u/MisterMisterYeeeesss

In pre-war action shows, it seems like all the bad guys are named something like "The Spider", "The Octopus", or "The Weasel". Further, a lot of the bad guys (especially in theater serials at the time) hold meetings with their henchmen via radio or other gadget, and are referred to as "racketeers". Post-war, it feels like that went away in favor of obviously Nazi-inspired bad guys, and then a little later sometimes communists, both of which makes sense for the time period. Does anyone know where that pre-war trend/trope came from?

My nominee is Kathy from "Father Knows Best". The shrill, incessant see-saw intonation makes me want to invent time travel purely to tell her to shut up. Any other nominations?

I was reading about the concept of "resonance escape probability" and a question came to mind. What I was reading said, in effect, "if an incident neutron is close to a resonance energy, it's more likely to be captured". Does the neutron energy have to be below the energy level for capture, or just close to it?

These are garbage numbers, but as an example, if the resonance energy was 200keV, could a 204keV neutron be captured, or is it more of a "close to resonance without going over" scenario? If it could be captured would the extra energy just be dealt with as a slightly excited nucleus or would it try to dump it as a gamma ray?

Like most people (I imagine), nuclear power was first explained to me as something like "a neutron splits a U235 nucleus and...". As I started reading more about it, it seems like the neutron induces something that a layperson might describe as "wobbling" or "oscillation" in the nucleus, which eventually results in splitting.

My understanding is that the incident neutron "joins" the nucleus, but I've never read anything that mentions the nucleus briefly becoming U236 before the fission event.

That got me thinking that one of these things is true:

a) The incident neutron DOESN'T join the nucleus; it just starts the oscillation and flies away/disappears, so it IS U235 that splits.

b) The incident neutron DOES join the nucleus, but in some fashion where it's not considered to be U236.

c) The nucleus that splits IS actually U236, but it's just not talked about that way for some reason (possibly because it exists so briefly).

d) Something else.

With the addition of option 'D', I'm sure one of those things is true. Can anyone shed some light on which of those is actually the case?

Edit: I should have clarified that the really intense mathematical descriptions are over my head. So maybe it IS described as U236, but only in more advanced literature.

Every now and then when I'm listening to a show, I'll notice something different about the speech patterns. There are plenty of things we simply wouldn't say because they've fallen into disuse, but there are also grammatical differences. As an example, in English there's something called the "meaningless do".

"Do you have plans for this evening?" / "Do you have a pen?"

We might reply "I don't have plans tonight" or "I don't have a pen". In many shows, I've heard the earlier "I haven't any plans tonight" or "I haven't a pen" constructions.

I know this is kind of a niche area of interest, but if anyone's notice other grammatical changes I'd love to hear them. To be clear, I'm not talking about vocabulary (though that's interesting in its own right), just differences in sentence construction or grammar over the decades.