First of all - as I've said before, the older you get, the more you properly sense the incredibly rapid pace of change of human knowledge and abilities; and when you compare the timing of historical events to your own age, it starts to feel not very long ago at all.
Secondly, maybe I have read this before, but it hadn't stuck in my memory: the bomb turned out to be about 4 times more powerful than they had expected -
At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the first nuclear bomb was tested at Trinity Site, in a New Mexico desert valley called Jornada del Muerto, or Journey of the Dead.
- It was successful — far more successful than expected. Before the test, the scientists at the Manhattan Project had estimated the bomb — a 194-ton metal ball they referred to as "the Gadget" — would yield the explosive equivalent of between 700 and 5,000 tons of TNT. And that assumed it would work at all.
- In fact, after the blinding flash of light and that first awful mushroom cloud, observers discovered that Trinity's detonation force was equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, at a time when the most powerful conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal was equivalent to 10 tons of TNT.
"First of all - as I've said before, the older you get, the more you properly sense the incredibly rapid pace of change of human knowledge and abilities;"
ReplyDeleteThats what I used to see. But not now. Now its grinding to a halt. For two main reasons. 1. Oligarchical control of science. Leading to fraudulent science as yet one more racket and 2. The failure to near max out on old but good technology. We jump ahead to the skyscraper before we have the 5 story buildings everywhere. We want a 200 floor office and apartment building before we have ubiquitous 5 story factories. We jump ahead to the rocket before we've maxed out on canals. We want the super-fast train when we don't have the overnight luxury rail service. We try and apply a very fast train before we've maxed out on dirigibles.
But it was canals and dirigibles, matched with 5 story buildings everywhere, that would have provided the logistics, to create the wealth, that would have made the fast train and the space travel more viable.