Critical Mass
Yesterday, I wrote about crushing pressure.
Starting with a pool, then the ocean, then the Earth’s core, we journeyed through ever-higher pressures and imagined what happened each time. We made it all the way past stars and to black holes, but we don’t need to go quite that far today. What happens at the core of our Sun is plenty.
Down there, under the weight of hundreds of thousands of Earths, hydrogen atoms fuse into one another. Saying they “fuse together” sounds pretty blah, but fusion turns one element into another, precisely the process sought after by alchemists and fanatics for millennia. What starts as hydrogen turns into helium.
It seems like something magical takes place, but instead, fusion is the most natural process in the universe, without which there would almost surely be no life. Every time you see a star, you are seeing fusion happen.
Fission, on the other hand, is much more rare, but it’s the main way we humans tap into the power of the atom.
You start with a lot of
