[ExI] Interesting book

Sun Nov 18 17:14:07 UTC 2018

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 8:44 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Interesting book

>>…I am a physics junky from way back …  spike

>…Here's a little story a chemist told me once:  in his class there was a student problem which produced various answers….

>…I ran my Master's experiment ten times and got the same thing every time before my mentor was satisfied.  We try.

>…bill w

BillW, we don’t hate the descriptive sciences.  I am a big fan of birds and bird watching.  The field of biology in general is a perfect example of a science which is completely dependent on nouns, verbs and adjectives, yet still offers enormously useful predictive power.  

Psychology is a science I don’t understand but it does offer some great insights into human behavior, particularly after it really gets down to understanding evolution.

I look at it this way: no one can master all the areas of human knowledge, so we depend on each other to give us the part that really matters.  Once one masters certain fundamental tools, such as mastery of differential equations, one is enabled in some fields of study, such as engineering, dynamics and physics.  With that fundamental tool, many doors are wide open, doors which are locked tightly for those who don’t have that key.

In the New Yorker article, the atomic bomb author John Coster Mullen demonstrated complete mastery of the engineering end of what he is doing, but down later in the article demonstrated he is missing some key notions which a formal physics education can supply: that bit about making uranium from thorium for example (that’s one of those yes, but… comments) and making a critical mass from Americium.  In both cases there are reasons why we don’t worry about the bad guys doing this.  I ordered Coster Mullen’s book anyway.  There is a nucleon energy chart which explains what can be done and what cannot.

Once one masters the nucleon energy chart and all the different fission modes, one can calculate critical masses and a really important detail: how fast a critical mass must be assembled.

I leave you with a fun what if.

What if… nuclear reactions were 100 times less boomy than they are?

I fear if they had been, we woulda nuked ourselves off the planet by now.  

Reasoning: Alfred Nobel invented TNT.  He reasoned that it would make war impossible because it would become too dangerous.  But it didn’t; it led to more dangerous warfare.  I think he was right that a sufficiently large bomb or destructive technology will lead to peace.  He was wrong about what level of destruction was that level.  TNT isn’t boomy enough.  Nukes are.  Result: humans don’t nuke each other.  But humans still do TNT each other.  Result: nukes really are a weapon of peace, particularly the variety that were never used: the fusion weapon.

Conclusion: there is justifiable hope for humanity.

spike  

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