Strange crystals found inside wreckage from the first nuclear bomb test
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Whenever I read a phrase about scientists observing something they thought was impossible ... I get really excited for scientists in that field! :-)
Obviously it's historically significant, and the new forms of matter were first discovered there , so that's why trinitite is named after the site. But 80 years later, wouldn't we expect the other bomb sites to have just as many interesting chemical reactions?
The general term for for the fused glass-like material formed during a nuclear test" seems to be "atomsite" - https://www.osti.gov/pages/servlets/purl/3001767 . Some images of atomsite from the Trinity and Semipalatinsk test sites are at http://www.radioaktivitaet.uni-bremen.de/downloads/Pittauero...
As a wild guess, what's special is it might be the easiest to get, with many samples to study.
As I recall, research on meteorite impacts use the similarly formed Impactite to deduce various things about ancient impact sites. As an aside, I think they also do really elaborate calculations of force and angle of impact based on surveying the spread pattern and distribution of these little glass chunks.
and when a quick search finds the relevant research paper at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22133...
"A complex association of millimeter-sized, aerodynamically-shaped debris, including glass spherules, glass filaments, and composite-fused melt particles was recovered from beach sands on the shores of the Motoujina Peninsula in Hiroshima Bay, Japan. .... This study interprets the large volumes of fallout debris generated under extreme temperature conditions as products of the Hiroshima August 6th, 1945 atomic bomb aerial detonation. The chemical composition of the melt debris provides clues to their origin, particularly with regard to city building materials. This study is the first published record and description of fallout resulting from the destruction of an urban environment by atomic bombing."
and when the dynamics are described in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X2...
"Our analyses support the hypothesis that the Hiroshima glasses are gas phase condensates formed in the nuclear fireball ... The Hiroshima bomb exploded 580 m above the city so that no crater was formed at the surface. The plasma (called fireball) formed at this altitude, had a maximal radius of 230 m (Imanaka,2011; Malik, 1985). ... The maximum temperature on the ground during the explosion was estimated to be 6287°C (thermal wave) (Radvanec, 2009) while the maximum pressure reached 35 tons per m² (3171 bar) at the arrival of the blast wave at the hypocenter, 1.3s after the explosion (Radvanec, 2009). Under such conditions, the city materials were injected as vapor or melted debris in the air 0.5 to 2 seconds after the explosion and vaporized by the high temperatures prevailing in the plasma (4000-2500 K) at that time (Adams et al., 1960, Supplementary S6)."
I think what your analysis didn't consider was the observation that "The fact that no crater was produced by the explosion (Glasstone & Dolan, 1977) reinforce the idea that the primary source of Hiroshima glasses is the city materials and not the soils or the basement rocks below the city."
I have some Trinitite. It's easy to obtain. You can buy it in rock shops, especially in the Southwest. Back in the day, when they opened the Trinity site to the public a couple of days a year, there was no prohibition on collecting Trinitite. That's why rock shops have it.
They still open the site to the public one or two days a year but they won't let you collect Trinitite any more. You can walk on it but don't try to put it in your pocket or a person with a gun will pull you aside for a chat.
https://www.nps.gov/thingstodo/alamogordo-visit-the-trinity-...
There's not much public access to the sites in Nevada; at least until the DOE resumes their bus tours and they're even more hard over about not letting you pick up anything.
Totally OT but if "dodeca" means 12, why isn't 14 just "tetradeca"? What's the "kai" for?
I guess like asking why 120 is said "one hundred and twenty" in some dialects.
Maybe that's how 14 and 12 are written in Greek.
For example, already Aristotle used "dipoda" (2-feet) for humans and birds, "tetrapoda" (4-feet) for other terrestrial vertebrates and "hexapoda" (6-feet) for insects. After the same model one can say "oktopoda" (8-feet) about spiders and "tetrakaidekapoda" (14-feet) about woodlice.
:-)
I haven't read of any particular reason for this, but I'd posit that numbers up to twelve were more commonly used in everyday life, so shorter, irregular forms were easier to use and remember. Much like many of the irregular verb forms in spoken language happened because they were so commonly used.
The ancient Greek system also gave us triskaidekaphobia - the fear of the number 13.
There's also some fun when you get to 70... which is soixante-dix (sixty ten)... and 80 which is quatre-vingts (four twenties)... and 90 as quatre-vingt-dix (four twenties ten).
Some dialects of French outside of France have changed how they count.
18 is duodeviginti (two from twenty) and 19 is undeviginti (one from twenty).
But we do have duodecim, aka dozen. So we just need to add "onezen" to the current vernacular to make the set complete. Let's go team onezen!
12 being divisible by 2,3,4,6; 10 being divisible by 2,5 -- means base 12 is easier to multiply and divide to reach whole numbers.
Ancient Greek spans several centuries of sound shifts and many dialects. It cannot easily be simplified into one specific pronunciation, particularly not one that is based on your specific dialect of English. Wiktionary has /kǎi̯/, /ˈkɛ/, /ˈcɛ/ and /ˈce/ for "καὶ".
The correspondents of the -teen numbers in Greek were formed similarly with English, after the model of 14 = four and ten = "tetrakaideka".
"Tetrakaideka" is a contracted form of 14, normally used in compound words. When "14" was an isolated word, it would have been "tettarakaideka" or "tessarakaideka". These are the forms for the neuter gender, the numeral "4" = "tettara" or "tessara" (depending on the dialect) was changed by declension for other genders and cases.
In Ancient Greek numbers bigger than 20, the word "and" = "kai" was usually omitted, but then the bigger number was always the first like in "twenty-four". When "and" was inserted, then the order could also be inverse, like in "four-and-twenty".
"kai" is "and" in Greek.
Does it really count as "naturally forming" if we had to artificially construct and detonate a nuke during a carefully conducted experiment to create this one?
We’re also very much dependent on nature and natural forces.
So everything we do is, even if many steps removed, still an act of nature.
We use the term natural specifically to distinguish between the.. natural and artificial.
A term like that is necessary.
If anything, we should be more careful with our use of language. For instance; 'naturally ocurring' vs. 'human made'.
Isn't this solely because De Beers wants to keep the product of their mines artificially priced higher? So they come up with phrases to make lab grown diamonds sound less than the ones they mine?
Without the influence of humans: natural.
There’s a useful definition for you. Otherwise according to your definition the term “natural” is completely meaningless and serves no purpose.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2017-0...
You can drastically change the amount of fallout with materials and design decisions, so it's worth considering.
For example, tsar bomba was tested with a lead tamper instead of uranium; this reduced the yield, but also the fallout. The Ripple design has no tamper, was used in the last US airdrop test, and produces very little fallout compared to other designs.
A limited fallout design allows for occupation and/or resettlement after an attack, so it seems useful to consider.
Yes, yes, it didn't make a practical difference because MAD makes them all unusable.
Clean H-bombs are only clean if used for air bursts, but air bursts aren't effective for excavation.
The term “natural” is meaningless when used in ways like on “all natural juice” labels, because the line is arbitrary and suits whatever the argument is (usually by being a fancy substitute for “good”).
There are uses for the term, like in “natural sciences” (as opposed to philosophy, for example). Incidentally, the core limitation of natural sciences is related to the contention of “natural juice”: we are part of nature, and so when it comes to studying some aspects of nature it becomes circular and unproductively self-referential.
The line between ourselves and nature is paradoxical and it is worth pondering why we draw it at all.
"Melted sand"?? Isn't it "molten sand"? Is my hunch completely wrong, or is the author not a native speaker? Neither am I, but melted sand sounds so weird to my ears.
This all happened in a matter of seconds, so atoms didn’t have time to arrange into stable structures,[...]
If I was to nitpick, "melted" is kind of inaccurate and not entirely natural in this context. Technically, molten sand is also melted sand, because that's how you get it to that state? Usually, you'd hear about solidified magma, crystalized sand, cast iron, air-cast steel, unevenly settled corium... to make a better point on how it turned back into a solid and what to expect from it - something like "The molten sand crystalized into an unusual structure" would be clearer.
I'd usually rather hear "melted" if it is important to note that this had a phase change and back. Plastic on an electrical device may look melted, indicating heat. A hardened steel part may look melted, which may damage the hardening. Rubber on a hydraulic line may look melted, also indicating heat. A plastic container looking melted in the context of chemicals may indicate some compromise.
Now the words sound weird in my head. Thank you.
One of the survivors finds a glass ring (something like trinitite) among the post-nuclear-blast rubble of Saks Fifth Avenue[3] in New York and sees visions of the future (or something) through it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_Song_(McCammon_novel) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Stoker_Award#External_lin... [3] my memories of this book may be embellishing this a bit....
Which could also result in a B movie, I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:_Shadow_of_Cher...
When discussing new novel molecular structures, one would think providing a concrete visuals of what they look like more interesting than human-scale photos of materials containing them?