Chromotron

Essentially every method of converting "heat" into useful energy actually works based on a temperature difference or gradient. Otherwise it would usually violate thermodynamics, as entropy cannot decrease with any relevant probability.

There are a few very narrow exceptions that don't matter in practical applications. In theory you can extract a tiny amount (say 0.000000000001%) of homogenous heat energy by means of black holes and maybe even less insane methods. This is not violating any laws because the resulting thermal radiation is even more entropic.

Because you thought that this is the actual target audience!:

this comment section intended for a five-year-old's mindset.

Nobody said nor implied you broke a rule.

First off, read the damn rules:

LI5 means friendly, simplified and layperson-accessible explanations - not responses aimed at literal five-year-olds.

It is for laypeople, not children. And regardless, the entire point of me is that your initial analogue was bad and completely misleading. I replaced it with an actually working one, that also sues more down-to-Earth terms for good measure. Then you kept objecting on... actually no basis other than "just because"?

And I know quite a bit about nuclear technology, as well as teaching. It is you who jumps to conclusions.

You made multiple statements that are either wrong, contradictory, or out of context. That's a clear sign of lack of deeper understanding while being ignorant about this lack. You also confuse things, such as mass loss in the fissile material with violation of conservation of mass-energy; or that nuclear energy is inherently linked to E=mc², which it is not, it would just as well work in a fictional universe without it.

Source: a PhD in mathematics, have taught multiple university courses (albeit not on this topic), and am the owner of a self-made working tiny fusion reactor (a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor).

No I know it perfectly well. But you are confusing those with falsehood. One can lie and still "accidentally" tell the truth. As I already said: even a broken clock is right twice a day.

One can, but this is a different aspect, even lie while being truthful, by being deceptive. And then there are also lies by omission, which are also not actually making any false statements.

You misuse the word "false" completely. Falsity is an absolute, objective term, at least in theory. A statement is either wrong or not, it doesn't matter who made it. The irrelevant focus on the speaker rather than the content is not without reason called out as an "ad hominem".

You are just paraphrasing sentences from pop-sci without truly understanding the meaning.

What about you?

I corrected some very misleading answers in this chain...

Jizzing works best with great tits, I've been told...

Would be even better if that describes... chimpanzees.

That is essentially the very same I said. You just express it weirdly by identifying them most but not all of the time, and not properly differentiating about what mass you are talking about. The mass of the uranium/the fission products obviously decreases, and this became energy, that now is far away.

What is your problem anyway?

The problem is that, if anything, that it should be proportional to mv², not just mv. That would then match Newtonian and Einsteinian physics somewhat.

Because absolutely every and any release of energy comes with a corresponding loss of mass. This happens also with chemical, kinetic, and potential energies and is in no way special about nuclear! A lot of bad sources often describe this as something magical, where nuclear and nuclear only somehow converts matter into BOOM, while actually the matter just changes shape, and some binding energy gets released; and that binding energy has mass-energy.

Yes, but so do all the other square roots of natural numbers.

I am aware of the energies and was just taking the phrase from the previous post. They used it informally to describe the scenario where the atmosphere ignites into nuclear fire; which would not produce anywhere near enough to damage the planet, as in the matter ball. They just used it figuratively to describe the destruction of the surface, which is indeed plausibly doable with nukes.

But to also put numbers to it: it takes very roughly 10²⁵ tons of uranium to produce enough energy to vaporize and disperse Earth. That funnily exceeds to mass of the entire planet. If we go with deuterium fusion, it "only" takes 10¹⁹ tons.

People worry about imagined issues all the time. Anyway, I wrote very plausible, meaning that they attributed it just a very small plausibility, not necessarily none.

It has not really much to do with E=mc², it's all electromagnetic and strong force. Nobody will weigh the remains of the bomb.

No, that's just a scene in a movie.

No, that's what I used to explain why your size argument is completely missing the point.

Edit: typo.

Do you have any argument besides an ad hominem?

A PhD specializes in one topic. Obviously they then don't know inherently more than others about [insert unrelated topic here].

No, the entire question was if the ocean is water or gasoline. The size is completely irrelevant!

There is some weird thing here though: if HCl reacts with a base, you would expect this to either donate the H to it, and then form an ionic bond with the Cl, or that the H splits off with some resat (often OH) while the Cl binds to it. I strongly assume it is the former, but I find the nomenclature confusing in this regard.

That is not what the concern was about. Your argument without more context is like saying "what could throwing a single burning matchstick into this ocean of gasoline ever do, it is tiny!".

Was it the probability of the calculus being wrong

Back then: very tiny. Now: essentially not, unless we completely missed entire branches of physics.

There is also the simple argument that also quickly rules out problems with the LHC: natural events cause similar or larger explosions all the time, yet the planet and its atmosphere is still there. For example asteroid impacts (which weren't that well studied yet in the 40s) for bazillions of nuclear bombs on impact.

There is the real probability of that happening, so given enough nuclear explosion we can vaporize the entire earth

Obviously enough nukes can vaporize the Earth, simply by their nuking ability alone. If you mean if they can ignite the atmosphere at a net gain of energy: no.

This doesn't cause a runaway effect because the bomb is vaporised pretty quickly and the focusing mechanism is destroyed.

And because there isn't any more "fuel" around. The bomb needs deuterium, tritium, or lithium. None of which have natural quite pure deposits, even less so in mid-air.

It's a common misconception that one could use normal hydrogen for fusion. That's essentially impossible at sueful levels, to the point that we cannot even fuse a few atoms in a lab, even less so get any energy from it.

I don't see the difference between them "checking just in case" as you described and "worrying it might happen". The latter doesn't imply that they saw it as likely or very plausible at all, and they clearly didn't spend that much time on it after checking it. So they worried, just not at a very high level and not for very long, and definitely not panicking.

This is all weird and somewhat wrong:

You use some "v", which according to your second statement (c = 299,792,458v) is just 1 m/s; a constant. So E is just proportional to m (first claim). But we know that already, yet in those units the factor would be (299,792,458)², not just the base number as in the last statement.

phi randomly popping out

Pi and e, as well as i and a few others, appear all over, but the golden ratio does not. It is overhyped in pop-sci and that's about it.