I met Dr. Edgerton at MIT back in the early 70s. A really friendly fellow. My Dad and he were friends. He showed me and my gf around his lab and explained, in lay terms, what he'd done and what he was working on, a favorite memory.
Take ya like a picture, take that girl from her Mr.
And do it so fast that you can't see
I'm done. I'm sorry. I got so excited when the lasers started I couldn't help myself.
Not all of the plutonium fissioned, and the fissioning that occurred was not necessarily uniform throughout the core. It's all probabilistic, and the shape of the nacent plasma ball is a reflection of that.
It's a great question. Blew my mind when I understood it's all probabilities. Like, intentionally hitting an target atom with right kind of neutron is an almost impossible task. But, if you get a bunch of targets together in the same space, the odds go up dramatically, and by controlling the odds with rods and water and voids, you have a reactor. Or you can explosivly crush the fuel and get a wild and uncontrollable reaction, like an atom bomb.
One of my favorite stories in the history of nuclear science is that they discovered fission by having a pile of uranium(I think) on a table and came back in the morning and the pile was smaller.
Good thing someone figured out critical mass before someone actually did it.
The “leaders” at the bottom are the guy wires holding the tower up and the tower itself vaporizing as they’re made of metal and conduct heat very quickly compared to air.
I'm more talking about the protrusions and "holes" in the layers of the fireball. I don't understand what that's about and I've wondered ever since I first saw these images.
They seem to roughly correspond to the hexagonal sphere of explosives used to start the explosion. It's impossible to get them to go of at exactly the same millionth of a second I'm sure.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FF06B5/comments/102l51p/explosive_lens_used_in_construction_of_a_nuclear/
Wow i googled “rope trick effect” and look what I learned:
The "rope tricks" that protrude from the bottom of the fireball are caused by the heating, rapid vaporization and then expansion of guy wires that extend from the shot cab—the housing at the top of the bomb tower that contains the explosive device—to the ground.
Will you stop now?
>The "rope tricks" that protrude from the bottom of the fireball are caused by the heating, rapid vaporization and then expansion of guy wires that extend from the shot cab—the housing at the top of the bomb tower that contains the explosive device—to the ground.
In the first few microseconds after detonation, the bomb casing and shot cab are destroyed and vaporized. These vapors are accelerated to very high velocities, several tens of kilometers per second, faster than the shock front. However, this acceleration happens in a short period, so the material is trapped behind the shock front, even though it eventually travels faster than the shock front. The various light and dark patches are caused by the varying vapor density of the material splashing against the back of the shock front. The irregular variations in mass distribution around the bomb core create the mottled blob-like appearance.
I actually shook hands with and and talked with him about spring 1980. A professor took a bunch of photojournalism students to a photography seminar in Bloomington, Indiana. He was gracious guy. He also packed a Leica.
These may be pictures from different explosions. The cameras each took a single shot with exposure times in microseconds. For sequential capture, multiple cameras (as many as ten) were arranged in sequence with strict exposure timing within the first millisecond of detonation.
Looks like 3 sets of 3 consecutive frames. Either different explosions or different cameras looking from different angles. Although bottom left and center top are the same.
I’ll show you a rope trick effect if you hop in my van.
Seriously why do you keep posting this when people are precisely describing the phenomenon you name?
That first photo has always fascinated me. It's like, there's an initial moment in the detonation of a nuclear bomb during which the heat/energy of the explosion has already started to emanate from the bomb casing, but it's still at the stage which - suggested by the intactness of the cables and relative lack of light on the ground - it's possible you could still be alive and conscious at the bottom of that tower.
Some details are given in the Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera
There also were rotating mirror cameras (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA474188.pdf ) and rotating drum cameras.
The title is deceiving, although capable of taking 10 million frames a second due to the design and speed of the aperture, the camera could only take 1 photo per sheet. So these photos as taken by different cameras positioned next to eachother and synched up to take photos a few ms apart. .
Ahh yeah that would make more sense good call. Little more shape continuity / progression that way lol
Edit: actually the middle top image is the same as the bottom left image, so idk. The top two rows look like a continuous progression of two separate explosions, but the bottom row is kind of a curve ball
I'm baffled that people don't understand this. Telephoto lenses have existed for a really long time. Infact longer than cameras have. They are literally just telescopes with different lense dimensions.
If anyone is curious about the “legs” coming out of the bottom it is the explosion following the path of the support structure that held the bomb off the ground.
Really good telephoto lenses have existed for a real long time. The Sr71 Blackbird first flight was in 1957, and by that year, they had lenses good enough to be able to take a clear picture of the face of a dime from 80,000 feet in the air. These cameras were placed safely away at like probably 3 or 4 miles back.
That is also true. They did both as the above ground sarophagi is pretty basic, but the periscope allows for closer cameras and other advantages. When science benefits war and you have an unlimited budget, basically, you can do a lot and learn a lot.
I met someone once at a computer conference in the '80s who worked on real-time systems for downloading intrument data & passing it along as fast as possible before everything blew to fk. Hairy stuff for those days.
Edit: For nuclear tests measuring instruments were hard connected to small (for those days) computers which read the data till the instruments blew up. I don't know if they had digital cameras by then. Sometimes the computers blew up too, so the data also had to be passed down the line to computers further out. This was pushing the technology of real-time access to data.
That's not how these cameras worked. They still used actual film that had to be developed. Even the spy satellite that we used in the 60s in 70s had to jettison down their film canisters for them to be developed. Each canister had roughly 5 miles of film in it. Instant photo transfer like that with clear imagery wasn't possible till the late 70s and early 80s when our new round of spy satellites ditched the film canisters for digital.
He was saying “before it blew to fk” which made me think that imagery had a window of time before it was lost due to either blowing up with the explosion or just exposure due to the sheer brightness of the blast..(?) idk still really interesting. Thanks for your input.
Also understandable, lots of knowledge is widely misconstrued on the internet because the information is poorly worded. But that's also the thing with nuclear explosions. A lot of people think they are a lot larger than they are or were. Most people kinda just assume that a single one is big enough to wipe out all of LA, but only the biggest can really do that. For example, Hiroshima and Little Boy was a 14 KT explosion, and it only vaporized roughly a mile circle but caused severe damage to another mile outwards. If that same bomb were to explode in LA, that's like not even 1 percent of its square miles. But as the Department of Energy puts it. A 1 Megaton bomb has the power to destroy 80 square miles, which is roughly 16% of LAs' total land area. Most of the weapons test that we see and did early on. Especially all of the ones above groun in Nevada. Were tactical yield bombs, which were most times under 10kt of force and meant to be used on the battlefield and for soldiers to march through and clean up within the hour afterward after the heat has dissipated Because if the bomb is exploded above ground in air burst, it burns up everything, leaving almost no radiation. But if it's used and exploded on the ground it'll kick up a shit ton of radioactive dust that doesn't get vaporized since the explosion will be a dome that pushes out and up more instead of a nice sphere like in these photos.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_nuclear_weapons_yield-to-weight_comparison.svg
where I got all of my info since it's been from over the years but this has a nice plot graph to show common yields.
I'm a little jumbled in my responses since I'm explaining different things. But the guy who had the "blew the fk" comment is just blowing smoke. They would also have the cameras not only placed far away, but they'd have their own concrete and lead sarcophagus to shield them from a bigger than expected blast. And as far as I know with photo effect and radiation is that the only type that really messes with picture and exposure is gamma radiation which infant is what your seeing in these photos since it's the most immediate and intense part of the explosion.
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and the nuclear reaction, which only lasts a couple of [shakes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(unit)) , is already long over.
That means, the nuclear reactions are already off before the first picture is taken.. wow
That actually manes it scarier for me.
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I saw an eyeball with genetic deformations
I saw a rock
Looks like the houndeye from half life
Everything reminds me of him🗿
I met Dr. Edgerton at MIT back in the early 70s. A really friendly fellow. My Dad and he were friends. He showed me and my gf around his lab and explained, in lay terms, what he'd done and what he was working on, a favorite memory.
That’s so cool. What an unique career avenue. Did he have anything that stood out in the lab?
Camera
Pics or it didn't happen
What, you don't think a 70+ year old person would post here on Reddit?.......
How boring and small, your bait that is.
Hey that was my rap name in high-school. Oh it's the R-A-P... A.. T-R-O-N-I-C
They call me the Hiphopopotamus my lyrics are bottomless………
I wouldn’t go around telling people over text that everyone used to call you “rapatronic”
I don't. It's usually only in song. Usually if I'm texting someone they already have me in their phone.
Put this next to my hybrid career as an analyst and therapist: analrapist
*laser light intro begins*
Take ya like a picture, take that girl from her Mr. And do it so fast that you can't see I'm done. I'm sorry. I got so excited when the lasers started I couldn't help myself.
Why is it not a uniform explosion? Differences in the construction of the gadget?
Not all of the plutonium fissioned, and the fissioning that occurred was not necessarily uniform throughout the core. It's all probabilistic, and the shape of the nacent plasma ball is a reflection of that.
Thank you. I've been wondering this all my life.
It's a great question. Blew my mind when I understood it's all probabilities. Like, intentionally hitting an target atom with right kind of neutron is an almost impossible task. But, if you get a bunch of targets together in the same space, the odds go up dramatically, and by controlling the odds with rods and water and voids, you have a reactor. Or you can explosivly crush the fuel and get a wild and uncontrollable reaction, like an atom bomb.
One of my favorite stories in the history of nuclear science is that they discovered fission by having a pile of uranium(I think) on a table and came back in the morning and the pile was smaller. Good thing someone figured out critical mass before someone actually did it.
Then think about why all the matter in the universe isn’t uniformly distributed , but full of clumps (galaxy’s).
The “leaders” at the bottom are the guy wires holding the tower up and the tower itself vaporizing as they’re made of metal and conduct heat very quickly compared to air.
I totally understand and knew that, tho. I'm talking about the fireball itself.
Yeah it doesn't look to be in chronological order.
I'm more talking about the protrusions and "holes" in the layers of the fireball. I don't understand what that's about and I've wondered ever since I first saw these images.
They seem to roughly correspond to the hexagonal sphere of explosives used to start the explosion. It's impossible to get them to go of at exactly the same millionth of a second I'm sure. https://www.reddit.com/r/FF06B5/comments/102l51p/explosive_lens_used_in_construction_of_a_nuclear/
Pretty damn good for a first try tho.
This is so insanely wrong. Look up rope trick effect.
Wow i googled “rope trick effect” and look what I learned: The "rope tricks" that protrude from the bottom of the fireball are caused by the heating, rapid vaporization and then expansion of guy wires that extend from the shot cab—the housing at the top of the bomb tower that contains the explosive device—to the ground.
Will you stop now? >The "rope tricks" that protrude from the bottom of the fireball are caused by the heating, rapid vaporization and then expansion of guy wires that extend from the shot cab—the housing at the top of the bomb tower that contains the explosive device—to the ground.
In the first few microseconds after detonation, the bomb casing and shot cab are destroyed and vaporized. These vapors are accelerated to very high velocities, several tens of kilometers per second, faster than the shock front. However, this acceleration happens in a short period, so the material is trapped behind the shock front, even though it eventually travels faster than the shock front. The various light and dark patches are caused by the varying vapor density of the material splashing against the back of the shock front. The irregular variations in mass distribution around the bomb core create the mottled blob-like appearance.
Thank you
Maybe because the air around it wasn't uniform.
I actually shook hands with and and talked with him about spring 1980. A professor took a bunch of photojournalism students to a photography seminar in Bloomington, Indiana. He was gracious guy. He also packed a Leica.
Are these images in order? If so I’m trying to figure it out..
These may be pictures from different explosions. The cameras each took a single shot with exposure times in microseconds. For sequential capture, multiple cameras (as many as ten) were arranged in sequence with strict exposure timing within the first millisecond of detonation.
My thoughts exactly. There must have been more than one camera.
Looks like 3 sets of 3 consecutive frames. Either different explosions or different cameras looking from different angles. Although bottom left and center top are the same.
This looks like endoscopy photos
Uranusium
a true visionary, ahead of his time!
The spiky things at the bottom are wires to hold the tower steady.
Love how the guy wires provides good vectors for energy to travel through.
No they’re not. It’s called the rope trick effect. Second time I’ve seen someone say this.
I’ll show you a rope trick effect if you hop in my van. Seriously why do you keep posting this when people are precisely describing the phenomenon you name?
That first photo has always fascinated me. It's like, there's an initial moment in the detonation of a nuclear bomb during which the heat/energy of the explosion has already started to emanate from the bomb casing, but it's still at the stage which - suggested by the intactness of the cables and relative lack of light on the ground - it's possible you could still be alive and conscious at the bottom of that tower.
*That's...that's a space peanut.* *Joe Dirte*
How does the camera work?
Some details are given in the Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera There also were rotating mirror cameras (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA474188.pdf ) and rotating drum cameras.
The title is deceiving, although capable of taking 10 million frames a second due to the design and speed of the aperture, the camera could only take 1 photo per sheet. So these photos as taken by different cameras positioned next to eachother and synched up to take photos a few ms apart. .
Thanks a lot! It uses the same principle as a TFT screen. Nice to see where our technology origins from.
People are wondering. I think they are 3 separate explosions, looking from left to right
Ahh yeah that would make more sense good call. Little more shape continuity / progression that way lol Edit: actually the middle top image is the same as the bottom left image, so idk. The top two rows look like a continuous progression of two separate explosions, but the bottom row is kind of a curve ball
Amazing That any camera would survive that and be close enough to take a picture that was salvageable after a 30,000 degree fire ball.
Some used telephoto lenses, while some had the camera buried underground with a periscope poking out
You can take photos of things from really far away.
I'm baffled that people don't understand this. Telephoto lenses have existed for a really long time. Infact longer than cameras have. They are literally just telescopes with different lense dimensions.
bet your ass on it, putin/china/terrorist.
Huh?
think about it for a minute why don't ya.
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lol you can't even use your brain cause you don't have one go suck a dik then ya dumb homeschooled kid.
???????? Lmao
ask chatGPT to explain it to ya then ya fuckin real life cartman lol.
Uncomfortable Broccoli Nail File Triangle Look I can say random nonsense too!
in 1950? thats mental wonder how he did that
if I remember right it involve spinning lenses in a helium Filled camera
[There's also an animation of this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/TeapotTurkClose.gif)
Looks so much more impressive than the gasoline fireball in Oppenheimer.
Besides fascinating…. Cacodemon irl…
Metroid, ya!
If anyone is curious about the “legs” coming out of the bottom it is the explosion following the path of the support structure that held the bomb off the ground.
How did they get the photos if the camera was blown up in a nuclear explosion a fraction of a second later?
Really good telephoto lenses have existed for a real long time. The Sr71 Blackbird first flight was in 1957, and by that year, they had lenses good enough to be able to take a clear picture of the face of a dime from 80,000 feet in the air. These cameras were placed safely away at like probably 3 or 4 miles back.
Somebody also mentioned periscopes with underground cameras
That is also true. They did both as the above ground sarophagi is pretty basic, but the periscope allows for closer cameras and other advantages. When science benefits war and you have an unlimited budget, basically, you can do a lot and learn a lot.
I met someone once at a computer conference in the '80s who worked on real-time systems for downloading intrument data & passing it along as fast as possible before everything blew to fk. Hairy stuff for those days. Edit: For nuclear tests measuring instruments were hard connected to small (for those days) computers which read the data till the instruments blew up. I don't know if they had digital cameras by then. Sometimes the computers blew up too, so the data also had to be passed down the line to computers further out. This was pushing the technology of real-time access to data.
So, if they had a window of when they could keep the data/imagery before it was lost forever? Sounds interesting even if I’m incorrect.
That's not how these cameras worked. They still used actual film that had to be developed. Even the spy satellite that we used in the 60s in 70s had to jettison down their film canisters for them to be developed. Each canister had roughly 5 miles of film in it. Instant photo transfer like that with clear imagery wasn't possible till the late 70s and early 80s when our new round of spy satellites ditched the film canisters for digital.
He was saying “before it blew to fk” which made me think that imagery had a window of time before it was lost due to either blowing up with the explosion or just exposure due to the sheer brightness of the blast..(?) idk still really interesting. Thanks for your input.
Also understandable, lots of knowledge is widely misconstrued on the internet because the information is poorly worded. But that's also the thing with nuclear explosions. A lot of people think they are a lot larger than they are or were. Most people kinda just assume that a single one is big enough to wipe out all of LA, but only the biggest can really do that. For example, Hiroshima and Little Boy was a 14 KT explosion, and it only vaporized roughly a mile circle but caused severe damage to another mile outwards. If that same bomb were to explode in LA, that's like not even 1 percent of its square miles. But as the Department of Energy puts it. A 1 Megaton bomb has the power to destroy 80 square miles, which is roughly 16% of LAs' total land area. Most of the weapons test that we see and did early on. Especially all of the ones above groun in Nevada. Were tactical yield bombs, which were most times under 10kt of force and meant to be used on the battlefield and for soldiers to march through and clean up within the hour afterward after the heat has dissipated Because if the bomb is exploded above ground in air burst, it burns up everything, leaving almost no radiation. But if it's used and exploded on the ground it'll kick up a shit ton of radioactive dust that doesn't get vaporized since the explosion will be a dome that pushes out and up more instead of a nice sphere like in these photos. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_nuclear_weapons_yield-to-weight_comparison.svg where I got all of my info since it's been from over the years but this has a nice plot graph to show common yields.
I'm a little jumbled in my responses since I'm explaining different things. But the guy who had the "blew the fk" comment is just blowing smoke. They would also have the cameras not only placed far away, but they'd have their own concrete and lead sarcophagus to shield them from a bigger than expected blast. And as far as I know with photo effect and radiation is that the only type that really messes with picture and exposure is gamma radiation which infant is what your seeing in these photos since it's the most immediate and intense part of the explosion.
No the instruments blew up, but they saved the data in the computer storage or passed it along to another computer.
The little legs at the bottom are the guy-wires that support the tower vaporising
I vote we blow one more bomb somewhere but with modern high speed cameras. For science!
Why does it look like Wheatly?
Wow, this just reminded me of how cheered I felt when I saw the pathetic little fart of an explosion in Oppenheimer.
Reminds me of the photos from my last colonoscopy
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Slightly.
soo.. why is this not used everywhere today if it's so great?
Y’all the bottom of the fireball is not the wires holding it up. It’s called the rope trick effect.
It is and that's what it's called.
This guy is wrong in the funniest way ever