A excellent follow-up on how surface area for a given volume is actually minimized in the real world.
Some say it was impossible:
http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/did_ismail_the_bloodthirsty_really_father_888_childrenAccording to the Guinness Book of World Records, the 18th century Moroccan ruler Ismail the Bloodthirsty holds the record for being the most prolific father ever. He supposedly fathered 888 children, which means he had to father about 15 children a year for 60 years.
But Dorothy Einon, a researcher at University College London, argues in her article "How many children can one man have?" that even if Ismail had access to a steady supply of fertile women, it would have been impossible for him to father this many children.
But others say, yeah, he could have achieved it:
http://www.livescience.com/43661-how-sultan-sired-1000-kids.html
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085292
http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-general/how-sultan-moulay-ismail-morocco-sired-1000-children-001386
No one was supposed to look directly at the flash. Once it had passed, you could watch, but only through the special welder's-style glasses supplied...Then, at 5:10 AM the countdown began.
The Project was using the same frequency as radio station KCBA out of Delano, California. At that moment, the station was broadcasting melodious strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner," which intermingled with the voice of physicist Sam Allison as he counted down the final moments to the test.
The General Groves got in position and waited. What would he do, he wondered, if once the countdown ended, nothing happened?
"...by the dawn's early light..."
The years of preparation. The money. The manpower.
"...at the twilight's last gleaming.."
Then, at 5:29:45, Mountain War Time, it happened.
"...And the rockets' red glare...the bombs bursting in air..."
Up on the hill 25 miles away, physicist Joan Hinton felt the heat first. She would later say the it "looked like a sea of light" that was "gradually sucked up into an awful purple glow that went up and up into a mushroom cloud. It looked beautiful as it lit up the morning sun." Then came the rumbling...
More than 100 miles away, the Socorro Chieftain newspaper reported:
"The flash was intensely white and seemed to fill the entire world. It was followed by a large crimson glow..."
The Test Gadget vaporized the steel tower and carved a crater six feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter. The temperature at the center of the mass of fire was four times the temperature at the center of the sun. The resulting pressure, more than 100 billion atmospheres, was the greatest ever to exist on the surface of the earth. It knocked men down who were standing 10,000 yards away and the resulting flash was visible for more than 200 miles and audible for at least 40. And 150 miles away, a drowsy-eyed woman in Arizona told the local paper she wondered why she "saw the sun come up and go down again."
The Girls of Atomic City
The Untold Story Of The Women Who Helped Win World War Two
Denise Kiernan, pp 436-438
And here's what another teenager has to say:
One of the Project's more enthusiastic, ambitious, optimistic and inspirational characters, Ernest Lawrence found it impossible to believe what the District Engineer was saying: Those high school girls they had pulled from rural Tennessee to operate his calutrons in Y-12 were doing it better than his own team of scientists.
In Berkeley, only PhDs had been allowed to operate the panels controlling the electo-magnetic separation units. When Tennessee Eastman suggested turning over the operation of Lawrence's calutrons to a bunch of young women fresh off the farm with nothing more than a public school education, the Nobel Prize winner was skeptical. But it was decided Lawrence's team would work out the kinks for calutron units and then pass control to the female operators.
Then the District Engineer gave Lawrence some surprising news: The "hillbilly" girls were generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs had. And Product was all that mattered.
A gauntlet had been thrown down.
The two men agreed to a production race. Whichever group generated the most enriched Tubealloy over a specified amount of time would win - though "winning" only meant bragging rights for the Engineer or Lawrence.
By the end of the designated contest period, Lawrence and his PhDs had lost handily.
They just couldn't stop fiddling with things, Lawrence thought, trying to make things run smoother, faster, harder. Still, he was surprised.
The District Engineer understood perfectly. Those girls, "hillbilly" or no, had been trained like soldiers. Do what you're told. Don't ask why. He and General Groves knew that was how you got results.
The Girls of Atomic City
The Untold Story of the Women Who helped Win World War Two
Denise Kiernan, pp 217-219
