Posted on 04/18/2016 7:17:04 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Most everyone has a pretty good idea of what an atomic explosion looks like. Through images and video, we know the flash, the fireball, the mushroom cloud. Seeing it all in person is quite different, however.
One of the few firsthand accounts immortalized to paper comes courtesy of the inimitable Richard Feynman, who was present for the very first detonation of a nuclear weapon. The test, codenamed "Trinity" was carried out on July 16, 1945 in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico. The 20-kiloton blast was the culmination of years of work by the scientists of the Manhattan Project. One of those scientists, the 27-year-old Feynman, sought to view his handiwork with his own eyes: They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty miles away, you couldn't see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can't go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing.
Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said, "That's not it. That's an after-image." So I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange. Clouds form and disappear again--from the compression and expansion of the shock wave.
Finally, a big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it's a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out, the heat.
All this took about one minute. It was a series from bright to dark, and I had seen it. I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn thing--the first Trinity test. Everybody else had dark glasses, and the people at six miles couldn't see it because they were all told to lie on the floor. I'm probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye.
Actually, Feynman wasn't the only person who chose not to don their safety glasses that day. Ralph Carlisle Smith, the future assistant director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, also observed the explosion with the naked eye. Here's what he saw:
How about hundreds of thousands? Or for that matter, how about one?
I always remember the remarks of the venerable philosopher, Jonathan Brandmeir ... OK a wise-ass DJ. He was discussing the conundrum of proportionate response one day, for some reason, and said IIRC, “OK, maybe Hiroshima was worse than Pearl Harbor. Maybe it was a hundred times worse ... maybe it was a MILLION times worse ... but they started it.”
Thank You, Professor.
During the war my mom lived with her aunt and uncle in El Paso, TX about 100 miles south of White Sands. Her uncle was outside in the yard in the early morning dark when the sky lit up as if the sun were rising in the north. Hard to hide a test that big.
And now N Korea and Iran will have this technology and don’t care if their citizens are lost in retaliation.
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
I happened to look at the photo upside down, and what I saw sent a shiver down my spine. It looked like a demonic creature with two huge black horns emerging from its head.
Very awesome--but not exactly in a good way!
Yup. It’s a big mistake to assume that our adversaries have the same values that we do. That was part and parcel of Dubya’s theory on reconstructing the Arab world in our image.
It's a page-turner you can't put down. You'll know more than a little something about Physics all of a sudden after reading it too.
[ Amazing that before the first test, they knew what to expect as far as light, heat and blast radius. ]
They knew roughly how much matter was gonna be converted to energy, so they had a very good idea.
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1945 technology. I hope people remember that it still works.
They were correct in believing that. However the number may have been closer to 500,000.
Bfl
We "saved" Western Civilization, only to lose it in our universities just two generations later...
:(
Probably one of the more practical applications of E = mc2.
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As Feynman said in his lecture book, the fission bombs were a lesson in the strength of the electromagnetic force.
Richard Feynman is the star of the Feynman Lecture Series on Physics. Really a great series if you get a chance to see them.
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According to an FR post a few months ago, they are now available online for free.
They knew roughly how much matter was gonna be converted to energy, so they had a very good idea.
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They knew about the strength of the electromagnetic force. The energy of a fission bomb comes from protons repulsing each other.
Fact!
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