“I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. (…) I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth. (…) I would see people building a bridge, or they’d be making a new road, and I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless.”
Richard Feynman
The Bethe – Feynman formula is a physics equation used to estimate the efficiency of an atomic weapon. This equation is widely misunderstood and surrounded by an aura of mysticism. In this post, I will thus take the time to explain how to obtain this formula from elementary ‘undergraduate’ physics. This approach is not discussed by Serber in his Los Alamos primer and, apparently, remains ‘classified’ to this day. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY Continue reading
