So this is basically the Slow Mo Guys with a really big laser?
Boffins blow up water with LASERS, to watch explosions in slow-mo
Boffins at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford's PULSE institute have had fun blowing up water jets and droplets with an X-ray laser. For science, of course. What they say they want is to study the microscopic movies to understand what happens when liquids are vaporized by the world's brightest X-ray laser. …
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Wednesday 25th May 2016 09:01 GMT Chris G
Always interesting
I like explosions, when we were kids we used sugar and weed killer or black powder from fireworks to blow up all kinds of stuff, the bigger the bang the better, if it made your ears ring you were definitely getting somewhere. I guess nowadays we would be in for psychiatric reports etc and put on a list.
I do recommend not blowing up wasps nests though, it seems to make them quite irate.
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Wednesday 25th May 2016 09:27 GMT 2460 Something
Re: Always interesting
Ha ha ha, reminds me of what one of my friends did when we were much younger, except the nutter buried a load of it in the garden lit the fuse and retreated. Spectacular explosion, made a massive crater, the mud from which flew quite a distance, including splattering all over the house windows ... which he would have got away with if his mum hadn't currently been sat in there, with a few friends.
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Wednesday 25th May 2016 13:50 GMT Tom 7
Re: Always interesting
Fortunate enough to have an equally pyromaniacal bloodline. Lots of cannons (grandad had a 10lb box of gunpowder from somewhere) but the most impressive thing I saw and heard was a giant plastic bag (10' by 6' ish) filled with coal gas from the cooker and the correct amount of oxygen from a dentist.
This was bonfire night but when the flame on the paraffin soaked string reached the plastic the detonation was phenomenal (my memory still swears it had BANG! written across it). Not sure if it was deafness or the fact everyone within 5 miles was trying to work out what the fuck that was meant the silence was deafening for quite a while. Then, from the 50 or so party goers in the vicinity, hysterical laughter borne of shock for about half an hour.
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Wednesday 25th May 2016 09:52 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Always interesting
"when we were kids we used sugar and weed killer or black powder from fireworks to blow up all kinds of stuff"
We had a method of inflating balloons from the gas supply. We constructed fuses from a length of paper impregnated with sodium chlorate (weed killer) with a few matches taped to one end and then taped to the balloon. Lit the fuse (NOT with a match) and released. A hundred foot or so in the air the balloon burst, the gas exploded and burning matches scattered across the sky. Being in a narrow valley echoed the bang.
Lovely, but nowadays you'd probably be put into care.
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Thursday 26th May 2016 07:26 GMT Citizen99
Re: Always interesting
As a spotty teenager in the '50s at boarding school, the local chemist sold me 2 lbs of saltpetre in the weeks preceeding Guy Fawkes Day. These days there'd be a SWAT team around in double-quick time.
The good old threepenny banger could be weighted with mud and dropped into the local derelict canal. The shock wave was excellent. I do regret not having a high-speed camera to record the results of placing one in a moist cowpat.
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Wednesday 25th May 2016 09:04 GMT M7S
A valuable extension of this kind of research
So, a shark fires its laser, if this blows up water, and if focussed properly does this make the medium through which it has to "swim" less dense and therefore help the shark travel faster, or does the force of the exploding medium ahead impede the shark?
These kinds of things are important.
Discuss amongst yourselves....
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Wednesday 25th May 2016 11:26 GMT Alien8n
Re: The bit that intrigues me
Once I read your comment I was thinking that myself, short of freezing the droplet to near absolute zero the lack of air pressure should convert the water into gas. However, reading the article carefully it states that the laser and microscope are in a vacuum, but it's possible the water droplets are not. Would be interesting to see the full setup to confirm.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
