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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🖖
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.
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.
