The Supernova Bomb

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These nuclear explosives would be triggered by conventional explosives and would have an implosion type fission primer. The explosive lenses for the fission primer in each nuclear device would be timed to detonate simultaneously.

Some points for the critical mind to ponder:

1. Was the claim first announced through media or scientific channels?
Real discoveries go through an unbiased peer review process, which results in publication through scientific journals. When a belief is first announced through social media (like a privately-owned website devoted to perceptual and developmental disorders), there's generally a reason its proponents chose not to subject it to the scrutiny of scientific review. The reason being that the claims have no basis in real science.

Conclusion: The OP posted his idea in a philosophical thread on a social website devoted to Aspergers' Syndrome and the people who have it -- an inappropriate forum for scientific discoveries. Therefore, it is not to be taken seriously.

2. Does the claim meet the qualifications of a theory?
a) A theory must originate from, and be well supported by, experimental evidence. Anecdotal or unsubstantiated reports don't qualify. It must be supported by many strands of evidence, and not just a single claim. (Crank claims are usually supported by only one source -- the person making the claim).
b) A theory must be specific enough to be falsifiable by testing. If it cannot be tested or refuted, it can't qualify as a theory. And if something is truly testable, others must be able to repeat the tests and get the same results. (Cranks will generally claim some excuse or make up a reason why it can't be tested or repeated by others.)
c) A theory must allow for challenges based on the discovery of new evidence. It must be dynamic, tentative, and correctable. (Crank science generally doesn't allow for any challenges at all.)

Conclusion: The idea stated in the OP does not qualify as a theory due to the facts that: There is no predisposing science; its inherent lack of testability and falsifiablity; and its intolerance for challenge.

3. Does the claim sound far fetched, or too good to be true?
When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Does the claim truly fit in with what we know of the way the universe works? Approach such claims with extreme skepticism, and demand evidence that's as extraordinary as the claim.

Conclusion: The claim seems drawn from the realm of speculative fiction -- a planet-buster or doomsday machine, to be specific. Please note that the OP idea, AS PRESENTED, does not also present any evidence that it would work; no maths or experimental data whatsoever.

4. Does the claim come from a source dedicated to supporting it?
Science works by starting with a null hypothesis and searching for evidence (Empiricism). Crank science starts with a positive hypothesis and cherry-picks supporting 'evidence', and may also attempt to support it with questionable research and anecdotal reasoning (Rationalism). It's unlikely that any person in love with their claims will present any type of evidence other than that which supports their claim, and its bias should be given serious consideration.

Conclusion: The 'Rationalist' approach is inherently un-scientific, and is therefore not to be trusted due to its inherently subjective nature. Thus, the OP idea is presented in a completely unscientific way, and can not be trusted.

5. Is the claimant up front about any testing?
Be skeptical of any claims that do not detail testing methodology that was thorough and responsible, including external verification and duplication, or that do not provide evidence unsupportive of the conclusion.

Conclusion: The OP idea is not supported by any testing. Therefore, it can not be counted as theoretical. It is, at best, a speculative idea.

6. How good is the quality of data supporting the claim?
Are there any experimental data? How reliable are the experimental data? For that matter, is there any mathematical proof to support the claim in the first place?

Conclusion: There is no data to examine, therefore the idea can not be taken seriously.

7. Does the claimant have legitimate credentials?
Did the claimant receive a degree from an accredited university? If so, is that degree directly applicable to the field of their claim?

Conclusion: No credentials. 'Nuff said.

This has been a grand philosophical exercise, and I'm glad to have had a part in it. Should the OP ever show any valid maths that would elevate his idea to an hypothesis, then the mods would do well to move this thread to the Science forum. Until then, there's nothing more to contribute here.

-F-

Guys! Guys! We have NO (not any) technology even remotely approaching what would be necessary to reproduce a supernova at ANY scale. It simply does NOT exist. It is a fantasy. It is a delusion. It has no reality.

ruveyn

In that case, let's develop it!

How? We don't have a practical clue on how we can do it out our scale. We don't even have a glimmer.

ruveyn

Spiderman 2 they made a sun duhh, just do what they did, then figure out how to make a supernova from it.

Utter and complete nonsense.

...no it is not. Why do you dismiss the idea so quickly? Just look at the formulas Dr. Octavius used to make a sun.

What is necessary is that a sizable amount of fusion fuel is compressed to a density so extreme that the quantum effects become pronounced enough to force it apart violently. That is, the coulomb forces have enough energy that they create gamma ray pressure amongst the positively charged nuclei(and electrons too). Fusion requires an enormous amount of input energy to overcome the repulsive coulomb forces. The idea is not only to fuse the resulting hydrogen isotopes into helium, but to compress the nascent helium to densities so enormous that the strong nuclear force takes over and produces even heavier nuclei. The inner core is a fusion device that is detonated shortly after the nuclear explosive lens, but its explosive force will be less strong. This will add additional gamma ray pressure into the imploding core and add energy to the coulomb forces between the nuclei. So there needs to be high enough density in the outer layers of the imploding core that the gamma rays from the inner *pit* will collide with the compressed nuclei(energized from gamma ray bombardment)and trigger pair production releasing additional energy to increase the momentum of the nuclei being crushed.


As for Supernovae: Remember the uncertainty principle? Well as the distance between the nuclei and electrons sandwiched between them becomes smaller, their momentum becomes larger, and due to special relativity there is a maximum theoretical density that can be obtained when the velocity of these compressed nuclei approaches the speed of light. Since the mass is far too small to produce enough gravitational energy to further the collapse, once the energy produced by the collapsed nuclei exceeds the energy produces by the implosive force used to compress the core, it explodes violently.

That's true, but it led to a catastrophic chain reaction that almost destroyed the city! Such power cannot be wielded by man safely, at least without eight mechanical arms

Heh, I remember that. I liked how it had no shielding so that Dr. Oc and all the journalists at the press conference were exposed to the inevitable neutron radiation.

Such a device seems idiotic. We have enough nukes to fry the planet. We don't need to create a face supernova.

We don't need to 'create' a wooly mammoth from elephant DNA, but there are people and funding dedicated to doing just that.

Who knows? Maybe if there were an actual Supernova Bomb -- or just a valid theory behind it -- such a device could be used to power a multi-generation spaceship to another star system.

Pure speculation, I know ... but this is the Philosophy forum (PP&R), which has nothing to do with science, after all!

But wouldn't we first have to create a genetically engineered spider and make it bite someone so we can have a spiderman ready to save us in case Octavius' arms go haywire?

I've got a book (The Los Alamos Primer) that has the orientation lectures that were given to the scientists arriving at the beginning of the atomic bomb project. It has a lot of numbers in it that are relevant to the process of a nuclear bomb going off, so I'm going to use some of them to make a few calculations to see if this is plausible.

1 kg of U-235 has 2.58e24 nuclei, and completely fissioning it would release about 20 kilotons of energy. I'm going to assume that that's the number of fissions in our bombs, and that it's also the number of neutrons released by the explosion of one bomb. It's a conservative estimate, since about 2.52 neutrons get produced per fission in U-235. I'm also going to round it down to 10^24, since we're more interested in ballpark figures.

I'm going to assume that the configuration of the fissionable material at the time that it goes off (or is just about to go off) is approximately spherical, and has a radius of 10 cm. That is a guess, but it shouldn't be off by more than a factor of 10. I'm going to do the calculation twice, once with the assumption that the bombs are 1 meter apart, and once with the assumption that they're 10 m apart.

The surface area of a sphere is 4*pi*r^2, and the cross section is pi*r^2. Let r1 be 10 cm and r2 be the distance between the cores. This gives a formula of (pi*r1^2)/(4*pi*r2^2) = (r1/(2*r2))^2 for the fraction of neutrons that reach the other core.

1 meter apart: 1e24 * (10cm/(2*100cm))^2 = 1e24 * 0.05^2 = 2.5e21
10 meters apart: 1e24 * (10cm/(2*1000cm))^2 = 1e24 * 0.005^2 = 2.5e19

According to the book, when they got the pieces in an optimal configuration, they wanted a 10 million neutron per second background to guarantee that the bomb would go off then. If we space them 10 meters apart, and one of them went off slightly earlier, it would be bathing the other one with 25 billion billion neutrons over a period of much less than a second, basically guaranteeing that the slightly late one would predetonate. In the book, they did a calculation of the yield of a bomb predetonating, and came up with about 60 tons of high explosives.

The timing problem isn't with the electronics, I'm sure that signals could be sent to detonators next to chemical explosives that would be within a nanosecond or two. How much random difference would there be in the speed with which the explosives went off? Or the speed with which the pieces of material come together (or compress)? The bombs actually go off when a random neutron starts a reaction while the material is supercritical. There will be some variability in exactly when the chain reaction starts, even if there were no difference in exactly when each bomb went supercritical.

For a nuclear weapon not to fizzle, it needs a low neutron background while it is going from barely critical to supercritical enough to fission a decent percentage of the material. Bathing it in astronomical numbers of neutrons from a nearby nuclear explosion is about the best way I can think of to make sure that it will fizzle.

Alright but only if it doesn't bite Tobey Maguire this time around, the world has suffered enough from one emo spider man