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Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

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Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#31

Post by atomicnumber3 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #20
lioeters wrote: post #12

What I find so strange about the awe and horror of the atom bomb, its utter power and violence, is how it was the result of decades - well, centuries - of abstract thinking in mathematics and theoretical physics. And how it required particularly new paradigms about the nature of the material world. Imagine a cosmic being looking at the Earth through a microscope, and seeing this bubble pop on the surface in mid-20th…

The really mad thing is that while you say it's centuries of abstract thinking and the like, it was only 50 years between the discovery of X-rays and radiation and the first atom bomb, or 40 between the first idea that you could use fission to make a bomb. Neutrons and the nuclear chain reaction was only theorized in the 30's, about 10-15 years before the first nuclear bomb was detonated. But likewise, there was only…

It's funny to me to imagine that the whole time humans were doing basically anything on this planet, nuclear fission was also already happening in a few places around the world. I wonder how much science would've been jump-started if we'd found any of the natural nuclear reactors prior to having figured fission out already.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#32

Post by IAmGraydon »

cassianoleal wrote: post #5

> And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.” I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.

Yes, but don’t be pedantic. Of course nuclear holocaust is more nuanced than that, but we was making a point as to the cause of the end of the world, not exactly how the last human will literally die.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#33

Post by sib »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #20
lioeters wrote: post #12

What I find so strange about the awe and horror of the atom bomb, its utter power and violence, is how it was the result of decades - well, centuries - of abstract thinking in mathematics and theoretical physics. And how it required particularly new paradigms about the nature of the material world. Imagine a cosmic being looking at the Earth through a microscope, and seeing this bubble pop on the surface in mid-20th…

The really mad thing is that while you say it's centuries of abstract thinking and the like, it was only 50 years between the discovery of X-rays and radiation and the first atom bomb, or 40 between the first idea that you could use fission to make a bomb. Neutrons and the nuclear chain reaction was only theorized in the 30's, about 10-15 years before the first nuclear bomb was detonated. But likewise, there was only…

While rocketry is older than Newton, even in 1920, it was widely believed that rockets would not work in space (and therefore couldn't get us to the moon).

https://www.astronomy.com/today-in-the-history-of-astronomy/...

Luckily, the Times did issue a correction - almost 50 years later, on July 17, 1969. The day after NASA launched the first mission to the moon.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#34

Post by photochemsyn »

kilobaud wrote: post #27
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or as something without a mouth and needing to scream.

Hah, if Harlan Ellison were alive for the dawn of LLMs as a widespread technology, he would have had many (dangerous) things to say about the copyright issues, and potential horrors

Now we can get an LLM to adopt the persona of Harlan Ellison by fine-tuning it on all of Harlan Ellison’s recorded works and possibly other people’s written reminiscences of their interactions with him and have it generate Ellison-like opinions on the current LLM situation that might be hard to distinguish from Ellison’s actual work.

I don’t know if Ellison would be amused or horrified, really. Like some ROM personality construct out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer - nightmare fuel, immortal Steve Jobs / Bill Gates ghosts generating endless drivel.

“So here is my opinion on your LLM situation, since you dragged me out of the grave-shaped server rack to provide one:

The machine has no humiliation. That is its first defect. The people who sell it have no embarrassment. That is the second.

The danger is not that machines will become writers. The danger is that human beings will become satisfied with things that merely resemble writing. The danger is not that machines will think. The danger is that people will stop noticing when they themselves are not thinking. The danger is not the fake Ellison, fake Didion, fake Baldwin, fake Le Guin, fake Morrison, fake anybody. The danger is the spiritual laziness that asks for ghosts because it cannot bear the burden of encountering the living or honoring the dead.”

I’d take 50:50 odds on the Butlerian Jihad becoming a thing, myself.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#35

Post by tencentshill »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #21
chasd00 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt the same, my thinking at the time was they didn’t want the bomb to steal the show. The movie was about the man not the machine. /hah very articulate of me for this early in the morning

I suppose that's true, but it's still positioned as the focal point or climax of the film I think. But Nolan intentionally hamstrung himself by eschewing CGI in favor of practical effects. I mean in theory you could do a practical effect of a nuke but that requires detonating a nuke; the west hasn't done that since 1992, the last nuclear detonation was done by North Korea in 2017.

Dont worry, the US will be doing it soon too

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2026/05/21/why_pre...

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#36

Post by libraryofbabel »

I used to teach a class on the history of contemporary science (WW2-present) and I started the class with Trinity. There’s no other moment better.

We know how it turned out, but the people there waiting for the test did not know how it would turn out. The bomb might not have worked. Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world. Hans Bethe had sat down and done the calculations on that exact scenario and said it would not, but there was always the possibility of missing something. Enrico Fermi was offering bets on it on the day of the test, as a dark joke.

In the end it worked as expected; one of the most successful and horrifying experiments in the history of science.

Of all the photos from the test the one that struck me the most looking through them today was the photograph of the plutonium core being carried into the ranch house for assembly in a little heavy box. It’s a small thing, about the size of a grapefruit, although twice as dense as lead. It looked just like a sphere of any old metal, but it was something profoundly alien, made inside nuclear reactors. And it still is so strange to me that something that small has so much energy locked up inside and that, by imploding the little sphere just right, we can let the demon out.

Trinity is one of the pivotal moments in the history of our species and eighty years on we still don’t know what the eventual consequences of it will be. The bombs are still here waiting for us and they still pose all sorts of terrifying questions for the future that most people prefer not to think about.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#37

Post by cassianoleal »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #32
cassianoleal wrote: post #5

> And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.” I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.

Yes, but don’t be pedantic. Of course nuclear holocaust is more nuanced than that, but we was making a point as to the cause of the end of the world, not exactly how the last human will literally die.

Could a similar argument be made about your comment, perhaps? :)

I wasn't being intentionally pedantic. I was in fact making a point that the reality will be a lot more grim than watching a giant fireball turn into a mushroom-shaped cloud for a few seconds or minutes.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#38

Post by dylan604 »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #22
small_model wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the films budget they could have sourced a small nuclear bomb the size of the original Trinity test and detonated it just for the movie. Just make sure the camera is rolling as it's a one take shot.

It’s pretty morbid but I think I would go watch if there ever was a public nuclear above surface test again. I hope it will never happen.

This is something that happened[0]. Not sure about that site, but a search returned a bunch of similar sites with no domains I was familiar.

[0] https://www.storyhunt.io/en/articles/the-atomic-parties

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#39

Post by Butterbrezel »

There is a heart breaking documentary about the people who live in the vicinity of the trinity test site, the lack of communication with them around the test, and the lack of recognition and support of their increased rates of cancer and medical spending [1]. I learned a lot from it. While many downwinders [2] gained recognition and compensation for their radiation exposure in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 [3], the population around the Trinity test site was excluded and has never been recognized or compensated for being the first victims of an atomic bomb.

[1] https://www.firstwebombednewmexico.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders#Current_status [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Exposure_Compensatio...

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#40

Post by pstuart »

photochemsyn wrote: post #34
kilobaud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, if Harlan Ellison were alive for the dawn of LLMs as a widespread technology, he would have had many (dangerous) things to say about the copyright issues, and potential horrors

Now we can get an LLM to adopt the persona of Harlan Ellison by fine-tuning it on all of Harlan Ellison’s recorded works and possibly other people’s written reminiscences of their interactions with him and have it generate Ellison-like opinions on the current LLM situation that might be hard to distinguish from Ellison’s actual work. I don’t know if Ellison would be amused or horrified, really. Like some ROM personal…

This would be a worthy experiment to do. I think Harlan would be amused, horrified, and flattered -- let's find out!
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