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Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#11

Post by small_model »

api wrote: post #4

One of my big gripes with the film Oppenheimer was the blast itself, obviously a climactic moment in the film. It looked like someone set off a bunch of chemical explosives. That’s not how it looked in real life. Totally bizarre decision. I don’t know if they were trying to avoid effects on purpose of go gritty and retro or something but the “unearthly cosmic horror” feel of the first a-bomb blast is important. It’s…

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.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#12

Post by lioeters »

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 century. Then another, and another pop. Some of them evaporated hundreds of thousands of human beings, melting and dying in gruesome ways you can't imagine in the worst nightmares of hell. Later these organisms learn to harness this destructive force for more useful and productive purposes, powering their cities and data centers for machine intelligence. And this massive amount of energy is released by breaking up the tiniest particles of matter, the nucleus of an atom, how clever and strange is that. Well, no more strange than the phenomenon of life itself, I suppose.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#13

Post by Sharlin »

sandworm101 wrote: post #2

I suspect the actual first frames are still classified as they likely evidence detonator tech/performance. So the real first moments of the nuclear age will never be shown. (The high-speed cameras would have started filming shortly before the blast.)

I doubt that there’s anything that’s been classified in a long time in 80-year-old footage of tech that’s well understood by any interested party. Fission weapons are rather trivial to manufacture, the bottleneck has always been access to high-purity fissile material. Hydrogen bombs OTOH involve a lot of classified stuff.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#14

Post by enoint »

sandworm101 wrote: post #2

I suspect the actual first frames are still classified as they likely evidence detonator tech/performance. So the real first moments of the nuclear age will never be shown. (The high-speed cameras would have started filming shortly before the blast.)

I think Peter Kuran has said that the majority of interesting footage is neglected rather than classified. He specializes in X-ray photos of the first few milliseconds.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#15

Post by [deleted] »

chasd00 wrote: post #9
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.

Or in a zoo refusing to mate.

[deleted]

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#16

Post by cucumber3732842 »

The picture I find most meaningful it the one showing the back side of an instrumentation bunker with the foreground occupied by welders on skids with the broom and shovel in the dirt. Those things are essentially the same today even down to their construction. The way they are used is the same. Yet the world we live in is completely different.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#17

Post by gibspaulding »

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…

Whenever I’m tempted to think that potential AGI/ASI scenarios sound “too sci-fi” I have to remind myself of this. We live in a world with nuclear weapons and spaceships and microwave ovens. It might prove impossible and it might not, but we can’t predict that based on a general vibe of sci-fi-ness.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#18

Post by superxpro12 »

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…

At the end of the day.... everything we see and do is just the abstract result of potential energy being released in some form. What is an atom bomb other than an extreme form of this?

The survival of the human species relies on its ability to expend energy. Grow food? We need gas to run the tractors.

Travel to your jobs? Gas or electricity.

Travel to another planet? Massive amount of energy.

Ride away on a spacecraft to another solar system? Massive amount of energy.

The amount of energy required to do these things is probably more than the amount of energy required to erase ourselves from existence. And when we have the ability to harness that energy, do we really think we are responsible enough to not do that, accidentally or adversarial-y?

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#19

Post by Cthulhu_ »

chasd00 wrote: post #9
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.

Or in a zoo refusing to mate.

Or as something without a mouth and needing to scream.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#20

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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 a few decades between the first airplane and the first person on the moon (although rocketry goes back hundreds of years. Actually TIL rocketry is older than Newton's laws of physics)

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