Atomic Bombs   were exploded over Hiroshima ( right ) and Nagasaki to end World War 2. Nagasaki's Fat Man was 40% more powerful than Hiroshima's Little Boy.  The Tsar Bomba of the Soviet Union, a hydrogen bomb, was 3500 times more powerful than Fat Man. Watch this fascinating  video of how much destruction these weapons would cause . Comparison with other bombs, height of Mount Everest and altitude of commercial airliner. It is reported, that Soviet scientists were worried about this H-Bomb being, perhaps, too powerful, so they decided to limit the size to 50 Megatons, but instead got 57 MT of TNT.  They could have brought it up to more than 100 MT. Can a more powerful bomb be built?  Yes, an  anti-matter bomb.  Watch this video. Theoretically, should be 100 times more powerful than a Tsar Bomba. Just half a gram of anti-matter reacting with half a gram of ordinary matter would produce the equivalent of the Nagasaki A-Bomb. A ton of anti-matter ...

Wednesday is my sci-tech day.  With the recent passage of   Richard Garwin,   I'll assess where we are today on the Hydrogen Bomb, for he was the individual who was in charge of building the first one in 1951, at the age of 23.  Yes, he lived to be 97. My only link to nuclear energy is that I twice worked under Edward Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  But this was in the 1970's, and for half a century I haven't done much in this field.  In any case, at LLNL I was with the laser fusion program.  Teller was not only the father of the Hydrogen Bomb, he also was director of this lab, where  John Nuckols  had developed a process to use a laser to produce fusion for power. Teller came to Hawaii in the 70's, proposing a bank of wind turbines at the top of the Koolaus.  This was so long ago that Google can't find that photo, which was on the front page of one of the local newspapers.  While there, I joined him and Momok...

I watched on Netflix last night:   Einstein and the Bomb .   Rotten Tomatoes  reviewers gave it an 83 rating. What surprised me was that while I knew it was his letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that got the U.S. going on the Manhattan Project, security reasons did not allow him to participate in the effort.  The film  Oppenheimer  covers the building phase of the Atomic Bomb, and a portion of it shows  Oppie meeting with Einstein . So I thought this morning, what can go wrong today to instantly eliminate us.  It then occurred to me that a nuclear war between Russia and the Free World would probably be it.   One list  has climate change at #1, nuclear warfare #2, pandemics #3, social media #4, The Butterfly Effect #5, quantum computing #6, AI #7, the death of all bees #8, asteroid impact #9 and alien invasion #10. But climate change will take time to kill us, and there are reasons to believe that we will gain contr...