At 5:30 AM 63 years ago today, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brainchild was first tested at the Trinity site in what is now White Sands missile base in New Mexico. The device, code named “the gadget,” was Plutonium implosion based, because the Uranium version was a sure thing. Indeed, as President Truman decreed, the next 2 “tests” were over Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and ended WWII). The ball on the right illustrates the amount of Plutonium 239 needed for the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.
MIT’s “Doc” Edgerton, the father of high speed photography, used his Rapatronic cameras (note the plural - one shot per camera!) to capture the event at microsecond intervals with exposures as short as 10 nanoseconds. The cameras were based on a sandwich of 2 polarized plates at 90 degrees to each other - blocking 100% of the light; with a filling of a cell that could polarize light at 45 degrees when energized. Due to the strange nature of light polarization, adding a 45 degree filter between two 90 degree filters actually lets 50% of the light through. Go figure!
They probably explain it well at the Exploratorium, the best science museum in the country, founded by Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank. Go read Lawrence and Oppenheimer by Nuel Pharr Davis for the Trinity backstory. It is a great read.
P.S. A photo of the initial tenth of a microsecond of the Trinity blast has been on display by Doc Edgerton’s old office in MIT forever. But, until recently, for security reasons(?), unlike the milk drop crown, it has had no label. If you go see it, it is unlikely you’d mistake it for a bullet through a balloon!
Simon Plouffe has a newInverter containing over 2.459 BILLION constants. A few of the most interesting ones are named after mathematicians. Can you match the constant with the name(s) without looking?
We first blogged about George Carlin, appropriately enough, in a post about language, pointing you to the seven dirty words - verbatum transcript prepared by the FCC. Dirty words keep changing - prior to 1900 the terrible seven would have been doggone, drat, forcryingoutloud, gee or jeepers, Jiminy Crickets (safe enough for Disney now), Odsbodkins, and the ’sh’ words shoot and shucks. Genius is a constant and lives on.
As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer began a presentation at the Corvinus University in Budapest, a rude Hungarian (redundant) student stood up and shouted
Hey you! Microsoft has stolen 25 <billion> Hungarian Forint. To the Hungarian people, give that money back. Right now!
He then threw 3 eggs - 1 on the floor, 1 on the wall, and 1 on the projector screen - before running out of ammunition, while Ballmer took refuge under the rostrum. The student was asked to “Please leave” and “Very quickly” and “What were you thinking?” to which he responded the country pays while this guy has the nerve to be parading around here, and walked out exposing everyone to the back of his shirt proclaiming “Microsoft = Corruption.”
Following the “friendly disruption” Ballmer calmly continued his talk, wherein he was found by index.hu to be a surprisingly brilliant speaker. In the Q&A he admitted to being egged before, in 1966 (no doubt on Halloween, when he would have been 10).
While the whole incident took place in broken English, Fake Steve Jobs is looking for a Czech translator!? I am sure you’ve seen the original recording of the event posted on youtube - here is the Bono version. Now we know who the Eggman is, but who is the Walrus?
Dear friends, both known and unknown to me, fellow Russians, and people of all countries and continents, in a few minutes a mighty spaceship will carry me into the far-away expanses of space. What can I say to you in these last minutes before the start? At this instant, the whole of my life seems to be condensed into one wonderful moment. Everything I have experienced and done till now has been in preparation for this moment. You must realize that it is hard to express my feeling now that the test for which we have been training long and passionately is at hand. I don’t have to tell you what I felt when it was suggested that I should make this flight, the first in history. Was it joy? No, it was something more than that. Pride? No, it was not just pride. I felt great happiness. To be the first to enter the cosmos, to engage single handed in an unprecedented duel with nature - could anyone dream of anything greater than that? But immediately after that I thought of the tremendous responsibility I bore: to be the first to do what generations of people had dreamed of; to be the first to pave the way into space for mankind. This responsibility is not toward one person, not toward a few dozen, not toward a group. It is a responsibility toward all mankind - toward its present and its future. Am I happy as I set off on this space flight? Of course I’m happy. After all, in all times and epochs the greatest happiness for man has been to take part in new discoveries. It is a matter of minutes now before the start. I say to you, ‘Until we meet again,’ dear friends, just as people say to each other when setting out on a long journey. I would like very much to embrace you all, people known and unknown to me, close friends and strangers alike. See you soon! – Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, first person in space, April 12, 1961
Τomas Rokicki is a man of many algorithms. He co-authored Golly, a Life simulator that is super fast due to its unique hashlife algorithm. Last month he proved that 25 face moves (where face move = a quarter or half turn) are suffficient to solve any Rubik’s cube, and he did it using a computer (similar to the solution to the famous Four Color Problem) - specifically, he used Herbert Kociemba’s Cube Solver, which you can download for free.
In 1995 Michael Reid showed that 20 moves were necessary to solve the superflip (pictured). Kociemba ran his cube solver over 1 million random configurations, and not one needed more than 20 moves to solve. He then ran 1000 optimal random configurations (at ~2 minutes per solution with 3 GHz processors and 8 GB memory) and found the “average” cube can be optimally solved in ~18 moves. It clearly appears that 20 moves should suffice to solve any Rubik’s cube. But can that be proven?
Initially, solution algorithms could take up to 75 moves. In 1995 Reid showed Kociemba’s algorithm could reduce the maximum to 29 moves, still quite a ways from 20. In 2006 this was improved to 27, and in 2007 to 26. Now, thanks to Tom Rokicki, it stands at 25 - and he is on to 24.
Update: As of June, Rokicki cut it to 23 using a Sony/Spiderman render farm.
Today, of course, is the Ides of March, when Anonymous is slated to protest Scientology again, two days after founder L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday. But let’s look back to the future to Pi Day, the 14th of March, which is Einstein’s birthday, and, according to Sean at Cosmic Variance, Talk Like a Physicist Day (not to be confused with any other Talk Like a PD).
Going into physics was the biggest mistake of my life.
Or you might want to see scientists explain their research results on video. In that case check out SciVee.tv. In keeping with our back to the future theme, below is Dr. David Frisch and James Smith’s demonstration, atop Mount Washington, of time dilation, first predicted by Einstein.
