Because I finally watched the "Lost" season finale (OPEN SPOILERS)

[Baldwin]

Last Wednesday, I set my DVR to record the season finale of Lost. Next day, I found that it had lost the ability to read a disc. Apparently this has happened to a lot of people who bought Panasonic DVD/VHS combos. So I was left with a disc that I can't watch on a non-Panasonic machine.

Today, I got around to watching the two-hour episode online. Then I looked for a thread here on Domebo, my favorite message board. No dice. So I looked at SDMB: Lengthy thread. 298 posts. However, in none of those posts does anybody mention the two points I would have wanted to make. Since I managed to get myself banned (for the third and final time) from SDMB, I'll make them here.

1) Everything to do with that hydrogen bomb was irredeemably stupid. Ridiculous plot device that never made sense in the show and should have been left out.

It made no sense in 1957: the U.S. military, for one of its H-bomb tests, puts the bomb on a large island that doesn't appear on charts. Neither the bomb itself nor the group of soldiers and technicians landed on the island is ever heard of again; apparently there are no repercussions out in the world.

It made no sense in 1977: In fact, when dealing with the phrase "detonate a hydrogen bomb", I think the writers for Lost don't understand "detonate", "hydrogen" or "bomb". What the hell do they think the thing is? They got the weight about right, and know it contains plutonium, which is good; but I don't think they know about the hydrogen part, or needing cryogenics to keep the deuterium liquid, or even the fact that there's no fucking way to "detonate" the plutonium without a shitload of conventional explosives surrounding it. That would be the tons of stuff in the bomb casing, back there in the tunnel.

When they removed the "plutonium core" from the bomb, I thought "Well, obviously there's going to be no explosion, then. So what the hell are they going to do with the plutonium?" (And, presumably, U-235.)

Question: do the writers honestly believe that a bomb like that is 20 tons of decoration and packing material enclosing the actual part that goes boom? Did they learn science from Roadrunner cartoons?

When such a major plot device is so completely, unnecessarily stupid, it makes it a little hard to take anything in the show seriously.

2) Since Dr. Chang apparently loses his hand after the interference of our intrepid idiot heroes, this lends support to the idea that all they've achieved is another causal loop -- causing the very thing they were trying to prevent, just like when Sayid shot young Ben -- and that we've still got a single timeline with a predetermined outcome.

[cmyk]

I sort of had some of the same issues. I wondered if Faraday, in '77, freaking out about pointing rifles around a Hydrogen Bomb was really warranted, since it can't go off unless they trigger the atomic bomb deep inside. A rifle can't do that. Maybe he was just bluffing to get the gun out of his face.

As for the US bringing Jughead there in the first place... I dunno. All I know is they did do testing in the south-pacific around that time, so who knows what the story is behind that.

But as for setting off the trigger itself, I thought it was possible if it was more like the Little Boy design, with a gun-trigger. The outer shell did look more like Fat Man, and yet it was supposed to be a hydrogen bomb. I'm just not that familiar with those designs. Couldn't a Little Boy type uranium-235 trigger work, by itself? How much explosives would be required to set off just the fissile part of the weapon?

Also, I'm left wondering, just because we saw Juliet hit the trigger with a rock, and it went all WHITE at the end, doesn't mean that was only an atomic blast... It could be just a coincidence of the climax of whatever this "incident" was by releasing this "mysterious" EM radiation. It's all kind of silly, really. Or maybe it was a combination of the two, as some others suggested.

[Baldwin]

The bomb in the show should be a cryogenic thermonuclear device. About 21 tons. Most of the space is taken up by the shaped charges of conventional expolosive. You can shoot the bomb with a rifle all day, if you want. In order to have a thermonuclear explosion, first you have to detonate the conventional explosive; and not by shootiong it, either. The charges have to be set off in a particular way by the electrical system, so that they create a symmetrical implosion of the plutonium and U-235, compressing it enough to cause a fission explosion (like the Hiroshima bomb). This is already an atomic bomb, but it's only a trigger to compress the liquid deuterium enough to create a fusion explosion. That's the big one, converting something like 1% of the deuterium into pure, buttery energy.

If you could actually disassemble the bomb and take out the fissionable material, I imagine it would be a big sphere. In any case, what you've now got is radioactive fissionable material with a sphere of liquid deuterium at its center. (Or it would be liquid if it were still cryogenically maintained after 20 years, which wouldn't be the case.)

Note: I could be wrong about both these points: I think the cryogenic bomb was already considered impractical by 1957, and they were testing bombs using solid lithium hydride. Also, depending on the design, the fusionable material might be physically separate from the fission bomb.

But in any case, the fissionable material should be spherical; no idea how heavy. And, what are they supposed to do with it? It's not an atomic bomb, because there's nothing to trigger the fission reaction. There's no chemical explosive; that's still in the big giant metal thing back in the tunnel. You can't set it to "detonate on impact"; there's nothing to detonate.

This isn't nitpicking. They made that hydrogen bomb such a major plot device that it's practically a character; so a basic understanding of how it works isn't too much to ask.

ETA: I'm sure there're folks here with much deeper understanding of nuclear devices than I have, and I've been going by memory instead of looking stuff up. Please correct me if I'm wrong about stuff.

[hatesfreedom]

It's a very complex show at this point and there should be no surprise that there are a hefty amount of bloopers and errors each episode.

http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Inc ... ts_1_%26_2

I think its pretty shitty they made the bomb such a big part without understanding the technical limitations of it, but at the same time for all I know it could be a thermonuclear bomb from the future or a different dimension, or even changed by whatever nano-monster creature they run into that week. Lost is not one of those shows you want to go into thinking you'll understand everything that happens. Also, why'd they kill Juliet :-(

[Baldwin]

Also, why'd they kill Juliet :-(

I don't know, l'il ferret. I also don't know why all the steel scaffolding and stuff at the bottom of the drillwell was so intact. If I recall, the strength of a magnetic field is inversely proportional to the cube of the distance between the source and the object affected; if the field was strong enough to pull all that stuff into the hole from a hundred feet down, then at the bottom of the shaft it should be fantastically strong. I'd think all the material would be crushed into a metallic mass with organic liquid (formerly Juliet) in the midst of it.

Again, not nitpicking. When you make magnetic fields a major plot device, referred to over and over, they should make some kind of sense.