Yes. Heavy water ice is about 1% more dense than liquid water at its melting temperature of 3.82° C. I wouldn’t recommend drinking large amounts of heavy water, but you could make sinking ice cubes out of it.
Once the bomb has assembled a super-critical mass of fissionable material, each chain reaction that occurs will grow exponentially with time and lead to a catastrophic release of energy. But you’re right in wondering just what starts those chain reactions. The answer is natural radioactivity from a trigger material. While the nuclear fuel’s own radioactivity could provide those first few neutrons, it’s generally not reliable enough. To make sure that the chain reactions get started properly, most nuclear weapons introduce a highly radioactive neutron-emitting trigger material into the nuclear fuel assembly.
Critical mass is something of a misnomer because in addition to mass, it also depends on shape, density, and even the objects surrounding the nuclear fuel. Anything that makes the nuclear fuel more efficient at using its neutrons to induce fissions helps that fuel approach critical mass. The characteristics of the materials also play a role. For example, fissioning plutonium 239 nuclei release more neutrons on average than fissioning uranium 235 nuclei. As a result, plutonium 239 is better at sustaining a chain reaction than uranium 235 and critical masses of plutonium 239 are typically smaller than for uranium 235.
When you heat water on the stove, heat flows into the water from below and the water at the bottom of the pot becomes a little hotter than the water above it. As a result, the water at the bottom of the pot boils first and its steam bubbles begin to rise up through the cooler water above. As they rise, these steam bubbles cool and collapse—they are crushed back into liquid water by the ambient air pressure. These collapsing steam bubbles are noisy. When the water finally boils throughout, the steam bubbles no longer collapse as they rise and simply pop softly at the surface of the liquid.
Almost the instant the nuclear fuel reaches critical mass, it begins to release heat and explode. If this fuel overheats and rips itself apart before most its nuclei have undergone fission, only a small fraction of the fuel’s nuclear energy will have been released in the explosion. There are at least two possible causes for such a “fizzle”: slow assembly of the super-critical mass needed for explosive chain reactions and poor containment of the exploding fuel. A well designed fission bomb assembles its super-critical mass astonishingly quickly and it shrouds that mass in an envelope that prevents it from exploding until most of the nuclei have had time to shatter.
Not without using something other than pure, normal water for the ice. The density of ice is always less than that of water at the same pressure. While squeezing the ice will increase its density, it will also increase the density of the water so the ice will always float. Of course, you could add dense materials to the ice to weight it down to neutral buoyancy, but then it wouldn’t be pure ice any more.
An object doesn’t have to be on the ground to be a target for lightning. In fact, most lightning strikes don’t reach the ground at all—they occur between different clouds. All that’s needed for a lightning strike between two objects is for them to have very different voltages, because that difference in voltages means that energy will be released when electricity flows between the objects.
If an airplane’s voltage begins to differ significantly from that of its surroundings, it’s going to have trouble. Sooner or later, it will encounter something that will exchange electric charge with it and the results may be disastrous. To avoid a lightning strike, the airplane must keep its voltage near that of its surroundings. That’s why it has static dissipaters on the tips of its wings. These sharp metal spikes use a phenomenon known as a corona discharge to spray unwanted electric charges into the air behind the plane. Any stray charges that the plane picks up by rubbing against the air or by passing through electrically charged clouds are quickly released to the air so that the plane’s voltage never differs significantly from that of its surroundings and it never sticks out as a target for lightning. While an unlucky plane may still get caught in an exchange of lightning between two other objects, the use of static dissipaters significantly reduces its chances of being hit directly.
In effect, you would be a skydiver without a parachute and would survive up until the moment of impact with the ground. Like any skydiver who has just left a forward-moving airplane, you would initially accelerate downward (due to gravity) and backward (due to air resistance). In those first few seconds, you would lose your forward velocity and would begin traveling downward rapidly. But soon you would be traveling downward so rapidly through the air that air resistance would keep you from picking up any more speed. You would then coast downward at a constant speed and would feel your normal weight. If you closed your eyes at this point, you would feel as though you were suspended on a strong upward stream of air. Unfortunately, this situation wouldn’t last forever—you would eventually reach the ground. At that point, the ground would exert a tremendous upward force on you in order to stop you from penetrating into its surface. This upward force would cause you to decelerate very rapidly and it would also do you in.
An airplane supports itself in flight by deflecting the passing airstream downward. The plane’s wings push this airstream downward and the airstream reacts by pushing the wings upward. This action/reaction effect is an example of Newton’s third law of motion, which observes that forces always come in equal but oppositely directed pairs: if one object pushes on another, then the second object must push back on the first object with a force of equal strength pointing in the opposite direction. Even air obeys this law so that when the plane’s wings push air downward, the air must push the wings upward in response. In level flight, the deflected air pushes upward so hard that it supports the entire weight of the plane. Just how the airplane’s wings deflect the airstream downward to obtain this upward lift force is a marvel of fluid dynamics. We can view it from at least two perspectives: a Newtonian perspective which concentrates on the accelerations of the passing airstream and a Bernoullian perspective which concentrates on speeds and pressures in that airstream.
The Newtonian perspective is the most intuitive and where we will start. The airstream arriving at the forward or “leading” edge of the airplane wing splits into two separate flows that travel over and under the wing, respectively. The wing is shaped and tilted so that these two flows experience very different accelerations as they travel around the wing. The flow that goes under the wing encounters a downward sloping surface that pushes it downward and it accelerates downward. In response to this downward push, the air pushes upward on the bottom of the wing and provides part of the force that supports the plane.
The air that flows over the wing follows a more complicated route. At first, this flow encounters an upward sloping surface that pushes it upward and it accelerates upward. In response to this upward force, the air pushes downward on the leading portion of the wing’s top surface. But the wing’s top surface is curved so that it soon begins to slope downward rather than upward. When this happens, the airflow must accelerate downward to stay in contact with it. A suction effect appears, in which the rear or “trailing” portion of the wing’s top surface sucks downward on the air and the air sucks upward on it in response. This upward suction force more than balances the downward force at the leading edge of the wing so that the air flowing over the wing provides an overall upward force on the wing.
Since both of these air flows produce upward forces on the wing, they act together to support the airplane’s weight. The air passing both under and over the wings is deflected downward and the plane remains suspended.
In the Bernoullian view, air flowing around a wing’s sloping surfaces experiences changes in speed and pressure that lead to an overall upward force on the wing. The fact that each speed change is accompanied by a pressure change is the result of a conservation of energy in air passing a stationary surface—when the air’s speed and motional energy increase, the air’s pressure and pressure energy must decrease to compensate. In short, when air flowing around the wing speeds up, its pressure drops and when it slows down, its pressure rises.
When air going under the wing encounters the downward sloping bottom surface, it slows down. As a result, the air’s pressure rises and it exerts a strong upward force on the wing. But when air going over the wing encounters the up and down sloping top surface, it slows down and then speeds up. As a result, the air’s pressure first rises and then drops dramatically, and it exerts a very weak overall downward force on the wing. Because the upward force on the bottom of the wing is much stronger than the downward force on the top of the wing, there is an upward overall pressure force on the wing. This upward force can be strong enough to support the weight of the airplane.
But despite the apparent differences between these two descriptions of airplane flight, they are completely equivalent. The upward pressure force of the Bernoullian perspective is exactly the same as the upward reaction force of the Newtonian perspective. They are simply two ways of looking at the force produced by deflecting an airstream, a force known as lift.
While I don’t know the details of the jump, there are some basic physics issues that must be present. At a fundamental level, the skater approaches the jump in a non-spinning state, leaps into the air while acquiring a spin, spins three times in the air, lands on the ice while giving up the spin, and then leaves the jump in a non-spinning state. Most of the physics is in spin, so that’s what I’ll discuss.
To start herself spinning, something must exert a twist on the skater and that something is the ice. She uses her skates to twist the ice in one direction and, as a result, the ice twists her in the opposite direction. This effect is an example of the action/reaction principle known as Newton’s third law of motion. Because of the ice’s twist on her, she acquires angular momentum during her takeoff. Angular momentum is a form of momentum that’s associated with rotation and, like normal momentum, angular momentum is important for one special reason: it’s a conserved physical quantity, meaning that it cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transferred between objects. The ice transfers angular momentum to the skater during her takeoff and she retains that angular momentum throughout her flight. She only gives up the angular momentum when she lands and the ice can twist her again.
During her flight, her angular momentum causes her to spin but the rate at which she spins depends on her shape. The narrower she is, the faster she spins. This effect is familiar to anyone who has watched a skater spin on the tip of one skate. If she starts spinning with her arms spread widely and then pulls them in so that she becomes very narrow, her rate of rotation increases dramatically. That’s because while she is on the tip of one skate, the ice can’t twist her and she spins with a fixed amount of angular momentum. By changing her shape to become as narrow as possible, she allows this angular momentum to make her spin very quickly. And this same rapid rotation occurs in the triple axle jump. The jumper starts the jump with arms and legs widely spread and then pulls into a narrow shape so that she spins rapidly in the air.
Finally, in landing the skater must stop herself from spinning and she does this by twisting the ice in reverse. The ice again reacts by twisting her in reverse, slowing her spin and removing her angular momentum. She skates away smoothly without much spin.