The meter, the second and the traditional base 10 are useful standards to communicate quantitative measurements, for instance of the radius of an explosion over time. However, these subjective units for space, time and numbers themselves obscure the scale-invariant similarity of physical phenomena, like the deep kinship between explosions of all sorts, from tiny laser-induced blasts to supernovae. Nature could not care less about the length of our feet and the number of our fingers. In this seventh episode we show that explosions provide a great example of the inherent indifference of Nature on our arbitrary subjective standards to measure and to count. We show that any explosion not only provides its own objective units, but also its own base for counting. After spending the last episodes freeing ourselves from subjective units, it is now time to do physics beyond base 10.

*Video Content*

On this page, you will find the pdf slides used in the making of the video, together with some films, gifs, images and plots used in the video. Feel free to use this content in any way you see fit.

A link to the datasets we used is available at the end of this page, together with the references associated with this video.

Slides

A7_SLIDES_compressed.pdf

Download our slideshow for your lectures / presentations.

GIFs

Plots

References

From previous episodes:
Mack (1946)
Mack (1947)
Bainbridge (1976)
Taylor (1950a)
Taylor (1950b)
O'Connell (1957)
Schmitt (2016)
Nguyen (2017)
Porzel (1957)
Kingerey (1962)
Aouad (2021)
Hargather (2007)
Kleine (2010)
Porneala (2006)
Campanella (2019)
Grun (1991)
Xiang (2017)
Trinity and Beyond
Greg Spriggs and the curation of nuclear atmospheric tests:
https://str.llnl.gov/october-2017/spriggs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWpqGKUG5yY&ab_channel=LawrenceLivermoreNationalLaboratory
LLNL Nuclear Test Films Browser:
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/misc/llnlfilms/

More on Trinity:
Source of the Trinity footage and pictures: Los Alamos National Laboratory https://www.lanl.gov/ https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/trinity-test-1945 https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/julian-e-mack https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/high-speed-photography
More nuclear tests:
https://www.atomcentral.com/ https://www.sonicbomb.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFbzthhT2eRcBpEPc5FPGtQ

Authors:
Marc-Antoine Fardin (Institut Jacques Monod, CNRS, Université Paris Cité)
Mathieu Hautefeuille (Institut de Biologie Paris-Seine, Sorbonne Université)
Vivek Sharma (Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago)

Acknowledgements:
Anna Part (Atomic Heritage Foundation, National Museum of Nuclear Science & History)
Greg Spriggs (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)