this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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Riding somewhat on what other's were saying regarding the neutron bombardment experiments: there's also stuff like the "demon core," the fissile core for the planned-but-never-made-or-dropped 3rd nuclear bomb. The scientists did create nuclear piles that were subcritical and measured them and such. Those are the "small (and extremely slow) explosions" that led to the big (fast) ones later.
We value "breakthroughs" way too much, for precisely the same reason we overvalue critical "climactic" events in history: we're storytelling apes and good stories have singular inflection moments that teach lessons. But real life doesn't have that, real life has incremental change that humans arbitrarily assign a critical moment after some accumulation to in order to make narratives.