> 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.
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.
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 what led Oppenheimer to recite “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
Because that's exactly what it was. I agree with you, the puritanism around special effects doesn't make sense when there's plenty of high quality archival footage out there, and instead of using that or CGI to look similar, you do something that looks completely wrong.
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.
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.
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.
I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.
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.
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 what led Oppenheimer to recite “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
/hah very articulate of me for this early in the morning