alt Hacker News> instead of turning the human body into what could be considered "nothing"
You can't turn material into "nothing". At best you can turn it into equivalent amount of energy if you collide it with antimatter.
That being said I don't really feel the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration". In both cases you stop being biology and start being physics in a subjective instant. (at least from the perspective of your own central nervous system, which has not enough time to even detect that something has happened)
In both cases you go from a living, breathing, laughing, thinking human being into contaminants in the air or surfaces around you.
What do you feel is the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration"? Is it about how big your largest continuous chunk is? Where do you draw the line?
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By "nothing" is that there isn't a piece of you that is still you. Disintegration means that we can still find pieces of "you" in the environment. Not sure if there's any recoverable DNA left thought, that was most likely destroyed by the other waves of the atomic bomb.
the specific definition is that vaporization turns solids and liquids into gas or plasma, while disintegration means being broken into pieces. the difference between a gas and a solid, and also fine solids suspended in a gas, is fairly well defined.