Your overall point is well taken, but you’re interpreting “century” to mean “last hundred years”. The way I’d interpret the word, this is a candidate for understatement of the last century. And the winner was probably somewhere near the Trinity test...
No, I’m referring to the fact that before the Trinity test lots of people greatly underestimated what the yield would be. Someone must surely have said “it will be a little bigger than our conventional bombs”.
There’s a famous story about Trinity where the scientists all bet on the blast magnitude, and a visiting general made a ridiculously huge prediction, way above what they hoped for, in order to flatter his hosts. He won; the blast was still far more powerful than his seemingly fanciful, signaling-motivated guess but he came the closest.
Sure they are. You’re not being creative enough if you can’t figure out how (hint: they can affect the orbital trajectories of some pretty large objects, which can themselves affect the orbital trajectories of some really big objects).
Your overall point is well taken, but you’re interpreting “century” to mean “last hundred years”. The way I’d interpret the word, this is a candidate for understatement of the last century. And the winner was probably somewhere near the Trinity test...
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Strikes me as just statement statement not over or under (I’m assuming this is your reference?)
No, I’m referring to the fact that before the Trinity test lots of people greatly underestimated what the yield would be. Someone must surely have said “it will be a little bigger than our conventional bombs”.
There’s a famous story about Trinity where the scientists all bet on the blast magnitude, and a visiting general made a ridiculously huge prediction, way above what they hoped for, in order to flatter his hosts. He won; the blast was still far more powerful than his seemingly fanciful, signaling-motivated guess but he came the closest.
It will go boom and look bright. I dunno what else, I just clear the floors.
Atomic bombs aren’t much good for destroying one world, let alone worlds in general.
Sure they are. You’re not being creative enough if you can’t figure out how (hint: they can affect the orbital trajectories of some pretty large objects, which can themselves affect the orbital trajectories of some really big objects).