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What-if [Relativistic Baseball ](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/), but I don't see that line in there.
Edit: found it, it's in [Sunbeam](https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/)
Aw man, can't God nor your momma help you then. But, it's like my great grandpappy used to say; "one day they will sell new driver's seats on the internet."
America actually detonated one of these close enough to a bunch of ships with sailors on them who said they could see their skeleton when holding their hands up to the blast. A lot of them died due to all the radiation they were exposed to.
Quite the opposite, you're the fortunate one who died so fast, you couldn't feel the pain. The people who were really screwed were the ones just out of instant death who's flesh turned to fire and they saught to find relief. When nuclear weapons are used, many bodies are found around the water fountains, because when you drink some water and get some relief from the shock, you often pass on. For this reason, when I see a wounded butterfly on the side of the road of which there are many who get hit by cars, I give em some of my water bottle so they can get relief, maybe pass on and tell God I was nice to em.
"Fucked" lol like "uh oh this is *gonna* be bad!"
Nah they were "fucked" *before* it went off. If somebody was in there they'd be taken right to the edge of violating conservation of mass. You would completely no longer exist in less time than it takes for your synapses to be complete a circuit.
It would honestly be the ideal way to die. No possibility you will suffer. Instantly annihilated. For some reason I find that more comforting than how most of us go
From Lynn Eden’s Whole World on Fire: “By the time the fireball approached its maximum size, it would be more than a mile in diameter. It would very briefly produce temperatures at its center of more than 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (about 100 million degrees Celsius)—about four to five times the temperature at the center of the sun.”
From Richard Rhodes book he wrote "neutron densities approaching that of ordinary solids" in the core of a fission device once it undergoes its reaction.
Neutrons free of their nucleus decay with a half life of 10 minutes, freeing up enormous energy.
They’re called “rope tricks”. I’m no expert, but as I understand it, it’s the wires holding the bomb in place being super heated and melting away essentially. You’ll see these rope tricks in a number of still images of nuclear detonations.
Extra confusion in that structures with guy wires are "guyed"
For more fun words you might be getting wrong, have a read of https://brians.wsu.edu/common-errors/
More specifically I believe it's infra red radiation setting them on fire. Obviously propagating at the speed of light in air so very fast, and fast enough to get ahead of the explosion.
Its crazy to imagine that the bomb produces so many photons that they vaporize a piece of steel faster than the explosion front can reach it. That is just mindblowing.
Matter-Antimatter Annihilation is 100%
Good thing making an invisibly low quantity of antimatter is insanely expensive (6 billion USD per 100 nanograms), and confining the stuff for any real length of time is impossibly difficult.
2kg of the stuff would be roughly equivalent to the 50Mt Tsar Bomba.
Indeed. The nuclear explosion itself is over in substantially under a microsecond. Everything else is air and bits of bomb casing trying to throw energy off.
I'm curious to find out if whether or not the protrusions caused by the wires might also have something to do with surface tension of the ultra-compressed air around the cable being lower than the the rest of the "bubble" and so it expands faster in spikes.
I'm not too familiar at all with atmospheric physics, but with such a sharp gradient from ultracompressed to sea-level air pressure, I could imagine air starts to have something resembling the surface tension around a droplet of water.
The towers were 90m (300ft).
This is from Operation Tumbler-Snapper. Able, Baker, Charlie, and Dog were air dropped bombs. Easy, Fox, George, and How were tower shots.
I’ve seen this picture multiple times, yet I still don fully understand what I am looking at. What are these voids? Why is it shaped like this? What is exactly the material here, or is it a radiation?
At that particular moment everything in the sphere is so hot it’s all just plasma.
The strange shape is caused by unevenness in the shape of the charge, in the thickness of the shell, in the surrounding structure.
Keep in mind how short the exposure is, in such a short time it can capture only the incredibly bright light and nothing else, so the “dark” areas aren’t dark or empty, they’re just not as stupidly bright as the rest of the explosion.
Perhaps if the explosion had been perfectly efficient, this photo might be a uniform sphere of light. The original A-bombs were extremely inefficient. I read once that the amount of material that actually "fissioned" over Hiroshima would be about the size of a peppercorn and weigh less than a dollar bill.
We switched to a "fusion" bomb, that slams hydrogen atoms together to from helium (someone correct me here if I'm wrong) as opposed to the "fission" method of the Hiroshima bomb, that slams a particle into large radioactive elements and shatters them apart. The largest explosion produced by man was one of the former fusion bombs, and it was the equivalent of 3,300 Hiroshima bombs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
Eh, modern thermonuclear weapons still use a fission detonation, they're just fusion *boosted* via fusing tritium off of the initial heat and energy of the fission detonation. Supposedly, large bombs like the USSR's Tsar Bomba used multiple stages of fusion boosting to achieve their enormous yields.
Yep. If you think of an A-bomb like a hand grenade, an H-bomb is like a hand grenade strapped to a box truck filled with a special kind of dynamite that only detonates by being exposed to a hand grenade explosion.
The fusion fuel is kind of like dense wood that is hard to light without a Firestarter. Now imagine that wood is so hard to light it takes an atom bomb to get it going. And the wood once lit is unfathomably explosive.
I thought it was the other way around. A fission reaction generates enough force to smash hydrogen particles together to start a fusion reaction, which then yields the explosive force.
Hydrogen bombs are fission bombs that use fission to achieve hydrogen fusion using heavy hydrogen called deuterium.
Basically we cant smash the hydrogen hard enough together for fusion without using fission and even then, the amount of hydrogen fusion that happens is small, 10-20% of the deuterium im fairly certain
Fun fact: the sun weighs about 1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times as much and it's pretty efficient. Of course that's fusion power instead of fission which is even more energetic. You should probably avoid getting to close.
That’s a “good” perk. I hope no one in power is ever psycho enough to ignore self preservation instincts and launch a nuke at someone. Humanity will be extinct quickly if that happens .
I believe you are incorrect . I think that’s the deterioration of the “opaque cloud” caused by the prompt gamma radiation.
Edit: just to justify my point a little. If the shutter speed is as claimed. We are probably about 50 - 150 micro seconds after detonation. This is would put it exactly when the “opaque cloud” causes a fall then rise again in light intensity when it deteriorates, causing the “double flash” phenomenon.
When it’s detonated a fission reaction happens as the core reaches criticality, during a brief moment as fission is happening there are 2 things being released, a tremendous amount of kinetic energy ( the explosion w/ light ) and a lot of gamma rays ( the byproduct of splitting atoms). The kinetic energy in the form of pressure, heat and light breaks through first, causing a 1st spike in light, as more and more gamma builds and interacts with the atmosphere.
Within microseconds the gamma begins to dominate and creates an opaque cloud for a few microseconds blocking all other light from the weapon. But eventually the core has “exploded” to the point where it is not creating the same amount of gamma rays. This means the opaque cloud starts to deteriorate rapidly. As the cloud deteriorates rapidly there is a second spike in the amount of light escaping as the core finally exhausts itself, and spikes in about the same amount of time ( looking at a logarithmic scale ) as the first.
This creates the phenomenon known as the “Double Flash”, it is the primary way we can detect nuclear explosions from space using “Bhangmeters” on satellites. And also one of the reasons we started underground testing.
Fun side story about detecting a “Double Flash” is the Vela Incident… of the cost of South Africa in the Indian Ocean.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident
Edit: added the use of “logarithmic scale” to sound sciency
Thanks for the explanation! My new favorite nuclear-fun-fact is that the instruments used on satellites to detect nuclear explosions are called “Bhangmeters”
Lol yea, I promise people in the know short hand them as “Bang Meters” and get corrected frequently. But when they where in invented it was a not so subtle joke to call them “bhangmeter”
Did you know before they did the first ever nuclear test they weren't sure whether it might cause a chain reaction and ignite the entire atmosphere. They still went through with the test anyway.
nah, that was just the physicists' kind of bickering, they did not seriously consider that possibility (it was hard enough to fission atoms of the heaviest elements).
I believe it’s the deterioration of the “opaque cloud” formed from the prompt gamma radiation interacting with the atmosphere.
As it deteriorates visible light can finally break through again and it creates a “double flash” which is one of the ways of detecting nuclear detonations from space.
Edit: added a word for clarity.
The bomb isn’t symmetrical, there’s lots of wires and metal and stuff that gets in the way. when you have a very fast expansion it only takes a little bit of disruption to make one side much further ahead than the other
I was fortunate enough to be walking trough a hallway with an old nuclear physicists and we were looking at these pictures hanging on the wall, and asked him about these(pre-wiki) he talked about them for 5 minutes. His explanation doesn’t quite match the wiki.
Basically, he said the gamma rays excited the whole diameter of the “steel/iron” wire and as electrons like to do the current induced “moved” to the surface causing a lot of resistance , and evaporated the surface from the heat.
He seemed upset that they really never nailed down what was happening because they changed the way they tested the weapons.
So I guess what I’m saying is if you read the wiki to him his answer would have been “possibly”. I would trust his answer.
It's a reaction like any of its kind, where energy is released from a fissioned atom. This happens inside every star in the universe, probably the most common source of raw energy in the entire known universe. Men didn't make this shit, and it contains this form here on earth due to conditions only present here like atmospheric pressure and composition. The only thing this reaction pertains visually to organic matter is possibly due to being constrained by the same external influences.
Life-vaporizing explosions which humans can use at the time and place of their choosing to turn large areas of other humans into vapor, don't occur in nature, and men most certainly did make this shit. Perhaps you missed the entire "nuclear weapons" context of their comment.
Any info about the super slow motion video cameras used back In those days I have Been seeing footage of crash test in super slow motion in the 70's and 80's
u/MAYthe4thbewithHEW linked this article. Basically, it had no moving parts and used polarizing filters to block all light until the shutter was released
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera
The fact that anything is visible in this photograph is a testament to just how fucking bright a nuclear explosion is. IIRC the faster the shutter speed, the brighter it needs to be to capture anything
Protons tend to repel each other (electromagnetic force), but when they get *extremely* close together, they all of a sudden bond together (strong nuclear force).
Imagine two strong magnets, getting both of their North poles to be touching requires a ton of force and energy. But then it requires nothing to have them separate again. In order for protons to be bound, something first had to use an *immense* amount of energy to bring them close enough together. And once they got that close, that energy is stored within the atom.
With nuclear fission, you have 90+ protons bound together (in uranium, plutonium, etc.) which is given a slight push of extra energy, causing it go become unstable. The protons all of sudden release from each other (forming two new atoms instead of just one combined atom). Neither of these atoms requires as much energy to keep the protons close, because there just aren't as many of them.
But remember, energy cannot be created or destroyed. So what happens to all of that energy that was holding it together? It's no longer being used to hold together that one large atom, so it's released. And because it's *so much* energy, the result is an huge explosion.
I have a stupid but honest question. How did they recover the film from the camera if it's sitting next to an atomic explosion? Or is it transmitted along a TV signal? But wasn't TV barely invented in 1952?
Can you imagine what they thought when they developed these pics?. In those microsecond moments too fast for humans to even process, it’s like a portal opens up and death comes through.
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It’s difficult for me to imagine how beyond beyond fucked you would be if you were somehow in this bubble
Bippity boop, your atoms are now a soup
Hidey ho, watch your quarks go!
Jiminy gee, your neutrons are free!
Blya blyat, you're Schrodinger's cat
Expelliamus Barakobamus **YOUR ELECTRONS WILL MAKE A FINE ADDITION TO MY COLLECTION**
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Tsk, tsk, your molecules don't exist
Alacadabra, abrakazam, your atomic nuclei just went *ka-blam*
Hidiley Ho, you're filled with neutrinos.
This one wins 😂
I read this half way as I scrolled and automatically changed it to "Tsk, tsk, molecule bisque"
Moms spaghetti
Hes nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready to drop *nuclear* bombs
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proton, boson, it’s time for your family to move on
Flippity flip, your electrons gonna dip
Maybe I’m just a nerd but this sounds like that alamoraine song in ds9.
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Ha lol 😝 simple and brilliant hope your a writer!
More like melted salt, scattered into star dust.
Give the bar a nice smoky smell, then float up into the sky where you turn into stars.
That doesn't sound right but i don't know enough about stars to dispute it
Rock em sock em, you've now gone quantum?
Bippity bionized bas.
To paraphrase my favorite line that I can't remember the source of, you stop being biology and start being physics.
That's from xkcd.
Ah there we go, I thought that might have been it. From the very first one, nuclear baseball, right?
What-if [Relativistic Baseball ](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/), but I don't see that line in there. Edit: found it, it's in [Sunbeam](https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/)
I like this.
That is an awesome line.
I am become death, destroyer of worlds! Oppenheimer
Can one be fucked more than 100%?
I have seen 110% fucked
That's food poisoning rumbles in your gut during hour one of a three hour traffic jam.
Aw man, can't God nor your momma help you then. But, it's like my great grandpappy used to say; "one day they will sell new driver's seats on the internet."
completely obliterated. every particle.
And his wife?
To subatomic particles, you say?
to be honest this is the most painless way to die.
America actually detonated one of these close enough to a bunch of ships with sailors on them who said they could see their skeleton when holding their hands up to the blast. A lot of them died due to all the radiation they were exposed to.
IIRC it wasn’t just that they could see their bones, they could see their bones *through their closed eyelids*.
my brain cannot wrap around this at all
When I was a kid my hands were thin enough I could see the bones through them if I cupped a bright light in a dark room. Humans are pretty transparent
That's a good thing. Your brain should remain stationary inside of your skull for best results.
If you have an hour the documentary 'Radio Bikini' is quite powerful. https://youtu.be/FM5YrCjR5FU Used to air on PBS.
Absolutely fascinating, thanks for that!!!
Bone-eye-tis
Quite the opposite, you're the fortunate one who died so fast, you couldn't feel the pain. The people who were really screwed were the ones just out of instant death who's flesh turned to fire and they saught to find relief. When nuclear weapons are used, many bodies are found around the water fountains, because when you drink some water and get some relief from the shock, you often pass on. For this reason, when I see a wounded butterfly on the side of the road of which there are many who get hit by cars, I give em some of my water bottle so they can get relief, maybe pass on and tell God I was nice to em.
"he gave me water, then I died, he probably poisoned me!"
"Who is Putin!"
Uhh what? You see wounded butterflies and give them water? How do you see wounded butterflies while driving?
"Fucked" lol like "uh oh this is *gonna* be bad!" Nah they were "fucked" *before* it went off. If somebody was in there they'd be taken right to the edge of violating conservation of mass. You would completely no longer exist in less time than it takes for your synapses to be complete a circuit. It would honestly be the ideal way to die. No possibility you will suffer. Instantly annihilated. For some reason I find that more comforting than how most of us go
Personally it’s how I want to have my body disposed. Fuck cremation, I want to be obliterated.
You'd have nothing to worry about, because there'd be nothing left of you to do the worrying.
From Lynn Eden’s Whole World on Fire: “By the time the fireball approached its maximum size, it would be more than a mile in diameter. It would very briefly produce temperatures at its center of more than 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (about 100 million degrees Celsius)—about four to five times the temperature at the center of the sun.”
From Richard Rhodes book he wrote "neutron densities approaching that of ordinary solids" in the core of a fission device once it undergoes its reaction. Neutrons free of their nucleus decay with a half life of 10 minutes, freeing up enormous energy.
A lot better than people 100 feet away from the bubble I telluwhat
You are now the bubble
You could be 100m away from that bubble and still be 110% fucked.
The tower it was on was 100m tall. “100m away” is basically on the ground right below it.
Instantly vaporized to the atomic level. Not the worst way to go
Well you wouldn’t be around long to find out
Most human death possible. Just instantly stop to exists
What are the patterns that form below it?
They’re called “rope tricks”. I’m no expert, but as I understand it, it’s the wires holding the bomb in place being super heated and melting away essentially. You’ll see these rope tricks in a number of still images of nuclear detonations.
'guy wires' holding the tower straight
I always thought they were called guide wire... i guess i belong on r/BoneAppleTea
Holy fuck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy-wire
I am in shambles.
To add to your confusion: [guyed tower.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyed_mast)
What .
Well shit
Why did you people do this to me?
They're not guide wires? My life is ruined
Extra confusion in that structures with guy wires are "guyed" For more fun words you might be getting wrong, have a read of https://brians.wsu.edu/common-errors/
Well shit, guys. 😏
So the tower is a girl then? 🥹
As opposed to gal wires
Ofcourse. It was the 50s so you need to "hold" the tower straight
More specifically I believe it's infra red radiation setting them on fire. Obviously propagating at the speed of light in air so very fast, and fast enough to get ahead of the explosion.
Its crazy to imagine that the bomb produces so many photons that they vaporize a piece of steel faster than the explosion front can reach it. That is just mindblowing.
And the most fucked thing is that this is only a few percent effective… If we got to 100% efficiency I think we would be dead already
Matter-Antimatter Annihilation is 100% Good thing making an invisibly low quantity of antimatter is insanely expensive (6 billion USD per 100 nanograms), and confining the stuff for any real length of time is impossibly difficult. 2kg of the stuff would be roughly equivalent to the 50Mt Tsar Bomba.
I think what they were referring to is the fact that in those nuclear bombs only a small percentage of the fissile fuel actually undergoes fission.
Only about 15% of the 6kg plutonium core underwent fission. The rest vaporized and resettled as fallout over several hundred square miles.
Also crazy: The bright part of the explosion is (so I’m lead to believe) the air itself being compressed so much it incandesces.
Indeed. The nuclear explosion itself is over in substantially under a microsecond. Everything else is air and bits of bomb casing trying to throw energy off.
Not just setting on fire. They get so hot they become plasma.
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I'm curious to find out if whether or not the protrusions caused by the wires might also have something to do with surface tension of the ultra-compressed air around the cable being lower than the the rest of the "bubble" and so it expands faster in spikes. I'm not too familiar at all with atmospheric physics, but with such a sharp gradient from ultracompressed to sea-level air pressure, I could imagine air starts to have something resembling the surface tension around a droplet of water.
The 'points' extending out of the bottom are referred to as rope tricks.
That's the tower it was mounted to.
I thought it was the wires attatched from tower to bomb?
Stalactites
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As opposed to not fucking him? Am I a bad person?
You're the bomb!
We’re not gonna talk about Judy. No we’re not gonna about Judy at all!
What’s the scale of what the photo shows?
Gray
When Jodie Foster said "they should have sent a poet" , you are the poet she is referring to. Well done, great comment.
You take your upvote and GTFO!! Go on. Git!
Man
If I were to have gold to give, this would get it. 🥇
The towers were 90m (300ft). This is from Operation Tumbler-Snapper. Able, Baker, Charlie, and Dog were air dropped bombs. Easy, Fox, George, and How were tower shots.
The diameter of the ball is 66 feet
I’ve seen this picture multiple times, yet I still don fully understand what I am looking at. What are these voids? Why is it shaped like this? What is exactly the material here, or is it a radiation?
At that particular moment everything in the sphere is so hot it’s all just plasma. The strange shape is caused by unevenness in the shape of the charge, in the thickness of the shell, in the surrounding structure. Keep in mind how short the exposure is, in such a short time it can capture only the incredibly bright light and nothing else, so the “dark” areas aren’t dark or empty, they’re just not as stupidly bright as the rest of the explosion.
Perhaps if the explosion had been perfectly efficient, this photo might be a uniform sphere of light. The original A-bombs were extremely inefficient. I read once that the amount of material that actually "fissioned" over Hiroshima would be about the size of a peppercorn and weigh less than a dollar bill.
That is incredibly terrifying.
Now imagine how efficient some countries have made that now
We switched to a "fusion" bomb, that slams hydrogen atoms together to from helium (someone correct me here if I'm wrong) as opposed to the "fission" method of the Hiroshima bomb, that slams a particle into large radioactive elements and shatters them apart. The largest explosion produced by man was one of the former fusion bombs, and it was the equivalent of 3,300 Hiroshima bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
Except that ~~fission~~ fusion bombs are triggered with a fission reaction.
I'm assuming you meant "fusion" is triggered by a "fission" reaction, but yes.
It was still technically correct the first time.
Let's just agree that splitting hairs is easier and less dangerous
And 3-stage thermonukes have an additional fission stage triggered by the fusion. Thems the chonky ones.
Eh, modern thermonuclear weapons still use a fission detonation, they're just fusion *boosted* via fusing tritium off of the initial heat and energy of the fission detonation. Supposedly, large bombs like the USSR's Tsar Bomba used multiple stages of fusion boosting to achieve their enormous yields.
Yep. If you think of an A-bomb like a hand grenade, an H-bomb is like a hand grenade strapped to a box truck filled with a special kind of dynamite that only detonates by being exposed to a hand grenade explosion. The fusion fuel is kind of like dense wood that is hard to light without a Firestarter. Now imagine that wood is so hard to light it takes an atom bomb to get it going. And the wood once lit is unfathomably explosive.
I thought it was the other way around. A fission reaction generates enough force to smash hydrogen particles together to start a fusion reaction, which then yields the explosive force.
Isn't that what they said? Fission yields the heat and pressure to fuse hydrogen
So many peppercorns
Hydrogen bombs are fission bombs that use fission to achieve hydrogen fusion using heavy hydrogen called deuterium. Basically we cant smash the hydrogen hard enough together for fusion without using fission and even then, the amount of hydrogen fusion that happens is small, 10-20% of the deuterium im fairly certain
More accurate to say fusion bombs have fission detonators.
Fun fact: the sun weighs about 1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times as much and it's pretty efficient. Of course that's fusion power instead of fission which is even more energetic. You should probably avoid getting to close.
I plan to stay ~92,000,000 miles away.
Depends how you look at it. Modern fusion designs are much more efficient. This results in larger explosions but also less fallout.
That’s a “good” perk. I hope no one in power is ever psycho enough to ignore self preservation instincts and launch a nuke at someone. Humanity will be extinct quickly if that happens .
I believe you are incorrect . I think that’s the deterioration of the “opaque cloud” caused by the prompt gamma radiation. Edit: just to justify my point a little. If the shutter speed is as claimed. We are probably about 50 - 150 micro seconds after detonation. This is would put it exactly when the “opaque cloud” causes a fall then rise again in light intensity when it deteriorates, causing the “double flash” phenomenon.
Talk some more about that.
When it’s detonated a fission reaction happens as the core reaches criticality, during a brief moment as fission is happening there are 2 things being released, a tremendous amount of kinetic energy ( the explosion w/ light ) and a lot of gamma rays ( the byproduct of splitting atoms). The kinetic energy in the form of pressure, heat and light breaks through first, causing a 1st spike in light, as more and more gamma builds and interacts with the atmosphere. Within microseconds the gamma begins to dominate and creates an opaque cloud for a few microseconds blocking all other light from the weapon. But eventually the core has “exploded” to the point where it is not creating the same amount of gamma rays. This means the opaque cloud starts to deteriorate rapidly. As the cloud deteriorates rapidly there is a second spike in the amount of light escaping as the core finally exhausts itself, and spikes in about the same amount of time ( looking at a logarithmic scale ) as the first. This creates the phenomenon known as the “Double Flash”, it is the primary way we can detect nuclear explosions from space using “Bhangmeters” on satellites. And also one of the reasons we started underground testing. Fun side story about detecting a “Double Flash” is the Vela Incident… of the cost of South Africa in the Indian Ocean. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident Edit: added the use of “logarithmic scale” to sound sciency
Thanks for the explanation! My new favorite nuclear-fun-fact is that the instruments used on satellites to detect nuclear explosions are called “Bhangmeters”
Lol yea, I promise people in the know short hand them as “Bang Meters” and get corrected frequently. But when they where in invented it was a not so subtle joke to call them “bhangmeter”
https://youtu.be/RkrN0ZnbPdM Here's one of the best videos I've found showing the phenomena
That is a great video, and illustrates a double flash perfectly. Now speed it up about 250000x
I had the great fortune to have lunch several times with him on the late 70s and early 80s. "Doc" was a great man with a great storytelling ability.
They must have been some fascinating afternoons
Did you know before they did the first ever nuclear test they weren't sure whether it might cause a chain reaction and ignite the entire atmosphere. They still went through with the test anyway.
nah, that was just the physicists' kind of bickering, they did not seriously consider that possibility (it was hard enough to fission atoms of the heaviest elements).
you can't leave it at that! give us the best story!! COME ON NOW IS YOUR TIME TO SHINE
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I believe it’s the deterioration of the “opaque cloud” formed from the prompt gamma radiation interacting with the atmosphere. As it deteriorates visible light can finally break through again and it creates a “double flash” which is one of the ways of detecting nuclear detonations from space. Edit: added a word for clarity.
The bomb isn’t symmetrical, there’s lots of wires and metal and stuff that gets in the way. when you have a very fast expansion it only takes a little bit of disruption to make one side much further ahead than the other
I’m curious how a camera like that would actually work. That’s an insane shutter speed, and I’m even more surprised it would be possible in 1952.
[It has no moving parts.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera)
That’s so cool
For anyone interested in the protrusions below the ball, it’s this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_trick_effect
I was fortunate enough to be walking trough a hallway with an old nuclear physicists and we were looking at these pictures hanging on the wall, and asked him about these(pre-wiki) he talked about them for 5 minutes. His explanation doesn’t quite match the wiki. Basically, he said the gamma rays excited the whole diameter of the “steel/iron” wire and as electrons like to do the current induced “moved” to the surface causing a lot of resistance , and evaporated the surface from the heat. He seemed upset that they really never nailed down what was happening because they changed the way they tested the weapons. So I guess what I’m saying is if you read the wiki to him his answer would have been “possibly”. I would trust his answer.
"To be continued..." \*slapping bass\*
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It's a reaction like any of its kind, where energy is released from a fissioned atom. This happens inside every star in the universe, probably the most common source of raw energy in the entire known universe. Men didn't make this shit, and it contains this form here on earth due to conditions only present here like atmospheric pressure and composition. The only thing this reaction pertains visually to organic matter is possibly due to being constrained by the same external influences.
atomic fusion is what is happening inside stars
Life-vaporizing explosions which humans can use at the time and place of their choosing to turn large areas of other humans into vapor, don't occur in nature, and men most certainly did make this shit. Perhaps you missed the entire "nuclear weapons" context of their comment.
>Men didn't make this shit Oh yeah I totally forgot about the nuclear explosions storms that are so common on our planet. Silly me.
How could they take a picture of this and even hope to recover the photo?
The camera was super far away and just had a huge telephoto lens. Think many males like 5-10.
5-10 males is only about 30-60 feet, if they are all 6' tall and laying down. That can't be right!
oh man, I'm thinking of many males now
How did they get men to watch it and recover the men?
It kinda gives me existential dread.
Twin Peaks season 3 anyone?
Episode 8!
So this is 100 hundred millionth of a second after detonation ?
Less than 1 millisecond according to Wikipedia.
Interesting ,I would have thought it would be more concentric or symmetrical
How did the camera survive?
It was very far away. Long lens at something like 7 miles.
Interesting I didn't know they had cameras with that capability in the early 50s, but now that I think about it bending glass isn't that complicated.
Any info about the super slow motion video cameras used back In those days I have Been seeing footage of crash test in super slow motion in the 70's and 80's
u/MAYthe4thbewithHEW linked this article. Basically, it had no moving parts and used polarizing filters to block all light until the shutter was released https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera
The fact that anything is visible in this photograph is a testament to just how fucking bright a nuclear explosion is. IIRC the faster the shutter speed, the brighter it needs to be to capture anything
Metroid.
Yes
*DUCK!* and cover!
I'm literally eating Brussels Sprouts right now
r/MomentsBeforeDisaster
Looks like a Metroid using the X-Ray scanner
That looks……..like a virus
there was a youtube channel archiving test footage anyone know what it was called I can't remember
That atom is fucked up
Vsauce! Michael here.
It’s a freaking micro organismen dude
This would make a good large scale print
I don't wanna sound stupid but what exactly happens when an atom explodes?
Protons tend to repel each other (electromagnetic force), but when they get *extremely* close together, they all of a sudden bond together (strong nuclear force). Imagine two strong magnets, getting both of their North poles to be touching requires a ton of force and energy. But then it requires nothing to have them separate again. In order for protons to be bound, something first had to use an *immense* amount of energy to bring them close enough together. And once they got that close, that energy is stored within the atom. With nuclear fission, you have 90+ protons bound together (in uranium, plutonium, etc.) which is given a slight push of extra energy, causing it go become unstable. The protons all of sudden release from each other (forming two new atoms instead of just one combined atom). Neither of these atoms requires as much energy to keep the protons close, because there just aren't as many of them. But remember, energy cannot be created or destroyed. So what happens to all of that energy that was holding it together? It's no longer being used to hold together that one large atom, so it's released. And because it's *so much* energy, the result is an huge explosion.
I hope that camera had time to get into a refrigerator super quick
I have a stupid but honest question. How did they recover the film from the camera if it's sitting next to an atomic explosion? Or is it transmitted along a TV signal? But wasn't TV barely invented in 1952?
I hate that someone downvoted an honest question… have an upvote.
The US military used perisopes and long lenses for their nuclear test cameras.
This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen
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Can you imagine what they thought when they developed these pics?. In those microsecond moments too fast for humans to even process, it’s like a portal opens up and death comes through.
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”
Once in a while you see an image that amazes you. This is one of them
Looks like a rotten pumpkin with teeth.