Any idea or guess?
Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2023 7:52 pm
I am reading this book.
Without knowing exactly what those calculations were anyone want to give a guess estimated as to how long a computer similar to what we use would take to do the same calculations described below?
Teller had made several different estimates of the amount of tritium that would be required. At the time of the 1946 conference it was assumed that the Super could be ignited with fewer than four hundred grams of tritium, which was not considered prohibitive, but an estimate by Teller in September 1947 was about twice as large. In December 1949, even before Truman’s H-bomb announcement, two parallel sets of calculations were begun in an attempt once again to determine the tritium requirement. One set entailed preparation of a machine calculation to go on a computer called the ENIAC, in Aberdeen, Maryland. Preparing the calculation took six months and was carried out by two husband-and-wife teams, John and Klari von Neumann in Princeton, and Foster and Cerda Evans with John Calkin in Los Alamos. The calculation went on the ENIAC in June 1950 and continued into the summer.21
Since the results would not be known for some time, Stanislaw Ulam and a collaborator, Cornelius Everett, undertook a second set by hand. It was expected that their work, a simplified version of the ENIAC calculation, would provide less detailed results than the ENIAC but would do so faster. The two mathematicians worked four to six hours a day, applying slide rules, pencil, and paper to a set of highly simplified calculations and filling page after page with stepwise computations. Everett, a self-effacing workaholic whom Ulam had known before the war at the University of Wisconsin, performed such a large number of calculations that his slide rule wore out, leading him to joke that the least the government could do was buy him a new one. They began their work in early winter and by the end of February 1950 concluded that it would take far more tritium to ignite the Super than any of Teller’s estimates, ranging from three hundred to six hundred grams, had foreseen.22
- Capture.JPG (13.47 KiB) Viewed 2837 times
Without knowing exactly what those calculations were anyone want to give a guess estimated as to how long a computer similar to what we use would take to do the same calculations described below?
Teller had made several different estimates of the amount of tritium that would be required. At the time of the 1946 conference it was assumed that the Super could be ignited with fewer than four hundred grams of tritium, which was not considered prohibitive, but an estimate by Teller in September 1947 was about twice as large. In December 1949, even before Truman’s H-bomb announcement, two parallel sets of calculations were begun in an attempt once again to determine the tritium requirement. One set entailed preparation of a machine calculation to go on a computer called the ENIAC, in Aberdeen, Maryland. Preparing the calculation took six months and was carried out by two husband-and-wife teams, John and Klari von Neumann in Princeton, and Foster and Cerda Evans with John Calkin in Los Alamos. The calculation went on the ENIAC in June 1950 and continued into the summer.21
Since the results would not be known for some time, Stanislaw Ulam and a collaborator, Cornelius Everett, undertook a second set by hand. It was expected that their work, a simplified version of the ENIAC calculation, would provide less detailed results than the ENIAC but would do so faster. The two mathematicians worked four to six hours a day, applying slide rules, pencil, and paper to a set of highly simplified calculations and filling page after page with stepwise computations. Everett, a self-effacing workaholic whom Ulam had known before the war at the University of Wisconsin, performed such a large number of calculations that his slide rule wore out, leading him to joke that the least the government could do was buy him a new one. They began their work in early winter and by the end of February 1950 concluded that it would take far more tritium to ignite the Super than any of Teller’s estimates, ranging from three hundred to six hundred grams, had foreseen.22