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by IAmYourDensity 1640 days ago
Quantum Mechanics led to the development of nuclear weapons which led to the development of the packet switched Internet Protocol designed to maintain connectivity even during a nuclear war. Internet Protocol led to the development of the internet economy.
2 comments
Animats 1640 days ago
Well, not really. The atomic bomb didn't really require quantum mechanics to build. Certainly not the gun bomb. That's two hunks of enriched uranium forced together. Implosion was tougher, but mostly a hydrodynamics problem. H-bombs required much more theory.
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IAmYourDensity 1640 days ago
Yes, you probably don't need QM to design a gun bomb, but to build one you do need 64kg of enriched U-235 and for that you need a Manhattan Project and for that you need Einstein to write a letter to the President and for that you need Bohr & Wheeler to write "The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission" in 1939 and confidently explain that it could work and for that you need QM.
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daniel-cussen 1640 days ago
And they could only produce a single gun bomb. The other one had to be Plutonium, meaning it had to have a neutron trigger, IIRC that involved Bohr. It took two bombs to end the war.
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xcambar 1640 days ago
> packet switched Internet Protocol designed to maintain connectivity even during a nuclear war

Source please?

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ben_bai 1640 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
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qilo 1640 days ago
Wikipedia link basically says, that ARPANET's resistance to nuclear war is a false rumor.
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IAmYourDensity 1640 days ago
The Wikipedia page quotes one Director of DARPA (Stephen J. Lukasik):

The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.

And Vint Cerf is quoted elsewhere [1] saying:

the original ARPAnet project was built to share computing resources among all the computer science departments. It was not built _solely_ to deal with nuclear attack, so it was a resource-sharing system

[1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense/2010/05/vint-cerf-exp...

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