Could The Fallout Series Actually Happen?

So if you rad my last post, I assume you've gathered the idea that I really like the idea of the fallout series, but a big question to ask is is an atomic apocalypse real and possible? I mean there are fungi that can create zombies out of ants and meteorites are another scarily obvious possibility but could the world end because of good old human hostility?

According to Wikipedia, these are the countries that currently have nuclear weapons.

Less than you thought? Me too, I personally assumed that during the cold war a lot more countries would have gotten busy with their nuclear research but there are in fact only 5 recognized Nuclear Weapon States in the world today that are America, Russia, France, China and of course the UK.

The other colors stand for countries that do also have access to nuclear weapons, except for the countries colored green which are in fact states that used to have nuclear weapons but no longer possess them or have disassembled them in the case of South Africa.

All that aside there are estimated to be 10144 nuclear weapons in the world, which seems far too precise for an estimation but I'll let that pass as they probably know what they're doing.

So firstly lets look at the size of the are they'd need to nuke. The total surface area of the Earth is listed as  510 million square kilometers, but we only need to know the habitable regions. The total land surface area is listed as 149 million square kilometers. But the bombs would obviously be dropped on the populated area and so that is what we must calculate. Of this 149 million, deserts make up about 32 million, forests 39 million, mountains 30 million and freshwater 9 million square kilometers. Obviously none of these are able to have large communities and so the remaining surface area for humans to live on is only 39 million square kilometers, and even this will not be completely filled as humans don't live everywhere and they tend to clump together in regions rather than spread out and fill a whole area (95% of the population is estimated to live in 10% of the land area). But this figure fits our purpose so we'll use it for now.

The next factor which we must account for is the size of the bomb. In a nuclear explosion the damage can be thought of as circles around the area of the explosion. The first circle is the fireball radius, this tends to be very small and is the radius of the nuclear fireball itself. The second is that of the deadly radiation, with mortality rates of 50% and upwards, this radius is around 7.5km. The third and fourth radii are those of air blasts, this would gradually tail off, however they can remain deadly at radii of above 33km. The final circle is that of potentially the largest killer, the thermal energy. If large enough this will cause serious burns and create firestorms and can reach a terrifying 77km.

Comfortingly these are the figures that would be observed for the Tsar bomb, the biggest USSR bomb ever designed which packed a massive 100 megaton explosion (equivalent of exploding 100 million tonnes of TNT), However if all nuclear weapons were this powerful, it would only take around 2100 to nuke our 39 million square kilometers, meaning they they would have actually quite a good chance to be thorough and go over it 4 times, making sure they killed everyone.

Less comfortingly however, is that in a nuclear explosion, the explosion itself isn't the only killer. Possibly one of the most frightening implications of a nuclear bomb is the nuclear fallout which comes after.

When a nuclear bomb is detonated it releases massive amounts of energy in gamma waves, enough to actually cause a lot of the surrounding material e.g. dust to become radioactive aswell. And when the explosion forms its iconic mushroom cloud, all of this radioactive material is sucked up into it, and through this, into the atmosphere.


This radioactive material can be devastating to the environment, in some cases it has been seen to contaminate areas up too 500km away from the detonation! And when we take into account our ten thousand nuclear weapons, its pretty obvious that that's more than enough fallout to go around.

As a result of this, people would suffer mutations and illnesses, cancer would be widespread and the fact that isotopes such as Strontium-90 would be created which can directly bond into our bodies means that this radiation would most likely prove fatal for most.

However the good news is that if there ever does happen to be a nuclear war, provided you can survive the initial destruction, the fallout and any diseases that follow, you're pretty much in the clear!

So the final answer is yes, fallout could potentially happen, because physics.

Once again thank you all for reading, it means a lot to me that people actually read this! And if there ever is a nuclear apocalypse, fallout is more likely than we realise, with humanity's tendency to survive against the odds.

Anyway I'm finishing up now, so \i'll see you all again soon and thanks for reading! :)

Fallout 4 and Atoms part 2

So Fallout 4 came out yesterday, for those of you who don't know, that is a video game. The idea of the fallout series in general was to take the fear of the nuclear apocalypse that haunted people from the 50s riiight the way through to the end of the cold war, and then make it into a fun playable experience.

See as the name suggests (fallout means the radioactive particles that fall as dust or rain after a nuclear weapon is detonated), the fallout series are all set in a world similar to that of the 1960s, except the nuclear war actually happened and now it is a wasteland.

I'm not just telling you this because I'm a nerd, the point which I am making is that this is a truly brilliant game, the gameplay is immersive, there is plenty of stuff to do, and the trailer below has me still humming the wanderer.

However the thing that appeals to me most about fallout 4 is that its a NUCLEAR apocalypse. Not zombies or aliens or ancient artifacts but good old fashioned nuclear war between America and China that wipes out the world in 2 hours and is followed by crazy survivor attempts to mutate humans into super-soldiers and to create deadly viral weapons.

So pretty simple idea - pretty fantastic game series.

You know the announcement of fallout 4 and the nuclear bombs that caused the series were actually what caused me to google atoms and write these posts on all this stuff.

Anyway I'm getting a little off topic, to tell the truth that was all mainly a filler because this post may not be as long as the last one see this post, I am going to cover the other model of the atom in use today, the quantum mechanical model.

Back in a simpler time you could ask any physicist what is the difference between some light and this electron and they would have said that one is a wave whereas the other is a particle, but then physics once more got in the way of our nice simple view of the world.

See there is this weird phenomenon called the photoelectric effect that helped to muck up our nice simple view. To put it simply, when you shine light above a certain frequency (and therefore energy) on a metal's surface, there are electrons emitted instantaneously. Now some of you might be thinking its just like boiling off water, the light gives it thermal energy and so the electrons have enough energy to escape, but the weird thing wasn't the emission, it was the fact that it occurred instantaneously. Even with the biggest oven in the world, there would be a gap in time before the metal was heated and the electrons boiled off, so what exactly is going on here?

It was a guy called Plank's hypothesis that helped us to understand what was going on here, as he suggested that light was less of a wave of energy and more like a massive stream of quantised packets of energy, like how a river flowing looks like a liquid, but in fact is made up of trillions of H2O molecules.

But why is this so important? Well the higher the frequency, the more energy these packets will be carrying, which means that above a certain energy, they would provide exactly the amount of energy that an electron would need to escape the positive pull of the surface of the metal. We refer to this amount of energy as the work function. However the key thing to take from this is that light doesn't always behave like a wave, sometimes it behaves like particles.

The second thing that began to mess with our heads was much simpler, what happens when you shoot a beam of electrons at a disk shaped target? Well up until they hit the target, they act completely normal, flying along in a straight line, but when they hit the target, something bizarre happens, specifically this:

Whats so weird about this you ask? This is the pattern which scattered light makes when it is diffracted. And therefore the electrons are no longer acting like a particle, but like a wave instead.

From these two seemingly small things, some very clever people were able to draft up the theory of what we know as the wave particle duality, the idea that waves and particles can be equated as one thing in a similar way to how Einstein equated matter and energy. In order to do this, DeBroglie created a very interesting equation:

Which is in summary wavelength is equal to Planck's constant over mass times velocity. Or to the non physics people, waves and particles pretend to be each other.

What does this have to do with atoms you ask? Well many more equations were made until eventually we became able to actually write a particle as a wave of probability, stating effectively how much of the particle is there. And the particles we can do this with include electrons.

So last time I showed you the electrons in nice tidy orbitals, whereas the quantum model of the atom takes into account the fact that electrons could be wavey and makes it look like this instead:


And when there is more than one they will still repel, despite being merely a cloud of charge and will form all the pretty patterns on the right. depending on how many are present. to be as far away from each other as possible, much like two arguing siblings.

And that is how simple the quantum model of the atom gets, well now hopefully you understand atoms just a little bit better now.

You know whats a weird thought? Just how complex such an incredibly small system can even be, there was a time that the atoms were thought of as indivisible, but over time we have come to discover that even these tiny little bits of stuff are even more unimaginably complex than we could ever manage to completely understand.

Once again it has been a pleasure writing and thank you all for reading, see you soon :)

A Journey to the Centre of the Atom - Part 1

HELLLLOOOOO INTERNEEEEEETTTTTT!!!! I have missed you guys but now I'm back and had a pretty interesting idea for a couple of more posts!

For anyone who doesn't know, I'm a massive physics nerd. Physics is great, in some cases it knows exactly what's going on and can predict is really accurately. But in other cases it can model something, but all that we really know for certain is how little we really know about the topic, and one of the most famous cases of this is the atom.

Humans seem to love making things, our creativity is one of the things that defines us, setting us apart from the bacteria and fungi that we share this planet with. But there have been times where in order to make new things, we have had to have a greater understanding of what we're making them out of.

We have always been looking closer and closer, building microscopes to detect light and even electrons in an attempt to figure out what everything is made of, probing deeper and deeper, trying to find the indivisible individual sections of matter that make up everything. The atom may not be the simple individual piece that we're looking for but it is a truly beautiful system, made up of a complex structure of matter and balanced charges.

In this post I'll explain the classical model of the atom, where we assume everything is all nice and tidy and made of particles and not a quantum mess of clouds of charge and such.

So lets begin with the biggest part, the atom itself, the largest atom known to us is that of Cesium (CS) which has a radius of around 270 pm. Lets put that in perspective, 1 pm is 1x10^-12 m or in an easier to understand format, 0.000000000001 m that means that one of these atoms is 0.000000000540 m across. Pretty small right? Guess again because that's not as small as an atom gets, the smallest atom possible is that of helium, with a minuscule radius of 31 pm, nearly 9 times smaller! OK fine that's really not that much smaller in the sense of things, until you realise that's the difference between the Arc De Triomphe and the Empire State Building!

So that's how big they are, or more accurately how small they are, I mean there's more atoms in a grain of sand than there are grains of sand on Earth!

Anyway moving on, next layer, AKA the electrons! Who doesn't love electrons? They power our gadgets, they're thought to be fundamental particles, they do all kinds of cool stuff with light and charged particles and they supposedly orbit neatly in shells of 2, 8 and 8 right? Wrong.

Electrons are great little things, but they are by no means straightforward. The fact that they repel means that when they are orbiting an atom they take up positions that will allow them to be as far away as possible from the other, so one is fine by itself, two will be on opposite sides of the nucleus, three will be in a triangle and 4 will be a tetrahedron and so on and so forth.

The chart on the right is a bit of a preview to next time but also shows just how incredibly complex these seemingly simple little lumps of negativity can be.

And it only gets weirder.

Now on to the next part of the atom, the nucleus, a region which is so dense that if we could fill 1 cubic meter with the nuclei of atoms (they're all roughly equally dense) it would weight roughly 2.7x10^17 kg, which is equivalent to 77500000000 Saturn V rockets. ItIhelps to visualise to say that if the moon was compressed to this density from its current average density of 3347 kg/m3 then it would have a new surface area of 22600 meters squares, roughly the size of 1 quarter of Ireland. So yeah its pretty incredibly dense, and as the electron's mass pales in comparison we tend to just say that the mass of the nucleus is the mass of the atom.

But now we must leave out electrifying friends as we have to go deeper!

Anyone who has done GCSE physics will know that the nucleus contains protons and neutrons, the positively charged particles that keep the electrons around and the neutral particles really don't do much more than add more mass and stability to the nucleus.

But lets look a little closer shall we? Firstly the proton. This particle is the optimist of the atomic trio, constantly positive with a charge of +1. Its is also spinning constantly as are all of the particles, and as it is spinning, the motor effect dictates that a small magnetic field is generated. And that is pretty much it, it is also interesting to note that as a hydrogen nucleus is simply 1 proton by itself, we find a lot of protons simply floating around as either Hydrogen atoms or alone as Hydrogen + ions.

Secondly the neutron, this is actually sightly more simple than the proton, the neutron consists of quarks which have charges that actually balance out to 0 making it a completely neutral particle (hence the name). The neutron just kind of sits there, spinning around and adding a bit of mass, sometimes it may influence the spin of an electron but that is really one of the only significant effects that the particle has.

However when we look at what happens to the system as a whole under different circumstances, it gets a lot more interesting, for example, while the strong force can easily bind together a nucleus with the same amount of protons and neutrons, once there is an imbalance, things start to get a little bit tricky. Through quantum mechanical processes, the nucleus can literally beak apart over and over again, emitting alpha particles (helium nuclei) until it is eventually stable enough to bind the particles together better. We call this radioactive decay (although there are two other types that occur in different ways to this one).

Does anyone think this is as small as things get? If you did then you're completely wrong and need to remember that physics does not comply or cooperate with us willingly. Ever. Scientists in the late 60s decided they wanted to see what was inside these particles, so naturally they got a big particle acceleration machine and smashed things into each other until they found their answer. (yay physics!)

What they found was extremely interesting, when you fire an electron at a proton with enough speed it will actually go through the proton, however it is deflected by what appear to be 3 point charges within the proton. The same applies to the neutron. The physicists who predicted this before the experiments were carried out had creatively chosen the name "Quarks" pronounced "kworks" as opposed to a traditional physicsy name like subnucleonic particles, which is frankly refreshing considering how wildly creatively science as a whole has named most things (yes I'm talking about you chemistry with all of your naming systems!).

Quarks make up protons and neutrons, there are 6 flavours of quark called up, down, strange charm, top and bottom, they all possess a charge of either 2/3 or 1/3 (positive or negative) and they also posess colour charge because normal charge is not enough for them, and as a result of this, cannot exist alone and I swear that I did not make up any of that, those are actually the correct names and terms.

Personally I'm looking forward to the names that they will come up with for more advancements in this field just as much as the science itself!

At the moment we have no idea what is inside a quark, for all we know it might be fundamental, and until we can prove it experimentally we have no clues other than theoretical maths created to support theories. However physicists at the Large hadron Collider (LHC) are doing exactly that, being unsure if the LHC can actually provide enough energy to break a quark into bits, they are instead aiming to make one excited (energetic) in the hopes that they can tell from the energy emissions whether or not it has a substructure.

And there we have it, from atomic radii to quarks, that is the nuclear model of the atom, which is surprisingly not able to explain everything, considering the amount of detail it consists of. But anyway whats a story for next time.

If any of you saw the date yes I did spend lots of Halloween typing this but I already went to Halloween party this week and can't cope with continuing my walking dead marathon at night when its dark so don't judge me!

Anyhow its getting late and I am tired so I'll leave it there for today, has it occurred to you yet that particle physicists are a bunch of atoms trying to understand themselves? Yep our universe it that awesome and weird and clever and generally crazy.

On that note I shall leave you all once more, Happy Halloween to you all and I'll post again soon! :)