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I guess there are two kinds of people because when I learned that splitting atoms causes a nuclear explosion, I got a craft knife and some sand from the garden and went to town on them trying to slice some atoms just right 👌
When I was in kindergarten they showed us a cartoon with anthropomorphic teeth to try to encourage dental hygiene and those teeth scared me so much that I refused to brush my teeth for years and I ended up getting gum disease because of it.
When I learned about germs, how they’re everywhere and too small to see, I thought I must be squishing them every time I touch anything. So I went around the entire house touching every surfaces, especially the windows, because nobody ever touched those.
I had no exposure to school or formal education when I was real young. I just had a few picture books about the world, one was a cut-away that showed the layers of earth’s crust, mantle and core.
Being about 5, I had no idea of the proportions or scales involved so whenever I saw someone digging a hole outside for a firepit or fencepost I would yell and scream that they were going to break through to lava and it would pour everywhere and burn everything up.
Nobody was able to explain things to me so I had to self-educate myself about science and everything else over the next couple decades. Fast forward to me now explaining to people on reddit what lava is, that it’s actually molten rock… there are a lot of people who have never thought about it, saw pictures of volcanoes and just accepted that they spit out “hot goo” and never thought deeper.
I wish I was kidding, but also… I wonder if it’s a simpler, more peaceful life when you don’t know how anything works. I was up at 2:00 AM with my brain whirring away, like every night.
I loved this story, thank you for sharing.
I think the people who sleep well at night are the ones that don’t care how anything works. Sometimes it’s ignorance, but often it’s just burnout, and worse sometimes it’s a complete lack of empathy for anything that isn’t themselves.
Learned about Vacuum Decay when I was 10…it gave me another complex layered on top of my other complex layer cake…
yeah my poor dyson /s
Seriously though, the best part about vacuum decay is you’d never see it coming and barely have time to notice if it did happen.
New anxiety just dropped.
Its not possible to do by any metric. And besides, a chain reaction is needed. A single atom turned into pure kinetic energy wouldn’t be noticeable at all.
Yes, and if I cut a mango, how many billions of atoms is that? So I’d recommend to cut the mango in increments of one angstrom to minimise the chances of a chain reaction happening.
\0. The force that keeps the nucleus together is much stronger than the force needed to break the inter-atom bonfs. (Blanking on the names right now. Strong and weak forces?)
Yeah, but what if the knife is really sharp?
The knife edge can’t be smaller than an atoms width, so still no.
You say that until someone pulls the classic prank of swapping all your mango atoms with uranium-235.
Yeah and what if I squish the mango, thereby compressing the water and fusing the hydrogen into helium?
When I was a kid, I was playing one day outside and then later I realized there is an ant nest nearby and I saw that I killed some ants by walking near it.
After that, I didn’t want to kill any more bugs etc, so whenever I was walking on grass, I would always check the grass before me to see if there are any bugs in it, and only then I would make a step.Yeah, it was very slow and inefficient, but it wasn’t that bad because I was actively avoiding grass and this whole experiment didn’t last very long either, maybe a couple of months.
Then I went back to stepping on the bugs.
Just tell yourself they’d kill you if they had the chance, it’s a preemptive strike
Reminds me of The Flintstones Split the Atom
A single atom wouldn’t even be worse than, like, a pop rock anyway. You need a whole mess of them motherfuckers to make a big boom.
If I accidentally bite an atom and the tiny shards shatters nearby atoms, wouldn’t that just make more? Like sort of… a chain reaction ?
Maybe I just have to gobble up all my salad before all the booms blow my jaws and neighbours away.
I think your jaw would have to be made of tungsten or something for that to happen, but I’m not a physist; I’ve just played one in a video game. 🤷♂️
Sometimes all kids need is a scientifically literate adult to explain precisely why their fear isn’t possible.
Yea, just tell them they and the surrounding half mile would be instantly vaporized and wouldn’t even know they were dead.
“It hasn’t happened yet and you damn sure aren’t special enough to be the one to do it”
It happens all the time. That’s how the multiverse branches are kept under a manageable number for the simulation.
If I’m to believe that second person didn’t misspeak, they had “mental breakdowns” with an “s”, so multiple breakdowns, over the thought that their eating lettuce could cause a nuclear apocalypse.
They must really like lettuce. If I had a mental breakdown over the fear that my eating a specific food would cause untold human death and suffering, including my own, I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe.
(While chewing lettuce) “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
Would you mind doing that more over towards Washington DC, please? TIA.
Tactical salad, lol.
I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe
I guess you did not grow up with parents that forced you to clean up your plate before leaving the dinner table
How dare you add common sense to our imaginary and greatly embellished struggles!
The audacity of this guy, I almost died of Asperger!
Maybe after the first few mental breakdowns, they could have maybe just gone on the internet may be kind of like, I don’t know, learned more. So they were saying they were just so sure that they could accidentally split atoms and they didn’t question why there weren’t nuclear explosions going off at every restaurant hundreds of thousands of times per day.
Edit: /s for the simpletons below 👇
Ah yes, name calling. What a mature way to handle the situation.
You understand that there are a lot of people alive before the internet existed, right? And if this person is relating a story from their childhood, and they’re anywhere over like 35 years old, us old people couldn’t just “go on the internet”.
And even if you did go on the internet, there wouldnt be any answer to the prompt “does chewing salad risk splitting atoms” on yahoo or altavista. The search engines where not “smart” enough to parse deeper in the question nor where there enough “random trivia” answers online
Reminds me of a profoundly stupid movie I saw as a child called Young Einstein starring Yahoo Serious and no that’s not aphasia talking. He takes an atom out to the shed and splits it with a chisel. An explosion ensues, complete with charred face and smoking hair standing on end.
profoundly stupid
Hey, that was my favourite movie when it came out. I was sure Yahoo Serious was going to be a huge star.
I don’t equate “profoundly stupid” to “bad”. I enjoy a good stupid movie. I adore Hudson Hawk. I watch Ready Player One all the time in the background.
I mean… The chance of that happening is incredibly low, but… It’s not zero.
Have fun stressing out of cutting things. Any cut you make can be the one low chance cut when you accidentally split an atom. :)
It is zero. You split atoms all the time, thanks to the radioactive carbon-14 in our bodies, from nuclear testing.
A nuclear bomb goes off because a lot of atoms split all at once, which causes a whole lot more atoms to then split. But that requires a critical mass. It doesn’t just happen on its own.
sorry, but the chances are actually zero. it takes a lot more force and specialized conditions to split an atom than a knife
Just be glad no one showed you crunching life savers in the dark.
I remember being told “Atoms are always moving”, so I would cut reeeeaaaalllllyyyy fucking slow for a bit thinking that the atoms would “move out of the way.”
I also just read my husband this meme and he was like “Oh yeah. I remember thinking I was risking my area for arts and crafts.”
