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What could probably happen....
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What's this from?!
The Amazing World of Gumball. It's a great show.
The energy from nuclear reactions can be astonishingly large (compared to, say, chemical reactions).
But atoms are really, really, really small.
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I remember growing up as a kid, doing my time in Sunday School, and getting this story pitched as "Wise King Solomon ferret's out the truth of maternity by determining which claimant truly cares about the life of the child".
It's kinda crazy how the story has permuted into "Two women fight over a thing and both agree splitting it in half is the fair solution."
I think the permutation is because it works better on a comedic level. Probably started out as basic "But what if king Solomon did cut the baby in half" arguments and eventually became a general joke. The base level of "cut the baby in half" is already dark by itself all it takes is going through with it and you have a good bit of dark humor.
Also the whole scenario of king Solomon almost comes across as him not necessarily being particularly smart but moreso that the people he was dealing with were crazy or stupid.
What I like about the story is that true motherhood isn't about biology or DNA but about caring. And I get why even people who care about the well-being of a child wouldn't care about the well-being of an atom
You are waaaay overthinking this
They're just describing the plot of the actual story though...
Except they forgot this is a joke.
The story hasn't permuted into cutting things in half is the fair solution. No one is seriously telling that story.
Real talk: Would literally cutting a single atom in half unleash the force of an atomic bomb? Would it even be a noticeable reaction to the unassisted human eye?
I've seen some science show stuff at particle accelerators where a dude points to some device giving off sparks and is like "these sparks are actually anti-matter explosions." So I wonder if a single atom of regular matter would even be a spark.
I found a similar discussion on Reddit and liked this comment because it was easy to understand:
The energy released in the fission (splitting) of ONE atom of U-235 is enough to make a single grain of sand visibly move.
It's apparently a quote from the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.
So instead of gas powered leaf blowers and all their noise, we ought to go nuclear.
Instead of constant noise there's just a single pop, and the leaves are gone. Just be careful with the dosage.
There are carbon atoms splitting (decaying) inside of you right now. This is why carbon dating works. Do you notice them?
Yeah, unless the atom in question is neutronium, you won't notice and if it is neutronium, you have all kinds of issues even without splitting it.
This reminds me of people freaking out over particle accelerators. Will it create a black hole????
Only they don't know that the Earth is regularly bombarded with high energy particles from space. The reason we need particle accelerators is so that we can accelerate the desired types of particles to the desired speed, and aim them at the desired place.
Most people have no idea just how little they actually know about the world around them.
Hell, most of what the average person "knows" is just made up assumptions they had about things they knew little to nothing about and subsequently internalized those assumptions without actually researching if they were correct.
Humans are hella prone to trapping ourselves in fallacious thought without even knowing we do it. It's just how our brains have evolved to work through inductive reasoning.
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Man they could have forced countless generations to fight genocidal wars without the monotheistic religious pretext or impetus if this has really happened.
Don't worry, if that happened, something else will take it place. The only constant is the genocide, the reason is just a variable.
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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