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That’s a 4D knife.
knife shrinks
No, that knife isn’t made of atoms, that knife is made of pure solid quarks. That’s why it can cut atomic nuclei.
I choose to believe it’s made of small atoms, the kind you get from firing a shrink ray at something.
They call me Johnny Smallatoms
How big was that knife originally?!
Depends on what display you are viewing it on.
Sad to not see more comments about The Subtle Knife. This is a great meme for that concept!
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Then he went on to make lemonade with strawberries and heavy water. Deuterium, you get me? Strawberry fusion lemonade.
No I don’t get it. But I would like to. Is this one of those scenarios where three physicists walk into a bar, each one tells a joke but none of it are funny so no one gets it?
The moment I wrote it, I was hearing it in the voice of Benny Safdie in his first scene as weirdo Edward Teller, in “Oppenheimer”.
Didn’t watch the movie, probably why it went over my head. Sorry 🤷♂️
No Oppenheimer?!!
Your geek credentials are hereby revoked until further notice!
Or until you atone!Subject matter doesn’t appeal to me much, and I’m also not very fond of the lead actor (no particular reason, he’s a great actor) If it serves as consolation I only watched like 15min of barbie, either
I didn’t make it through 5min of Barbie lol
Oppenheimer was good and had nice music too.
Oppenheimer is a mainstream movie though. It’s not that geeky.
It’s a movie about physics, with characters like Niels Bohr featured prominently, which just so happened to be made for general audiences and it was a hit, by a director whose other historical film was about Dunkirk.
Before these movies were made, the subjects were pretty much obscure to the mainstream. Films like these are regarded as risky for large studios, and it’s widely acknowledged that Christopher Nolan is on the very short list of directors with the blessing to do absolutely whatever they want at large studio scale and budget and that is not part of a franchise. And by “very short list” I mean people like Stanley Kubrick.
The “mainstream” label on Oppenheimer is incidental, after the fact.
I would watch an edit of the movie that only featured the physics part of it. It’s the boring part I don’t have time for
Is that what killed that girl at Panera a while back?
And that’s how we got bubbles in beer.
I’m glad someone else remembers that movie.
God, I saw it in the theater. That theater was almost completely empty.
*chop “damn.” *chop “damn.” *cho -BOOM
Don’t eat fissile cucumbers.
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And that’s why you don’t see cooking mouse no more.
Knives are also made of atoms
They could be made of degenerate matter.
Not this knife
Sure? How many? Because I have some atoms at home and need a new knife
At least 50
Boy, that’s alot!
but an alot of atoms is just a regular old alot…!
Atomception
Some are smaller than others
Call that a knife?
That’s gotta be the sharpest knife in existence having a diameter of half an atom…
Doesn’t have to be sharp. It could be extremely fast.
That’s easy to explain, having cut a lot of cucumbers in my life. Since the actual nucleus of an atom is much smaller than the atom including its electrons itself, the probability of hitting the protons or neutrons is so small, that I’d need to live for a few thousand years and cut 1 cucumber per second nonstop, before this scenario happens even once. It is not impossible, just very improbable.
Fission doesn’t happen because we cut atoms in half. Fission happens because we blast enriched uranium with neutrons, the uranium absorbs a neutron, gets too heavy, and falls apart.
I mean think about it. Atoms are surrounded by a negatively charged electron cloud. Pushing 2 atoms together would be (sorta) like trying to push the like poles of two magnets together.
That’s just one way to do it.
Sure, but you can also rip off electrons from atoms by rubbing them or bending a piece of wire. The energy needed to trigger fission in uranium is less than a picojoule, it just needs to be focused enough to knock away the part of the atom, which is why neutrons are the most common way.
Here is a chart with the rate of fusion for two hydrogen atoms at various temperatures.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#/media/File%3AFusion_rxnrate.svg
This chart bottoms out at a few million degrees, since the probability is extremely low.
You’re assuming the blade would be thinner than the nucleus, at the very least.
Okay, now explain bananas.
Well, that’s why we generally eat bananas without cutting. As everyone knows, bananas are slightly radioactive. This increases the danger when cutting them exponentially, so don’t do that.
What about your teeth?
What do your teeth look like, man?
Some are quite sharp. Won’t they cause a fission? Should I just munch on the banana instead?
I know very little about physics and I’m pretty sure you could cut cucumbers with a knife until the end of time and you’ll never trigger a nuclear explosion.
You’re doing it wrong. The mouse just diced a cucumber really, really l, small.
Not with that attitude.
The electromagnetic force from the atoms’ respective electron cloud probably help prevent atom from getting close to each other. And the strong nuclear force also help prevent atom from splitting.
You mean I’m just not cutting strong enough?
Yes
(assuming your post isn’t a joke) it is impossible to cause a nuclear reaction by cutting cucumbers.
the biggest innacuracy in this comic is that as the panel zooms in on the cucumber atoms, the knife looks exactly the same. if it was realistic it would just be a bunch of metal atoms pushing aside a bunch of cucumber atoms, not a sharp knife slicing through individual atoms.
The Subtle Knife is definitely so sharp that it cuts through dimensions, so I think it would cut atoms.
So really that just means it’s not inaccurate, it’s just a very specific, fictional knife!
Maybe it’s not zooming in. Maybe the atoms of the cucumber are getting bigger! 😏
Well… that, and one nucleus splitting in half wouldn‘t start a chain reaction in a cucumber, and therefore not release a macroscopically noticeable amount of energy.
To put into perspective just how trivial it is, the actual amount of energy of splitting a single nucleus is on the order of picojoules. The shock from touching a doorknob is a few millijoules, literally millions of times more powerful.
Bro, you should sharpen your knives.
Won’t this cause nicks and dulling as sudden heating and impact lead to both knives becoming extremely useless ?
Also replacing one of the knives with a sharpening rod, I can sort of suspend disbelief enough to believe it “possible”.
It’s also why cats are afraid of cucumbers.
But what would you do with the sliced cucumbers of millenia?
Dunno. I guess growing them fast enough would also be a problem.
Someone let Einstein loose, we must admit that violence is on occasion the only recourse.
Ok if it is theoretically possible to cut atoms by using metal knives then why didn’t ever a fission happen? I mean if you combine all knife cutting in the whole world since knives exist, the probability should be pretty high.
Well fission of uranium isn’t hard. I want you to see to fission a C atom! XD
Hmm this made me wonder why something like this wouldn’t melt the rock and then sink into the crust and then into the planet. Probably not hot enough.
And that made me think if we could build something like a big pellet of fissile material, encase it in tungsten or something so that it is hot enough to do so but remains stable, and then let it sink into the earth. Maybe that could be tracked? Then we could learn something about how it moves and where it ends up. But probably can’t be tracked since this isn’t star trek 🖖
Well, it probably happened an infinite amount of times already. But the resulting cucumber-detonation just triggers a new Big Bang. We’re on the whatever-millionth reset now. Should end any day now. STOP CUTTING CUCUMBERS, SHEEPLE!!
Actually, it’s because cucumbers are so cool (c.f. cool as a cucumber) that they’re in a ground state. It’s actually endothermic to split their atoms so you don’t get a chain reaction.
Cutting hot vegetables, habernaros for example, is much more risky and adequate precautions should always be taken to avoid radioactivity contaminating sensitive regions of the body.
I thought the only option with cucumbers is to keep mashing them together until fusion, no?
We’re gonna need a community for comedy homicide for this. That last panel ruins it.
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reminds me of yahoo serious splitting a beer atom with a chisel in his shed. young einstein, what a fun movie
Hawking, my guy, why have you forsaken us? 🥺 I believed in you
One of these nerds is not like the others,
One of these geeks just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which nerd is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?Tyson? Why not cause he’s an asshole? Are you aware that both Einstein and Hawkings were also assholes?
But they weren’t pretentious know-it-alls on TV and YT
I can imagine Twitter and YouTube in their day. Cancelled so fast lol
Stephen Hawking did post to Twitter. He used Twitter to communicate about science, the future of humanity, and important causes like climate change. One of his first tweets was in 2014 when he used the platform to raise awareness about ALS, the disease he had lived with for decades. While not prolific on Twitter, the posts reflected his passion for science, space exploration, and human progress.
At least, according to ChatGPT.
While Einstein and Hawking (no s) were giants of their field, published papers that turned all other accepted science on its head, and have basic physical phenomenon of the Universe named after them, they were surprisingly limited in their knowledge of other fields. Whereas NdT will expound on absolutely any topic with the complete certainty that he is a fucking expert, even if he only just now inferred the existence of the thing from the question he is presently being asked. He is a Mycroftian megabrain of galactic proportions, a fact he appreciates better than anyone else.
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I don’t like Tyson because I feel he preaches an inaccurate version of the scientific philosophy. So many times I hear him saying things along the lines of absolute certainty, because it’s SCIENCE.
Where, we of the true faith, preach: the evidence indicates that this is the most likely to be true, or at least, this model makes predictions about the world more reliably than any other we currently have.
Amen.
