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

[Mike Jing]

OK, so I wasn't completely lost. I was just wondering in what sense was the
word "Critical" used on the religious side of the pun. Does it mean
"crucial", or "given to judging"?

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 1:07 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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