U-235, or Beauty and Horror
I once wrote a chapter on quantum physics but its edges were stalked by a spectral figure.
Every atom walks a thin line, a tightrope held taut by its own internal forces: electrons in a cloud-like cluster bound to the nucleus by an attraction between those of their own with a negative charge and the positively charged protons within the nucleus (Becker 69). Balance, symmetry, harmony? Not quite—or, at least not always. Here attraction and repulsion coexist: opposites attract and like repels like. Disrupt the balance and the nucleus begins to rip apart, only the neutron (itself having no electrical charge) can play the role of mediator. A triangle in miniature: the interplay of weak, strong, and electromagnetic forces.
Each element has its own personality, its own quirks and quarks. Hiding out in the earth’s crust, uranium was born with a larger nucleic body than many of its elemental siblings. While in smaller nuclei, the strong force (which only acts in close proximity) wins out, larger nuclei are less stable, pulled apart by electric, or repulsive, forces. Fed too many protons and neutrons (beyond, for example 26 and 30-32, respectively), the nucleus’ stability begins to flicker. Uranium is extremely unstable. With its big nucleic body of 92 protons “it doesn’t matter how many neutrons you add to uranium—it eventually decays” (Becker 70). This time it’s ‘mortality in miniature,’ but a form of mortality well beyond the scope of human time. In place of our century (if we’re lucky), two forms of uranium persist for billions of years before full decay: U-235 and U-238. The numbers denote these forms’ atomic constitutions: 143 neutrons and 92 protons for the former, and three additional neutrons for U-238, the slightly heftier and heavier twin (Becker 70-71).
While the two isotopes, or forms, of this element may look similar they adamantly assert their individuality when they meet an additional neutron. Becker: “hitting a U-235 nucleus with a neutron leads the nucleus to fission: it splits into two smaller nuclei, releasing a fabulous quantity of energy, along with a few floating neutrons” (71). Get together enough of U-235 and you’ll start a chain reaction: the leftover neutrons will hit other U-235 nuclei, splitting them and releasing energy and matter—radioactive atomic fragments, heat, and gamma rays. Just three neutrons, utterly imperceptible to the human eye, make the difference for U-238. These three extra neutrons provide the stability which “makes it impossible to build a bomb out of U-238” (Becker 71).
Jeanette Winterson: “Inside the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima lies the beauty of Einstein’s E = MC2” (103). The becoming-matter of energy and vice versa. Humans reached the atomic bomb by adding more and more non-neutral equations to the nucleus of quantum physics. Despite its abstraction, “[a]ll thought,” Elizabeth Grosz reminds us, has “an ethical dimension” (Incorporeal 149). Dwelling in the realm of the incorporeal, the immaterial, the unseen, yet embedded within the material, thought moves—itself and matter. E = MC2: energy becoming matter. Despite seeming to exist in the realm of pure thought, mathematics matters (especially when the military pays for the chalk and board). While metaphors play a role in reminding us of the entanglement of the incorporeal and corporeal, they aren’t the only way to make something ‘real.’
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We won’t be around to see out uranium’s decay in places like Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Chernobyl, but we’re proleptically haunted. Quantum physics “troubles time,” but also “ushers in troubling times” (Barad, “Troubling Time/s” 62). As Karen Barad notes, radiation’s temporality is, like its elemental antecedent, unstable—it “elongates, disperses, and exponentially frays time’s coherence,” affecting not only those who survived the events of the bombings or explosions, but also generations to come (Barad, “No Small Matter” G109).
At the same time, however, quantum theory has given us luxuries of the everyday (the aforementioned mobile devices and supermarket scanners) and potentially lifesaving technology (such as X-ray machines and radiotherapy). Beauty and horror. Eros and Thanatos. All thought has an ethical dimension, implications for “how we live and act, what we value, and how we produce and create” …and destroy (Grosz, Incorporeal 3). The smallest parts of our world require, to borrow a phrase from Bertrand Russell, a “largeness of contemplation” (in Popova, “A Largeness” n.p.).
Works cited:
Barad, Karen. “No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering.” Multitudes, vol. 65, no. 4, 2016, pp. 64-74.
Becker, Adam. What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. Basic Books, 2018.
Grosz, Elizabeth. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. Columbia University Press, 2017.
Popova, Maria. “A Largeness of Contemplation: Bertrand Russell on Intuition, the Intellect, and the Nature of Time.” Brain Pickings, 13 May 2016,
Winterson, Jeanette. Gut Symmetries. Granta, 1990.
Image credit: “Hamlet and his Father’s Ghost,” William Blake, 1806, British Museum, Wikimedia Commons.