[time-nuts] Time of death-Again

Marshall Eubanks tme at americafree.tv
Wed Oct 27 23:50:34 UTC 2010


On Oct 27, 2010, at 7:18 PM, jimlux wrote:

> Marshall Eubanks wrote:
>> On Oct 27, 2010, at 6:51 PM, Perry Sandeen wrote:
>>> Gents,
>>> 
>>> Wrote: < If you want a sub-microsecond time of death, sit on a bomb like Major T. J. "King" Kong in "Dr. Strangelove," and get your friends to time and triangulate the prompt radiation. That should be good to a few 10's of nanoseconds.
>>> 
> 
> 
> Folks, one doesn't need a thermonuclear device for this sort of almost instantaneous disintegration.
> 
> Standard old high explosives could get your "duration of death" down in the submillisecond range, and a simple optical pickup could determine the time when the explosion occurs to nanoseconds (after calibrating for light time delay).
> 
> Black powder which is really a propellant might even be able to disassemble your corpus in less than a millisecond.
> 
> However, if one needs microsecond type uncertainties, then the nuclear device is probably your best bet. Probably not under a microsecond though, from simple mechanical disassembly.  say you were standing just outside the approaching fireball... the fireball (in early stages) grows roughly at the speed of light as the photons proceed out.  The question would be whether there is enough flux to ionize you in a suitably short time.  Basically, you'd have to heat your 100kg or so up to a few thousand K.  Let's see.. 400kJ would heat 100kg up one degree, so 400MJ would get you to 1000 degrees, which is hot, but not ionized.  probably dead though.
> If you were, say, 10 meters away, and your body intercepts 1/2 square meter of the flux which is assumed spread evenly over 314 square meters, the instantaneous power of the explosion would have to be 400MJ*628 in 1 microsecond, or about 251GJ/microsecond, or a mere 250E15 Watts
> 
> (As I recall, close in, the first thing to come out is high energy gamma rays, so you'd need to look at the first few microseconds of gamma flux vs time... I'm sure the data is out there somewhere)

For an air burst, there is a very short pulse of gamma rays coming from the very hot bomb material, until the radiation ionizes & heats the surrounding air. This takes maybe a microsecond. After that the fireball expands as a shock/pressure wave (i.e., well below the speed of light) with enough optical depth to block the gamma rays, so the radiation output actually drops dramatically for a while. This causes the characteristic double light pulse of an air burst. 

So, you would want to be close (a few meters at most) to the bomb casing to be sure. Otherwise, you would have to wait for the fireball to get to you, which would take inconveniently long. 

Doc Edgarton told a class I was in a story of a bomb set off inside a greenhouse, which he was supposed to take high speed pictures of (through the glass). The prompt gammas immediately made the glass opaque, so all his pictures showed was a blank greenhouse and nothing else (by the time the fireball broke the glass, it was too late to observe whatever he was supposed to observe). The picture looked just like a greenhouse painted white, with no clue as to the fury within.

This is getting far afield, so I will shut up now.

Regards
Marshall 


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