I'm open to discussion, but I'd say there is a flaw in your example -- if points A and B are truly 'at rest' relative to each other then by definition the distance between them is not growing (no velocity induced redshift). I think you are trying to use the definition of 'rest' as meaning no "peculiar motion" (astronomical term) on top of the motion imparted up on them by the expansion of space between them. A concrete example would be galaxies observed at a large distance -- they all have a redshift due to the expansion of space between us, on top of whatever random peculiar motions they may have, but the true measure of the velocity between us and them is the observed redshift no matter how it comes about (neglecting gravitational redshifts). If the separation velocity is greater than c then the redshift becomes infinite = no signals.
Space itself can expand such that the objects (events?) within it are moving apart at faster than c. Any two objects separating faster than c can't measure that -- they cannot pass any signal between them. Any light (or other signal) which leaves one will be redshifted away to nothing before it gets to the other. They are outside each other's observable universe. I'm pretty sure this has to handled using General Relativity, I don't think Special Relativity has any concept of expanding or contracting space-time. Space-time described by Special Relativity is flat and static.
Forbes -- there's a an unbiased source for you. Think about it -- a rich, connected guy figures out a scheme to get even richer by polluting a resource used by everyone else (the GPS assigned radio band) -- that's pretty much the business model of all of Forbes's target audience. And as far as LightSquared's $3-4B investment, they could have saved it all by asking some real engineers and physicists if they could pull this off. It's not the FCC's fault if all they listened to was bullshit artists who told them what they wanted to hear. Even if they thought they could roll over us regular, civil GPS users, they must have known that they were going to run up against the military and and aviation GPS users. It's not the FCC's job to save themselves from their own greed and stupidity. Screw them, they made a bad investment, lost it and hopefully won't come back.
The Apollo Command Module was not "uncontrolled" on reentry. Its center of gravity was intentionally offset from the spacecraft's centerline. This gave it a semi-gliding (admittedly steep but not non-existent) capability. Thus they could control the direction of the reentry aerodynamically by using thrusters to rotate the spacecraft and so control the direction of "glide". There was a lot more capability to that Apollo-Saturn stack than is visible or well known!
I read all the other answers and they are accurate but not complete. L2 and L3 are not points of stability in the sense that you can put an object there and it will stay there -- they are metastable in that the forces on the object are balanced, but balanced in the sense of balancing on a knife edge. A small perturbation inward or outward from L2 or L3 will be amplified and the object leaves position. That said, there are stable trajectories of the object such that it can "orbit" L2 or L3 such that it stays nearby. Thus there is an regular motion of the object where it trades potential energy for kinetic in a repeatable pattern, sort of how an object in an elliptical orbit around the earth does the same. Sorry, I don't know the details and don't have time to go deeper -- I had to do a quick review on Wikipedia to get this far.
If they (the referenced paper, which I flipped through) are saying that you need to transmute the U-238 to a short-lived isotope to make it safe, they are nuts. U-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years and so is not very radioactive, it is what primarily comes out of the ground. If the industry were to just mine the natural uranium, take out the U-235 for reactors then put the leftover U-238 back into the ground (or dump it in the sea which already has a lot of natural uranium) then the final result is less natural radioactivity than what was started with. Considering U-238 as a dangerous waste product weakens their argument considerably.
We never got He-3 commercially from natural sources -- just not enough of it around and too difficult to separate from He-4. All of the He-3 in use was made via fission reactors (mostly through production of H-3, which decays to He-3), and not just any old utility power generating reactor, either. Those reactors (government and mostly weapons affiliated) aren't doing so much anymore and there is a shortage of He-3.
So what have they done lately? In more modern history (20th century) the screwed-up reparations imposed on Germany after WWI which materially contributed to the instability there and so catalyzed WWII in Europe were primarily due to French demands. Also the French attempt to reclaim their colonies in South-East Asia after WWII gave us the instability there which lead the US into picking the wrong side and screwing it up in Vietnam. France's lack of participation in NATO wasn't particularly helpful in keeping the Soviets at bay from about 1950 to 1990, either. So, yeah, thanks for the help in 1781, and the French were inadvertently helpful in 1812 in keeping the Brits busy in Europe, but since then what have they done but cause trouble for the other western democracies?
"Math departments are kept afloat with distribution requirements" -- What?? Can anyone on this board honestly say that there are too many required math courses in a college curriculum? Anyone in a STEM field can't get enough math, ever. And all those students who are in fields which don't require it and are taking math only to satisfy distribution requirements aren't getting enough either. Everyone claiming a college degree should have at least enough math to understand the statistics and economics which are argued over during every election, plus compound interest, renting vs home ownership, and a host of other subjects relating to personal and societal issues. These people are voting for God's sake! Criticize the universities for providing lame, boring math classes all you want but not because the students are getting too much math.
Max Range of Concorde = 7250 km (from Wikipedia) Distance London to Los Angeles = 8750 km Not enough range relegated the Concorde to being a niche product; it couldn't do the transpacific routes where you really wanted the speed. And on the really long routes a subsonic aircraft that didn't have to stop to refuel could probably give it good competition for total travel time.
It is not so much that elementary particles are mathematical points (zero dimensional objects) as that they have no internal "structure" like the 'non-elementary' particles (protons, for example) and no even more 'elementary' constituents. At the deepest level in the Standard Model all 'particles' are described as excitations of quantum fields and have positive probability density over a region in space which is not a point. Electrons are conventionally referred to as "point particles" but that is slang for the deeper description.
All true but let's take a closer look at comparable Soviet and American missions -- Luna 9 and Surveyor 1, the first soft landers on the moon by the respective programs. Luna 9 -- landed Feb 3, 1966, transmitted three series of TV pictures over an 8 hour period. The last contact with the spacecraft was made on Feb 6, three days after landing. Surveyor 1 -- landed June 2, 1966, transmitted over 11,000 photos from the lunar surface, including wide-angle and narrow-angle panoramas, focus ranging surveys, photometric surveys, special area surveys, and celestial photography. Surveyor 1 continued from to return engineering data for over 7 months (until Jan 7, 1967) with interruptions during the two week lunar nights (the spacecraft was solar powered), but it survived the nights and began operations again when the sun powered it up. 3 days of lunar operations by Luna 9 vs 7 months by Surveyor 1 -- Luna 9 was an achievement, no question, but Surveyor 1 was a considerably more capable device. And Surveyor 1 was followed by Surveyors 3, 5, 6, and 7 with similar performances. A similar comparison can be made between the Soviet Mars 3 lander and the American Viking 1 lander on Mars. (statistics above taken from the Wikipedia pages).
You really can't say that when right now there is a permanently crewed space station in orbit, and uncountable robot missions to other planets in the Solar System. Not as exciting as a crewed moon landing, but definitely not sad.
Let's cut ShanghaiBill some slack here -- he's right that the next guy in line would have done the job. The Apollo schedule was so fluid that it was not possible to say for sure which mission and crew would be the first lander. For a while, Apollo 10 looked like it would be the landing mission and it, like Apollo 11, was crewed by three space flight veterans (not true of the later Apollo missions). So, not denigrating Armstrong's achievement, any of those Apollo mission commanders were up to the job. Deke Slayton states as a fact in his autobiography that if Gus Grissom had not been killed in Apollo 1, he would have seen to it that Grissom would have commanded the first landing mission.
Apollo's 18, 19, 20 were canceled in the 60's -- well before the Boomers had any influence. The major tilt of the US budget since then has increasingly gone to social welfare programs used by the parents of the Boomers. Medicare and Social Security (for better or worse -- I don't want to get into that argument) have increasingly gobbled up the federal budget and until 2011 no Boomer was eligible for Medicare on the basis of their age. The 'Greatest Generation', not the Boomers, were the recipients of all this government largess during the decades since Apollo.
So the guys that are liars (or incompetent) and lo-ball their initial budget estimates to get the project started are rewarded with funding and the guys that are honest from the start and put big contingencies in their estimates for unknowns never get funded because they are always underbid. If the desired goal is to reward BS, dishonesty, and political pull over scientific merit it's working great.
Unlike many sociological theories proposed, we have a great experimental example of your hypothesis to examine -- Europe. Equivalent to the USA by most measures but made up of small and medium nations instead of states under a central government. Didn't work out too well in the 20th century (two major wars), and not off to a good start in the 21st, economically for sure. Declining in world influence daily (for what's that is worth). The USA, with its problems, looks pretty good by comparison. Not to diss the Europeans -- some of my best friends and relatives are European...
It's not the Feds who don't want to open Yucca mountain to store the nuclear waste, its the annoying citizens around there who don't want it all sent to their backyard. In this case the Feds are just not telling the local residents, "screw you, you are getting it anyway". Would you prefer they handled that way? And here in Texas, it isn't the Feds which are preventing the building of transmission lines, its all those private landowners who are resisting the 'eminent domain' taking of their land so that people on one end can get rich selling power and cities on the other end can get cheap power. The energy problems we have may be political, but that is the nature of a democracy -- not every one sees it your way and some of those others have enough pull with the government so they don't just have to sit back and take it. Maybe not ideal but better than the alternatives.
Armstrong's steps onto the moon were transmitted live -- I watched it in 1969 along with 1/5 of the rest of the world as you said. He deployed the camera while going down the ladder -- Wiki quote from the Apollo 11 page: "Climbing down the nine-rung ladder, Armstrong pulled a D-ring to deploy the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) folded against Eagle's side and activate the TV camera, and at 02:56 UTC he set his left foot on the surface." The footage from the LM window during landing was not transmitted live -- it was recorded and brought back. We didn't get that live -- that is the point I made in my first reply -- no live video of the landing, only live video Armstrong walking out almost two hours later.
Actually, as I recall from 1969, there was no live TV from the lunar landers (any of them) until the astronauts opened the hatch on the LM and started climbing out; they had to deploy a camera on the outside of the lunar module. This was hours after the actual landing. During the landing itself all we got was audio of the spacecraft communications. Any footage of the landings themselves were from film movie cameras developed after the missions.
Here is my take on that -- for whatever reason, the Americans have put this device on Mars (and have a functioning orbiter around Saturn, and have a spacecraft headed toward Pluto, etc.). No other nation or group of nations has done it or done planetary exploration on the scale of the Americans -- specifically I am calling out the EU and Japan on this item, both of which have huge economies and the technological prowess to do it, but choose not to (though the EU might be coming around, a bit). Only the Americans have spent the money to do it; who knows what all their motivations (our motivations, I'm American) might be? If part of it is overtly displayed nationalism then I will accept that as part of the deal to get the missions. I will be fully supportive of any other nation which does the same thing.
I don't think Bell Labs is a good example of private industry research. When Bell Labs existed, AT&T had a monopoly on telephone communications and could milk the market for whatever it would bear. Thus they were not subject to competitive pressures to cut costs to the bone and the corporate officers felt they could afford a research arm like Bell Labs without a short term payoff in every effort. They could trade short term profit for long term gains, kind of like the government can do with its sponsored research. Thus Bell Labs operated more like government lab. Those days are gone.
This is where the "free market" and "free trade" as practiced in the US now (everything done by private companies with short term profits above all) fails. When some entrepreneur tries to ramp up production of rare earths in the US, the Chinese will release enough of their stockpile to put him out of business, similar (but not exactly the same) as for solar panel production lately. The US should just close its market to Chinese produced goods which incorporate Chinese produced rare earths unless US manufacturers have the same access to the Chinese rare earths.
AC, I guess you weren't on Okinawa in the summer of '45 to see what "trying to negotiate a surrender" looked like back then, with the mass suicides of civilians encouraged by the Imperial Army and such. Toward the very end the Japanese were looking for victory in a military battle by which they could negotiate better terms, such as no post-war occupation of the country -- which wasn't going to happen until the invasion of the main islands. It took two A-bombs and the entrance of the Soviets into hostiltiies against them to convince the leaders in the government to finally give it up. It took two A-bombs because some advisers in the Imperial government were convinced that the US could only have produced one.
I'll give you a partial try. I think that is is too much to ask to say what these particles are "actually made of" -- that requires too much of the vagaries of human language. What the physicists do now is produce mathematical models which match the observations. That said, the Standard Model represents particles such as electrons and photons as excitations of a field. A one dimensional model is a jump rope. The jump rope is the field -- if you wiggle (excite) the jump rope you make bumps in it. These excitation bumps can move back and forth -- these are the free particles of the field moving around. They can move, be created and be destroyed, all upon the background of the "field", the jump rope. So now create a four dimensional field in space-time called an "electron field". In its lowest energy state there are no electrons -- in an excited state it expresses excitations which are perceived as electrons. Of course there are quantum and relativistic complications to all these "field" descriptions. There is a field for each fundamental particle, but the actual existence of the "field" is hard to say -- I'll only say that it is shorthand for the math equations which describe the particles. By the way, the electrons, photons and neutrinos are fundamental in the Standard Model in the sense that they are excitations of a field and cannot be further broken down. Protons and neutrons are not fundamental -- they are composites of quarks which in turn are fundamental. Supposedly without a Higgs field with which the fundamental particles can interact they would all be mass-less. I don't know enough of the mechanism by which an electron (excitation of an electron field) interacts with the Higgs field to make the electron massive. This is all Standard Model stuff, Strings, Superstrings, etc are beyond that.
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I'm open to discussion, but I'd say there is a flaw in your example -- if points A and B are truly 'at rest' relative to each other then by definition the distance between them is not growing (no velocity induced redshift). I think you are trying to use the definition of 'rest' as meaning no "peculiar motion" (astronomical term) on top of the motion imparted up on them by the expansion of space between them. A concrete example would be galaxies observed at a large distance -- they all have a redshift due to the expansion of space between us, on top of whatever random peculiar motions they may have, but the true measure of the velocity between us and them is the observed redshift no matter how it comes about (neglecting gravitational redshifts). If the separation velocity is greater than c then the redshift becomes infinite = no signals.
Space itself can expand such that the objects (events?) within it are moving apart at faster than c. Any two objects separating faster than c can't measure that -- they cannot pass any signal between them. Any light (or other signal) which leaves one will be redshifted away to nothing before it gets to the other. They are outside each other's observable universe. I'm pretty sure this has to handled using General Relativity, I don't think Special Relativity has any concept of expanding or contracting space-time. Space-time described by Special Relativity is flat and static.
Forbes -- there's a an unbiased source for you. Think about it -- a rich, connected guy figures out a scheme to get even richer by polluting a resource used by everyone else (the GPS assigned radio band) -- that's pretty much the business model of all of Forbes's target audience. And as far as LightSquared's $3-4B investment, they could have saved it all by asking some real engineers and physicists if they could pull this off. It's not the FCC's fault if all they listened to was bullshit artists who told them what they wanted to hear. Even if they thought they could roll over us regular, civil GPS users, they must have known that they were going to run up against the military and and aviation GPS users. It's not the FCC's job to save themselves from their own greed and stupidity. Screw them, they made a bad investment, lost it and hopefully won't come back.
The Apollo Command Module was not "uncontrolled" on reentry. Its center of gravity was intentionally offset from the spacecraft's centerline. This gave it a semi-gliding (admittedly steep but not non-existent) capability. Thus they could control the direction of the reentry aerodynamically by using thrusters to rotate the spacecraft and so control the direction of "glide". There was a lot more capability to that Apollo-Saturn stack than is visible or well known!
I read all the other answers and they are accurate but not complete. L2 and L3 are not points of stability in the sense that you can put an object there and it will stay there -- they are metastable in that the forces on the object are balanced, but balanced in the sense of balancing on a knife edge. A small perturbation inward or outward from L2 or L3 will be amplified and the object leaves position. That said, there are stable trajectories of the object such that it can "orbit" L2 or L3 such that it stays nearby. Thus there is an regular motion of the object where it trades potential energy for kinetic in a repeatable pattern, sort of how an object in an elliptical orbit around the earth does the same. Sorry, I don't know the details and don't have time to go deeper -- I had to do a quick review on Wikipedia to get this far.
If they (the referenced paper, which I flipped through) are saying that you need to transmute the U-238 to a short-lived isotope to make it safe, they are nuts. U-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years and so is not very radioactive, it is what primarily comes out of the ground. If the industry were to just mine the natural uranium, take out the U-235 for reactors then put the leftover U-238 back into the ground (or dump it in the sea which already has a lot of natural uranium) then the final result is less natural radioactivity than what was started with. Considering U-238 as a dangerous waste product weakens their argument considerably.
We never got He-3 commercially from natural sources -- just not enough of it around and too difficult to separate from He-4. All of the He-3 in use was made via fission reactors (mostly through production of H-3, which decays to He-3), and not just any old utility power generating reactor, either. Those reactors (government and mostly weapons affiliated) aren't doing so much anymore and there is a shortage of He-3.
So what have they done lately? In more modern history (20th century) the screwed-up reparations imposed on Germany after WWI which materially contributed to the instability there and so catalyzed WWII in Europe were primarily due to French demands.
Also the French attempt to reclaim their colonies in South-East Asia after WWII gave us the instability there which lead the US into picking the wrong side and screwing it up in Vietnam. France's lack of participation in NATO wasn't particularly helpful in keeping the Soviets at bay from about 1950 to 1990, either. So, yeah, thanks for the help in 1781, and the French were inadvertently helpful in 1812 in keeping the Brits busy in Europe, but since then what have they done but cause trouble for the other western democracies?
"Math departments are kept afloat with distribution requirements" -- What?? Can anyone on this board honestly say that there are too many required math courses in a college curriculum? Anyone in a STEM field can't get enough math, ever. And all those students who are in fields which don't require it and are taking math only to satisfy distribution requirements aren't getting enough either. Everyone claiming a college degree should have at least enough math to understand the statistics and economics which are argued over during every election, plus compound interest, renting vs home ownership, and a host of other subjects relating to personal and societal issues. These people are voting for God's sake! Criticize the universities for providing lame, boring math classes all you want but not because the students are getting too much math.
Max Range of Concorde = 7250 km (from Wikipedia)
Distance London to Los Angeles = 8750 km
Not enough range relegated the Concorde to being a niche product; it couldn't do the transpacific routes where you really wanted the speed. And on the really long routes a subsonic aircraft that didn't have to stop to refuel could probably give it good competition for total travel time.
It is not so much that elementary particles are mathematical points (zero dimensional objects) as that they have no internal "structure" like the 'non-elementary' particles (protons, for example) and no even more 'elementary' constituents. At the deepest level in the Standard Model all 'particles' are described as excitations of quantum fields and have positive probability density over a region in space which is not a point. Electrons are conventionally referred to as "point particles" but that is slang for the deeper description.
All true but let's take a closer look at comparable Soviet and American missions -- Luna 9 and Surveyor 1, the first soft landers on the moon by the respective programs. Luna 9 -- landed Feb 3, 1966, transmitted three series of TV pictures over an 8 hour period. The last contact with the spacecraft was made on Feb 6, three days after landing. Surveyor 1 -- landed June 2, 1966, transmitted over 11,000 photos from the lunar surface, including wide-angle and narrow-angle panoramas, focus ranging surveys, photometric surveys, special area surveys, and celestial photography. Surveyor 1 continued from to return engineering data for over 7 months (until Jan 7, 1967) with interruptions during the two week lunar nights (the spacecraft was solar powered), but it survived the nights and began operations again when the sun powered it up. 3 days of lunar operations by Luna 9 vs 7 months by Surveyor 1 -- Luna 9 was an achievement, no question, but Surveyor 1 was a considerably more capable device. And Surveyor 1 was followed by Surveyors 3, 5, 6, and 7 with similar performances. A similar comparison can be made between the Soviet Mars 3 lander and the American Viking 1 lander on Mars. (statistics above taken from the Wikipedia pages).
You really can't say that when right now there is a permanently crewed space station in orbit, and uncountable robot missions to other planets in the Solar System. Not as exciting as a crewed moon landing, but definitely not sad.
Let's cut ShanghaiBill some slack here -- he's right that the next guy in line would have done the job. The Apollo schedule was so fluid that it was not possible to say for sure which mission and crew would be the first lander. For a while, Apollo 10 looked like it would be the landing mission and it, like Apollo 11, was crewed by three space flight veterans (not true of the later Apollo missions). So, not denigrating Armstrong's achievement, any of those Apollo mission commanders were up to the job. Deke Slayton states as a fact in his autobiography that if Gus Grissom had not been killed in Apollo 1, he would have seen to it that Grissom would have commanded the first landing mission.
Apollo's 18, 19, 20 were canceled in the 60's -- well before the Boomers had any influence. The major tilt of the US budget since then has increasingly gone to social welfare programs used by the parents of the Boomers. Medicare and Social Security (for better or worse -- I don't want to get into that argument) have increasingly gobbled up the federal budget and until 2011 no Boomer was eligible for Medicare on the basis of their age. The 'Greatest Generation', not the Boomers, were the recipients of all this government largess during the decades since Apollo.
So the guys that are liars (or incompetent) and lo-ball their initial budget estimates to get the project started are rewarded with funding and the guys that are honest from the start and put big contingencies in their estimates for unknowns never get funded because they are always underbid. If the desired goal is to reward BS, dishonesty, and political pull over scientific merit it's working great.
Unlike many sociological theories proposed, we have a great experimental example of your hypothesis to examine -- Europe. Equivalent to the USA by most measures but made up of small and medium nations instead of states under a central government. Didn't work out too well in the 20th century (two major wars), and not off to a good start in the 21st, economically for sure. Declining in world influence daily (for what's that is worth). The USA, with its problems, looks pretty good by comparison. Not to diss the Europeans -- some of my best friends and relatives are European...
It's not the Feds who don't want to open Yucca mountain to store the nuclear waste, its the annoying citizens around there who don't want it all sent to their backyard. In this case the Feds are just not telling the local residents, "screw you, you are getting it anyway". Would you prefer they handled that way?
And here in Texas, it isn't the Feds which are preventing the building of transmission lines, its all those private landowners who are resisting the 'eminent domain' taking of their land so that people on one end can get rich selling power and cities on the other end can get cheap power.
The energy problems we have may be political, but that is the nature of a democracy -- not every one sees it your way and some of those others have enough pull with the government so they don't just have to sit back and take it. Maybe not ideal but better than the alternatives.
Armstrong's steps onto the moon were transmitted live -- I watched it in 1969 along with 1/5 of the rest of the world as you said. He deployed the camera while going down the ladder -- Wiki quote from the Apollo 11 page: "Climbing down the nine-rung ladder, Armstrong pulled a D-ring to deploy the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) folded against Eagle's side and activate the TV camera, and at 02:56 UTC he set his left foot on the surface." The footage from the LM window during landing was not transmitted live -- it was recorded and brought back. We didn't get that live -- that is the point I made in my first reply -- no live video of the landing, only live video Armstrong walking out almost two hours later.
Actually, as I recall from 1969, there was no live TV from the lunar landers (any of them) until the astronauts opened the hatch on the LM and started climbing out; they had to deploy a camera on the outside of the lunar module. This was hours after the actual landing. During the landing itself all we got was audio of the spacecraft communications. Any footage of the landings themselves were from film movie cameras developed after the missions.
Here is my take on that -- for whatever reason, the Americans have put this device on Mars (and have a functioning orbiter around Saturn, and have a spacecraft headed toward Pluto, etc.). No other nation or group of nations has done it or done planetary exploration on the scale of the Americans -- specifically I am calling out the EU and Japan on this item, both of which have huge economies and the technological prowess to do it, but choose not to (though the EU might be coming around, a bit). Only the Americans have spent the money to do it; who knows what all their motivations (our motivations, I'm American) might be? If part of it is overtly displayed nationalism then I will accept that as part of the deal to get the missions. I will be fully supportive of any other nation which does the same thing.
I don't think Bell Labs is a good example of private industry research. When Bell Labs existed, AT&T had a monopoly on telephone communications and could milk the market for whatever it would bear. Thus they were not subject to competitive pressures to cut costs to the bone and the corporate officers felt they could afford a research arm like Bell Labs without a short term payoff in every effort. They could trade short term profit for long term gains, kind of like the government can do with its sponsored research. Thus Bell Labs operated more like government lab. Those days are gone.
This is where the "free market" and "free trade" as practiced in the US now (everything done by private companies with short term profits above all) fails. When some entrepreneur tries to ramp up production of rare earths in the US, the Chinese will release enough of their stockpile to put him out of business, similar (but not exactly the same) as for solar panel production lately. The US should just close its market to Chinese produced goods which incorporate Chinese produced rare earths unless US manufacturers have the same access to the Chinese rare earths.
AC, I guess you weren't on Okinawa in the summer of '45 to see what "trying to negotiate a surrender" looked like back then, with the mass suicides of civilians encouraged by the Imperial Army and such. Toward the very end the Japanese were looking for victory in a military battle by which they could negotiate better terms, such as no post-war occupation of the country -- which wasn't going to happen until the invasion of the main islands. It took two A-bombs and the entrance of the Soviets into hostiltiies against them to convince the leaders in the government to finally give it up. It took two A-bombs because some advisers in the Imperial government were convinced that the US could only have produced one.
I'll give you a partial try. I think that is is too much to ask to say what these particles are "actually made of" -- that requires too much of the vagaries of human language. What the physicists do now is produce mathematical models which match the observations. That said, the Standard Model represents particles such as electrons and photons as excitations of a field. A one dimensional model is a jump rope. The jump rope is the field -- if you wiggle (excite) the jump rope you make bumps in it. These excitation bumps can move back and forth -- these are the free particles of the field moving around. They can move, be created and be destroyed, all upon the background of the "field", the jump rope. So now create a four dimensional field in space-time called an "electron field". In its lowest energy state there are no electrons -- in an excited state it expresses excitations which are perceived as electrons. Of course there are quantum and relativistic complications to all these "field" descriptions. There is a field for each fundamental particle, but the actual existence of the "field" is hard to say -- I'll only say that it is shorthand for the math equations which describe the particles. By the way, the electrons, photons and neutrinos are fundamental in the Standard Model in the sense that they are excitations of a field and cannot be further broken down. Protons and neutrons are not fundamental -- they are composites of quarks which in turn are fundamental. Supposedly without a Higgs field with which the fundamental particles can interact they would all be mass-less. I don't know enough of the mechanism by which an electron (excitation of an electron field) interacts with the Higgs field to make the electron massive. This is all Standard Model stuff, Strings, Superstrings, etc are beyond that.