In this video we are going to answer one of the most frequently asked questions we receive from our viewers. What actually are those mysterious lines in many photos of nuclear explosions?
The never usually show that, the big ticket is the blast itself and not the boring detail of setting it up. But I know what you mean. Often times, all the work that went into something like these big events is more interesting. I have watched so many videos about Apollo preparations, how the astronauts were trained, the construction of the equipment for that reason. But for years I always wondered about this before learning of the sounding rockets. In pre-internet days, searching for answers was either difficult or very time consuming.
Honesty is the best policy !!!! BTW smoke rockets are used only in test detonations. In actual war they would not use them. Obviously . . . the rockets are useful only when high speed cameras are set up to record the event. Clearly that means they know ahead of time exactly WHEN the explosion will happen. In war that would be impossible.
@@piehound oh I know the US military would never deploy smoke rockets, especially considering most of the US nuclear stockpile is either ICBMs or SLBMs
@@tomstamford6837 there is just a very limited supply of nuke footage out there, same with meaningful volcanic eruptions, you just exhaust it very quickly, so it's always rad to see something new.
Most impressed by the hard math/science behind these experiments. It makes me wonder how modern nuclear developments are conducted in current times considering live testing is banned. There seem to be periods in human history where developments just leapfrog into a whole new era.
It seems like you’re describing the 20th century. An era of unprecedented research and advancements, unhampered by the whiny wokeism that’s currently damning the 21st century.
In the case of North Korea, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there were a lot of scientists in Ukraine where a lot of the research was done, were suddenly without work. So, they went to work for North Korea. Taking decades of nuclear science with them. In the case of the USSR, they were working on their ownbprogram, but they got a huge headstart from information stolen from the US by spies. People like the Rosenburgs helped the program come along a great way like that. Those are the only two countries I can say with any assuredness how they developed nuclear weapons. But judging from the pattern, I think it's safe to say other nuclear powers that shouldn't have them like Israel and South Africa probably developed their weapons using stolen information. I'm pretty sure that the UK worked with the US to develop their weapons. And I have no clue how France got the bomb. They seem the least likely developed country to have nukes. Of course, there's a lot more to building nukes than just knowing how. One of the hardest parts is purifying uranium ore into weapons grade uranium-235. Which requires massive, extremely fast, extremely precisely built centrifuges made out of special, high strength metal alloys since they spin so fast that normal materials would just tear themselves apart. You need a lot of information and special materials just to process the uranium. Then making it into a bomb from there is actually fairly straight forward by comparison. But the materials and methods for making these centrifuges alone are not easy to get. Then you need people who know what they're doing. Just read about the accidents at los alamos while the US was developing their bombs. There was one incident in which a researcher had a vial of plutonium in liquid form explode in his face. Covering his face and inside of his mouth with what at the time was most of the plutonium that existed on the planet. Only a few ml. But you bet the government wanted their plutonium back. After all was said and done, dude had to process the plutonium out of his contaminated clothes, things in the room that were contaminated and bodily fluids, vomit and uring I believe. He never got any radiation siclness or poisoning from the plutonium. But he had a hefty enough dose that plutonium was detectable in his urine until he died. Oh yeah and there are the demon core incidents. Those are a classic.
Although I'd seen those smoke trails, I always thought they were caused by some weird reaction between the air and the explosion. I never even thought they were put there deliberately to help monitor what was going on. Great video!
as you know, if there were some weird reaction where would be more smoke trails. i suggest a good and tiny book called: consider a spherical cow, made myself see world better as it is.
I honestly thought it was lighting strikes, I just assumed that large of a thermal reaction caused some friction that needed to be released. The more ya know.
(3:00) is where the question ("what are those LINES...?") gets answered. If you only want to know what these lines are - (3:00) is where you get your _(trivial)_ answer. All before that is scientific stuff, that's surely interesting for some, but only serves to lead to that point.
Whenever you see the shockwave hit houses it always looks like a huge blast of wind, but watching those smoke trails you understand it not wind its more like every particle of air suddenly wanted to exist 10 feet to the left and they're taking everything with them. Edit. Okay so explosions are chemical reactions, two or more ingredients react with each other which creates heat which continues the reaction. But chemical reactions do not remove matter, they simply convert it to a different form, so if you have a fist sized ball of explosives and it all explodes then you are left with a ball of super dense super heated gasses that is equal to the mass of the ball but wants to take up much more space, so those gasses expand outwards but they cant break the speed of sound so it becomes a pressure wave expanding outwards in all directions. But as soon as the pressure wave passes over you the air stops, there is no energy imparted into the air it is simply trying to make room for the sudden expansion of hot gasses. Nukes work the same way except instead of a chemical reaction turning solids to gasses its atoms splitting into two with some extra bits flying off, plus breaking the nuclear bond releases much more energy so everything gets much hotter and more heat equals more expansion equals more pressure and bigger boom. The wind caused by nukes is not from the explosion but from the air expanding to far and springing back combined with a massive updraft from the fireball rising into the upper atmosphere. Fun fact, any atomic bomb footage you have seen where the fireball seemed to have fiery legs its because the nuke was on top of a tower which was supported by cables and the heat has vaporized the cables so fast they basically explode.
the effect you see is not the smoke trail being displaced, but the compressed air in the wavefront acting as a lense that distorts the view on the smoketrail. those are the "hooks" you see. Distorting lense effects of supercompressed air.
Can we all take a moment to appreciate the ingenuity here? This is the nuclear explosion equivalent of those black and white lines/rulers on high speed camera videos. Truly an incredible work of engineering and practical knowledge
@@sidv4615 of course! If you watch some high speed camera videos, especially ones where they want to show movement per frame (like a bullet), they may have a wall in the background with either a ruler or a set of black and white lines that are ruled equally (ie all of them are 1 inch long) so you can see how many inches it moves in a specific amount of time. So if the bullet has moved 3 inches in 5 seconds with a frame rate of 10,000 frames per second, you can use some algebraic equations to find out exactly how fast that bullet is moving. I’m not smart enough to do that math but that’s the long-and-short of how they can derive those numbers. SO with the nuclear bomb, if shockwave passes three of those smoke lines in 5 seconds at 10,000 frames per second, and those smoke lines are 100 feet apart, they can calculate the speed of the shockwave, or whatever else they want to measure. I hope that makes sense, please ask more questions if you need more info :)
The last clip (3:54) was also very interesting. We were able to see how the shock wave got reflected from the ground, ran vertically up in the air, deformed the fireball and dragged dust and smoke up behind it.
The lowest part of the rebounded wave nearly doubles the energy of the expanding ground wave…the rebounded energy combines with the original expanding wave at ground level. This is called a Mach wave and one of the reasons that airbursts have more lethal shock waves at ground level. Ground bursts provide more of a radioactive cloud, but less of a expanding shock wave. 😮
It never ceases to amaze me how ingenious a large group of humans can be when they cooperate. Even the smartest individual cannot compare to the power of a large group of moderately smart people. It also shows how many potentially weird phenomena can be explained by our CURRENT ideas about the laws of physics if you spend enough time thinking about it.
When I was like 7 or 8, I used to think those lines were, like, somehow related to the Earth's magnetosphere, like the nuke was somehow causing it to manifest visually. It obviously never occurred to me to wonder why the lines were always conveniently perpendicular to the camera.
@@aztronomy7457 Keep in mind, this was back when we had channels like Discovery and TLC and they were still in "education mode", as opposed to today when we see the endgame of needing to appeal to wider audiences with shorter attention spans.
@@maxsparks5183 Pretty sure I didn't know the _word_ "magnetosphere" but I mean sure, by that age, everyone knows what magnets are, that the Earth is a kind of magnet in its own right, and that they tend to be illustrated (somewhat imprecisely) as having lines coming out of them in various directions.
Thanks for that. Often seen the lines but didn't know if they were somehow an artifact of the explosion itself or something else. Good explanation of the "double flash" as well. A former boss I had many years ago helped design protective "flash glasses" that would protect an observer from the second flash (which does most of the damage). The protective "glasses" or actually goggles, would have to sense the first flash, then fire an extremely quick acting "squib charge" which would then drive a "shutter" closed to protect the wearers eyes.
So this is one of those imponderables I've had in my life for as long as I can remember. So glad I got it explained in such an elegant and succinct fashion. As soon as they gave the example of the heathered balloon I knew immediately what the purpose of the smoke trails was. Well done!
I’ve always noticed those trails, and was always curious what they were. I took them to be some mysterious aspect of the detonation itself, and wanted to know more about them. Now I know, but although the explanation was interesting, I feel kinda underwhelmed to find that it wasn’t some exotic radiation being released.
I remember getting warnings about fallout. It showed on the news the wind patterns. There were numerous atomic bomb tests in the 50's and 60's. Yes, I'm old.
I once attended an awkward (boring) birthday gathering where I only knew the host. I sat and marveled over one of the gifts, a thick volume of 10x14" color photos of nuke-tests with single-paragraph captions, one of which explained the smoke trails. Maybe I'm strange, but I found the book beautiful.
I always knew it was something to do with shockwaves but it's amazing that a simple observation lead to their use. Also this is the first time I'm seeing them fire.
Of course many many specialist eyes watched and rewatched those videos for every nuance and glimmer that they could inform them of. Every facet and particle on each frame was being considered provisionally important.
Another fun fact: Metal spheres (solid ) were placed within 100 yards of ground zero. Most people would surmise that these spheres would vaporize instantly. The spheres survived, although their circumference shrunk appreciatively. This demonstrates an ablative process via the high temperature.
I always wondered what those weird trails were, I assumed it was some phenomena of the blast itself, I never knew that rockets were sent up seconds before the blast. Thanks for clearing that up.
This answered a lifelong question I had about those strange lines. What was strange is that it seemed that I was the only person that wondered what they were because no one asked or seemed to care.
Outstanding video. It seemed obvious they were for yield calculation, but I didn't realize this was the mechanism behind it. Simple, straight forward and to the point like a video should be! Nice! :)
@@grindelston5968: I can understand that. How obvious a given thing is will greatly depend on the work/career/interests someone has. For myself looking at this from the outside, there can only be so many reasons for shooting giant lines of smoke trails just before a detonation. My initial thought was that displacement of the smoke itself by the initial pressure wave could give yield calculations. Which turned out to be true, but I had the underlying mechanism wrong. Or, to put it in real world context, you could think of my initial notion as the windsock at an airport. How much it's hanging and which direction tell you two important things: Wind speed and direction. Same kind of deal, except that initial guess was wrong.
I love the way Feynman described it. Gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, it takes a whole planet to weigh you down. The forces we see in our everyday lives can shape the world in dramatic ways, but there is much more hidden beneath the surface. When you feel static electricity, that is the effect of an extremely minuscule amount of charge, accumulated by the triboelectric effect. When generating electricity, we humans concentrate a very small amount of electrons to do our bidding, the weight of the entire internet is akin to a strawberry. On very small scales, we can still see this power, when you touch something you are coming so close to it that its electric charge pushes back on you. However, the strong nuclear force is even stronger, but once again, its constituents are in numerical balance, hiding away the fact that extreme energy exists in all things. To unleash this power from only a dollar bill’s weight of fissile material created the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki. But everything everywhere stores this energy.
E=mc2. The energy contained in mass is gargantuan if released by nuclear fission or fusion. The multiplier c2 means you only need a small amount of mass liberation to produce extraordinary amounts of energy.
Thanks for the straight forward and very professional explanation of this .. yes, I've often wondered what those lines were. I just assumed they were a result of the magnitude of the explosion. Thanks again.
there is a more important question: in various TV-films or series, there are terrorist organisations that claim to have a nuclear bomb. and when they fire one, there are those lines. the simple question: why so some terrorists need those smoke rockets? do they really care that much? "we will explode a city, but for scientific purposes, we have set rockets up that allow you to learn from it"
I always thought it was some kind of electromagnetic reaction interfacing between the ground and atmosphere kind of like how there is lightening in volcanic eruptions.. thanks for straightening me out. Neat!
THANK Y O U !!! For MANY Years I always wanted to know, "...what da Hell are those lines coming from and why are they being used, and for what purpose, and....." You Explained one (1) of the many Mysteries I had in my life....Now, I can go to sleep.😉
That one drove me crazy for years... I knew it couldn't be part of the bomb itself but I couldn't figure out what caused it or if it had a purpose. The regular distances between each 'marker' suggested it was some measurement tool...but for a 'nuke' that where they measuring I knew it wasn't "power". In the end, I could only manage "size"
I am more confused and uninterested about nuclear explosion than ever before. Thank you buddy, your monotonous voice and not-user-friendly explanations is way to go
MY FATHER who was in the Navy in the late 1950's. Saw 12 atomic bombs tests up close (a human Guinea pig). They called it Operation Hardtack in the Pacific. My father said they gave him special dark Goggles (That I still have) and was also told to turn away from the blast and put his arm in from of his eyes. My father said he was a 2 man navy boat in the ocean. When the blast went off. There was so much radiation that included x-rays. He could see through the goggles, his arm, the boat and see the skeleton of the fish in the water. My dad had both eardrums blown out and eventually died of cancer 20 years ago after being almost totally deaf for 40 years. Waiting for his VA benefits hearing to increase his disability from only 15% to 100%. He never lived long enough for the hearing. The U.S. Government had stalled him for years. That was there plan. To wait for him to die 1st. My mom is still alive and could use the 40 years of back pay they owed him.
He made up the x ray stuff, X ray machines have a sensor that detects the x rays that where blocked by the human body. You fathers eyes would never be able to do that and x rays are invisible to the human eye.
@@n1ckster055 I am not so sure. Gamma-rays can induce X-rays of lower energy, when they hit material. That is why we had lead-layers inside a cassette of X-ray sensitive film to photograph objects as part of an X-ray inspection. The lead would absorb the higher energy rays from outside and turn them into lower energies, as well as free electrons that would amplify the projected image on the film. In theory, a human eye is indeed insensitive to small wavelengths above the blue bandwidth into the ultraviolet, so that X-rays are certainly not triggering the retina as visible light does. But, gamma- and X-ray radiation may cause secondary radiation. I don't know as how this might have worked during a nuclear explosion though, I never thought of the ways that unintended projections of images may occur under those conditions.
@@n1ckster055 The trick we applied was this: we attached a stack of several cassettes onto an object that we were supposed to inspect. We set up a Co60 source or a linear accelerator opposite to the stack of cassettes, with the object in between. Inside each cassette was a different combination of either a single film of a certain speed, or the same film, but sandwiched between lead-layers (or even stainless steel in some cases). The cassette could therefore contain only one film, or multiple films of different speeds, either combined with amplifying layers, or without any amplifiers. The idea was to cover a multitude of different thicknesses that we had to inspect in a single exposure. That saved a lot of time and effort. Obviously, we only had to go through that kind of tedious effort in case of really thick steel objects. Smaller objects could be more conveniently inspected with a single paper-wrapped film, which was of a certain speed and was sandwiched between layers of 0.027 mm lead, deposited on paper. We used portable X-ray sources for that, or Ir192 radioactive sources, which were very mobile to deploy in the field.
@@n1ckster055 However, the light flash is intense enough to be able to be seen through human tissue. There are reports of such observations. Then there is X-ray fluorescence...
He also liked to tell whoppers. If x-rays let you see through things, you'd kind of notice that when getting a medical x-ray of your body or a cat scan.
As a teenager, I started to realize that these lines were from rockets that I believed carried instrumentation to measure the blast. Turns out I was partially correct as the rockets do not carry measuring devices, but instead the smoke from the rockets is used to measure the shockwave. However, I always knew that these were rocket trails because I used to build and fly model rockets from the age of 10. Fascinating stuff!
Holy cow. This whole time I've been just assuming the lines were distortions in the film caused by the radiation. I had no idea they were actually real physical things.
That was something that I often wondered as the vertical orientation and consistency from ground to maximum elevation made no sense if it were related to the explosion. Of course with high speed cameras you don't see much prior to the detonation so I always assumed that there was some phenomenon that I just wasn't aware of. I never actually realized that these were only visible with test runs.
Those lines are actually a bug within the game and we currently patching it, thanks for letting us know about the issue and we will add a hot fix immediately!
I really feel like although this video is super technical, i still sense it's own awareness of what a real treat it was for me as I watched it. I know there was nothing more to say, but when it was over I was saddened being as I could have watched a video on this topic and in this style indefinitely. Thank you. Also thank you for the new footage.
And then there are all these children in the comments complaining about how it was "way too long" because everything needs to be a 7 second tik tok now.
It’s quite literally common sense tbh. Everyone thinks differently but I knew what those lines were meant for before I KNEW what they were meant for. Nice vid btw👌
Thanks for answering this question. I thought they were flares dropped by the bomber. Also the hbomb explosion always looked like lemon meringue pie filling to me as a kid. Great viddie
What you are referring to is a ‘ground burst’. Air bursts are more efficient because you get increased blast radius with less lingering radiation. If you want to destroy a city entirely, do an air burst. If you want to destroy a city and leave it uninhabitable, do a ground burst.
@@zaynthebrayn More importantly, with an air burst you multiply the strength of the shockwave where it intersects with the ground - thus increasing the damage.
Super good explanation! I am always amazed by the fact that the Trinity test was filmed with 6 super high speed cameras.Yes, not much material fits on one tape. But the fact that it was possible is almost unbelievable.
That just makes too much damn sense, feels good to walk away from a nuclear explosion/physics video knowing I was actually able to wrap my resin coated brain around this one.
It would be nice if the narration extended to telling us what practical use could be made from studying the development of these clouds and shockwaves at such a fine time scale.
I remember working on tracking transmitters for rockets used at Operation Fishbowl, 1962 I think. I was at Cubic in San Diego but Cubic had engineers at the test site, reporting and staying in bunkers. I don't know whether the rockets had smoke trails and I have lost contact with the Cubic folks. I do know that the rockets were tracked and my transmitters were used.
When I was a little boy, I was fascinated by nuclear detonations "and still am" and I used to draw these lines when i draw a nuclear detonation even though I didn't know what they were
Awesome, thanks for the video! I remember asking my teacher im 5th or 6th grade about exactly these smoke lines when we were learning about nuclear energy and bombs. He had no idea. Now I'm 34 and I got my answer 😂
I’m really annoyed with the internet. It’s supposed to be some greatly intelligent source of information, but I “put forth” days of effort to find an answer for this. After about 5 consecutive days, about 3 hours or so per day, of looking for info on this, I gave up. That was a little over a year ago. And now I come to find out, through the algorithm, that answers not only existed within months of my original attempt, but at least 4 years prior? Why was it so hard to find this when I was looking for it? What’s even more frustrating is that finding this video was pure luck. Seriously, the Oppenheimer movie is all it took for this to appear. I got my answer at least.
Yes; of course those smoke trails were never the result of the expulsions, but were always some sort of measurement devices! It's the soldiers marching toward the explosions that I feel sorry for.
On footage of nuclear blasts captured on CCD camera sensor, they get a shimmering effect on the pixels where some pixels appear dead for a few frames. Or full white. It's just some speckling of pixels that linger. I hear this is caused by the radiation hitting the sensor's equivalent to "pixels". These are called scintillating pixels. Why then does this appear in some other smaller but reportedly non-nuclear explosions like the Tianjin, China explosion in 2015? But there are plenty others like Beirut. But this one I mentioned in China is particularly obvious with the scintillating pixels. Is there any amplification effects if one of these small tactical nukes is detonated in the basement of a high-rise building next to the air conditioning refrigerant tanks? Is there a reaction with the coolant and fission fuel that directs the energy upward and amplifies it? Would it leave a molten granite crater in the ground where that high-rise building once stood? Just some things for other videos. Great channel.
Probably one of the most amazing nuclear mini documentaries I've ever watched, good job. I'm not sure if it's on purpose or if I'm listening to vintage samples, the delivery style is amazing as well. I really like the 1950s vibe.
Finally, a explination for one of the many thing that keep me up at night. I knew It could’nt of been from the blast itself and always found the spacing to be oddly simlar. I would sit and contemplate; “how does this explosion create this? It can’t be the nuke. what is it?” It’s a ruler….finally! “Not being facetious - I’m going to sleep good tonight” cross your fingers something else doesnt come to take this riddles place in my brain.
I always guessed the smoke trails where used for some calculation but I never knew it was for the shock, pretty cool how they got around calculating something they couldn't see.
3:19 Extreme lower right corner of the frame: smoke pot. Check out the films of the Grable Atomic Cannon shot, white and black smoke pots are used in addition to the smoke rockets.
I've honestly never seen footage of the smoke rockets being fired off before detonating the nuke, so thanks for sharing that
The never usually show that, the big ticket is the blast itself and not the boring detail of setting it up.
But I know what you mean. Often times, all the work that went into something like these big events is more interesting. I have watched so many videos about Apollo preparations, how the astronauts were trained, the construction of the equipment for that reason.
But for years I always wondered about this before learning of the sounding rockets. In pre-internet days, searching for answers was either difficult or very time consuming.
Honesty is the best policy !!!! BTW smoke rockets are used only in test detonations. In actual war they would not use them. Obviously . . . the rockets are useful only when high speed cameras are set up to record the event. Clearly that means they know ahead of time exactly WHEN the explosion will happen. In war that would be impossible.
@@piehound oh I know the US military would never deploy smoke rockets, especially considering most of the US nuclear stockpile is either ICBMs or SLBMs
@@tomstamford6837 there is just a very limited supply of nuke footage out there, same with meaningful volcanic eruptions, you just exhaust it very quickly, so it's always rad to see something new.
true
FUN FACT: It took ~240,000 times longer to explain this phenomenon in this video than for the event to occur in real time.
That's not my idea of fun.
Great COMMENT. In plain English. It gets so hot it can't get out of it's own way. Hotter than shit.💩💩💩
Detonation and energetics be like that.
r/theydidthemath
@@Invalidinput
The other side of the coin. Thanks for augmenting my statement.
Most impressed by the hard math/science behind these experiments. It makes me wonder how modern nuclear developments are conducted in current times considering live testing is banned. There seem to be periods in human history where developments just leapfrog into a whole new era.
It seems like you’re describing the 20th century. An era of unprecedented research and advancements, unhampered by the whiny wokeism that’s currently damning the 21st century.
Supercomputers. Very big supercomputers.
I'm all for experiments, using the results to vaporize innocent civilian women, children, elderly and men is what doesn't sit quite right with me.
Simulations, hope and maintenance. I'm more interested how PEOPLE are recruited for the work, as it isn't taught in regular university classes.
In the case of North Korea, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there were a lot of scientists in Ukraine where a lot of the research was done, were suddenly without work. So, they went to work for North Korea. Taking decades of nuclear science with them.
In the case of the USSR, they were working on their ownbprogram, but they got a huge headstart from information stolen from the US by spies. People like the Rosenburgs helped the program come along a great way like that.
Those are the only two countries I can say with any assuredness how they developed nuclear weapons. But judging from the pattern, I think it's safe to say other nuclear powers that shouldn't have them like Israel and South Africa probably developed their weapons using stolen information.
I'm pretty sure that the UK worked with the US to develop their weapons. And I have no clue how France got the bomb. They seem the least likely developed country to have nukes.
Of course, there's a lot more to building nukes than just knowing how. One of the hardest parts is purifying uranium ore into weapons grade uranium-235. Which requires massive, extremely fast, extremely precisely built centrifuges made out of special, high strength metal alloys since they spin so fast that normal materials would just tear themselves apart. You need a lot of information and special materials just to process the uranium. Then making it into a bomb from there is actually fairly straight forward by comparison. But the materials and methods for making these centrifuges alone are not easy to get. Then you need people who know what they're doing.
Just read about the accidents at los alamos while the US was developing their bombs. There was one incident in which a researcher had a vial of plutonium in liquid form explode in his face. Covering his face and inside of his mouth with what at the time was most of the plutonium that existed on the planet. Only a few ml. But you bet the government wanted their plutonium back. After all was said and done, dude had to process the plutonium out of his contaminated clothes, things in the room that were contaminated and bodily fluids, vomit and uring I believe. He never got any radiation siclness or poisoning from the plutonium. But he had a hefty enough dose that plutonium was detectable in his urine until he died.
Oh yeah and there are the demon core incidents. Those are a classic.
Although I'd seen those smoke trails, I always thought they were caused by some weird reaction between the air and the explosion. I never even thought they were put there deliberately to help monitor what was going on. Great video!
as you know, if there were some weird reaction where would be more smoke trails. i suggest a good and tiny book called: consider a spherical cow, made myself see world better as it is.
it's like graph papering the sky :D
I honestly thought it was lighting strikes, I just assumed that large of a thermal reaction caused some friction that needed to be released. The more ya know.
(3:00) is where the question ("what are those LINES...?") gets answered.
If you only want to know what these lines are - (3:00) is where you get your _(trivial)_ answer.
All before that is scientific stuff, that's surely interesting for some, but only serves to lead to that point.
Whenever you see the shockwave hit houses it always looks like a huge blast of wind, but watching those smoke trails you understand it not wind its more like every particle of air suddenly wanted to exist 10 feet to the left and they're taking everything with them.
Edit. Okay so explosions are chemical reactions, two or more ingredients react with each other which creates heat which continues the reaction. But chemical reactions do not remove matter, they simply convert it to a different form, so if you have a fist sized ball of explosives and it all explodes then you are left with a ball of super dense super heated gasses that is equal to the mass of the ball but wants to take up much more space, so those gasses expand outwards but they cant break the speed of sound so it becomes a pressure wave expanding outwards in all directions. But as soon as the pressure wave passes over you the air stops, there is no energy imparted into the air it is simply trying to make room for the sudden expansion of hot gasses.
Nukes work the same way except instead of a chemical reaction turning solids to gasses its atoms splitting into two with some extra bits flying off, plus breaking the nuclear bond releases much more energy so everything gets much hotter and more heat equals more expansion equals more pressure and bigger boom.
The wind caused by nukes is not from the explosion but from the air expanding to far and springing back combined with a massive updraft from the fireball rising into the upper atmosphere.
Fun fact, any atomic bomb footage you have seen where the fireball seemed to have fiery legs its because the nuke was on top of a tower which was supported by cables and the heat has vaporized the cables so fast they basically explode.
Is that not wind?
Probably teleporting
It isnt wind, but it gives off the effect of such. It's very similar to how waves propagate through water.
the effect you see is not the smoke trail being displaced, but the compressed air in the wavefront acting as a lense that distorts the view on the smoketrail. those are the "hooks" you see.
Distorting lense effects of supercompressed air.
@@jackcallahan1848 it's like wind in the way a handshake relates to a punch.
Can we all take a moment to appreciate the ingenuity here? This is the nuclear explosion equivalent of those black and white lines/rulers on high speed camera videos. Truly an incredible work of engineering and practical knowledge
It’s amazing.
...all in the service of mass murder.
Can you explain what you meant by black and white lines/rulers on high speed camera videos
@@sidv4615 of course! If you watch some high speed camera videos, especially ones where they want to show movement per frame (like a bullet), they may have a wall in the background with either a ruler or a set of black and white lines that are ruled equally (ie all of them are 1 inch long) so you can see how many inches it moves in a specific amount of time.
So if the bullet has moved 3 inches in 5 seconds with a frame rate of 10,000 frames per second, you can use some algebraic equations to find out exactly how fast that bullet is moving. I’m not smart enough to do that math but that’s the long-and-short of how they can derive those numbers.
SO with the nuclear bomb, if shockwave passes three of those smoke lines in 5 seconds at 10,000 frames per second, and those smoke lines are 100 feet apart, they can calculate the speed of the shockwave, or whatever else they want to measure.
I hope that makes sense, please ask more questions if you need more info :)
I'll not take a moment, no
I think the way shockwaves interact with smoke and dust is strangely beautiful, also really haunting
I really want to watch a nuke go off
It’s designed to end humanity so 😐
@@enolopanr9820 No, they're designed to never be used
@@Surrenitie No, they're used as deterrence.
@@ultimaxkom8728 Precisely
The last clip (3:54) was also very interesting. We were able to see how the shock wave got reflected from the ground, ran vertically up in the air, deformed the fireball and dragged dust and smoke up behind it.
It creates a mushroom cloud
That’s fucking sick
The lowest part of the rebounded wave nearly doubles the energy of the expanding ground wave…the rebounded energy combines with the original expanding wave at ground level. This is called a Mach wave and one of the reasons that airbursts have more lethal shock waves at ground level. Ground bursts provide more of a radioactive cloud, but less of a expanding shock wave. 😮
It never ceases to amaze me how ingenious a large group of humans can be when they cooperate. Even the smartest individual cannot compare to the power of a large group of moderately smart people. It also shows how many potentially weird phenomena can be explained by our CURRENT ideas about the laws of physics if you spend enough time thinking about it.
When I was like 7 or 8, I used to think those lines were, like, somehow related to the Earth's magnetosphere, like the nuke was somehow causing it to manifest visually. It obviously never occurred to me to wonder why the lines were always conveniently perpendicular to the camera.
Me too, I thought "spoooky interaction" ! LOL
You knew what the magnetosphere was when you were 7 ? Ok Einstein
@@aztronomy7457 Keep in mind, this was back when we had channels like Discovery and TLC and they were still in "education mode", as opposed to today when we see the endgame of needing to appeal to wider audiences with shorter attention spans.
You were thinking about “magnetosphere” at 7 or 8 years old? Well damn! I was playing cowboys and Indians.😏
@@maxsparks5183 Pretty sure I didn't know the _word_ "magnetosphere" but I mean sure, by that age, everyone knows what magnets are, that the Earth is a kind of magnet in its own right, and that they tend to be illustrated (somewhat imprecisely) as having lines coming out of them in various directions.
I remember noticing these when I was a teenager in documentaries but only now, twenty years later learned what they where from, Thank you.
Thanks for that. Often seen the lines but didn't know if they were somehow an artifact of the explosion itself or something else. Good explanation of the "double flash" as well. A former boss I had many years ago helped design protective "flash glasses" that would protect an observer from the second flash (which does most of the damage). The protective "glasses" or actually goggles, would have to sense the first flash, then fire an extremely quick acting "squib charge" which would then drive a "shutter" closed to protect the wearers eyes.
Strapping explosive charged glasses to your face so you can look directly at the brightest thing humans have ever created and hopefully not go blind.
I have wondered for decades what those lines were, so thank you for explaining them so succinctly.
Kept you occupied daily didn’t it
So this is one of those imponderables I've had in my life for as long as I can remember. So glad I got it explained in such an elegant and succinct fashion. As soon as they gave the example of the heathered balloon I knew immediately what the purpose of the smoke trails was. Well done!
I’ve always noticed those trails, and was always curious what they were. I took them to be some mysterious aspect of the detonation itself, and wanted to know more about them.
Now I know, but although the explanation was interesting, I feel kinda underwhelmed to find that it wasn’t some exotic radiation being released.
I 100% agree with everything you said
Try to wrap your head around him saying "when the average temperature of the fireball drops below 300,000° Celsius".
You could fry an egg at.those temps, then again what egg?
@@k2000kidd1There is a radius around a nuclear detonation where every pizza is cooked to perfection. Just something I thought I should share.
I remember getting warnings about fallout. It showed on the news the wind patterns. There were numerous atomic bomb tests in the 50's and 60's. Yes, I'm old.
Hey man we will all get old one day at least you got to experience a nuclear bomb in the flesh! Not that I want to during my lifetime
I once attended an awkward (boring) birthday gathering where I only knew the host. I sat and marveled over one of the gifts, a thick volume of 10x14" color photos of nuke-tests with single-paragraph captions, one of which explained the smoke trails. Maybe I'm strange, but I found the book beautiful.
A huge thank you! This has never been explained or at least been available information before. We are many who have been wondering for decades 🙂
Well said. I am one of the many.
I always knew it was something to do with shockwaves but it's amazing that a simple observation lead to their use. Also this is the first time I'm seeing them fire.
Of course many many specialist eyes watched and rewatched those videos for every nuance and glimmer that they could inform them of. Every facet and particle on each frame was being considered provisionally important.
SHOCKWAVE TRAIL METER BARRIER BUT THIS LOOK LIKE THE TRINITY RADIOACTIVE TRAIL. :3
Another fun fact: Metal spheres (solid ) were placed within 100 yards of ground zero. Most people would surmise that these spheres would vaporize instantly. The spheres survived, although their circumference shrunk appreciatively. This demonstrates an ablative process via the high temperature.
This is a great part of CZcams. I got a question answered I didn’t know I had. 😊
I always wondered what those weird trails were, I assumed it was some phenomena of the blast itself, I never knew that rockets were sent up seconds before the blast. Thanks for clearing that up.
Thanks now I don't have to watch the video.
@@SungazerDNB🤣
This answered a lifelong question I had about those strange lines. What was strange is that it seemed that I was the only person that wondered what they were because no one asked or seemed to care.
same here, i did think it was some kind of reaction of the explosion, lightning or something.
You were not the only one
Outstanding video. It seemed obvious they were for yield calculation, but I didn't realize this was the mechanism behind it. Simple, straight forward and to the point like a video should be! Nice! :)
Yes.
Maybe obvious for you, I had absolutely no idea
@@grindelston5968: I can understand that. How obvious a given thing is will greatly depend on the work/career/interests someone has. For myself looking at this from the outside, there can only be so many reasons for shooting giant lines of smoke trails just before a detonation. My initial thought was that displacement of the smoke itself by the initial pressure wave could give yield calculations. Which turned out to be true, but I had the underlying mechanism wrong. Or, to put it in real world context, you could think of my initial notion as the windsock at an airport. How much it's hanging and which direction tell you two important things: Wind speed and direction. Same kind of deal, except that initial guess was wrong.
I always asked myself what those lines are? Thanks for explaining for us.
No hubub, no going back in time a hundred years to the discovery of atomic reactions, no BS; Straight to the point with the answer posed. 10/10 video.
Anyone else notice the absolute PERFECTION that is this narrators pronunciations? Thank you sir
Sounds like AI
Always been curious about this. Very well done! 2 for 2 on great uploads so far. Keep it up 👍
thank you so much
What still questions me is what in the world gives these materials such force
I love the way Feynman described it.
Gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, it takes a whole planet to weigh you down. The forces we see in our everyday lives can shape the world in dramatic ways, but there is much more hidden beneath the surface. When you feel static electricity, that is the effect of an extremely minuscule amount of charge, accumulated by the triboelectric effect. When generating electricity, we humans concentrate a very small amount of electrons to do our bidding, the weight of the entire internet is akin to a strawberry. On very small scales, we can still see this power, when you touch something you are coming so close to it that its electric charge pushes back on you. However, the strong nuclear force is even stronger, but once again, its constituents are in numerical balance, hiding away the fact that extreme energy exists in all things. To unleash this power from only a dollar bill’s weight of fissile material created the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki. But everything everywhere stores this energy.
E=mc2. The energy contained in mass is gargantuan if released by nuclear fission or fusion. The multiplier c2 means you only need a small amount of mass liberation to produce extraordinary amounts of energy.
It's called the strong force.
That's easy: Male Insecurity.
🎉
@@bold810 If only the birthing people were a fraction of our greatness.
So obvious, yet so ingenious. Great presentation and thorough explanation. Bravo to atomicarchive.
QUESTION: Due to the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) would these recordings be possible today with a modern cell phone for example?
We should have the answer soon, I'm sure someone will have a phone handy Ukraine.
This is the speed of voice needed for education. Really great mini lecture.
Thanks for the straight forward and very professional explanation of this .. yes, I've often wondered what those lines were. I just assumed they were a result of the magnitude of the explosion. Thanks again.
Well done! 👍 Clear and concise. Keep it coming.
there is a more important question: in various TV-films or series, there are terrorist organisations that claim to have a nuclear bomb. and when they fire one, there are those lines.
the simple question: why so some terrorists need those smoke rockets? do they really care that much? "we will explode a city, but for scientific purposes, we have set rockets up that allow you to learn from it"
Probably the producers that didn’t know what those lines were and didn’t bother to check it out
1:30
Notice the smiley face at the center of the plasma ball. This is the universe happily reminding you of your meager existence.
I've waited about three decades to learn this. thank you🙏
I always thought it was some kind of electromagnetic reaction interfacing between the ground and atmosphere kind of like how there is lightening in volcanic eruptions.. thanks for straightening me out. Neat!
THANK Y O U !!!
For MANY Years I always wanted to know, "...what da Hell are those lines coming from and why are they being used, and for what purpose, and....."
You Explained one (1) of the many Mysteries I had in my life....Now, I can go to sleep.😉
That one drove me crazy for years...
I knew it couldn't be part of the bomb itself but I couldn't figure out what caused it or if it had a purpose.
The regular distances between each 'marker' suggested it was some measurement tool...but for a 'nuke' that where they measuring I knew it wasn't "power".
In the end, I could only manage "size"
Wow... this video showed an expert in using the most words to explain something so simple...
I am more confused and uninterested about nuclear explosion than ever before. Thank you buddy, your monotonous voice and not-user-friendly explanations is way to go
MY FATHER who was in the Navy in the late 1950's. Saw 12 atomic bombs tests up close (a human Guinea pig). They called it Operation Hardtack in the Pacific. My father said they gave him special dark Goggles (That I still have) and was also told to turn away from the blast and put his arm in from of his eyes. My father said he was a 2 man navy boat in the ocean. When the blast went off. There was so much radiation that included x-rays. He could see through the goggles, his arm, the boat and see the skeleton of the fish in the water. My dad had both eardrums blown out and eventually died of cancer 20 years ago after being almost totally deaf for 40 years. Waiting for his VA benefits hearing to increase his disability from only 15% to 100%. He never lived long enough for the hearing. The U.S. Government had stalled him for years. That was there plan. To wait for him to die 1st. My mom is still alive and could use the 40 years of back pay they owed him.
He made up the x ray stuff, X ray machines have a sensor that detects the x rays that where blocked by the human body. You fathers eyes would never be able to do that and x rays are invisible to the human eye.
@@n1ckster055 I am not so sure. Gamma-rays can induce X-rays of lower energy, when they hit material. That is why we had lead-layers inside a cassette of X-ray sensitive film to photograph objects as part of an X-ray inspection. The lead would absorb the higher energy rays from outside and turn them into lower energies, as well as free electrons that would amplify the projected image on the film.
In theory, a human eye is indeed insensitive to small wavelengths above the blue bandwidth into the ultraviolet, so that X-rays are certainly not triggering the retina as visible light does. But, gamma- and X-ray radiation may cause secondary radiation. I don't know as how this might have worked during a nuclear explosion though, I never thought of the ways that unintended projections of images may occur under those conditions.
@@n1ckster055 The trick we applied was this: we attached a stack of several cassettes onto an object that we were supposed to inspect. We set up a Co60 source or a linear accelerator opposite to the stack of cassettes, with the object in between. Inside each cassette was a different combination of either a single film of a certain speed, or the same film, but sandwiched between lead-layers (or even stainless steel in some cases). The cassette could therefore contain only one film, or multiple films of different speeds, either combined with amplifying layers, or without any amplifiers. The idea was to cover a multitude of different thicknesses that we had to inspect in a single exposure. That saved a lot of time and effort.
Obviously, we only had to go through that kind of tedious effort in case of really thick steel objects. Smaller objects could be more conveniently inspected with a single paper-wrapped film, which was of a certain speed and was sandwiched between layers of 0.027 mm lead, deposited on paper. We used portable X-ray sources for that, or Ir192 radioactive sources, which were very mobile to deploy in the field.
@@n1ckster055 However, the light flash is intense enough to be able to be seen through human tissue. There are reports of such observations. Then there is X-ray fluorescence...
He also liked to tell whoppers. If x-rays let you see through things, you'd kind of notice that when getting a medical x-ray of your body or a cat scan.
As a teenager, I started to realize that these lines were from rockets that I believed carried instrumentation to measure the blast. Turns out I was partially correct as the rockets do not carry measuring devices, but instead the smoke from the rockets is used to measure the shockwave. However, I always knew that these were rocket trails because I used to build and fly model rockets from the age of 10. Fascinating stuff!
I figured these were rockets to measure the size of the mushroom cloud. Kinda close. Subscribed, as this was explained clearly and succinctly.
Holy cow. This whole time I've been just assuming the lines were distortions in the film caused by the radiation. I had no idea they were actually real physical things.
That was something that I often wondered as the vertical orientation and consistency from ground to maximum elevation made no sense if it were related to the explosion. Of course with high speed cameras you don't see much prior to the detonation so I always assumed that there was some phenomenon that I just wasn't aware of. I never actually realized that these were only visible with test runs.
After observing these lines several times,
I knew they were some kind of measuring devises.
Thank you for this clean description.
Those lines are actually a bug within the game and we currently patching it, thanks for letting us know about the issue and we will add a hot fix immediately!
Oh, so many thanks, very useful! (I will never again do such a bomb test at home, without those smoke trail lines.)
this is one of those videos you can watch on 2x speed and feels normal
It's absolutely incredible how this managed to make an explosion sound boring.
Video went straight in with a no-holds-barred-I'm-not-gonna-sugar-coat-it answer. Boom! Tetris for AtomicA.
Thank you for solving a question I had never even been exposed to (never seen those lines before) but this was really fascinating
You've won a subscriber.
I really feel like although this video is super technical, i still sense it's own awareness of what a real treat it was for me as I watched it. I know there was nothing more to say, but when it was over I was saddened being as I could have watched a video on this topic and in this style indefinitely. Thank you. Also thank you for the new footage.
And then there are all these children in the comments complaining about how it was "way too long" because everything needs to be a 7 second tik tok now.
"What are those lines?"
"Smoke rockets"
-roll credits-
It’s quite literally common sense tbh. Everyone thinks differently but I knew what those lines were meant for before I KNEW what they were meant for. Nice vid btw👌
Thanks for answering this question. I thought they were flares dropped by the bomber. Also the hbomb explosion always looked like lemon meringue pie filling to me as a kid. Great viddie
well thanks for making me hungry : (
You know I always thought they hit the ground first I didn't know it was an airburst.
All those birds... I think you can see some of them in this video as white flashes appearing around the explosion 😢RIP little guys
What you are referring to is a ‘ground burst’. Air bursts are more efficient because you get increased blast radius with less lingering radiation.
If you want to destroy a city entirely, do an air burst.
If you want to destroy a city and leave it uninhabitable, do a ground burst.
@@zaynthebrayn thank you for letting me know. Deep down im sorry I asked.
@@zaynthebrayn air burts are good for getting the most of the blast energy aswell
@@zaynthebrayn More importantly, with an air burst you multiply the strength of the shockwave where it intersects with the ground - thus increasing the damage.
Anyone else have to play this video at 1.25x speed?
Yeah. Immediately
Multiplied by 20x.
The narration reminds me of How it’s Made. Pretty cool.
Fascinating the film quality they produced back then. I remember watching a whole documentary regarding filming nuclear tests
Super good explanation!
I am always amazed by the fact that the Trinity test was filmed with 6 super high speed cameras.Yes, not much material fits on one tape. But the fact that it was possible is almost unbelievable.
3:00 theres your answer just saved you 2 minutes
Thanks! Now when this extremely random topic pops up at a party, it will be my time to shine.
That footage at the end is absolutely stunning
I feel the voice for this video is too soothing. That blast is terrifying.
"There also were other rockets" THERE SAVED YOU THE TIME. HOLY SHIT
That just makes too much damn sense, feels good to walk away from a nuclear explosion/physics video knowing I was actually able to wrap my resin coated brain around this one.
What a simple yet smart way to track explosion movement! Thank you so much for this explanation!
Thank you for making this sound 1 million times more complicated than it actually is..................
Fascinating video! If you play it at 1.5x speed, the voiceover still sounds like a perfectly normal speed and cadence.
It would be nice if the narration extended to telling us what practical use could be made from studying the development of these clouds and shockwaves at such a fine time scale.
Thank you for taking it slow and making it a perfect ELI 5!
That we can now have this explained so casually is frightening.
I remember working on tracking transmitters for rockets used at Operation Fishbowl, 1962 I think. I was at Cubic in San Diego but Cubic had engineers at the test site, reporting and staying in bunkers. I don't know whether the rockets had smoke trails and I have lost contact with the Cubic folks. I do know that the rockets were tracked and my transmitters were used.
Great explanation and great video. I always wonder what the hell they were
Oh my goodness thank you! I've wondered about this for decades but never bothered to google it. Many thanks!
When I was a little boy, I was fascinated by nuclear detonations "and still am" and I used to draw these lines when i draw a nuclear detonation even though I didn't know what they were
Awesome, thanks for the video! I remember asking my teacher im 5th or 6th grade about exactly these smoke lines when we were learning about nuclear energy and bombs. He had no idea. Now I'm 34 and I got my answer 😂
Thank you for that slow and really accurate speech for not native english speaking people. And for that illuminating declaration… 😊
I’m really annoyed with the internet. It’s supposed to be some greatly intelligent source of information, but I “put forth” days of effort to find an answer for this. After about 5 consecutive days, about 3 hours or so per day, of looking for info on this, I gave up. That was a little over a year ago. And now I come to find out, through the algorithm, that answers not only existed within months of my original attempt, but at least 4 years prior? Why was it so hard to find this when I was looking for it? What’s even more frustrating is that finding this video was pure luck. Seriously, the Oppenheimer movie is all it took for this to appear. I got my answer at least.
Isn’t it amazing that something so beautiful and something so majestic can simply… melt your face right off your body - Jim Carrey as Jimmy Stewart.
FINALLY!
I've literally always wondered for all my life and never got any answers.
Yes; of course those smoke trails were never the result of the expulsions, but were always some sort of measurement devices! It's the soldiers marching toward the explosions that I feel sorry for.
Speed up to 1.25X so the narrator doesn't sound like he's reading you a bedtime story.
On footage of nuclear blasts captured on CCD camera sensor, they get a shimmering effect on the pixels where some pixels appear dead for a few frames. Or full white. It's just some speckling of pixels that linger. I hear this is caused by the radiation hitting the sensor's equivalent to "pixels".
These are called scintillating pixels.
Why then does this appear in some other smaller but reportedly non-nuclear explosions like the Tianjin, China explosion in 2015? But there are plenty others like Beirut. But this one I mentioned in China is particularly obvious with the scintillating pixels.
Is there any amplification effects if one of these small tactical nukes is detonated in the basement of a high-rise building next to the air conditioning refrigerant tanks? Is there a reaction with the coolant and fission fuel that directs the energy upward and amplifies it? Would it leave a molten granite crater in the ground where that high-rise building once stood?
Just some things for other videos. Great channel.
It starts with a “crack” noise, similar to when a lightning strike and thunder starts in the nature. The explosion happens after that.
Still amazed to see those explosions.
What a crazy weapon.
Probably one of the most amazing nuclear mini documentaries I've ever watched, good job.
I'm not sure if it's on purpose or if I'm listening to vintage samples, the delivery style is amazing as well. I really like the 1950s vibe.
Finally, a explination for one of the many thing that keep me up at night. I knew It could’nt of been from the blast itself and always found the spacing to be oddly simlar. I would sit and contemplate; “how does this explosion create this? It can’t be the nuke. what is it?”
It’s a ruler….finally! “Not being facetious - I’m going to sleep good tonight” cross your fingers something else doesnt come to take this riddles place in my brain.
I hypothesized what they were for 40 ago. Thanks for confirming.
Interesting! I also like that you didn't rush through the video, nor the explanation of it, it was well paced 👍
They always puzzled me. Thanks for clearing it up.
I don't know how many times I've looked for this info and never found it. And behold! You tube had the answer!
I always guessed the smoke trails where used for some calculation but I never knew it was for the shock, pretty cool how they got around calculating something they couldn't see.
3:19 Extreme lower right corner of the frame: smoke pot. Check out the films of the Grable Atomic Cannon shot, white and black smoke pots are used in addition to the smoke rockets.
Thank you for the explanation every time I see one in person I’ve always wondered the same thing