One of these nerds is not like the others,
One of these geeks just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which nerd is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?I don't like Tyson because I feel he preaches an inaccurate version of the scientific philosophy. So many times I hear him saying things along the lines of absolute certainty, because it's SCIENCE.
Where, we of the true faith, preach: the evidence indicates that this is the most likely to be true, or at least, this model makes predictions about the world more reliably than any other we currently have.
Amen.
We're gonna need a community for comedy homicide for this. That last panel ruins it.
!comedyhomicide@lemmy.world exists but has no posts, consider cross posting
That’s easy to explain, having cut a lot of cucumbers in my life. Since the actual nucleus of an atom is much smaller than the atom including its electrons itself, the probability of hitting the protons or neutrons is so small, that I’d need to live for a few thousand years and cut 1 cucumber per second nonstop, before this scenario happens even once. It is not impossible, just very improbable.
(assuming your post isn't a joke) it is impossible to cause a nuclear reaction by cutting cucumbers.
the biggest innacuracy in this comic is that as the panel zooms in on the cucumber atoms, the knife looks exactly the same. if it was realistic it would just be a bunch of metal atoms pushing aside a bunch of cucumber atoms, not a sharp knife slicing through individual atoms.
The Subtle Knife is definitely so sharp that it cuts through dimensions, so I think it would cut atoms.
So really that just means it's not inaccurate, it's just a very specific, fictional knife!
Fission doesn't happen because we cut atoms in half. Fission happens because we blast enriched uranium with neutrons, the uranium absorbs a neutron, gets too heavy, and falls apart.
I mean think about it. Atoms are surrounded by a negatively charged electron cloud. Pushing 2 atoms together would be (sorta) like trying to push the like poles of two magnets together.
That’s just one way to do it.
Sure, but you can also rip off electrons from atoms by rubbing them or bending a piece of wire. The energy needed to trigger fission in uranium is less than a picojoule, it just needs to be focused enough to knock away the part of the atom, which is why neutrons are the most common way.
Here is a chart with the rate of fusion for two hydrogen atoms at various temperatures.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#/media/File%3AFusion_rxnrate.svg
This chart bottoms out at a few million degrees, since the probability is extremely low.
I know very little about physics and I'm pretty sure you could cut cucumbers with a knife until the end of time and you'll never trigger a nuclear explosion.
It’s also why cats are afraid of cucumbers.
Actually, it's because cucumbers are so cool (c.f. cool as a cucumber) that they're in a ground state. It's actually endothermic to split their atoms so you don't get a chain reaction.
Cutting hot vegetables, habernaros for example, is much more risky and adequate precautions should always be taken to avoid radioactivity contaminating sensitive regions of the body.
I thought the only option with cucumbers is to keep mashing them together until fusion, no?
Ok if it is theoretically possible to cut atoms by using metal knives then why didn't ever a fission happen? I mean if you combine all knife cutting in the whole world since knives exist, the probability should be pretty high.
Well, it probably happened an infinite amount of times already. But the resulting cucumber-detonation just triggers a new Big Bang. We’re on the whatever-millionth reset now. Should end any day now. STOP CUTTING CUCUMBERS, SHEEPLE!!
You're assuming the blade would be thinner than the nucleus, at the very least.
But what would you do with the sliced cucumbers of millenia?
Dunno. I guess growing them fast enough would also be a problem.
Someone let Einstein loose, we must admit that violence is on occasion the only recourse.
Not with that attitude.
Then he went on to make lemonade with strawberries and heavy water. Deuterium, you get me? Strawberry fusion lemonade.
No I don’t get it. But I would like to. Is this one of those scenarios where three physicists walk into a bar, each one tells a joke but none of it are funny so no one gets it?
Is that what killed that girl at Panera a while back?
And that's how we got bubbles in beer.
I'm glad someone else remembers that movie.
God, I saw it in the theater. That theater was almost completely empty.
*chop "damn." *chop "damn." *cho -BOOM
That's a 4D knife.
That's gotta be the sharpest knife in existence having a diameter of half an atom...
Doesn't have to be sharp. It could be extremely fast.
And that's why you don't see cooking mouse no more.
When I was a kid, I was legitimately afraid of this
reminds me of yahoo serious splitting a beer atom with a chisel in his shed. young einstein, what a fun movie
Let me atom *
Hawking, my guy, why have you forsaken us? 🥺 I believed in you
knife shrinks
