The fabled Demon Core was a radioactive plutonium sphere housed in a beryllium hemisphere. By holding the hemisphere in place with one hand and levering it with a screwdriver in the other, scientists early in the atomic era conducted extremely dangerous criticality experiments. The Demon Core killed two of them—and is now the subject of many killer memes. Alex Wellerstein collects the best of them and muses on the weird dark humor at hand. [via discussion at Hacker News]
The medical details of the "Demon Core" accidents are pretty horrible. The photographs of the victims are not something you probably want to see — they are bad. I have described them elsewhere. Suffice to say these were extremely painful deaths, involving a body whose internal cellular processes were breaking down in real time under the influence of billions of tiny cellular cuts, and all the while the poor scientists were being monitored, photographed, and (ultimately) inventoried. Slotin's hubris and bravado caused his death, but it didn't mean he deserved that suffering, and it doesn't mean we can't feel sorry for him, one human to another. I am not trying to be a scold. We just have to remember that we are not making fun of an abstract idea, here. There was real suffering involved.
And… yet. What is interesting to me about many of the initial memes, especially the anime ones, is that they appear to have originated from Japan. And that adds a wrinkle to the sentiment here.
Catgirls tickling dragons' tails, a good image for the back end of the 2020s.
