[ExI] puzzle

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2014 7:39 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] puzzle


On Jul 16, 2014 5:51 PM, "William Flynn Wallace" <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:

> My question:  in what circumstance (s) may it be regarded as full?  

If the halfway mark was created by drilling through the glass, no more liquid can remain in the glass after exceeding this new max-fill point.

The liquid itself will expand exactly twice its volume due to internal chemical reactions….

 

See, there ya go, BillW, they are thinking outside the box.

Regarding that list I sent you earlier, they are going to bust my chops on one of those items.  I had suggested a saturated aqueous solution of plutonium perchlorate was placed in the glass to such a depth that adding more would assemble a critical mass and so a wise man would call that subcritical mass FULL.  But after I thought about it, I realized that even if you purify the isotope of plutonium which would require the smallest mass to achieve criticality, no aqueous solution could ever get there, even assuming the most soluble plutonium salt and the most aggressive aqueous solvent such as a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids.  

I did some BOTECs and realized you would get nowhere near a critical mass that way even if you had oceans of the stuff.  You would still be orders of magnitude from a criticality.  Just like anything on our scale, the nuclear capture cross section decreases as the inverse square of the distance, so the plutonium ions in an aqueous solution could emit alphas all day and never cause a criticality.  So I bust my own chops in advance, and I scold me for not thinking of something obvious like that before I wrote the list, damn.  Embarrassed am I.  The force is weak with this one.  {8-[

spike

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