Cursed Objects That Scientists Fear

Here are some discoveries scientists wish we hadn't made!

Legal Stuff.

[RCAvhstape]

"No scientists have been brave enough to take the Annabelle doll into a lab for testing." Translates to "No scientist wants to waste his time and risk his credibility on that BS."

[sgvincent]

I’m sitting here eating taco bell while watching a video about a methane gas explosion.

[bbarott]

Regarding the Demon Core, Beryllium is not a tamper, it is a reflector. Tampers are made of heavy materials, lead or depleted uranium. A fission weapon typically contains both a reflector and a tamper.

[cambridgemart]

On Chernobyl, they did NOT shut down the cooling system, the experiment was to disconnect the grid tie and use the electricity generated by the reactor as it shut down to run the cooling system. It was a non-standard test ordered by the management, supposedly under instruction from the KGB.

[KatonRyu]

The flash the people saw in the Demon Core incident wasn't actually a real flash of light. It was the Cherenkov effect happening in the fluids of their eyeballs, just to make things a bit more creepy.

[blackhawk]

Just to clarify, the demon core wouldn't have blown up like a nuke and leveled Los Alamosa simply from the Tamper fully encasing it without spacers. If that's how it worked, then Plutonium-based fission nukes wouldn't require hundreds of pounds of precisely timed high explosives surrounding it to get the desired results.

Instead, what would have happened if the tamper hadn't been knocked off was that the surrounding area would have been irradiated to lethal levels until the core got so hot that it melted through the base holding it and, probably, the ground beneath it as well. At which point, the reaction would stop. The whole facility would have probably still needed to be permanently evacuated and cordoned off, with cleanup crews being sent in once radiation levels dropped to survivable levels, but it wouldn't have turned Los Alamos into a black smear.

[Excanda]

Mac Beth is also very cursed it seems. The first time it was performed the theatre troop died within a month of performing it. The second time half the audience died also within a month. The third time half the troop and the theatre burned down. They now call it the 'scottish play'.

[PREACHIT-bk]

Its so comforting to know so many clumsy people are working on deadly weapons.

[Seluecus]

Forgot to mention that all the scientists (working the demon core when it went critical) were demanded to go back to the spots they were standing, as Wells had told them that they were already dead, so they may as well get some more information out of it, such as radiation amount vs distance vs length of time it'd take for each scientist to die from being exposed.

[deathstrike]

Also as a side note: Anthrax is a Greek word that means "coal" It was described that way because the lungs looked blackened from a person who has died from it. The traditional treatment now is Ciproximine. It's a very powerful antibiotic and had to be given up to a year for inhalation Anthrax. The problem is, is that Anthrax is extremely stubborn, especially a "created" version. It can return in a patient if it is not monitored carefully months, even years later.

Their is a vaccine for Anthrax, but it has unpleasant side effects, takes quite a few to achieve immunity, and doesn't last long for protection. But better than nothing.

[RipleySawzen]

Misinformation: The Chernobyl "accident" wasn't a safety test; it was a full-blown experiment. They were experimenting with the reactor's ability to operate under certain conditions. The reactor passed with flying colors, performing above specifications, which tells you how badly they F-ed up.

Also, the elephant's foot is perfectly fine to touch. Just wash your hands immediately. Last time I did the calculations, you could sleep next to it for a full night and be perfectly fine. The more dangerous something is, radioactively, the shorter duration it will be dangerous for.

[deancalder]

The biggest problem with the annabelle doll 1 is that after you touch or insult it anything bad that happens you'll link to it, the only problem is bad things happen everyday to people who've never been near it, you're trying to draw a straight line to the doll not realising that the people there can't possibly go the rest of their lives without anything bad happening.

[prof.bizzarro]

6:28 "The core was melted down and recast in a new weapon"... Thank goodness, the demon core has been rendered harmless...

[manubour]

I know it was a different time & security standards weren't the same but that scientist with the atomic core & screwdriver deserves a posthumous darwin award

[ShockInazuma]

Arthur has technically bested the Elephant's Foot. He went to it many times and still lives on to tell the tale.

[steinbauge]

Korneev, although taking risks, knew what he was doing. The Chernobyl incident has shown that humans and animals have more ability to overcome the effects of radiation than previously thought. The ecosystem in the forbidden zone has thrived in the absence of hunting and human activity despite the presence of some hot spots. Most of the zone is livable and a number of civilians that had nowhere else to go have lived there.

[artor]

No, the Demon Core would not level the site if it went supercritical. It would simply melt down while irradiating everything around it. It requires a very carefully symmetric detonation to induce a nuclear explosion. Without the rest of the bomb around it, the core cannot do that.

[dayknowsalchemy]

Quick clarification: it was Dr. Richard Feynman - in asking Slotin NOT to do what he was doing - who actually coined the term, "tickling the dragons tail." Apropos, all the same.

[ottopartz]

Fun fact related to the grainy photos from Chernobyl. In 1945 scientists at Kodak surmised that a large nuclear reaction (explosion) had taken place due issues they were having with transporting x-ray film. They found trace amounts of the wrong kind of radiation in their raw materials that would later be named cesium-141 IIRC. They knew about the bomb months before the nuclear explosions in Japan.

[brillopad]

It actually wasn't "radioactive atoms" that killed Slotin. It was gamma radiation, which is made of extremely high-energy photons.