Tickling the Dragon's Tail: The Horrible Heart of a Nuclear Bomb

[@TodayIFoundOut]

Thanks to Keeps for sponsoring this video! Go to www.keeps.com/BRAINFOOD to get 50% off off your first order of Keeps hair loss treatment.

[@trogdordog04smith95]

Simon and I have the same hair style

[@fuckyoutube5584]

What about a video about todays average day itema or activities can kill lol or most dangerous items in daily life idk something risky,dangerous and life risking

[@danielgreen6302]

A little late Simon, checkout A brief History Of The Demon Core by Plainly Difficult. But of course you knew that.

[@iceetmarne3571]

Tfjkh

[@anarchyantz1564]

Can you do one on Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski. He is known for surviving an accident in 1978, when a high-energy proton beam from a particle accelerator passed through his brain. Yes, he got shot through the head with a particle moving at near lightspeed!

[@mikeseventhree3827]

You always know something went wrong when they mention the security guard who was present by their full name.

[@mikesarasota4858]

Hopefully they would usethe full name regardless of the person's position

[@damenwhelan3236]

@Mike Sarasota You'd think so. But story telling ruined us.

[@thurstonbell1692]

🤣

[@stevecastro1325]

One of my favorite warning signs outside of a laboratory was, “do not look into laser equipment with your remaining eye”

[@jerryfick613]

I used to work on rolling stock at a chemical plant. Next to one receiving pipe there was an alarm and beacon lamp. I was told, "If you see/hear that alarm going and people are running toward you... Don't let them catch up with you."

[@bighulkingwar_machine1123]

@@jerryfick613 I wish I got that it sounds good

[@christobalcolon6601]

Is there such a thing as a "neutron detector"? During the cold-fusion hype of the 80s, scientists tried to confirm the phenomenon, but stated that it is not so simple as sourcing an off-the-shelf-neutron-detector and then taking it out of the box to confirm neutron emissions.

[@MrNoobed]

@@christobalcolon6601 that was for detecting galactic background gamma rays

[@ExarchGaming]

@@christobalcolon6601 They can't confirm the phenomonon because in order to have "cold fusion" also known as room temperature fusion, the electrons have to be replaced by Muons, with their larger mass they allow fusion to be ignited at a much cooler temperature and pressure. (thus why it's called Cold Fusion) but those muons only exist for a maximum of 2 microseconds or around 2000 nanoseconds. If we ever found a way to stabilize those muons, cold fusion would then be possible.

[@Aaron-from-BroTrio]

I always thought that Louis Slotin's words from immediately after the accident were haunting. “Well, that does it.” He knew for a fact that he was already dead.

[@XtreeM_FaiL]

"Oops."

[@778899mike]

That's rough.

[@Ocewot]

my mans was sticking a butterknife into the toaster to fish out toast on a nuclear level. how do people become so laxed? well i guess he was always that way? idk.

[@differentbutsimilar7893]

@@Ocewot What's crazy about it to me is... these insanely ballsy and negligent people were the ones that brought us nuclear bombs, one of, if not the most destructive force-bringer-things ever to exist. But then... of course it would be guys like this who would be interested in building such dangerous things in the first place. Eh... yeah. It all checks out. Still totally nuts... like nuclear bombs themselves are.

[@ridesq]

@@Ocewot amazing and vivid characterization

[@kymo6343]

"3-Dimensional sunburn" ...That's among some of the most horrifying things I've ever heard and had to imagine...

[@andyl0261]

Another term would be "cooked"...

[@srr1887]

What does 3D sunburn means

[@SilverWingedOne]

​@@srr1887 It means the person got burned on the inside, too.

[@orcus6893]

These Scientists are a good example of what not to do in a laboratory

[@liqqit]

Simon didn't lose his hair. It just grew on the opposite side of his head...

[@xXjosecoseXx]

His hair is invisible!

[@michaeltobias3110]

Pretty funny

[@charleschidsey6192]

@Jordon Carlson : There is no gravitational force. His hair’s future was simply on his face.

[@phenomanon4028]

When you get older, I does like a senior citizen and moves south to where it is warm and moist

[@Born2Losenot2win]

God: uuuuuh… I meant to do that…

[@virginiahansen320]

I feel like a big opportunity was missed in linking the hair loss sponsor with the radiation-poisoning-related topic of the video.

[@dtaylor10chuckufarle]

Damn good point...!

[@christobalcolon6601]

Hair-brained idea.

[@EdricLysharae]

Hah!

[@jonathanseibert8832]

No matter how many times I hear this story, it always gives me goosebumps.. was an honor to hear it from everyone's favorite blazin fact boy

[@Talkingwithfamouspeople]

Note: "Tickling the Dragon's Tail" was coined by Richard Feynman as a description for this crazily haphazard "testing protocol."

[@jeffdroog]

I'd have called it,grabbing the dragon by the coconuts

[@jeffdroog]

I'd have called it,grabbing the dragon by the coconuts

[@SpiraSpiraSpira]

This reminds me of a Chinese idiom, translated it means: ‘Poking a dragon in the anus, asking to be shat upon’

[@Kanitoxx]

@@SpiraSpiraSpira being shitted by a dragon may not be that bad, 1. It's just shit, or 2. It's flammable and it cremate you in a fraction of a second... Those options sound way better than rot alive.

[@Talkingwithfamouspeople]

@Jessica Jensen huh?

[@the_once-and-future_king.]

"I'm ok doing nuclear experiments with just my bare fingers and a screwdriver. What could go wrong with that?" --Louis Slotin (Allegedly)

[@barath4545]

Hold my Martini!

[@mm-yt8sf]

hehe i remember as a freshman in engineering, i got a pair of wire strippers which i thought were so cool because they had a mechanism for pinching, cutting, and separating the insulation and my friend who was a senior scoffed at it and said i should just use my teeth like he did. :-D

[@Epoch11]

@@mm-yt8sf your friend clearly could have used his head as I'm sure it came to a very sharp point

[@RCAvhstape]

"Safety measures are for pussies." - also probably Slotin

[@charlesmayrand4275]

Famous last words

[@densealloy]

"So you're my replacement. I'm gonna show you how to do your job..Shims are for sissies.... just hold it here and use the screw driver. Like th....oh crap....my bad. Hope you make it". That's one hell of a training day.

[@marley7145]

"We saw at last your noble heart revealed." There is nothing noble about endangering so many other people so recklessly, a fact he obviously realized once it was too late to do anything about it.

[@Grayeques]

Right? It's like calling someone noble because they crashed while driving drunk and only injured and maimed people rather then kill them. Good thing his quick reflexes and good heart made him swerve away last second!

[@dynamicworlds1]

I mean if we're talking "noble" as in sinking to the level of feudal lords and "revealed" as in backlit by the flash of nuclear energy passing through your body maybe....but I don thing that was how the author meant it.

[@bettygreenhansen]

It’s not equivalent to compare tickling the dragon’s tail to drunk driving. This was an experiment gone wrong. Every one of those scientists in the room knew exactly what was going on and the risk they were taking. Heck the security guard probably also knew the risk. This was a post mortem tribute to the man. His unthinking act of separating the hemispheres was very telling. He did not run (which is what I would have done), but prevented CRITICALITY by his quick action. Good on him. RIP

[@outsidehitter6230]

When I was a kid growing up in Los Alamos in the sixties, this wasn't the version of the story they told us young'uns. No mention at all of the "idiot" factor described here. We were told the guy tickling the Dragon's Tail was a volunteer who knew he was going to die but volunteered anyway.

[@boris2342]

We could have lost the WAR because of him

[@barrydysert2974]

A more heroic tale no doubt. Thank you for sharing!:-) 🖖

[@WarblesOnALot]

G'day, What part of, Old Unkle Spam... is it..., That ye fails T' Undersconstumble ? Wartime Propaganda, Mate...; Always Pure Self-serving Bullshite, Thickly laid on, With a Trowel...! Such is life, Have a good one... Stay safe. ;-p Ciao !

[@svancina]

They were civilians so they did volunteer. They were also PhD physicists, so they knew the danger. They just thought they could get away with doing unsafe things. We all do that, even if we'd all acknowledge it's stupid after taking time to think.

[@grandbean9031]

@@WarblesOnALot This is either a bot or a psychopath.

[@lazeroussdomain5862]

Just to keep things extra sciency, at the beginning of this video you are displaying a pellet of Pu-238 (HL: 88 years I believe). Pu-238 is not fissile (it's is however fertile, but that would not produce the reight isotopic composition for a weapon core). That's why it's glowing red hot. Pu-238 is primarily an alpha emitter. Very high energy content of the particles emitted, but with extremely low penetration depth. That's why it's so hot, it's absorbing nearly all of it's own emissions. This isotope is used for RTG cores for spacecraft. Pu-239 is the the reactor fuel/bomb core fissile isotope of Plutonium. This is the kind that can go critical and maintain a fission chain reaction, rather than just emit energy in the form of decay heat.

[@adamlee7161]

Good Lord man. If that beard gets any bigger it will need it's own channel.

[@jefferyindorf699]

The beard is in discussions about its channel. The main sticking point is the beards wages, and perks.

[@brianbarrett2487]

Today with Simon's Beard and Ego?

[@Foolish188]

Preparing for the ultimate "comb over".

[@BrandyHoelscher]

Agreed. And I’d sub that one too. 🤣

[@obelic71]

This video is just a hint his beard is reaching critical mass

[@AlexanderTzalumen]

It's always seemed odd to me that media depictions of radiation are generally green, but actual radiation is usually eerie blue.

[@Bacopa68]

I think that's because of radium dial clocks and watches. But yeah, ionized air from criticality is blue, as is Cherenkov radiation in water. I've actually seen Cherenkov blue with my own eyes. It's beautiful, but I'm not gonna swim in that pool.

[@AlexanderTzalumen]

@@Bacopa68 Apparently caesium-137 also glows blue in air at subcritical levels, as described in the Goiânia accident.

[@brianbarrett2487]

Radiation is an action. Alpha/Beta/Gamma particles "radiate" away from an object. The resulting interactions cause "Cherenkov effect" in air and water which causes us to see blue photons

[@Bacopa68]

@@brianbarrett2487 I'm pretty sure the blue in the air is ionization florescence. Cherenkov radiation in water is different.

[@RCAvhstape]

The blue flash of Cherenkov radiation that victims witness is caused by charged particles from the reaction passing through the aqueous fluid in the witness's eyeballs. While Cherenkov radiation can occur in air, criticality accidents caught on security cameras usually don't catch any blue flash, even though the unfortunate people in the video reported seeing a bright blue flash.

[@carlstanland5333]

🎶 Gotta keep’em separated! Heeeeeyyyy aaayyyyy…!🎶

[@ItsAsparageese]

HEEEEYYY THEY DON'T PAY NO MIND IF YOU LET THE THING SLIP, YOU'RE MOSTLY CUTTING YOUR OWN TI-EE-IME

[@toddellner5283]

I grew up around some of the people who were involved in the original Hanford Project. The term all of them used was "Twisting the Dragon's Tail"

[@ryanroberts1104]

Ah, the good old days...when you could still do whatever you wanted with your plutonium core without everybody getting all upset about it...

[@makarabaduk1754]

People weren't so... critical... in those days ;-)

[@Dick_Gozinya]

I know, right? It's my plutonium core and I'll do whatever I want with it! And if you don't like it, then don't stand so close!

[@TheLinuxYes]

Darwin would have allowed the Dragon to continue sleeping until he found a safe way of handling//experimenting with it.

[@GrinderCB]

Slotin's accident was portrayed in the movie "Fat Man and Little Boy" with John Cusack playing a scientist based loosely on Slotin. It was historically inaccurate, taking place before the Trinity test where in real life it occurred months later.

[@johnathandavis3693]

Yeah that is a hair-raising sequence in that movie....

[@SoremRasmussen]

I was going to mention this too. It seems to me that elements of both of these accidents are portrayed in that incident in "Fat Man and Little Boy". I love that movie, and appreciate the artistic license in including the accidents. It emphasizes the overall message. But it also illustrates how Hollywood's artistic approaches can do a real disservice to actual historical fact.

[@zefallafez]

Lying leftist propaganda. The movie also claims that Groves refused to let his family know when in fact he was was the one who had an army plane fly to Canada to fly his parents to be by his side. They also claim that the US had determined that the Germans weren’t close to building a bomb before the war was over when in fact the US weren’t convinced of that fact until 2 years after the end of the war. Leslie Groves book, Now it Can be Told, is available at Amazon.

[@GrinderCB]

@@zefallafez That's the problem with the general public, that they believe movies that are preceeded by the phrase, "Based on a true story." If Hollywood stuck only to the facts, they'd be documentaries and would be very boring. The term "show business" means they want to make money putting on a show so they alter the true story to add drama, intrigue, excitement, etc. The TV movie, "Day One," starring Brian Dennehy as Groves and David Strathairn as Oppenheimer, was much more accurate. Thanks for the prompt on the book. As a history buff I'm interested in reading it.

[@dahawk8574]

The John Cusack version is a totally excusable rearrangement of the historical timeline. If you portray the event happening after Trinity, and after H&N, then it becomes anticlimactic. Like trying to tell a Super Bowl story of what happens to a QB after the game had been won. The audience has lost interest. Rearranging a sequence of historical events can be fine, if done properly, and for excusable reasons.

[@ziaride]

I took a tour of the Slotin Building, now part of Manhattan Project National Park. Very eerie, there were marks on the floor where everyone was standing. Slotin had the forethought to quickly mark down where everyone was standing to quickly calculate how much they'd all been dosed with while already knowing he was a goner.

[@revcrussell]

As a nuclear engineer this is the best explanation of nuclear physics I have seen on KZbin, better than SciShow or anything else.

[@jeremycraddock4176]

He is a little ridiculous but Kyle Hill does a pretty good job as well.

[@ItsAsparageese]

It's definitely sound, I'll always send people to Kyle Hill first for this type of stuff but Fact Boi definitely picks writers who do good research and good scripting

[@dynamicworlds1]

Late but Scott Manley is also pretty excellent on this subject

[@bosmerfromcanada3878]

Both Daghlian and Slotin should posthumously receive the "A FLORIDA MAN" Lifetime Achievement Award.

[@thomasbonse]

Was the Darwin Award not enough?

[@gowankommando]

Darwin has nothing on Florida Man

[@johnathandavis3693]

The only difference is Florida Man would have said "Hey watch THIS"....

[@BronxBastard730]

Did you think of that slick burn all by yourself or did your mommy help you ???

[@bosmerfromcanada3878]

@@BronxBastard730 Of course I thought of it myself, I had the TV running at the same time while I was cleaning my apartment...or FLAT as you Brits call it and Matt Gaetz was on.

[@tint1122]

You should do one on the Canadian and Australian Residential School Systems. They recently found 215 children as young as 3 in a mass grave in Kamloops BC. As a Aboriginal from Canada, this is truly... saddening and depressing.

[@fft2020]

This man is a legend among legends ! The only bald bearded man that can sell you hair growth products and shaving solutions at the same time !

[@motorway2roswell]

No offense to my main man, but Keeps sounds like a complete scam to me.

[@erniebuchinski3614]

As Dr. Phil no doubt thought, "Hey, I'm a fat guy who actually sold y'all a diet plan!" Or, as our national hero Butt-Head might say, "It doesn't get any better than this, Beavis, huh-huh, huh-huh!"

[@ItsAsparageese]

@@motorway2roswell The drugs objectively work, they're well supported by evidence and people have used them by prescription for years. They just cut costs by distributing directly instead of adding retail middleman markup, I assume (this part's an inference based on what I know about other businesses in other sectors doing the same thing). I'm not a dude nor in the industry but I'm in healthcare and used to work with estheticians and heard credible discussion of the subject. The science is there 🤷‍♂️

[@jamesmeppler6375]

Hes the only one who gets the appreciation, you know he just reads a script right? These words you're hearing are not coming from Simon, Simon isn't the writer

[@ItsAsparageese]

@@jamesmeppler6375 You know he literally does all the administrative work and runs all his channels including assigning topics for his writers, right? Simon doesn't just do the presenting, he makes the decisions. There's a huge difference. It's a valid and logical reason for why his fandom have started personally appreciating him as a human and not just his content. Let people enjoy things, ffs, how are you irate enough to complain about how much people like someone when there are actual problems in the world to care about instead

[@medusagorgo5146]

Waaay back in the late 80’s when I first joined the army, I was assigned to a special weapons depot. It was a small one, only 9 bunkers, it was a Host Nation site outside of Herborn-Seelbach in Germany. The actual site was at Bellersdorf, the only thing left is the road and the fence. I spent a better part of 3 years guarding the top of that hill and being afraid of what was inside those bunkers. What made me the most fearful was the people who worked on those things. They regularly took drugs while they were working on them (I married (and divorced) one of them) not to mention the amount of sex crimes that occurred in our unit. It was fucking insane. Like everyone went crazy there.

[@youtubeaccount5153]

That’s the stuff movies are made of. Cool story. Hope you didn’t spill any national security secrets. Don’t worry, mums the word. I won’t say a thing.

[@Hurricayne92]

If you want to learn more I recommend checking out Kyle Hills’s Half life histories on the demon core.

[@FunSizeSpamberguesa]

I just recently discovered Kyle Hill, and I've been bingeing his videos for the last week.

[@MaryAnnNytowl]

Yes, they are very good! And Kyle Hill is a top-notch narrator on the stories, too!

[@Vampyratus]

Came to the comments to make this same comment but thought I'd check first before posting!

[@notj5712]

9:40. My answer to would have been, "actually it's zero, because if this doesn't kill you soon, I am going to."

[@Neoentrophy]

Ahhh the Demon Core. Good times

[@Milesco]

There's actually an article about it in Wikipedia.

[@JP-sk1fu]

In all of these Keeps ads, Simon implies that he had hair on his head once...I just can't even imagine such a thing being true.

[@harryshector]

I have some difficulty describing the two protagonists of this story as ‘victims.’ They are perpetrators. Everyone else affected by their chutzpa are truly victims.

[@chitlitlah]

Well it sounds like the first guy was following poor established procedures and his hand slipped. It was more the facility's fault for relying so heavily on a person's dexterity to prevent a catastrophe. The second guy ignored established procedure that resulted from the first guy, so he's pretty well at fault for his demise.

[@ItsAsparageese]

Hindsight is 20/20. Yeah they recklessly failed to follow best practices, but the importance of and adherence to best practices was still itself an evolving science. People like these guys are a big part of why we have better protocols and practices today, in all science fields.

[@jamesmeppler6375]

Then they aren't protagonists but antagonists in this story

[@DjVortex-w]

I think that the other scientists in the room had only themselves to blame. They knew about the dangers of radioactivity, but went along with the completely reckless experiments anyway.

[@Hurricayne92]

@@ItsAsparageese I’m sorry but Slotin was warned by Fermi, one of the greatest minds of the time, that his actions would see him dead so yea he has no excuse.

[@thirdwheel1985au]

Another thing to note about Slotin is that, after he knocked down the top half of the sphere, he had the other scientists in the room mark their location on the floor with a piece of chalk, along with his own. It's hardly an exoneration of him, but it did provide some useful data, so at least his death wasn't in vain.

[@puncheex2]

9:56 "There it was determined that Slotin had absorbed nearly 8,000 REM..." No, he wasn't exposed to 8000 rems. The final report gave him 1,000 rads of neutrons plus 114 rads of gamma. For neutrons to the torso, the correction factor to convert to rems is 2.4 (20 for neutrons at 1 MeV, 0.12 for torso irradiation), totalling out to 2500 rems or 25 sieverts, about 6 times a 50% fatal dose. For Graves the dose was 166 rads of neutrons, 26 rads gamma. About 200 rads, converts to 480 rems, or 4.8 sieverts, usually considered a 50% likelihood of a fatal dose. You did get Daghlian's dose, quoted at 550 rems, a little low. The final report listed his getting 200 rads of neutrons and 110 rads of gamma. Using the same 2.4 factor, the effective dose was 775 rems or about 8 sieverts.

[@Foolish188]

Went to a class reunion, the hair loss was much less than I expected. So suspecting hair pieces, I went around asking my old buddies how much their hair piece cost. Most of them told me.

[@roryfriththetraveller4982]

god it freaks me out how cavalier the scientists of the early nuclear age were

[@alexv3357]

I want to hear more stories about the Russian nuclear program. I imagine accidents like this were more like Tuesday under Stalin

[@akizeta]

Check out the KZbin channel @PlainlyDifficult, he does a lot of videos on nuclear accidents, including obscure Russian ones.

[@alexv3357]

@@akizeta I've been subscribed to that guy for years

[@randomobserver8168]

Well, there are a few levels of this to consider: 1. Dangerous work is dangerous work. There will be casualties. 2. It SHOULD have safety protocols and procedures, with such equipment as ingenuity can provide being properly used, to minimize those losses. This will exist at the beginning but will get better over time. 3. The earliest days of anything will always be the cowboy era- it's how the endeavour achieves the great successes that open it up and lay the groundwork for what comes after. These cowboys will occasionally ignore even the protocols already in place. Sometimes it will succeed, sometimes fail. 4. Their risk-taking is rightly judged, and should be most harshly judged when it fails. Slightly less harshly when it succeeds. Perhaps most harshly of all when proved unnecessary, in a way that should have been obvious in advance. 5. Some bonus points in mitigation are earned when the cowboy pays most or all of the price himself, as was the case here.

[@Raz.C]

@ Today I Found Out When talking about Plutonium, it's important to clarify which isotope of Plutonium you're referring to, since some isotopes emit alpha radiation fast enough to trigger a chain reaction in the rest of the Plutonium. In point of fact, _Military Grade Plutonium_ is Plutonium that has a very low percentage of this spontaneously fissile Plutonium Isotope (Pu 240 and 241). It's also worth noting that there are some Plutonium isotopes that never occur naturally, but there are others that DO occur naturally. Anyway, I expect that you guys are talking about Plutonium 239. Nevertheless, as a chemist, I would have preferred it if you had specified the isotope.

[@Yupppi]

Funny that a person who caused the life-threatening emergency situation by his pure recklessness was titled a hero who saved the others at the cost of his own life.

[@robertgotschall1246]

I've heard this story several times but this is the first one that made sense, thank you.

[@MaryAnnNytowl]

Check out Kyle Hill's Halflife History video on the Demon Core. Very in-depth, and hid narrations are top-notch!

[@Dreagostini]

Thanks for putting the add in the very beginning of the video

[@jeremispetre1988]

I use more safety equipment when using superglue.

[@Hoshimaru57]

And meanwhile I once used superglue to seal a gash in my arm after absent mindedly scratching my arm forgetting I was holding a brand new modeling knife. My skin flayed open like a fish and I panicked, washed off the initial blood, poured some hydrogen peroxide on it, and then tried to stick myself back together with a tube of superglue as I’d had done once when I took a knife through the thumb at work (the one wasn’t me being stupid). There are 2 scars now. The top one isn’t too bad, but the bottom one is larger and red due to increased blood flow in the area. It has been like that for about 7 months now.

[@MaryAnnNytowl]

@@Hoshimaru57 since superglue was first made to be used in just that way, it's not surprising. I've done it, myself, in fact - often. Not flaying my arm open with a knife by accident, but getting a deep cut and using superglue to close it. Had one get infected, once, and the doctor just told me that I did a good job realigning the edges, and put me on antibiotics to kill the infection. 😄

[@katieell4084]

I've seen dozens of Whistler's videos and it only hit me now how great he is as a speaker. That, I think, might approach an adequate acknowledgement of his skill - its one of those talents that is less noticeable the more advanced it is. Very cool that KZbin made it possible for us to enjoy his work so easily and I celebrate his success (he has added new channels at a rate I cannot keep up with) as a lover of science and learning.

[@HyprHotshot]

All he’s doing is reading a script

[@katieell4084]

@@HyprHotshot Ah, the classic reaction from someone who both immature and doesn't know anything at all about a subject. Fear not, little buddy; as you progress into adolescence and onto adulthood, you will stop saying really dumb things like that and gradually understand that if you wish to remark upon something, you must first ask yourself if you know anything at all about it - that will save you from embarrassing yourself like you just did here. I believe in you! Learn from this mistake and do better, champ!

[@claudeger]

Look up the play called "Louis Slotin Sonata" by Paul Mullin on Amazon (Kindle format). It's a recounting of the last few days of Slotin. Great play about a tragic accident during a crazy period.

[@brianfeathers7473]

Pvt Hemmerly died in 1968…at the age of 62? That would mean he was at oldest 35 if he enlisted for WWII service in 1941. And yet, by 1945, he was still rank Pvt, at age 40? If he was promoted and was busted back down to Pvt, there’s no way they would assign that soldier to a security detail at the Manhattan Project. Something’s not right with these numbers.

[@tommunyon2874]

I went to school in Los Alamos with a person who was conceived after her father was deemed to be sterile after radiation exposure. This story has many permutations known to us locals as "The Ice House Incident." The Health Research Laboratory, adjacent to the Los Alamos Medical Center has worked to refine prognoses for radiation exposure.

[@neilwyrchowny9253]

I was aware of the Demon Core but not the Winnipeg connection. 🤔

[@seansloth]

Half of my like is for the content regarding the demon core, the other half for how amazing Simon's beard is getting

[@TwinTn]

For anyone wondering, Louis Slotin received 8000 rem of radiation, which is equivalent to eating 800 000 000 bananas at once.

[@Chris.Pontius]

Damn. I'll never forget the day I got really hungry and ate 400.000.000 bananas. Can only imagine what this guy went through.

[@longboardfella5306]

How many elephants or Eiffel towers?

[@PaulTheFox1988]

@@longboardfella5306 I don't think you can eat the Eiffel tower, so we can't use that as a comparison. I mean, you're free to try, but I can't see the French being happy about it :D

[@Hurricayne92]

@@longboardfella5306 well since bananas contain a radioactive isotope of potassium and I’m not entire sure that elephants contain the same isotope the question is kinda weird 😂

[@joker-zk3kt]

A math teacher wrote this 😂

[@twocvbloke]

It's like extracting toast from a toaster with a fork, while the toaster is still on, and your ankles are connected to ground, and there's no RCD, or fuses, or anything, something's going to go wrong... :P

[@MaryAnnNytowl]

And you're standing in water, more like, but yes.

[@raypitts4880]

its called TOAST

[@alexanderevans8524]

New to the channel, great content choices. Dark. Elegant. Awesome.

[@lambotama]

Simon's hair just fell through his head

[@R32R38]

The strangest deaths at Los Alamos were three members of the cleaning crew, who in 1946 passed around a bottle of cheap wine. It turned out to have been contaminated with antifreeze.

[@raymondclouston6255]

So a loop accelerator is a cyclatron...so what is a long line one called..a linear accelerator?

[@srenkoch6127]

yep

[@raymondclouston6255]

@@srenkoch6127 ty..seriuosly

[@uggligr]

The advertisement for "Keeps" weirdly fits right in the video! This is rare...

[@shewolfsiren]

This story was also featured in “Dark Matters: Twisted But True Tales Of Science “. The episode is titled “The Demon Core”.

[@MaryAnnNytowl]

Also, Halflife History with Kyle Hill has a video on the Demon Core which is done very well.

[@delfin7461]

It's crazy when you realize what happened at Los Alamos. There's a great film called, Fat Man and Little Boy. It's about the work at Los Alamos

[@jaybee9269]

Yeah! Also if you ever get a chance there’s a TV movie called “Day One” about the Manhattan Project.

[@RCAvhstape]

That film is so inaccurate in terms of dates and names etc.

[@akizeta]

@@RCAvhstape Real life seldom follows the laws of narrative causality necessary for making a good story.

[@RCAvhstape]

@@akizeta Doesn't change the fact of my statement. Maybe Apollo 13 would've been a better film if they used warp drive engines. I doubt it.

[@akizeta]

@@RCAvhstape _Apollo 13,_ for all its accuracy, took its own liberties with narrative to make it a more compelling story.

[@jbrisby]

"Hey, watch this!" FOOOM!!!!

[@Juan-wj3vk]

I work for Los Alamos and I love your videos on the subject. Our lab has a historian named Alan Carr. He would love to hear from you guys.

[@TheAsylumCat]

Truly the hubris of man is as boundless as the cosmos.

[@lpnlizard2742]

There are Old Scientists and there are Bold Scientists, There are no Old And Bold Scientists.

[@devifoxe]

If they have used the sponsor of the video they will not be bold....

[@paulmiddleton8699]

They showed an accident like that in the film The Shadow Makers.

[@AtheistOrphan]

Good film.

[@frednesbittjr.7862]

This "accident" was noted in the movie 'Beginning of the End"

[@neeneko]

Hrm. I am not sure 'Tickling the Dragon's Tail' was used to refer to the first type of experiment. I recall it being used to describe the beryllium sphere experiments, not the tungsten carbide brick ones.

[@KLAWNINETY]

Wasn't slottin doing the sphere experiment and the first guy doing the brick experiment?

[@locustfire75]

Simon's beard is so glorious, Vikings have declared it their new Valhalla.

[@nonyobusiness1201]

@8:21: which coincidentally is how the game of "Jenga" was thought up.

[@nonyobusiness1201]

@9:44 "I'm afraid I have less than a 50% chance at living.... HOLD UP, these are nuclear scientists? His mathematical skills were way off that day 0% is less than 50%, but it's zero!!!

[@MaryAnnNytowl]

@@nonyobusiness1201 but it IS less than 50%, after all.

[@pmgn8444]

A very good video. Safety protocols were very loose in that era (1940s & 1950s). The 1960s and 1970s were not that much better. I worked at the US Dept. of Energy's Hanford site for over 25 years. Things started to change in the late 1980s. Current (circa 2021) safety requirements are now so strict that very little get done at Hanford. I don't expect the nuclear waste will get put into a safe state (aka "cleaned up") for decades.

[@2lefThumbs]

The Slotin episode shows why dangeeous exleriments should *always* be carried out alone, contrary to what was said about the first example

[@walterkersting6238]

Did that guy just call himself an atomic bomb puttertogetherer?

[@brianholmes4415]

Great documentary!

[@Niinsa62]

Very good. Keep them coming. Big thanks.

[@lirrobinson8377]

The sign on the Los Alamos gate says, "0 days since the last accident."

[@youtubeaccount5153]

LOL. ala The Far Side.

[@raypitts4880]

had to read it twice to figure out what it meant.

[@N1njaSnake]

"Flown in at the army's expense" as if they were doing anyone a favor, considering how people risked their literal life to develop new weapons.

[@motorway2roswell]

2:37 this photo of Robert Oppenheimer kinda looks like David Byrne of the Talking Heads

[@ItsAsparageese]

Simon: "Hey, can I look at your homework? Not to like copy it, I just need inspiration on this subject" Kyle Hill: "Yeah, sure thing man!" Simon: {keeps his word}

[@michaelmarks5012]

Just think of all the Soviet experiments that never got told.

[@kingnekogon]

Kyle Hill also did a great video on the topic for anyone else interested in the topic.

[@josjawillems3708]

Some people disintegrate and become blue, radiant living gods after a failed nuclear experiment. Some people just disintegrate. Life can be unfair.

[@Son_of_Mandalore]

Where do you find the time for all the research and all the script writing and all the channels!!! That said, all of it is amazing. Thanks

[@kirtuszook1281]

He has clones many of them

[@Son_of_Mandalore]

@@kirtuszook1281 thanks for the inside scoop!! 😂 😂 👍

[@kirtuszook1281]

@@Son_of_Mandalore If I remember correctly it's an inside joke from his business blaze channel

[@Son_of_Mandalore]

@@kirtuszook1281 thanks man 😁👍

[@kirtuszook1281]

@@Son_of_Mandalore Happy to help

[@analogdesigner-Jay]

I had dinner with Harry Daghlian's nephew several years ago. He was surprised that I knew so much about the history of these tragic events.

[@exidy-yt]

Thank you Simon, for actually calling the Fat Man bomb 'fat man' this time, instead of 'big man' like in your video a couple weeks back on one of your other channels, that kind of PC pandering over even the tiniest 'anti-ableist' or wtf ever movement has no place in a channel about facts, not about woke identity politics. I say this as a fat man myself. ;-) Excellent summary of the Demon Core's history for the uninformed. Keep up the good work!

[@AdamIsUrqed]

More like tickling the dragon's taint. A little much, and the bugger will blow.

[@mellbenham6809]

Worked with both Pu239 and Pu238 238's really nasty stuff 83 year half life and give off a really energetic Alpha particle it destroys plastic and paper at a molecular level paper turns to powered and PVC goes green then brown and finally black and brittle I never liked working on glove boxes with it in as you didn't need much to cause a major problem.

[@amvanderveen5189]

Simon. Dude. Your hair is glorious! Who cares that it's not in your head?!

[@jamesmeppler6375]

Beards grow on peoples head?

[@fernandobarajas3157]

Do you know about the radiation accident that happened in Goiania Brazil.. I guess a radiation machine used to treat ailments was left in an abandoned hospital and some junk sellers found it,broke the radiation case out and then broke that opened. A girl put the powder on her face,lips and fingernails and the other guys played with it. Well after a few hours a couple people died some got deathly ill but survived. Well all in all the house was leveled and cleaned up. The girl was barried in a lead lined coffin .. It's pretty crazy that they broke the radiation case open and played with the glowing powder..

[@Habu12]

John Cusack did a great scene re-enacting that very experiment in “Fatman and Little Boy”.

[@NoalFarstrider]

Slotin is the type of guy who would of flown a nuclear powered vehicle... The dragons tail and preventing critical mass is key to the tick tacks movement.

[@richardmarty9939]

I did a bit of work up at the lab awhile ago when I was a younger mad scientist. Godiva reactors are cool but you dont want to be near them as they operate...

[@TheHoagie13]

2:10 "Harry" and I have a couple things in common: - Born in Waterbury Connecticut (1921; 1989 respectively. Moved to Minnesota in April 1993 myself). AND my uncle Ron went to MIT and graduated in 1981... He works for Honeywell in Phoenix AZ, having a higher Security Clearance than I did in my 8yrs in the Military! Freaky...

[@SkycometAnimeVamp]

The story of The Demon Core is interesting but also a stark warning about the danger of playing around with radioactive material

[@michaelstephens360]

He received an honored funeral. Amazing Grace played on the bagpipes as his body was launched into space

[@auro1986]

does radioactive material magnetize when electricity is passed through it?

[@COPKALA]

radioactive elements are not ferromagnetic.

[@chouseification]

@@COPKALA radiation and magnetism aren't bound properties, i.e. the radioactive isotopes of iron still retain a lot of magnetic properties.

[@MaryAnnNytowl]

@@chouseification he meant normally radioactive, like radium, cesium, iridium, uranium, etc., etc., NOT the odd isotope of a normally non-radioactive element.

[@chouseification]

@@MaryAnnNytowl well then the answer is quite obviously based upon the traits of the specific element and not as a general rule. The periodic table is arranged as it is for a reason... things in the same column tend to behave similarly to each other. Ergo, each specific element is a completely different question, so the "radioactive elements" aren't some bucket you can generalize about as OP has. What OP is probably looking for is "a few do or can but most do not". :P

[@MaryAnnNytowl]

@@chouseification no, I don't think so. They said "does radioactive material," not "do any of the radioactive materials." That's why I said what I did.

[@taliaryn3699]

Winnipeg! Definitely an interesting city, full of so many stories

[@peterlewerin4213]

Pvt Cleary: "I'd like to transfer to active duty in Korea, sir." Commander: "Why? It's about to go live there, people will be killed." Pvt Cleary: "... I'd prefer active duty in Korea, sir."

[@TheEvilCommenter]

Good video 👍

[@FectacularSpail]

Great quote at the end.

[@karenjarrett8904]

I have a question, both sets of family members were permitted to visit these men while in hospital. Did they display any symptoms of radiation poisoning? Simon, This was very interesting thank you .

[@Remedynr]

Has this been re-uploaded? I've seen this video by Simon years ago