalry I guess we would get first nuclear power plants in the 60-70's depending on need. 

But you could not make an nuclear bomb with 19th century technology, yes if you started in 1880 you might do it in 40 years  
 

[Nuke]

had we discovered fission at peace time i think things would have been a lot different. even the manhattan project was more about execution (manufacturing weapons grade nuclear material) rather than figuring out how. they knew that part going into the war. having not developed enrichment before viable powerplants would have changed things a lot. people would be building reactors left and right and since nobody would have made a weapon out of it, they wouldnt have seen it as destructive. the technology would have propagated like wildfire all over the world.

eventually someone with an eye towards world domination would figure out how to weaponize it. perhaps many nations developing the enrichment steps in parallel, and not sharing it knowing where it can lead. when questioned they could pass it off as a way to make a better reactor (eg a breeder). those nations would start secretly manufacturing stockpiles. with no concept of deterrence they keep them in secret in case of invasion. they are expensive and untested so there is some restraint in their use. the little spin off wars resulting from the end of wwii, eg korea/vietnam, start conventional enough, but when the heat is on the nukes come out (they are of the pure fission variety). also no nuclear deterrence stunts the development of rocketry. shooting for the moon may tip your hand, so its mostly strategic bombers that are used. so nuclear war is not as instideath as it is in a post icbm era and small scale nuclear wars become somewhat viable.

us influence in the world is going to be less as well, a more costly battle with japan, resources are consumed, quality of life goes down and war becomes very unpopular. so we may revert to pre-war isolationism. korea/vietnam may not be americas problem, but probably someone else's. its still likely to be the tinderbox that lights cities aflame. environmentalism is stunted because its hard to notice the earth going south when its ravaged by war, some of which are nuclear. of course thats not a problem because everyone is on nuclear power, and electric cars become a thing in the '70s in response to opec. assuming there is an opec, or a '70s. us isolationism should help that happen while the eastern hemisphere burns.

i think i prefer our current situation as its showing the power of nuclear war in a much more controlled way, and establishing the deterrence doctrines early. the profound effect this has had on war is probably a good thing. i figure the fear mongering will go away as climate change worsens. the delay to get people to flip on the issue of nuclear power is still going to be significant but not viable fusion significant. we really need the stopgap.

[Vanamonde]

Once we deduced the existence of atoms, figuring out how to manipulate them was inevitable. It's not in human nature to leave knowledge sitting around unused and technologies tend to arise as soon as their prerequisites are met. 

[StrandedonEarth]

Similarly, once we had photographic film that also happened to be sensitive to x-rays, the discovery of the radioactive rabbit hole was inevitable 

[awsumguy76801]

9 hours ago, TheSaint said:

This sort of thing comes up more frequently than you'd expect. I think it arises out of the fact that people think nuclear technology is way more complex (and, usually, more dangerous) than it really is because they personally don't understand how it works. Dunning-Kruger strikes again. I'm sure that at some point it will be like the pyramids, there will be conspiracy nuts claiming that it was far too advanced for humans to come up with themselves, so therefore we were given the technology by aliens.

Remember that well into the 1970s all of our nuclear technology was designed with pen, paper, and slide rules. It isn't terribly complicated. It was just theorized and designed by very smart people.

Im not a nuclear scientist or anything but ik how fission works, shoot a neutron at an atom like uranium that will split easy and cause the strong force is trying to hold the atom together when it splits all that energy gets released and that split atom flies off and makes a chain reaction. But thats all i know and theres a lot of really complicated math and physics behind it and its amazing they were able to figure it out then but i think the reason they did was because guys like oppenheimer felt like they were racing against the germans. It also amazes me how little we have used nuclear tech because its so amazing and I think I know reasons why but its probably too political and crazy to be talking about here so ill keep it too myself.

[Kerbart]

On 6/19/2024 at 4:58 AM, awsumguy76801 said:

Or is it inevitable for any civilization/species to get that technology when they reach 1940s level technology? Interesting question

The application of nuclear technology in WW2 was, on all levels, incredibly crude and primitive by modern standards. It still took a tremendous effort, not just for the technology to build the implosion bomb, but also to refine the fissile material.

The motivation to get that done was there; aside from that the Germans had a nuclear program, very little was known of it (and as was learned later, because there was very little to it). Facing extinction by the threat of the other side getting there first, the US completed the project.

So, is it inevitable that a civilization with 1940s technology would develop the bomb? When facing existential threats, maybe, otherwise, unlikely.

Edited June 21 by Kerbart

[TheSaint]

1 hour ago, awsumguy76801 said:

Im not a nuclear scientist or anything but ik how fission works, shoot a neutron at an atom like uranium that will split easy and cause the strong force is trying to hold the atom together when it splits all that energy gets released and that split atom flies off and makes a chain reaction. But thats all i know and theres a lot of really complicated math and physics behind it and its amazing they were able to figure it out then but i think the reason they did was because guys like oppenheimer felt like they were racing against the germans. It also amazes me how little we have used nuclear tech because its so amazing and I think I know reasons why but its probably too political and crazy to be talking about here so ill keep it too myself.

Case in point: That's actually not how nuclear fission works. At all. Allow me:

• One of the major misunderstandings that people have about nuclear fission is that they imagine that neutrons smash into the uranium atom and break it apart, like through kinetic energy or something. That's not what happens. What happens is that the isotope uranium-235 absorbs a neutron and becomes the isotope uranium-236, which then immediately decays through fission, releasing fission fragments, fast neutrons, and a whole ton of gamma rays. Which is why it is easier to sustain a fission reaction with a population of low energy (thermal) neutrons than it is to sustain it with a population of high energy (fast) neutrons. Because it is easier for uranium-235 to absorb a low energy neutron than a high energy neutron. Which is counter-intuitive to the popular image of nuclear fission.
• The split atom (or fission fragments) are not what sustains the chain reaction. That's the released neutrons. Each nuclear fission reaction releases (on average) 2.85 high energy, or fast, neutrons. But, as I said above, uranium-235 doesn't like to absorb fast neutrons. It can, but the chances of the reaction happening are much smaller. You need a much higher density of uranium-235 to sustain such a reaction, which would require you to enrich your uranium to a much higher ratio of uranium-235 to uranium-238, thus weapon-grade uranium. This is the principle difference between a nuclear reactor and a nuclear weapon. Nuclear weapons create an environment in which the fissile material can maintain a chain reaction based solely on the population of fast neutrons (a condition known as "prompt criticality"). Nuclear reactors are specifically designed so they cannot achieve prompt criticality, they cannot sustain a chain reaction with fast neutrons. They require the neutrons to have their energy levels reduced, or "thermalized" in order to produce enough fission reactions in their concentration of uranium-235 to sustain a chain reaction. Which is why reactors have moderators. In light water reactors, the moderator is water. In graphite-moderated reactors the moderator is graphite. The moderator is a substance which is introduced around the nuclear fuel which reduces the energy levels of the fast neutrons through collisions, producing a population of thermalized neutrons which then sustains the chain reaction.

Honestly, the math and physics behind it isn't that complicated. I learned what I know in six months at Naval Nuclear Power School. I couldn't design a reactor, but I understand how they function, and how they malfunction. And I'm not a genius. I'm above average. I was tested back in grade school and my IQ was 130, which is above average, but not genius. And, trust me, a large fraction of the guys who graduated NNPS were not above average. I know, I had to train them when they got to the fleet. You don't have to be a genius to understand nuclear physics. It's not magic or super-science. You just have to take the time to learn it.

So, to get back to the original subject, I've never felt like nuclear technology was out of its time or place. Simply because I understand it.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, awsumguy76801 said:

a lot of really complicated math and physics behind it

Only to make it small, safe, and effective.

The basic math/phys is almost kindergarten with shovels.

[TheSaint]

12 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

The basic math/phys is almost kindergarten with shovels.

Okay, I wouldn't go that far....