I still struggle to see how that sudden reaction can create so much pressure, a regular explosive is creating heavy byproducts and is expanding the gases already present in the explosive, but the sudden heating of a small uranium core and the air around it can create a bigger explosion than a bomb thousands of times heavier? Boggles my mind
Well that’s the thing, conventional explosions convert chemical bonds into energy. Chemical bonds are fairly weak in the grand scheme of things.
Nuclear weapons convert nuclear bonds into energy. Atoms really like staying the atoms they currently are, so forcing them to convert all at once releases a ton of energy.
Yea, the concentration of energy trapped in matter is immense. People say matter is energy and e=mc^2 but you really have to do the calculations to see how much work that c squared is doing. A small grain of sand is probably more energy than the largest bomb, but the hard part is converting that matter into energy.
A hydrogen bomb (even bigger than a nuke,) converts less than a percent of the matter in the bomb to energy.
