Could a nuclear blast cook a pizza?

who's ready for hell's kitchen night i hear that gordon gets angry in this one yeah okay fantastical i have the pizza here i'm gonna pop in the oven and i'm just gonna leave it for three kilometers outside of a nuclear blast that that's weird that doesn't sound right aria where'd you get these instructions some guy on reddit of course you did of course you did well sorry y'all but we're gonna have to pause hell's kitchen night for a while because i think someone is wrong on the internet now entering the facility because the internet is populated by total dweebazoids every few weeks or so inevitably some science meme comes out of the woodwork to snipe nerds wherever they may click and the latest is this one which was found on shower thoughts on reddit and it got so much of that sweet sweet totally useless karma the meme uses that yes nuclear blasts are bad but there is some radius at which all the frozen pizzas in the area would be perfectly cooked now this is admittedly a very fun thought as was a related meme how hard you have to slap a chicken to cook it but in both memes some aspect of reality is being ignored for fairly easy to do math so let's break it down and also you can't cook a chicken by slapping it how many times i'll have to teach you this lesson old man first what happens when a nuclear bomb detonates well putting aside for the moment i think we should never ever use nuclear bombs ever again and having them is terribly consequential for the entire planet and puts us all in danger at every second of every day of your entire life the sequence of events following in nuclear detonation are very well understood first in under one microsecond after some hunk of uranium or plutonium goes critical with the help of some conventional explosives the material itself the bomb casing and the air immediately surrounding the bomb are vaporized and turn into tens to hundreds of millions of degree plasma this plasma is so hot that it radiates x-rays out in all directions but these x-rays don't make it very far the air absorbs these x-rays and becomes heated again and this forms the fireball the fireball then rapidly expands in diameter and rises and cools over time re-radiating all that energy from the blast in the form of infrared and visible light and then a few milliseconds afterwards then the shock wave follows if you want to see this apocalypse up close look no further than the absolutely stunning hd archival footage that we have today and i'm not trying to take away anything from internet nerdery here i have seen some decent attempts to math this meme this dude apparently reads the same military papers that i do i'm on a watch list and calculated that perfect pizza cooking for a 10 inch pizza pie occurs about three miles outside of a one megaton blast although they know that this is inside the blast wave radius so you don't exactly get to enjoy a slice unfortunately math like this is kind of a slap a chicken to cook it like process yes it gets some result but that result kind of ignores the reality of the situation but hey i probably would have done the same thing in my first pass i would have used some heating equation to get the raw heat and jewels i would need to bring some pizza from frozen to cooked and then i would use some military equations based on transmittance and weapon yield to get the distance from which i need my pizza pie to be depending on the size of the pizza pie so maybe you may be asking yourself hey kyle what's the problem well the problem is time as any good stuff will tell you it's not about raw heat energy it's how you use it oh oh carb oh i missed through with the conveniences of modern technology cooking effort seems kind of like an afterthought now just get an oven put some frozen pizza dough in there and 20 minutes later you're sitting on your couch by yourself and crying but back when cooking was first discovered back when cooking was hard it was a monumental effort and achievement now archaeologists disagree on the exact time frame here but it seems like a few hundred thousand years ago those that would become humans started applying heat to food and when you apply heat to food you unlock materials like carbohydrates and sugars and proteins that our body cannot get otherwise from raw food alone through our digestive system and this allowed early humans to grow their bodies and brains in fact some studies link the advent of cooking with the doubling of human brain size so in a very real sense cooking is one of the most important things humans ever figured out how to do a decently large tree may receive about a billion joules worth of energy from the sun over the course of 11 hours if the tree has 25 square meters of available leaf space i'm just estimating and look that tree just loves it can't get enough of that sweet sweet sun juice but if you apply that exact same gigajoules worth of energy to the tree in just a fraction of a second the tree in fact can get enough of that and it really doesn't like it you see the difference here of course is time and time is the same reason why we won't be cooking with a nuclear blast it's not going to become the next annoyingly impractical way of cooking your overpriced burger at a stuck-up gastropub and that's because even when a weapon has a yield in the billions of kilograms of tnt equivalent the heat from these weapons lasts but less than 10 seconds on average it's the reason for these weapons infamous flash burn effect what is so morbidly interesting about the heat of a nuclear blast is the ability to vaporize and ignite without really starting real fires at least not right away two examples illustrate this better for me than anything i've ever seen the first is from a test and the second is from a victim of the hiroshima bombing the latter is slightly graphic so slight warning there this first footage is from the test shot of an atomic shell in 1953 and i know you can't see the colors here but keep in mind that this bus has a full paint job like any other the bus doesn't burst into flame but all the paint on the side facing the blast is instantaneously vaporized before the vehicle is slammed by the blast wave nuclear heat pulses are so fast and so intense that they produce some truly terrifying phenomena next i'm going to show you a picture of a woman who faced the horrors of hiroshima her back was towards the blast that day and she was wearing a kimono with white and black patterns remember that we are talking about heat so shockingly brilliant that the small difference in light absorption between black and white fabric literally etched the black pattern of the woman's dress into her skin but not the white pattern the physics and physiology of these blasts are traumatizing look i know that neither of those examples were fun or lighthearted but that's because nuclear weapons are terrible and serious but we can go back to pizza for a second if you want now according to figures that i got from the military i'm on a watch list household materials wood even metal will blister char and melt even ignite in the face of a heat pulse from a nuclear weapon but they will not sustain flames as another paper points out even if there are flames in the nuclear blast heat pulse they will be snuffed out immediately afterward when the blast wave comes just milliseconds later and if you had some frozen pizza in a supermarket somewhere within the perfect radius the heat from the heat pulse probably won't even make it inside the store and i'm not being dramatic look at another photo from hiroshima notice that only the parts of the chair that were in front of a window are charred and nothing else even if you were to hold up a frozen pizza perfectly in the path of a heat pulse from a nuclear weapon if you put the necessary energy into this pizza to heat it up to perfectly oh perfectly cooked with the short amount of time that we're talking about it would destroy the pizza i do not say this very often but the specific numbers don't really matter so much here everything is so intense and so quick this meme is never going to work cooking takes the slow steady application of relatively low heat over a long amount of time not just milliseconds of thousands and thousands of degrees and we have we haven't even talked about the blast wave yep oh that's pretty good though unsurprisingly the yield of a nuclear device determines at which distance the thermal radiation will still be dangerous and it also determines the size of the blast wave where 50 of a nuclear bomb's energy goes so you could theoretically be at a distance where it would ignite the surface of your pizza box sure and nothing else but you might also be within the distance where the overpressure from the blast wave would literally pulverize your pepperoni and i don't think this meme can work as perfectly cooked if your perfectly cooked pizza is charred and still in a million frozen pieces i mean what would someone like gordon ramsay say if you presented that to him something like i'm not eating that whoa whoa arya lang sorry are to the menagerie please we gotta stop wat we gotta stop watching that show everything that we've gone through today is just another reason why we wouldn't want even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons not only would millions or perhaps billions die that's bad i guess we wouldn't even have cooked pizza in the aftermath of the apocalypse and that sucks aria we that's it no more hell's kitchen until next time okay put on health kitchen they don't watch patches now exiting the facility thank you so much to the vera nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to call out research assistant karen oliver and visiting scholar crystal small if you want to join the facility if you want to chat with me almost every day on discord give me episode ideas see content early behind the scenes content be a part of our match at the gathering league trivia nights all that stuff you can go to patreon.com kyle hill right now and get on the staff today and if you support us just enough you get your name on arya here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the time how well could i possibly bullets so a good way to illustrate the time dependence of heat transfer is with something like bullets and we calculated this before and i forget what show it's on but i calculated that a bullet could pass through a lightsaber's blade the same power that could cut into a blast door like qui-gon gin that would not fully vaporize a bullet as it passed through it because the bullet passes through it so quickly similarly you can't cook a pizza with a nuclear blast even though the heat is so intense because the time values are just so small although i have been eating a meat lover's pizza this and filming this entire episode so i'm i'm fine with cooking it slow thanks for watching it's good pizza

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 248,707

Rating: 4.9634385 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, nuclear weapons, atomic bomb, nukes, pizza, memes, reddit, shower thoughts, nuclear blast, hiroshima, nuclear war

Id: zplGMTQmx1I

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020