Atomic bomb question?

Yes, atoms can be split but your friend didn't explain too well.

Atoms are made of a nucleus with electrons around the outside. You can remove electrons by rubbing your hair with a wool sweater so technically that's splitting atoms.

The nucleus is made of neutrons and protons and there's nothing you can do in chemistry or electricity or with a hammer to split those. Neutrons and protons are made of quarks, and that's even harder to split.

An atom bomb uses a radioactive heavy element like uranium or plutonium that emits neutrons. The neutrons can be captured by other nuclei and that makes them unstable - too many neutrons, like a kid who's eaten too many hot dogs and tries just one more. So it splits in half, and emits more neutrons, which it other atoms. If enough get hit you have a chain reaction and everything gets hot, i.e. you have a nuclear explosion. It all works because the uranium atoms have too much energy stored up inside, and they'd be more stable if they were half the size. Kind of like the hot-dog eating contest turning into a barf fest.

Lots on wikipedia etc. I'm sure

Atoms cannot be split easily. Certainly not by any chemical means.

However radioactive atoms do split, and when they do they give off energy. Atomic bombs work by getting a lot of these splitting atoms in one place, which essentially concentrates the energy. Putting "critical mass" into a web-search engine will probably give you details.

You are both wrong.

When he used chemistry to explain how atoms are split, your friend was wrong. Chemistry cannot split atoms; it takes physics devices to do that. In chemistry mass is invariant.. In physics it can be converted into energy.

And you are wrong because atoms can and do get split. We do it daily in nuke power plants where controlled chain reactions of atoms splitting create the energy to drive the generators for electric power. The process is called nuclear fission; look it up on the web.

It is a chain reaction whatever it does .Nucleotopic energy is always an interesting conversation .Where will it go from here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission