Talk:Explosion
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Can anyone write a stub here? What is an explosion?
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[edit] =another kind of explosion
this term is used formally, and sometimes measurably, as a nonlinear increase in sets or populations--74.236.193.55 02:08, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Big Bang not an explosion
It is incorrect to call the Big Bang an explosion. While often portrayed as such in popular accounts, this is deeply misleading, since there was nothing that exploded, nor was there anything to explode into; the Big Bang is simply the initial singularity of spacetime and/or the hot initial state of the universe, depending on your terminology. While associated with heat and an expansion, it is not an explosion in the conventional sense, and hence should be removed from the list of explosions. 142.3.164.195 23:55, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] suspended particulate explosions
I'm no expert, but seems there should at least be mention of the explosive potential of fine dust when diffused in air--in the U.S. west, grain elevator explosions are an all-too-common phenomenon.
--nizo --68.55.122.146 13:12, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Texas City
The Texas City Disaster of April 16, 1947 ... found elsewhere in Wikipedia ... surely is one of the major explosions of a chemical nature.
[edit] shoemaker-levy 9
shoemaker-levy 9 shouldn't be here, because it didn't explode. it was pulled apart by jupiters gravity and then collided with the upper atmosphere. It doesn't qualify as an explosion, so i'm removing it. Dallas 09:56, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
- I'm not sure that I agree with you there. The fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting the atmosphere of Jupiter, were probably the largest explosions directly observed by man (have we directly observed any stellar novas yet?). As the article mentions, the largest fragment colliding with Jupiters atmosphere was estimated to have caused an energy release of 6,000,000 megatons of TNT or about 750 times the world's nuclear arsenal. It was a conversion of kinetic energy into heat, rather than a conversion from chemical energy or nuclear energy, but that doesn't make it any less of an explosion. It still resulted in a rapid heating of gasses in Jupiter's atmosphere, with fireball plumes reaching 3,000 km high. Each collision would have been quite similar to the Tunguska event, but _much_ larger. -- Solipsist 12:51, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] non-disaster, non-nuclear
How about a section for really big non-nuclear, deliberate explosions like Minor Scale? That's not the largest ever by a long way. The US military once stacked up enough TNT in the Nevada desert to equal the power of the Fat Man or Little Boy bomb. It was either in the 1960's or early 1970's. I saw it on a documentary on TV a few years ago.
