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A note on Nuclear Fission

When an atom fissions, it releases a teeny tiny amount of energy ( The decay of one atom of uranium-235 releases about 200MeV or about 3*10-11J.). But atoms are quite small. An atom does not make a big explosion when it splits.

To get a big explosion, you need to split lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of them—many, many trillions of them.

Each one releases only a teeny amount of energy, but when you add up the teeny amount of energy from trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms, then you get a big explosion. (The explosion of 1kg of TNT releases 4MJ).

Details from Columbarium

Wilhelm Kotarbiński (Polish, 1848-1921)

Oil on canvas

"A true theologian...is someone who has tasted of God directly."

- Kyriacos Markides, Inner River

Physics is an eternal chaos. You have to adapt to this condition and like it or you become mathematician.

Theoretical Physicist (via scienceprofessorquotes)

The view from Gemini 12 on this day in 1966.

What were astronauts like when they first returned from outer space? Nurse Dee O'Hara: ‘They have something, a sort of wild look, I would say, as if they had fallen in love with a mystery up there, sort of as if they haven’t got their feet back on the ground, as if they regret having come back to us… a rage at having come back to earth. As if up there they’re not only freed from weight, from the force of gravity, but from desires, affections, passions, ambitions, from the body. Did you know that for months John [Glenn] and Wally [Schirra] and Scott [Carpenter] went around looking at the sky? You could speak to them and they didn’t answer, you could touch them on the shoulder and they didn’t notice; their only contact with the world was a dazed, absent, happy smile. They smiled at everything and everybody, and they were always tripping over things. They kept tripping over things because they never had their eyes on the ground.’

Craig Nelson, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (via m-l-rio)

Europa’s Stunning Surface (desktop/laptop) Click the image to download the correct size for your desktop or laptop in high resolution

From Earthrise to the black hole: astronomy’s most famous images.

Photographs from history that capture humanity’s exploration of the heavens.

20 July 1969

One of the most iconic views of Earth, taken from the Apollo 11 spacecraft as it orbited the moon. Describing the scene, the astronaut Neil Armstrong said: ‘It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small’ | This caption was updated on 11 April 2019 to correct the date the picture was taken, photograph: Nasa.

21 July 1969

Buzz Aldrin, the lunar module pilot for the first moon landing, poses on the lunar surface. The footprints of the astronauts are clearly visible in the soil. Neil Armstrong took the picture with a 70mm Hasselblad lunar surface camera Photograph: American Photo Archive/Alamy

25 February 1979

This dramatic view of Jupiter’s great red spot and its surroundings was obtained by the Voyager 1 space probe

Photograph: JPL/Nasa/UIG/Getty Images

14 February 1990

Often referred to as ‘the pale blue dot’ image, this picture was taken when Voyager 1 was 4bn miles (6.4bn km) from Earth and 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. Earth is a mere point of light, just 0.12 pixels in size when viewed from that distance. The fuzzy light is scattered sunlight because Earth was close to the sun (from the perspective of Voyager)

Photograph: JPL/Nasa

6 January 2004

The first colour image of Mars taken by the panoramic camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It was the sharpest photograph ever taken on the surface of the planet

Photograph: JPL/Nasa/AP

25 September 2012

Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, this photo was assembled by combining 10 years of Hubble space telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the centre of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, the telescope revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time

Photograph: Hubble space telescope/Nasa/ESA

24 July 2015

A combination of images captured by the New Horizons space probe, with enhanced colours to show differences in the composition and texture of Pluto’s surface

Photograph: AP

10 April 2019

The first image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon telescope (EHT) – a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape

Photograph: EHT Collaboration/UCL

A Good Old-Fashioned Midwestern Apocalypse