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| Phil also understood the importance of scale, and was constantly
surprising in his ways of demonstrating it. Here are two photographs
of mushroom clouds. The one on the left is the Trinity explosion -
19 kilotons in the New Mexico desert, the first nuclear explosion
the world had ever seen. The one on the right looks kind of
similar. But it’s not. The one on the right is Mike, a 10 megaton
explosion in the South Pacific- the first US H-bomb explosion. Trinity’s
mushroom cloud was 30,000 feet high. Mike’s mushroom cloud was 4 times
as high – 135,000 feet. But they look about the same because the photographer
(and me, courtesy of Photoshop) have chosen image sizes that might
conveniently fit on an 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper in a manuscript as
an illustration. There is NO SENSE in which these images represent
the same explosive phenomenon. (Herb Lin) |
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