Trinity

[door_of_time]

"The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately." — Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell

"It was so brilliant purple, with all the radioactive glowing." — Frank Oppenheimer

"... there was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green." — Isidor I. Rabi

(And Hiroshima: "The mushroom cloud itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it has a red core in it and everything was burning inside..." — Staff Sergeant George Caron)

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Various forms of radiation produce colors of lights that are almost never seen in nature - we don't even have names for them. Even a simple, obsolete fission explosion produces the kind of light described in your entry; thermonuclear explosions are almost unimaginable, so intense that what they produce can barely be thought of as light at all.

But it doesn't take a province-destroying explosion to produce strangely beautiful colors. Marie Curie describes going into her makeshift laboratory at night, and pausing before turning on the lights, because the glowing sample vials of radioactive materials in various places within the lab made a beautiful "firefly" effect. The blue Cerenkov radiation seen in spent fuel pools is actually stronger in the ultraviolet, but most humans can't see the UV and perceive it as an eerily beautiful blue/purple glow within the water. (A nuclear plant worker was taking a reporter on a tour of the plant. When they got to the spent fuel storage, the reporter looked in through a very thick glass window - the glass contained lead and other things that didn't impede its clarity, but acted as radiation shielding - and remarked about the glowing "swimming pool". The worker told him, "If you opened this door and began walking towards the pool, you'd be dead before you got halfway there - the radiation is that high.")

There are other, far less dangerous, things that glow pretty colors because of radiation. Tritium is a form of hydrogen that gives off a weak radiation that can make phosphor chemicals glow. Coat the inside of a very small glass tube with phosphor, fill the tube with tritium, seal it tightly, and encapsulate it in clear acrylic plastic. You have a distinctive marker light that needs no power nor exposure to light, but the radiation from the tritium isn't strong enough to go through the glass tube - in fact, it's not strong enough to go through human skin. You can keep it on a keyring in your pocket.

Let us now ponder how something deadly and destructive (an A-bomb, or a room full of radium samples) can create such beauty...

[door-of-time.livejournal.com]

It's all those poor little electrons being kicked out of their orbits!

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Well, technically, the atoms emit photons when the excited electrons drop back to their original energy levels. But it's pretty!