Re: GR translation: what hep humorists here are already calling “Critical Mass”

[David Morris]

The literal meaning of  the term shouldn't  discount its more fun porn
aspect, especially in GR.

David Morris

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 12:07 PM Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's a pun: "Mass" DOES refer to the religious ceremony as well as to the
> physicists' term for enough fissionable U-235 or Pu-239 to maintain net
> energy output in a reactor, or deliver it in an exponential burst as a
> weapon.
>
> (Science-nerd sidebar: what is really critical is the RATE at which
> neutrons from fissioning atomic nuclei strike other nuclei and cause them
> to fission, releasing more neutrons...etc. etc. It's like disease
> transmission: on average, how many others does one person with flu transmit
> it to? If the rate is less than 1, the outbreak subsides; if it's much more
> than 1, it becomes an epidemiic.
>
> That rate depends not only on nuclear physics itself but on the geometry
> -- the spatial distribution of the atoms, and thus the likelihood of a
> flying neutron hitting another nucleus before it exits the material. A
> sphere is ideal; better than the same mass in a flat slab. Very early in
> the Manhattan Project, they realized that the nascent explosion would melt,
> vaporize, and blow the whole mass apart before more than a few percent of
> the atoms split. That was acceptable for U-235: the "Little Boy" uranium
> bomb fired a slug of U-235 down a short "gun  barrel" into a cavity in a
> larger chunk, adding up to more-than-critical mass even though it started
> melting as the slug hit. Faster-fissioning plutonium was worse; but if you
> could *compress* a sub-critical mass -- literally force the atoms of metal
> closer together -- there would be more hits, more fission, doubling and
> redoubling in microseconds, before the explosion gathered force. Hence the
> much more complex and challenging "Fat Man" Pu-239 bomb, with a spherical
> shell of explosives squeezing a ball of solid metal -- very briefly -- to
> lesser volume, higher density, and a chain reaction that wouldn't have
> happened without the squeeze. You can get a critical RATE -- which is what
> matters for the explosive yield -- from a mass that wouldn't be even close
> to critical sitting on a workbench.
>
> So the usually unstated subtext to all discussions of how much fissionable
> U-235 or Pu-239 Iran or North Korea has, and how many nuclear weapons that
> could produce, is "how good is their 'squeeze' design?" That matters more
> than the mass -- but the 1940-vintage (for scientists) or 1945-vintage (for
> the public) term survives.)
>
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 9:21 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Ah, I missed it completely then. Somehow I thought "Mass" was referring
>> to the religious ceremony, and people are celebrating it while listening to
>> Father Rapier's "passionate demonstrations".
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 10:13 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Umm,  my take on the term in this context means the instant that
>>> ejaculation becomes inevitable.
>>>
>>> David Morris
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 7:38 PM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> V539.10-24, P548.12-26   DEVIL’S ADVOCATE’S what the shingle sez, yes
>>>> inside is a Jesuit here to act in that capacity, here to preach, like his
>>>> colleague Teilhard de Chardin, against return. Here to say that critical
>>>> mass cannot be ignored. Once the technical means of control have reached a
>>>> certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the
>>>> chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning.
>>>> It’s a potent case Father Rapier makes here, not without great moments of
>>>> eloquence, moments when he himself is clearly moved . . . no need even to
>>>> be there, at the office, for visitors may tune in from anywhere in the
>>>> Convention to his passionate demonstrations, which often come in the midst
>>>> of celebrating what hep humorists here are already calling “Critical Mass”
>>>> (get it? not too many did in 1945, the Cosmic Bomb was still trembling in
>>>> its earliness, not yet revealed to the People, so you heard the term only
>>>> in the very superhepcat-to-hepcat exchanges).
>>>>
>>>> Does the word "critical" here refer to the nature of Father Rapier's
>>>> sermon, as in "given to adverse or unfavourable criticism"?
>>>> I'm aware of the pun, of course.
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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