Ehh, just read it, apparently it’s thermal shock.

ps dont mind me just a freak of nature any way but the pic’s are pritty cool!
gypse.

I’d never heard of the Kerr Effect, but a rotation of 90 degs is mentioned for these cameras. Given the intensity of light from a bomb blast, it seems one would only need rotate the polarizati0n the tiniest bit.

Admiral Dread did a good job providing the temperature you were asking about, so I’ll pick up some of the other stuff. The sun is, on average, about 98,000,000 miles from the Earth. The reason a nuke doesn’t destroy the Earth with the temperatures generated is that the amount of energy released in total is inconsequential compared to that of the Sun, and is a very localized event. The Sun’s diameter is roughly 870,000 miles while the Earth has a diameter of a little under 8,000 miles. So the 2-dimensional area of the photosphere of the sun facing the Earth is roughly 594,166,500,000 square miles – radiating heat at about 5,800K over that entire surface (and the corona of the Sun has temperatures reaching at times up to a million K… and since the corona of the sun is outside of the photosphere, it has an even larger surface area).

The size of the fireball from a nuke is incredibly smaller than that (if it were a 20 mile diameter fireball, the 2D surface area would be 314 miles, or nine decimal places smaller than the Sun and divided by a constant) and maintains that temperature for a very short time. If it were somehow able to maintain that temperature for an extended amount of time, trouble could very well ensue. You can pass your hand through a flame, but the short duration keeps you from getting a burn. Keep your hand there for a minute…. you get the picture.

Ha! Nice Berkana. Einstein once said that if you couldn’t explain something to a six year old then you don’t truly understand it yourself. That quote was paraphrased but it gets the point across. I’m looking forward to taking some modern physics myself. It’ll be fun. Like pie. Alan should get some too. Nothing relieves the stress of a busy schedual like a nice big slice of pumpking pie with double scooped whip cream. mhmm.

This is just a guess, but it could be related to the optical scanners that were developed for mail sorting. Not quite the same as photography, but to get an image sharp enough to be analyzed by OCR software from an envelope zipping through a slot probably requires a lot of the same kind of expertise.

No matter has to move 100 feet for the size of the blast to reach 100 feet. A lot of the energy is transferred by electromagnetic radiation (with a HUGE range of frequencies), which moves at the speed of light. Be careful not to confuse the wave speed with the particle speed.

Also, about the polarization: Nobody seems to be noticing the difference between amplitude and intensity. But the latter (intensity, energy per area per time) is proportional to the square of the former (amplitude, peak electric field magnitude). Everyone seems to be calculating amplitudes, and then saying that that’s the fraction of the light that gets through. That may be the fraction of the electric field, but the fraction of the energy (the same as the fraction of the photons, and usually taken to be the more meaningful quantity) is the square of that. So if the stack of polarizers transmits, say, 70.7% of the amplitude, then half the light energy is getting through.

A polarizer in effect eliminates all of the electric field in one direction but has no effect on the electric field in the other direction (perpendicular to the first direction). With this fact, the cosine function, and knowing that energy is proportional to electric field squared, you can solve all of these problems. A fun exercise is to see how high the transmittance can get if you can insert a very large number of polarizers in between the crossed polarizers.

Describing the same event in terms of photons is a little more complicated but gives the same answer in the end. Part of the problem is that there’s more than one “consistent history,” i.e. more than one logically and mathematically correct series of classical-like events that could be chosen to describe the quantum mechanical process, and the various histories are mutually inconsistent. What’s the difference between a set of photons that are all randomly polarized and a set of photons that are all either x or y polarized, with 50% probability of each, and no correlations? If I’m not mistaken, they have the same density operator, so there is in principle no way to distinguish them.