once we figured out the trick and started a nuclear reaction, the thing blew up in a fraction of a second
Please, never use this metaphor again. This level of magical thinking is just embarrassing for all of us. It's like saying that building a house must be a really fast process, because burning the house down goes really quickly.
Nuclear weapons blow up easily because, for (e.g.) plutonium, "blowing up" is thermodynamically favorable. A brick of plutonium has much less entropy than a giant fireball and an expanding cloud of radioactive fallout. In a thermodynamic sense, the plutonium nuclei want to be fissioned. All you have to do is find a way to coax them out of their metastable state.
A human brain is massively thermodynamically unfavorable. If you put a bunch of proteins in a box the odds that they will self-assemble into Einstein's brain are, literally, astronomically small.
That's why the brain is a miracle and a nuclear reaction is, frankly, pretty commonplace. There are a lot of stars. Stars are easy to explain. Brains are hard.
Please, never use this metaphor again. This level of magical thinking is just embarrassing for all of us. It's like saying that building a house must be a really fast process, because burning the house down goes really quickly.
Nuclear weapons blow up easily because, for (e.g.) plutonium, "blowing up" is thermodynamically favorable. A brick of plutonium has much less entropy than a giant fireball and an expanding cloud of radioactive fallout. In a thermodynamic sense, the plutonium nuclei want to be fissioned. All you have to do is find a way to coax them out of their metastable state.
A human brain is massively thermodynamically unfavorable. If you put a bunch of proteins in a box the odds that they will self-assemble into Einstein's brain are, literally, astronomically small.
That's why the brain is a miracle and a nuclear reaction is, frankly, pretty commonplace. There are a lot of stars. Stars are easy to explain. Brains are hard.