[quote]heimdall wrote:
Allow me to play devil’s advocate.
Aside from all the comments that are of the “they deserved it” bent, or the “It shortened the war and sent a message to the Russians”, the way I heard it at the time the U.S. were preparing to drop the bombs Japan was nearly economically wiped out from the war and on the verge of collapse anyway.
Historians have thus debated whether it was even necessary to drop the bombs?
What say you?[/quote]
Necessary? No. We could have invaded. The loss of life would likely have been much higher.
Japan was in rough shape, but it is naive to think they would have surrendered. They would have fought against the invasion.
The historians that preach the atomic bomb wasn’t necessary have an axe to grind. They are trying to make a point against the nuclear bogeyman.
The loss of life from the atomic bombs was less than the loss of life in Dresden and Tokyo. I think it was also lower than the loss of life in Berlin too.
[quote]mertdawg wrote:
Floortom wrote:
Those few hundred thousand civilians had it coming to them. It’s their fault for being born in Japan anyways.
We warned Japan to evacuate those cities a week ahead of time. They thought they might be able to make them into martyrs.
[/quote]
Yet you chose to bomb those civilians. Rahter than bombing a deserted location, a military base, a harbour or something.
Sometimes you should just admitt that your nation screwed up. Your nation has pulled out some great moves in the face of adversity and we respect that, but trying to defend killing tons and tons of civilians is pathetic.
[quote]pookie wrote:
Now, in chemistry, the most fundamental rule is the law of conservation of mass. That law states that there is no detectable change of mass during a chemical reaction. No atoms are split or fused. E=mc^2 is never invoked when explaining those reactions. You’ve got the same amount of matter after the reaction as you had before. Different molecules, yes; but same atoms.
If you still don’t get it, well I give up. Like the saying goes “Ignorance can be cured, stupid is forever.”
[/quote]
OK you chimps, start scratching.
Sheldon Glashow
Theoretical Physicist
Boston University
This is the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s development of the special theory of relativity and so, of course, I went back and looked at his original papers, at least translated into English. And it really is amazing. The paper that he wrote in September of 1905 developed a basic idea of E = mc2, except it was more M=e/c2, same equation. But he argued in this paper that when an object emits light, say a flashlight, it becomes lighter, that the decrease in mass would be equal to the amount of energy radiated, divided by the square of the speed of light. And that was kind of a separate development in addition to the theory of relativity, and it is central, because what I’d like people to understand is that once upon a time there was a law of conservation of mass. Lavoisier, in the 1700s, showed that when you have chemical reactions, the mass of the reactants is the same as the mass of the final products. That was a keystone to science, and a second keystone was the law of conservation of energy developed in the 19th century.
And what E = mc2 does is tell us that both of those laws are wrong?mass changes. When I combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water, the mass of the water is not equal to the mass of the hydrogen and oxygen. It’s a little bit less. And when you take water apart into hydrogen and oxygen, the mass of the hydrogen and oxygen is a little tiny bit greater than the mass of the water, and that difference is the amount of energy that you supplied to take the water molecules apart. So this is a pretty trivial effect. Lavoisier couldn’t possibly know this, because it occurs in the 10th decimal place ordinarily. If you burn a ton of fuel, maybe a few micrograms of matter disappear and are converted into energy, so you don’t notice it. You do notice it at nuclear reactors. There, a significant fraction of the mass is converted into energy. And you certainly notice it at particle accelerators, where we convert energy into mass.
"I understand that to calculate the heat released or absorbed during a nuclear reaction you find the difference between the product mass and reactant mass and use the formula (E=mc2). But what about heat released or absorbed during a chemical reaction? The book I have says that mass is conserved during a chemical reaction, so where does the heat energy come from? – TC
While your book’s claim is well intended, it’s actually incorrect. The author is trying to point out that atoms aren’t created or destroyed during the reaction and that all the reactant atoms are still present in the products. But equating the conservation of atoms with the conservation of mass overlooks any mass loss associated with changes in the chemical bonds between atoms. While bond masses are extremely small compared to the masses of atoms, they do change as the results of chemical reactions. However even the most energy-releasing or “exothermic” reactions only produce overall mass losses of about one part in a billion and no one has yet succeeded in weighing matter precisely enough to detect such tiny changes."
“Example: consider a simple chemical reaction C + O2 → CO2 + E. We ordinarily do not bother with E/c2 as a mass on the right, because it is so small, but the truth is that CO2 has a mass that is slightly less than the sum of the masses of C and O2.”
http://www2.yk.psu.edu/~jhb3/cotw06.htm
CH4 + 2O2 —> CO2 + 2H2O
If we have stoichiometrically equivalent masses of reactants and products, we have a mass of 80 grams on each side of the equation, apparently indicating that there is no mass change. Consider now that this reaction is exothermic, releasing 890 kJ of heat. The only way in which energy can be released is if the products of the reaction have a smaller mass than the reactants - after all, the energy released is a result of the conversion of some mass into energy. This mass equivalent of the 890 kJ can be calculated by Einstein’s equation of mass/energy equivalence
Yet you chose to bomb those civilians. Rahter than bombing a deserted location, a military base, a harbour or something.
Sometimes you should just admitt that your nation screwed up. Your nation has pulled out some great moves in the face of adversity and we respect that, but trying to defend killing tons and tons of civilians is pathetic.[/quote]
If you haven’t already made up your mind about the whole thing I suggest you go read some books to gain a greater insight than you have shown here.
Don’t get all your info from some anti-nuke college professor on this one.
Truman made the right call to drop the bombs where they did. Dropping them on a remote island would not have been effective.
More civilians were killed in other bombings during WWII than were killed by atomic bombs as I noted earlier.
…burn a ton of fuel, maybe a few micrograms of matter disappear…
…you don’t notice it…
…about one part in a billion…
…and no one has yet succeeded in weighing matter precisely enough to detect such tiny changes.
[/quote]
How big of a fucking clue does it take for you to understand how ridiculous it is to talk about conventional chemical explosives using E=mc^2?
A simpler question: Having read your own sources, does the sentence “There is no difference between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons.” still make sense to you? As far as you’re concerned, a stick of TNT is a nuclear weapon?
When you train, do you lookup the position of the sun and the moon so you can adjust your weights according to their tidal pull? 'Cause the effect of the sun and moon’s gravity on your barbells are measurable a lot sooner than the 10th decimal, let me tell you.
[quote]pookie wrote:
How big of a fucking clue does it take for you to understand how ridiculous it is to talk about conventional chemical explosives using E=mc^2?
[/quote]
So the 7 sources I posted which talk about chemical reactions in terms of E=mc^2 are ridiculous-worthy of ridicule? I’m glad you weren’t there to ridicule Einstein who I showed also talked about the same thing.
There’s something I like to call “reading in context.” When you read the second sentence which qualifies the first by adding the idea that they are the same in that they both derive ALL of their energy from a conversion of mass (a fact that as you slowly start to understand to be true, you shift the context from absolutes to importances, trivialities etc.)the answer is yes. If someone had asked you yesterday, "When you combine hydrogen and oxygen chemically to produce water and release energy, can that energy be completely accounted for by a decrease in mass of the reacting atoms, you would have obviously said “no!” I have educated you, and unfortunately embarrased you by doing so. Sorry.
And I’d be interested to know what you think this has to do with a nuclear weapon. The fact that you think this has anything to do with a nuclear reaction is laughable, but I’m sure that given enough time you will figure it out and come up with some justification for why it was meaningful.
So we come back to my original 3 points:
Nuclear and conventional weapons are the same in that they both derive ALL of their energy from e=mc^2
What most people think of as radioactive waste-that is to say fairly long half-life radiating material contaminating the earth for years-is not produced by fusion reactions.
The possibility that the A-bombs saved lives in the long run is a question worth consideration.
You are truly retarded, and I mean that not to offend people who are mentally disabled but every year or so I meet someone who has managed to make themselves into a retard and you are #1 for this year.
And before you lie and say you would have answered “yes” to the chemical energy coming from mass question:
mertdawg wrote:
You are wrong and despite the retardation, Pookie will agree here.
Pookie wrote
Wrong again.
mertdawg wrote:
The relative movement of the atoms and electrons in the electric potential energy field during a chemical reaction equates to a minute change of mass which converts just as predicted by E=MC^2.
mert, my knowledge of things chemical and nuclear are scant, but even now it seems to me that explaining chemical reaction by the use of E=mc^2 is like using a telescope to examine your neighbor’s house.
BTW, im sure pookie doesn’t need any assistance from me, but believing him to be a retard only helps to solidify your own retardation. and dont misinterpret that to me calling you a tard.
Mert, your sources are fine, but you have over-generalized from the cases they talk about to the case of these bombs. In particular, you make a mistake in looking at the explosion of the bomb as a release of energy. In fact, most of the energy is conserved. It’s merely converted from one form to another.
Consider the following mind experiment. I take a conventional bomb and explode it in an empty universe. Result is a bunch of fragments and gas travelling rapidly away from where the bomb used to be. Formerly, the bomb had energy in it in the form of chemical bonds. After being exploded, it has kinetic energy in it instead. Relativity tells us that these little flying pieces of bomb weigh more than they would if they were at rest - just as the unexploded bomb weighed slightly more than what these pieces of exploded bomb would weigh at rest. So most of the energy (and it’s equivalent very tiny mass) is still in the ‘bomb system’, it’s just in a different form, converted from chemical to kinetic. No e=mc**2 required.
But when the bomb explodes some light is emitted. This is some actual energy that escapes the bomb system altogether. By this tiny amount of energy the exploded bomb including its resultant kinetic energy weighs a teensy bit less than what we started with.
In this sense both kinds of bombs work the same, except in the nuclear case substitute intra-nuclear forces for chemical bonds, and of course the amount of mass/energy converted into light is proportionally much greater. You’re right this is not actually a qualitative difference. But in the conventional bomb the amount of mass involved cannot even be weighed, whereas with the nuclear bomb we can look at the Periodic Table and see the difference in mass very clearly. Quantity has a quality all its own.
[quote]wufwugy wrote:
mert, my knowledge of things chemical and nuclear are scant, but even now it seems to me that explaining chemical reaction by the use of E=mc^2 is like using a telescope to examine your neighbor’s house.
[/quote]
That would have been a fine response to my original post (Rather than his non-constructive response that everything in my post was wrong), and I would respond that its not much different when viewing nuclear reactions. The mass change during NUCLEAR reactions is on the verge of being insignificant (1 part in 10,000 to 100,000).
[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
Mert, your sources are fine, but you have over-generalized from the cases they talk about to the case of these bombs. In particular, you make a mistake in looking at the explosion of the bomb as a release of energy. In fact, most of the energy is conserved. It’s merely converted from one form to another.
Consider the following mind experiment. I take a conventional bomb and explode it in an empty universe. Result is a bunch of fragments and gas travelling rapidly away from where the bomb used to be. Formerly, the bomb had energy in it in the form of chemical bonds. After being exploded, it has kinetic energy in it instead. Relativity tells us that these little flying pieces of bomb weigh more than they would if they were at rest - just as the unexploded bomb weighed slightly more than what these pieces of exploded bomb would weigh at rest. So most of the energy (and it’s equivalent very tiny mass) is still in the ‘bomb system’, it’s just in a different form, converted from chemical to kinetic. No e=mc**2 required.
[/quote]
No, if you read the sources you’ll see that actually relativity REDEFINES chemical potential energy and in fact ALL potential energy as a form of mass. In effect, it says that the usual forms of potential energy we talk about are artificial. See how that is different from your explanation?
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
LOL At least you guys are being nicer to him now. Mert, please stop.[/quote]
And you showed that you didn’t understand that chemical potential energy is redefined as mass in relativity. Then I showed it to you. Now your either being dumb or playing dumb.
[quote]wufwugy wrote:
BTW, im sure pookie doesn’t need any assistance from me, but believing him to be a retard only helps to solidify your own retardation. and dont misinterpret that to me calling you a tard.[/quote]
And don’t get me wrong here. I know he is highly intelligent, he jumped in made a blanket statement that everything I said was wrong with no questions of clarification, or constructive intention.
He went down the wrong road trying to explain the science, and when he saw he made a mistake, he couldn’t back up. Tha’s why he’s drawing chicken scratch right now.
I backed up. For example, I had been taught that fusion was for practical purposes considered to be non-waste producing because it didn’t produce any long lasting radioactive waste (which is true). I read up and found that it does produce a short period of secondary radiation which is classified as another category of waste. So I revised what I said, to say that it didn’t create any long lasting waste-which is the point I was trying to make in the first place.
I would not ridicule Pookie for his technical errors which I listed yesterday, but rather for completely ignoring them, accepting them for the sake of being right, or pretending they never happened so he doesn’t have to admit he made a mistake. That’s the kind of self retardation that I am talking about.
Mert baby, seriously, you mean well, but you are misreading the articles. Taking them out of context if you will. A reaction from a chemical bond or a molecular bond is nowhere near the reaction of a nuclear bomb. If I took one hydrogen atom and had it react with an element on the opposite side of the periodic table in a chemical reaction that caused an electron to jump, that would be along the lines of a bomb, only in a bomb, instead of one atom you use about a trillion x100 atoms of both. Now in the one atom example, likely you wouldn’t even be able to see anything with your eyes, you would need an electron microscope to see the reaction. Now in a nuclear explosion, you take an atom and split it, this would be easily viewed with the naked eye. Now this is where people are not understanding you, E=MC^2 does not apply to the same reactions as that would be like saying 1=100000. the energy in both reactions is not the same yet the mass is the same. The equation just cant work for both. Sorry.
[quote]pookie wrote:
mertdawg wrote:
…relativity REDEFINES chemical potential energy
Now you’re saying that E=mc^2 is Enstein’s Theory of Relativity? This is getting more amusing by the minute…
[/quote]
YES! What is E in one reference frame is m in another reference frame. In general relativity, the electric potential energy of the atoms in their shared electric field is understood to be equivalent to a mass and an acceleration.
[quote]Vegita wrote:
Mert baby, seriously, you mean well, but you are misreading the articles. Taking them out of context if you will. A reaction from a chemical bond or a molecular bond is nowhere near the reaction of a nuclear bomb. If I took one hydrogen atom and had it react with an element on the opposite side of the periodic table in a chemical reaction that caused an electron to jump, that would be along the lines of a bomb, only in a bomb, instead of one atom you use about a trillion x100 atoms of both. Now in the one atom example, likely you wouldn’t even be able to see anything with your eyes, you would need an electron microscope to see the reaction. Now in a nuclear explosion, you take an atom and split it, this would be easily viewed with the naked eye. Now this is where people are not understanding you, E=MC^2 does not apply to the same reactions as that would be like saying 1=100000. the energy in both reactions is not the same yet the mass is the same. The equation just cant work for both. Sorry.
V[/quote]
I am not reading the articles so that I can understand them. I teach chemistry and physics and work with 2 mentors who are theoretical physicists on a weekly basis.
You can’t see the energy from a single atom that undergoes a nuclear reaction
with your eye or a microscope, just as you can’t for a chemical reaction.
Let me give you a clear picture.
Let’s say you started with a kilo of uranium and a kilo of plastic explosives (which is a high explosive and so does not need any additional oxygen). You react the uranium in a nuclear reaction and the pound of plastic explosives in a chemical explosion, but you are able to do this in a sealed container and collect all of the atoms. (you CAN do this if you react them slowly).
You will still have about a kilo of material left over after both of these processes! If you weight more carefully, you can determine that in fact you have
0.999995 kilos of uranium products (this would be beyond the limit of a typical balance, or even most high precision balances. It would take an analytical balance to get a reading on that last decimal place.
0.99999995 kilos of plastic explosives products. This would require about the best balance in the world to get that last decimal place, but hey, our tools are getting better.
Pookie implied that you get total conversion of the 1 kilo of uranium into energy as I pointed out in a previous post. This process has nothing to do with any nuclear weapon we have.